[ExI] LA Times: Abbott's 'Flatland' vs. the animated film version

[PJ Manney]

This week's Sunday book review section revealed two classic satires
I've never read, but should have:  "Flatland" (and the "Flashman"
series by George MacDonald Fraser, which is not H+ or extropic in the
least, but is brutal anti-imperial historical satire and therefore
right up my alley).  Regarding "Flatland, apparently neither of the
movie versions embrace the satire of the original.

My father was right.  Too many books, too little time.  <sigh>

PJ

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-bk-wertheim2mar02,0,7981806.story

>From the Los Angeles Times
BOOK REVIEW
It's a flat, flat, flat, flat world
The text of Abbott's 1884 novella 'Flatland' and the screenplay of the
latest animated film version.
By Margaret Wertheim

March 2, 2008

Flatland

The Movie Edition

Edwin A. Abbott, with Thomas Banchoff and the filmmakers of "Flatland"

Princeton University Press: 168 pp., $15

IN 1884, the English mathematician Edwin Abbott Abbott published an
enchanting fable set in a two-dimensional world he called Flatland.
Within this planar universe live triangles, squares, hexagons and
other polygonal beings, who go about their business within a mere two
degrees of freedom, working, playing and carrying on the processes of
government without the luxury of depth. The hero and narrator, one A.
Square, is a modest fellow, rather low down in the social hierarchy of
Flatland but intellectually curious and a bit of a mathematician at
heart. He likes to think about numbers and shapes, and at times he
wonders whether there isn't, somehow, more to reality than meets the
eye.

In A. Square's dexterously naive voice, addressed to "the Reader," we
learn about the physics, physiology, educational system, history,
governance and social hierarchy that pertain in his two-dimensional,
Euclidean domain. Here, a rigid pecking order reigns: The more sides a
citizen has, the higher is his class. Thus Triangles are the lowest
class, with Isosceles even lower than Equilaterals; next come Squares,
who serve as clerks, scribes and other literate functionaries; then
Pentagons and Hexagons, who make up the professionals (physicians,
lawyers); and so on up to the "infinitely-sided" Circles, the priestly
and noble classes.

All this is delivered with the earnestness of a convert; toward the
end of the tale, we learn that A. Square has been inducted into the
mysteries of the Third Dimension by a magnificent stranger in the form
of a Sphere. Under Lord Sphere's guidance, he has been vouchsafed a
glimpse of the vast, expanded cosmos of three-dimensional space,
herein known as Spaceland, in which reside the transcendently
excellent figures of Cubes, higher-dimensional versions of his own
lowly form.

Like so many other heroes who have seen the light of a higher order,
from Jesus to Galileo, A. Square will suffer greatly for the
illumination he offers his fellow citizens. In Flatland, any
discussion of a third dimension is heresy, punishable by imprisonment
or death. Indeed, A. Square narrates from prison, where he has been
confined for the past seven years, having failed to stifle his
enthusiasm over what he witnessed during his brief time in Spaceland.

To many students of mathematics, "Flatland" stands alongside "Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland" as one of the most beloved stories of the
modern age. Like Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Abbott was able to
transform complex mathematical ideas -- in this case, an emerging
understanding of multidimensional space -- into a fantastical story at
once whimsical and serious, which, by confounding genre, remains as
fresh and appealing as when it was first published.

Just as the Alice tales have done, "Flatland" has inspired many
imitators and renditions in other media. Among its "sequels" are
"Sphereland" (1965) by Dionys Burger; "The Planiverse" (1984) by A.K.
Dewdney, mathematical games columnist for Scientific American;
"Flatterland" (2001) by English mathematician Ian Stewart; and
"Spaceland" (2002) by U.S. mathematician Rudy Rucker. In an episode of
"Cosmos," Carl Sagan used "Flatland" to explain higher-dimensional
spaces, and in a 1960s episode of "The Outer Limits," a character
named Eck visited humans from his own two-dimensional world. In 1965,
Dudley Moore narrated the first animated film version, which was
followed by a second film in 1982, directed by mathematician Michele
Emmer. There has even been an opera -- "VAS: An Opera in Flatland"
(2002) by Steve Tomasula. My favorite theatrical rendition is a
delightful puppet opera by Randall Wong, performed here last year at
the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

Last year also saw the production of not one but two new film
versions, the first a full-length animated feature directed by Ladd
Ehlinger Jr., updating the story from Victorian England to
contemporary America, and the second a 30-minute animation starring
the voices of Martin Sheen, Kristen Bell and Michael York, which has
just been released on DVD. Accompanying the latter is "Flatland: The
Movie Edition," published by Princeton University Press, in which we
get Abbott's novella plus the script of the movie, along with an
introduction by Brown University mathematics professor Thomas Banchoff
and commentary by the film's writer and producer (Seth Caplan),
director (Jeffrey Travis) and chief animator (Dano Johnson).

All movies of beloved stories must struggle against the preconceptions
of their fans, and I will be honest in confessing that as soon as I
laid eyes on the lush color graphics in the Princeton book my heart
began to sink. I first read "Flatland" when I was studying mathematics
at Sydney University 25 years ago and fell in love with its subtle
blend of fantasy, pedagogy and satire. Reading it again a
quarter-century later, I was particularly struck by Abbott's incisive
skewering of class-bound Victorian society, and particularly by his
parodic rendition of Victorian attitudes to women. In "Flatland,"
women are the lowest class of all, being merely straight lines with no
area at all, and hence literally no space for brains. When Flatland
was first published, some readers misunderstood Abbott's point and
accused him of misogyny, whereas in fact he was a brilliant teacher
who supported the cause of women's education.

Beneath its fairy-tale trappings, "Flatland" was a subversive piece of
social commentary, and it wasn't written for little children. The
makers of the new film have stripped this multifaceted story of much
of its depth and reduced it to a bland, rather saccharine lesson. The
basic educational message -- about one-, two-, three-, and possibly
higher-dimensional spaces -- is intact, but the social satire is gone.
Instead, we get a simplified story in which there is little ambiguity
about who is "good" and who is "bad." A. Square has been given a
mathematically inclined granddaughter named Hex, who is a hexagon, and
it is she who first plants in his mind the idea of a third dimension.
(This has a parallel in the original, where A. Square has a smart
hexagonal grandson.) Although it's nice to see a female character
taking a mathematical lead, the very power of satire is in revealing
what it is apparently obscuring. Hex's intellectual perkiness comes
off as a politically correct gesture, as do several other
simplifications in aspects of the film, which seems aimed at a
primary-school audience.

The filmmakers have made admirablye attempteds to inform the look of
"Flatland: The Movie" with mathematical motifs, such as fractals, but
I wish they'd paid less attention to visual effects and more to the
texture of the story. Sadly, this is a very flattened version of
Flatland. If you want to experience the full depth of this miniature
masterpiece, pick up "The Annotated Flatland," with notes by Stewart.
Its multidimensional treasures will leave you as starry-eyed as A.
Square himself.

Margaret Wertheim is the author of "The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A
History of Space From Dante to the Internet."