Philip Sandifer's Blog, page 54

Sex in the Time of Empire

I was a guest on Daniel & Shana's Oi! Spaceman podcast again, this time talking about 'Rose' and 'The End of the World'.  But now, back to the ongoing saga...

 

The last time I wrote about Star Wars, I said that it sees the galactic politics and history it depicts as being essentially powered by neurosis, specifically male neurosis.  Rogue One very explicitly adheres to this pattern - though, laudably, it represents a counter-strain in opposition.

In Rogue One, the Death Star openly represents the immense strength and immense vulnerability of any imperial system, the simultaneously terrifying and ridiculous urges and principles which animate such systems.  At a different-yet-connected level, it represents the same mixture of dangerous power and ridiculous vulnerability within one of the techno-bureaucrats who run that system.  It sees the causal throughline as very clearly running from inside the heads of at least two men, out into the universe.

I have mixed feelings about this.  The thesis that politics comes from emotions and psychology, though I believe it is ultimately wrong, doesn’t necessarily have to collapse into a reactionary ‘fix yourself first’ ideology.  Psychology clearly plays a role in politics, and in resistance and struggle.  The subjective factor is important.  We are generally supposed to think that the ‘mass psychology of crowds’ is negative and scary, but crowds can also be expressions of unifying principles rather than just the loss of individuality, and collective struggles create dialectics of learning and cooperation that expand people’s political horizons.  This is why it is generally a mistake to too ruthlessly criticise mass political movements that, while broadly on the right side, also have imperfect or even pernicious elements.  A lot of people who demonstrate against Trump will have ideas that are retrograde, unpleasant, unhelpful, conventional, short-sighted… but they’re still better than anyone else because they’re there, on the street.  And the collective process of protest creates a space - found nowhere else within capitalism - in which people can encounter strange new people, and strange new ideas, face to face as it were, in struggle, in unity but not in conformity, where they can learn and grow and expand, can improve their political consciousness.  The social effect of mutual support and solidarity in struggle is a vital part of any radical movement.  This is undoubtedly psychological.  Indeed, it is only the vulgar reduction of psychology, society, etc into discrete and separate things (itself an aspect of bourgeois ideology) which sees the psychological aspect as being apart from the other dynamics of political struggle.  Anything that impedes this dialectic is to be shunned, including criticism that stops being constructive and becomes sectarian doctrinaire nitpicking, whether it comes from identity politics or from class politics.  (Again, the apparent schism is a false dichotomy.)

On the other hand, the way Rogue One – and Star Wars generally – depicts cosmic levels of political tyranny and turmoil as emanating directly from inside addled and repressed and anxious male brains can be, as it were, reclaimed.  It needn’t reduce the political to the personal so much as remind us that all these structures are, ultimately, human creations, and as such they are structured like us, as are all things we create, as are our children.  And while I reject the ‘King List’ version of history – the idea that history is ultimately the result of the ideas and actions of ‘great men’ – there is doubtless a sense in which the grotesque imbalances of class society make the individual neuroses of certain individuals far more damaging to the rest of us than they should be.  I’m sure I could think of applications of this idea to present-day political events, if I were to make a special effort.

Rogue One is a deeply political film, but it shows every political decision made by the m ain characters underwritten by essentially personal motivations.  It would not be fair or accurate, however, to say that these personal motivations are always apolitical or unpolitical.  Apart from anything else, I reject any theory of human consciousness which sees humans as essentially isolated individuals staring out at the world through two peepholes.  Human consciousness is socially constructed.  Every individual is the shifting and temporary arrangement of interrelations between a self and a society.  Self and world, self and society, are interpenetrating.  The self is really nothing more than a way of looking at a particular bit of the world.  That doesn’t make it unreal, but it does - contra bourgeois ideology - make it untenable as a sovereign and supreme subject.  We are far more socially constructed than popular bourgeois ideology would have us believe, and this makes us more free rather than less, because freedom is social too, not individual as capitalism always claims.  So I don’t really believe that there are such things as apolitical or unpolitical emotions at all.  However, it is possible to designate an emotion or motivation as apolitical or unpolitical in a temporary and local sense, depending on one’s chosen and temporary working definition of politics in any given situation.  In some texts, the personal motivations of the characters are carefully segregated from politics.  But I don’t think Rogue One does this.

For instance, it is very hard to see Krennic’s internalised, denied, curdled, possibly-unconscious attraction to Galen as unpolitical or apolitical in the context of the Empire.  There is no explicit homophobia in the Empire, but I can’t imagine a whisper of such things would do a man’s career any good.

Just as the Empire is inherently human, and largely white and/or Western, so it is inherently… well, not straight exactly, but rather sexless.  Mind you, its depiction as sexless on screen is to do with ‘real world’ factors such as the overall sexlessness of the series, designed as it was for children. 

It’s worth asking - given that sexuality is such a huge part of human psychology, and given that we are opaque to ourselves and not in control of our unconscious drives, and given that almost all children’s stories are written by adults, and given that the modern practice in children’s stories is to edit out sexuality to a great degree… where does the sexuality go?  If we don’t believe that sexuality, or indeed any part of the human psyche, sits in a mental box that we can choose to keep open or closed, then we should probably assume that sexuality gets into children’s stories written by adults.  When it is consciously edited out, it manifests itself unconsciously.  It is sublimated, and reconfigured into other forms.  And indeed, anyone who knows children’s stories know this.  Classic fairytales are dripping with sublimated sex, as are many modern children’s stories, particularly more elaborate ones for older children. 

Sex generally only factors into the series in the abstract and distanced form of family relationships.  The relationship between Anakin and Padme in the prequels should, on the surface, be the sexiest the series ever got… but that isn’t exactly how it pans out on screen.  It’s noticeable that, like almost every couple of failed-couple in the Harry Potter series, Anakin and Padme meet first when they are children.  (Natalie Portman was actually 18 when she starred in Episode One, but her character is depicted in highly childlike ways.)  In practice, Anakin and Padme spend very little time doing anything sexy.  In fact, Padme spends very little time doing anything, and they spend very little time together overall.  Even Leia and Han’s ‘romance’ in Empire and Jedi consists of a couple of kisses between largely-hostile conversations and lots of running around, being captured, escaping, going on missions, etc.  If Leia got it on with Han after rescuing him from Jabba, the film is careful to take us back to Degobah with Luke while this happens, so we can watch a muppet die instead.  Meanwhile, the rest of the galaxy seems superficially sexless, apart from Jabba himself, who likes chained semi-naked humanoid slavegirls, despite being a giant slug, which is so incoherent it scrambles the sexual implications until lust itself looks both inherently abusive and inherently… um… what would be the word?  Impractical?  Let’s go with that. 

Jabba, and Jabba’s palace, is one locus of where the adult sexuality - consciously edited out but, of course, uncontainable, goes in the stories.  It can’t not get in - because human sexulaity simply doesn’t work like that - so it has to be hidden, so it goes into dark corners and into disguise, is transfigured and reified.  One of the tells is the very adolescentness of the Jabba sequences, with their anxious combination of sex, domination, and revulsion.  But one reason why the Jabba sequences don’t work so well in context (despite being, in aspiration, some of the most interesting material in the series) is because they’re too open about containing sublimated sexuality. 

Meanwhile, the films’ most powerful sequences tend to work precisely because they sublimate the sexuality more completely.  Part of the thrill of the Empire is in its combination of orderliness and opulence, coldness and pageantry, blankness and texture, functionality and fetishism.  The Empire is gorgeous to look at in a way that the Rebellion simply isn’t.  It’s no accident that assorted Rebel characters suddenly look a lot sexier when they steal and don imperial uniforms.  We know about the libidinous charge of the uniform, generally.  There is no uniform that is not fetishised by human beings, not even the SS uniform.  And indeed, it is almost certainly putting the cart before the horse to suggest that uniforms are only fetishised later, as an afterthought.  (I wanted to include some theory from sex theorists here, but you try researching this topic on Google.) 

Krennic’s sublimated attraction to Galen exists in the context of an imperial culture that is intensely male and homosocial, and dripping with repurposed and furtive glamour, and as repressed as it is oppressive.  Moreover, it occurs in the contest of the Empire’s inhuman repurposing and utilisation of all human creativity.  The sexual spark that is poured furtively into the Empire’s aesthetically controlled-yet-gorgeous evil becomes a symbol of the way structures like the Empire simultaneously repress human creativity and also fuel themselves on that very repression.

Orwell pointed out in Nineteen Eighty-Four how totalitarianism (not a term I’m fond of, but let’s cope) channels sexual energies into frenzied hate directed towards designated enemies of the state, foreign and domestic.  The impersonality of the hate can be seen in the way it can be directed towards one object one minute, and then immediately redirected towards another object the next minute, without a moment’s pause or disorientation.  I have to say, I don’t think this sort of thing is the fundamental animating principle of tyranny, but it is certainly a technique in the social construction and maintenance of tyranny.  Political structures find and utilise existing human psychological realities, and construct themselves along those lines.  How could they do otherwise, being themselves human creations?  In the process, they interpenetrate with human psychological realities, affecting them in return.  In class society, this is a form of alienation.  It is by no means unique to authoritarian regimes, but it is generally a feature of hierarchical societies.  In such societies it can be directed towards foreign competitors, and in the age of empire it forms part of the psychological animus of supremacism, racial or cultural.  Look how easy it is for centrist liberals, working within the ideological mainstream, to instantly, without any consciousness of being directed, channel alarming degrees of frothing moral urgency and outrage towards whatever designated enemy or crisis currently best serves the needs of established power.  It’s sometimes forgotten these days that liberals were yelling bellicose cries of “Benghazi!” before conservatives turned that word into a conspiracy theory.  Western culture is still imperial.  It still channels alienated human creativity - some of it undoubtedly sexual, though I wouldn’t want to enthrone sexual energy too much; it’s hardly the only or necessarily the most crucial energy - towards the needs of power.

What we end up with is, of course, the old question of the relation between structure and agency in history.  But we also end up with the old question of the relation between structure and agency inside the human mind.  These are actually questions which Star Wars tries to grapple with.  Indeed, once again, while the series as a whole tends to do so implicitly, Rogue One tends to make it far more aesthetically explicit.  It relies upon the idea that the galaxy is structured fractally, with each instantiation of structure existing within a larger instantiation of the same structure, and with smaller instantiations of the same structure within it in turn.

But we’ll get to that.

 

Myriad Universes: Blood & Honor

Returning from an exploratory mission in the Gamma Quadrant, Jadzia Dax informs us through a Science Officer's Log that her team has discovered something unique: A mysterious blue glowing artefact of unknown origin. Also on her team aboard the runabout USS Orinoco are her erstwhile travelling companion Doctor Julian Bashir, and an operations division ensign called Jamie. Before they can dock, however, Julian gets an urgent call from Commander Sisko that he's needed in the infirmary to tend to a medical emergency. Before he can even acknowledge, however, he's beamed there directly from the runabout cockpit.

A Lieutenant Jayakar has been unfortunately killed in some sort horrible malfunction. She was escorting a diplomatic party from the Romulan Star Empire led by an Ambassador Jannek when something seemed to go wrong with one of they airlocks. Jannek himself is on hand to offer his condolences, and urges diligence to Commander Sisko in determining whether it really was an accident, or whether the Lieutenant was murdered. Odo reports that mechanical failure seems like the obvious initial culprit, but he would never accuse Chief O'Brien of negligence, and is far more inclined to point the finger at deliberate sabotage. There's an obvious tension with the Romulan party present, but before Jannek can excuse himself Dax and Jamie arrive. We get the by-now stock Trill joke (which Jadzia even lampshades), wherein she tries to catch up with an old friend who doesn't recognise her at first. Jannek, however, seems far more interested in Jamie: He compliments the wisdom in her assignment to Deep Space 9, and expresses a desire to get to know her better, a fact which leaves her and Doctor Bashir somewhat taken aback.

Some time later, Commander Sisko escorts Jannek to the floor of the Bajoran Provisional Government. The Ambassador is interested in opening up formal diplomatic relations with Bajor, but the Bajorans are suspicions. Not of the Romulans themselves, necessarily, but because the Romulans have dealt with the Cardassians in the past. Jannek contends that the Romulan Star Empire seeks to work with anyone who “shares its interests”, but it's clear he's going to have some work to do in swaying them. Back on the station, Jadzia, Julian and Jamie are running tests on the artefact in the lab when one of Jannek's aides comes in suffering from abdominal pain. Turns out he had an allergic reaction to something he ate, namely some Klingon gagh.

After returning from their meeting with the Provisional Government, Jannek and Sisko are talking about Federation history, which is something the Ambassador is deeply interested in. He says Commander Sisko reminds him of the great Starfleet hero James T. Kirk, but Ben can't see how, feeling that he and Kirk are really almost polar opposites, specifically mentioning how important family is to him, which he contrasts with Kirk's desire to never be anywhere other than a starship bridge. Sisko does say that both he and Kirk are both “a product of our times”, and Jannek says he is as well. Unlike his father, who was a commander in the Imperial military, he chose instead to be a diplomat and work for peace through negotiation. After Commander Sisko leaves for the night, Jannek's aide comes in to deliver a report.

The aide tells Jannek about the artefact Dax's team found in the Gamma Quadrant and explains that she's examining it with Doctor Bashir and Ensign Jamie, whose full name is revealed to us as Jamie Samantha Kirk. Also, the artefact may be a new kind of life form, as it's radiating a massive amount of energy. Jannek has heard all he needs though, and dismisses his aid. As he leaves, we see that a vase on Jannek's table is actually Odo in disguise, and that he's been eavesdropping on the two Romulans. Odo then goes to see Quark to ask him, in his usual way, whether or not he knows anything about the artefact. After some light and friendly threats, Quark confesses that he has had offers for it, but from Bajorans. Quark stresses that he doesn't know anything about the artefact or what it is though (except that it's probably valuable), as his contacts wouldn't tell him anything when he asked. Odo leaves the bar, but immediately gets an alarm indicating a breach in the infirmary.

There's been another goldshirt death, this time some guy named Winters, and there's a massive energy discharge from the infirmary. Odo and Sisko go to investigate, and they see an intruder getting zapped hardcore by the artefact. Odo warns the Commander it's too dangerous for them to go in themselves, but then the energy levels return to normal, and the two are left wondering what the artefact is and why it's suddenly become so important. Sisko and Odo have a brief conversation about intrinsic value before they discover another death: One of the Romulan aides, namely, the one who Doctor Bashir treated earlier and who reported on the artefact to Ambassador Jannek. Commander Sisko questions Jannek about the incident. Although Sisko is suspicious, Jannek is honest with him, saying his aide was acting under his orders, but only to find out anything that could help with the negotiations with the Bajorans.

Later, Commander Sisko asks Major Kira what she thinks of things. Jannek knew about the attempted theft of the artefact, but Ben can't figure out if this means he was the one behind it or not. Kira says she's been talking with Odo, and they both think the Bajorans are involved: Because the artefact is from the Gamma Quadrant, and many Bajorans see anything connected with the Wormhole to be the WIll of the Prophets, a fundamentalist sect might be trying to secure it for their own aims. The question is, if they are, are they also connected to the Romulans? Just then, Odo comes in and says he saw Ambassador Jannek at Quark's Bar sharing a date with Jamie Kirk, although he dryly admits “I may not be comfortable with humanoid rituals, but I don't believe his intentions are of the romantic kind”. Commander Sisko tells Odo to keep watch, but not to take any rash action.

At the Bar, Jamie is still stunned by Jannek's interest in her. The Ambassador says he's trying to get to know the people of Starfleet better, but Kirk protests there must be more important people he could be talking to than her. Jannek responds that they in truth have a lot in common, but while that may be so, Jamie has another appointment and has to leave, though she's open to continuing their conversation later. It turns out Jamie, along with Jadzia Dax and Doctor Bashir, are taking the Orinoco to a safe distance away from Deep Space 9 so that they can conduct safer tests on the artefact. They don't get very far when suddenly a pair of armed Bajorans jumps out of the storage bays and commandeers the ship, saying something about a “chalice” and affording it “the respect it deserves”. It doesn't take long for Ops to notice this, and that the ship is diverting to Bajor. Sisko, Kira and Miles O'Brien go after it in the Rio Grande, but before they can leave Ambassador Jannek requests to come along to prove his innocence once and for all.

Thankfully, Dax thought to activate a homing signal and the rescue team finds the Orinoco fairly quickly. It's Ambassador Jannek who picks up the trail, and leads Sisko, Kira and O'Brien to a secluded valley where Dax, Bashir and Kirk are being guarded by a group of armed Bajoran militants who have put the artefact on some kind of pedestal. And not just any Bajoran militants, but the Circle, who have reformed in order to weaponize the artefact, which they believe is an Ark of the Covenant-style Divine Superweapon that will “Strike down the disbelievers” while protecting the “chosen ones”. However things go pretty badly for them once they activate it, as the power of the Chalice winds up snuffing out the the Circle's own members, and leaving Jannek and the Deep Space 9 team alive. Dax and Bashir try to revive them, but then the Chalice transforms into a new shape: That of a humanoid figure.

The figure identifies itself as Ayelborne, last of the Organians. Ayelborne promises to revive all of the fallen, and recaps “Errand of Mercy”, that Original Series episode where the Organians prevented a war between the humans and the Klingons. Ayelborne is about to leave this plane of being, but before he does, he wants to do the same for the Federation and the Romulan Star Empire. It is revealed that Jannek is the son of the Romulan Commander Captain James Kirk battled to the death in “Balance of Terror”, and Jamie Kirk, is, of course, a descendant of Kirk himself. Jannek explains that, among Romulans, vengeance is passed down generation to generation until it is extracted, but Jannek wanted to buck that trend, and sought out Captain Kirk's descendant so that they could work together for peace instead, for his father had said that he and James Kirk could have been friends in another reality. And with that, Jamie Kirk accepts a position as Ambassador Jannek's official liaison to the Federation, with a sly hint that “an old family friend” of both of theirs is happy.

“Blood & Honor” is the result of a somewhat experimental period in Malibu's history. It's the first in a “Celebrity” side series that, while it only lasted two issues, featured actual Star Trek actors writing their own Star Trek stories to explore parts of their character they weren't given the chance to on television. If you couldn't tell given the plot, this issue was written by Mark Lenard, who played both Spock's father Ambassador Sarek and, more relevantly, the Romulan Commander from “Balance of Terror”. Although it was, realistically speaking, always only ever going to be Malibu that would take a chance on a project like this, it does lead to the interesting end product of a story about peace with the Romulan Star Empire, with an explicit nod to Spock's reunification movement, being done on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine instead of on Star Trek: The Next Generation, which is where you might be inclined to assume it would be a better fit.

That said, however, “Blood & Honor” is a far better fit for this side of the galaxy then it might seem to be at first glance. We're skipping ahead a bit in our narrative to May 1995 (and we'll jump back a few months to January next time) simply because I happen to think placing this story here makes a cleaner arc to my planned end-point, so you'll notice the character designs Leonard Kirk uses are based on early Dominion War designs (and Commander Sisko is altogether more gruff and brusque then I would like him, but that could simply be due to Mark Lenard's comparative unfamiliarity with his character too), though the story itself is very much a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine one. There's The Circle, of course, which links it directly to the previous incarnation, but this also a story very much about peace and not war. The overt connection to not only “Balance of Terror”, but “Errand of Mercy” and “Unification” certainly gives “Blood & Honor” a whiff of fanwank about it, but I'm inclined to forgive it for a couple reasons: One, these are all stories that had a massive impact on not just Trekkie fandom but pop culture more broadly, so a general audience could reasonably be expected to be familiar with them (and if they're not, there's enough naturalistic exposition that it conveys the required backstory elegantly).

Secondly, “Balance of Terror” was arguably the best damn thing the Original Series ever fucking did and something Star Trek has, broadly speaking, utterly fucking failed to properly interact with in the 29 years since. The one exception being, of course, Hearts and Minds. And now maybe it's more clear why Star Trek: Deep Space Nine doing a story about the Romulans and “Balance of Terror” makes sense.

“Blood & Honor” is nothing less then the natural end-point of the Romulan mythology that has existed since “Balance of Terror” and was troublesomely complicated by “The Neutral Zone” and “The Enemy”. The series has picked up Jadzia Dax's challenge to the Romulans in Hearts and Minds that they have lost their honour and integrity and decided to respond to it head on. It's a testament to how important it was for the series to do this and to the immense cultural gravity of “Balance of Terror”, not to mention the author himself, that Mark Lenard chose to use his opportunity to pen a Star Trek story to address this instead of doing something with Spock and Sarek instead, which I'm sure almost every Star Trek fan would have expected him to. Although it does strike me as I write this that you could very easily read Ambassador Jannek as a combination of the Romulan Commander and Sarek, which probably says something in and of itself.

But give or take “Balance of Terror” and Hearts and Minds, and “Blood & Honor” is on its own level a story that's very much at home on Deep Space 9. If you think about the kind of diegetic role a place like the station would play, one could certainly imagine it being somewhere diplomatic parties would go to hold gatherings and whatnot. Indeed, we even saw some of that in “The Forsaken” and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine The Next Generation. It certainly makes more sense for ambassadors to be paying a visit to Deep Space 9 then to ask a a notional exploration ship like Captain Picard's Enterprise to ferry them about, and the Bajorans provide an important third party who needs to be convinced of the good intentions of diplomatic representatives from galactic powers like the Federation and the Romulan Star Empire, as we see in this story.

It must be said though there are a few quirks and eccentricities with this book. As important as it is, it's very clearly Jamie and Jannek's story that's front and centre here, to the point the regular cast are pushed aside a bit. A certain type of Star Trek fan will probably resent this, and hell, I'm not 100% onboard with it either. But this is a more nuanced nitpick that deserves a more empathetic reading than the raising of the dread “M.S.” phrase. What this has is the shape of a proper Next Generation-era Star Trek story (speaking of, I love the touch of both Jannek and Jamie Kirk being part of their own respective “Next Generations”, and the flagging of the contrast between James Kirk and Benjamin Sisko): The character development should go to the guest stars-That's the only way Star Trek's brand of utopianism can accommodate drama of the sort Westerners understand. The tricky bit is striking the balance between keeping the dramatic stuff on the non-regulars while still making sure the regulars play an important role in fostering that. In this kind of setup the regulars are best employed as mentor and role model figures, and nobody here really gets the opportunity to be that: Not even Jadzia Dax who, for various reasons, one would very much like to see her be.

In fact, I have to confess the writing for the regulars is bit wanting across the board. Jannek is as good as one would expect and Jamie Kirk is adorable, but it's clear Mark Lenard doesn't have a great grasp on the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine characters, though that's perhaps understandable. Dax is probably the biggest miss from my perspective and I already mentioned Sisko's odd gruffness, and while we could possibly blame the Dominion War for that it is worth noting Sisko here is a bit reminiscent of Captain Picard or Jim Kirk, if you caught them in a grouchy mood on a bad day. Another obvious Original Series throwback that's even less desirable are the redshirt deaths, or in this case the goldshirt ones. Bad form, there. Elsewhere, Lenard doesn't quite seem to know what to do with characters like Major Kira, and I don't think Chief O'Brien even gets a line. On the other hand, Odo is quite proactive and gets a number of opportunities to display his trademark snark, oddly muted in Lenard's hands as it may be.

(Putting Lenard's script aside for the moment, the art in this issue is also not the greatest I've ever seen from this book. That said, I do super dig how Kirk models the USS Orinoco after its Playmates Toys incarnation, weird upside-down cockpit and all.)

But even this is all being way too harsh on this story. I'm inclined to be far more forgiving to Mark Lenard then I am Mike W. Barr, who was actually the head writer on this book for like a year and had an even worse ear for his own characters and employed way more egregious pulp serial stalling tactics. Of course Mark Lenard would be most comfortable writing for Ambassador Jannek, why would we expect otherwise? The important thing here is the heart of what Lenard wrote, because a Star Trek story in summer, 1995 echoing Hearts and Minds' themes of peace and reconciliation, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's own broader themes of healing, was sadly an outlier. The fact that it's about peace with the Romulans and bringing an end to an unnatural and unneeded conflict that reaches all the way back to “Balance of Terror” is an added bonus, but the fact it's about peace at all is its most important legacy. Because in 1995 that's getting harder and harder to find.

It is worth asking ourselves what kind of peace we're promised at the story's “Beginning”. Jannek is, of course, a diplomat, and seems altogether more interested in going through official diplomatic channels to resolve conflict, even as he himself likens diplomacy to hunting and stalking prey. This would be a peace for those in the halls of power, the liberal dream that representative democracy is the cure for all the world's ills. This is, we should already know, a dangerously misguided fallacy. Many years ago, long before I ever thought of starting this project, I tried to rewatch Babylon 5 for the first time since the 1990s, and I couldn't get through it at all. Even then I was repulsed by how unrealistic the fantasy it was trying to sell was, even before I looked more closely at all the other ugly political implications of that series. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine should not be trying to be Babylon 5 in the first place, but these are ideas we should keep in mind.

This, more than anything else, marks “Blood & Honor” as being very much a product of its time. Its heart is in the right place, but maybe its mind isn't quite there yet. We are about to bid farewell to Starbase Deep Space 9, its life tragically cut short in its prime. As we prepare to say our goodbyes, we must think seriously about what it's come to stand for over these past two years. Because it has to mean more than the dream of entitled white liberalism.

As in all things, it's best to go back to the beginning to find the answer.

Cultural Marxism 6: Inversions

I've set the Patreon thresholds for reviewing Doctor Who S10 - $300 (currently $9 a week away) for reviews, and $320 for podcasts. So if you're not backing Eruditorum Press on Patreon, now's a great time to change that.

Inversions continues the basic trend that began with The State of the Art whereby Banks writes Culture stories whose premises amount to attempts to break the Culture. Having essentially exhausted the two extremes of premises with the form “what if the Culture met X,” however, Banks moves in a different direction by asking, essentially, “what if you took the Culture out?” This is, obviously, quite the feat, and there are aspects of Inversions that clearly don’t quite work outside of the original publication context. When Excession was first published, it very clearly declared itself a Culture novel on the cover. Inversions, on the other hand, was published with no such description. There were significant clues, including a “note on the text” omitted from subsequent editions that contained a conspicuously capitalized reference to one of the characters being “from a different Culture,” but broadly speaking, other than the fact that it was an Iain M. Banks novel instead of an Iain Banks novel, the book was not even overtly science fiction, little yet overtly a Culture novel.

Instead it unfolds with a structure that’s a sort of simplified version of the two-threads approach in Use of Weapons, only without the non-chronological storytelling. Instead the two narratives, titled The Doctor and The Bodyguard, unfold in parallel, switching back and forth between them. Each is set in a different territory on a planet with obvious resemblances to medieval Europe, and focuses on a mysterious outsider who’s a key confidante of the territory’s ruler, and who, it emerges, is clearly in fact a Culture agent. Neither chapter is told from this character’s perspective - the Doctor’s tale is related by her assistant, while the Bodyguard’s is simply told in the third person. And so audiences sit at a remove from the Culture for once, watching its manipulations from the outside, albeit with more understanding of what’s going on than any of the actual characters (including, by dint of the doubled narrative, the Doctor and the Bodyguard themselves).

The way this was intended to work, for a 1998 audience, was for the book to unfold with a shock of slow recognition. It’s not a particularly subtle problem - the reader is clearly supposed to figure it out fairly easily. But the moment of figuring out what’s going on in the book is clearly intended to be part of the book’s impact, and it’s something that’s diminished by calling it “book 6 of 10 in the Culture series” The question that unfolds instead - “in what sense is this a Culture novel” may seem only subtly different from “what sort of novel is this,” but it’s a difference with teeth, moving the book from one about discovering its structure to one about working backwards from a solution.

It’s impossible to say with certainty, but this doesn’t seem likely to have helped the book. On a basic level, a book that at first glance appears to be about a quasi-medieval setting but that gradually reveals itself to be a Culture novel is an easier sell than a Culture novel that doesn’t actually feature the Culture. In one a familiar genre of medieval skullduggery deforms in interesting ways. In another, the reader follows along as the author explains their trick. Banks has said the book was an attempt to write “a Culture novel that wasn’t.” Fundamentally, making it one isn’t going to go well.

This isn’t completely fair - it’s not as though Inversions is a one-trick pony any more than Use of Weapons is. There’s at least one decent mystery, some great characters, and the usual sparkle of Banks’s wit. Still, like Use of Weapons, it’s trick is a big part of the point. But the comparison is revealing in other ways too. Use of Weapons still unfolds majestically if you know the twist; indeed, that’s the more satisfying pass in most regards because of how well the twist is set up. But Inversions has no such extra reward for the already knowledgeable reader. Once one knows how all the pieces fit together, the whole is in this case diminished slightly.

Part of the problem is that its interleaved narratives simply don’t measure up to one another. This is always a risk when a writer does the “discrete plot strands”” trick with a book, whether that writer be George R.R. Martin or William Gibson: if one of your strands is distinctly not up to par with the others it immediately becomes a focus point for the book’s ills. And in Inversions the Doctor narrative is head and shoulders above the Bodyguard one. This is partially by design. Inversions explicitly sets up Vosill and DeWar as having a longstanding debate about interventionalism. The book emphatically comes down on Vosill’s side, and this preference extends far beyond having her story work out better. She’s simply the more fun character. She gets moments of warmth and humor where DeWar is taciturn and brooding. She takes the proactive interventionalist standpoint, and so gets to do things, while DeWar’s passivity mean that large swaths of his strand are devoted to him telling thinly veiled stories about the Culture that explain his history with Vosill. And so every Bodyguard chapter lands like the second helping of vegetables you have to finish before you can go back to watching television.

A deeper and more fundamental problem, though, is the basic fact that Banks comes down so emphatically on one side of the interventionism debate. This debate, after all, has been one of the most basic thematic components of the Culture series to date. And the heart of this theme has been a certain ambiguity: the Culture’s interventionism is at once sympathetic - the means by which they morally justify their expansive hedonism - and troublesome. The reader was routinely called on to ask whether the Culture’s interventions were worth their cost, whether in material suffering or in the corrosive morality involved in working with Zakalwe. But the question was never answered.

Here, however, Vosill and DeWar have an active debate going on about whether active intervention is a good idea or not. And then it meticulously shows Vosill’s position to be better. At the end of her story she’s generally increased the welfare of the kingdom she was working in, gotten important reforms passed that decentralize power, quietly introduced several medical breakthroughs, and had a bunch of vicious assholes killed, a fact that the book never really tries to make the reader feel bad about. (If anything, Vosill’s tendency to quietly murder anyone who’s irritatingly reactionary is treated as a source of mild entertainment.) DeWar, on the other hand, dithers about ineffectually, making only occasional suggestions to UrLeyn, and generally not ones that are focused on reform so much as on short-term political or military gain. Eventually everything comes apart for UrLeyn after he gets sucked into a military engagement DeWar tentatively warned against, and then he gets killed by his chief concubine, who DeWar spent the bulk of the book failing spectacularly to suspect.

It’s not that this position is a surprise per se. Banks’s sympathies were always clearly with the Culture, and he’s the one who set up their interventionism as a form of moral justification. For him to come out with an explicitly anti-interventionist position would be jarring, weird, and ultimately out of keeping with what the Culture is as a series. But equally, coming out emphatically in the “pro” camp is just… boring. It replaces ambiguity with didacticism. Sure, countless writers strive to be as subtle as Banks is when he’s being didactic, but that doesn’t make Inversions less of a drag within the context of Banks’s work.

The problem is not, to be clear, the idea of doing a Culture story from the perspective of the civilization they’re intervening in. That’s a great hook of the sort you’d expect from Banks. The problem is more the sort of society that Inversions depicts. This isn’t the parodically depraved Affront, the zealous yet arguably effective Idirans, or the fascinatingly pathological Azad. This is a by-the-numbers quasi-medieval kingdom whose problems amount to nothing more than “it’s not at the liberal democracy stage of history yet.” There’s no sense of actual depth to the ideas here. It’s the most generic possible perspective to look up at the Culture from. And as novel as the basic idea of a ground-level view of the Culture is, by book six in the series we need a more interesting viewpoint on them than generic medieval politics can provide.

Instead we get a book where all of the elements seem to point inevitably towards a frustratingly obvious conclusion. There’s only one thing, from its setup, that Inversions was ever going to be, and it proceeds with straightforward deliberateness towards being that exact thing. It’s not bad at being that thing. Parts of it are excellent, and not in some sarcastic Curate’s Egg way. But all the same, the book ends up illustrating something that any artist who spends time stalking the extremes and breaking points of concepts eventually realizes, which is that, for all that one learns a lot about the concept itself by doing that, the edges of a concept aren’t actually where its best work tends to be done. As with The State of the Art and Excession, there’s a sense in which exploring the Culture wouldn’t have been complete if something like Inversions hadn’t been done. But for all of that, the major effect of it is that its box has been checked off now, and Banks can move on to other and hopefully more interesting things.

Luke & Order

(No, not that Luke.  The other one.)

Okay, first of all, I’m aware that Luke Cage has been much written about.  I confess, I haven’t read much of the commentary.  Pure laziness.  I understand a lot of the criticism was about the show subscribing to a rather conservative form of Black ‘respectability politics’.  I can certainly see that issue, but I’m not going to concentrate on it.  Even so, I strongly suspect I’m still going to be reiterating stuff other people have already said.  Also, I’m a white British guy, so inevitably I’m at a disadvantage when it comes to understanding and criticising this particular text. 

Throat-cleared, and ass hopefully covered, here we go.

Oh, and SPOILERS and TRIGGERS.

For various complex, tedious, and irrelevant reasons, I’ve seen a lot of Law & Order in my life, despite not really liking it.  At times, the Marvel/Netflix series Luke Cage strongly reminded me of Law & Order.  Specifically, bits of it strongly reminded me of the Law & Order ‘race episode’.  I say ‘race episode’ singular because Law & Order really only had one race episode, which they made over and over and over again.

Roughly, it went like this:

A crime is committed against a Black person in New York, or by a Black person in New York, or in the ‘Black community’ in New York… or some combination of all three.

The police investigate in good faith.  The police department treats a crime in the Black community exactly the same way they treat every crime they investigate, every week.  However, in the course of their investigation, they have to interview and question Black people… which causes them problems.  Many of the Black people they question respond with mistrust and hostility to the police, who are just trying to do their job.  They are immediately and irrationally touchy, respond with anger to reasonable questions, throw out accusations of harassment when simply being treated as the police would treat any witnesses, etc.  Much anti-police rhetoric is used by Black characters, the substance of which is belied by how we see the actual police behave.

Several key members of the police team, often in senior positions, are themselves Black.  The Lieutenant in charge of the detectives is Black, and is also a woman  - the police precinct upon which Law & Order is centred being run by, for most of the series, a Black woman cop.  Other members of the police hierarchy will be Black too. 

The police will find themselves under immense and unfair pressure from the powers-that-be and the media to solve the case quickly, preferably with the arrest of a non-Black suspect. 

There will probably be a scene where the police are mobbed by the media, who insolently ask them questions about whether they’re covering something up from racist motives, etc.  Media intrusion - which pushes an unfair narrative of racist cops failing to give the Black community justice, deliberately or through incompetence - will severely hamper the police investigation.  Not only are the authorities shown to harbour no racism, explicit or implicit, but they are also shown to be justly terrified of the Black community’s irrational ire.

There may well be a Black politician - be they a city councilman, or a radical preacher, or whatever - who will also cause the police huge problems, relentlessly stoking the rage of the Black community, using incendiary rhetoric, invoking the name of Martin Luther King for their own cynical purposes, misrepresenting the actions of the police, spinning conspiracy theories about systemic racism, encouraging protests (which are inherently irrelevant and a hindrance to getting things sorted out), and furthering their own opportunistic agenda in the process.  The Black community will be shown to be mostly entirely in the thrall of these charismatic but insincere trouble-makers.  They will be depicted as clockwork mice at the command of the angriest African-American voice.  They will be shown rallying when told to, mindlessly chanting and pumping their angry fists in the air, disrupting court proceedings, and generally behaving like pitchfork-brandishing villagers in a Frankenstein movie.

Of course, Law & Order will go on to show the trial stage of the case, in which the well-meaning DA and prosecutors, who only care about justice (unlike all those angry people outside, with their political agendas), will fall over themselves to be sensitive to the Black community, but will also stubbornly and heroically insist upon pursuing justice.  People of principle, they will find themselves up against a defense attorney who is essentially a con-artist.  The defender is either being cynical and slimey, seeking to raise their profile, or is entertaining a deluded and fanatical political agenda.  Win or lose, their arguments will be shown to amount to a kind of special pleading, a demand for extra exemptions or privileges for Black people, a petulant demand for a get-out-of-jail-free card based on positive discrimination, predicated on excuses and a refusal to take responsibility, and blaming racism and/or white people for all their problems, most of which they cause themselves, some of which they simply fantasize into existence. 

Prosecutor Jack McCoy (or whoever) will get a speech about how it’s Black people who create racism nowadays by refusing to take responsibility for their problems, blaming everything on white people, demanding special treatment, and hallucinating racism everywhere they look.

There is real racism in the New York of Law & Order, but it is confined to aberrant individuals, bad apples (the occasional redneck cop that most of the others hate), and full-on white supremacists (who the authorities naturally pursue with righteous vigour).  Following the ‘race episode’ there will be a ‘racism episode’ (note the disconnection) in which the rough-diamond cops-with-hearts-of-gold will arrest - and the fiery liberal prosecutors will prosecute - actual racists, who will generally be members of an overt white-supremacist terrorist organisation comprised of a few unhinged bigots (because that’s what racism really is). 

This is a caricature… but it’s not that much of a caricature.  It was basically that bad.  Again and again and again. 

(Oh, and by the way, the same basic dynamic is largely true of the Law & Order feminism episode, the Law & Order gay issues episode, etc, etc, etc.  Other episodes they made over and over again included the the abortion episode and the rich people episode.  These are interesting because they tend to come from an ostensibly more strongly progressive direction, but simplify the issues into crude caricature and meaninglessness.  But we’ll resist that digression.  Suffice to say: Law & Order’s claims to being drama which explored complex issues were laughable.)

Now, onto Luke Cage.  I saw a lot of the Law & Order race episode in Luke Cage.  (There are lots of things to be said about Luke Cage, some of them good, so you’ll have to pardon my deliberately rather narrow and negative focus here.)  True, there’s a lot in the Law & Order race episode that doesn’t get into Luke Cage, or gets into it in only a muted or transmuted form, but it’s still sometimes recognisably playing with the same ideas.

It’s notable that almost all the killings in the series are committed by Black people.  Even when Shades kills a load of Diamondback’s (Black) henchmen, it’s actually self-defence.  The crime which kickstarts the entire narrative, the hijacking of the arms deal in the scrapyard, is a matter almost entirely between young Black men (one of them is Hispanic).  The subsequent attack on Pop’s is an attempted massacre of Black people by a Black Man, with Shades looking on.  Shades plans to kill Cottonmouth but Mariah gets there first.  (Shades eventually kills Candace, it’s true.) 

Now, a lot of this is down to the laudable fact that Luke Cage is a story largely about Black people, and thus has a cast of largely Black characters - something so rare in the mainstream that some perplexed white viewers were genuinely moved to complain, without any apparent self-awareness, about the absence of faces like their own in the show.  (Bless.)  Most killings in Luke Cage are of and by Black people, because Black people do most of everything in Luke Cage.  Which is good.  But it nevertheless makes Luke Cage a series about what can, with a nasty agenda in play, be called ‘Black on Black crime’.  In the context of a society in which every attempt at talking about issues of structural racism and inequality is met with reactionary screeching about all the ‘Black on Black crime’ that we’re supposedly ‘not talking about’, this is a big contextual issue.  It also, as I say, ties in with the usual manner in which the Law & Order ‘race episode’ worked.  The very first iteration of the ‘race episode’ was about a Black girl who falsely claimed to have been sexually abused by “white cops” (thus igniting a needless race war on the streets) to cover up the fact that she was being cruelly treated by her abusive father.  And it goes on like that, generally.

As in Law & Order, the police investigate in good faith (we’ll get to that), but find themselves stymied by the media, and by the powers-that-be desperately pressuring them for results because they’re scared by the furious reaction of the protesting Black mobs with placards.

Luke Cage doesn’t play up the idea of Black protestors as a mob of unhinged, delusional, nonsensically furious and unreasoning dupes quite as much as Law & Order always used to… but even so, all Mariah has to do is spout a few slogans and the anonymous hordes come running with their placards.  Mariah is definitely an iteration of the same cynical Black rabble-rousing demagogue repeatedly seen in Law & Order, with her opportunistic invocations of Black heroes, etc.  In Law & Order, this was all linked to the prevailing 1990s moral panic in white mainstream liberal circles about what was called ‘Black Rage’, which was a supposed epidemic of unreasoning Black fury in response to perceived but unreal slights, despite functional racial equality supposedly having been achieved (what with Clinton being "the first Black President" and all).  That particular iteration has died, but the underlying purblindness, complacence, and paranoia remain. 

Of course, Mariah is interesting in that she actually defends the police.  Her particular brand of Black ‘respectability politics’ is all about defending the justness of the status quo, and of claiming moral respectability for Black people based on their acceptance of it, and cooperation with it.  As an establishment representative of Harlem, which is now transformed by neoliberalism, this makes sense.  Even so, I don’t think there’s any denying that the scenes in which she leads rowdy and emotional protests reek of a reconfigured form of the same of terror of the insurgent Black crowd.  She looks like the quintessential racist portrait of Black leaders as cynical, insincere, opportunistic, the herders of an irrational mob.  Luke Cage might have more surface sympathy for the protesters than Law & Order ever did, but ultimately their feelings of outrage are contextualised by the causes of the police misconduct to which they’re responding.  The police are repeatedly alibied, even when they're wrong, and the whole thing takes on the contours of the classic ‘tragic misunderstanding’ that was so beloved by the writers of Law & Order, even if they put more of the failure of intellect onto angry Black people.  (We’ll get to the issue of how Luke Cage alibis the cops.)  Whatever sympathy we might be encouraged to feel for them, the people in the protesting crowds in Luke Cage are a reconfigured version of the same easily-fooled dupes who just do whatever they’re told, and get angry about whatever they’re told to get angry about, by the identity politics demagogue with the loudest voice. 

Mariah actually sets about trying to adapt and redirect the anti-police anger of the Black protesters towards Luke.  She succeeds.  People at least tolerate her triangulations, despite Luke having much support in the community.  It’s a hamfisted depiction of protest which, in typical bourgeois fashion, sees protesters as desperate to find a leader to obey, even when her priorities are not really theirs.  When ordinary Black people in Harlem manage to break free of Mariah’s agenda, and lend Luke their support and help, they do it individually, not collectively.  Individual action is the scene of free moral choice and thought.  Collective protest is the death of such things.  And, of course, the most pivotal example of a Black Harlem resident defying Mariah’s anti-Luke agenda is a cop.  The cops’ distrust of Luke is rational you see, if mistaken… unlike the distrust of the fooled crowd.  So naturally, a cop - being rational and free of any group prejudice (!) - is the guy to see things clearly.

Most of the important cops in the story of Luke Cage are Black.  In fact, in Luke Cage, the NYPD seems to mostly be run by Black cops.  Black women cops.  At least, in Harlem.  One of the series’ main protagonists is a Black woman cop.  Both her bosses are cops who are also women of colour.  This actually trumps Law & Order in which, although Lt. Van Buren - a Black woman senior police officer - is a major character, we don’t generally see her reporting to two Black woman superiors.

(There’s always a risk, at times like this, of sounding like a malignant twerp who is feeling threatened.  Let me assure you, that’s not my issue here.  At least, I hope it isn’t.)

What are the facts?  Time for me to do some amateurish research.

As of 2014, Black people made up about 16% of the NYPD, despite being 23% of the city’s population.  Meanwhile, 33% of New York’s population is white, and are represented to the tune of 54% in the NYPD.  (Source.)  These numbers are maybe not terrible, but they’re definitely not as good as they could be.  Even so, the NYPD seems to be more racially diverse than any other US police force.  In 2014, the NYPD took in 607 academy graduates.  51% were from ‘minorities’.  (Source.)  Whites still heavily outnumbered any individual non-white ethnicity.  The number of Black applicants seems to be falling again after an upward trend.

80% of applicants were male, leaving women significantly outnumbered. 

In 2015, women made up almost 35% of the NYPD, and only 17% of uniformed officers.  (Source.)

The number of woman officers in the NYPD has been hovering around 16-17% since at least 2003, according to this graph…

 

...which comes from this study by Salomon Alcocer Guajardo, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Public Management, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York.

As you can see from this graph, of the 17% of the NYPD in 2013 who were uniformed woman officers, roughly 5% were Black.  Roughly 6% were Hispanic.  So Black and Hispanic woman officers outnumbered white female officers in 2013.  Even so, uniformed officers who were also women of colour were very much a minority.

Luke Cage doesn’t violate this reality.  Most of the uniformed officers seen in the series are white males, with some Black males seen, with one playing a brief but pivotal role.

But we’re chasing the issue of how realistic it is to see Black female non-uniformed ranking officers.  This is hard to determine, at least for me.  I have to admit, I couldn’t get the numbers.  If anyone can help me find them, I’d be very grateful.  I had to interrogate Google pretty hard to get the information I did find, especially about women police officers.  There were far fewer sources on the representation of women in the NYPD, and in police generally, than there were on racial demographics.  The sources on women officers of colour were fewer still.  Mysteriously.  Because, y’know, that issue isn’t important at all.

While minorities have been increasingly represented in higher ranks since the early 2000s, they’re still heavily outnumbered.  In 2014, 82% of NYPD officers of Deputy Inspector rank or higher were white, with only 6.8% for Blacks.

The Guajardo study referred to above also tells us that, in 2015, while 47% of uniformed police officers (of all genders) were white, they constituted 54.7% of detectives.  Black officers, at 15.9% total, constituted 15.7% of detectives.  The pattern holds for Sergeants.  So white officers are more likely to be of higher ranks.

According to another study by Professor Guajardo, looking at racial and gender composition of the NYPD between 2005 and 2011:

the level of diversity within the police ranks declines precipitously and consistently after the rank of sergeant, and the disparity ratios reveal that the number of White officers exceeds the number of Black, Hispanic, Asian, and other minority group officers for all ranks with the exception of the rank of police officer. The findings also show that the number of female officers in general lags far behind those of males as well as of specific police ranks.

…

Despite progress in hiring minorities and females into the NYPD, the advances that minorities and females have made in regard to promotions within the NYPD have been marginal at best.

Again, to be honest, I couldn’t come up with an answer to the (apparently simple) question I wanted answered: how many Black female plainclothes detectives are there in the NYPD?  Nobody seems to know, or care, or at least be prepared to tell us.  Not on the internet anyway. 

Of course, I'm not a proper scholar doing real research; I'm a dilletante footling around on the internet.  Even so, I'm going to be impudent and go ahead and make some (I hope) reasonable guesses about the general picture.  The information above shows that women uniformed officers are in a decided minority, and Black women uniformed officers are a minority within that minority (though, as I say, they outnumber white woman uniformed officers).  Moreover, the promotion prospects for non-white officers are generally lower than those of white officers.  Apparently, it is simply not known how many plainclothes police officers roam the streets of New York.  But the article I just linked to says it’s probably “well into the hundreds”... which, while alarming from some angles, is a relatively small amount of the total police force.  Of course, not all these plainclothes cops are detectives.  The Detective Bureau of the NYPD, at least according to Wikipedia, numbers 5,000 employees.  This seems a suspiciously tidy number, but it’s at least a general indication of the relative size of the detective division.  (Again, not all these employees will be detectives, of course.)  So we’re looking at the plainclothes NYPD detectives being a relatively tiny group.  Given that Black female uniformed officers are a minority within a minority, and one that is - on the axis of race alone - disadvantaged when it comes to promotion, I think it's fair to assume that the number of Black woman plainclothes police detectives of senior rank in New York is going to be pretty small.  I stand to be corrected.

Luke Cage shows us no less than three in one Precinct alone.  Detective Misty Knight (Simone Missick), Inspector Priscilla Ridley (Karen Pittman), and Thembi Wallace (Sonja Sohn, who is African-American/Korean). 

Of course, it’s an old conundrum.  Is it good to have positive and inclusive representation at any cost, or does it come at too high a price when it misrepresents the realities of the world?  I understand the former view but I tend towards the latter.  I think it’s great for Black women to see themselves on TV, in positions beyond and above the old stereotypes.  But I also worry about the way the capitalist culture industries now relentlessly misrepresent capitalist society as far more equitable and equal than it really is, with the whole enterprise underwritten by a specious and complacent liberalism that is eager to address these issues only when they are confined to improving representation in narrative media.

I strongly suspect that, just as the public tend to massively underestimate the numbers of civillian casualties in Western wars, massively overestimate the numbers of Muslims living in Western countries, massively overestimate how much Islamic terrorism goes on, massively overestimate how much of the welfare budget goes to refugees, etc etc etc, they'd probably also massively overestimate the number of Black female police officers, FBI officers, Judges, etc, and for similar reasons.  The problem here is that people are being encouraged to think that their societies are more equal than they really are, or maybe even that the disadvantaged are actually now advantaged. In this context, it isn't hard to see why some react to Feminism, or to the sight of angry Black protesters, with puzzlement and resentment.

The under-representation of Black women in the higher ranks of the police does not, of course, stem from any inherent lack of ability, but rather from structural factors.  At the sharp end, we’re talking about discrimination, economic inequality, disproportionate lack of opportunity, etc.  At the blunter-but-no-less-troublesome end, we’re talking about socio-ideological disincentives that amount to psychological and cultural barriers, which is all tied up with capitalist patriarchy.  Of course, it’s possible that seeing Black woman detectives on TV, despite them being relatively rare in reality, might help chip away at some of these psychological and cultural barriers, but that’s a bit too much like blaming the victim for me, seemingly implying that equality doesn’t exist yet only because the under-represented simply feel less worthy… and that we can help them get over this by patronising them and, effectively, lying to them.

(This is without getting into any of the issues about ‘lean-in’ establishment feminism, or what role the police really play in capitalist society in general, their role in maintaining the unequal racial order, or the more troublesome aspects of the NYPD in particular.)

The trouble with Luke Cage showing us an NYPD seemingly full of high-ranking Black women is that it basically lies to us about the state of the world.  This is especially troublesome in a show which visibly sets itself the remit of ‘saying something’ about issues of race and… well, of law and order. 

This sort of double consciousness is riven right through the show.  It’s great that a show gives us a Black hero who wears a hoodie and who sometimes has to defend himself against white beat cops who are trigger-happy and dangerous when they stop a Black man who is just walking along in the street, minding his own business.  The relevance of that is obvious, as is the charge inherent in seeing the Black man in question then defend himself by throwing those cops flying, and all in righteous self-defence, and without losing his hero status. 

Trouble is, as I say, the show alibis the cops as much as it condemns them.  The white cops who stop Luke are not just happening upon someone they instantly racially-profile, or responding to a panicky call from someone who’s scared by the very sight of a passing Black man.  They’re on the look-out for a man who is, as far as they genuinely know, a dangerous suspect.  He’s supposed to have murdered a white cop (who is depicted as about the most harmless and universally-beloved guy imaginable).  Naturally, the cops are generally depicted as only becoming trigger happy and aggressive with suspects as a response to an unprovoked attack on one of their own.  Luke matches the description of the suspect because… well, because he is him (though he didn’t kill the officer).  The cops are actually stopping the right man, as far as they can be expected to know.  They are, moreover, justified in feeling extremely wary of Luke Cage.  Luke is very big and intimidating, unlike most of the Black people we’ve seen in dashcams and phone-films being aggressively tackled by police.  And unlike, say, Eric Garner, Luke also happens to genuinely be super-strong and near-impervious to pain or injury.  The racist perception of Black men as bigger and more physically threatening is actually implicitly justified in this instance, in the story. 

This is the inherent problem with the whole concept of Luke, which is that he’s a character based on the old racist stereotype of the Black man as a sort of human-shaped rock, scarily powerful, a great hulking lump of dangerous meat, impenetrable, unable to feel pain or punishment the way other bodies do… all of which comes more or less directly from the ideology of slavery.  Slavery was ideologically justified with a narrative about Black people which centred on their skin, not just its colour but also its supposed brutish, animalistic, inhuman imperviousness.  The whole concept of the character of Luke is bound up with his skin having just this quality.  Luke Cage arguably subverts and detournes this stereotype, or tries to, but it’s still an inherent problem with the character.

When the inevitable altercation with the beat cops happens, what we actually see on screen - whatever the rationale for this - is a total inversion of the reality that is now so troubling and disturbingly frequent (in relative terms), i.e. the image of cops inflicting serious injury on Black bodies they misperceive as existentially threatening.  One of the cops does pump Luke’s back full of bullets but, as we know, Luke’s skin can deflect them, very much unlike Walter Scott’s.  Moreover, unlike Walter Scott, Luke isn’t running away but actually only has his back turned on one cop because, sensing that bullets are about to fly in his direction, he grabs the other cop and turns him around, thus protecting him from his partner’s shots.

As is so often the case in ideologically-inflected depictions of unequal power relationships, the person who would be at a disadvantage in the real world is depicted as more strong than those who would actually pose a deadly threat to them.  As is also common in such depictions, the super-strong oppressed then have the greater moral responsibility laid upon them too.  Luke is very pointedly not, say, a pre-teen with a toy gun, or a fleeing 5-year old, or a teenage girl at a pool party.  He is instead a massive, genuinely dangerous, genuinely impervious fugitive… and he is allowed to be the hero in spite of this only because he takes it upon himself to protect the people who would carelessly end his life.  Meanwhile, they, whatever is implied about how they automatically see Luke, are alibied by their justifiable agenda, and their understandable jitters… just as the cops are so often seen as justified in court when yet another black body lies riddled with bullets.

The impunity with which Luke is eventually allowed to walk away from this altercation by the police authorities, once he has walked in and provided them with “context”, is also deeply misleading. 

This sort of weirdly skewed misrepresentation crops up again and again. 

There’s a scene where a cop arrests a Black kid, puts him in an interview room, fails to start any recording of the encounter, fails to ensure the kid has another suitable adult present, fails to inform the kid of his rights, and then, physically assaults him.  But the cop in question is Black.  Again, this is a misrepresentation of how such things tend to work, at least in high profile examples.  I don’t actually have much of a problem with the fact that the cop in this example is himself Black.  In many ways, it gets at something true, which is that such situations don’t exclusively involve white cops.  (...which itself gestures towards the structural, systemic, institutional class role of the police in the maintenance of the racial order of capitalist social hierarchy.  It’s more than just white ‘bad apple’ bigots in the force.)  However, there’s no denying that the way the scene is designed looks like cowardice, like pussyfooting around a raw meta-truth.  At least the two cops who stop Luke in the street are both white.  But the real thing I want to get to here is that the cop who beats the kid in the interview room is depicted as responding to what he reasonably sees as intense provocation (Luke killed a cop; this kid is protecting him, etc).  Moreover, the abusive cop is actually arrested, according to Inspector Ridley.  When Misty chokes (!) Claire Temple in an interview room, she is put through an institutional wringer of suspension and psychological evaluation before being allowed to return to duty.  Not only is the act of choking a suspect reconfigured as something a Black woman does, it is then depicted as something the Department treats with the utmost horror.  And the institutional response is itself overseen by a Black woman senior officer.

While I’m sure there are procedures in place for dealing with assaults on suspects or interviewees, the choice the show makes - to invert the races and genders, and then to belabour the serious response of the police to misconduct - does seem to miss the point of the recent conversations around these issues, and once again smacks of alibiing power rather concentrating on the seriously fucked-up aspects of pertinent real-life cases and issues.  When people are protesting white male cops piling onto Eric Garner and choking him to death, and then not being charged for it, Luke Cage looks like it is seriously missing the important point here, or - at maximum charitability - encoding it behind so many distorting layers that we can’t see it properly.  This looks like cowardice… or, more likely, a deeply mainstream set of underlying assumptions, in which it is taken for granted that authority is fundamentally open and trustworthy, poking through the surface air of ‘serious discussion of issues’.  Which, as I say, looks a lot like Law & Order’s ‘race episode’.

There’s a bit later in the series when, after he escapes police custody and goes on the run, Misty defends Luke by saying something like “He’s a black man accused of killing a cop, being chased by cops with special bullets, and you wonder why he’s running!”  But this really is just lip service.  First of all, it comes from a cop, thus positioning the cops as being able to understand a Black person’s fear of cops… which, in light of actual police views, and ‘Blue Lives Matter’, etc, seems misrepresentative.  Moreover, the cop who says it is herself an implicit misrepresentation of the actual composition of the police force and, relatedly, of the balance of racial and gender opportunities in society, and in powerful institutions.  Also, does a Black person have to be an entirely innocent hero in order to justify them not being shot out of hand?  Does a Black suspect, in short, have to actually be an "angel" in order to not warrant summary execution?

As we’ve seen, the police force chasing Luke have already been repeatedly positioned as being ultra-reasonable in their attitudes.  Even their anger is reasonable.  They’ve launched their aggressive manhunt only in response to what they think is Luke’s murder of a cop (as it happens, though it wasn’t Luke, the cop was murdered by a Black man… in fact, as noted, almost all the people killed in the entire series, Black or white, are killed by Black men).  Later, Luke will be treated with kid gloves by the police in connection not only with the murdered cop (which it is proved he didn’t do) but also in connection with the patrol cops he actually did hurl around like ninepins, while being filmed by a police dashcam.  Luke will, at one point, be permitted to escape by a Black uniformed cop.  At almost every stage, the police are represented as restrained, righteous, and reasonable - almost ridiculously reasonable - in their dealings with him.  Their fears are contextualised as justifiable, even in the context of the set-piece scene evidently designed to recall instances of ‘stop and search’ gone wrong. 

As a response to the urgent issue of police racism and police brutality, Luke Cage is frustrating in the way it sets itself the task of commenting from a position of solidarity with Black people, but then relentlessly sets about alibiing the police.  Ultimately, it sides with the status quo… and in more ways than the ones I’ve just outlined.

I’ve gone on longer than I expected to about this, and not covered all the issues I wanted to cover, so I may do more on Luke Cage another time.  We’ll see, based on how badly I’ve embarrassed myself this time.  Never have I been more awkwardly aware of how white we all are here… which is no bad thing (the awkward awareness, I mean).

I’d be genuinely very keen to hear people’s view on this, and especially to hear any factual stuff anyone has bearing on these issues. 

By the way: huge thanks go out to Max Curtis for helping me with the research for this.  He provided me with the shots of the tables you can see above.  (Any errors are all mine, of course.)

My Patreon, should you so wish.

 

Silver Millennium Anniversary

Fuck.

I swore never to speak of such things again. But there's no way I can get out of talking about this, is there?

This past week, as of this posting, was the 25th Anniversary of the premier of the first animated adaptation of Bishōjo Senshi Sailormoon, or, as it's better known in the west, Sailor Moon. Like most Japanese pop media, Sailor Moon actually started as a manga first, and thus the *true* 25th Anniversary of the series was last year. But the first anime is considered by the overwhelming majority of fans to be the definitive version of the story, and is certainly the most well known internationally. So this is the date that's going to be seeing the most widespread attention and acclaim from critic and fan circles. Sailor Moon is one of those huge anime shows that even people who aren't familiar with Japanese media will instantly recognise. It, along with Dragon Ball Z and Ranma 1/2, defined the anime landscape of the early 1990s and was an integral part of the international anime breakout. It was also far and away the most interesting of the three to my eyes, which is what I thought when I was looking to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of Japanese media a few years back. Quite simply, you can't claim to fully understand the history of global pop culture without looking at Sailor Moon.

And thus I'm spending Women's History Month writing about one of the most infuriatingly fraught examples of Mirror Darkly female empowerment in all of pop culture history.

But I get ahead of myself. As if it wasn't clear, Sailor Moon and I have a history. I have a special relationship with this series, and, in this case, “special” does not entirely mean “good”. I was drawn to Sailor Moon after coming off of a high spent writing about Dirty Pair for Vaka Rangi, and it seemed to me at first glace that Sailor Moon was the natural and fitting, if slightly counterintuitive, successor to Dirty Pair in terms of mass-market young adult Japanese fiction targeted primarily towards girls. It also served as a curious contrast to that series: Whereas Dirty Pair came out of the otaku scene of the early 1980s and was thus heavy on the hard (or hard-ish) science fiction (and failed somewhat spectacularly), Sailor Moon came out of a later generation of Japanese nerd culture, dropped the science fiction altogether and was unique in the sense it was the first large scale manga-to-anime franchise helmed by a woman who wasn't Rumiko Takahashi to gain universal success and acclaim.

Like I do with all such series, I sat down to read the manga first before I checked out the anime to get a feel for creator Naoko Takeuchi's original intent. And things promptly went downhill from there.

There is no other franchise I have ever followed or studied that has caused me as much grief, anxiety, confusion, self-doubt, anguish and pain as Sailor Moon. I wanted more than anything to adore it, yet I despised almost every moment spent with what I found to be a seemingly willfully incoherent, juvenile (and at times shockingly bigoted) piece of sequential art, aesthetically and creatively compromised even by pulp serial standards. Reading Sailor Moon was a simply miserable experience for me, made altogether worse by the franchise's hit squad of a fandom, who used my every comment about it (almost all of which of which were at the time deliberately praiseworthy in an earnest and sincere attempt to stay positive, for my own mental health if nothing else) as basis for unceasing personal attacks. Privately, I chronicled my slow descent into hopelessness on now-abandoned social media profiles, pushed to the depths of desperation and self-loathing at my utter inability to see what everyone else in the world saw in Sailor Moon.

And yet, even so, in the years since I have been utterly unable to leave Sailor Moon behind. It remains a permanent fixation in my pop culture lens and has remained with me longer than almost all of the other series I've studied, even the ones I've said I've actually enjoyed. I keep coming back to Sailor Moon to sift through its ashes over and over and over again in the way I gather some people do (or at least did) with the Star Wars prequels, desperately searching for answers. Because, as awful as it most certainly can be, it also does some absolutely miraculous things nothing else I've seen in pop culture has ever done. It is quite possibly the greatest Curate's Egg in all of manga and anime. As a result, as much as it hurt me, I've come to know Sailor Moon better then a lot of other things. It's gotten to the point of becoming a series I almost love to hate...and perhaps hate to love. In its own terminology, Sailor Moon is an Enemy. But it's my Enemy. It is my greatest rival, my equal and opposite, and no-one else is allowed to fight it with as much lust and intimacy as I am. The second anime adapted a story arc about a traumatic apocalypse that literally killed the future in 2016, and it was, and still is, the only thing that's been there for me.

I am not going to be doing an in-depth review or analysis of Sailor Moon. Not here, and possibly not anywhere. Ever. Sailor Moon almost transcends critique for me and, frankly, if I can avoid its fans, I'd prefer to. But I do feel obligated to share a few thoughts and observations on this drawn-out and entirely appropriate Silver Anniversary. Like a lot of manga-to-anime adaptations, the original version of Sailor Moon is far less well known then the animated series that displaced it. Unlike a lot of similar franchises, however, the original manga-ka is still held up as the singular creative visionary of Sailor Moon, in spite of her actual comparatively diminished creative role in the anime. While Rumiko Takahashi is certainly beloved and well respected, most fans of Urusei Yatsura, Ranma 1/2 and InuYasha seem quick to admit the anime adaptations generally improved on the source material to some degree or another (indeed, in the case of Urusei Yatsura, it's the movie Beautiful Dreamer that is held up as the greatest thing the franchise ever did. A film that was directed and envisioned primarily by then-up and coming filmmaker Mamoru Oshii, and which Takahashi herself is rumoured to have actually despised).

And in truth, while they won't slag off the original manga, almost every Sailor Moon fan (at least in the West) will have indescribably formative nostalgia for the first anime adaptation, and probably won't have a lot to say about any of the other versions of the story (which, aside from a second anime series the fandom only seems to begrudgingly accept, also includes a live-action TV series, several stage musicals, a bunch of actually-not-terrible video games and even an AU written by the original manga-ka herself). It is exclusively this interpretation of these characters and this story that most people seem to prefer to remember and headcanon as the definitive ones. This is particularly interesting, because even by manga-to-anime standards, the original show changes a *lot* about Sailor Moon. To someone coming to the show from the manga, these characters are simply unrecognisable, and I'm sure anime fans feel the same way about the manga. Most of the time this helps, because Naoko Takeuchi has a terrible habit of writing her characters as so stock and two-dimensional they become actually indistinguishable from one another, a problem exacerbated by her own art style.

So for example, from what I can gather (oh by the way confession time: I have not watched this series all the way through. It's fucking long for one thing, but also, after finishing the manga I had negative desire to do so), Rei, Sailor Mars, a character who, near as I can tell, basically spends the series as “generic shrine maiden” and “programmatically aloof” is transformed into one of the most multifaceted and beloved characters in the franchise. Meanwhile, Ami/Sailor Mercury is “the bookish nerdy one”...That is, unless the plot requires someone to hold the idiot ball and act like a dumbass (well more of a dumbass than usual anyway) to facilitate a plot contrivance, at which point it will inevitably be her. The anime gives her a lot more interiority and time to form a close bond with Usagi (the titular Sailor Moon) before the other Senshi show up. This is a problem all of the non-Usagi Sailor Scouts have: In the manga, they're all introduced within the span of literally pages and are never really given the chance to become distinct characters in their own right, never ascending beyond the rank of Usagi's doting supporting cast. Similarly, anime fans would be shocked to learn how superfluous and forgettable the iconic Queen Beryl really is, who in the source material is merely the first in a parade of increasingly indistinguishable Cackling Evil Queens.

The expansionist approach taken by the anime does, however, have its disadvantages. Haruka/Sailor Uranus and Michiru/Sailor Neptune, who debut in the third story arc, are in my view arguably the greatest idea Sailor Moon ever had. Introduced as a pair of grown-up, “big sister” Sailor Scouts who have a different mission and get their powers from a different source then the core “Inner Senshi”, Uranus and Neptune are based on Takeuchi's belief that Takarazuka, all all-female musical Revue in which women play both male and female roles, is “the highest form of empowerment” a woman can aspire to (a debatable claim, but one that explains the multitude of tie-in soundtracks to the first anime, the existence of the Sailor Moon stage musical and the heavy emphasis on Takarazuka-style melodrama, music and imagery in the second anime) and are also in a committed romantic relationship with one another (now is not the time to discuss what *kind* of relationship Haruka and Michiru have. Suffice to say blood has been shed on this topic. Mostly mine). Haruka, Sailor Uranus, is even explicitly stated to be “both man and woman”, and that this is where her power comes from.

It was Haruka and Michiru that drew me to Sailor Moon in the first place, partly because it's been claimed they were possibly based (at least in part) on Kei and Yuri from Dirty Pair, but mostly because they're fascinating characters in their own right with or without that connection. And truth be known, as soon as they show up the Sailor Moon manga takes a *dramatic* turn for the better. Takeuchi seems liberated writing for them, and you kind of wish there was a whole manga just about them. Their introductory arc, Sailor Moon Infinity, is no less plagued by structural or conceptual problems than the rest of the manga (and even ends on some fairly disgusting heteronormativity and reproductive futurism, another *huge* problem with Sailor Moon), but when it's actually working, simply nothing can touch what it has to say about gender. However the first anime, in its attempt to add depth to the characters, re-envisions Haruka and Michiru as ends-justify-the-means Knight Templar 90s antiheroes (and if they're not, this is the part of them I see most praised in out-of-context Tumblr posts), which they absolutely were not in the original manga, and that makes it very, very hard to sympathize with them.

This results in an odd reversal of their intended role: In many ways, Uranus and Neptune *upstage* the Inner Senshi in Sailor Moon Infinity, and while their methods seem strange and hard to understand, Takeuchi is always careful to frame it in such a way that the Inner Senshi are our viewpoint characters. Ergo, the only reason Haruka and Michiru seem strange to us is because this is children's fantasy and the behaviour of adults sometimes seems strange to children. But Haruka and Michiru are elders who truly have the best interest of their juniors at heart...Even if the finale shits all over this in a multiplicity of ways. Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune were clearly intended to be Naoko Takeuchi's definitive statement on gender and female empowerment (she even calls Haruka her “ideal woman” and a role model she herself openly aspires to be like. This is in contrast with Usagi, who is an author insert character fraught with so many layers of self-deprecation it at times borders on self-parody), and this nuance is completely lost in the first anime version of this story.

But nobody in the cast gets hurt by the manga-to-anime translation worse than Sailor Venus. Venus is probably my favourite Senshi, even accounting for the Dirty Pairishness of Uranus and Neptune, but the character I love and the character Sailor Moon fans know are two entirely different people. At the root of this is the inescapable fact Sailor Venus and Sailor Moon are basically the same character, with one being the prototype for the other. Naoko Takeuchi had previously written a parody of Super Sentai-type series called Codename: Sailor V, which starred Minako Aino, the character who would later become Sailor Venus. The series was unexpectedly popular and Takeuchi was asked to turn it into a franchise, but after all the changes and revisions were made during the transition process it became Sailor Moon instead. Something that, while clearly sharing the same lineage, was manifestly a different entity altogether.

The Sailor Moon manga gets around this by writing Minako as the hero of another story and considerably downplaying her role in the series: She's the loyal, noble, honourable and hypercompetent commanding general of the Sailor Senshi and the right-hand woman of Neo Queen Serenity (Sailor Moon's past/future/alternate/true self. Sailor Moon Metaphysics gets confusing), but that's about all it tells us about her. When she's introduced in Sailor Moon, she's already established as a hero in her own right and is always off running other errands elsewhere (much like Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune, actually). The anime, however, in its attempts to differentiate Usagi and Minako, effectively turns Minako into a giggling and comically inept airhead. While Minako in the source material did occasionally have these qualities, they were more often then not attempts at obfuscating stupidity for the benefit of her enemies...And flamboyantly, self-consciously awkward plays at fitting in for the benefit of her friends. This is a girl who knows deep down in her heart she'll never truly belong anywhere.

Minako is always shown to have very powerful hidden depths, but they appear to be deliberately left unexplored. The most we ever get is the very subtle implications of arc 4, Sailor Moon Dream, that Sailor Venus has some unspoken extradiegetic connection to Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune as their peer (indeed in the preceding Sailor Moon Infinity she's even the only Sailor Scout other than Uranus to take on a male alter ego), and the odd offhand comment from Minako herself that, unique among *all* of the Senshi, she is in truth the avatar of a goddess. This is as it should be, and while the anime does eventually give its Venus a character arc that, though profoundly different from the one the Venus of the manga gets, is still a satisfying development of that particular character, it loses all of these oversignified subtleties. But an argument could be made this is for the best: The first anime does cut out most of Sailor Moon's confusion, both negative and positive, and distills the story in such a way it was able to become a global pop culture phenomenon.

There are other problems too. Naoko Takeuchi is praised very highly for her attention to detail when it comes to symbolism: Like most anime characters, the cast of Sailor Moon all have birthdays and blood types that are supposed to give us hints about their unique characterizations, provided you follow the framework of Japanese astrology (an appropriately syncretic system combining elements of both Western and Chinese astrological symbolism). In the case of Sailor Moon, the Senshis' birth dates were chosen not just based on Zodiac signs, but what their associated element is and where their ruling planet would be. So, Sailor Jupiter is born on December 5 because that makes it so her Zodiac sign is Sagittarius, which is supposed to be a clue as to what her personality is like, and also because it makes Jupiter her ruling planet. The associated element for that combination is wind, so Sailor Jupiter has wind-based powers.

The problem is, none of this actually makes sense or holds together in practice. Sailor Mercury's astrological symbolism gives her water powers...But Neptune is the god of the sea and Sailor Neptune has control over the ocean. Sailor Neptune and Sailor Mercury never interact, in case you were wondering, even in Sailor Moon Dream where the “Inner” Senshi are paired up with mentors from the “Outer” Senshi (except for Sailor Moon, who gets her True Love Tuxedo Mask and Sailor Venus...who gets nobody). Similarly, both Sailor Jupiter and Sailor Uranus have wind powers and never interact (though Uranus' is supposedly more “sky” based, but really), and Sailor Pluto and Sailor Saturn are both associated with death.

(This would almost work given the reading that Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune are heroes from another story, so there might be some expected redundancy in that case, that is if they weren't swiftly retconned into being generic Sailor Senshi after their debut story arc.)

Sailor Pluto is also retconned to have a very vague and ill-defined connection to Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune, who were introduced later than her, seemingly just because they're all “Outer” Senshi and are thus “supposed” to go together. There's a handwavey invocation of the Imperial Regalia of Japan (Uranus' sword, Neptune's mirror and Pluto's...staff with a sparkly bit at the top. That's like a jewel, right?) to link them together, even though what the Three Talismans, as they're called in Sailor Moon Infinity, do has absolutely nothing to do with what the actual artefacts of Amaterasu-ōmikami-sama are supposed to do. And none of this has even the remotest connection to the underworld, which is what Sailor Pluto was originally the guardian of.

And while it's a cheap shot bringing in Sailor Venus again as she was created so much earlier than everyone else for a series with an entirely different set of symbolic and mythological associations, she was retconned in and thus we have to acknowledge how she complicates things. Sailor Venus' astrological symbolism is a mess, apparently being *both* a Libra (which would fittingly make her ruling planet Venus) *and* a Sagittarius (which wouldn't) depending on which point in the series you start reading. The earliest drafts of the manga have Minako's birthday as November 22, while all later materials retcon it to be October 22. However, it's seemingly back to November 22 in the graphic novel The Lover of Princess Kaguya (written and taking place after Sailor Moon Infinity, a good *three years* into the run of Sailor Moon), because the Senshi throw a party to celebrate Christmas *as well as* the joint birthdays of Minako and Makoto (Sailor Jupiter), apparently because Naoko Takeuchi simply forgot she changed it.

Sailor Venus even complicates the symbolism of the other Senshi too. Mars is linked to war and has fire associations, and while Sailor Mars *does* have fire powers, it's Sailor Venus who, apart from being an actual military commander, actually says she is “the goddess of love and war”. And while I'm sure this gives Mars/Venus shippers one more tool in their arsenal to beat the drum of a 'ship that, like so much else fans seem to like about this series, is for all intents and purposes exclusive to the first anime, we have to grant this was a later expansion to the franchise. Speaking of Venus, funny thing about her is that while her powers are ostensibly love-based, she seems to use light- and sun-based attacks just as much, if not more so: Some of her powers also involve a lot of Star and Crescent symbolism, which can represent the admixture of Solar and Lunar just as much as it can the Moon and Venus. Also, the Sun is evil in Sailor Moon for some reason.

So the goddess of love and light is retconned into subservience to the exalted messianic lunar feminine. I'll just leave that there. Do with it what you will.

The first anime, to its credit, changes and streamlines all of this, removing any and all ambiguity when it comes to the astrological symbolism of the Sailor Scouts. Sailor Venus is explicitly and definitively a Libra born on October 22, for example, among other things. And while this and other such changes to the story (such as savvily using filler arcs to add a Dragon Ball Z-style Wandering the Earth tone to an otherwise hypercompressed serial) certainly makes the mythology less confusing and more cohesive, from a critical standpoint it also makes the series a bit less interesting. Granted much of what makes the Sailor Moon manga interesting is due to sloppiness and general screwups, but still: Sailor Moon's noble failures are crucial to understanding what it really is and what it's really about, and they shouldn't just be glossed over or ignored. You must ask yourself what you'd rather have: A tight and cohesive story you can sit down and watch for entertainment uncritically as a discrete package, or something that forces you to think about its implications and symbolism, both positive and negative? Do you want to *enjoy* Sailor Moon, or do you want to *know* Sailor Moon?

That wasn't a rhetorical question, and I truthfully cannot answer that. That's up to you to decide for yourself.

But all this is a roundabout way of addressing the elephant in the room here. If the anime *just* streamlined the manga's story and made it more accessible a la Urusei Yatsura that would be one thing. But at least in the case of that series, almost everyone eagerly acknowledges, accepts, and indeed embraces, the differences between Rumiko Takahashi's vision for the series and Mamoru Oshii's. This does not happen in Sailor Moon fandom. Naoko Takeuchi is treated like James Cameron, or perhaps more fittingly Gene Roddenberry or George Lucas: The singular visionary behind the entire franchise and absolutely everything it ever does. And that's simply not the case.

Takeuchi is certainly actively involved in everything Sailor Moon, but to say she's directly responsible for all of it is misleading. It is far more accurate historically speaking to draw a line between the original Sailor Moon anime and that of Revolutionary Girl Utena (which was helmed by one of the series' directors and is in many ways a *direct response* to it) than it is to draw one from the original Sailor Moon anime back to Naoko Takeuchi's manga. This is something I think Takeuchi herself would even admit, as she's said a number of times she was shocked by some of the changes made to the first anime and freely admits she doesn't think she could capture the look of the show with her own drawing style. Disregarding the influence of Kuniko Ikuhara (director of the first four seasons of the original Sailor Moon anime and Revolutionary Girl Utena) is being willfully ignorant of history and unfair to both him and, frankly Takeuchi: This move to deify her in spite of everything seems like a deliberate attempt to paper over her own quirks and eccentricities as a writer in an attempt to attribute only the best of Sailor Moon to her...while conveniently pretending the worst doesn't also exist.

The absolute most egregious and unforgivable example of this is the vitriolic reception the second anime, Sailor Moon Crystal, has received from hardcore fans of the first show. It is positively raked across the coals for being incoherent, at times deeply objectifying and sexist, and reliant on stalling techniques to hold up its really weird pacing, which seems to give almost no time for important things like character development and altogether too much for exposition. And this is, in many ways, true, but it's only a half-truth. What *nobody* who has critiqued Sailor Moon Crystal has *ever* been willing to admit is that *every single* criticism that's been hurled at Crystal could be, and should be, raised against the original manga as well.

I'll admit I've only watched the third season (again, I have absolutely no desire to go any further with this than I already have), but from what I can tell, Sailor Moon Crystal is a *fiercely loyal* adaptation of the manga. Far more loyal, in fact, than the original anime, and far more loyal, it would seem, than Sailor Moon fans are comfortable with: I saw zero appreciable difference between the manga and Crystal versions of Sailor Moon Infinity (in fact, the Crystal version felt noticeably tighter and more coherent to me, though critically without losing one drop of the intended symbolism of Infinity's story), with the plot being instantly recognisbale at a shot-for-shot level. The backlash against it strikes me as being born of a mixture of rose-tinted nostalgia and insecurity: A desperate hope that we can justify our childhood tastes in media to ourselves, and a desperate wish to not have to blame Naoko Takeuchi for anything.

And I get this, in part, anyway. It is very hard to say unkind things about Naoko Takeuchi, who by all accounts seems like a perfectly sweet lady who only wants the best for everyone. *I* hate having to be mean to her, and I *especially* hate having to eviscerate her magnum opus, which seems to have done so much good for so many girls the world over. But I simply cannot condone this latent desire to scrounge together a liberal fandom canon comfort zone around it with a (Female) God at the head. Not being honest with Naoko Takeuchi, and with ourselves, is doing her an even worse injustice: Not truthfully engaging with her positionality and the material reality of her work, choosing to selectively remember only the parts of it we like and granting only our happiest memories to her at the expense of everyone else who was involved in a multi-billion-dollar international franchise, is nothing short of the height of irresponsibility.

After all, isn't Sailor Moon, in spite of everything else it may or may not have done, ultimately a series about being true to yourself?

An Increasingly Inaccurately Named Trilogy: Episode VII - The Force Awakens

It is damning with faint praise to say that “George Lucas done right” is a task perfectly suited to J.J. Abrams’s abilities, which is of course why it’s such a fun thing to assert. It’s not quite true, for reasons we’ll get to, but there’s more truth to it than not, and for the most part the truth is more revealing. Certainly it’s very obviously the logic Disney applied in hiring Abrams for the job of making Star Wars into a viable property again, and their benign cynicism is on the whole easy to understand. The prequels had made Return of the Jedi a better end to the saga in more ways than one, their famous awfulness drying up the bulk of the cultural goodwill the franchise had while muddying the question of what Star Wars should look like post-1983 with a host of unsatisfying answers that nevertheless needed to be considered.

Abrams, in this context, was an eminently safe pair of hands. He’d already rebooted Star Trek with an aesthetic that could uncharitably be summarized as “wishing it was Star Wars,” and with Super 8 had shown himself a skilled practitioner of 1970s nostalgia. More broadly, he was a director who could solve both of Disney’s immediate problems. On the one hand, he was fluent and respected enough in geek culture to keep rabid Star Wars fans on board. Such fans make up a negligible share of the audience for a major tentpole film, but are vocal and engaged enough that losing them creates a significant marketing problem. On the other hand, he was actually capable of making films that people liked and wanted to see.

I noted when I reviewed the film that Abrams was decidedly more interested in making a good Star Wars film than he was in making a good film. This is indisputably true. The Force Awakens works because it is a well-executed Star Wars film. Abrams strikes an intelligent balance between the obligatory wipes and stylistic tics that define the saga and more dynamic, lively moments. Much of this is little stuff - the shuddering, darkly lit shots of Storm Troopers in their shuttles, for instance, or the cut from Finn’s helmet to Rey in her goggles - that hardly merits praise, but there’s still a form of sophistication to it that Lucas simply wasn’t invested in. And these are mixed, in the early sequences, with teasing shots of ruined Star Wars iconography: a crashed Star Destroyer, or a fallen AT-AT. There’s a cheeky, illicit thrill - a child getting to play with the grown-up toys, and yet rising to the occasion so that their exuberance is tempered with real technical nous. Abrams is awed by the material, but not overawed.

This is, in the end, because Abrams is a joyless cynic interested only in appearances and iconography. Abrams is, throughout the film, singularly interested in making sure everything looks good. Over and over again the tone the film reaches for is “here’s a classic Star Wars moment… but it looks good, no?” And Abrams’s sense of classic Star Wars moments is thoroughly predictable, drawing almost entirely from the original trilogy while ignoring the prequels. What this means is that the film is as devoid of Lucas’s gonzo instincts as it’s possible to be while still being the seventh Star Wars film. The only place things flirt with overt weirdness is the sequence on Takodana, and its weirdness is all borrowed imitation of the cantina scene. Past that, the film is determined to reassure its audience that there’s not going to be anything like Jar-Jar Binks or the Ewoks here.

What Abrams brings, on the other hand, is basically a Kasdan-like competence applied throughout the production. (And of course, Kasdan’s around on script duty.) Abrams spent enough time in the killing fields of dramedy television to be good at mixing action and comedy, and the bits that are supposed to be funny have an easy charm that Lucas’s work doesn’t. Even broad physical comedy like the BB-8 lighter gag plays out with effortless-feeling comic timing as opposed to broad silliness. Characters have clear motivations and arcs across the film. There’s never a moment where the film does not seem to know what it’s doing. All of this is straightforwardly good, just as it was when Kasdan arrived to apply some discipline to Lucas’s vision.

But what’s really important about Abrams is that he extends this clarity to the thematic elements. The high point of this is undoubtedly Kylo Ren, who is a wickedly clever synthesis of Lucas’s varying conceptions of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader. Jack has already wisely noted that Abrams offers a very politically right-on update to Star Wars, but the decision to forgeround Anakin’s MRA tendencies in crafting a new generation of the archetype is by some margin the choice of his with the most teeth. Abrams wisely sequences the revelations about him for maximum effect. He’s introduced first as a sadistic quasi-Vader, thus relieving Adam Driver of the difficult challenge posed to Hayden Christensen whereby one must play an angst-ridden teenager first and then convincingly make him a dark lord of evil. And all of this, in turn, is established before the mythos-based reason why the audience should give a fuck about him, namely that he’s Han and Leia’s son.

This is also, sensibly, Abrams’s strategy for introducing a new set of protagonists. In contrast to how A New Hope is forced to function, the film does not open with familiar characters from the previous trilogy, but rather with a tangible absence of Luke, a decision that’s sustained through the entire film. Han and Leia are similarly withheld, which gives Rey and Finn time to breathe instead of having to compete with the mythos right off the bat. Abrams also eschews Lucas’s tendency towards treating protagonists as things to observe, making a film that’s actually structured around Rey’s Hero’s Journey that’s long on scenes where the viewer is invited to empathize with her. This is undoubtedly wise, not because that approach is inherently better than Lucas’s more Brechtian tendencies, but because it’s necessary to sell the idea of a Star Wars film with no obvious Skywalkers. Rey has to win over a mildly skeptical (and sexist) audience, and the more intimate approach to her story accomplishes that.

The other thing that holding back the familiar characters for a bit accomplishes is the inspired decision to give Han Solo the structural role occupied by Obi-Wan in A New Hope. This works not only because Harrison Ford is straightforwardly the best actor of the previous generation, but because it creates a satisfying parallelism - Obi-Wan and Han were both the most morally interesting characters of their respective trilogies. By having him be the relic of the past that serves as a launching pad for the next generation of protagonists (and we should note that this is also the Qui-Gon role) Abrams sets his film up as a moral progression of the series that takes it forward towards new questions and perspectives.

In this regard we should note the obvious early frontrunner for this role in Episode X: Finn. There is an unexpected horror in his character - a fascist army obtaining its shock troops by stealing children is uncomfortable in its closeness to how the world actually works. Like Anakin’s enslavement (and quite unlike “they’re clones with suppressed intelligence”), there are aspects of this concept that are simply too upsetting to depict within the framework of what Star Wars is. Obviously he’s another iteration of the familiar trope of subaltern and objectified people - the whole “literally doesn’t have a name” thing kind of settles that. But he’s the first such character since Anakin to obtain any sort of protagonist status, and the first ever to do so as a straightforwardly sympathetic protagonist. Even if the subsequent two parts of this trilogy don’t do anything interesting with this (just as The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi don’t really find much to do with Han’s moral implications), there’s a weighty moral progression in the very fact of it.

This is echoed in the larger transformation of the mythos as the role of the defeated Empire is taken up by the First Order, who are a new iteration of the familiar space fascists. This time, instead of being an evil within or an established government, they are a defined military enemy within the galaxy. This creates a pattern that had not previously been part of what “starting a new trilogy” meant within Star Wars, in that the fascists in both A New Hope and The Force Awakens take on the basic form of the previous trilogy’s good guys. The First Order is, by all appearances, a rebellion.

The good guys, meanwhile, have turned into a Resistance. This is a subtle upgrade, but one emphasized elsewhere in the film, most obviously in Maz Kanata’s speech about evil and the taking many forms. The saga has always acknowledged the dark side as an eternal threat, but here it’s more a cyclic one - something that’s defeated and then comes back in a new form, against which one must be perpetually vigilant. “Resistance” nicely captures this, acknowledging that this opposition must be a part of everyday existence. There was no resistance to speak of in the prequel trilogy, and this is certainly part and parcel of how the Empire came to rise. Note also the “temptation to the light side” idea, which further enriches the notion of this as a perpetual struggle instead of, as the prequel trilogy suggested, a series of wily plots from a secretive two-man crew of Darths.

Obviously there is much that is in the air here. Firm comment on how this new batch of thematic pieces fit together and, more to the point, how they don’t will require two further movies. How Rey fits into the generational Skywalker saga, where Finn fits into the overall design, the precise contours of what the First Order is, and for that matter how they handle the obvious importance that Princess Leia has to the narrative as the person saying that there’s still good in the bad guy given Carrie Fisher’s death (I say recast the role; if Alec Guinness can be replaced, anyone can be.) are all questions whose answers will open and foreclose possibilities. But Abrams, in his meticulousness, has also left a narrower field of possibilities than either The Phantom Menace or A New Hope did. The Force Awakens is straightforward even for a Star Wars film. This is not a criticism, to be sure - much of the twistiness of previous Star Wars films has been due to poor filmmaking, not well-done ambiguity. But it’s an interesting situation going forward.

The other interesting thing going forward, of course, is the lack of actual architect for this trilogy. Abrams remains an executive producer going forward, and surely handed some information over to Rian Johnson, but is far more out of the picture going forward than Lucas was on The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Rian Johnson, on the other hand, is a shockingly bold choice for The Last Jedi - the first time the series has ever been graced by a writer or director who’s already done better stuff than Star Wars. Indeed, I’m half tempted to do a quick triptych of posts on his filmography before December, just to really set ridiculous expectations for myself in covering The Last Jedi.

But for now we bring this trilogy to a temporary close. What shall I say? I still don’t particularly like Star Wars, in the sense of not feeling any investment in its mythology. It contrasts sharply with Doctor Who in this regard, and even with the Marvel Universe. It pales even behind Game of Thrones, which is a show I hate to love. But I am, at least, invested in the question of what’s next and looking forward to The Last Jedi. Yes, this is in part because of Johnson, a director I’ve followed avidly since before The Brothers Bloom. But that doesn’t diminish the role of The Force Awakens in that. As beginnings go, it’s the most promising that Star Wars has ever had.

 

Rankings

Return of the Jedi
The Force Awakens
A New Hope
Attack of the Clones
The Empire Strikes Back
The Phantom Menace
Revenge of the Sith

The Anti-Potter, Part 1: J. K. Rowling and the Effable Mirror

Happy Friday, all.  Notices first:

There’s a new episode of Wrong With Authority up for you to download, here.  WWA is a podcast about movies about historical events, created and starring myself, Kit Power, Daniel Harper, and James Murphy.  We take it in turns to host.  This time, James is hosting, and we’re talking about Shadow of the Vampire and Gods and Monsters, two movies about the lives of genius directors of classic horror cinema.  So far, the show is getting better with every episode, so check it out.  I believe podcasts in which white guys talk about movies are a real rarity online, so tell all your friends.

I still have a Patreon , as does Eruditorum Press generally .

Sam Keeper is still being really interesting about Rogue One at the moment… and I’m not just saying that because Sam is saying nice things about me and Phil (though that obviously shows excellent taste).

I myself do have more to say about Rogue One and Star Wars generally, but I’m taking a bit of a break for now.  Instead, here’s the first of a new occasional series about another obscure, niche fantasy franchise you probably haven’t heard of.  

 

A little while ago, in the context of a post about John Hurt, I talked a little about the character he plays in the Harry Potter films: Mr Ollivander.  Ollivander is an interesting ‘way in’ to thinking about some aspects of J.K. Rowling’s weltanschauung.

Ollivander is a rarity in Rowling’s work, and also in the films.  Not only is he irresolvably ambiguous, but he’s also a character who has a fundamentally different view of the world to everyone else.  These two things taken together mark him out.  There are other people in the stories who have perspectives that are unorthodox in the Wizarding World, but they are all either evil or foolish.  (In the films there is also Luna, who is neither… but screen-Luna is a very different beast to page-Luna.)

As I noted in the John Hurt essay, Harry - who normally arrives at very decided views on people very quickly, and who usually turns out to be right - is always unsure about Ollivander.  Of course, he turns out to be right about Ollivander anyway, in the sense that he’s right to not be sure about him.  Not because he later turns out to be evil, or a Death Eater (or is it ‘Deatheater’?  I don’t know, I listened to the audiobooks) in disguise, but simply because the books themselves aren’t sure about him.  He turns up again in later books and his character never resolves one way or the other. 

Rowling doesn’t treat Ollivander with her customary spite.  It’s an old saw that good writers have to be sadists towards their characters.  I’m not sure that’s true.  But that isn’t what I’m getting at anyway.  As a writer, Rowling generally has an extremely cruel and judgemental view of people.  She tends to be less judgemental than is warranted towards characters she has decided, a priori, that she likes and we should like too.  Sirius Black, for instance.  But conversely, she tends to be extremely judgemental - in a casually-yet-obsessively callous way - towards people who, all told, are guilty of very petty and human sins.  For instance, she draws Sybil Trelawney (the Hogwarts Divination teacher) as dishonest, vain, pathetic, melodramatic, and a comedy drunk.  The disdain and contempt she repeatedly revels in heaping upon this relatively inoffensive creature is strangely feverish. 

Rowling is writer enough to set up characters whose flaws require sympathy, and then strangely reluctant to afford them any.  She either flatly denies that they need any (for flaws anyway) because she has decided, despite evidence to the contrary, that they are perfect, or she refuses sympathy towards the glaring imperfections of characters she sees as weak.  Weakness is a particular horror of Rowling’s, and also Harry’s.  He is never more anxious and self-pitying (both of which he is a lot) than when he thinks he has detected a weakness in himself, or thinks others have detected a weakness in him (real or imaginary).  For instance, he frets for ages in Prisoner of Azkaban, over his inability to withstand proximity to the Dementors.  When he confines some of his fears to Remus Lupin, Lupin seems to immediately sense the source of Harry’s anxiety, and to sympathise, because he hurriedly blurts out an excuse for Harry’s vulnerability, saying “It’s nothing to do with weakness!”  This is in the context of a storyline in which Lupin’s old school friend Peter Pettigrew (they were in a circle of friends with Sirius and Harry’s father James) is depicted as about the most contemptible entity imaginable, and his wickedness stems fundamentally from his weakness.  As we learn more about this circle of friends, we learn that both James Potter and Sirius Black were hateful little shits at school.  Giant Quiddich hoops are jumped through in later books to explain why James Potter - despite being an egomaniac and a bully - was actually a great bloke, or at least became one.  The key difference between James (who grew up to be a hero) and Peter (who grew up to be a traitor) is that James’ nastiness was at least strong, whereas Peter’s was weak.  Weakness is inherently evil, for Rowling.  Worse, it’s revolting.  There is nothing worse than being weak.  Not even being fat is worse… and for Rowling, who absolutely hates fat people, that’s saying something.  Of course, it’s not either/or.  Peter Pettigrew is fat.

The films, in their customary fashion, soften all this somewhat, at least with regards the non-evil characters… by, for instance, hiring Emma Thompson to play Trelawney as merely scatterbrained and lonely. 

Ollivander, by contrast, is written far more closely to his character in the book.  He is genial, amiable, helpful, and untrustworthy.  He is untrustworthy, it transpires in the books, because he has unusual beliefs and interests.  This is generally the way in Rowling.  Much as she ostensibly celebrates eccentricity, and sneers at middle-class conformity in the persons of the Dursleys, she is actually deeply suspicious of anyone with non-mainstream views and interests.  She ridicules Hermione for her political dissent.  Beyond policy disagreements between elites, she represents the only other (possible) form of political dissent in the Wizarding World as the kooky conspiracy-theorizing of the Lovegoods.  Essentially, by the worldview apparently taken for granted in the books, you either accept the basic validity of the status quo, or you’re Hitler, or David Icke… or, at best, a smug and condescending elitist reformer like Hermione. 

(I’ve written before - and may do again - about how Voldemort is the Right and the Left, and anyone else who wants to fundamentally change the world, all rolled up into one big ball of fanaticism… see here and here… a view confirmed by Rowling’s inability to tell the difference between fascism and radical anti-fascism on Twitter.) 

In Rowling’s world of flattened and banal ‘magic’, witchcraft and wizardry are so dull and omnipresent that they are normality.  It becomes necessary for her to needlessly multiply entities, as they say.  She must, in order to create mysteries, invent an extra layer of the mystical and occult beneath the mundane, quotidian ‘magical’ reality of the Wizarding World.  (This is something that happens again and again in the books, in various forms.  As Dan Hemmens pointed out in his majestically irritable sporking of Deathly Hallows, for some reason a magic sword isn’t enough to destroy a Horcrux; it must also be impregnated with basilisk venom too!)  This extra layer she invents around Ollivander is ultimately explained in the final book… which is to say that she invents it and then retrofits it back onto the continuity of the rest of the series.  It is to do with wands, how they’re made, how they work, how they ‘choose’ their owners, how they develop and sometimes change allegiances.  The extra layer, in other words, is to do with Ollivander.  And it had to be so, because he’s one of the few things going right the way back to the first book but also still ambiguous. 

Rowling is often credited with encouraging literacy.  She supposed to have gotten an entire generation reading (an idea about which hardly anything has ever been said that isn’t either too kind or unfair on Rowling, or not secretly venomous towards young people).  But her attitude to books, reading, and literacy is actually very complex.  She is happy to use reluctance or inability to read as a signifier marking characters out as beneath contempt (Dudley, Crabbe and Goyle) but her treatment of book-enthusiast Hermione is deeply ambivalent.  Hermione’s attachment to books is depicted as obsessive, unhealthy, and purblind as often as it is admirable and helpful.  Hermione even runs-down her own bookish cleverness at the end of the first book, in favour of Harry’s bravery and compassion, despite having shown no less bravery and compassion herself.  The actual librarian in the stories, Madame Pince, is an unlikeable nonentity who fetishizes books over people.  And the books in the school library, though often said to be treasure troves, usually tend to come up with partial answers far too late.  Useful insights tend to come from instinct, recalled-conversations, etc.  In the second book, Chamber of Secrets, one of the teachers puts all his own books on the class reading list, and they turn out to be full of unscrupulous lies. 

The ambivalent attitude to books can be found writ-large in the sixth book, Half-Blood Prince, in which Harry becomes attached to an old chemistry textbook that offers insights which help him jump ahead of everyone else in his class.  But the useful insights in the book are all scribbled in the margins rather than printed in the text itself.  And it turns out that the notes were made by Snape when he was a wannabe Death Eater, and also contain vicious curses.  In the end, the safest thing to do with the book is to deliberately lose it.  Harry’s response to his own use of one of the vicious curses is to blame the book, and throw it away.  The valence of this is changed in the film to Harry being encouraged by Ginny, who quietly and suddenly seems more mature than him, to put aside a dark side of himself.  It looks, partly down to how hard Daniel Radcliffe is trying to invest Harry with much-needed interiority, like Harry realises something scary and distasteful about himself and, with some help from his friends, acts to address it.  This is rather likeable, despite being yet another iteration of the already-accomplished-girl-teaches-boy-to-be-the-hero trope.  It is certainly more likeable than Harry’s reaction in the book.  Having recklessly used a curse he doesn’t understand on Malfoy, who was crying alone in a toilet at the time, and discovered that it inflicts life-threatening injury, Book!Harry’s main concern is whether Snape is going to give him detention.  Snape is, needless to say, depicted as an utter shit for being angry with Harry for slashing open the skin of a fellow pupil.  This is a writer so immersed in her own fantasy world, and her own adoration of her chosen favourites, that she’s not only forgotten whether any of what she’s writing makes sense, she’s also forgotten basic standards of human decency.  But I digress...

Whatever we think of it, written information is viewed with suspicion in  Rowling’s world.  More fundamentally, there seems to be no such thing as discovery, dissent, or revelation in written or printed words.  As noted, the only meaningful dissent is Hermione’s  - smug, arrogant, out-of-touch, elitist, middle-class - liberalism.  Aside from that, there is Lovegood’s Quibbler, the equivalent of the National Inquirer crossed with conspiracy theory websites.  The only other periodicals are inconsequential ‘womens’ magazines’ (Witch Weekly), and the Daily Prophet.  The Prophet is the ‘respectable’ news source, but carries only sensationalism and scandal-mongering (Reeta Skeeter) or political reportage which slavishly follows the establishment line, as when the magazine uncritically accepts the view of Minister for Magic Cornelius Fudge that Harry and Dumbledore are nutty troublemakers for claiming that Voldemort has returned.  You could see this as a satirical jab at the media, and you’d be right, except that it underlies a more fundamental mistrust of all literacy in the books.  Harry’s schoolbooks are either filled with banalities (the moons of Jupiter), lies (Lockheart’s autobiographies), nonsense (crystal gazing and tea leaves, which is as silly in Rowling’s world as in the real world), dull (history books are nothing but recitations of dates and names), sinister and off-limits (full of methods of magical torture) or simply unread.  There are no new theories, no hypotheses, no philosophy, no new discoveries, no new proposed paradigms, no debates, no competing perspectives.  Books are not places where one finds discussion or analysis of ideas.  Political perspectives are not debated.  There is no great conversation, and no great battleground.  Moreover, such ideas as there are seem frozen in time.  Ideas have no history.  They are not evolved and contested, or developed, or disproved, or championed, or dissected, or melded. 

Where does all this go?  It’s tempting to say that it is simply edited out, that this aspect of society has no analogue in the Wizarding World in the way that many other aspects of society do.  But I don’t think this is quite right. 

Firstly, surface levels of the magical world are arranged so as to give the impression of there having been debates and competing perspectives.  These features look like the end results of such a history of ideas.  It’s a strange kind of idealism (in the philosophical sense) in which it is definitely ideas that drive history, change, politics, society, government, etc (reality being fundamentally immaterial as well as deterministic in Rowling’s world), and yet the ideas don’t seem to have come from anywhere.  They’re just there.  It’s a bit like Castrovalva, which popped into existence - complete with people and customs and traditions and opinions - a couple of minutes before the Doctor and his friends arrived.  Castrovalva too has a library full of books which detail a flat and meaningless history which is little more than a recitation of events.  But at least Castrovalva is admitted to have been a recent creation, which explains its lack of any intellectual history, or the lack of substance in its written record.  That’s part of the point of the story.  Rowling’s Wizarding World, like Castrovalva, was created a second or two before we walked into it, but neither troubles to admit as much or take much trouble to cover it up.  So the first answer to ‘where does the history of ideas go’ is: into a sort of contextless present political ‘situation’ which is happy to just be there without any real history.

The second answer is less straightforward.  The history of ideas becomes a hidden history, an occluded history, a history of rumour and myth and obsession.  It becomes a strange thing: a pocket of mystical, disavowed, and occult gnosis within a world that is itself notionally such a pocket.

But the pocket world that is the Wizarding World is not actually an alternative world, but is actually content to be a kind of banal mirror held up to the most banal and superficial aspects of our world... the aspects, or perhaps I should say the representations, of our world that are all over the mainstream media.  Normality as understood by tacit, centrist liberalism.  The Wizarding World is a mirror to this mirror.  And yet it fails to act like a hall of mirrors, distorting for effect, or like an infinity effect created by two mirrors facing each other, or like a reflecting telescope, which reflects reflections in order to magnify.  It’s more like a tiny mirror being held a long way away from a huge one, so that the tiny mirror contains an obscure cameo of everything the huge mirror reflects.  And far from distorting the image itself, it simply reproduces the image in miniaturised and distant form. 

The pocket-within-a-pocket thus becomes the furtive, guilty recognition of the fact that, despite being set amidst the ineffable, the Harry Potter stories are in fact entirely effable.  They are based on effability.  Effability is their rationale, their organising logic, their raison d’etre.  They are, by design, the de-magicification of the concept of magic.  Ollivander’s little subculture - the devotees of the story of the Deathly Hallows - is a kind of loose brotherhood of occultists within the non-occult space of Rowling’s pseudo-occultic magical community.

It is also inhabited by Xenophilius Lovegood (who’s into it precisely because it’s fringe, and his attraction to fringe ideas is presented as pathological), by proto-Voldemort and pseudo-Hitler Grindelwald (who looks to be the recurring villain of the Fantastic Beasts movies), and for a time by Dumbledore.  Dumbledore and Grindelwald are friends and their mutual obsession with the Deathly Hallows is the conscious logic behind what is strongly implied to be a homosexual love affair (this is a can of worms all to itself).  It is also the mystical basis for their sometime shared ideology of Wizard supremacy.  This is fairly acute of Rowling, in that it connects a supremacist and fascistic ideology with an underlying attitude of hermetic and insular mysticism - which has some basis in fact.  The consciously ideological ‘intellectuals’ of fascism, particularly Nazism, were often obsessed with mystical volkisch legends.  There is a definite axis (pardon the pun) of fascism which intersects with quackish mysticism, mythical accounts of racial heritage, and a fascination with a supposedly lost and occluded ancient past which is now retold only in legend.  

This ties in with the way in which Voldemort, the only person in the stories who ideologically wishes to fundamentally change his own society, is himself both the Left and the Right simultaneously.  The very flatness and mundanity of the Wizarding World, its nature as a cameo of a straightforward reflection, is a function of the view of the world which sees ‘normality’ as inherently non-ideological.  The Wizarding World is populated largely by middle-class professionals, officialdom, bureaucrats, functionaries, desk-jockeys, clerks, etc, or by petty bourgeois small traders.  The few working class characters (in the conventional sense) we see are generally insignificant and moronic (Stan Shunpike, Knight Bus conductor) and are, without exception, not engaged in industry or production.  The lowest forms of working class drudgery are carried out by the Elves, who are depicted as slaves but who are also… well, again, that’s a whole can of worms to itself.  Things like toilets and cars are ‘muggle artifacts’, implying that people in the Wizarding World do not make such things, or indeed anything… which makes it a puzzle to figure out where all the things in the Wizarding World come from.  The world is full of artifacts, produced things, and yet they are simply there (again, the contextless presence of a present situation, coupled with a silent amputation of any history).  This is another way of saying that the commodity form is edited out of social reality in the Wizarding World.  Things are bought and sold, but the process of production is left forever undepicted and unmentioned.  The only people who actually make anything in the Wizarding World are the Goblins, who create magical swords and armour, etc., and this is only because they are not human.  (Yet again, the goblins are another can of worms by themselves.) 

The point is that Ollivander becomes Harry’s way into understanding the closest thing the Wizarding World has (besides the magic-Nazism of the Death Eaters) to an internal counter-narrative, a layer of occult knowledge, a genuinely eccentric current of dissent, a subculture with its own hermetic lore and priorities.  It is a loose fraternity of men who are steeped in ‘wand lore’, the study of the attitudes and choices of wands. 

This, by the way, is also the closest thing in the stories to an admission that the Wizards and Witches are served by sentient beings who are both absolutely indispensable and utterly in their thrall.  The helpless but integral nature of the wands is the closest the stories get to noticing that the kind of society manifested in the Wizarding World - middle class, petty bourgeois - is impossible without the support of creative forces which are both vital and almost totally unacknowledged.  It is the closest thing to an acknowledgement of the creation of value elsewhere.  Far closer than anything found in the more prominent discussion around House Elves.  It is entirely in keeping with Rowling’s tendency to emphasize the agency of inanimate objects over humans, without recognising that she is doing so… but then commodity fetishism is, in many ways, the central logic of these stories, which is why they often seem like a novelisation of various concepts in bourgeois economics, which is commodity fetishism codified.

But we’re at the end so we need to kill off a much-loved regular, for shock value.  I think I’ll kill Phil this time.  Sorry Phil… but that’s storytelling for you.

 

The_OA Exegesis: Champion

Thank you for coming back.  My travels have kept me away.  I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting.

You must be hungry!  Aren’t you?  Maybe having a little bite of something something will help to take the edge off.  Yeah, a nice morsel.  A small good thing.  Maybe a chicken sandwich, or a bowl of soup.  Maybe some chocolate, or chips.  Something charred, perhaps?  Or a bit salty?   Maybe something cheesy, or with tomatoes, something with color.

Whatever it is, go get it now.  That tasty thing. 

I’ll wait.  Oh, and save one bite for the end, if you would.

Thank you.  You know who you are. 

 

Champion

Again, the opening image of the episode points to something significant in its middle, something significant that ends up being a point of failure.  In “New Colossus” we first saw the eyes of the Statue of Liberty, and that place marked a huge turning point in Prairie’s life, but it wasn’t exactly a success for her.  This is where her prophecy failed her – but then, maybe she was always going to be found by Hap, and she simply ended up being the cause of her own fate.  In any case, there’s a profound irony between the Statue of Liberty, and how “New Colossus” ends with the revelation of Prairie’s imprisonment.  Here, we get another seeming success: Prairie actually finding Homer’s ring, and a cell phone bill, which allows the prisoners a chance at escape—only for it to completely fall apart when the ring is ultimately lost.  Clever manipulation fails, and the episode ends with images of brute strength and violence. 

That said, we really should attend to the implications of everything to do with Homer’s ring, especially in light of the repeating motifs that have already been established in the first two chapters.  First, we’ve detailed a number of circular motifs—Homer’s ring was actually mentioned in “Homecoming,” and in “New Colossus” we got details like The Healos’ “Full Circle” with its verses pointing towards Ouroboros (combined with various snake references) and hence Eternal Return.  As we established in Chapter 1, the presence of WATER symbolizes a “bridge” in The_OA, a passage between different realities, a way to cross from the Ordinary World to the Other Side.  And as we saw in Chapter 2, the presence of GLASS symbolizes separation and isolation.  All these signifiers come together in the championship ring scenes.

Homer’s ring returns, again and again—in the opening image, which itself is presented as being underwater; then when Prairie finds the ring and drops it in a bathtub that holds a woman long dead (of course); and finally when the ring is passed back and forth between the glass cubicle prisons via an underground river, a river that eventually captures the ring (enveloped in a wireless cell phone bill) and takes it away forever.  So, yeah, there’s plenty here to work with.  The ring symbolizes eternity—the snake eating its own tail, the perpetual cycle of death and rebirth.  Of course it’s going to get back to Homer via the river, which is that bridge that can penetrate the glass walls of separation, which also indicates that the individual cells of Prairie, Homer, Rachel, and Scott might be different realities unto themselves, a nice metaphor for the human condition.  Of course the river takes the message of Eternity to a watery grave.  It’s… it’s neat, I think, to suggest that we ultimately have to let go of our notions of Eternity.  That a hope for perpetuity in the endless cycle of death and rebirth is something to escape from rather than to clutch onto. 

There’s an extra layer here to consider as well—in Chapter 2, the use of the SNAKE motif, with the opening shot of snakes tucked away into glass cubicles, suggests that the prisoners are snakes themselves, symbolically at least.  So the source of Eternity, of that endless cycle of shedding your skin, is something that actually comes from within, not without.  It’s tapping into that power that ultimately allows Prairie, Homer, Scott and Rachel to connect.  Their plan for escape fails, but the walls that separate them have started to come down, figuratively speaking, they’re able to work together in a way that they hadn’t been able to before.  They’ve become connected, which itself is a form of resistance against Hap’s domination.

 

Glass Houses

OA: The first time you fall asleep in prison, you forget. You wake up a free woman. And then you remember that you're not.  You lose your freedom many times before you finally believe it.

One of our concerns here at the Exegesis has to do with the practical application of alchemy to our real world concerns, which is one of the things we really appreciate about The_OA.  This show isn’t just about one woman’s journey through death and back again, but about the nature of fear, and power, and how we can respond to it, and how effective those responses may or may not be.  It does this primarily through metaphor—I mean, it’s not like we’re all locked away in the basements of mad scientists, literally speaking.  But this is such a fantastic and striking image that we can glean general structural principles to the dynamics of power-over that can be applied to a variety of real-world situations.

So what is it that actually imprisons us?  Not literal walls of glass, no.  Not our computer screens, really.  But “walls of glass” certainly makes a nice image to represent the prison of a mind that isn’t aware of the restrictions it places upon itself in response to the abstract structures of power and domination.  Take, for example, how differently we behave when we believe we’re being observed versus when we think we have privacy.  On the one hand, such… viewability… can be incredibly constricting.  We see this when Prairie and Homer pass the ring back and forth only while Hap is outside burying the body of August.  They couldn’t do this when they thought they’d be seen.  It’s much the same as we saw in Chapter 1, when Nancy and Abel remove the door to their daughter’s bedroom, to keep her under surveillance. 

And yet, conversely, open doors are also what we need to let someone in to our lives, to forge a real and deep connection.  To be seen by another, we must be visible, open.  So it’s not visibility itself that’s inherently oppressive.  How visibility functions depends on the context of the existing power structures and intentions that are already in play.

So when Hap is down in the basement wiping WATER off the windows (preventing connection in the midst of isolation), loudly, in the dark before daybreak with only the light of his headlamp to guide him (the light emerges from his forehead, the “third eye,” indicating his focus is actually on something that resides deep with human consciousness, as well as what his impact really is), we see things like Homer rolling over and ignoring him, and Prairie waking up restlessly to the noise, and Scott hiding behind one of his plants, like a feral animal in the jungle.  Hap is exercising material control over his prisoners, from their perceptions of day and night to the food they eat, so their visibility is another form of constriction. 

But then Prairie stands up for herself, uses that visibility to reach out to Hap and manipulate his emotions: she’s blind, she needs fresh air and sunlight so as not to lose her mind.  And Hap complies.  She uses the opportunity of visibility to make herself seen as she wants to be seen—which isn’t necessarily the same as being seen for who she really is, which is much more powerful, but not always appropriate when power relations aren’t balanced.  Nonetheless, she’s actively resisting her conditions.  And when the time comes for her to bond with Homer, Scott, and Rachel, the visibility of each other makes that possible… because they’ve finally been able to exercise power with each other, which is rooted in having the same power amongst each other.  This is something that exists even though Prairie has privileges not afforded to the others.  It exists because despite those privileges, she doesn’t use them to establish herself within a hierarchy.  Given the opportunity to eat real food, for example, she waits until she can bring sandwiches to everyone. 

However, the glass prison isn’t so easily dismantled. 

OA: We were like the living dead. Right next to each other, but alone. There's nothing more isolating than not being able to feel time.

“The living dead,” what a great line.  It evokes the sense of being in a coma—what Homer recovered from back when we saw his “news story” on YouTube in Chapter One, and what Hap described the ordinary world as back in Chapter Two.  We are zombies, asleep, not woke, only milling about looking for something to eat.  At least, that’s how we are before some kind of enlightenment to the situation we’re actually in.

And even if we’re “awake,” that doesn’t mean we’re free.  As OA pointed out, when you’re in prison you have the illusion of being free, and then one remembers that one is not as you wake up.  Waking up doesn’t change power dynamics, it only informs us to power dynamics that we weren’t previously aware of.  And just being aware doesn’t solve our problems for us.

Take, for example, the scene where OA and Steve huddle in an empty bathtub.  It’s an interesting scene, starting with the fact that it takes place in an empty bathtub, with OA staring out a window as a single lit tree.  Bathtubs are containers for water, the “bridge” in this show, so an empty one is striking both visually and thematically.  There’s the suggestion of connectivity between OA and Steve—they’re getting into casual conversations that don’t really have a point to them other than self-expression and getting to know each other.  Like, OA starts waxing philosophical, talking about the family that was going to live here and what life was going to be like for them: fights in the kitchen, making babies, heartache, sex, growing old. 

STEVE: You sound like one of the poetry kids.
OA: Poetry kids?
STEVE: You know, the ones who write poems about, like, cutting themselves and shit.

Like OA wouldn’t have any idea about cutting herself or anything.  Anyways, while she’s telling this story, she starts laying out little pieces of tile on the edge of the tub, arranging them like little walls, forming little parallel compartments.  I’m sure there’s a metaphor here, maybe for parallel realities?  Like, the Abandoned House in this reality is, well, abandoned, but had the economy not collapsed then the there’d be a family living here instead.  Something like that.  Or perhaps the realities are nested, like Russian Matryoshka dolls, or the concentric rings that flash on the screen at the end of this chapter.

Steve asks about whether OA’s plans include something “dangerous,” namely the rescue of Scott and Homer and Rachel.  She nods, and then Steve reaches out to touch her hair.  OA reacts—she’d said back in the first episode that “no touch” was one of the rules, and here Steve has just broken it.  This ends their reverie, and she leaves the house.  Which demonstrates that even though OA is now free from the imprisoned reality that she’s described to the Five, the internal prison remains, she’s not free enough to let herself be touched by another human being yet.  She still flinches from touch, having been denied it for so long. 

I bring all this up because I don’t want us to lose track of this underlying current. The glass prison, the translucent prison, it doesn’t need physical glass to function effectively.  This is because it’s so pervasive in society, it’s become an assumption that everyone takes for granted.

As soon as OA leaves the house, we get Alfonso “French” Sosa coming back in, and an altercation between him and Steve ensues.  This starts, however, with an invocation of power dynamics:

FRENCH:  Hey, what'd you do to her?
STEVE:  Nothing. Don't treat me like I'm some fucking pedophile or something.
FRENCH:  Pedophiles are people who are into kids.
STEVE:  You think you're so fucking smart, don't you?  You think you're the king of the world and we're your dumb little servants?

French, as we noted previously, is someone who has complied with the system, whereas Steve has reacted with rebellion.  The system, though, as Steve astutely points out, is one based on the notion of kings and servants, of an established power relationship that’s based on overt domination.  But this isn’t ultimately what presses Steve’s buttons—it isn’t until French brings up the fact that Steve’s parents want to send their son to military school in Asheville, invoking another context of domination and more importantly one of abandonment that Steve and French actually resort to violence against each other.  And it’s funny, Steve is all sure that he can still beat up French (having done so, apparently, when they were twelve years old), and actually gets in a nice cut on French’s forehead, but French quickly established his own dominance and gets Steve on his back in a chokehold.  When French relents, Steve calls him a “pussy” because he didn’t go all the way, but it’s not like Steve tries to reassert himself after this. 

This is all still glass prison stuff.  By establishing hierarchies, true connection is prevented.

Systems of domination are so pervasive that they even infiltrate our leisure activities, our games.  Like football (American style).  Or lacrosse.  We haven’t talked about football yet, other than as an example of school-related violence, but this is a thread that’s been present for three chapters now.  In Chapter One, Homer’s near-death experience happened on a football field, and the sidebar to this YouTube video had other football-related activities highlighted.  In Chapter Two, we noted that a news story in the background of French’s mother’s room was in the context of a local college’s football game, and of course French got his scholarship in part because of his sports activities.  In Chapter Three, it all starts to converge: we see Homer in his varsity jacket and we find he’s now got a proper championship ring; French blames the wound he got on his forehead from Steve on lacrosse; and then there’s this strange shot of a football field that sticks out like a sore thumb, because it’s not like any scenes prior or hence actually take place anywhere near a football field. 

So let’s talk about football and lacrosse for a bit.  Lacrosse was actually a Canadian aboriginal ritual discovered by the French when they entered that territory – they called it “lacrosse” after the long sticks with curved nets on the end that are the standard equipment used in the game we also call “field hockey.”  Well, actually, let’s call it ritual – for the originators, it was most definitely ritual, specifically symbolic of warfare but presented as an offering to the Creator.  American football is also laden with war metaphors – there’s attack and defense, “aerial assaults” in the passing game (a deep pass is called a “bomb”), and there are “smashmouth” running plays, plays that are run “up the gut” and down someone’s throat.  There’s actually a rape subtext here too, as “scoring” means either getting into the “end” zone, or “splitting the uprights” with a kicked field goal. 

Regardless, the whole point of these games, or rituals, as practiced today is for one side to establish and demonstrate dominance over the other.  And nowadays, games aren’t played to a tie; there must be a victor.  And, eventually, a “champion.” “Champion,” by the way, is the title of this chapter.  The word means not just someone who is victorious over another, who wins in a game of power-over, but also refers to fighters in general, especially those who fight on the behalf of others (this has shades of French’s scholarship from the Knightsmen Foundation).  But the word “champion” actually derives from the word “campus,” which we now associate with, well, schools.  Schools have campuses; this is where they are located. 

Funnily enough, though, the word “campus” originally referred to a “field of battle.”

So let’s wrap our dive into the local school system with Steve’s foray into “alternative school” in the bowels of the school, a dead end where the word “physics” (not "psychics") is painted on the walls such as to take advantage of the optics of a particular perspective.  Now, “alternative school” is basically sitting in front of a computer while a condescending woman tells you to go at your own pace.  Again, even here, there’s an aspect of power-over.  Condescension only happens when a power imbalance is recognized, and actually when it’s being reinforced.

The layout of the room itself enforces a lack of connection amongst the students: they are all sitting behind computer screens (glass walls, in other words) and as such they can’t really see each other.  You’d have to lean around the screen to see who’s sitting across from you.  Like one student does with the woman sitting next to Steve.  She immediately recognizes that the young man is looking at her tits, and she makes a big scene—she takes Steve’s water, pours it over her breasts, then throws the empty bottle at the, um, jeez he’s not really a teacher, is he?  More like a monitor.  Another pair of eyes in the Panopticon.  (Given that Steve actually points out that the water is his, and given that water is a “bridge” or a medium of connectivity in the visual language of the show, we’d expect Steve and the young woman to eventually develop a relationship, right?)

She goes unnamed in this chapter, alas, but we’ll address her name later.  It’s terribly apt.  But what we can do is see how she is reacting to power structures—like the male gaze, or the “alternative school” overall.  She is a rebel, like Steve.  She reacts with big gestures and the intimation of violence.  Quite natural.  Also pretty ineffective in the long run, as power-over structures have already cornered the market when it comes to violent expression.  (But damn, pretty satisfying in the short term!) 

 

A Lamb in Wolf’s Clothing

*** MONTAGE – Necklaces, Wolf, Lamb, Bird Broach ***

The young woman has put together an interesting ensemble for herself.  I was particularly taken with her jewelry – she wears necklaces featuring both an Ankh and a Yin-Yang symbol.  Now, this isn’t out of the ordinary for someone rocking a light-goth look.  Entirely apropos.  But I still think it’s a neat production choice – the Yin-Yang points back to our basic alchemical principle, the union of opposites, while the Ankh means “life,” pure and simple, though it often carries divine connotations; it’s also been hypothesized that it represents the union of the “male triad” and the “female unit.”  

 

Anyways, it’s here that we’re going to start paying closer attention to things like costuming in The_OA, for it’s here that we see OA actually pick out an item of clothing to wear while shopping with her mother.  She picks out a sweatshirt with a Wolf printed on the front, which is a stark contrast to her outfit in flashback, where she wears an overshirt that resembles lamb’s wool.  And, I dunno, I think there’s something to be said about this.  Back when she was Prairie, she really did have the innocence of a lamb.  Now, she’s The OA, and there’s a darker connotation to this… she is no longer a lamb, but looking to feast.  Which suggests a lot more intentionality to her storytelling with the Five than might be readily apparent.  She really is a completely different person with them than she is with, say, her parents. 

 

The color of the Wolf shirt is a kind of periwinkle.  Now, this doesn’t have a particular Alchemical resonance in of itself.  (The colors of Alchemy are traditionally Black, for the nigredo period of self-disintegration, White or Silver, for the albedo period of self-purification, and Yellow to Red for the rubedo period of integration and spiritual mastery, all three of which make up the Great Work.  So when Rachel tells the story of her near-death experience, which for her includes an out-of-body experience at the scene of her death, and points out that her little brother had a RED backpack from this out-of-body perspective, it’s a story that has a particular alchemical resonance.)  However, just because a color isn’t alchemical doesn’t mean it can’t have resonance of its own within the text itself.  And as it turns out, there is an interesting color palette at work within The_OA. 

 

In particular, we see a kind of lavender hue associated with Hap.  The lights above the glass cages at dusk, for example, have a faint purplish glow.  The bath water in which the dead body of August sits has that same color to it.  It’s the same color of Hap’s scarf when he finds Prairie in the New York subway.  It’s the same color, actually, that gets added to blue to make it periwinkle.

 

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves—we aren’t supposed to know yet what Hap and The OA are actually up to at this point, so let us just leave these fashion choices here for posterity and attend to one last costuming detail before the intermission: Betty Broderick-Allen’s broach.  It’s a lovely bird motif, all shiny and sparkly!  I like sparkles.  Anyways, this cues us into BBA’s path in the show – she is becoming a bird (and don’t forget, when we first saw her in Chapter One, we saw her with a veritable flock of tweety-birds pasted to the chalkboard behind her).  Birds are symbols of freedom, we think, for this show at least.  BBA is slowly earning her freedom… but we’ll get to her after the break.

 

 

Intermission

 

*** RACHEL / SIA ***

 

Today we have a couple of songs sung by Sharon Van Etten.  Van Etten plays Rachel on The_OA, but acting is a relatively new gig for her, as she’s an accomplished singer and songwriter in her own right.  In Chapter Three, we get to hear Van Etten sing a couple of songs, one as Rachel, and the other as a voice over at the end of the episode.

 

The first song is one of Van Etten’s own compositions, “I Wish I Knew,” from her debut album Because I Was in Love.  It’s a striking scene—Rachel has just told the story of stealing away her little brother to pursue her dream as a singer in Nashville, but she flipped the minivan and had her NDE, and in the process left her brother in a wheelchair.  Anyways, Rachel starts imagining what she’d do if she escaped Hap’s prison, and she says she’d sing a song to her little brother.  Homer eventually asks Rachel to sing the song, at which point she turns around on her bed, facing away from everyone, and it seems as if she’s declined the invitation.  Everyone else slumps back, as if in defeat… and then Rachel begins to sing.

 

(This conceit of not facing one’s audience when singing immediately reminded me of Sia, an Australian singer/songwriter who now chooses not to show her face when she’s performing, to avoid the cult of celebrity and maintain a modicum of privacy.  We’ll return to Sia and her recent work with dancer Maddie Ziegler and choreographer Ryan Heffington in a later essay; for now, we simply want to put them on our radar.)

 

(*** ADD LINK ***) Rachel sings “I Wish I Knew,” in a slow, low, bluesy fashion, much more so than on the album recording.  It’s sad, and lilting, and rather poignant within the context of the Underground in which they live.

 

I wish I knew what to do with you,
But the truth is I ain't got a clue,
Do you? Do You?

I wish I had an idea of what I need,
But we, oh we, can't know and that's okay,
That's okay.

 

This is a song that’s supposed to be sung to Rachel’s little brother, and the first stanza really works with this intention.  She wishes she knew what to do with him, this little boy with the lost red backpack who is now in a wheelchair.  When we get to the second stanza, though, it seems to become more self-referential.  Being locked away in those glass cages, losing track of time, of course it makes sense to lose the sense of what one needs.  But then the lyrics shift to “we” and it’s like Rachel is singing to the whole group that this is okay, it has to be okay, because none of this is really their fault.

 

This song transitions to the final scene upstairs, which we’ll cover a bit more in depth a little bit later, but it’s nice hearing Van Etten sing while we get shots of Hap’s kitchen, now adorned with Braille labels for Prairie to find her way around.  (The first shop upstairs is of a kitchen cabinet labeled “glasses” in Braille, followed by a salt shaker labeled “salt” and a pepper shaker that has “soap” labeled on it, upside down, strangely enough.)  Prairie spills coffee, and the song ends.

 

The second song comes right at the end, when Prairie is running through the woods.  At first it sounds like a continuation of Van Etten’s earlier song, so similar is it in style and cadence, but it’s actually a cover of “It’s a Wonderful World,” written by Bob Thiele and George David Weiss, performed and popularized by Louis Armstrong, back in 1967.  The song itself is pure schmaltz, a ballad of pure gratitude for the beauty of the world around us, but with Van Etten’s rendition, slow and laden with minor notes, it becomes imbued with sadness and irony.

 

I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself what a wonderful world.

 

For it’s not a bright blue day with clouds of white, nor a dark night—the skies are grey and steely, the wind whips through Prairie’s hair, the trees stripped bare and the ground hibernating under a mantle of copper and brown, even the parts that have been strip mined.  And it’s not like Prairie can see any of this anyways, she’s blind, and yet after this period of isolation and imprisonment, to suddenly taste freedom, would an environment even as harsh as this seem like a wonderful world?

 

 

BBA

 

*** BOX PICTURE ***

 

So, we were talking about Betty Broderick-Allen, or “BBA” as Steve calls her, and her lovely bird pin that she’s wearing as she’s sitting in the car listening to her phone messages, communications left behind by a lawyer, Rod Spence… and then what’s presumably the last message left by her late brother.

 

Rod Spence is reminding BBA that there’s the matter of her brother’s will to attend to.  Which she keeps putting off.  Spence doesn’t actually say much of import here, but damn that’s an interesting name.  “Roderick” means “famous power” and “Rodney” derives from “Hroda’s Island,” which you just know I’m going to take as an invocation to LOST.  (I have my reasons.)  “Spence,” on the other hand, derives from “Spencer,” and a “spencer” is someone whose job it was to dispense the lord’s provisions.  Rod Spence is the person responsible for dispensing the provisions of BBA’s brother.

 

But in what sense should BBA’s brother be considered a “lord”?  Well, I’m glad I asked that question, because her brother’s name is Theo.  “Theo” derives from the Greek for “god.”  So here, then, we get a level of subtext beyond BBA’s feelings of sadness and guilt for the loss of her brother.  No, this is more than that—we can also take this as a parallel world exploring her feelings about the death of God. This is reinforced by Theo’s message:

 

THEO: Hey, Otter. Theo. Just throwing out a line to see what comes back.

 

First, BBA has a nickname, “Otter.”  Not quite a fish, but an aquatic animal nonetheless.  And Theo here is “throwing out a line,” as if he were a fisherman.  A fisher of men, perhaps, or a fisher king, however we want to posit it, it still plays into certain Christian mythologies, where “fishing” is a metaphor for finding people and helping them along on their spiritual journeys—and even more so, hooking people’s souls for salvation.  So Theo, the “god” of this metaphor, is reaching out to Otter and hoping to save her from her own remorse. 

 

No wonder she’s so taken with The OA.

 

The other striking image with BBA occurs in the classroom: she finds a somewhat lewd picture of herself, drawn presumably by one of her students, up on her whiteboard.  But rather than simply erase it, she draws a green box around the image, using perspective, then sits back and simply gazes at it.  Reflecting on how she’s boxed in?  The sides of the box aren’t filled in, they’re clear, like windows.  BBA is learning to let go.

 

But not so much that she’s unwilling to dig into Steven a little bit.  She tells him, as a reminder to head off to “alternative school,” that she “stuck out her neck for him.”  Stuck out her neck, like a chicken?

 

 

Pat Knowler, Chicago Tribune

 

Hey, I said I had another LOST connection going on, and it comes to us in spades via Pat Knowler, the writer from the Chicago Tribune who accosts Nancy at the Costco (or Sam’s Club, whatever) about getting “Prairie” her story in book form. 

 

Sadly, there’s not much to a name here.  “Pat” means “noble” (think patrician) and “Knowler” means “dweller by the knoll,” though “kneller” means “noisy, disruptive.”  The book that Pat wrote, Stolen, is about a young man named Jamie Price, which is slightly more interesting.  “Price” fits in nicely with some of our other comments on The_OA, as it’s a name that means “son of the fiery warrior” and as such resonates with our broader concerns of power-oven and American football. 

 

“Jamie,” on the other hand, derives from “Jacob,” and that is a name that strongly resonates with me.  It’s a biblical name, and references a patriarch who had an “ascension” experience of his own.

 

*** BLAKE JACOB PIC ***

 

Jacob left Beersheba, and went toward Haran. He came to the place and stayed there that night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold, there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! And behold, the Lord stood above it [or "beside him"] and said, "I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendants; and your descendants shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and by you and your descendants shall all the families of the earth bless themselves. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done that of which I have spoken to you." Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, "Surely the Lord is in this place; and I did not know it." And he was afraid, and said, "This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.

 

From this passage we get the phrase “Jacob’s Ladder,” which is basically another axis mundi that connects the Ordinary World to the Other Side.  A bridge, in other words, so very relevant to our proceedings here in The_OA.  Well, as it turns out, there’s also a very important character in LOST named Jacob (for much the same reasons, I expect), the man who we discover is the “protector” or perhaps the “rulemaker” of The Island in that show.

 

Now, why is Jane so hung up on seeing LOST references in The_OA?  Maybe she’s just seeing things that aren’t there?  Well, that’s always possible.  But then we get a character like Pat Knowler bringing up a set of numbers, twice (we could say twinned) that makes the hair on the back of Jane’s neck stand up on end:

 

PAT:  I won the National Book Award for this. I'm only trying to say that my work is not sensationalistic. I spent 8 months with that family—

NANCY: I don't care.

PAT: —15 weeks on the USA Today best-seller list.

 

8 months, 15 weeks.  That’s an 815 reference, which LOST fans should recognize immediately as “Flight 815” – you know, the plane that crashed on the Island.  The numbers come up again when Pat has dinner with the Johnsons:

 

OA: You wrote the book about the boy?

PAT: Jamie. Amazing young man.

OA: What is he like?

PAT: He was only 8 when he was abducted. Uh, 15 when he was rescued.

 

There it is again, 8 and 15, back to back. 

 

OA ends up declining to help Pat write this book.  As Pat describes it, being able to write “the end” at the end of the book with Jamie Price helped Jamie to achieve a measure of closure and healing to his ordeal of abduction.  But OA balks at this: “His story has an end… I’m… This is just beginning.”  And it’s not that OA doesn’t want to tell the story—obviously she does, as evidenced with her time at the Abandoned House with the Five.  But a story that has no end, well, that’s a story that’s always happening.  A circular story, perhaps, or at least one with many parallel iterations.

 

HOMER:  You got it?

RACHEL:  He's coming! He's coming!

PRAIRIE:  I got it, I got it. I got it. Wait. Wait, I lost it. I lost it!

HOMER:  Catch it downstream! Downstream!

 

FRENCH: Wait, so you lost Homer's ring?

OA:  Yeah.

 

 

Repeating Motifs

 

So, yeah, there are a lot of repeating motifs in The_OA, like the bathtub sequence we described earlier, which is mirrored by a transitional shot—after the conversation with Pat Knowler, we get a simple shot of OA washing up in the bath, and then we cut to the Abandoned House, where OA continues her story with the Five.  A “transitional shot” is a shot that allows us to transition from one scene to another.  It is, in other words, a bridge.

 

As we pointed out before, there’s plenty of water in this episode: the underground river running through the glass cages, ultimately connecting them (which Prairie finds out to some dismay when she tries to drink when everyone else is bathing), or the scene where Steve’s water is taken so that the young woman in “alternative school” (hmm, parallel reality) can make a point.  And when Prairie describes to her fellow prisoners what she’d like to do when they escape, she says she’d like to swim.  Be surrounded by water, held by something other than the dark.

 

There’s also the matter of the dead woman in the bathtub water, a dark mirror to Prairie’s own experience.  The dead woman is named August, not by herself but as a nickname from the others.  “August” means “great” or “venerable,” sharing the same Latin root of augere (to increase) that lies in the word “augment.”  But that root is also the root of “augur,” a diviner or soothsayer, a prophet.  What a strange juxtaposition – death as something prophesied, and great.

 

Songs and birds recur again as well.  Rachel sings like an angel, frankly.  More interestingly, when Prairie is sobbing by the River after the failed “ring in the Verizon bill” scheme, she’s snapped out of it by Homer in a most interesting way:

 

HOMER: Jump.

PRAIRIE: What?

HOMER: Stop talking. Start jumping. Jump. Again.

PRAIRIE: Please, I can't.

HOMER: Oh, keep going. Do it, Prairie. Jump. Again. Flap your arms as you jump. Not silly, but for real. Like your arms are giant wings. Again. Higher. Again.

 

The girl who imagines herself as a fish is being taught to fly.  Again and again.  Over and over.  Iterations.  Eternal Return.

 

We also talked previously about “waking” and “sleeping” as metaphors for spiritual enlightenment, especially in the context of the prophetic dreams that Nina and Prairie had; Hap previously described the world around us as being in a “coma,” and Homer himself was in a coma after his football injury.  Here, we get introduced to two new vectors of “sleeping” – the sleeping gas that Hap uses to knock out his prisoners, and the sleeping pills that Prairie uses to try to knock out Hap.

 

Hap says he uses the sleeping gas so his prisoners don’t have to “worry,” which of course implies that what Hap is doing is indeed worrisome.  I mean, I’d be worried, especially given that one of his prisoners, August, is a dead woman in a bathtub.  In an ironic twist, though, it’s talking about sleeping gas that makes Hap fall asleep to the reality of what he’s got on his hands, namely a strong competent woman that he’s grossly underestimated simply because she’s blind: she takes this conversational opportunity to push Hap down the stairs and make her own escape.

 

An escape that she herself failed at by trying to use sleeping pills to knock out Hap.  See?  Everything that goes around, comes around. 

 

 

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Time

 

*** SOUP BOWL WITH PARSLEY ***

 

Let’s talk about food.  We’ve kind of touched on this before—like, when Nina ate birds’ eggs the morning of her near-death experience. Prairie eating oysters with Hap; in The Hymn of the Pearl, eating food in Egypt and falling into a stupor.  In “Champion,” there’s all kinds of stuff going on with food, throughout the chapter, and with all kinds of implications, alchemical implications.

 

Take the beet soup that Prairie makes for Hap, which just happens to have sleeping powder in it.  Hmm, sounds familiar.  Prairie’s trying to take the role of Egypt here, which is exactly the opposite position she really needs to take, at least when we consider this all as metaphor for her journey (as opposed to addressing just the literal aspects of her condition).  She’s stepped into a position of power, and tries to exercise power-over her captor.  It’s completely understandable, trying to manipulate the system, but the problem with system manipulation is that it doesn’t actually challenge the underlying assumptions of the system; instead, it ends up perpetuating them.

 

Mmm, that’s a big bite to swallow. 

 

It’s an interesting soup that she makes Hap, even before the addition of the sleeping powder.  It’s a beet stew that Prairie’s father taught her to make—so this is something laden with both childhood experience and metaphorical implications (the “father” being a representative of the Divine in this case), a point that’s emphasized with the primary ingredient:

 

HAP: Why do Russians love beets so much?

PRAIRIE: Beets survive frost.

HAP: Hmm. Of course. Something always survives.

 

Beets represent the ability to overcome death, to realize a kind of rebirth.  They’re also RED in color, which has alchemical significance (and Prairie is performing alchemy here, making this stew); the rubedo stage of the Great Work is where the work of integration occurs, a “reddening” whereby the opposites of the ordinary world and the divine are wedded together. 

 

But it isn’t this reddening that Hap reacts to.  Rather, it’s the “tomato” paste (another Reddening, but without the divine implications) in one of the other stock ingredients.  Being allergic, Hap isn’t just in danger of falling asleep, but nearly has his own near-death experience.  And this is such a great sequence—it’s at this point that Prairie has to save Hap, lest the other “starve” to death in the basement, despite the automated food pellets.  It’s at this point that Prairie finds Homer’s ring in the bathroom, and drops it in the bathtub water where August rests in peace. 

 

Food runs through this entire chapter.  Right at the very beginning, we see Nancy shopping for groceries, as she’s accosted by Pat Knowler.  In the next scene, they’re all having dinner together at the Johnsons’ house, eating some Little Caesar’s pizza (light on the tomato sauce, but not lacking in allusion, for a “little Caesar” is akin to the Gnostic demiurge), while Pat talks about being a vegan, “not a political or spiritual decision,” she says, but actually rooted in “wanting to take control” of what she puts in her mouth.  While in Hap’s basement, we see automated food pellets being delivered to the prisoners, an entirely different form of control being exercised by Hap.

 

And then there’s the great scene early in Prairie’s time at Hap’s, when he lets her upstairs for the first time, ostensibly just to feel the sunlight on her face.  Prairie finds a knife, but doesn’t use it for attack; rather, she applies it to a loaf of bread, and quickly learns her way around the kitchen to make Hap a chicken sandwich.  The chicken, of course, plays into all the bird symbolism we’ve seen so far.  Here, Prairie takes flight, gaining all kinds of good things for herself: a measure of freedom from Hap, and the gratitude of the other prisoners, for Prairie is certainly adept at manipulating a system she’s barely familiar with. 

 

SCOTT: Why’d you have to fuck it up with mustard?

 

Prairie puts mustard on the sandwiches she makes for Hap and the prisoners, something that Scott points out in particular.  I’m reminded of the Parable of the Mustard Seed: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field; which indeed is smaller than all seeds. But when it is grown, it is greater than the herbs, and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in its branches.”  Nice, the reference to birds here, too.  But what’s actually interesting here is the implication that by making a bird sandwich, in a particular way, Prairie is opening up a door to “the kingdom of heaven,” if not actually creating it in the first place.

 

This is such a far cry from how the chapter ends, though.  For while Prairie is quite resourceful in complying with her dominator, and manipulating that system, she still can’t escape it in the end.  So she resorts to rebellion, to violence, and actually gets further than she ever had before, even though it’s  not nearly far enough.  And again, there are all kinds of interesting details that converge here:

 

HAP: The gas is so you... you don’t have to worry.  Look, Prairie, all great work... important work, comes at great cost.

 

I love this union of the sleeping gas and the phrase “great work” in this dialogue.  Prairie pushes Hap down the stairs at this point, depositing him in the dungeon that he’s kept for his prisoners.  And then she grabs a cast iron skillet – a tool for cooking, and she breaks open a window (destroying that which prevents connection) through which she escapes, however temporarily.  She winds her way through the trees, while we hear Rachel singing in voice-over.  But her violence is, in the end, met with more violence, as the butt of a rifle knocks her out as the wind whips through the (talk about sleeping gas!). 

 

So that’s where we end the chapter, with a cliffhanger at the edge of a cliff – see, this text is perhaps more self-aware than we’ve given it credit for. 

 

I do hope you remembered to save a bite to eat.  You can go ahead and swallow it now.

 

You know who you are.

Pandora's Hope

I was watching TV the other night when a commercial caught my eye. It's the exceptional ad that does this, since I usually have commercials muted so I can focus on constructive things instead. In this case, I immediately recognised, entirely against my will, the iconography of planet Pandora from James Cameron's Avatar, a movie I never saw. I was wondering if this meant we were getting an imminent Avatar sequel and was just beginning to ponder the ramifications of that before the true purpose of the commercial became clear: Opening in May of this year in the Animal Kingdom park of Walt Disney World Resort will be Pandora: The World of Avatar, an entirely new land attraction that seeks to create the world of the beloved film in physical form.

My first thoughts were, unironically, “well, that's going to do incredibly well” followed soon after by “this seems like a good fit”. Though the religiously ecstatic paean to CGI that is Avatar at first glance seems like a strange fit for the ostensibly environmentalist tone of Disney's Animal Kingdom, the connection seems like a much more intuitive one if you look at it deeper for a few reasons, the least of which is the film's own loose environmentalist message. The movie itself is in many ways the least interesting thing about Avatar: I'm not going to be doing a full review or analysis of the film or anything like that-Frankly, the fact I'm ever writing about Avatar at all, a movie that's almost a decade old, leaves me feeling pretty dispirited. For our purposes, what I'm going to say the most important thing to note about Avatar is how it used film technology and genre fiction in a way that was uniquely positioned to manipulate a starvation most people don't even know they have. Writer Jonathan Zap explains this very well in a piece he retooled for Reality Sandwich a few years ago, and while I don't completely agree with everything Zap says, he does make a point about Avatar and our relationships with our true selves I haven't seen anyone else make.

Avatar's fans are notoriously rabid, but, as Zap points out, you can't entirely blame them. They yearn for escape and for sublimation so deeply and so powerfully that they explicitly want to live in the fictional world of Pandora to the point some get suicidal when faced with the fact they can't. In the most severe cases, they believe themselves to actually *be* incarnations of the characters from the film: Avatar's motifs of a kind of postmodern technological spiritual ascension resonated very strongly with people who secretly feel they're living a life of lies and bullshit (because they are) and are unconsciously starving to reunite with their true self, but who don't want to openly admit it. Avatar plays on postmodern malaise in a materialist and reductive world and was always perfectly suited to be adopted as part of the burgeoning hyper-reality movement. And now, Disney is going to give those people exactly what they want, to live in a Pandora of their own...For a day, and provided they can pay for it, of course. And it really is a match made in, well, someplace I suppose, as the only fandom that can rival Avatar's in terms of sheer blind religious fervor is Disney's.

But I want to call attention to something else James Cameron said about Avatar and Pandora, and that Jonathan Zap actually quotes him on in that article:

“It’s my world, you all are just living in it.”

Well, of course he would say that. He's a filmmaker. Cinema's Deal with the Devil was when a young and insecure film studies, desperate for attention and recognition from the literary establishment, elevated the image of the director to exalted authorial status, and in doing so, literally deified him. James Cameron doesn't think he's a god, he thinks he's God. Monotheistic. Infallible. All-powerful. The director is so obsessed with the master narrative written about him that he conveniently ignores the army of creative figures who it took to bring “his” vision to life. We could take this one step further and even question how much of Avatar really was James Cameron's vision in the first place: The first thing artists and Gnostic visionaries alike have to accept upon awakening is that the vision can never be conveyed one-to-one to another person. Something will always be lost in translation. That's life.
 
But no, let's get more basic and materialistic. We live, after all, in a materialistic world. The world of Pandora may not be aesthetically or creatively all James Cameron's, but legally it is, at least in substantial part, because of copyright and intellectual property laws, and the same is true for Walt Disney World. The resort may arguably be the most perfect example of bringing a fictional world to life through clever knowing artifice (which is another way of getting at why the Avatar cross-promotion is such a good fit), and, if you have the money, it's a wonderful place to visit. But it is, ultimately, fictional, and fiction is not real. Those in genre fiction circles who might be inclined to view science fiction and fantasy as a substitute for something permanent would do well to remember that. Fiction cannot replace what's missing from your own life. Take it from someone with experience: The best it can do is help point you in the right direction and give you an intellectual framework to play with when you're just starting to figure things out. At some point, you have to take matters into your own hands.
 
As Jonathan Zap also mentions, apart from being the title of the highest grossing movie of all time, the term “avatar” is also used both in Hindu religious texts to refer to a god incarnate as a mortal human and in computer and video game circles, where it's used to mean pretty much the exact opposite concept. The conventional thinking goes that video games offer empowerment and instantaneous validation and recognition for success. For reasons similar to why people might want to escape into genre fiction worlds more generally, that sense of acknowledgment and purpose is not something most people get on an everyday basis under late-stage capitalism. And there is, I suppose, something to that: I've seen compelling arguments that the addition of gambling mechanics (really, a removal of the artifice that previously disguised the gambling connection in the medium's roots) to many modern games that was raising a lot of concern some years back combined with the cultural origins of a certain reactionary fundamentalist movement are damning enough evidence of this.
 
I tend to approach video games from a different perspective though, one born from creative play and transformative experiences. Talented and skillful games can foster this in a really special and meaningful way (unsurprisingly, I'm going to argue it's Nintendo and Bethesda Softworks who are the best at it, probably Cyan Worlds too). Fiction may be intrinsically limited in what it can do for you, but I'm going to be a bit brash and maintain that video games can, at least potentially, do more than other kinds of fiction because of the practical way the medium is structured. I'm running the risk of repeating arguments I've made a lot of other places, and this essay feels repetitive and superfluous enough as it is right now, so I'm going to try and focus on a different case study if I can.
 
There is a real vibrancy, I feel, in certain corners of video game culture. To make a half-baked stab at tying this essay together, let's make the comparison again with cinema. One must always be careful what one wishes for, and film studies got exactly what it wanted by turning film culture, at least to my eyes, into even more of a locked-down, top-down authorial deifying climate of creative bankruptcy than even literature studies. Films (and television, and anything derived from the cinematic tradition) almost seem like the quintessential example of art perverted by capitalism to me, with discrete products we are programmed to find desirable. They are meant to be bought, sold and genuflected before, and then disposed of when the next new release comes out. But video games, in spite of their traditional inferiority complex and nerdish impulses that leads the AAA industry to go chasing cinema for inspiration (though even that seems to have died down some in recent years), and in spite of the selfsame industry's increasingly appalling business practices, has never quite managed to succumb so thoroughly to this Death Drive.
 
There's something about video games that, to me at least, encourages transformative play at a basic level, and that's carried through into the way the medium has permeated into broader culture. Video games may not be able to send you on a shamanic journey to enlightenment, but the really good ones can maybe give you an idea of what that's like and their popularity speaks to a subconscious yearning to reconnect with this forgotten path. And that path is by definition intensely personal, which is perhaps why video games, in my eye, lend themselves to remix and reappropriation better than any other form of popular media (though my use of the term “remix” there serves as a nod to the fact something similar occurs with music). The console mod scene (not to be confused with the prolific, and equally compelling, PC gaming mod scene), ROM hackers, chiptune artists and indie fashion designers in Tokyo all share the same drive to create something fresh and new out of their personal relationship with hardware and software many would consider a dated aesthetic.
 
Unlike Avatar, there is no canon world your gracious and merciful God has granted you the gift of beholding in video games or video game culture, and the idea there is has always been faintly ridiculous (even if certain people don't want to admit it). As I've tried to argue before, that's basically physically impossible given your role in the creative act. You make the world yourself. You are an active part of the process. You are the process. That kind of thing just doesn't happen with movies from what I can tell, in no small part because if someone ever tried that with a movie the MPAA would sue them out of existence. But the MPAA is just one emanation of the same Death Drive that consumes film culture and genre fiction, with its insular and incestuous focus on mythological dynasty-building. Avatar marks a kind of zenith for cinema and genre fiction as we traditionally understand it, yet, in doing so, it reveals the worrying shortcomings of both.
 
As I watch the industry and medium of video games undergo yet another dramatic transition, I can't help but keep myself up at nights thinking about these concepts. After all, for everything I've just said, Nintendo did just release a console that has priced everyone but the hardest of the hardcore out of enjoying it under the auspices of reaching out to them. And last year they signed a deal with Universal Studios to make Nintendo theme parks, which sure is a thing to think about in light of this Avatar business. And yet at the same time, I see the Japanese underground fashion and music scene quietly continuing to plug away, making things that have never been seen before. There is a rockist/popist divide of sorts emerging in video game culture, especially retro game culture (indeed, a case could be made this is built into the psychogeography of Tokyo in the explicitly gendered, and moneyed, divide between Akihabara and Harajuku/Shibuya). Which is something I don't think anyone really saw coming, at least not in the West, where video games (especially retro games) will always have the stigma of the Nerd orbiting them. But I have to say, I'm kind of glad it is: For the first time it feels like there's an actual future somewhere for a set of aesthetics and sensory memories that have always been part of me, but that I could never comfortably express.
 
Still though. I feel obligated to re-evaluate my place among all this. For as much as I want to cheer on and support all the Harajuku Girls, I am equally faced with the painful reality that I am not one and can never be one. In a lot of ways I feel I've missed my chance at cultural relevance. Perhaps my entire generation did, though I maintain that at least in my personal case growing up the way I did made that challenging through no fault of my own. Furthermore, I have to question my choice of work as a media critic and historian: I hope I've been able to provide insight for people through the work I do, but while I hold the creative energy of eros as a core value, lately it's been hard for me to feel like I've ever actually created anything new in my life. If I'm not careful to balance my hyperawareness of past moments, I run the risk of being, deservedly, swept aside in the cultural tide.
 
For now though, I'm getting a new Game Boy.

An Increasingly Inaccurately Named Trilogy: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi

The standard line about the original trilogy is that Return of the Jedi is its weak link. It will surprise nobody to learn that I’m suspicious of this logic, which is at its heart rooted in an aesthetic that says that big reveals like Vader being Luke’s father are good and Ewoks are bad, but it’s nevertheless worth recognizing that Return of the Jedi is the one film in the original trilogy that’s markedly improved by the presence of the prequels. This isn’t a new observation - it’s at the heart of the famous Machete Order, which suggests putting the prequels between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and which basically prompted this entire series with its argument for why you should skip The Phantom Menace while doing this, which was the immediate cause of my remarking that prequel criticism was generally worse than the prequels themselves.

The problem that Return of the Jedi has on its own merits is Luke’s constant assertion that there’s still good in Darth Vader, a claim that not only lacks justification in the films but is actively unjustified by the sheer degree that Darth Vader is an ostentatious force of pure evil badassery. As we’ve discussed at length, it’s not that the claim that there’s some good in him is particularly justified by the prequels either, but at least the line is uttered by Padme in Revenge of the Sith, and more to the point, the prequels put significant effort into making Anakin an actual character. It’s difficult to actually imagine the Darth Vader of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back making an abrupt face turn, but while it’s still a bit out of left field, it’s perfectly possible to imagine the Anakin Skywalker of Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the SIth doing it. (I mean, hell, he’s so fickle in Revenge of the Sith that it’s basically possible to imagine him doing anything.)

More broadly, the relationship between Luke and Vader is, in the original trilogy, a pure abstraction - it matters entirely because of the basic ideological valences of fathers and sons. Indeed, the fact that it literally only matters because of patriarchy goes a long way towards explaining the weirdly outre status of Leia within this relationship, with her involvement a somewhat disposable third movie reveal in which she gets played as the fool, getting a piece of information the audience already knows and that has no actual bearing on the plot. But as a conclusion to the entire Lucas-governed saga it’s a far deeper relationship, and that gives the film new weight, a fact reflected in Lucas’s decision to replace Sebastian Shaw with Hayden Christensen in the final scene. (Honestly not a bad decision, though he probably should have replaced Alec Guinness with Ewan MacGregor in this and The Empire Strikes Back to set it up better.)

But it’s worth interrogating why this should be the case. After all, it’s not obvious that the solution to an undercooked finale is to go back and add more stuff before it while not actually changing anything about the finale itself save for swapping out “Lapti Nek” for “Jedi Rocks.” Indeed, in most circumstances adding more things that a finale is expected to resolve is the exact opposite of fixing the problem. Part of the issue is what we’ve already discussed - the concerns set up by A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back are abstractions based on archetypal relations. But this isn’t a fault - indeed, it’s baked into George Lucas’s basic idea of a Buck Rogers-style serial.

No, the important thing is that Return of the Jedi marks the point in Lucas’s chronological development of Star Wars where the movies start getting a bit weird. I mean, The Empire Strikes Back isn’t without its utter barminess, featuring as it does both the Exogorth and Yoda. Even A New Hope has the Cantina scene. But both films spend most of their time on fairly standard space action serial ideas. By the time of Return of the Jedi, however, Lucas was running out of obvious ideas, and so was forced towards things like, well, Jabba the Hutt’s palace and the Ewoks. This trend only continued over the course of the prequels, and so it’s not a surprise that adding them to the narrative helps Return of the Jedi, in that it becomes a film that balances the approach of the five previous instead of a weird aberration.

Obviously the consensus is not that Lucas running out of obvious ideas was a good thing. As I said, I’m naturally inclined to be skeptical of this. Doctor Who fandom has a famous factionalization into “guns” and “frocks,” with guns preferring action and exploding Daleks and the like, while frocks like stories that are much more like, well the prequel trilogy. And I’ve got a long critical track record of standing up for frocks. All the same, it’s clearly the case that the prequels simply are not as good movies as the original trilogy, which isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of Lucas’s weirder instincts.

The problem, though, isn’t Lucas’s weirder instincts so much as the fact that his weirder instincts lead him away from his strengths. By and large, as sheer weirdness increases, clarity of storytelling has to as well. Lucas, meanwhile, is deeply undisciplined in his storytelling. His plots are sloppy and ill-structured, his characters are bland archetypes, and his dialogue is cornball. And as his more (literally) alienating ideas come to the forefront these failings get less and less room to hide.

The irony of this, though, is that even though his weirder instincts drag him away from his best filmmaking, they’re still on their own merits his absolute best tendencies. Even A New Hope works largely because of Lucas’s propensity for slight strangeness, with much of its texture defined by touches like the Jawas, Chewbacca, or throwaway phrases like “moisture farm” and “clone wars.” The decision to have the initial viewpoint characters be C-3PO and R2-D2 is astonishing in its out-of-left-fieldness, and yet it’s one of the most important in the film, a bold setting of expectations that notably convolutes attempts to pretend the film begins with Luke’s call to adventure and not Leia’s droids. And for all that the original trilogy is better, its overall plot of generic rebels overthrowing generic fascists is far less interesting than the collapse of a corrupt democracy. Indeed, if you want to boil the core argument of An Increasingly Inaccurately Named Trilogy into a single sentence, it’s basically “the movies the prequels are failing to be are much more interesting than the ones the original trilogy are succeeding at being.”

But then there’s Return of the Jedi. A film where Lucas’s weird instincts have the moderating force they so desperately need in the form of Lawrence Kasdan, who dutifully makes sure the film remembers to actually be about something most of the time. Sure, Lucas’s weird instincts also just aren’t on full blast yet (notably he blatantly can’t think of anything other than “the Death Star again maybe?”). But there’s also a clear arc with narrative purpose to the strange sequences. The Jabba the Hutt opening is even more cut off from the rest of the film than Hoth is in The Empire Strikes Back, with the film all but restarting with Mon Mothma’s appearance. But it still has a clear arc of demonstrating how much the events of the previous film have changed Luke and a nifty gimmick of sequentially reintroducing the characters as the rescue scheme unfolds. As a result the weird bits are delightful instead of simply alienating, and the sequence is a classic.

But even better are the Ewoks. Jabba, after all, is grotesque, but his sequence is decidedly not frock, and Carrie Fisher’s got the metal bikini to prove it. The Ewoks, on the other hand, are an absolutely bonkers turn that clashes gloriously with the operatic grandeur of the three-way showdown on the Death Star. And yet they’re handled with just as much attentiveness as the Jabba the Hutt sequence. Everyone involved is clearly committed to making the Ewoks work as a concept, and is hell-bent on taking them seriously. The Ewok death scene is very possibly the most brilliant thing in the entire saga, a rare moment in which the story decides to just go for it and really push an idea as far as it can go. Sure, the battle for Endor hasn’t got the visceral thrill of Hoth or the trench run, but it’s an utterly gonzo notion played with skill and conviction, and I think that’s a fundamentally better thing to be.

Like most of Return of the Jedi, though, the Ewoks really shine in the context of the whole saga, where they more clearly provide a sense of thematic resolution. As mentioned, taken on its own the politics of the original trilogy are not particularly complex. And this poses something of a problem for the saga as a whole; Revenge of the Sith ends with a complex network of moral and political concerns that it inadequately resolves before ostentatiously punting them onto the next generation. The original trilogy, however, does not pick any of them up. One can divine interesting answers, and the saga’s not over yet, but it’s simply not the case that A New Hope or The Empire Strikes Back are particularly interested in the questions asked by Revenge of the Sith.

But the Ewoks do. They’re another iteration of the prequel trilogy’s most fascinating thematic concern, namely the practice of considering groups as subhuman, whether the droids, the Tusken Raiders, the clones, or the practice of slavery. The Ewoks are filling the classic pulp adventure role of “the savages,” but avoid the crass racial stereotypes that characterize a lot of the prequel trilogy’s alien species. Indeed, they’re one of a handful of successful ways to incorporate the trope of savages into adventure fiction that don’t involve ugly racial implications.

More than that, however, the Ewoks finally provide something of a resolution to the longstanding issue. They form an entirely functional rebellion of their own, not only rising up against their oppressors but clawing out a place within the human-dominated social order. It’s easy to make too much of this; the Ewoks are, like R2-D2 and Chewbacca, left untranslated, which makes it difficult to ascribe much depth to anything they do. But the fact that the Empire’s climactic downfall is fundamentally down to a subaltern indigenous population rising up against oppression is valuable - a significant statement that makes editing Naboo into the closing montage sensible in spite of the fact that we’ve not spent any significant time there since Attack of the Clones, just because the Gungans are one of the most obvious parallels to the Ewoks (though not quite as blatant as the Jawas). This is in many ways a more meaningful sort of closure than anything character-based could possibly be - one rooted in what the saga has been about instead of in its raw iconography.

And so the saga as Lucas envisioned it comes to a close. It is worth noting, this would have been enough. Either as a trilogy or a sextet, Return of the Jedi would have made a fine conclusion to Star Wars, a series that was always grounded more in George Lucas’s desire to see his daydreams realized on a movie screen than in anything else. Star Wars has always been more than just these six movies, yes, but as a statement of artistic vision in science fiction they are peerless. Even as they acquired countless imitators, Lucas remained singular, strange, and at times downright baffling. On some level quality seems no more interesting a question to raise about Lucas’s work than it is about Henry Darger’s. The only difference is that somehow Lucas’s mad visions got made into multimillion dollar movies instead of drawings abandoned in a Chicago apartment.

But, of course, the consequence of that is that his vision was never going to remain his own. There was always too much money in allowing it to be otherwise. This is not some suggestion that Lucas’s vision was somehow compromised by his tendency to keep one eye on the toy market. There is no “Lucas’s vision” separate from the commercial concerns, a fact that does not detract from its delightful weirdness in the slightest. Rather, it is an acknowledgment that this vision could never endure as the untouched center of Star Wars. It was always going to become a franchise, not a saga. This has its merits - Jack’s done a stellar job of illustrating how interesting Rogue One is over the last few weeks, and I’m going to have plenty of nice things to say about The Force Awakens next week. But there’s still something that even I, who, twelve thousand words into this thing still don’t actually like Star Wars very much, find poignant about seeing Lucas’s vision pass into history within it.

Ranking

Return of the Jedi
A New Hope
Attack of the Clones
The Empire Strikes Back
The Phantom Menace
Revenge of the Sith