Back from a weekend at the seaside. I always take a lot of work along, but I never do any of it. Most of my time is spent watching satellite TV and this time I was told that the TV is broken. Unfortunately, from a work point of view, my mother managed to fix it, and I was watching old episode of “Law and Order” despite my resolution to keep the set switched off.
Law and Order is a wonderful show: my expectations start low, but like a good TV lawyer’s closing statement, they convince me that they are addressing a deep philosophical point. For example, I am not a big fan of the “good and evil” viewpoint. As a scientist, this is a little too touchy-feely for my taste. Nevertheless, one episode presented a convincing argument (which I’m not going to repeat here) for its usefulness.
In some ways, the Law and Order series is formulaic. This means that it can become a little boring (“been there, done that”) after a while. On the other hand, such predictability may also be exactly what draws its regular audience, as Fry explained (“When Aliens attack”, Season 1). TM hit the nail on the head in his comment on my Recursive Movie post: this kind of parameterization is exactly what one needs in a recursive movie. Every instance should be the same except for a parameter that grows smaller and smaller, until we reached the termination condition.
Now comes a subtlety. Depending on how a recursive computation uses the information it calculates, the global information “known” to the computation almost always increases as the recursion unfolds. This is what happens in “Groundhog Day”. The recursive function is “live_day()”, the parameter is the day (ok, it stays the same but if you want to be technical, we could add a relive count), and Phil’s knowledge increases until some condition is satisfied.
Linear recursion is easy, but binary recursion (for example, visiting each node in a binary tree), seems more difficult. There is simply too much information for the audience to process, and it does not seem possible to make it exciting enough. But perhaps it is not necessary for a recursive movie to show all recursive calls. Perhaps a single invocation is enough. For example, I am an instance of multiple recursion. I am one node in a large family tree, streching all the way back to…well, all the way back. I think that I would be satisfied with a movie in which a character realizes this. Maybe it would even be more satisfying to know that a single instance can represent the whole. Synecdoche. Take that, Charlie Kaufman.
It mat not actually be necessary to show the recursive movies. Perhaps one could show just the “body” of the recursive function and how the plot actually unfolds is left to the viewer.
Like, the protagonist simply figures out that if I sort this half of the mess out and then this other half, and merge them then we’re done. One could perhaps, as a plot device, show some key moments of a lower level so that the viewer will get the idea.
That is what I tried to say in the last paragraph. Perhaps it wasn’t as clearly stated as it could be. But I think that, with the right hints in the right place, this would in fact make a more interesting movie.