Dark Star

In my and my wife's mutual viewing of this strange universe, one tiny portion around which we have found ourselves sharing a perambulating journey for the last 23 years, there has been just a single aberration. This relates to the John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon film, ‘Dark Star’. Maggie (who is a painter) had never heard of this film prior to my singing its praises at intervals over the course of our unblemished marriage. Then, last year, having not seen the film since the 1970s (when I was an Astronomy student in London), I got hold of a DVD of it in Blockbuster, and sat down to share it with her, anticipating her total pleasure at viewing something of such wonderfulness for the very first time. I was appalled to observe that she hated it! She didn’t even stick with it to the end. I was baffled and in an attempt to make sense of things I put together a research programme of, I must say, exquisitely simple yet crisply effective design, one that was carefully formulated to tease out the subtle factors that lay behind this phenomenon. In essence, I made the children watch it. Guess what - Ruth (who likes physics) was gripped but Megan (an art freak) and Caitlin (who adores fashion) walked out. I’m beginning to suspect that there is a defining difference here between individuals of a scientific turn of mind and those of an artsy turn of mind.

March 2011

See:
Wikipedia - 'Dark Star'
IMDb - 'Dark Star'
allmovie - 'Dark Star'
Rotten Tomatoes - 'Dark Star'
Dan O'Bannon Guardian obituary