Hacker Cinema
The Man in the White Suit
1951 · Film · 85 min
Directed by Alexander Mackendrick
The unassuming, nebbishy inventor Sidney Stratton creates a miraculous fabric that will never be dirty or worn out. Clearly he can make a fortune selling clothes made of the material, but may cause a crisis in the process. After all, once someone buys one of his suits they won't ever have to fix them or buy another one, and the clothing industry will collapse overnight. Nevertheless, Sidney is determined to put his invention on the market, forcing the clothing factory bigwigs to resort to more desperate measures...
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"They live" was a cult classic, and great fun if you were a Roddy Piper fan.
Other entertaining films =3
"The Great Dictator" (Charlie Chaplin, 1940)
https://archive.org/details/the-great-dictator-disc-01-title-2
"Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951)
https://archive.org/details/day-the-earth-stood-still-1951
"Invasion Of The Body Snatchers" (1956)
https://archive.org/details/invasionofthebodysnatchers1956_201911/
"The Man in the White Suit" (1951)
https://archive.org/details/the-man-in-the-white-suit_202105
"The Twilight Zone" (1959)
https://archive.org/details/the-twilight-zone-1959-s-01-e-00-original-pilot/The+Twilight+Zone+1959+S01E12+What+You+Need.mp4
https://archive.org/details/the-twilight-zone-1959-s-01-e-00-original-pilot/The+Twilight+Zone+1959+S01E25+People+Are+Alike+All+Over.mp4
https://archive.org/details/the-twilight-zone-1959-s-03-e-15-a-quality-of-mercy/The+Twilight+Zone+1959+S03E24+To+Serve+Man.mp4
https://archive.org/details/the-twilight-zone-1959-s-03-e-15-a-quality-of-mercy/The+Twilight+Zone+1959+S03E28+The+Little+People.mp4
The man in the white suit 1951
I have some routine (not sure what to call it) where I take a context (by lack of better words) then work backwards.
This topic had me wonder what great lessons or insights in (my) life have not at all been captured by any movie. What followed was like an eruption of great movie ideas. What each movie really needs is at least one amazing plot twist. Nothing really accomplishes that the way changing the viewers perception of life does.
Ill do a crude example but it probably doesn't do justice to the raw idea.
I discover one day that you can always increase your spending to match your income and at the end of your money have a chunk of month left.
I discover that selling your brain in a job leaves your free time without one.
I also discover one day that physical activity is not optional.
I talk with a very successful business man who one day discovered that his chair in front of the TV is only a few meters away from his car and that his personal parking spot is only a few meters from his personal office. After some 30 years he had to walk 150ish meters to the other end of the building and was absolutely exhausted. Only then he realized he didn't get any physical activity at all.
One could forge a plot from that where the protagonist progresses from wealth, a highly successful career, weak and depressed all the way to a shit physical job with crappy pay. The villa, the cars, the credit card wife, the fake friends, it all has to go. Why internet if one can read books. Why drive if one can walk in the rain?
May I recommend "The man in the white suit", a British comedy from the 50s that predicted this development.
http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0044876/
It's fun, but also a time capsule of capital vs labor in the 1950s.
The evolution of the home clothes washer pretty much eliminated the half of the labor argument: people don't send most of their laundry out to be cleaned much anymore.
Genuine scientific progress is usually collaborative even if the nature of fame, and fiction, is to single out individuals, writes Quentin Cooper.
It is sixty years since Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor became Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth the Second. Sixty years in which the planet has changed beyond recognition. As part of the Diamond Jubilee festivities the BBC asked the public to help select the sixty “New Elizabethans” – living or dead, British or not – who have had the most impact on life during her (or possibly Her) reign. Which in effect means fifty-nine since HRH herself is pretty much a shoe-in. Given all the myriad ways science and technology have left their mark on the last 60 years, it’s a list which you might expect scientists and inventors to dominate. And I’ve no problem thinking of worthy contenders. Indisputable geniuses like Sidney Stratton, Ned and Philip Brainard, Robert Campbell and Alexander Hartdegen. Don’t know them? More familiar may be Emmett Brown, Caractacus Potts or Eldon Tyrell.
Each is responsible for one or more world-changing inventions and breakthroughs. Unfortunately, as you will have no doubt figured out, each is also fictional.
Stratton, played by Alec Guinness, devises an indestructible fabric in wonderful Ealing comedy The Man In the White Suit; Brainard with a change of first name invents gravity-defying flying rubber in both The Absent Minded Professor and the Robin Williams remake Flubber; Campbell is Medicine Man Sean Connery curing cancer; and although in HG Wells’ novel and the first film version he has no name, in the most recent remake it’s Alexander Hartdegen who builds The Time Machine.
The time travel – by flying DeLorean – is rather more stylish from Doc Emmett Brown in the Back To The Future trilogy; Caractacus Potts also gets a car to fly and creates whistling confectionery in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; and Eldon Tyrell gives life, and death, to Bladerunner’s replicants.
‘Nutty professor’
This may seem a long and very male list of characters who have come up with things that, if real, would be ranked among the greatest advances of all time. That’s because it is. Well, apart from the “toot sweets” in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Now try to do the same for the individuals behind genuine inventions and breakthroughs. It’s almost impossible.
You might say Watson or Crick for the structure of DNA – but while both did key work they also needed Rosalind Franklin and a host of other supporting characters. There is also far more to DNA than its structure. Or what about Tim Berners Lee who “invented” the World Wide Web? Undoubtedly “TimBL” was vital to its development but what about his less well lauded partner – Robert Callieau - or the many thousands of others who have left their mark on what it has become? And Ian Wilmut – the man who brought Dolly the Sheep to the world’s attention? Sure enough,the paper that describes just how the world’s first cloned mammal was “created” shows the names of at least four other scientists involved in the research.
It is a problem that can only get worse. Think of the growing number of “big science” projects, from the Human Genome to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). All involve thousands of people working in myriad disciplines. Naming an individual who is single-handedly responsible for the project – and its findings - is an impossible task. The Nobel Prizes – perhaps the organisation that has done the most to promote the idea of individual triumph – is already under pressure to change its ways. Last year’s prize for dark energy came under fire from the Astronomer Royal – the Queen’s own astronomer - for not accurately reflecting the true number of people who carried out the work. I don’t envy the Nobel Committee faced with plucking out three individuals if - and when - the Higgs Boson is discovered at the LHC.
That is because genuine scientific progress is usually collaborative and collective even if the nature of fame, and fiction, is to single out individuals and hand them all the credit. We like to make heroes, and a century ago stories about dashing, dynamic inventors saving the day, and the world, through their indefatigable ingenuity were so popular they even had their own name – Edisonades, inspired by the famously sweaty Thomas Edison. Such tales peaked in popularity long before EAM Windsor became QE2. Now even in fantasies in which a scientist makes some amazing advance, they are usually portrayed as nutty, absent-minded, eccentric or plain weird.
So it will be interesting to see which scientists, if any, end up being allotted a place among the New Elizabethans. For all their incalculable influence on life as we now live it, few have changed anything single-handedly, while many who have made a significant difference have achieved little or no public recognition. Unlike their fictional counterparts, the scientists who have transformed our world seldom get starring roles, just an uncredited cameo as part of the crowd.