#having a sense of catharsis knowing the character they liked growing up was representing them all along :)

[reanimatedgh0ul]

ik this had to have been such a massive W for the neurodivergent/autistic chicanos out there when this was announced

[newdougsblog]

The Tragic Hero Full of Fear

Hello everyone! Before I get into this, I’d like to thank @jasontoddiefor​ for both the name and being the main enabler of this fun piece of writing. I also want to thank all my wonderful friends over on Discord for letting me bounce ideas off of them and helping me. You are all amazing!!

Ok, so let’s get into it!

The first six Star Wars movies (the Original and Prequel trilogies) are commonly referred to as “the Tragedy of Darth Vader.”  But what makes these movies a tragedy? How is Anakin Skywalker himself, the main character of said tragedy, a tragic hero? In this meta/essay, I will discuss how Anakin himself is definitionally a tragic hero and outline his story as it relates to the structure of a classic Greek tragedy.  

This essay will focus solely on Anakin’s character as he is canonically portrayed.

The Hero

Let’s go through the main traits of a tragic hero (as per early literature) and discuss them in the context of Anakin Skywalker.

Possesses immense courage and strength and is usually favored by the gods

Anakin’s courage is evident throughout his entire life, such as when he participates in the pod race in TPM or on the front lines during the Clone Wars. 

While we cannot definitively ascribe Anakin’s abilities to any deity, we can associate them with the Force. The Force is able to somewhat influence the happenings of the universe in certain ways and takes the place of any sort of deity.

Whether Anakin is the “Chosen One” or not, his connection to the Force is stronger than that of any other Force-sensitive being, so he is consequently closer to it than most, if not all, other Force-sensitive beings. 

Extreme loyalty to family and country 

Anakin is consistent in his demonstrations of loyalty to those he has strong feelings for (whether those feelings be romantic or platonic).

His devotion to Padmé surpasses his loyalty to the Jedi, and he is always willing to go to great lengths to ensure their safety and well-being.

Anakin also exhibits a strong sense of devotion to his mother, Shmi. His devotion to her, and by extension her wellbeing, surpasses his duties as Jedi. 

In ROTS, Anakin says, “I will not betray the Republic… my loyalties lie with the Chancellor and with the Senate… and with you” (you, in this case, referring to Padmé). In this quotation, Anakin’s loyalties are made quite clear. At this point, he is not faithful to the Jedi, but to his government, its leaders, and, of course, his wife.

Representative of society’s current values

During the Clone Wars, Anakin is known by the moniker, “the Hero with No Fear,” and is one of the Republic’s “poster boys.” He is charismatic, kind, seemingly fearless (obviously) and a strong fighter, thus representing the values that were important to the Republic at the time. The last characteristic is especially important because of the assurance it instills in times of war. As a representation of the Republic, Anakin’s prowess on the battlefield creates hope for its citizens that victory is possible. 

Anakin also empathizes with the opinion that the seemingly outdated Jedi Code holds them back. In the Citadel Arc, Tarkin remarks that “the Jedi Code prevents [the Jedi] from going far enough to achieve victory.” Anakin actually agrees with this statement, replying that “[he’s] also found that [the Jedi] sometimes fall short of victory because of [their] methods” (Season 3, Episode 19). He shows a sense of allegiance not to the ancient ways of the Jedi, but to the newer, more modern ideals regarding military action. 

Anakin claims to have brought “peace, justice, freedom, and security” to his “new Empire.” While the Empire's interpretations of the aforementioned values are skewed, Anakin continues to represent them as Darth Vader. 

Anakin’s statement to Obi-Wan also mirrors Palpatine’s declaration to the Senate: “In order to ensure our security and continuing stability, the Republic will be reorganized into the first Galactic Empire, for a safe and secure society which I assure you will last for ten thousand years.” The people applaud this statement, demonstrating a general sense of exhaustion in regards to the war and a yearning for what this new Empire is promising them.

Lead astray/challenged by strong feelings

Though there are many, many examples of Anakin’s emotions getting the better of him, we’re simply going to list two:

Anakin’s fury and anguish after the death of his mom leads to his slaughter of the Tuskens

Anakin’s overwhelming fear of losing Padmé is ultimately what leads to his Fall.

Every tragic hero possesses what is called a hamartia, or a fatal flaw. This trait largely contributes to the hero’s catastrophic downfall. Anakin’s hamartia is his need for control, which partially manifests through his fear of loss. 

Let’s explore this idea in more detail. 

Though Anakin grows up as a slave, the movies neglect to explicitly cover the trauma left from his time in slavery. However, it is worth noting that slaves did not have the ability to make many choices for themselves; they didn’t even own their bodies. After being freed, Anakin is whisked away to become a Jedi. He does not possess much control over his life as Jedi, for he is simply told what path he is going to take. While Anakin does make this decision on his own, becoming a Jedi is a disciplined and somewhat-strict way of life and not one that allows for an abundance of reckless autonomy as he is wont to engage in. 

(Side note: I’m not here to argue about Qui-Gon’s decision-making abilities, nor do I wish to engage in discourse regarding the Jedi’s way of life. I am simply presenting and objectively stating these facts in relation to Anakin because they are pertinent to my point.) 

During AOTC, Anakin is unable to save his mother from death. As Shmi dies in his arms, Anakin is absolutely helpless. The situation is completely out of his control, and he is forced to contend with the reality that despite all of his power, he cannot control everything that happens. 

He also feels that he has a larger potential for power and is being held back by Obi-Wan: “although I'm a Padawan learner, in some ways... a lot of ways... I'm ahead of him. I'm ready for the trials. I know I am! He knows it too. He believes I'm too unpredictable… I know I started my training late... but he won't let me move on.” Anakin believes Obi-Wan, his teacher and mentor, is holding him back. He expresses a self-held conviction of his status and skills and does not trust the word of his superior. 

In ROTS, Anakin starts dreaming of Padmé’s death. Considering what occurred the last time he dreamt of a loved one’s demise, Anakin is justifiably (or at least justifiably from his point of view) worried. He consequently wants to stop these dreams from coming true in any way possible. His fear of death, especially that of his loved ones, represents his need for control over everything, even things that are uncontrollable. This overwhelming desire leads to Anakin’s drastic actions.

As Darth Vader, he no longer possesses such fears, for everyone that he loved is either dead or has betrayed him. He is the epitome of order and control, eliminating any who disturb this perceived equilibrium. 

However, this changes because of one person: Luke Skywalker. 

Luke reintroduces something that was (arguably) long-absent in Vader’s life, which is interpersonal attachment. Vader yearns for his son to join him by his side. When Luke refuses, Vader continues to attempt to seek him out. In ROTJ, Vader is forced to choose between the Emperor, a man he has long trusted and followed, and Luke, the son he never knew he had. Out of a desire to protect and keep what little family he has left (and likely a sense of “I couldn’t save Padmé but at least I can save her legacy by keeping her child(ren) alive and safe”), Vader defeats the Emperor and saves his son. Though his actions are definitionally heroic, Anakin never truly overcomes his hamartia. 

The Structure of a Tragedy

Classic Greek tragedies follow a specific story structure, which, according to the German playwright Gustav Freytag, is as follows:

We’re going to focus on the three aspects that best represent Anakin’s story as a tragedy: The peripeteia, the anagnorisis, and the catastrophe/denouement. These occur during and/or after the climax. 

The peripeteia is the climax/the turning point in the plot. Said change usually involves the protagonist's good luck and prosperity taking a turn for the worse. 

Within the tragedy we are discussing, the peripeteia occurs when Anakin chooses Sidious over Mace Windu and solidifies his allegiance to the Dark side, becoming the very thing he swore to destroy. It is at this point that things really start to go downhill. He kills children, chokes his wife, fights his best friend, gets his remaining limbs cut off, etc. 

The anagnorisis is the point in the tragedy when the protagonist recognizes their error, seeing the true nature of that which they were previously ignorant of, usually regarding their circumstances or a specific relationship (such as Oedipus’ realization that his wife was actually his mother). In most tragedies, the anagnorisis is in close proximity to the peripeteia. In Anakin’s story, the anagnorisis occurs during ROTJ. After being wounded in his fight against Luke, Vader watches as his son is brutally electrocuted by Sidious. It is at this moment that Darth Vader realizes that Luke was right—there is good in him, and he still has the chance to redeem himself. 

The catastrophe/denouement (since this is a tragedy, we’re going to go with “catastrophe”) is the end of the tragedy. Events and conflicts are resolved and brought to a close, and a new sort of “normality” is established. The catastrophe often provides a sense of catharsis (release of tension) for the viewer. The protagonist is worse off than they were at the beginning of the tragedy. 

The catastrophe within “The Tragedy of Darth Vader” transpires soon after the anagnorisis at the end of ROTJ. Though the realization of his capacity for good is the anagnorisis, the follow-through (via his actions), as well as what consequently occurs, is the catastrophe. As previously discussed, Vader saves Luke by killing the Emperor but does so at the cost of his own life. This serves as the resolution of the tragedy, for the hero’s fate has been confirmed—Darth Vader fulfills his destined role as the Chosen One and, in doing so, brings about his own redemption and dies as Anakin Skywalker.

In conclusion, the categorization of Star Wars as a tragedy is a choice that heavily influences Anakin, the protagonist and hero, of the story. He is without a doubt a tragic hero whose fatal flaw leads to his downfall. In accordance with Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, Anakin’s tragedy is constructed not by personal agency, but by the narrative itself.

Works Cited

“Darth Vader.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 15 Mar. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darth_Vader.

“Dramatic Structure.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 20 Feb. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_structure.

“Hero.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 19 Oct. 2016, www.britannica.com/art/hero-literary-and-cultural-figure.

Lucas, George, director. Star Wars: Episode III— Revenge of the Sith. Lucasfilm Ltd., 2005.

Lucas, George, director. Star Wars: Episode II— Attack of the Clones. Lucasfilm Ltd. , 2002.

Michnovetz, Matt. “Star Wars: The Clone Wars, ‘Counterattack.’” Season 3, episode 19, 4 Mar. 2011.

“Sophocles: the Purest Artist.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/art/tragedy-literature/Sophocles-the-purest-artist.

“Theory of Tragedy.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/art/tragedy-literature/Theory-of-tragedy.

“Tragic Hero.” Dictionary.com, Dictionary.com, www.dictionary.com/browse/tragic-hero. 

[wickwrites]

Burning as a Motif for Humanity in Violet Evergarden

I think, when watching Violet Evergarden, most of us picked up on fire as a motif for Violet’s trauma – the violence and destruction she witnessed in the war, and the violence and destruction she engendered with her own hands. I’m not going to go into this too much because it’s all pretty self-explanatory, if not trite, but here are some quick examples of fire as a motif for her trauma just to lay the groundwork for the rest of the essay:

In frame 1 (episode 8), Violet draws first blood on the battlefield, and the once contained fire from the felled soldiers’ lanterns spread quickly through the forest, a symbol for how one small act of violence can cascade into large scale destruction. In frame 2, Gilbert stares at the carnage in front of him, horrified. In frame 3, the major is shot, and all we get to see is a screen of flames. In frame 4 (episode 12), Merkulov stares into a fire as he schemes about re-kindling the war.

I want to follow this (well trodden) opinion up with a more encompassing statement. That is, fire, in Violet Evergarden, is not limited to representing the destructive power of violence and trauma. Instead, it is a motif for humanity itself – an embodiment of the full range of experiences and emotions that make us human.  

To show this, I’m going to start off at the beginning of Violet’s journey, focusing on how her disconnect (from herself as well as others) is illustrated in episode one. For instance, her initial struggle to move her now mechanical arms as she sits in her hospital bed in the opening sequence is an excellent embodiment of her dissociation from her own body and lack of agency. I want to, however, focus on two scenes that are particularly relevant for our discussion:

First, the scene where Violet spills tea on her hand:

And second, the scene where Hodgins insists that Violet is burning:

These scenes are similar: in both, someone asserts that Violet must be in pain, specifically due to burning, and in both, Violet rejects that statement. In the first, however, that burning is physical. And in the second, that burning is emotional. Regardless, Violet is so removed from her own body that she is incapable of feeling either. Her mechanical hand is therefore an embodiment of her inhumanity (ie. her “dollness” or “weapon-ness”). Like her, it is cold, mechanical, insensitive, without life or agency. After all, up until now, all she’s been doing is killing on command, without the ability to think for herself, experience her own pain, or sympathize with her victims’ pain.

When the screen shows that Hodgins is indeed correct, that Violet is literally on fire (frame 1), that fire is depicted with restraint. Flames engulfs Violet’s body, but those flames are from a streetlamp enclosed in glass. It is controlled and distant. This encapsulates Violet’s current state; she is literally on fire, but that fire is so compartmentalized and suppressed, and she is so far removed from her own experience, that she is incapable of feeling it.

In frame 2, we are viewing Violet in a flashback, from Hodgin’s point of view. Although we’re offered a close up shot of her bloodied hands, we see, about two cuts later, that Hodgin is actually observing Violet from afar (frame 2.5). This distance demonstrates that he cannot bring himself to reach out to her, something that Hodgin confesses he feels guilty about literally 5 seconds later. They were, at that point in time, and perhaps even now, unable to connect.

In frames 3 and 4, Hodgin is speaking again. We get this super far shot of Violet’s body. The camera is straight on, objective, and unfeeling. This unsympathetic framing has two functions. First, it distances us from Violet. Our inability to see the details on her face and her relatively neutral body language gives us, the audience, no real way inidication her thoughts. Second, it distances Violet from herself. As someone who experiences dissociative symptoms from PTSD, this is a very poignant way of framing what it feels like to be removed from your own experience. Hodgin’s line, “You’ll understand what I’m saying one day. And, for the first time, you’ll notice all your burn scars,” further drives home the sense that Violet is completely estranged from herself. It almost feels like we are looking at her, from her own detached point of view.

We’re going to move on now, but we’ll get back to these frames later in the analysis, so hold onto them.

Throughout Violet’s journey, fire comes up again and again. Specifically, it shows up in moments of emotional intimacy, connection, and healing. Let’s see what I mean by this:

I have here a collection of moments that all occur at the same narrative point in their respective mini-stories: the moment where one character reaches out to another, sympathizes with them, and literally pulls them of their darkness. For example, frame 1 (episode 3) shows Violet bringing a letter from Luculia to her brother. It expresses Luculia’s gratitude and love for him, and ultimately mends their relationship. In frame 2 (episode 4), Violet and Iris share a moment of emotional intimacy and connection, which is the beginning of Iris’ story’s resolution. In frame 3 (episode 9), Violet’s suicidal despondency is interrupted by the mailman, bringing her a heartwarming letter from all her friends. In frame 4 (episode 11), Violet comforts a dying solder by a fireplace.

It’s not that other modes of lighting do not exist – modern looking lamps show up repeatedly in the show. Even Iris’ rural family has them, so I can reasonably assume that, no, the above moments do not all coincidentally use lamps because that’s all there is in this universe; the usage of fire during moments of catharsis is deliberate, and establishes that fire can also bring hope, kindness, and love.

Now that we’ve explored the dual nature of fire as both destructive/constructive, painful/cathartic, let’s go onto the thesis of my essay. Why do I say that being on fire is to be human? Let’s go back to the scene where Hodgin tells Violet she’s on fire (episode 1, on the left), and compare it to the scene where Violet finally realizes that Hodgin was right and that she is on fire (episode 7, on the right):

In these sequences, there is a notable shift in framing and perspective. In frame 1b, we finally get to see Violet’s blood-stained hands from her point of view, as opposed to from Hodgin’s point of view in 1a. Violet becomes aware of her past as an actual agent choosing to kill, shown through the first-person point of view. Similarly, the medium, straight on shot of Violet looking down at her hands (frame 2a) is replaced with an intimate first-person, close-up view (frame 2b). In shots 3a and 3b, the difference in framing is most pronounced. In 3a, we get this straight on, long shot. In frame 3b, the camera’s detachment is replaced by a claustrophobic closeness. While this framing does an excellent job at conveying the panicked feeling of “everything crashing down all at once”, it also demonstrates Violet’s new-found awareness of herself. While before, the camera was used to alienate, now it is used to create a sense of painful awareness and intimacy.

These series of shots are the first in the entire show, I believe, of Violet's body from her own point of view. Their co-incidence with her awakening self-awareness characterizes the state of “being in one’s body” as a precondition to self-connection, or more specifically, to Violet’s understanding of herself as neither a weapon nor a doll, but as a human. Correspondingly, this pivotal moment serves as a catalyst for her subsequent emotional development. From this episode on towards the finale, we’re launched into a heart wrenching sequence of events: Violet’s desperate grieving for Gilbert’s apparent death, her attempted suicide driven by newfound grief, and most importantly, Violet receiving her first written letter, an act that is strongly representative of genuine human connection. Following these events, Violet’s emotional connection to both herself and others only continues to grow; during her two final jobs of the story, she breaks down crying in response to the suffering of her clients, demonstrating a level of compassion—if not empathy—that she seems to have never been able to tap into before.

At the same time, Violet acquires a new sense of agency, making plot-driving decisions that no longer require other characters’ validations. Most poignantly, in episode 12, she chooses to stay on the train to fight Merkulov, explicitly going against Dietfried’s order for her to leave. Her reason?

She doesn’t want anyone to die anymore.

And it’s this moment, for me, that consolidated her as a character with true agency. Up until now, all her major decisions have been framed in relation to Gilbert: she killed in the war because Gilbert ordered her to, and she became an Auto Memories Doll because she wanted to understand Gilbert’s enigmatic “I love you”. Now, however, her motivation is purely her own—she fights, simply because she doesn’t want anyone else to die. It’s a line implies an intimate knowledge of loss. It’s a sentiment motivated by compassion. It’s a raw and extraordinarily human thing to say.

When Violet embarks on her journey to decipher Gilbert’s love, she is devoid of many traits we consider inherent and possibly even unique to being human—suffering, compassion, altruism, love, agency, and the interplay between them. As an Auto Memories Doll, she learns to live, experiencing all these emotions she had never had the luxury to experience before, and we quickly realize that she cannot know what love is without simultaneously wrestling with her trauma. She learns that yes, sometimes the fire destroys and sometimes it burns, but sometimes it thaws too, and you cannot have one without the other. You cannot choose what the fire does to you; you cannot choose what you want to feel. Thus, to be on fire is to know the anguish of its destruction, but it is also, and more importantly, to know the catharsis of human connection, to be the warm flame that pulls someone else out of the dark, to be pulled out of the dark yourself. To be on fire is to be human.

[calamity-bean]

so... i finally saw Midsommar

Those who recall how much I did NOT enjoy Hereditary (even though I wanted to, I swear!) will be gratified / vindicated / indifferent to learn that I enjoyed Midsommar much, MUCH more, and like it better and better the more I digest it. Folk horror in general is much more up my alley in terms of themes and tropes and tone, I suppose, and I love / sympathize with / want to communally wail in empathy with Dani a lot. I’ve seen a lot of talk about the intense emotional catharsis of her character arc and how it is arguably a freeing, liberating experience for her and yet simultaneously subsumes her into the very cultish, very boundary-erasing community of Hårga, a community in which individual lives and experiences are very much secondary to the community as a whole. And I find all of that fascinating. But one thing I haven’t really seen touched on is how this same sort of loss of identity is expressed through the particular way this film handles not death itself — we don’t even see half the deaths — but the remains of the dead.

Something I think about a lot when it comes to horror in general is the idea of the human body as meat: not the flesh of a person but the meat of an animal, which is, after all, what we all are, and what we will all become, in the end. And many of us don’t like to think about that! We don’t like to think about dying, and we don’t like to think about what will happen to our bodies after we die, and we don’t like to think of ourselves as meat because meat is fallible, meat is ephemeral, meat is food — something that will inevitably be devoured and digested and broken down. Many (though not all) of us have tried to forestall this process, of course... Speaking particularly from my own modern Western/American perspective (a cultural perspective similar to what the outsiders in Midsommar bring with them to Hårga), we commonly treat our cadavers with cosmetics and preservatives to prolong the illusion of life; we handle our loved one’s remains (however they are disposed of) with reverence and respect, we fear and avoid corpses in general, and we regard mistreating a corpse as an insult and an act of violence irrespective of the corpse’s actual sentience or ability to feel pain. Even if we believe that the soul persists in some afterlife and/or that the body is but a shell, our actions tend to reflect a strongly held feeling that human remains are still, in some way, people rather than just objects.

And where Midsommar derives much of its horror, I think, is from its very stark denial of that mind-set. Not every horror film really engages with this idea of bodies as meat, in my opinion, not even the ones with corpses strewn over every frame... I’m struggling to articulate my point here and didn’t really mean to go on like this in the first place, but I think one doesn’t necessarily engage with this concept simply by reducing a character to blood and guts. In fact, I think the relative lack of blood in Midsommar contributes to this theme by virtue of not visually obscuring what happens to the characters’ flesh, particularly when it comes to the many lingering close-ups on the sacrifices of the attestupa. The presentation of their ruined faces is starkly clear, unartificial, unadorned, and unsentimental. The face, the part of the human body most associated with identity and personhood, reduced to a very clearly visible tangle of meat and bone. Other faces are flayed and passed around as masks; other bodies are used to feed the chickens, or buried in the garden in much the same way grain and meat were buried so that the May Queen could bless the crops and livestock. And in general, the way the camera presents these corpses to the audience is extremely... matter of fact. No jump scares, no spooky lighting or gushing blood. Just plain shots in plain daylight. Most of the time, the camera handles the corpses as casually and comfortably as the Hårga themselves do when they lug them about and prop them up as though there’s nothing disturbing about touching a bloated or mangled corpse. Why would there be? These are farm people, after all, accustomed to butchering livestock. The bodies they hoist from those wheelbarrows are just more meat.

And if that seems to fly in the fact of the fact that these corpses are part of a very holy ritual — and therefore would surely be imbued with a certain holiness themselves — I would argue that the Hårga regard those corpses as no more holy than the slab of livestock meat they buried with the grain. (And no less holy, either.) I would argue that their ancestral tree is far more holy and more of a person to them than the actual bodies that are burned to be scattered upon it. I would argue that the erasure of individual identity and the transformation of Human Person into Organic Object is, in fact, essential in a society and a ritual centered around ideas of growth and rebirth and harvest and being intimately connected to each other and to nature and regarding death, very unflinchingly, as the natural conclusion of one cycle and the beginning of another. Before the elders jump from the precipice, they are honored, they are regarded as individuals, they are loved. Before the volunteers are consumed by the fire, we see them embrace the members of their community in farewell. The people of Hårga truly care for each other, I really believe, and do not take lightly the sacrifice of their lives. They simply are not very sentimental about their flesh.

So the horror of this film, then — or part of the horror, at least — comes from this disconnect between Hårga’s very blase and matter-of-fact view of bodies as organic objects that grow, breed, reproduce, age, die, and then become food for other things (be they trees or chickens or flames), versus the outsiders’ view of bodies as intrinsic extensions of personhood (and thus horrific to violate or disrespect or kill). The audience (or at least most people I know) tend to be aligned with the outsiders’ perspective on this. The camera tends to be aligned with Hårga’s. And Dani, who starts out haunted by the corpse of her sister and all the grief and horror it represents, ultimately becomes complicit in the making of corpses via becoming something of a metaphorical corpse herself: her old life destroyed, her new life just on the cusp of beginning, her sense of self having been chewed up and devoured and digested into something new.

[villainever]

God, We're All Tired: Female Conflict in Killing Eve's Season One Finale

So I'm sure 1x08 has been analysed to death, but seeing as we're winding up to the end of Killing Eve's second season (sad face), I thought I'd jump in with a completely unsolicited reflection on the ultimate culmination of Villanelle and Eve's mutual obsession and pursuit. I'll kick off by saying that from the start, we knew this moment would be interesting, for a whole slew of reasons: Firstly, from the get-go, we were shown that Killing Eve was here to subvert and reconstruct; it's deeply oriented within its genre, but it's irreverent, and even what I would describe as a reclamation of spy-fi. Specifically, it's a female-led narrative taking ownership of a set of texts and tropes that have consistently objectified and excluded women by turns. From its inception, the psychological thriller genre has delighted in a) withholding women's agency, and killing/torturing/assaulting them, both to shock viewers and to lend pathos to the motivations of male characters, and b) revelling in their "expiration" from sexual desirability, and casting the "ailing crone" as the villain orchestrating events. Killing Eve has absolutely no interest in ever reducing its women to their component parts. There are no pedestals, and there are no pitchforks. As a show, it hits all the golden points of suspense television, and completely reimagines the rest; it's a masterpiece balacing act of keeping the classic cat-and-mouse recogniseable, while allowing Eve and Villanelle to each be both the predator and the prey.

Secondly, our two protagonists are women. Highly unusual and exceptional women -- that's inarguable -- but nevertheless, they've been socialised in particular ways. What's so fascinating here is that both have been injected with a comfort in and enjoyment of theatrical violence that's usually reserved for male villains. However, even at their most ruthless, there's an innate intimacy to both of them -- unlike, say, for example, the Joker, Villanelle's flamboyance and love affair with destruction never manifest as mass-killings or the eradication of infrastructure (like blowing up a hospital). Villanelle exacts each murder with the creativity of the truly engaged and passionate, but it's always personal and unique, usually one-on-one. She doesn't have a vendetta against the world, either; she finds beauty in it -- in ice-cream and movies and nice architecture or fun clothes. Similarly, Eve is enthralled by Villanelle's flair for the deadly and the dramatic, but it's not born out of a spite for humanity, but a sense of artistry and a consuming need for some adrenaline in her otherwise numb and mundane life. These complexities muddle their emotions and motivations, and make it difficult for even the most television-literate to semi-accurately predict their storylines.

Thirdly, Eve and Villanelle are never positioned as diametrically opposed. This in itself is not exactly out of the left field -- a lot of media with a dark focal point or mature subjects introduce heroes and villains who share key traits (e.g. Sherlock and Irene, in CBS's Elementary), or even comparable goals (e.g. Black Panther's Killmonger and Nadia both want to open Wakanda's borders). In most cases, though, the antagonist will represent some kind of seduction to the 'other side', that the protagonist inevitably resists the allure of (e.g. Andy realising Miranda isn't who she wants to grow up to be -- successful but alienated -- and goes back to her excuse of a boyfriend in TDWP). But while Eve and Villanelle are very much established as one another's temptations, we also see that they'll grant the other access to a part of the world that is, for now, barred from them: Villanelle and Eve will stop each other from being bored. They "resist the allure" not because they fear moral wrongdoing, but because they cling to their respective images of themselves -- Eve, as someone "nice and normal", who happens to have a grey area for a hobby, and Villanelle, as someone independent, in control, with no lines she wouldn't cross. Way back in the pilot, we're shown that they don't actually WANT to destroy each other. Villanelle is too interesting to Eve, Eve is too attractive to Villanelle. Yes, they pose a significant threat to their respective lifestyles, but as we've had proven, they're becoming willing to risk that if it means gaining something more. They don't reflect a sinister alternative timeline of "look what you could've been" (which is inherently hero-centric, and Killing Eve pays as much attention to Villanelle as Eve), they offer each other a "look what you could still be", that is at once dark and hopeful -- something that they've really elaborated on in this second season. But 1x08, even though it is very much the symbolic collision that is the centrepiece of all chase stories, is not their first meeting. Villanelle goes to Eve's house in the (iconic) 1x05. So why not save that for the finale? Why not build and build and have that tension released right at the end? Because, crucially, 1x05 generated more tension. The show's writing is so substantial that it doesn't worry about losing its audience after the moment they've been waiting for happens. It's one of the reasons you could have the entire plot of Killing Eve spoiled, and then still enjoy every episode when you watch it yourself: it's the How that we love as much as the What. Killing Eve takes the time and space to revel in its style, characters, and setting -- but that's another essay. In 1x05, their meeting is high-octane, and crucially, it's brief. We get a snapshot of how their infatuation and fixation translates into chemistry. And they both become real to one another. Eve's last reservations begin to fade as she realises that she can survive an encounter with Villanelle, and her sense of self -- most importantly, the subconscious idea that she's somehow special -- is vindicated (Eve's slight narcissism, and how the show makes it compelling and intoxicating, is yet another thing I could go on about). For Villanelle, Eve is allowed to be more than just great hair and a worthy threat. She's someone challenging and entertaining. What's so incredible about that first meeting is that it's proof that this dynamic isn't running on mystery and fumes. It's sustainable. They continue to appeal to one another once they're in the same room together. They appeal even more. Their sexual tension skyrockets, and the whole dance becomes extremely personal. They can't write one another off as playthings, although they largely continue to attempt that, at least for a short while. With this in mind, let's move on to that finale. Not only is Eve trashing Villanelle's apartment hilarious, and a perfect articulation of the humour/danger cantilever that makes Killing Eve awesome, but it provides a critical catharsis for the audience before the actual confrontation. By this point, the price for Eve's obsession is starting to rack up -- her job is circling the drain, Niko's dodging her calls, her self-image is blurring. Eve has a whole lot of feelings, but she's allowed to express them on her own, symbolically taking them out on Villanelle by ruining her things, which become a vehicle for venting her frustrations without actually affecting their relationship. When Villanelle does arrive, Eve's ready. This scene would've worked if it was some sexy wall-leaning, banter, and Eve surprise-stabbing Villanelle in the middle of a conversation. I think that's probably how a lot of screenwriters today would've done it, scrawling it off by rote and relying on Villaneve's chemistry and Comer and Oh's excellent acting to nail the bit. Instead, we get this civil conversation, and then they lie down together, first relaxing, and then gravitating towards one another. I don't believe that Eve knew until the millisecond she decided to do it that she would actually try and stab Villanelle. I actually gave this mini-essay a title, and it's "female conflict". That's because I think that this entire sequence wouldn't have happened in a show created by men, or featuring male characters. In violent shows, we get violent conflict. Killing Eve is unquestionably a violent show, but it's distinct from its contemporaries in that the characters aren't there to prop up the violence; the violence is there to reveal and develop the characters. But after a whole season of elaborate murder and tyre-squealing pursuit, we get this stillness. Yet, it doesn't feel for even a beat like bathos. It's absolutely a climax, and it's both suspenseful and arresting. It really illustrates that the show is about fascination: they're hungry to know everything, like Eve says. There's no performative combat. We can't guess what's going to happen because neither can they. Their obsession isn't a "this town ain’t big enough for the both of us" situation. It's a "this town is only the both of us". Their worlds are reduced to each other and they don't want to squander it with fighting, because fundamentally, Eve and Villanelle are so much more similar than they are different. Again, I say this is so fitting for female characters because they see this co-existence as an option. It's so simple, but the idea of your protagonist and antagonist sighing, "Fuck, can't we just have a lie down after all this?" and making it satisfying is incredibly radical. Because it's so personal, and intimate, and human. At every interval, the writing asks, What would we actually do at this moment? Not, What precedent has popular culture set for this moment? Too often, I think we give characters responses that we've seen before in texts, because we watched/read it, accepted it, and just filed it into our own work, knowing it's what the audience expects. But this scene with Eve and Villanelle is so heart-wrenchingly in-character. It's two people charging at each other full speed, not to hit each other but to be close to one another. And like so many other tiny beats over the course of the season, Killing Eve luxuriates in this proximity. We get to breathe. It's gentle. It's a gentle pause between two people who could utterly eradicate one another, but choose not to. It's ladden as well with such a specific but familiar kind of exhaustion, and it's an act of defiance, too. Killing Eve rejects the hegemonic (and predominantly masculine) cultural assertion that conflict (or even sometimes, in the less typical texts, debate and negotiation) is the way to resolve difference, and indeed, that difference must be resolved. That one must overpower the other. That your enemy is an alien and cannot be connected with, related to. The fact is, a lot of even this first season isn't spent chasing, it's spent running. Eve and Villanelle take an interest in each other early on, and it quickly escalates from intellectual to sexual to emotional (insofar as either of them are capable of that). By 1x05, they've caught up to each other. The rest of the time, though, they're fleeing from how much they want each other, how alike they might be. And in Villanelle's Paris apartment, they concede: I love you more than I hate you. I need you more than I should. And it's with that concession that we as an audience can experience their relaxation, too. It's what we've -- consciously or not -- been waiting for. That acknowledgement. But Margot, you say, you've been talking about how this isn't about violence -- have your forgotten that Eve STABS Villanelle, literally three seconds after this? I have not, The Only Follower Who Read This Far. So why engineer all this, and then have Eve knife Villanelle straight in the gut? Because even though they have this liminal second together, their story isn't resolved. Killing Eve goes absolutely wild with power dynamics, and I could discuss that for hours, too -- Eve is older, but Villanelle is more experienced; Eve is more stable, but Villanelle is more adaptable, etc. But generally speaking -- partially because Eve is, at the beginning, something of an audience surrogate -- the scales are in Villanelle's favour. She's dangerous, clever, has no fear of legal consequences, and has more freedom and greater resources. Killing Eve is allergic to any pedestrian predictability, so it shakes up this arrangement. In stabbing Villanelle, Eve proves to both of them what she's capable of. Prior to this, they had an impression of their similarities, but this throws into sharp relief exactly how deep those run. Eve immediately regrets the stabbing, because it wasn't about getting rid of Villanelle. She doesn't want to hurt her so much as show her that Eve has power too, has recklessness too, can keep up. This interaction isn't the product of an inability to relate, but a desperation to connect. This joins them together, affirms their relationship. Eve isn't trying to dominate her, to win, not really. She's telling Villanelle what she's capable of, and equating them. We get this confirmed in how Villanelle perceives in the stab wound as a symbol of affection (2x02, 2x05), and how Eve says she continues to think about it constantly (2x05). I believe that while Villanelle always respected Eve, if Eve hadn't stabbed her, Villanelle would've remained confident that she, quietly, had the upper hand. That if ever need be, she could be more cunning and cruel and decisive than Eve. But Eve's put them in the same ring, and also removed one major wall between them -- Villanelle's murderous side is a key part of her character, and after this, she knows that Eve isn't intruiged by her despite this, but because of it, and because it’s at least partially common ground. Eve isn't Anna (another comparison I could go off on a tangent about, but I'll spare you). In sum, I think that the season one finale was beautifully rendered, and reflected Killing Eve's appreciation of itself. It let the characters interact genuinely, it refreshed their dynamic, and allowed them development separately (Eve's new understanding of her own capacity for harm; Villanelle's new experience with vulnerability, and not being able to predict others) and together (intertwining them irrevocably, further aligning them). It's one of those rare scenes where it's completely surprising at the time of viewing, but in hindsight, seems inevitable, and you can't imagine it any different. I can't make any predictions for the season two final episode other than I expect something equally unexpected, something just as loyal to the characters and their relationship, and their capacity to embrace and antagonise each other. This essay is probably borderline incoherent. It really got away from me. I set a timer for half an hour and told myself that whatever I got written in that time, I'd post. Thanks so much for your kind comments on my rant yesterday, and I hope this is at least vaguely what you were looking for, @ the people who said they'd read another. You're my favs. If you've got something else Killing Eve-related you'd like me to yell about, let me know! Or if you want to come chat, I promise I'm friendly! I’m using the tag “#villainever writes” for this rambly stuff atm, so if I ever write another of these I’ll have a digital drawer to put it in hahah

[popwasabi]

How some stoners named “Harold & Kumar” made Asian Americans proud

Being Asian American can make you feel invisible at times or worst, the butt of every bad joke.

Sure, lots of Americans love Asian things like sushi, kung fu, anime, and tacky calligraphy tattoos that don’t mean what they say they mean but they don’t particularly care about having the people themselves present or even represented.

And typically when we are represented it tends to look like this.

Or this.

Or this.

(I said what I SAID!)

Now Asian Americans are not by any stretch the most marginalized or even the least represented people in the larger American cultural diaspora, but they’re fairly consistently forgotten or grossly stereotyped in our media regardless and this has larger consequences. Representation is important because it makes a people’s presence known to the larger majority.

Our pop culture has unfortunately played a role in erasing, appropriating, and misrepresenting Asian folk. An action movie may feature a white actor with extreme martial arts skills fighting in Hong Kong but might not have a single prominent Asian voice throughout the plot and those that do are typically gross caricatures. The Cyberpunk genre loves Asian aesthetics from its Tokyo inspired neon lighting, futurist cityscape, and ramen carts abound but boy, is the populace typically dominantly white.

(I love this movie but considering how many Asian things and aesthetic choices there are in it would it have killed Denis Villeneuve to have at least ONE background Asian person??)

It’s not shocking then that 2004’s stoner comedy classic “Harold & Kumar” starts with a pair of white dudes beginning their own adventure by leaving one of the titular heroes in the dust to do their dirty work because “Asians love math” or something. Despite not being a stoner, at the time at least, I related hard to this movie and its characters as the film touched on a number of triggers I had growing up.

2004 was a formative year for me as an Asian American. For the first time ever, my history classes were touching on Asian culture with discussions on Japanese feudalism which awakened a deep sense of pride I didn’t know I had at the time. I was watching NHK samurai dramas about Miyamoto Musashi and later the Shinsengumi which led to me begin training in kendo. Anime had suddenly become more mainstream with the premiere of Shonen Jump and pirated subtitled anime littering all of YouTube. But more importantly, and distressingly, I became more aware of my identity because it was increasingly getting called out as I was getting older.

I’ve been labeled a number of different pejoratives growing up through my teens.

“Nerd.”

“Weirdo.”

“Loser”

But none cut deeper than “Chinese boy.”

I’m not Chinese, of course, in fact I’m half white and half Japanese but try telling the various ignorant lunkheads I knew growing up to respect and differentiate between them all. Hell, better yet tell them I’m just as American as they are too.

Being labeled “Chinese” hit a very personal chord with me. To lots of Americans, unfortunately, we’re all “Chinese” and the various qualities that make each of our cultures unique are inconsequential to them. We AAPI’s all individually take a measure of pride in those unique qualities and to have it all sequestered under a blanket “Chinese” label was beyond insulting.

(And I don’t care what you tell me or how much you hate China’s government, this is a THOUSAND percent a dog whistle.)

For Asian Americans, there have been various ways one reacts to these insults. Some of course, who learned confidence at a younger age, would shrug it off or ignore it, some would outright resent it but for me at least it only made me dig my heels in deeper. Yeah, I’m Asian, so fuck you!

That energy is deep “Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle” as these two Asian American characters not only navigate a crazy night of searching for an open White Castle to satisfy their stoner cravings but also confront various microaggressions from outside and within the Asian community.

Harold, of course, struggles with his confidence. He can’t stand up for himself when the aforementioned two white bros from the start of the film saddle him with extra work. He laments doing the typical Asian thing of being too passive when confronted by authority. He can’t find the will to ask the girl next door out because again he sees himself as an impotent Asian guy unwilling to make the first move. The whole movie he struggles with his inner feelings because he’s been taught and programmed to a certain extent to be timid because that’s the Asian identity.

Meanwhile, Kumar’s character is about resisting conformity to those same stereotypes but in the worst ways. He co-opts black and hip-hop culture as seen in his messy apartment room. He fights his dad who is forcing him to take his doctor's exam, something he doesn’t want. Generational pressure is common in all cultures but it’s an entirely different animal when it comes to the Asian upbringing. Kumar embodies this resist from beginning to the end of the film and though he does decide to take the test, it’s important that he chooses to do it, not his dad, and certainly not because he’s Indian. He decides that choosing to be a great doctor doesn’t mean he is becoming a stereotype because his identity is not just about being Asian.

(Every Asian kid has heard their parent make an unintentional innuendo.)

Harold and Kumar’s differing approaches create a charming pair for the film to bounce off as Kumar’s brashness often lands them in trouble and Harold’s timid demure keeps them down in its own way and the two finally come together when Kumar learns to understand the difference between conformity and choice and Harold learns conformity doesn’t define him.

Both characters confront all kinds of microaggressions against their identity throughout the film. Cops making fun of their names. The extreme sports bros making every racist joke every Asian kid has every heard growing up at them. All Asian Americans have grown up wanting to deliver the perfect comeback or “fuck you” moment against these types of people and when our heroes triumph and put them all in their place there is undeniable catharsis as it happens for everyone who has seen this movie.

(Seriously, there isn’t a more satisfying good triumphing over evil moment in film for me than the conclusion of this particular plot.)

The movie confronts stereotypes in more ways than one though. Throughout the movie Harold and Kumar are confronted by a situation that makes them think it’ll go one direction but ends up (usually comedically) the opposite. Harold and Kumar try to hook up with two beautiful transfer students who turn out to have horrible bowel issues. Harold is reluctant to go to the Asian American club party because even he believes in his own ethnic stereotypes of them but it turns out it’s a banger of a party with plenty of weed to boot. Harold and Kumar are picked up by a lonesome, disfigured tow truck driver and are shocked to find he’s married to a beautiful woman. And the aforementioned extreme sports bros turn out to love cheesy pop music and romantic songs.

Basically, the whole movie is about giving a big middle finger to all our preconceived notions we have about identity and it's brilliant.

(Nothing wrong with cheesy pop music, of course.)

“Harold & Kumar” is great for other reasons too. John Cho and Kal Penn still play greatly off each other. There’s plenty of great one-liners sprinkled between each scene. The entire journey to find White Castle burgers in the middle of the night is a fairly genius premise for a stoner comedy still. And Neil Patrick Harris playing “himself” is still iconic.

Parts of the movie haven’t aged, well of course. There’s some bad gross-out humor, some lazy gay panic jokes and not to mention some sexist quips that don’t land well in 2020. Also, let’s just not talk about the sequels.

(I still find this scene amusing though.)

That said, “Harold & Kumar’s” first film in this munchie saga is not only a grade-A stoner flick but simply one of the best films ever when it comes to bringing that much needed representation of the time to Asian Americans. Watching Harold & Kumar stick it to their annoying white antagonists while delivering a “fuck you” to every racist joke I ever heard growing up is still cathartic as hell and made me feel proud to be Asian American during a turbulent time for myself growing up.

Though it’s not Masterpiece Theater by any stretch, Harold & Kumar will always hold a special place in my heart and remains forever “high” on my list of favorite movies of all-time.

Happy 4/20, y’all!

[jcmorgenstern]

u should answer the questions for the letters: c r i s p y. no real reason for those letters, in that order. obviously

henlo friend and thank you!!! I had a lot of fun with these and also did not shut up.

C: What member do you identify with most?

Oh man. That’s actually really hard? Obviously I’ve done a fair bit of ego-involvement with the crispy boy (no really??) but overall in terms of personality I’d say I identify most with Maia, show!Jace, or Simon.

Maia has had a lot of shit happen but she’s incredible in how much she keeps working towards her dreams and supporting the people she cares about. As much as she knows and has learned to value and protect herself, she’s ferociously protective of her loved ones. She also has a fair bit of ambition, a strong sense of morality and justice, and feeling of responsibility--towards the pack, and for herself. I do see a bit of myself in her but more than anything I aspire to be more like her.

Show!Jace I relate to a lot mostly because I’ve projected on him so much (lol) but I really get a deep sense of struggling with himself and being closeted. He’s kind of depressed and sad and who can’t relate to that? But underlying all that he has a deep and almost desperate need for human connection and also he has daddy issues, so like, worm.

Simon is a giddy nerd who has a lot of weird shit happen to him and more than anything I think he’s just kind of...the everyman in terms of pop culture references etc. But he also has a heart of gold and loves like a golden retriever and who doesn’t want to be that?

To be honest I don’t really know why I latched onto Jonathan so much, other than the obvious daddy issues thing. Maybe it’s the frustrated sense of longing for belonging and connection, or the deep feeling of self-hatred or the profound desire to be better or different than he is. I think there are a lot of things Jonathan’s demon blood could represent that are a lot less esoteric or boring than “pure evil.” Also I just love tragic, powerful dumb bitches so yknow.

R: Are there any writers (fanfic or otherwise) you consider an influence?

Man I was literally JUST thinking about how much I’ve taken from JKR as a writer, not even on purpose but just in...she was the first writer whose work I truly soaked in daily for years and years, it’s not surprising I see her voice or her humor or her narrative/structural quirks coming out in my own writing.

I: Do you have a guilty pleasure in fic (reading or writing)?

Oh god, do I. I would say unhealthy power dynamics are both my catnip and kryptonite. I was actually just thinking about this too--I think the attraction for me is the catharsis of “controlled horror.” Abusive or coercive relationships in real life do literally terrify me, but I find them just short of fascinating in fiction. It’s like fiction allows me to experience and access and interact with that fear in controlled doses (like watching horror movies does for horror buffs), and that catharsis somehow translates as weirdly alluring.

S: Any fandom tropes you can’t resist?

I already answered this but I’d say the above paragraph expresses it better.

P: Are you what George R. R. Martin would call an “architect” or a “gardener”? (How much do you plan in advance, versus letting the story unfold as you go?)

I’m very much an obsessive planner, but weirdly neurotic about needing to be able to spin off whims or ideas as I go. I think having a sense of structure is essential, but allowing yourself the flexibility to look at the events you’ve planned or your ideas in new and creative ways is necessary to have anything new or spontaneous.

The backbone of the idea or plot usually comes to me as a whole, but I believe very strongly you need to allow yourself to innovate and spin off those ideas as the organic connections made as you write grow and mutuate the structure.

so like, both. also fuck grrm

Y: A character you want to protect.

Maia Roberts, Izzy Lightwood, Clary Fray, Luke Garroway, Aline Penhallow, Sebastian Verlac and Victor Aldertree.

Unprotect JCM at all costs. (but also protect him)

[theonyxpath]

Eric here. Today, I’m posting a fair chunk of the current Conviction and Loyalty section of Deviant. If conspiracies drive the actions of the entire cohort, Conviction and Loyalty Touchstones provide specific motivation to each individual Remade. Ready? Here we go:

Divergence damages the part of the Remade’s soul that once guided her senses of self and identity, replacing Virtue and Vice with the twin Anchors of Loyalty and Conviction. She defines herself by her interactions with others — specifically those actions driven by love and hate and directed toward a specific person, group, cause, or location.

A Remade’s Conviction can run white hot or blisteringly cold. It compels the transformed to do what needs to be done, often forcing her to make hard choices in the pursuit of her designated enemies. It dictates her need to confront anyone who would keep her from pursuing her goals. Conviction is the churning, seething anger that always lurks at the edges of her emotions. It is what makes a Renegade fight, what gives her the courage to escape, and what pushes her to determine her own fate. Conviction serves as a source of Willpower based on her actions.

Where anger and hate guide Conviction, Loyalty represents the Remade’s ties to those she cares about deeply and strives to protect — both from herself and from the sinister forces she tangles with. These are those few people who have stood by her since her Divergence, who accepted her how she was before and how she is now. They’re the friends and family who refuse to be scared off even when she insists they ought to run, that it’s for their own good. They’re also the new friends she’s made since everything changed. It’s hard for a Deviant to maintain relationships, but these ones approach the sacred for her. She’ll do anything it takes to protect the people who have earned her trust to this degree. Loyalty restores the Broken’s Willpower when she acts to uphold it.

Touchstones

Touchstones invoke strong feelings of hate or love in the Remade, anchoring her to her remaining humanity. Acting for or against a Touchstone helps the Deviant keep her Instabilities from growing worse, while falling short of these obligations shakes her confidence and can trigger disastrous complications.

Whether Conviction or Loyalty, most Touchstones are individual people. Some Broken forge ties with an object, place, or organization, but these are always concrete and localized – something that can be threatened or destroyed by a single actor in a single time and place, whether with a gun or an explosive.

A Deviant hates her Conviction Touchstones with a limitless rage. She recalls them with a passion so deep it always seethes just beneath the surface, ready to boil over. Most are members of the conspiracy that stalks her or created her: her Progenitor, the school administrator who nominated her for the experimental program, the lab tech who injected her with the serum, or the old roommate who invited her along to participate in an obscure ritual. She might even wish to see the lab where she was experimented on destroyed, or the ritual altar smashed Others have earned her enmity in other ways, such as by threatening a Loyalty Touchstone, standing in the way of the Remade’s revenge, or inconveniencing her in other ways: the police officer who keeps hauling her in for questioning, or the neighborhood gang that’s always making trouble for the cohort and their allies.

If causing a Conviction Touchstone to suffer is satisfying, killing one outright offers a moment of catharsis. However, resolving a Conviction Touchstone by destroying it does not extinguish the yawning chasm of the Deviant’s need to protect or exact vengeance. The Remade who destroys one Conviction Touchstone almost always replaces it with another as soon as possible – or with a Loyalty Touchstone.

The focus of a Loyalty Touchstone is often someone the Deviant knew before her Divergence. This may be an old friend or lover, a partner in crime, or even a former enemy whose past sins now pale in comparison to what her Progenitor did to her. Some Touchstones form after the Renegade goes through her ordeal: the lab assistant who helped her escape, or the member of her cohort who bears an uncanny resemblance to her little sister. They are people who remind her that even though being Remade took away a piece of her humanity, it didn’t take all of it. They show the transformed kindness even when — especially when — she’s incapable of showing it to herself, and they have her back even if they don’t always agree with her choices.

Loyalty Touchstones are the source of both comfort and concern for the Deviant. The Touchstone is the person he goes to when he’s troubled, but that means if his enemies are watching, and he’s not careful enough, he’s putting his friend in the conspiracy’s crosshairs. Ruthless conspirators often threaten to harm the Touchstone, following her to work, watching her children on the playground. They make her life difficult, sometimes using bureaucratic frustrations to mask their involvement. Police show up on her doorstep, following up on a tip that she’s harboring the fugitive Renegade. Child services pays a visit based on an anonymous call from a concerned party. Some conspirators contact the Touchstone directly, attempting to turn her against the Remade or suggesting they can protect her from him if he grows violent. They try their best to sow seeds of doubt between them.

Upsetting the Broken’s loved ones is a combination of a taunt and a threat. The conspiracy wants the Renegade to know they’re watching, to know they’re keeping tabs on where he goes and who he values. Anything they can do to throw their target off-balance is just fine by the conspiracy. In extreme cases, the Deviant’s enemies kidnap his Touchstones or put them in physical danger. While this can draw the Remade out of hiding or make him come to the table and negotiate, it also serves to fuel his hate and determination against the conspirators involved. Overtly threatening a Touchstone can backfire — a Touchstone is much less likely to be off the grid, and therefore will be missed by other people in her life if she suddenly stops showing up for work or her children don’t come to school. Conspirators usually deploy these extreme tactics sparingly, and only when they’re certain they can minimize the fallout.

Systems

Starting Renegade characters begin with at least three dots in Conviction and one in Loyalty, which Origin then modifies (see Chapter One). The sum of Loyalty and Conviction is never more than five. Each dot has one associated Touchstone, a character toward whom the Renegade feels a particularly strong hatred or protectiveness.

After a scene in which the Renegade makes progress toward one of her Conviction Touchstones, she gains one Willpower and takes a Beat. Once per session, when she risks danger or suffers for her Loyalty Touchstone, she regains all Willpower.

If a Touchstone is destroyed or killed, or when a Touchstone falls to Wavering, the Broken’s Loyalty or Conviction falls by one (depending on which Trait the Touchstone was attached to). If both Loyalty and Conviction reach 0, the Deviant goes Feral (p. XX).

Once per chapter, the Remade may declare a new Touchstone to fill an open Touchstone slot. This Touchstone begins at Wavering, and therefore doesn’t increase the character’s Loyalty or Conviction, unless it is successfully affirmed (p. XX).

A Touchstone may switch from Loyalty to Conviction (or vice versa) without Wavering first, as long as the Touchstone itself remains the same. When the Broken’s best friend betrays her, for example, her rage is so instantaneous she doesn’t pause to consider why her friend might have done such a thing.

Abandoning an existing Touchstone and replacing it with a new one is a two-step process. First, the Remade must cut ties with the old Touchstone, therefore losing a point of Loyalty or Conviction. This counts the same as his declaring a new Touchstone action for the chapter. Once the next chapter begins, he may name his new Touchstone, which begins at Wavering.

Acting counter to his Touchstone — failing to pursue the subject of a Conviction Touchstone or abandoning a Loyalty Touchstone in a time of need — means the Renegade has Faltered. The player rolls his current trait rating as a dice pool to determine the severity of the damage to the relationship:

Roll Results

Success: The character believes he made the right choice. Both trait and Touchstone remain in place.

Exceptional Success: The character heals a minor Instability.

Failure: Remove a dot of the trait. The Touchstone remains in place but becomes Wavering.

Dramatic Failure: The character loses both a dot in the trait and the Touchstone and suffers a medium Instability.

When a character acts against a Wavering Touchstone, he rolls his current trait as above, but on a failed roll, the Touchstone is lost, in addition to the dot.

The Renegade can also attempt to affirm a Wavering Touchstone, strengthening his friendship or rekindling his hatred for a conspirator. When he acts in support of a Wavering Touchstone, he rolls the trait (Conviction or Loyalty) as a dice pool.

Roll Results

Success: The character has gone above and beyond for his friend, or done a job that reminded him just how deeply his hatred toward his enemy burns. The Touchstone is no longer Wavering, and the Renegade gains a dot in that trait.

Exceptional Success: In affirming his dedication to the Touchstone, the character discovers a new reservoir of rage or devotion within himself. The character successfully affirms the Touchstone as above. In addition, if the character has an open Touchstone slot, he may immediately assign a new Touchstone, even if he has already done so during the current chapter. This new Touchstone is initially Wavering, as normal.

Failure: Nothing changes. The character has done the bare minimum his friend expects a decent person to do, or has chased down a lead against his enemy without any tangible results. The character does not regain the dot in the trait, and the Touchstone remains Wavering.

Dramatic Failure: The character finds he cannot rekindle his love or hate of the Touchstone. The character loses the Wavering Touchstone.

Sometimes the Renegade is caught between pursuing a Conviction Touchstone and aiding a Loyalty one. He gains the benefits for the one he follows, and rolls Faltering for the one he failed.

[clawfootpress]

Dear Mr. Met:

The other day I was riding my bike and I blew right through a stop sign. Didn’t even slow down. Didn’t even see it. I blame the Mets, partly. I was listening to a Mets game on my phone and they were winning but the Orioles had the bases loaded in the eighth and I was getting nervous. It was only my second day as a dog walker, so the part of my brain that wasn’t worried about the Mets was worried that I’d left a dog outside or a door unlocked or maybe the owners thought my notes were weird and they didn’t want me walking their dog again. With my brain full of such thoughts and feelings, I blew right through the stop sign.

  I don’t mean I saw the stop sign, slowed down, looked both ways, and rolled on through without coming to a full stop. I do that all the time. No, I’m talking about blowing right through it, not even knowing it was there.

  I don’t normally listen to my phone when I’m out biking, running, or walking. I don’t like things in my ears, for one, and I genuinely like hearing the sounds of the city. I thought I might be okay listening to the game since I wasn’t wearing ear buds. I had the phone mounted on my handlebars, the volume turned all the way up. It worked right up until the bases were loaded and I got nervous and blew right through the stop sign.

  A guy in a truck honked at me and called me an asshole. It could have been worse, he could have also been distracted, maybe also by the Mets. Who knows? It’s a big city in a big world. Maybe it was his second to last day on the job. Maybe it had been too many days since his last day on the job. Maybe his daughter was in the hospital. Maybe his daughter wasn’t talking to him. Maybe his daughter finally called him that morning after twenty-eight years. Maybe his boyfriend broke up with him. The multiplicity of possibilities boggles the mind.

  The point is, the guy could have also been distracted and blown right through the stop sign and then I really would have been in a jackpot. I still didn’t like being called an asshole, though, so I hit my brakes and turned around.

  Oh, he said, yeah?

 Yeah, I said, and rode right back at him.

  *

  You know how there’s this idea that if we put energy out into the world our desires can manifest? I believe that to be true. I’m not sure exactly how it works, I just know it works because I’ve seen it work. Rather, I’ve seen the inverse work. The energy I put out disintegrates the objects of my desire, which Buddhists say is good, I think, but I don’t know. I find it to be frustrating more than anything.

  It makes sense when you think about it. If there is a law of attraction, then there has to be a law of repulsion. No light without dark. No day without night. No hot without cold. No pleasure without pain. No sweet without salty. No joy without sorrow. No life without death. No attraction without repulsion. Imagine someone out there setting an intention for something. As the thing is moving toward them, it has to be moving away from someone else. In order for them to attract, someone else must repel. That’s physics.

  Even the great Jacob deGrom is not immune. In a game against the Rockies, he struck out nine batters in a row. Ten, as you know, is the record, held by the greatest Met of all, The Franchise, Tom Seaver. deGrom looked untouchable. He looked inevitable. I got excited. I texted my friends. The next batter got a hit.

  *

  Boy, was the guy in the truck mad. Understandably. I broke the law and put myself and others in danger, including him. He honked and yelled at me, which was freedom of expression at its finest. I stopped and turned back toward him and rode right back at him. I did that because he called me an asshole. I was wrong to blow through the stop sign, but I’m too proud to let someone call me an asshole.

  God and Ben Franklin gave that man every right to shoot me dead in the street (Freedom of Worship), but he didn’t shoot me, even though I charged at him like a wild beast.

 Instead of shooting me, he said, Oh, yeah?

 Instead of apologizing, I said, Yeah. You don’t get to call me names.

I said this because I’m a man and deserve to be treated as such, even when I fuck up. I dared to look the man in the pickup truck in the eye and demand he treat me with basic dignity. To which he responded, You’re right. I was wrong about that.

*

  Organized religion is dying but religiosity is alive and well. Prayers of Confession are all the rage.

  Everybody wants confession, everybody wants some cathartic narrative for it. The guilty especially. I’m watching True Detective, Season One.

  Look: Ellie Kemper should not have been in that Veiled Prophet debutant ball mostly because debutant balls are dumb, but raking her over the Twitter-coals until she apologized did nothing good. She was nineteen. At nineteen she was just as much a Victim of the Patriarchy as a Perpetrator of White Supremacy, but the crowd demanded atonement. Atonement for what? For being born into and participating in the life of a particular place with particular people at a particular time?

  Maybe you never had to navigate growing up with racists. Maybe you never had to navigate the complexity of loving racists. Or being loved by racists. Maybe you never had to do the emotional labor of depending on racists to drive you to the hospital. Of knowing racists are more than their racism. Knowing they are capable of great acts of love, which make them beautifully human, but makes their racism more stark, more deliberate, more sinful, awful, frustrating, heartbreaking. Of having to choose as a child, then as an adolescent, between participating or feeling completely alone. In a time and a place where there were no counselors, or the counselors were also racist. Maybe you’ve never had to parse out different subcategories of racism as you try to discern which relationships are worth it, whatever that might mean, and which are completely irredeemable, and then finding the courage to act accordingly. If you haven’t, you’re lucky. Privileged, even.

  Twitter got its confession, but neither you, nor I, nor Ellie Kemper, nor America is any less racist for it. I submit that Twitter only got its confession because Ellie Kemper was already prone to introspection, has been introspecting most of her life, and has done more introspecting than the average Twitter-activist. She didn’t change her mind, she was forced to dig up her past shit and lay it on the table to be picked over by people who only just took a seat. The new arrivals took a look at the shit and said, Boy that stinks. Then they felt better, and Ellie Kemper felt worse, and nothing else changed and that’s called progress.

  *

 My tension and adrenaline drained away. I saw his face, his particular face. He wasn’t a Man In a Pickup Truck, representative of everyman in a pickup truck; he was who he was. He had a round nose and bags under his eyes. Two or three days of stubble on his cheeks and chin. I wonder if he has grandchildren who complain about how scratchy it is? He looked scared, like a tired man who’d almost hit a careless cyclist. He didn’t to kill anyone and he was angry that I almost caused him to kill someone. I didn’t want this man to kill anyone, and I certainly didn’t want him to kill me.

  It was then that I apologized for blowing right through the stop sign. Well, I was wrong about that.

  He looked a little confused. It was a confusing situation. So, he said, we’re good then?

 I felt a little confused. Weren’t we supposed to keep yelling?

  We’re good then, I said.

  His last words to me were either, I love that, or I love you. I’m 99% sure he said, I love that, but isn’t it pretty to think that he said, I love you?

  *

Listen: it’s not that I’m anti-confession, but I’m wary and increasingly wary of proforma Prayers of Confession, especially when they are religiously proscribed by a demographic that claims to be Not Religious. (In the words of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Ask them a question and you are told the answer is to repeat a mantra.) Public confessions do, for better or worse, what religion does, for better or worse: tell us a story, give us a sense of control, shape our experience, and help us think we’re actually doing something – Look what we did, we extracted a confession! Private confessions don’t provide narrative, characters, or catharsis. All they offer is humanity, complexity, intimacy, vulnerability, and, occasionally, transformation.

  *

  I’m working on non-attachment, and, accordingly, on non-judgment, judgement being a form of attachment to the story we tell ourselves about how things should be.

  It’s difficult. I remain attached to the story that thirteen-year-old boys should be allowed to grow up, no matter how much they fuck up when they are thirteen-years-old, therefore I judge the officer who killed Adam Toledo. I judge the adult who gave the boy a gun and showed him how to shoot. I judge the people who made the gun and all the hands that carried the gun to the boy. I judge people who love guns more than they love thirteen-year-old boys.

  *

  I ‘preciate you, I said, clipping the first syllable like I was someone I’m not. If this was fiction, I’d strike that dialogue as sounding untrue, not in character, but real life is messier, real people are inconsistent, and that’s really what I said.

  I’m not great at talking to people. I was kind of hoping to get this one job with a delivery company because it was closer to home and paid more. The interviewer asked how I’d heard of their company. I said a friend had used them to move a large machine. I should have stopped there, but there is a word-gremlin inside me that likes to blow through stop signs. I said I’d moved that machine before and boy was I glad I didn’t have to move it again. I said that to the guy interviewing me about moving machines.

  So I’m walking dogs.

 *

  What I want to do is write stories. I desire to never sit through another interview. I want my stories to be my interview and you, the reader, the one who says, You’re hired, you can start immediately, you’ll never have to move machines or walk dogs ever again.

  I hesitate to say this too loud, lest the Inverse Laws of Attraction hear me. I also say this with an acute awareness that what writing does, for better or worse, is tell a story, give me a sense of control, shape my experience, and help me think I’m actually doing something. The obligation I have, then, is to tell good stories, to the best of my ability, populated with characters full of humanity, complexity, intimacy, vulnerability, who, at their best, offer the possibility of transformation. No cartoon villains.

  Unless I’m writing a cartoon. And there are villains.

  Is it possible for me (or anyone) to privately apologize for something I say or write, but publicly defend the right – and even the necessity – of saying it? It is. Is it possible for each to be equally true? It is.

  Fully human/fully divine. Very well then, I contradict myself.

  In the meantime, the world keeps shouting. It’s really difficult to talk when people are shouting all the time, especially when they are shouting the same thing over and over again, which is, BANG BANG BANG!

 I don’t know what to do with that. It feels like I either have to shout or ignore it. Shouting makes me tired but ignoring it feels as reckless as blowing right through a stop sign. So I work on my stories and let them try to make sense of this absurd world.

  *

  Speaking of absurd, just when I thought I had this letter all buttoned up and ready to send out the door, my wife was in a car accident. Another driver blew right through a stop sign and slammed into the driver’s side of our car. My wife is okay; our car is not. The woman who hit her was not distracted by the Mets because the Mets were rained out that day. I don’t know much about her other than she was driving on a suspended license without insurance. God and Ben Franklin gave her that right (No Quarter Without Consent). Who are you or I to tell her how to live?

  Equally, my wife could have shot her right between the eyes (Redress of Grievances) and of course that would have solved everything, except my wife doesn’t carry a gun. She probably never will. Can you believe that?

  *

  The guy in the pickup truck nodded and drove away. Such things can happen, even in America, depending on the characters, and when they don’t the story seems more stark, more deliberate, more sinful, awful, frustrating, heartbreaking.

  #LFGM,

Matt Lang

   PS –While I was naming and claiming my desire to watch Jacob deGrom strike out ten batters in a row, in another part of space-time Aaron Nola struck out nine batters in a row, and he looked untouchable, he looked inevitable. Someone got excited, someone texted their friends. On June 25th Aaron Nola, pitching for the Phillies, against the Mets, in New York, struck out ten Mets in a row, tying the record held by the greatest Met of all, The Franchise, Tom Seaver. I listened to all ten while riding my bike.

  Be careful what you wish for.

[geliki80-blog]

october 29, 2020, 1:24am

after watching some episodes of other shows, i settled on an episode of david letterman's netflix series with dave chappelle. it was powerful to watch something that referred to events happening this year that have touched my life, that have affected so many lives. and empowering to hear him amplify so many of the values that i have also come to embrace, including community. 

it made me think about my life in the small town i stayed in after college. this town made only slightly bigger by the university that brings in a more diverse range of thinkers and characters than the town itself could ever hope to boast about. i was drawn to this place because i wanted to be closer to thick clusters of trees and farther from dense throngs of people. the electricity of the city had worn me out by seventeen, and i craved an escape from the pace of consumerism that felt foreign and overwhelming to me.

but as i got older within the smaller town's limits, i recognized more and more about how my experiences fit within a bigger context. how certain things that had been more subtle or more covert in pittsburgh were obvious in a place still glaringly white, and glaringly conservative. and the more i realized about the way the town operated, and the way the country operated, and my own place within all of that, i felt more and more disconnected from my literal community. from the place where i liked the trees more than the people.

still i managed to make friends. characters paraded in and out of the tiny gas station on a corner at one of the four intersections in town where i worked part-time for several years. people spoke to me because i was just about the least threatening person, and i was in a subservient role. i had a welcoming aura that had been inviting strangers to open up to me from the time i was a teenager waiting on buses in downtown pittsburgh. that trait followed me into my twenties, and into various customer service positions. as a cashier, i didn't have the freedom to walk away from a customer who decided to unload about his day, his life, his opinions about the state of the country. there was a sense of marginalization that i always felt. a feeling of subversiveness just beneath the surface. and so community for me came to mean the group of people whom i had gravitated toward. whom i had chosen to talk to and listen to. people who stuck around and became close to me, spent time with me, allowed me into their lives and into their families and into their hearts. before long, new friends became people who were precious to me over a decade, and that time grows longer still with so many friends i had the pleasure of meeting in this tiny vortex of interesting and predictable people.

as i get older, i want to be more active in my community. i already know i have a talent for talking with people. for listening. and i know how many people i learned about just from that passive role as a cashier at a gas station. so imagine what i could accomplish with a bit more intention. i've never been much for schmoozing. i also don't believe in selling anything to people. but i know we all have needs, and i believe in working toward making sure everyone's are met. and i know that we stand a much better chance of accomplishing that if we work together, rather than against each other.

there are times that i have really fucked up with people. times when my ego or my perspective has gotten in the way of using a better approach to create dialogue. times when i've talked at someone. or times when my feelings got the best of me, and i spoke before i thought well enough. i think thoughtfulness is definitely something that improves with age and experience, especially if we're conscious about strengthening that muscle. when someone hurts me, there is the part of hurt that is all ego. that is painful. and forgiveness seems always to have two parts--one for forgiving the other person for being human and doing what humans do sometimes which might be lashing out, or projecting, or doing what wounded creatures do. the other for forgiving myself for reacting and getting mad at the person for being human and doing what wounded creatures do. and anyone who denies me permission to make mistakes is not really my friend. but anyone who is not my friend is not my enemy either. and again, ultimately we are both trying to achieve something with progress. with shaping the world around us (and within) toward what we want it to be. and while i cannot control how the other person advances with their own sense of forgiveness, it's never a bad time to engage in some self-reflection and re-evaluate what i have the power to grow within myself, improve within my own behaviors. what the other person does is up to them. and i want only never to hinder their growth. so sometimes stepping back, stepping away from someone is necessary. but the door for dialogue should never close. 

and i think that relates to the bigger picture. the bigger society that we're all a part of. 

tonight, i was thinking as i hung up the fiona apple poster in my room, the construction paper matting badly faded. the cheap plastic poster frame misaligned and taped at the corners to hold it all together. i was thinking about giving permission to people to make mistakes. allowing it. when that idea first comes into my mind, it comes with the assumption that people will learn from their mistakes, and become better. smarter. more compassionate. but there is an error to that thinking, because it assumes that people must be better than what they are, and that they are not worthy of forgiveness unless they evolve from their mistakes. we punish a child with the intention of teaching them to think and behave more appropriately. but children repeat behaviors, pushing the extent of our boundaries and still receiving forgiveness because it takes time to learn certain lessons. if that patience is not applied to adults, then everyone is doomed to failure. not only that, but we withhold love from people we deem as not acting right.

somewhere in my heart i know that i have to love my neighbor. and somewhere else in my heart i don't want anything to do with him unless i enjoy interacting with him.

friends are neighbors we choose, and it can be harder when they disappoint us. but only because we become so used to them that when they let us down we take it personally.

if we allow people to make mistakes, and accept that they will, and accept that it might take a long time for them to learn...how does that inform our expectations for leaders?

dave chappelle had a skit talking about an interaction he had with a transgender woman that did not paint her in a very kind light. and i was very upset with him. i wasn't the only one. but when he went on to continue making specials, i refrained from watching because i didn't want to support someone transphobic. i didn't want to risk that he would keep telling those kinds of jokes. but he ended up addressing that bit in a later special. i ended up coming back to him, because there was always something about his honesty and delivery, his artistry, that i was drawn to (like so many people). in the interview with letterman, he asks chappelle about if he wants to be a leader, acknowledging how letterman himself looked to dave for some sort of guidance. some sort of catharsis following the murder of george floyd. and it made me think about the leaders that the people choose versus the leaders that are groomed for us.

joe biden is the democratic nominee in our two-party presidential election, the results of which will be determined by an electoral college whose structure, like so many other things in this country, is in terrible need of revision. the people who are openly unenthusiastic about biden refer to his history, his involvement with legislation that was, like so many other things in this country, terribly imperfect and influenced by the politics of the time. biden had to change. as a public figure, as a political figure, he had to change with the times and with what the idea of a democrat meant, otherwise people like bernie sanders would stand a chance, and the two-party system would finally shift toward something more pluralistic, and the powers that be want to remain the powers that be. so while people condemn biden for his past, here i am wondering on one hand isn't he allowed to be imperfect? while at the same time wishing we could have had better leaders altogether from the start. leaders who were ahead of their time. leaders not so influenced by the politics and trends of the time. leaders who really make all of us feel confident they will be good for all of us. be what we really need in that office.

i guess what i'm saying is chappelle for president? but really what i'm saying is there has to be a balance between the degree of accountability a person holds for their behaviors and a degree of permission that we grant to people to learn from their mistakes and do better. and we shouldn't be electing anyone to office who hasn't demonstrated that they can learn from their mistakes. who remains the same self-interested, self-absorbed, capitalist pig they always were. i have every faith that chappelle will continue to evolve as a human being, because his craft and his passion are connected with that continuous journey of learning and experiencing and reflecting. i don't have as much faith in biden. but i want to. i want this not to be just another swing of the pendulum back toward the left before another shift toward the right again. i want our political arena to have more diversity. more progress. to really be for the people. even though that's not really the way it was set up. those were the words that were used, and they represent a good vision. a good potential.

i don't know what for the people really looks like. there are some examples around the world, but every place has its issues. no place on earth is perfect. (though ikaria might be close to it. and some of those other blue zones where people live the longest, happiest lives.) 

i have no power in what happens next. the presidential election is in five days. i've cast my vote. millions of citizens have. maybe the outcome has already been decided, and this election business is more of a farce than we realize. but i still have no control over what happens, and i have to focus back on the arena where i do have power. myself. my own backyard. my own community. my own friends and family. my work. so that's what i'll do. and i'll always feel grateful for people like chappelle who are willing to speak up about things many of us have a hard time with, even within our communities. thank goodness for unofficial leaders who open up the spaces for us to keep the dialogue going. especially when they can help us to laugh. because we're all dealing with so many of the mistakes people have been allowed to make for hundreds of years.

[alexanderwrites]

Album Review: Brick Body Kids Still Daydream - Open Mike Eagle

Mike Eagle keeps outdoing himself. Not many careers in rap (or music in general) have been as fascinating as his to watch grow, and what is particularly satisfying about his trajectory is that when he started out, he was already great. Starting with Unapologetic Art Rap and Rappers Will Die of Natural Causes (a vinyl i’ve played so much it’s wearing out), you can look through his catalogue and clearly see Mike evolving as an artist. Each album offers something new, and it’s thrilling to never know what to expect with each release. But one thing we always expect - and always get - is quality. And Brick Body Kids Still Daydream is his best album yet.

BBKSDD is an album fuelled by a powerful theme of gentrification, and that theme is realised beautifully throughout. The tracks are full of lost hope and long-lasting hurt, the pain of the home you knew being destroyed by those that are supposed to protect you. The hurt seeps into the songs to the point that there’s a melancholy underlying the whole thing, a perpetual dream state where you have to stand back from the situation to comprehend it. Legendary Iron Hood is a gorgeous and dreamy opener, with Exile’s reliably excellent production giving the song a golden-hued nocturnal funk. Mike sounds vulnerable and soulful, but with a strength that says he has endured, and will endure. It touches on a sense of nostalgia but without any heavy handed 90′s style production - it’s a song that sounds like it’s from now but about then.

The song also sets up a recurring character in the album, a sort-of everyday superhero who preserves himself by becoming “king” who’s “eyes glow like a demon from hell”. Later in Brick Body Complex, he’s establishing himself as being from a “Line of ghetto superheroes”, and there’s something beautiful and celebratory about being one amongst many; a sense of community that, for better or worse, understands each other. My Dad grew up on a working class London estate and more than anything, what he emphasises about the place was a sense of community. That outside the limits of the estate there were people who don’t care, and who don’t get it. But inside there is a shared, understood experience. This is what this album understands. 

And, while there is the aforementioned pain and melancholy, it is essential to read this album as a celebration of the people who live in the projects, the ghettos and the estates the world over. Daydreaming in the Projects is a particularly poignant track that “goes out to ghetto children making codewords in the projects around the world”. The song is exemplary of Mike’s unmatched ability to bring empathy to a song through his voice, a voice which has become one of the most distinctive and enjoyable voices in rap. His style is intimate, and imbued with a human warmth when he sings. 

But what makes this album even more of an evolution for Mike is how much he changes that voice for different characters. It’s hard to pick a best song, but No Selling is a tour de force. Mike sounds like he never has before when inhabiting the Uncle Butch character of the song. It is shot through with that trademark OME humour, but here he raps in the cadence of someone angry, desperate and tough as bricks. “Calm before the storm or something/I ain’t cried since ‘94 or something” he says, words intended to prove his strength. This character has to be strong. “I’m in a tonne of pain, but i’m no selling”. There are super-heroic nuances in a person who refuses to hand over their agency, and there is no space in this person’s life for wavering in the face of intimidation - because once the doubt seeps in, he’s torn down like the building he inhabits. The agony comes from the fact that while you might not sell, and while you might never give in, there are forces that can snatch your home and your life away from you.

When my dad showed me around the estate he grew up in, he sounded sad. It mostly still stood, but he remembered where there were playgrounds and old buildings. “It’s gone”, I remember him saying. My grandmother stayed on that estate until she died. She refused to leave, because it was her home. It belonged to her, and to everyone on that estate. It never got enough money and it was always under threat, but it is their home. The pain of that being taken away from them is unimaginable, but Mike knows the pain. My Auntie’s Building isn’t painful, it’s agonising. The song starts with the words “They blew up my Auntie’s building, put out her great grandchildren, who else in America deserves to have that feeling?” and from then on, it’s a straight-shooting plea to the listener to hear these people and hear their anguish. Mike sounds on the verge of tears throughout, like the whole album has been building to this boiling point, but where often we find catharsis at the end of a story, we only find rubble and broken hearts. 

What elevates the song - and the whole album - is its on point and furious indictment of how gentrification comes to be, and how those that live in projects, estates and ghettos, those that live on the breadline - will always be the people that suffer most under the remorseless greed of capitalist America. You can have your body, your family and your home taken from you as quickly as the swing of a wrecking ball. “They say america fights fair but they won’t demolish your time share” he spits, the entire verse being maybe the most succinct and viscerally powerful pieces in music about gentrification. 

It’s bittersweet. It’s an ode to the people and places of Mike’s childhood, but with that celebration also comes the inevitable realisation that it can be taken away in an instant. On Brick Body Kids Still Daydream, people and buildings become inseparable from each other. The building is the extension of the person, a synecdoche for those who live inside it. It represents something bigger than bricks and mortar, it represents humanity. That’s what the album begs for: to give these people their humanity. To look them in the fucking eye and understand what is happening. To try and help to change that. It is a noble intention and executed stunningly. A concept album only works if the songs are there, and man are the songs there on this album. They are 12 deeply re-listenable songs (i’ve played this album in full every day for the past week), the likes of which become a part of your every day life almost instantly. The album has dug into me and I can’t stop thinking about it. As a collection of songs it is terrific, but as a cohesive album, it is Mike’s masterpiece. @mikeeaglestinks, thank you for making my favourite album of the year. 

[junker-town]

20 sports movies we love that will ease your boredom

WireImage

It may be hard to find real sports to watch right now, but there is an ABUNDANCE of great fictional sports at your fingertips.

Televised sports are on hiatus for the foreseeable future. It’s a tough (but obviously necessary) blow, considering we’re all stuck inside with little to do, and sports would be the perfect diversion right about now.

Thankfully, there are hundreds, or possibly thousands, of sports-centric movies available to wile away the hours. Some might even be convincing enough to get you to yell at your screen, or feel the inimitable catharsis that comes from watching your team (the good team, obviously) win.

Below are some of the SB Nation staff’s go-to sports flicks, with information about where to stream them included. The majority are also available to rent via Amazon, YouTube, Google Play and the like.

Hot Rod (2007)

Available on Netflix, Prime and Pluto.

Insofar as failing to jump over things with a moped is a sport, Hot Rod is about sports. It’s an extremely dumb, pleasant movie with no stakes whatsoever, and it is my number one.

— Seth Rosenthal

Yes, it’s hilarious — but even more importantly, it has the ability to absorb you before you realize it and not let your mind wander out of its grasp. Distraction grade: 10 out of 10

— Will Buikema

Creed (2015)

Available to rent

Too many Rocky sequels to count, but this one really engages with the mythos around the character and who gets to take part in that myth. Michael B. Jordan and Tessa Thompson are two of Hollywood’s brightest stars, and while it’s frustrating they were not awarded like Sylvester Stallone for their performances, all three are terrific here. Also: unlike the original Rocky, this movie recognizes that boxing includes dodging and blocking as well as punching!

— Pete Volk

Goon (2011)

Available on Netflix.

You could probably analyze Goon for commentary about how we glorify violence in hockey, or you could sit back and enjoy a genuinely hilarious movie. It has everything you want in a hockey film. There’s a dim-witted but lovable bouncer who gets a chance at a hockey career in the minors, and a grumpy Quebecois prodigy with a physicality issue. There’s gratuitous blood and gore, and Liev Schreiber getting into fights, and a hint of bromance. There are even cameos from former NHL players, and one from current Dallas Stars forward Tyler Seguin in the film’s 2017 sequel, Goon: Last of the Enforcers, which is also on Netflix.

If you don’t mind some exaggerated violence and slapstick comedy (and particularly if that’s what you’re into), I highly recommend it. Plus, the soundtrack slaps.

— Sydney Kuntz

Bend it Like Beckham (2002)

Available on demand with Starz and DirecTV

It’s funny, it’s sweet, and the fact that you’ve definitely seen it before doesn’t mean you shouldn’t watch it again. It made Keira Knightley an international star, and Parminder Nagra picked up the FIFA presidential award. Beyond the film, it represented a crucial moment in David Beckham’s relationship with his country. He’d gone from villain in 1998 after that red card against Argentina, to hero in 2001 after that free kick against Greece. Eight months later this came out, and canonized him as a national treasure.

— Andi Thomas

High Flying Bird (2019)

Available on Netflix

What better to watch during a period without basketball than a movie about basketball personnel that takes place during a time of no basketball? High Flying Bird, shot entirely on iPhone by Steven Soderbergh, follows a top rookie and his ambitious agent during an NBA lockout, as they try and change the owner-heavy economic structure of the NBA.

— Pete Volk

Escape to Victory (1981, also just known as Victory)

Available on demand with Cinemax and DirecTV

Sylvester Stallone is an Allied solider in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. So is Michael Caine. In there with them, for some reason, is Pele, Bobby Moore, Ozzy Ardiles, and half of Ipswich Town’s 1981 UEFA Cup winning squad. And wouldn’t you just know it, they have to play an exhibition against a handpicked German side, for reasons of propaganda. Will they escape … to victory?

— Andi Thomas

Goal of the Dead (2014)

Available on Shudder

”Some kind of a riot. They are burning cars.”

”Given the refereeing, no wonder.”

French football superstar Samuel Lorit faces off against his hometown team in a cup game. His formerly adoring fans now all despise him. And then a tainted steroid injection turns pretty much everybody into zombies, straight from the 28 Days Later school of hard-running mouth-frothers. Good blood-soaked fun, if probably a bit too long. But then all films are too long these days. Return of the King won a million Oscars, and that didn’t have a ‘roid-raging zombie kicking a man’s head off his neck and into the goal.

— Andi Thomas

Fighting with My Family (2019)

Available on Prime and Hulu

Maybe the only worthwhile WWE Studios release ever? I’ll await the flame from fans of The Marine 5: Battleground in the comments. What would have otherwise been yet another vanilla sports inspiration story is elevated by a terrific cast, led by newly Oscar-nominated Florence Pugh.

— Pete Volk

The Damned United (2009)

Available to rent

An adaptation of a brilliant but bleak novel about Brian Clough’s doomed spell at Leeds United, the film dispenses with most of the book’s harrowing existential loneliness and discovers a surprisingly soft-hearted buddy story underneath. Michael Sheen disappears uncannily into his role, absolutely nailing Clough’s astringent self-possession, but Colm Meaney almost steals the film as Clough’s nemesis, Don Revie. A reminder that English football, back in the ‘70s, was a strange, drizzly place full of strange, compelling people.

— Andi Thomas

Hoop Dreams (1994)

Available on HBO, Kanopy and DirecTV

One of the best American documentaries. Also one of the best movies about dreams, who crushes them and how they evolve. It is also one of the best movies about race and poverty in America. All in all, this is one of the best movies about the allure and grace of basketball. A phenomenal film!

— Pete Volk

Horse Feathers (1932)

Available via the Internet Archive

I grew up watching the Marx Brothers with my dad, and I would be remiss not to mention this college football-centric classic. Turns out the “amateur” status of college football players was a joke in the 1930s, too!

— Pete Volk

Minding the Gap (2019)

Available on Hulu

Only tangentially about sports, since the group of kids at this documentary’s focus are skateboarders, but this is one of the great modern American documentaries about growing up, difficult friendships and toxic masculinity. Highly, highly recommend.

— Pete Volk

Starship Troopers (1997)

Available on Showtime, CBS All Access, DirecTV and Vudu

There are several reasons Starship Troopers is memorable — the broadly written anti-nationalist commentary! The exploding bugs! The co-ed showers! That one fight scene soundtracked to Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You,” for some reason! — but space football is the only one that fits with our theme. In the future, America’s favorite sport is played in high school gymnasiums on old wrestling mats. There are no special teams or roughness penalties. The ball is Nerf’s rough approximation of a baked potato wrapped in foil.

Johnny Rico, our protagonist, wins and is escorted off the field a hero. Roughly 20 minutes of film later, he’s left to die on an alien planet. Shit’s real, yo.

— Christian D’Andrea

Rush (2013)

Available on HBO

If you liked Ford V. Ferrari, you’ll probably love this. Retelling the true story of James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda’s intense Formula 1 rivalry, Rush has fantastic racing scenes and benefits from focusing on the wildly different personalities and approaches of the two rivals.

— Pete Volk

A League of Their Own (1992)

Available on Showtime, and very often randomly on cable

It almost feels redundant to list this classic, which you’ve probably already seen once or dozens of times. But if you have seen it, you know it holds up better than most of the feel-good, strings-swelling-styled sports hagiographies of the 1990s. A more-or-less accurate retelling of a vital and often ignored part of American sports history, conveyed via an all-star cast and too many quotable lines to count. The “hard” may be what makes it great, but there’s nothing hard about watching this iconic and genuinely uplifting movie. (I also wrote more about it here.)

—Natalie Weiner

Speed Racer (2008)

Available to rent

One of my favorite movies of all-time, taking many aesthetic cues from anime and seamlessly bringing them into the live-action world with breathtaking visual effects. Speed Racer is visually explosive and a delight for the senses, with a grounded conflict at its core (a family business getting bought out by a heartless corporation). In my opinion, this is sports + movies in their best balance with each other.

— Pete Volk

The Heart of the Game (2005)

Available to rent

A hardscrabble team works diligently to overcome the odds, with a few twists. The movie centers on a girls basketball team from Roosevelt High School, 10 minutes from where I grew up in Seattle, and the star of the team gets pregnant. Bring tissues.

— Natalie Weiner

Uncut Gems (2019)

Available to rent

No movie better captures the anxiety of being a sports fan, or the bad decisions you make because of your fandom. Also sports luminaries Kevin Garnett and Mike Francesa deliver excellent performances. My favorite 2019 release! Louis wrote more about it here.

— Pete Volk

Undisputed II: Last Man Standing (2006)

Available on Starz and DirecTV

This is the height of me on-my-bullshit, but please allow it: Scott Adkins and Michael Jai White are generational action stars, and this entry in the excellent Undisputed series shows their singular talents at their best. White plays an ex-boxer framed for a crime and sent to prison, where he fights for his freedom in an underground MMA ring. Adkins plays the terrifying Yuri Boyka, the reigning prison champ. This is so up my alley it’s not even funny, and hopefully it’s up yours, too!

— Pete Volk

More Than a Game (2008)

Available on Starz

It’s very easy to take LeBron James for granted. After all, he’s been doing otherworldly things in the NBA for almost two decades now. Sometimes it just seems like he’s always existed, like he’ll just be inevitable forever. At a time when we’re (hopefully temporarily) deprived of watching him play basketball, it’s worth revisiting this great documentary about his origin story. Yes, he overcame seemingly insurmountable odds, but the part that sticks with you is the people around him — those who believed in him completely, and who he has been just as loyal to in return.

— Natalie Weiner

[nightmareonfilmstreet]

Review: BLACK MIRROR Season 4 (Part I - Episodes 1 & 2)

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Review: BLACK MIRROR Season 4 (Part I - Episodes 1 & 2)

Black Mirror Season 4 dropped on December 29th, on Netflix.

SPOILER-FREE REVIEW:

Watch it. Oh my God, watch it. Now, then; Spoilers ahead.

EPISODE 1: USS CALLISTER

The aspect ratio of the opening sequence matches the aspect ratio of the old Star Trek television show. It’s little things like that keep my coffee hot and get me up in the morning.

“USS Callister” really tells two stories: the first is the tale of a loser computer programmer named Robert Daly, who’s created a groundbreaking Virtual-Reality-based game that lets people fly around the universe in spaceships, explore planets, battle each other trade, etcetera. The guy he started the company with is a dick who doesn’t appreciate his contributions to the company. His coworkers think he’s weird and awkward and kinda creepy sometimes.

The second story is that of a sadistic and cruel God named Robert Daly. Daly has created a parallel Virtual Reality that allows him to play out his fantasies of being a Hero in Charge, based on a retro science-fiction television show he loves. (Think Star Trek.)

The twist of the knife is that he has peopled this game with digital copies of coworkers he dislikes, generated by stolen samples of their DNA. They have all their memories and personalities from the real world. They are sentient, thinking and feeling as their real-world selves.

What “USS Callister” asks us is (among many other things), are they alive?

Not that episode one is all scowling and torment. Brooker mentioned that Black Mirror would ‘explore a little more comedy in this season’, and there is certainly a strong heartbeat of humor here. It’s the best kind of laughter, too, for the series: black humor. Hangman’s jokes. The dry British chuckle in the face of the abyss.

Watching the tortured, terrified digital clones of the USS Callister unwind while Daly is logged out of the game reminds one of London in the Blitz. Sure, there are bombs and blood and rubble everywhere, and things are pretty awful, but at least the bottles behind the bar survived.

When the newest digital clone, Cristin (played by Nanette Cole) finds out that nobody has genitals in Daly’s digital world, her battle cry is priceless:

Okay. Stealing my pussy is a red. Fucking. Line.

“USS Callister” is like a great Doctor Who episode that just happens to be Rated R.

When the trailers for Season 4 dropped, the teaser for “USS Callister” left out the real world entirely. It was a move of twofold genius. First, it saves the surprise of our first, bleak glimpse of the real world. Our introduction to neurotic weirdo Daly (an absolutely stunning performance by Jesse Plemons) feels like a nihilistic sigh of relief. It doesn’t have to be full dark 24/7, but there’s something in the uncompromising, unblinking hardness of Black Mirror that has always set it apart. A certain bleak jouissance that no other show delivers.

Second, it works as a commentary on the episode itself. In our little taste of “USS Callister,” the real world isn’t there at all. The trailer promises pure sci-fi. Pure escapism. Fun. Adventure. There’s no trace of the sinister sadism of Daly, or the suffering of his comrades. There’s no sense of true tragedy or actual stakes.

Just like the immersive, next-gen VR in the episode.

“Callister” examines the more disturbing elements of the AI and VR booms we’re seeing right now. Ten years from now, if we have a bad day, put on our VR headsets, and kill a hundred digital people in Call of Duty online, what will that mean? In a world where code is ever-improving, at what point is a program as nuanced and multifaceted as us? We don’t feel anything drowning Sims or making them wet themselves…but should we? If not today, when? At what point does simulated suffering cease to be Catharsis and become Sadism?

With the advent of technology like CRISPR, perhaps we aren’t so far from Daly’s nightmare after all.

  EPISODE 2: ARKANGEL

The obvious big-gun episode of the season is “Arkangel.” There’re no scrubs in the directorial talent of Black Mirror, but Jodie Foster (four Oscar nominations, two wins, Silence of the Lambs, ‘nuff said) is clearly the Heavy Hitter.

She swung for the fences.

She knocked it out of the park.

I don’t even like baseball.

“Arkangel” tells the story of a mother and daughter. When her daughter Sara (Aniya Hodge, Sara Abbot, and Brenna Harding) goes missing, Marie (Rosemarie DeWitt, Cinderella Man, Mad Men) has a monitoring system implanted in Sara’s head. It’s called “Arkangel,” and gives Marie access to Sara’s location, biological vitals, and even a direct feed from her optic nerve. Marie can see what Sara sees.

But “Arkangel” isn’t really about the creepy sci-fi stuff. None of the best episodes of Black Mirror are, and this is one of the best in the series. No. “Arkangel” is about what happens as Sara grows up. It’s about the Helicopter Parents of the future. About how far Marie will go to keep her safe, and how much of herself she’ll compromise to do it.

And the inevitable price to be paid.

The brilliance of Foster’s episode is (to borrow from Blake), its fearful symmetry. Its balance. Each element dances with another, each character reflected darkly in the actions of others. Sara and the all-seeing eye in her head are like a weight in the center of the episode. On one side is Marie and her Orwellian baby monitor. On the other is Trick (a superb performance by Own Teague), the Cute Drug Dealer from the Wrong Side of the Tracks, and all the rebellion and danger he represents.

Every line, every interaction in the episode shifts that weight, tilts the precarious position of the scale. Structurally, it’s breathtakingly beautiful. There is no wasted moment.

I don’t know whether to give the nod to Brooker (who has sole writing credit on the episode) or Foster for the delicate dance of these threads. The interplay between the writing and directing style is an elegant pas de deux, each word and element circling the others, and pulling the weave ever tighter.

Brooker understands Irony in a way that few shows do, and utilizes it like the keen, heartrending edge that it can be. And he knows Tragedy. The Capital-T kind that the Greeks told us so much about, all those years ago. He knows it intimately. Knows that the key to Tragedy is Hamaratia: the Fatal Flaw.

There are several Fatal Flaws in “Arkangel.” They run (appropriately) in arcs through the episode. Tracing those threads back reveals the subtlety and nuance Foster and Brooker actually manage.

Almost everything Marie does throughout the episode is countered or echoed elsewhere: when she reactivates the Arkangel unit in Sara’s teens, she sees her having sex with Trick, the “Dangerous Bad Boy.” Yet, that same night, she met up with one of her patients from physical therapy: a devil-may-care biker who injured himself driving his motorcycle recklessly, and shows no signs of slowing down.

Marie sees Sara experimenting with cocaine in Trick’s van. The effect of the drug is that it raises Sara’s heart rate. A few days later, Marie grinds some drugs into Sara’s morning smoothie. The effect of drugging her daughter is the spontaneous abortion of a pregnancy Sara didn’t even know about.

It’s ironic that Marie should confront Trick, condemning him as “a junkie.” Throughout the episode, Marie treats the Arkangel parent unit as a junkie treats drugs. She hides the unit upstairs, laments over whether to use it or not. Okay, just this one more time. Uses it just a little. Just a few functions. Starts carrying it with her. It’s clear that she’s addicted to it.

There’s even a brilliant reversal of the classic “Parent finds drugs in the kid’s room” scene, where Sara rifles her mother’s room and discovers that she’s still using the Arkangel parent unit. Sara is horrified and tosses it down, the perfect picture of a parent discovering their child’s dangerous addiction.

Marie is the first victim of Arkangel, and in her victimhood, she stands for all of us. I don’t mean the program itself. I’m talking about the sentiment behind it. Beneath the eerie veneer of the invasive surveillance of tomorrow, “Arkangel” is quietly commenting on something we’re experiencing today.

Safety. In excess. In extremis.

The opening scene of the episode doesn’t just establish the characters and set the stage. It holds up a mirror. Marie is giving birth: after complications during natural birth, the doctor is performing a C-section. “Arkangel” opens with Marie looking away from the things that frighten her: the doctors, the nurse, the procedure she’s undergoing. When Sara is finally born, the doctors whisk her away to a table nearby. There is no sound. No cry. Other doctors gather, and Marie becomes afraid: afraid her baby is dead, that she’s lost her little girl, and is powerless to help.

“Tell me she’s alright,” she says.

The nurse holds her hand, tells her to calm down. Comforts her. Then Sara cries and is brought over, and she’s fine, and everything is fine. We get the sort of close-up maternal scene we’re accustomed to seeing when babies are born on television. Lots of nuzzling and happy tears and lifelong bonds being wound between mother and child.

And then, brilliantly, brutally, honestly, Foster shows us what we seldom see these days, too busy cooing over the microcosm and the close-up.

She shows us the big picture.

On one side of the curtain, Marie is bonding with her little girl. Her daughter is alive and well. Everything is fine. Nurses smile and nod and congratulate her. And on the other side of the curtain, her body is open and bloody. Doctors work quietly to stop the bleeding and make her whole again. Though a routine procedure, Marie has experienced massive trauma, could conceivably die if things go wrong…but she’ll never know. The sheet protects her. She doesn’t feel a thing: the doctors have numbed her to the trauma she’s experiencing. All that’s left is bliss.

(By the by, I’m not suggesting we force new mothers to watch surgeries performed on them without anesthetic. I’m not a monster. I am an observer of metaphors.)

The “parental control” of the Arkangel unit is obviously the darkest, most troubling of the sci-fi elements of the episode, but it raises some interesting questions about what safety might mean, in the long-term.

When Sara’s grandfather has a heart attack, she can’t see what’s happening to him, and can’t hear his pleas for her to get help. She’s shielded from the trauma by the unit. But there’s a parallel in our world, here: if we crumble in the face of fear and trauma, shutting down and closing it out, refusing to look, what are the consequences of that willful blind eye?

Later, as Marie grieves over her father’s grave, Sara can’t see her mother’s face. Grief is uncomfortable. It has been censored out.

Again, there are real considerations for us in the real world. If we turn our backs on grief and powerful, negative human emotions because they make us uncomfortable, what does that mean? The end of empathy? A society that must grieve alone and uncomforted, with no community to feel and grieve with us, no strength to be lent to us because we are, in our sadness, upsetting?

Just something to think about.

Sara’s grandfather speaks for some us, after Marie has the Arkangel implanted in Sara’s head:

“I remember when we used to open up the door and let the kids be.”

It provokes an interesting thought. The difference between opening a door and a locked one can be the difference between a home and a prison. Between a conversation and a censure is the difference between a parent and a warden.

And once you’ve escaped a prison, why would you ever go back?

  Overall

There’s a common thread between “USS Callister” and “Arkangel.”

Hope.

When Cristin and company break out of Daly’s digital world, they have a whole new universe to explore. They’re in charge of their own destinies again. They have free will, and the will to live.

Once Sara escapes her mother’s smothering safety, she has a whole world to explore. She’s free, finally, with her whole life ahead of her.

Watching these two episodes, I noticed something for the first time. In the opening credits of Black Mirror, just before the screen goes dark, and we stare into the black possibilities of the onrushing technological age…

The Black Mirror always cracks. The mirror Brooker holds up is not impervious. We can escape.

There’s always hope.

[robedepourpre]

Black Sails is a tragedy. Literally.

So, my friend and I finished Black Sails this week-end, and boy was it a wild ride. We cried (a lot) and laughed (a bit), and talked far too much about it. She also came up with this idea about Black Sails having some similarities with a tragedy, and since she doesn’t have a tumblr (too time-consuming, she says. Psht), I’m the one sharing her views with you.

If there are comments or questions about it (and about the references she uses), I’ll answer the best I can, and relay them to her. Hey, if there are enough, she might be swayed enough to get her own blog !

*****

One thing I love about Black Sails is how conscious the whole show is of its own links with stories. For an ex-litterary student like me, it’s a delight to puzzle about it.

One interesting way of interpreting the whole story that occurred for me at the last episode is: the whole show is a tragedy about anger.

My argument is linked with my own culture: I know a lot about Greek tragedies and French ones, and not that much about the rest of them. Yet what I know about it makes quite a compelling, if incomplete, point.

 So, I’ll try to make it, with spoilers up to the end of S4 (and therefore, after the cut).

First thing about a tragedy is the weight of destiny. That one is quite obvious: we know that the Pirate Republic, Nassau, won’t stay that way for long. We know that the British will win, because both History and Treasure Island tell us they do. The same can be told for the Maroon insurrection wanted by Madi…

What’s interesting is that the link between BS and History is basically the same that we see in tragedy (and in romantic drama, and in a lot of historical shows): what matters is not the truth, but the myth of it and the way it can be bended to reinvent another story (yup, that’s basically what Rackham says to Mary at the end).

 Then, there’s the notion of hubris, which is quite present in the show. Hubris is an excessive pride that allows the heroes to try and defy the norms of the world (and with it, the gods). That can summarize the hope that Nassau remains free of English rules for Flint and Vane and Eleanor, but also Rodgers’s actions in S4, since he ignores what England wants in order to stay in control of Nassau (most obviously when he goes to Spain-controled Cuba in the middle of the war). Interestingly, hubris has a very similar treatment in BS and in some Greek tragedies (Antigone from Sophocle comes to mind): in both case, their hubris is justified and is based on an earnest desire for justice. But at the same time, that desire is scary and drives them to extremes. We see exactly the same thing with Flint and Rodgers.

In all those situations in BS, what fuels their hubris’s is anger (hence my “tragedy about anger”). Flint’s anger is born in the death of Thomas and Miranda. Rodgers’s anger at seeing the Island resisting him and civilization. Eleanor’s anger at needing a man to succeed. Vane’s anger is more discreet,because that’s not the main point of his story arc and is more said by his wish to stay free of any chains, but he still dies to make others angry and to make Flint’s plan come true, so I tend to count him in.

 Another thing that made me think of tragedies is the way Nassau, and then the maroons, are used. The structure of it is very similar to the Chorus/Coryphaeus relation in greek tragedies. Basically: the chorus and their spokeperson (the Coryphaeus) comment on the actions, and judge them. It’s very very close to Max saying “the streets are afraid/angry”, or to Madi and her mother then Julius telling Flint what the maroons want, and how the revolt he proposes suits, or not, their purpose.

That’s a very interesting fact, because all the moments that I alluded to? They are also the moment when BS hints that it’s a show about politics, or rather: how someone with a vision for Nassau tries to seize power and how their political agenda is received. It’s not the center of the show, but it’s quite crucial in the main events. For example: the reason Eleanor failed is deeply linked with the way she was unable to be seen as something different from a tyrant – same with Rodgers. The same could be said of the maroons: the way Flint aligns or not with what they want (be it hidden in peace or in open revolt with England) is crucial for him, and in some ways, overtakes his own plans: Madi’s resolve for a revolution lasts longer than Flint needs for it.

 My last (and longest) point is about passions.

So tragedies are more about facing your passions than about every characters dying or even a bad end (we have Corneille’s Cinna, a tragedy with a good end, and Racine’s Berenice, a tragedy without death).

Passions are emotions and states of being that, if growing unchecked, will eventually lead the character to their doom. If you prefer: the problem of passions is not their existence, but the moment when they are too much. The whole problem of a play is generally: a passion is born or exists and lead the main characters into making one or several harmful choices. They then face the consequences of that, and in doing so are either consumed by their passion (and are more likely to end up dead) or learn to harness it (and are more likely to end up alive, if someone else’s passion don’t kill them).

The most common passion throughout the show is anger.

For some, anger shapes their arcs:

·    Flint is born out of his anger at Thomas’s death (and becomes James again when Thomas is found alive). His whole arc is about him being finally able to let it go.

·    Miranda has two important moments that link her with anger. The major one, of course, is the manner of her death, when she expresses her anger for the very first time. She is consumed by her anger in this moment, and dies frome it. The second undermines Flint, since it’s the choice of pursuing the Maria Aleyne to kill Alfred Hamilton, which fuels the distrust that leads to the mutiny of Dufresne and the others.

·    Eleanor Guthrie’s main mistakes are all marked with her anger at seeing men trying to controls her life. It’s usually with Vane (unmaking him captain starts the moment she is called a tyrant, and well, I think their last meeting is quite telling in itself), though it also includes her father, Scott, Flint or Max. When her anger and her pride disappear, her storyline is ending – and she’s killed by her husband’s anger.

·    Billy looses slowly his power as a representative of the crew while he is consumed by his anger at Flint, thus becoming Billy Bones

·    Rodgers is to me a possible mirror of Flint in the way anger fuels them: they are the two character that can go from English gentleman to angry brute in a breath, and become even more angry and self-destructive when their lovers die.

·    Madi is also an exemple of a character that is more and more moved by her anger, though hers is directed towards slavery. That’s when she begins to align herself quite clearly with Flint. It’s very visible in her splendid answer to Rodgers when he tries to blackmail her with Silver’s lifein the last couple episodes. Actually, Madi’s anger is never resolved (and that may be my own regret with the end of S4).

·    Teach is a character that only appears in the plot when he is angry. He arrives to gloat over Eleanor’s death (enabling him to reconcile with Vane), goes when his anger is insufficient to make him defend Nassau, returns when Vane’s death angers him… and dies when Rackham persuades him to let go of avenging Vane.

 For others, anger is less important. There are two configurations:

·    Anne and Vane face another problematic passion, which is a love so great they lose their sense of self. However, we know that their anger exists, and that it clouds their judgement (Anne’s in S1, which leads to her and Rackham being excluded from Vane’s crew. As for Vane, Teach’s “that’s the first time Charles Vane stays cool instead of being angry” when Eleanor returns in S3 is a pretty good indication). But, beyond that, as I said, the passion that rules them is more about love to my mind (and the way it gives them a sense of self). Both struggle with their own sense of self, both chose to leave Nassau to find who they are (or, in Vane’s case, revert to a previous state of being by going with Teach) after a betrayal (Ashe’s daughter and Rackham leaving Anne on the shore). I could add that, when they return, their fate is decided by the ones they chose to love (and specifically, by their lucidity, for Max and Rackham - or lack thereof, in Eleanor’s case).

·    Max, Rackham and Silver are able to control that passion. Interestingly they are in some ways the winners of the show, Silver by disbanding Flint’s army, Max and Rackham by convincing Marion Guthrie to back them. Max and Rackham are very good at controlling their anger and making the right choices in spite of it. Max refuses to kill Silver in S4. Rackham, for all that he hates Rodgers, chooses to avenge himself with helping a legal process which is wonderfully vicious and subtle and is not a new action, but accompanying one that is already here.

 I was tempted to say that each season has an arc about a different passion, anger being the fourth (and so, the most important since it ends the story). S1 would be about desire, symbolized by the Urca gold. S2 about individuality (in French tragedies and in the Greek ones I studied, the fact that someone stands against the community is seen as a risk: that’s the problem raised by Antigone), since the key point is about enacting Thomas’s plan and growing closer to England (civilisation). S3 would then be about power with the question of who will rule Nassau.

 And lastly, linked with passion is the question of catharsis. It’s a notion defined by Aristotle and it’s basically the idea that tragedy frees us from our own passions by representing them in a way that’s relatable until it’s scary. Hence, heroes should be charismatic and humane, but also monstrous. And that’s the point of Vane and Flint at the end of S2 (”let’s remind them that the pirates should be scared”), the point of the creation of Long John Silver…That part is most wonderfully used buy the show runners. On the one hand, these decisions are always made under a cynical light. There is always the question of whether or not England is civilized (with Thomas’s fall, with Teach’s death…) compared to the so-called monsters. And on the other hand, Flint, Vane, Teach, Anne or Silver are sometimes monstrous, sometimes overcome by anger or able to reach a lack of empathy that is never depicted in a sympathetic light.

[snakepointb]

Ask me how I feel: Current times

The world is upside down. If you’re at the bottom and want to be on top, just turn everything upside down. You’re there. It’s a metaphor. I don’t know what it means. It just sounds true to me. What is true these days? I don’t know anymore. Somebody turned everything upside down. I turned myself upside down to be able to see things the right way up again, but in the meantime, somebody just shook everything around, and now, I don’t know whether I’m upside down, or everything around me is upside down, or inside out, or whether simply the terminology was swapped, or whether all or a combination of the above scenarios has manifested.

It’s confusing. It’s draining. It’s hard work. I want to cry sometimes. Other times it’s all hilarious. No one could make this up, but I suspect that someone did. Wow, what a guy (or girl)! Well, it wasn’t just one person, of course. There must have been a whole bunch of them. Sometimes I imagine them at their brainstorming sessions. Are they dead serious, or do they roll on the floor laughing at the thought of what they’ll be able to get away with. In my imagination they roll on the floor. It’s funnier. Those that do not roll on the floor laugh insanely, like the villain in Austin Powers, with an 80s Kung-Fu movie zoom in on his face. Robert Anton Wilson reminded us that reality is what you can get away with.

Imagining it like that is more entertaining, and what if anything can we expect to gain from this life but entertainment, at least according to George Carlin. Life is for your entertainment. Everything is for your entertainment. If you’re getting all worked up and frustrated, you’re doing something wrong. Just relax. Enjoy the show. Have a good time. Laugh.

It’s all a farce. All the big words have been turned into their opposite. We speak of the economy as if it is about managing the resources of the Earthly household. But what we mean is chrematistics, the art of maximizing personal profit. What economy used to mean has been termed ecology and was given to the academics to discuss to death. The practice of it has been appropriated by the chrematisticians and misleadingly termed economics. Nobody noticed.

Everything is misleading. We think that all of this economic hullaballoo is the entrepreneurial expression of homo modernus, the realization of our promised fate, the progress and wealth and glory that awaits us at the end of a long and arduous journey from the darkness and poverty of the past to the golden light of the future. But as one wise thinker expressed it, this economy is not an business enterprise. It is a liquidation. The whole planet is being stripped of its assets; everything is liquidated and carefully turned into transient expressions of social status.

This economy mines life itself by feeding on the regenerative capacity of nature. It decimates diversity, turning the potential of tomorrow’s abundance into today’s monetary profit. But what even is money? One hell of a belief system, that’s for sure. And here, too, people think it’s a science. They study it in finance, and economics, and business management and people get Nobel prizes for it. How astonishing!

It’s like we’re living in a world that makes sense on paper, but not beyond. Or imagine writing on the keyboard of your computer. You hit the letters and the words appear on the screen as they always do. You can write sentences using the same words and they mean the same things when you read them out. But the point is that that’s just on the surface.

Below the surface, there are additional levels of reality. In the case of your keyboard and your word processor, the next level of this reality is called ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. This ASCII code represents the text you write, but is actually much more comprehensive than that. Only the code space from 20 to 7E (hexadecimal) represent printable characters. The rest is machine commands and control characters.

So every letter and every symbol has a code. The code fore “A”, for example, is “1000001” (binary), and 41 (hexadecimal). The codes for “Z” are “1011010” and “5A”, respectively.

If someone went to the level of ASCII and changed all the code, we wouldn’t see it on our keyboard. We’d type an “A” but produce a “Z”. Since ASCII also represents control characters such as Delete, Backspace, or Line Feed. We might hit Return but delete a word, or press Shift but produce a space.

Changing the underlying code changes nothing on your keyboard, but everything in the actual effects of your actions in reality. In the same way, on the surface, our language and concepts appears the same, but at some point, somebody went ahead and changed all the underlying code.

It so comes that we now think we do economics, when what we’re actually doing is chrematistics. There are endless examples of this. We think we’re doing education when we’re actually doing indoctrination. We believe we’re doing rational science when it actually has already become a belief system. We think we’re eating diverse food, when in actual fact we are consuming processed commodities that are composed from a handful of raw ingredients that have been given the appearance of diversity. We think we are exercising freedom of thought and expression when in actual fact we have already internalized self-censorship and conduct conversation within delineated opinion corridors, ensuring at all times that we stay a safe distance from politically incorrect and other touchy subjects. We think that we are self-determined, free, and autonomous actors when in actual fact we have from the very first breath been firmly embedded in culturally determined matrices of values, morals, expectations, categories, gender roles, age roles, social conventions, and belief systems. Our mind is a colonized space. Our body is a vessel, and our mind was already being filled long before we could give informed consent. By the time we were old enough to object, most damage had already been done.

Well, it’s obviously not all damage. Don’t get me wrong. We were also given the frameworks to appreciate art and music and the ability to express ourselves. We also learn how to use our minds for useful things, such as writing and calculating, and making plans and stuff.

The point is that we have drifted for too long, placing too much emphasis on trust, and too little on scrutiny. And we were enticed to do so. The trust-inspiring message from the worlds of corporate and political governance was: “You just enjoy life, we’ll take care of the rest”.

For the last decades, we enjoyed life. I don’t know when exactly, but somewhere between the 1960s and the 2000s must have been the longest stretch of peace, rising living standards, social progress, civil liberties, and positive future outlook.

While our parents’ generation basked in this awe-inspiring wealth and abundance and faith in unlimited progress and power of science to transform the world for the better for everyone, the corporate powers were left unchecked.

Now, that the first generations have woken from the slumber and are finding themselves in a world full of growing existential threats and increasing bleakness of future outlook, we come to realize that those that we thought were taking care of “the rest”, first and foremost took care of themselves. They have become the untouchable billionaire class. The new divine rulers of the world. Untouchable by us mortals, untouchable by the law. Their relative social status and power is equal to that of the emperors of ancient Rome. Unfortunately their mental health is comparable to that of some of Rome’s more insane emperors, too. I think Jeffery Eppstein and his associates would have been best buddies with Caligula, had they ever had the fortune to meet.

Anyways, while taking care of themselves, the elite also did other things, like plan ahead for the time when people would start waking up. They also messed everything up to such an extent that everything is upside down, and even if you stand on your head, you will still not be able to make any sense of anything, because they also changed the underlying code. Like, you type an A and get a Z. You support peacekeeping missions and get war. The leaders of the Free World, champions of Human Rights, Liberty, and Democracy, the United States, France, and Germany are the largest, third-largest, and fourth-largest arms exporters in the world. Like, you type an A and get a Z. You vote for peace and get war. In the same way, you promote health but actually support the medical-industrial complex. The system’s been hacked. You’re being deceived. It doesn’t make any sense. It makes money. It’s a liquidation.

So how does this work?, you may ask. Well, I suspect that there is a kind of place for the cognitive dissonance “dividend”, if that’s what you want to call it. It follows the dominant logic of privatizing profits and collectivizing the cost. The cognitive dissonance dividend is absorbed by society through individuals who internalize it and express it as disease pathologies. Stress, trauma, mental disorders, diseases, sociopathology, psychopathology, violence, but also art. Lots of art. Thanks for the art. Oh my god, Halleluiah for Art! If it weren’t for the arts providing a reliable vehicle for collective catharsis, we would have long broken apart. So that’s one of the positive outcomes. The poetry and song, the visual art, the installation, the dance, the memes, the comedy, the tragedy, the film and theatre. The whole range of it. But that’s not the point.

The point is that everything is upside down, and no matter how many times you flip yourself, or the world, it’ll never come back together again, because, in addition, the underlying code has been changed. My suspicion is that it isn’t just the code that was changed, but the entire hardware and software and, most importantly, the architecture.

We’re all still behaving like it’s the good old days, while actually the system has already long entered a new paradigm, where data mining has replaced democratic decision-making processes and perception management has replaced the idea of citizens informed through a diverse and pluralistic media landscape .

It doesn’t matter. In the meantime. Don’t look for a reference point outside yourself, because you’re in a madly whirling vortex of confusion and disinformation. Look inside. Take a deep look at yourself. Perhaps you can undo some of the doings that have been done upon you and create some sort of holy ignorance, or a beginners mind, as some Zen practitioners like to call it. Madness is just another form of sanity. Embrace it. Enjoy it. Make it yours. Be upside down, and be a code breaker. Then, break free from the Matrix, cleanse the doors of perception and let everything appear as it is.

E&OE

[itsfinancethings]

If your aim is to tell a nuanced story about heroism, historical trauma and revenge, it’s probably best to keep Nazis—by which I mean the literal perpetrators of the Holocaust—out of it. From a thematic perspective, it’s very hard to win with these guys. Depict them as brilliant, bloodless killing machines, and you’ll burnish their terrifying mythology; choose instead to paint them as dimwitted, incompetent henchmen, and you’re liable to trivialize the suffering and deaths of millions. A few beloved films that take aim at Nazis have managed to avoid these traps by sacrificing emotional realism in favor of off-the-wall satire (The Producers) or sheer catharsis (Inglourious Basterds). Unfortunately, Amazon’s Hunters tries to juggle all three modes, for the duration of a 10-episode TV series, without anything approaching Mel Brooks’ wit or Quentin Tarantino’s technical flair.

Created by relative newcomer David Weil, Hunters will arrive on Prime Video on Friday, Feb. 21 with the imprimatur of executive producer Jordan Peele. It’s set in 1977—that culturally dense year remembered for Star Wars, punk, disco and the Son of Sam murders—and our hero is a young Jewish Brooklynite, Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman of Percy Jackson fame). Though he’d ideally be in college putting his prodigious smarts to use, Jonah is living at home, working in a comic store and moonlighting as the city’s most inept weed dealer in order to support the Holocaust-survivor grandma (Jeannie Berlin) who raised him. But there’s more to this doting matriarch than Jonah knows, until tragedy strikes and he meets her friend Meyer Offerman (the great Al Pacino, overdoing the stock old-Jewish-guy mannerisms a bit) and gets drawn into a squad of vigilantes assassinating members of a vast network of Nazis living under assumed names in the U.S.

Elsewhere in a 90-minute premiere that feels longer, a suburban-Maryland barbecue ends in a cartoonish burst of gunfire. Homegrown Nazi psycho Travis Leich (Greg Austin) calmly delivers wicked white-supremacist monologues in between calmly committing horrific acts of violence. And Millie Malone (Grey’s Anatomy alum Jerrika Hinton), a black woman struggling to earn respect in the overwhelmingly white, male FBI, is sent to Florida to investigate the murder of an elderly, female NASA scientist. The network of undercover Nazis starts to take shape, as does their evil plot to bring about a Fourth Reich on American soil.

Christopher Saunders/Amazon

Inspired in part by real mid-20th-century Nazi hunters and the shameful U.S. government initiative Operation Paperclip, Hunters shares with Peele’s movies an effort to use fun, propulsive genre storytelling as a vehicle for serious social commentary. Horror, for Peele, is a way of heightening our visceral responses to racism, exploitation, inequality. But Weil’s genre is action comedy, and the comedy in Hunters falls pretty flat. Dick jokes and scatological gags—some harrowingly visual—are constant. I’m not scandalized by this kind of humor, and it wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it were confined to Jonah and his teen pals (one of whom is called “Bootyhole”). Instead, we hear it from good guys, bad guys, young, old and everyone in between.

These aren’t the only characterizations that feel shallow or underdeveloped. Millie so closely resembles the righteous, earnest detective characters in network procedurals that her scenes almost seem spliced in from a different show. Opting to portray the Nazis as a hierarchy of cartoon villains, Weil makes them so uniformly crafty and fearsome that you can imagine contemporary neo-Nazis watching Hunters and feeling pretty good about their forebears. More disappointing are the Jewish characters, whose personalities are largely accumulations of benign stereotypes, religious factoids and firsthand or inherited trauma. Gefilte fish comes up so often, you’d think every Jew on the planet devoured those gelatinous gray discs daily. Though I wasn’t alive, much less in New York, in 1977, I did grow up Jewish among Jews of Meyer’s and Jonah’s generations, and for me these depictions (like gefilte fish) didn’t pass the smell test.

It seems obvious that caricatures of Jews, even affectionate ones, don’t make a very effective case against antisemitism. But the show also makes subtler, equally unfortunate choices in the way it represents racism. When it’s convenient to the story, anti-Jewish prejudice appears to eclipse or even erase the violence and discrimination nonwhite characters face—such as when Jonah’s black female love interest is dating a belligerent white guy who calls Jonah a “kike.”

Amazon Studios, Prime Video—Christopher SaundersJerrika Hinton in ‘Hunters’

The show’s biggest problem is the garbled messages it sends about violence and revenge. Like Tarantino, Weil palpably savors the suffering of Nazis and wants viewers to do the same. (There’s one particularly gross torture scene whose pleasures Amazon has cautioned me against “spoiling” with a description here.) And I’m not above admitting that I frequently felt a thrilling sense of poetic justice at the sight of mass murderers dying the same gruesome deaths they inflicted on millions of innocent victims. Yet Hunters also shows us those tragic deaths—both in flashbacks to the concentration camps and through the resurgent Reich’s crimes in its new home. Often they’re rendered glibly enough to be indistinguishable from the righteous kills. In a scene set amid the ironic brightness of a bowling alley, Travis, a near-omniscient villain of Coen Brothers proportions, smashes a guy’s teeth in with a bowling ball.

To his credit, Weil’s intention isn’t really to conflate genocide with vengeance for same. In interviews, he talks about growing up with a grandmother who survived the Holocaust and how as a kid her stories sounded to him like “the stuff of comic books and superheroes,” tales of “great good but grand evil.” He’s said that he hopes Hunters can provide “catharsis” and “wish fulfillment.” But he’s also observed that it “becomes this story that lives not in black and white, but in the gray and that murky morality,” posing the question: “If we hunt these monsters, do we risk becoming them ourselves?” Some of that ambivalence comes through in Jonah’s queasiness about becoming a killer, which inspires an intriguing but all-too-brief consideration of whether it’s possible to be a superhero—to be a good person who can stomach massacring bad people—if you don’t harbor considerable darkness of your own. But mostly, the show’s choice to make all forms of violence entertaining overshadows that nuance. At worst, Hunters can lose its antifascist chutzpah and start to come across as equal-opportunity sadistic.

It’s an unfortunate—perhaps the single most unfortunate—fact of life in 2020 that Nazis have recently goose-stepped their way into mainstream American politics, and thus that stories about killing them have begun to resonate as subversive for the first time in our history. That shouldn’t render them off-limits for the entertainment industry. (Just last year, HBO’s comic-book adaptation Watchmen used the superhero genre to launch a withering critique of white supremacy and its insidious, systemic influence in the U.S.) But it does mean that storytellers across media need to be cognizant of the moral and political undertones of their portrayals to an extent that Weil and co-showrunner Nikki Toscano don’t seem to have been. I trust that they as well as Peele, a busy filmmaker whose level of creative input here is unclear, have their hearts in the right place. It’s just a shame that there seems to be so much distance between what Hunters wants to say and what it actually expresses.