Arwen Spicer's Blog: Diary of a Readerly Writer (and Writerly Reader)

So, Yeah, Find Me on Dreamwidth

Well, folx, it just took me five minutes of clicking on Goodreads to find my own blog. In my stumbling attempts to understand social media, I was considering updating it again but, you know, no. Life's too short.

If you'd like to read any of my thoughts on fandom, literature, or sometimes life, please feel free to find me where I've consistently been since 2009, dear old Dreamwidth. God bless you, Dreamwidth:

https://labingi.dreamwidth.org/

Dreamwidth, you're not affiliated with a giant corporation, you don't have ads, you don't sell my data, and you're easy to use. I love you, Dreamwidth.

In any case, I just posted a review of Jeff VanderMeer's Hummingbird Salamander there.

The Last Jedi: Spoiler-Lite Initial Thoughts

Spoiler Free: It's a very good movie. It avoids a lot of cliché while remaining "Star Wars" and having a number of subtler call-backs to previous themes and arcs. All the major characters are developed pretty well, including nice doses of humor. Plotwise, the film reminds me a bit of the second X-Men movie, that is, very good but so complex that it loses a certain clarity and, well, force of narrative movement.

Despite some gripping action bits and good light saber fights, overall, the action lost impact for me by being too big, crowded, and defined by implausible escapes. True, Star Wars action has never been realistic: storm troopers' aim is a meme in itself. But I don't think it's just nostalgia goggles saying I can better suspend my belief for people dodging blaster fire than surviving giant explosions unscathed (and I'm not talking about intervention by the Force).

Spoiler-Lite reflections are at my Wordpress blog

Logan Review: X-Men back on Form

Logan does what big, established franchise films should: it uses its built-in budget and audience to do high quality, authentic storytelling rather than safe-bet replication of the usual action-hero(es) formula. Imagine: the entire movie—employing 15,000 people, the end credits tell us—has not one youthful action hero-protagonist at the height of (or discovering) his powers. Instead, it has a run-down guy who looks fifty, a guy in his nineties, and a kid. My God, it's a breath of fresh air.

Logan is a story about getting old. And superhero movie though it is, its exploration of aging could hardly be more down to earth. It has introduced me to an entirely new experience: personally identifying with Wolverine! He's in a position that many of us are in, myself included: feeling the wear and tear of age sapping our physical strength and energy at the very time we find ourselves caught between caring for aged parents and raising still young and needy children. We find ourselves Aeneas, carrying our father on our backs, holding our son by the hand, and hoping to survive whatever ordeal a difficult world has thrust us into.

I saw a lot of my 84-year-old father in the aged Charles. They are not similar personalities, but they are both great men, worn down by age to frailty and having lost much of what made them who they were. I understand completely where Logan is coming from in his profound need to care for Charles to the bitter end, even when Charles is frustrating, difficult, expensive, and not the man he was. Because he is the man he was, too, and for all that Logan is technically older than he is, he has been a father to Logan. He has won that love and that loyalty; it isn't going away.

Laura is a wonderful character, full or personality and power while still convincingly a child. Yet I find I have little to say about her. She is in formation. She is the future. Her story hasn't really happened yet. And I will stand with those who say it would be great to see her get her own film a few years down the line. But this film was about Logan and, to a lesser extent, Charles, portrayed exquisitely by Jackman and Stewart respectively. It was also about our contemporary world.

The X-Men has always been about real-world sociopolitics, and the political backdrop of this film rang true: from the brown women abused and ignored to the brown farmers driven out by agribusiness. The first X-Men movie pitted a fearful human majority against persecuted mutants. It showed senators trying to curry favor with voters by stoking fear of mutants. Well, that plotline would certainly still be current in our age of deportations and bans on refugees—and yet I find the present moment even more exactly depicted in the ambience of Logan. No one's out to curry the favor of the masses. The masses don't really matter anymore. The entrenched systems of power act autonomously, sending out armed troops across the land with impunity while most folks don't seem to notice—and couldn't do anything if they did. These power holders may be endorsed by the government, purely private; it doesn't matter; it's one and the same. They are the oligarchs. They work their will. It's nice to imagine that Canada remains a haven of social justice—may it prove true. But if there's one thing in the film that feels too easy, it's that escape.

Logan takes place in a dark time in a dark world, and it's a story about muddling through, which seems to be what we're all doing these days: young and old alike. The youthful action heroes aren't going to save us. It's just us, muddling through, like Tennyson's "Ulysses," so I'll end there:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will…

Ways to Help, Especially the Climate

To keep it positive, here's a small linkspam of ways to fight climate change and generally promote positive social action:

How to search for a socially responsible credit card. (Note: Credo/Working Assets are served by Bank of America.)

CarbonNeutralNow.org: the United Nations' program allowing individuals and businesses to purchase carbon offsets, supporting green projects in the developing world. Bloody awesome!

Carbon Offset Program in the Philippines. I attended a meeting featuring a speaker who had been on-site observing this reforestation program. It seems legit.

Green-e Energy: helping individuals and businesses buy into green energy. I never knew this existed till yesterday and haven't fully vetted it, but I see no immediate complaints through the BBB or just posted online. My first impression is it's legit.

Top 25 Retail Electricity Providers in the US: not solely geared toward green energy, but this list does include the company's green energy options as well as regions served and other info.

Donate directly to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe: now more than ever, they need it.

Favorite Fictional Couples

Goodreads has just asked author's to weigh in on their favorite fictional couples. I love the question, so here's my answer on the blog...

Naoe and Kagetora from Mizuna Kuwabara’s boys love light novel series Mirage of Blaze, which is about samurai spirits vying for control of modern day Japan while our plucky group of heroes (also samurai spirits) attempt to thwart them. Uesugi Kagetora, adopted son of Uesugi Kenshin, is the field commander of these defenders of modern Japan (and by extension the world). Naoe is his vassal and bodyguard. (Like most of the characters, both are historical figures.) The two of them have had a love-hate relationship—with both feeling generous doses of the love and the hate—for 400 years.

Why are they my favorite?

Well, Mirage and its main couple just blow everything else out of the water. This is no criticism of any other love story. Mirage is just so huge, weird, and no-holds-barred that it explodes the mind and senses. Naoe and Kagetora have the intense, obsessive, ugly-yet-compelling passion of Wuthering Heights’s Catherine and Heathcliff (who would also be high on my list) but at a length of several hundred more pages with a commensurate depth of psychology, philosophy, and character development. They are an investigation of (and sometime challenge to) Buddhist concepts of attachment and detachment. They are an exploration of trauma and its ramifications throughout life. They are an illustration of the horror of being trapped in destructive patterns and the possibility of growth out of them. They are an intense exercise in self-examination, self-flagellation, a study in how human relationships go wrong (and can be rescued). They are the insanity of intense, prolonged overextension (in this case, the overextension of living for 400 years without proper reincarnation/purification). They do not exist on an isolated story island consisting only of each other but rather widely affect and are affected by other loved ones, family, friends, enemies, strangers, the world. They signify that forgiveness and redemption are always available. They challenge us (and each other) to love brokenness and to find healing.

And they are also a BL/yaoi couple, which means they circumvent, subvert, refract, and otherwise complicate typical gender assumptions: I wrote an essay once arguing that they both represent "woman" (and "man") in various ways.

I don’t love them for the sex appeal, and I think I’m a little atypical as a Mirage fan in not finding the K/N sex much of a turn-on. Mind you, their sexual chemistry is fascinating, weird, disturbing, intense, and engrossing; it’s just a little too disturbing for me to be turned on by it. I don’t read it primarily for titillation value, but I do read with avidly—they have at least a couple of the strangest, most psychologically incisive sex scenes I’ve read.

Runner-Up

Vash and Wolfwood in Trigun—and, no, they are not a "couple." While they have been amply slashed (very occasionally well, I think), they are clearly non-sexual friends in both manga and anime canon. But in spirit—where it matters to me—I will count them as a couple because they become "partners," in so many words, and by any reasonable non-sexual definition, they surely fall in love, in the sense that they meet, spark, become engrossed by each other, transform each other’s lives, send each other through emotional roller coasters, fill a void in each other as no one else could, etc.

In contrast to Naoe and Kagetora, Vash and Wolfwood are an example of healthy love, though they surely have their problems. They do each other great good (and significant hurt). They become profound philosophical interlocutors who challenge each other to expand and reconsider their philosophical and moral assumptions. And they just spark tremendously, fit perfectly, and have a dashed lot of fun together, given that their whole relationship (especially in the manga) takes place on the eve of global apocalypse.

No Women?

No… not way up at the top levels. Alas, misogyny has a way of short-circuiting a story’s ability to generate a really compelling male-female couple. (I have never encountered a lesbian couple that has really gotten under my skin, probably, in part, because I’m attracted to men. But the closest has surely been Xena and Gabrielle.)

Some Runner-Up Male-Female Pairings (no particular order):

Catherine and Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights)
Mulder and Scully (X-Files)
Schmendrick and Molly (Last Unicorn and other stories)
Zhaan and Stark (Farscape)

Rogue One: The Les Misérables of Star Wars

And having led off with that title, I'm going to try to stay pretty spoiler free and offer some general impressions.

Overall, I really liked the film, but I'm still processing how I responded to it. I came out of it with a strong sense that I need to see it again—not in the fannish sense of wanting the same cathartic kick all over but in the more pensive sense of wanting to reevaluate it on a second go-round, to see how my response to it might shift.

For those avoiding spoilers, I'll just say it's a heavy Star Wars movie, minus arguably Revenge of the Sith, the heaviest, quite a bit more so than Empire. (To me, it feels emotionally weightier than RotS just because it's much better told.) And this heaviness was one source of my uncertainty about it. It seemed to have two tones: a classically Star Wars, storm troopers-aren't-hitting-anything, Saturday action movie tone and a much more serious, gritty, psychologically hard-hitting tone. I'm not sure these two work ideally together. I'm not sure that they don't. One could say Empire also walks these two tracks, and for my money Empire does it more cohesively. But that may be the voice of nostalgia. Or it may be that Empire profits from being part 2 of a very archetypically tried-and-true formula (the hero's journey). Rogue One doesn't aim for mythic territory. It's much more a story about "real life": i.e. the sorts of murky choices and difficult realities people fighting a powerful establishment actually face. I admire it for that.

What I came away liking most was the cast of characters—our core group of action heroes. The film juggled fully six new main characters (the main team), and with a small amount of screen time in which to develop each, developed all of them as individual, realistic people with strong backstories and character evolution. In some ways, it did as much character/relationship development in one movie as the original trilogy did in three—okay, maybe in two. But unlike The Force Awakens (which I also quite liked), it didn't feel like it was trying to cram three movies into one. It worked very well as a standalone, all the more impressive in an age when everything seems set up for sequels. (Of course, Rogue One has a sequel in A New Hope, but not in the sense of carrying over the same main characters.)

Ironically, of all these characters, the one I felt to be most off kilter—just a little off kilter—was Jyn, our protagonist. Mostly, I really liked her: backstory, identity, acting, which succeeded in conveying someone emotionally low affect with a lot of emotional nuance. But she seemed a bit too much all things heroic. This especially hit me when she began to wax inspiring about hope and the need to fight. It felt forced (no pun), partly because the script was extremely heavy handed, along the lines of "You're asking us to take risks based on nothing but hope, and I am going to say this so that you can quote the inspiring words you've heard about how rebellions are built on hope, and then Leia can say it again later and shout out to the title A New Hope." But beyond that, I found it hard to swallow that this young woman who's lived her life as a scrappy fighter, rejecting ties to idealistic movements, would suddenly turn into an inspiring revolutionary rhetorician. Yes, I know she was raised by an idealist rebel. Even so, the sudden shift in her tone felt about as realistic as if Han had given that speech. Still, overall, I liked Jyn a lot.

I was also pleased with the continuity the film had with the other films: very nice job matching the 1970s look of the rebels, very fun callbacks to the dog fights over the Death Star, nice set of references to the larger universe, good part for Mon Mothma, nice to see Bail Organa again and to see the cameos, not overblown, for See-Threepio and Artoo. Speaking of returning characters, however, this is a good segue-way to some niggles.

Niggles

CGI
I have mixed feelings about CGI Leia. It was very appropriate—necessary really—to feature Leia, and I think using CGI to achieve that is legitimate given the current, pretty impressive state of the technology. And it was a brief cameo, which was good. Yet the more I think about it, the more I feel trapped in the uncanny valley, and I can't help but wish that… maybe they hadn't shown her face full on… or maybe that they'd dug up some archival footage from the cutting room floor of ANH or the Christmas special to so they could composite in actual footage of Carrie Fisher (obviously without the camera on her face for dialogue).

I do not have mixed feelings about bringing Peter Cushing back to life as a CGI major character. It put me off. I landed squarely in the uncanny valley, and all I could think was: CGI Tarkin! Mind you, it was appropriate to have Tarkin in the story, and the voice acting for both him and Leia was excellent. But I would have preferred he be treated as a special guest star—as the Emperor often is—who wows you with his occasional presence, and I think seeing his reflection in the glass was much more convincingly "Tarkin." I would have liked to see more reliance on techniques like that.

(There's a piece of me, moreover, that feels such an approach would have been more respectful to the memory of Cushing—a sort of acknowledgement that he cannot be completely replaced by a computer—yes, I know there was actor behind that CGI and good voice work. Even so. But then, the other voice in me replies that I'm just being old fashioned. Tweaking actors with CGI is certainly the way of the future—and that's not necessarily bad if it can, say, make historical figures look more like themselves or ease recasting hurdles. I liked young Tony Stark in The Civil War better than if they'd just found a younger actor. More uncertainties.)

Women
Another niggle—ironically—was the lack of female presence in the film. Yes, the protagonist is a woman, and a great character. Her mother, though having a small part, was well realized too. Mon Mothma got her biggest part ever and was excellent. Leia cameo. A few other women flying by. But one got the sense that the general population was about 80-90% male and no one found this strange. Not one non-Jyn woman in their landing team of maybe ten rebel fighters? Not one? I kept searching and searching those faces. Did I miss someone? Not one?

Now, there are a couple of defenses for this. On the side of the Empire, the explanation is they're sexist. (This was, I believe, made explicit in the expanded universe: they just didn't like to put women in military or important scientific positions.) And that's fine… but it does raise the question of where Jyn gets, at one point, a perfectly tailored women's imperial uniform and why she seems a good candidate for infiltrating an imperial base while obviously being a woman. And yes, she is obviously a woman, even with visor down. If you're going to present the Empire as obviously sexist—to the point of not showing one single woman in any of its official positions—then you have a narrative obligation to mention that fact when it's relevant.

It's harder to explain away with the Rebels, whom, I guess, are not supposed to be sexist? And here's the where the second explanation comes in: continuity with A New Hope: it was made the '70s. Them's the breaks. And I'll buy that to a degree. I don't mind the men predominating, but they predominated a lot. In universe, one might explain the predominance as bleed-over from imperial culture. The Rebels, of course, do come out of imperial society: their pilots probably include a lot of imperial defectors, perhaps all men. But again, if your demographics are like that, it bears a mention. It really ought not to be visually shown and rhetorically erased. That's a textbook recipe for perpetuating inequalities, like the marginalization of women. (Side note: The Force Awakens did better here with palpably more significant female presence. Go TFA!)

Vader?
I found Vader okay in this film. He was used appropriately—sparingly, which was wise. He just wasn't… quite on form? Perhaps Jones just sounds a little old: I say this with love; he's about the same age as my dad. Perhaps Vader was too brightly lit? Perhaps the script just made him a bit too chatty? Perhaps I've just seen so much Vader he's just not scary anymore.

Overall
Niggles aside, overall, I really liked it. It was thought provoking. It was moving. It's a compliment to the film that I will need to see it again to fully process it. It will be with me increasingly deeply, I suspect, as I integrate it into my Star Wars canon.

Side note: I really liked the concept of Chirrut as a not-quite-Jedi, a true Force believer and at least slight Force sensitive, who never got Jedi training and possibly wouldn't have been strong enough to qualify as a Jedi, but who nonetheless has a deep philosophical understanding of the Force and Jedi ways. Being a Jedi is at least as much about having a certain perspective as it is about being able to manipulate the Force, and Chirrut shows an interesting dimension of this.

Second side note: As to the question of whether we should read Chirrut and Baze as romantic partners, read it however you want, but I think the question misses the point a little. The fact is that they loved each other: well written and well acted. They might have been lovers, brothers, platonic friends, second cousins twice removed, who knows? What matters is they loved.

We Need to Support Standing Rock

Right now in North Dakota, a massive gathering of Native Americans and allies is challenging the construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, which threatens lands sacred to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and could contaminate the water supply of millions who rely on the Missouri River if the pipeline were to leak. This movement is a vitally important act of resistance and deserves far more attention than it has received.

For me, this issue has sparked a new sense of clarity about my responsibilities as a white American. It is not enough to feel sympathetic to the struggles of Native Americans. I owe them material support. This is part of the reason I have contributed to the Standing Rock GoFundMe campaign, which provides supplies to the protectors at Standing Rock, who are now preparing to camp through the harsh winter months in sustained resistance to the pipeline. Supplies include sleeping bags, batteries, pots, shovels, tipi liners, tents, medic sinks, dishtowels, and much more. I encourage others to check it out and also check out the Standing Rock Donation Fund through StandingRock.org.

By supporting this movement, I can take a step toward repaying a small portion of what I owe to Native American peoples. I am an Anglo-Saxon descendant of pioneers, the most privileged ethnic group in the United States. I grew up north of San Francisco in the 1980s, raised to believe I was "on the Native Americans' side." I deplored the history of conquest and genocide practiced against them by my cultural ancestors. But all my life, I have profited from that history and not done a blessed thing to redress it.

I grew up roaming twenty beautiful acres of Sonoma County oak woodland, land ultimately available to my family because it was wrested from the peoples who used to live there, which likely included the Coast Miwok, Wappo, and/or Pomo. The Wappo culture was driven to extinction. The Pomo and a small number of Coast Miwok endure, dispossessed of virtually all their homeland. I owe something to the First Peoples alive today because I profit from the long history of crimes against them. It is only just—it is only a small step in the direction of justice—to pay something back.

But this in not a zero sum game. When I contribute to action to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, I do it not only to support the Standing Rock Sioux but also for the millions of Americans and the ecosystems relying on the Missouri River. I do it because we need to oppose fossil fuels and move with lightning speed to a no-carbon economy to save our planet from the worst ravages of climate change. And I also do it for myself—because climate change is exacerbating (if not causing) a drought of millennial proportions in my beloved California. And that corner of California is my homeland too and to see it dying kills my heart.

Everything is connected. The host of problems that besiege our nation (and much of the world) are symptoms of a single problem. The desecration of sacred sites, the endangered purity of the Missouri River, the California drought, the floods in Louisiana, the impoverishment of the Tribes, the impoverishment of the 99%, drug abuse, domestic abuse, factory farming, failing schools, Flint Michigan's water, Americans' anger at both Democrats and Republicans, ocean acidification, mass extinction (of species, cultures, languages), insufficient vacation, stress, and failing health: these are just a handful of symptoms of a social and ecological cascade failure caused by a national—and increasingly global—narrative that for centuries has made economic growth its defining virtue.

In this story, growth (profit, use, expansion) is more important than Tribal rights, more important than clean water, more important than workers' rights, more important than sparing livestock pain, more important than education, more important whole species' survival, more important than the oceans, more important than the atmosphere, more important than ecosystems, more important than medical care, more important than providing people food, more important than rest, more important than health, more important than the future, more important than family, more important than art, more important than beauty, more important than happiness, more important than compassion, more important than honesty, more important than truth, more important than reality. This story is killing us. We need to adopt a different story as swiftly and completely as we can. We need to replace growth and objectification with sustainability and reverence.

There are many other stories we can call on, from Christian compassion to Daoist balance. But in America, we cannot do better than listen to the stories of the First Americans, the ones who know best how to belong to this land. For centuries, their voices have been drowned out. We all need to create a space for them to be heard, not only because they deserve to be heard but because we need to learn what they're teaching. They are our first, best path to the future of America. It is not enough to offer platitudes about respect for Native voices. Voices do not spring from nowhere. Voices need food, water, shelter, rest, and a host of other material things. We must put our work and our money into reshaping our world. I am only beginning to do a little bit of my part, but my heart knows this is the right path and I'll keep walking it.

X-Men Apocalypse: A Fan's Reaction

Disclaimer: This is not a review of X-Men Apocalypse (though I've tagged it as such for simplicity) but some personal reflections (with SPOILERS).

This movie inverted a common experience of mine with Hollywood action films, which is they start out well but end as formulaic tripe. This film, in my view, started as tripe and ended up pretty good. Once I had accepted the fundamental lameness of the setup, the final showdown was a fairly satisfying mix of the usual X-Men philosophical conundrums, some appropriate character moments, and a good action sequence with appropriate use of the characters' powers against a plausibly formidable foe. I also generally thought the acting was very good and enjoyed many scenes and lines. And this film had a much better Phoenix setup than X3 and good development of Mystique as an increasingly strong character across the three films. The Apollo Star Trek episode was a perfect fit for the Apocalypse character. None of this, however, wipes out my overall feeling of disappointment.

The Okay
Apocalypse himself: I read a couple of reviews that said he was really wasted as a character. I don't know the storyline from the comics, but perhaps because I went in with low expectations, I thought he wasn't bad. He wasn't great: nothing nuanced or interestingly culturally other, but he wasn't a cackling villain or a lightweight, and I bought him fine as antagonist, especially given that the real moral struggle is with Magneto, Storm, etc.

The Niggling
Why does nobody age in this franchise? I know our culture worships youth, but in a story explicitly set twenty years after its first installment, which explicitly talked about how Mystique would stay young (and not everyone else), why does no one have one gray hair or look more than five years older?

A smaller niggle—half a compliment really: I love that these movies do different languages. The actors are well rehearsed. But why do they keep dropping into English when they're surrounded by people who are not primarily English speakers? Maybe we should assume they're still speaking whatever language and just suspend disbelief, but I'm missing the cues for that. And I found it very weird indeed that Erik would slip out of speaking Polish over his dying family and into English instead of German. If you're overwhelmed with grief, wouldn't be you overwhelmed in your native language? And why does Storm ask Apocalypse if he speaks English, get no initial indication that he does, and proceed to talk to him only in English in Egypt?

And speaking of very weird indeed, I find it hard to imagine a Jew who has seen his family murdered in the Holocaust, standing in Auschwitz, being told by some weird guy (even a very powerful guy) that that guy is both Elohim and a bunch of other deities—effectively that he should become an idolater—and not responding with some version of "Um, no." And I don't care if Erik is especially religious. How can you come from that cultural vantage point and not have that response? I had that response, and I don't even belong to any Judeo-Christian religion. Or if one wants to argue that Erik is just mentally fuzzy in that moment, it seems a natural thing to return to later when Erik turns against him. And while I'm smiling as I write this, I do think this is an example of generic action movie writing taking precedence over engagement with characters' backgrounds, and that's arguably not a great way to approach referencing the Holocaust, in particular.

The Real Failure of the Franchise
First Class had its problems, but I fannishly adore it as a film that got the emotional pitch just right. Days of Future Past was arguably better written overall but jettisoned a lot of that emotion. Apocalypse managed to be not especially well plotted and put the nail in the coffin of the emotional payoff set up in First Class.

This series has thrown away Magneto's character development, in particular, and the development of his relationship with Charles (and Raven). Between First Class and Days of Future Past, Erik sat in solitary confinement for ten years. Now, that could have been character defining if it had changed him in any way, driven him bonkers as solitary often does, etc. But it didn't. It was treated as about as significant as six months in jail. That's ten years of character development and possible Charles-Erik-Raven development time wasted. Between Days and Apocalypse, Erik buggers off to have family in Poland, wasting another ten years of Charles-Erik-Raven development time.

And while the family scenes, as an isolated bit of storytelling, were fine and well acted, that plot point made no sense for Magneto in his forties. The plotline in the comics, very reasonably, concerns young Magneto, newly free after the Holocaust, trying to build a normal life. It would make a lot of sense for pre-First Class Erik, who doesn't know there are other mutants and just wants to have a family and pass for someone who's not a freak. But it makes no sense for someone who has already developed a strong identity as Magneto. Even if you assume that the changed timeline in Days made him want to give peace a chance, I cannot imagine he would do less than Raven toward trying to help mutants. It's out of character. This is man so driven by the need to belong to his group and defend it that he'll repeatedly cause mayhem and death to do so. And then, we're told he turns his back on them and opts for trying to pass as a normal human with a normal human wife? I can't buy it. And it wasn't necessary.

Because in this very same story, we're also told that Quicksilver is Erik's son. Now, there's a character with a lot of personality already integrated into the franchise, who doesn't have to be generically created as the perfect wife-and-daughter who exist for no reason but to be cute and victimized. It would have been easy to set up a scenario where that father-son relationship is revealed, the two of them begin to bond, then Quicksilver gets killed (or seemingly), and Erik is pushed over the edge toward Apocalypse: fewer minor characters, greater cohesion, less wife/kid/victim stereotyping, more in character, and more emotional payoff for a relationship between two people rather than one person and two pieces of cardboard.

The fact that the movie didn't go there is indicative of my greatest criticism overall: emotional cowardice.

I don't know if Singer et al. got scolded by the studio after First Class for being "too gay" or "too confusing," but they sure backed off any emotional resonance for the last two movies. Charles and Erik are the most obvious victims: they had a touching and intense relationship in FC, one good fight scene in Days, and nothing in Apocalypse but a reserved "old friending" and a couple instances of James MacAvoy working hard to give maximum emotional weight to pretty sparse "I know how you feel" lines.

But they're not the only casualties. Charles and Raven got little emotional oomph, a sort of loose, "It's nice to see you." "This was never my home," as if they'd never actually known each other that well. Erik and Raven ditto: she seemed to care about his welfare as a sort of old friend, but there was no backbone to suggest they'd ever (as it seems) been an item or that his trying to kill her in Days left any lasting emotional mark. Erik and Peter ended up having no development. (From a pure plot perspective, it's unforgiveable that either Peter or Raven didn't say he was Erik's son when that was obviously the easiest way to make him back off destruction for Apocalypse.) Charles and Jean fared better, but here, too, there were missed opportunities for at least one moment of real emotional intensity between the two telepaths. In the scene where they're joining minds against Apocalypse, for example, they're rarely even in the same frame. I kept expecting her to touch his head to enhance the connection, and she didn't.

And this is a consistent thing: no one is allowed to touch anyone, no hugs, nothing, with the exception of Erik and his cardboard family. It's like everyone has become Rogue without her gloves. And that's why I wonder if there was scolding for being "too gay/confusing." Because our society (still? I mean, still?) doesn't recognize love in relationships that are not conventionally sexual-romantic (still privileging straight) or obviously familial. And mutant relationships often aren't that simple. People's lives are disrupted. Children are estranged from parents. Mutants find friends and family where they find them. Charles and Erik, obviously though depressingly in 2016, could be falling afoul of the "too gay" thing. But Charles and Raven may "confuse" people too: they're like brother and sister, but they're not biological siblings, so if they are too loving, will it read as creepy and sexual? All the more Charles and Jean. She is like his daughter, but she is not his daughter, so if they are too loving, will it read as creepy and sexual? Erik and Raven were presumably some sort of het pairing after FC, but they never for long or very conventionally, so if they appear too loving/intense/invested, will it just confuse the audience into thinking they're supposed to be the big lovers of the series, undercut Raven's independence perhaps?

Or maybe that's not it at all. But that's the only reason I can come up with for the Singer team's failure to follow through with the fascinating and palpable range of atypical emotional resonances it set up in FC. It's clear they know how to do it. They just spent two movies not doing it.

For all that, to end on a happy note, I enjoyed the movie. I really did—in the way we get jazzed by a fandom fix even if the product is mediocre. It amped me up. It had lots of engaging scenes. If they make more, I'm sure I'll see them (except the Wolverine ones. Enough with that. I liked his appearance in this one though).

Review: Bringing Them Back by Geoffrey Aguirre

Geoffrey James Aguirre's utopian science fiction novel, Bringing Them Back , is well worth a read for any fan of provocative utopian literature. (Disclaimer: I was in a critique group that reviewed an early draft of the book.) Aguirre posits a future Earth that has developed a technology to bring back the dead by reconstructing an exact replica of someone's body and brain. The technology is nearly flawless, the individuals effectively the same as the original people, diseases cured, and so on. These "reclaimed" people are then reeducated to participate in the utopia that has resurrected them. The moral imperative of this society is to resurrect "everyone, every when," all people since the dawn of humanity, starting with the most recently deceased. The resulting massive population is housed in huge "tech arcs" that arch up far above a surface world largely set aside for non-human life. Food can be synthesized from any matter, so hunger is unknown. This society, like our own, allows a mixture of freedoms and prohibitions, balancing stability against a comfortable range of life options for its citizens.

As the story opens, the reclamations have proceeded almost as far as back as the time of Christ, and the idea of resurrecting Jesus is causing philosophical and religious controversy, including backlash against the very idea of reclaiming people. Against this backdrop, a (comparatively) young woman, Kyna Roman, finds herself in possession of the key to a terrorist plot that might overthrow her civilization. As she gets drawn deeper into unfolding chaos, she must explore the foundations of her society and herself.

The premise of Bringing Them Back—the ideal of granting all people, past and present, functional immortality—is as provocative as any utopian idea I've read. When I summarized the book to a friend, he said to me, "It sounds more like hell than utopia," my first impression too. But Aguirre is scrupulous in examining the mechanisms and ramifications of his premise. He addresses to varying degrees overpopulation, ecology, religion, cultural dislocation and indoctrination, suicide, the legacy of colonialism, limits to freedom, reproductive rights and restrictions, bigotry, adaptations to climate change, and technological hazards ranging from the cataclysmic to the subtly psychological. His conclusion is clear: this utopia is not perfect, but it's pretty darn good. Personally, I remain unconvinced, but that's fine. Aguirre's novel is a challenging, rewarding mind experiment and its success measured not in how much we agree with his utopia but in how expansively he pushes the horizons of our thought.

Like much great utopian literature, Bringing Them Back is more about its setting than its human drama. Though it ramps up to pulse-pounding action near the end, its characters and their relationships are painted in broad strokes. The standout character for me is Eddie Slahal, a security agent and reclaimed citizen, who, in his original life, was a twentieth century Native American professor. In the character of Eddie, Aguirre, who is part Native American himself, delivers a refreshingly unstereotyped portrayal of a twentieth century Native American's cultural hybridity, loss and dislocation; his experiences with racism; the psychological turmoil of this life; and the contrast between that existence and his reclaimed life as a fully valued member of society.

More broadly, Aguirre creates social structures that effectively decenter the white colonial narrative of history. It is fascinating to see a future in which the Americas have been have been restored to a predominantly Native American population. In our society, it is rare, indeed, to find a narrative not primarily about Native American experience that, nonetheless, involves many Native Americans in the action. With much of its action set in the Americas, Bringing Them Back does just that. With people of indigenous American origin assigned to housing within American tech arcs, people of colonial ancestry, including Kyna, are assigned to a tech arc constructed in the middle of the ocean. Regardless of one's home address, however, citizens have the freedom to travel throughout the world, including down the surface. Interaction with others and exploration are encouraged. Colonialism has finally ended and ended in peace and prosperity for all.

Bringing Them Back is a self-published title and shows some telltales of this origin, for example, some uneven pacing and typographical errors. On the other hand, it makes good use of the freedom of self-publishing to introduce a truly unusual work aimed a select readership: fans of intensive utopian SF. Though thoroughly 21st century in its social awareness, the novel hearkens back to an earlier age in utopian science fiction, exemplified by authors such as William Morris, Olaf Stapledon, and H. G. Wells, where plot and character are secondary to thought experiment and the chief aim is to challenge us to contemplate the vast possibilities of human civilization. It stands a worthy addition to this tradition of utopian writing.

Star Wars: the Light & Dark Sides

It's interesting to read different responses to The Force Awaken's discourse on the Light and Dark Sides of the Force. Many voice sympathy for the Dark Side, sometimes critiquing the Jedi for being too rigid and dogmatic. But while the Jedi are not perfect, I agree with them that the Dark Side as a bad option. Being Force sensitive is dangerous because the Force is powerful and power corrupts, unless you're very careful. The Jedi articulate this need for care. The Dark Side is the path of least resistance, the much more naturally human path, the path most of us would take, and it is entirely possible that the "average" Dark Side practitioner is often multifaceted and relatable individual, more Kylo Ren than Vader or the Emperor. But the Dark Side does inevitably lead to pain and suffering.

The most important role the Jedi seem to play historically is policing users of the Dark Side. They do other things: helping with trade negotiations and so on, but other folks could do that (maybe better). It is very difficult, however, to take down a trained adept in the Force if you are not a trained adept. Star Wars posits a universe in which some people are born with an intrinsic ability to massively affect the world around them with the power of thought: if trained, they can lift heavy objects, influence (some) minds, choke people from across the room, stop laser blasts, practically fly, sense certain telepathic inputs from light years away, and are superhumanly awesome fighters. And some can even do some of this without training.

If power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and though Force adepts do not have absolute power, they have an amazing amount of power invested in their own bodies at their disposal in almost every circumstance in which they're conscious. The Dark Side is a problem because most people can't handle this kind of power without losing their perspective. Analogies are easy to come by: Tetsuo in Akira is a fairly ordinary boy till getting superpowers pushes him into a murderous revenge spree. This year's critically acclaimed series, Jessica Jones, features an antagonist who became an emotionally stunted psycho simply because he has the power to make people do what he says. Or let's consider real life: I have great admiration for Barack Obama on many levels, but as the US commander-in-chief, he is responsible for a drone warfare policy that has made whole countries afraid to stand under blue skies and has dismembered children. Whether or not you think this policy is justified, there's no disputing it causes a lot of damage to human lives. He doesn't do this because he's a monster. He does it because he has a lot of power. These choices are his. Thank God they're not mine.

Being an adept in the Force gives you massive power, and it's very, very hard to use massive power without beginning to do morally questionable things. The traditional Jedi are a rigid organization—perhaps too much so—but their rigidity speaks, I think, to the kind of discipline most people need to manage massive power without doing a lot of damage. It's no secret Jedi philosophy has real-world roots in Zen Buddhism. I recently reread parts of the Bhagavad Gita, so I'm going to zip all the way back to that Hindu antecedent of Buddhism for an example of this discipline in practice.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna counsels Arjuna on how to fight a just war. The truly just warrior acts completely without attachment, that is, with no illusion and pure clarity of perception, no bias, no ego, no personal investment. This is not, as I've heard some Star Wars fans argue, tantamount to being cold and abandoning love. Quite the contrary, once you achieve this detachment, once you're really not worried about yourself anymore, once you realize you don't need anything or anyone but your own internal self, then your eyes are opened and you become One with everything. Far from being loveless, this is the epitome of love: compassion universal and utterly unselfish. In a word, this is Yoda.

But not everyone is Yoda. Even by Jedi standards, he's outstanding. Most Jedi seem to be folks who have internalized this training and somewhat understand it but are no more perfect practitioners of it than most Christian priests are sinless or Buddhist monks enlightened. Yet most Jedi seem to emerge with sufficient skills to avoid using the Force to commit great acts of evil. And doubtless, some don't need that training and are just naturally psychologically healthy, unambitious, and do fine with their enhanced Force abilities. (Perhaps we don't hear much about them because they mostly stay out of trouble.) Still in all, it seems, some institution like the Jedi has historically needed to be around to provide a structure for addressing the "easy" tendency to use one's amazing powers to act out.

We don't know much about Kylo Ren yet, but he seems a decent case in point. In his origins, he seems an ordinary, decent guy. He was raised by loving, if imperfect, parents with good values. He has pretty good superficial social skills, a sense of humor, etc. And I don't know how he went so badly wrong, but I'm not terribly surprised because he's human—and he's a human in command of exceptional power very young. It's clear he has a painful relationship with his parents: Leia says she lost him when she let him go (whatever that means); Ren explicitly says Han was disappointing as a father. Well, Ren is like much of the human race in this. And most folks with uncomfortable family backgrounds are decent people. But most folks don't have the options of lashing out almost effortlessly with lethal force and little punitive consequence. But imagine that option and add just a typical amount of ordinary human pain: feelings of parental abandonment, betrayal, whatever, and you have a recipe for a slide into real abuse of that power. And that is why the Dark Side is easier and more seductive. It's the damn good yelling we want to give the friend who's hurt us. It's easy to give into. But it doesn't turn out well, whether it leads to Force choking or just lost friendship.

Luke was really lucky. He had very good teachers. Their names were Owen and Beru, and they taught him to have high self-esteem based on high standards for hard work, responsibility, and decent behavior with enough free rein for some fun and self-exploration. He grew up secure, loved, and unspoiled but with his childish foibles tolerated as a necessary piece of his journey. He had one of the soundest possible foundations for handling power: a psyche that is not particularly needy because it has always been taught it is inherently worthwhile. He may be whiny in A New Hope, but he embarks on his Jedi career already several steps down the path toward unattached compassion because he doesn't have an especially strong need for attachments to validate himself. And yet even Luke struggles quite a lot with the Dark Side because even he, like most everyone, has issues.

I've always been a believer in the Light Side. I've always accepted the wisdom of Obi-Wan and Yoda (though Yoda has sometimes annoyed me). And yet I can tell you with certainty that if I were a Force adept, I would have fallen to the Dark Side at some point (hopefully not permanently). I have been on the Dark Side metaphorically for quite a lot of my life. And I'm a very moral person. It's just easy to slip. But Ben and Yoda are right: the Light is stronger; it's a much surer base. It's much more comforting and more loving too.

And, yes, we need the Jedi to help us find it.