WSC Films

Short Story: Arthur Conan Doyle

8th of the 12 stories collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes "Locked Room Mystery" Holmes' client is Helen Stoner, a 32 year old spinster who lives with her stepfather: Dr. Grimesby Roylott of Stoke Moran. Dr Roylott is the last survivor of what was a wealthy but dissolute and violent tempered aristocratic Anglo-Saxon family of Surrey. After returning from India where he had a large medical practice and had served a jail sentence for killing his native Butler in a fit of rage, Roylett—a widower—settles with his two stepdaughters in the broken-down ancestral manor-all that is left of estates that had extended into Berkshire and Hampshire. The doctor becomes notorious for terrorizing the local village because of his quarrelsome personalty and violent temper. Dr. Roylott has required Miss Stoner, who is engaged to be married, to move into a particular bedroom of his heavily mortgaged ancestral home in Stoke Moran. This room was the one in which two years before, Helen's twin sister Julia had died under mysterious and dramatic circumstances—uttering the last words "The band! The speckled band!"—just prior to her wedding. Helen is reluctant to sleep in the room because a number of things about the bedroom are mysterious and disturbing. Late at night, Helen hears low whistling sounds followed by a metallic clang. There is a strange bell cord over the bed but it does not appear to work any bell. The rope goes to a ventilator—an opening high in the wall of the room, close to the ceiling—which provides air circulation between Helen's room and an adjacent room of Dr Roylott in the crumbling mansion. In addition, Helen's bed is clamped to the floor; this piece of furniture can never be moved from its position. Stoner surmises that Julia might have been murdered by the gypsies who wear speckled handkerchiefs around their necks, in order to bring in a bit of cash. Dr. Roylott has rented spare rooms in Stoke Moran near them. A cheetah and a baboon also have the run of the property, for Dr. Roylott keeps exotic pets from India. After Helen leaves, Dr. Roylott comes to visit Holmes, having traced his stepdaughter. He demands to know what Helen has said to Holmes, but Holmes refuses to say. Dr. Roylott bends an iron fireplace poker into a curve in an attempt to intimidate Holmes, but Holmes is unaffected as he attempts to make small talk during the encounter. After Roylott leaves, Holmes straightens the poker out again. Holmes research of the late wife's will finds that she had arranged for Roylett to receive an annuity which had been £ 1,100 GBP but now totals £ 750 GBP, with the provision that the daughters can each claim 1/3 of the annuity (£ 250 GBP) upon marriage. If both or even one daughter were to marry and claim the annuity due her, this would seriously pauperize Roylott financially-thus the doctor has motive for neither daughter to marry. Having arranged for Helen to spend the night in another bedroom, Holmes and Watson sneak into her bedroom without Dr. Roylott's knowledge. Holmes says that he has already deduced the solution to the mystery, and the test of his theory turns out to be successful. They hear the whistle, and Holmes also sees what the bell cord is really for, although Watson does not. Julia's last words about a "speckled band" were in fact describing "a swamp adder, the deadliest snake in India". The adjacent room was occupied by Dr. Roylott and a safe containing the venomous snake, and the ventilator and bell cord were bridges for the snake to land on the bed. After the swamp adder bit Julia, he called off the snake with the whistling, which made the snake climb up through the bell cord, disappearing from the scene. Now the swamp adder is sent again through the ventilator by Dr. Roylott to kill Julia's sister Helen. Holmes attacks the snake with a walking stick, sending it through the hole in the wall back toward its home in the physician's room. A shriek is heard, and the annoyed reptile is soon found to have injected its venom into the murderous physician. When Holmes and Watson enter the death scene, the swamp adder has wound its body around the head of its victim in triumph. Holmes replaces the reptile into the safe. A coroner's jury finds that Dr. Roylott came to his death due to indiscreet handling of a dangerous pet. Holmes grimly notes that he is indirectly responsible for Dr. Roylott's death, but that he is unlikely to feel much guilt over the chain of events that led to his departure from this world.

Life of Pi

A Canadian novelist named Yann Martel meets an Indian man, Pi Patel, with some knowledge from Pi's late father's friend, known to Pi as "Mamaji", for a good book. Pi tells Yann his life story. In a flashback, Pi's father named him Piscine Molitor after a swimming pool in France. By the time he reached secondary school, he changed his name to "Pi" (the Greek letter, π) because he was tired of being called "Pissing Patel" (due to the pronunciation of his name). Pi's family owned a zoo, and Pi took great interest in the animals, especially a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. When Pi tries feeding the tiger, his father runs in and angrily tells him that the tiger is dangerous, and forces Pi to witness the tiger killing a goat to prove his point. Pi is raised Hindu and vegetarian, but at 12 years old, he is introduced to Christianity and then Islam, and decides to follow all three religions as he "just wants to love God". His mother supports his desire to grow, but his father, a rationalist, tries to convert him to his own way of thinking. When Pi is 16, his father decides to move the family to Canada, where he intends to settle and sell the zoo animals. Pi's family books passage on a Japanese freighter named Tsimtsum. During a storm, the ship founders while Pi is on deck. He tries to find his family, but a member of the crew throws him into a lifeboat. As the ship falls into the sea, a freed zebra lands on the boat with him. Pi watches helplessly as the ship sinks, killing his family. After the storm, Pi finds himself in the lifeboat with the injured zebra, and is joined by an orangutan. A spotted hyena emerges from a tarpaulin covering half of the boat and snaps at Pi, forcing him to retreat to the top of the tarpaulin while it kills the zebra and orangutan. Later, Richard Parker emerges from under the tarpaulin, killing the hyena. Pi retrieves biscuits, water rations and a hand axe and builds a small raft to stay at a safe distance from Richard Parker. Pi begins fishing and is able to feed Richard Parker. He also collects rain water for them to drink. When the tiger jumps off to hunt fish, Pi considers letting it drown but ultimately helps it climb back into the boat. During a night-time encounter with a breaching humpback whale Pi loses much of his supplies, forcing him to eat fish for the first time in his life. Pi trains Richard Parker to accept him in the boat and realizes that caring for the tiger is keeping him alive. Weeks later they reach a floating island of edible plants, supporting a mangrove jungle, fresh water pools, and a large population of meerkats. Pi and Richard Parker eat and drink freely and regain strength. At night, the island transforms into a hostile environment: Richard Parker retreats to the lifeboat and the meerkats sleep in the trees while the fresh water pools turn acidic and digest the dead fish in the pools. Pi discovers that the island itself is carnivorous after finding a human tooth embedded in a flower. The next day, Pi and Richard Parker leave the island. The lifeboat reaches the coast of Mexico. Pi is crushed emotionally that Richard Parker does not acknowledge him before disappearing into the jungle. Pi is rescued and brought to a hospital. Insurance agents for the freighter interview him, but do not believe his story and ask what "really" happened. Pi tells a different story in which he shares the lifeboat with his mother, a Buddhist sailor with a broken leg, and the cook. In this story, Pi says that the cook killed the sailor in order to eat him and use him as bait. In a later struggle, Pi's mother pushed her son to safety on a smaller raft before the cook stabbed her and threw her overboard. Pi then took the knife and killed the cook, and managed to survive on the cook's flesh until reaching Mexico. The insurance agents are not satisfied with this story either, but they leave without questioning Pi any further. Next, Yann notes the parallels between the two stories: the orangutan was Pi's mother, the zebra was the sailor, the hyena was the cook, and Richard Parker was Pi. Pi asks which story the writer prefers, and Yann chooses "the one with the tiger" because it is "the better story", to which Pi responds, "Thank you. And so it goes with God". Glancing at a copy of the insurance report, Yann sees that the agents wrote that Pi survived 227 days at sea with an adult Bengal tiger, meaning they had also chosen to record the more fantastic story.

A Beautiful Mind

Based on the life of John Nash, a Nobel Laureate in Economics. The story begins in the early years of a young prodigy named John Nash. Early in the film, Nash begins to develop paranoid schizophrenia and endures delusional episodes while painfully watching the loss and burden his condition brings on his wife and friends.In 1947, John Nash arrives at Princeton. He is co-recipient, with Martin Hansen, of the prestigious Carnegie Scholarship for math. At a reception, he meets a group of other promising math and science graduate students, Richard Sol, Ainsley, and Bender . He also believes he meets his roommate Charles Herman, a literature student. Nash does not realize it yet, but he is suffering from a mental illness, and Herman is a figment of his imagination. Nash comes under increasing pressure to publish, but he refuses until he finds a truly original idea. His inspiration comes when he and his fellow graduate students discuss how to approach a group of women at a bar. Hansen quotes Adam Smith and advocates "every man for himself", but Nash argues that a cooperative approach would lead to better chances of success. This leads to a new concept of governing dynamics which Nash develops and publishes. On the strength of this he is offered an appointment at MIT where Sol and Bender join him. Some years later, Nash thinks he is invited to the Pentagon to crack encrypted enemy telecommunication.(imagination) Nash is able to decipher the code mentally, to the astonishment of other codebreakers. He considers his regular duties at MIT uninteresting and beneath his talents, so he is pleased to be given a new assignment by mysterious supervisor, William Parcher of the United States Department of Defense, to look for patterns in magazines and newspapers in order to thwart a Soviet plot. Nash becomes increasingly obsessive about searching for these hidden patterns and believes he is followed when he delivers his results to a secret mailbox. Meanwhile a student, Alicia Larde, asks him to dinner, and the two fall in love. On a return visit to Princeton, Nash runs into Charles and meets Charles' young niece Marcee (Vivien Cardone), whom he adores. With Charles' encouragement they marry. Nash begins to fear for his life after witnessing a shootout between Parcher and Soviet agents, but Parcher blackmails him into staying on his assignment. While delivering a guest lecture at Harvard University, Nash attempts to flee from what appear to be foreign agents, led by Dr. Rosen. After punching Rosen in an attempt to flee, Nash is forcibly sedated and sent to a psychiatric facility. He believes the facility is run by the Soviets. Dr. Rosen tells Alicia that Nash has schizophrenia and that Charles, Marcee and Parcher exist only in his imagination. Alicia investigates and finally confronts Nash with the unopened documents he had delivered to the secret mailbox. Nash is given a course of insulin shock therapy and eventually released. Frustrated with the side-effects of the antipsychotic medication he is taking, he secretly stops taking it. This causes a relapse and he meets Parcher again. After an incident where Nash endangers his infant son and accidentally knocks Alicia and the baby to the ground (thinking he's stopping Parcher from killing her), she flees the house in fear with their child. Nash steps in front of her car to prevent her from leaving. He tells Alicia, "She never gets old", referring to Marcee, who although years have passed since their first encounter, has remained exactly the same age and is still a little girl. With this, he finally accepts that they are part of his hallucinations. Against Dr. Rosen's advice, Nash decides not to restart his medication, believing that he can deal with his symptoms in another way. Alicia decides to stay and support him in this. Nash approaches his old friend and rival, Martin Hansen, now head of the Princeton math department, who grants him permission to work out of the library and audit classes. Years pass and as Nash grows older, he learns to ignore his hallucinations and earns the privilege of teaching again. In 1994, Nash is honored by his fellow professors for his achievement in mathematics, and goes on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his revolutionary work on game theory. The movie ends as Nash and Alicia leave the auditorium in Stockholm; Nash sees Charles, Marcee, and Parcher standing to one side and watching him.

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus (Essay)

It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock. If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn. If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Edipus, like Dostoevsky's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism. One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What!—-by such narrow ways—?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men. All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling. I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Freaks and Geeks, Pilot

The show centers on teenage Lindsay Weir and her younger brother Sam, who both attend William McKinley High School during the 1980-1981 school year in the town of Chippewa, Michigan, a fictional suburb of Detroit. Lindsay's friends constitute the "freaks" — Daniel Desario, Ken Miller, Nick Andopolis, Kim Kelly— and Sam's friends constitute the "geeks" — Neal Schweiber and Bill Haverchuck— of the title. The Weirs' parents, Harold and Jean, are featured in every episode. Millie Kentner, Lindsay's nerdy, highly religious former best friend, is a recurring character, as is Cindy Sanders , the attractive, popular cheerleader on whom Sam has a crush. The show's starting point is Lindsay's transition from her life as an academically proficient student, star "mathlete", and proper young girl to an Army-jacket-wearing teenager who hangs out with troubled slackers. Her relationships with her new friends, and the friction they cause with her parents and with her own self-image, form one central strand of the show; the other follows Sam and his group of geeky friends as they navigate a different part of the social universe, and try to fit in.