Love Death & Robots thoughts
30 January 2023
S03 EP3 : The Very Pulse of the Machine
god this animation is gorgeous !!!
sulfur eruptions. where are they?? also sulfur => they're in hell?
poems of the old earth book. i'm guessing they're not in our solar system? and/or our earth is gone
wakes up from the crash, stuck upside down => you're somewhere Else now
whoa, burton's face discomposed fast (?). my initial thought was that maybe kivelson's been asleep much longer than she thought, but actually i bet it's just that burton's helmet cracked and the atmosphere is super toxic. so yeah, we're in hell
planet in the sky. kinda looks like jupiter, so even if it's not i'm thinking gas giant
oh, io mission. so it is jupiter? she's wearing an argus i patch. argus. hmmm i think that was the name of the ship jason had in greek mythology? on the way home from war? ... ah okay no not quite. their ship was named argo after its builder argus. jason & the argonauts. which of course sounds like astronaut. anyway they sailed together looking for the golden fleece. gold like sulfur?
while on the subject: io. lover of zeus. she was the one who got turned into a cow
wait okay so if martha can use burton's oxygen, does that mean burton's suit wasn't structurally compromised? then why is her face purple?
putting gold (sulfur) dust on burton's face. from dust to dust / is this a funerary ritual?
this yellow and purple color scheme is so good. it's about the contrasts baby !! life in death, survival in the most inhospitable !!
"if i don't make it, better to die high" hell yeah
the pupil of her eye expands and then fades to the storm eye of jupiter. she's in the storm
burton's talking ??? did that sulfur dust crystallize on burton ??
"look i don't have time to figure out what unresolved psychological conflicts gave rise to whatever this shit is." i Love that
"oh sleep it is a gentle thing" google says rime of the ancient mariner by samuel taylor coleridge. okay quick break to read. dreaming of death. dead men walking under the moon. sins and hell. thematic sure but i gotta say i'm not a fan of this poem's scansion. like wtf is up with this iambs. mariner parallels space explorer.
"who spilled these starts across the sky" - the milky way by barbara juster esbensen. okay sure. burton says where's the hand of god
she's trying to communicate via poetry. aren't we all
faces in the rock formation
"i was the world in which i walked and what i saw" - tea at the palaz of hoon by wallace stevens.
so. something is using burton's voice to talk to martha, maybe. it says you're/we're in hell. we're dead. it's trying to introduce itself. it's saying it is the moon?/it is the spirit of that place/it can shape this place, this moon as it wills
also. martha knows this poetry. it's from that book we saw for a split second, poems of the old earth? the spirit learned how to talk from a poetry book
walking through the valley of giant women. color scheme goes from yellows to blues and greens. are we entering—life? an exit from yellow hell? or slipping further into the psychedelic dream? it's very beautiful though. it looks like she's underwater
there's a hole? a cave? a wound? oh never mind, it fixes (? builds? constructs?) itself => an eye. watching you
a very giant astronaut. mirroring burton with a cracked helmet? the spirit is mirroring the humans
(just) a dream. the trail of her friend's body dragging behind her. just one more step, she promises herself, over and over again.
drugging herself, out of her mind.
"what does this sound like?" demands not-burton. martha says "it sounds like a machine". it's not a planet, it's a machine. it's not a spiritual experience, it's drugs.
look at me, demands io. oh she's beautiful.
"and now i see with eye serene" - she was a phantom of delight by william wordsworth. okay so is io cherrypicking most relevant lines from these poems or can i consider the whole thing? because wordsworth here is painting a picture of a perfect woman, beautiful and human. but maybe not a real one. versus i think io here is saying she is real, is a machine, or at very least some kind of machine, but definitely not human. maybe i just don't know enough about poetry.
io is. communicating? with burton's mind.
"the marble index of a mind forever" - cambridge by william wordsworth again. io can only echo these poems.
burton's body picks up martha and carries her. a role reversal of earlier.
martha wakes up at the edge of a cliff, with a set of footprints already walking off the edge. burton's body??
"throw self in" proposes io. be with me in death, in life. i want to know you, she says. that's love, baby. "maybe i'm gonna live forever" says martha. maybe we'll be together forever. maybe this is the moment that lasts forever.
storm above, eyes up. falling into space, breaking apart. exploding, new energy, a violent fiery birth. and in perspective, look how small io is next to jupiter. just a lil baby
"earth station, come in." one last cry into the darkness. did they hear her, before she went?
and now rereading and reacting to my own notes:
argus i patch => she sure did go on a dangerous journey
martha borrowing burton's oxygen, foreshadowing life from death, and when burton becomes/is possessed by io, life from io too. a symbiotic relationship. one is dead, the other lives
the shot of her eye and then the eye of storm of jupiter => becoming one with the environment/io/the moon system
in the valley of the giant women, io gives martha a preview of what it would be to live in/with io?
omg wait of COURSE it's io i mean other than the fact that that's actually the name of the moon but also because it's I/0 !!
i'm thinking about how io says she's a machine. interesting word choice there. machine implies built by someone else. who built io? does it matter? i don't know that it does. i don't think we need an explanation here, the story fits without one. on the other hand, if something/someone did build io, where are they now? io seems to mostly speak in echos—did she learn any language from her original creators?
in summary:
holy shit that was beautiful. brb, i wanna go marry a moon