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weightlessribbons · 5 years

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The politics of RWBY and its faunus subplot

I love RWBY but every time I think about its politics it gives me a goddamn migraine

disgustingly long post below

So the main conflict of the story is the mostly apolitical struggle against the Grimm, and the largest subplot is the WF arc and the theme of anti-faunus racism

But the show has nearly nothing to say on the subject. Its message is almost utterly vacant.

We have Blake at the start of the show disillusioned with the only civil rights organization in existence, which is also a genocidal terrorist operation (🤔🤔🤔), and is left directionless and without a real idea of what to do.[1] Oobleck asks her how her being a huntress will solve the racism thing and she can't answer him. Okay, that's something: we could have a character arc about her finding direction and deciding to Do Something to Solve Racism.

But when she gives her speech at the end of the WF arc, in Menagerie like four volumes later, she still doesn't know what to do about racism! She scarcely mentions racism at all; all she says with any conviction is that the faunus population in general fails to denounce Adam’s WF. It reminds me of similar rhetoric with regard to Muslims in the US: if you're not loud enough in your denunciations, it's your own fault if people lump you in with the terrorists. Never mind that such demands are never made in good faith and minorities are lumped in with the terrorists anyway. If you're being discriminated against, it's your fault for not being a good enough citizen, and if you were just of better moral character you wouldn't be marginalized. That's all in the way of a plan Blake offers: just be a good person, and the humans will give you your rights!

So that's the message: racism is bad. Also, murdering innocent civilians is bad. Be a good person.

So what does "being a good person" mean?

Well, we can guess. A theme prominent here is forgiveness: Blake forgives Ilia. Implicit: the faunus should forgive the humans.[2]

That's it: forgiveness. Not, you know, any sort of political organization, or any sort of demands for justice, or any overthrow or even reform of corrupt institutions. Just keep playing the game and things will get better. Also, be willing to risk your life for others, and for the unity of the Society, even if they hate you. It’s not fair, but it’s the only way things get better.[3][4]

But is it, really?

We see a similar theme earlier, in V3. At the end of the volume we have narration by Salem to the effect of "unity" and "trust" being the greatest strengths of humanity. The obvious reading is, then, that unity and trust are Good. The Best, in fact. But what does that mean, exactly?

Cinder's monologue gives us an idea. According to her, the people have placed too much faith in their public institutions. Their "guardians" are authoritarian, secretive, and fallible.

There it is, then. The text is clear: distrust of powerful public institutions only helps the forces of evil.[5] (Also, the only people expressing such distrust are foreign chaos agents bent on destroying our freedoms.)

If "you should trust the authorities” seems to contradict the racism theme mentioned earlier, it actually doesn't. Racism in RWBY is never portrayed as an institutional or systemic issue; it's usually called "hatred". This allows for the text to acknowledge racism as an important issue that is a problem of character, rather than of power[6], and therefore attempts to address it should not destabilize existing power structures.

It’s no surprise, then, that racism, an ostensibly major theme, receives such scant attention. There's Weiss being racist, and Cardin being racist, the two things that receive more than a couple of lines on the topic. There's Blake's WF exposition that actually says very little about racism at all. There's a blink-and-you-miss-it "No Faunus" sign in a Mistral bar. There's Menagerie, some kind of faunus reservation, the nature of which is so vague it’s hard to say anything at all about it[7]. We get little attention to of (say) hiring or housing discrimination, or any other systemic racism; these are issues entirely foreign to the elite paramilitary children with whom the narrative is most concerned[8]. Again, racism presented as a character flaw, rather than a systemic issue of unjust power dynamics.

You can tell what a narrative cares about by what it emphasizes. The racism theme in the Vale arc is chiefly flavor for the hordes of faceless WF goons; the text doesn’t say anything worthwhile about racism itself. In the Mistral/Menagerie arc, the narrative is not about overcoming racism but about the recuperation of marginalized communities into the existing power structure in the name of unity and forgiveness.

What is lacking, I think, is any substantive or satisfying notion of justice. The text doesn’t give us any answer as to what should be done about racism, other than Be a Good Person, and that’s because racial justice simply isn’t that important to the narrative. Before solving a problem you must name it, and the text doesn’t. We have an entire racism/terrorism arc that manages to say nearly nothing on racism at all, because, as Blake says, the answer to the question of justice is complicated, and the text just doesn’t have the time.

[1]One funny thing to look at is Blake’s expository monologue to Sun in V1 about how the WF “turned dark”. The WF performed “organized attacks” by vandalizing discriminatory businesses and expropriating goods from corporations using “faunus labor”(does this mean slavery? or employees? that would be weird). It’s strange that these would be the things that forced her to leave; property crimes aren’t really a big deal compared to the killing of civilians depicted in the black trailer, which she for some reason doesn’t bring up. She says that it was working, and that human fear brought equality, but that such equality was bad since it wasn’t out of respect (and therefore would be fleeting). This is incredible in two ways. First: a government and populace that actually feared the WF would not bring equality, but rapid extermination (of the WF, that is). Fear doesn’t actually help unless you have power, and the WF seem to have no base of material or popular support and no praxis except insurrectionist violence[A]. Second: if it were somehow actually working, then why did Blake leave? What was the purpose of all this action, if not to attain power by making yourself a credible threat? Did you become a liberal out of nowhere? That she talks about property crime and “fear” instead of the killing of civilians is baffling.

[2]Yes, I know that Blake wants them to specifically go to Haven and physically stop the WF. Yes, stopping a terrorist attack is good, even if these civilians aren't at all fit for purpose. But this doesn't itself help to stop racism, which is why I didn't mention it specifically above.

[3]This mirrors the confrontation between Yang and Raven wrt Salem and the relic.

[4]We do learn later that Blake wants a “new” WF. This means, presumably, that the WF will go back to peaceful protest. But that doesn’t come up in her speech, and no mention, of course, of how it would help them in achieving their goals, or even what those goals are, specifically, other than ending “hatred” in general. March to End Racism. What a visionary.

[5]Also, distrust, anger, and other “negative emotions” attract the Grimm. That’s like metaphysical tone policing right there.

[6]There’s backstory of faunus having been enslaved which would count as systemic racism, but it doesn’t come up later or really affect anything on-screen, and the text doesn’t portray it at enough length or depth to characterize it as such.

[7]Menagerie being crappy must be understood within a wider context: why live in Menagerie, if it sucks, instead of where everyone else lives? Not much attention given to why this happens (other than perhaps “individuals are racist”). And does Menagerie being crappy actually have any consequences? Like economically, or socially? We don’t see them.

[8]The times where it seems the text might make a systemic critique are Adam’s backstory and Atlas in general. Adam’s trauma isn’t really remarked upon; he’s not a sympathetic figure. We don’t know much about Atlas since that’s for next season, but limiting your systemic critique to the one racist place seems a bad way to do things. We’ll have to see how it goes.

[A] Also, it’s not clear when the WF moved from “property crime” to “kill all humans”(which is comically over-the-top), and no one remarks on it. It gives one the sense that the narrative sees property crime and genocide as equally objectionable.

[ADDENDUM] Some might object by way of noting that RWBY hasn’t taken us to Atlas yet, where the racism lives, and that the WF arc wasn’t primarily about racism, but terrorism, so one shouldn’t expect the theme of racism to be addressed before Atlas. The problem is, though, that the WF was ostensibly founded as a civil rights organization; you cannot meaningfully conclude an arc on the WF without addressing racism. For example, at the end of V5 says that she wants to build a “new” WF. What does this mean? We never find out, because it’s not that important.

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ratherhavetheblues · 7 years

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ABBAS KIAROSTAMI’S TASTE OF CHERRY “How do you climb this?”/ “I’m used to it.”

An Abbas Kiarostami film may be characterized as an alert against getting rushed away from one’s best interests. The dramas of his films gather with wit and industry a powerful, world-wide coercive force prohibiting the cultivation of maximum lucidity and sufficiency. These introductions in the form of movies do not confine themselves to self-standing aesthetic objects to be promoted to a Pantheon and treasured as a cinematic/ cultural dividend. But rather, they presuppose viewers with the same eccentric and compelling range of struggle as those depicted on the screen.

Taste of Cherry (1997), therefore, brings to light a suicidal figure having been underwhelmed by all he was supposed to subscribe to, and lacking the resolve to effectively obviate the tainted input of a vast and vastly overrated majority. Accordingly, we are in the presence of the stirring of a new range of interaction, a range which may take centuries to become well-known as such.

It may seem ill-advised to move along that long path under the auspices of someone having lost all interest in being alive while still in perfect health. The protagonist emits a pall of contempt toward any instinct except his own obliteration. Therefore, beyond rejection of such energies and whatever sparks of defiance toward that perversity may arise, where are we to look for the rallies at the core of Kiarostami’s problematic? As it happens, in characteristic style, there are surprising, entirely intuitive and (perhaps this film’s special gift) quite extensive figures impinging upon the central juggernaut in ways which provide much food for thought. (The special snare, I think you will find, within this prize-winning supposed suspense-drama, takes the form of seeming to be on familiar film-entertainment grounds while being as far away from such diversion as the outer edge of the universe.)

Driving his white (-washed) Range Rover along a nondescript fringe of Tehran, the protagonist introduces himself within his rather antiseptic moving cell from which he discreetly scowls upon a horde of men at a depot where work for that day only may turn up. As part of an ongoing study of a revelatory vigor to be found within and without a moving car, we have ragged, imperilled hopefuls intent upon the spark of possibility perhaps alive in the stranger and his costly property, and at the same time the deadened gaze of the supposed beneficiary of life. We are about to encounter myriad such ironies, quite readily obtained. The thematic challenge, we will soon find, I think, is what upshot do these cross-purposes press forward? “You want laborers?” someone calls through a side-window. “No,” is the answer to those hungry for food and hungry for life’s free purchases. The faces reflected on the windshield during his cruise become dynamic apparitions from out of a motive transcending those grave and urgent preoccupations. In the episode just completed, his eyes would often be directed skyward, the better to maintain his abstract ways. On departing the job mart seen to be far too raucous for his spate of calculative instruction to seal the deal, he comes upon two boys playing in the remains of what was once a crude economy auto. “Hello, Mister!” one shouts. “Hello,” he replies, in hollow tone. He pulls away quickly, unprepared for such gusto.

Before tackling this film’s major task of gusto, it might be helpful to set in relief how the extreme discontent of the protagonist can be regarded as an example of outrageous obscurantism by an antiquity like Roger Ebert; but at the same time speaking clearly and deeply to a wide-awake inhabitant of the 21st century. Similarly, the political package of recent Middle-East slaughter tying Peter Bradshaw into knots, as pertaining to Muslim edicts against suicide, sinks into a totally inappropriate, which is to say old-fashioned, recourse to have the nihilist a victim of recent warfare and somehow a reflective powerhouse. That only a small constituency of the viewers will not become lost here (a situation confronting a considerable number of exceptional film artists) is really beside the point. What we are delivered to is the absorbing dilemma of which figure or figures are still in play; and what that means.

After that first reconnoitre—as culminating in stalking a subject hopefully willing to assist his macabre ambition, along a miles-long gravel quarry (and who mistakes him as a gay predator and tells him, “Clear off or I’ll smash your face in!”), —we receive a first and perhaps the sterling instance in this film of what it takes to make dead weight something alive. The idea-man adrift in an elemental mineral range comes upon a young man sifting through mounds of what could be garbage or also, however, useable material having mistakenly gone amiss. The programmatic, self-consciously singular searcher stops the car and asks the perhaps more interesting searcher, “What are you collecting?” The reply is both obvious and far more subtle. “…plastic bags… I pick them up and liquidate them near the factory.” He has cut his hand that morning and therewith we have the makings of a dour, Nobody-like idea-maven, from Jarmusch’s film, Dead Man (1995), spinning big vengeful schemes and dreams in face of a sensuously integral figure (having veered to a hope to be immersed in sheets of accounting figures in a factory; and having sustained a fatal injury which could, for all that, manifest tinctures of pure gold). Striking a whimsical note here, the stalker asks how he came upon his U.C.L.A. jersey, redolent of Hollywood and Johnny Depp. The stark factuality of the information clothes sheer magic. (“I found it over there last week…”) The driver (like Nobody) begins to task the unassuming laborer about the exotic implications of his garb. But a loud noise cuts that off. The next sounds are those of the saucy jingle produced by some ragamuffins. “Pissy, Pissy, your dick’s all sticky!” Far from devotion to the sagacious poetry of William Blake, the singular sentinel is fine with that doggerel due to a standard a pedant like the driver and like Nobody have never taken seriously. The self-possessed laborer assures the taken-aback dogmatist, “Don’t worry. They’re just playing…” In a process of seemingly every-man-for-himself, he adds, when asked about what he does with his earnings, “I send it to my family…” More probing about this stalwart coming to be clearly too-resolved-to-be-tempted with “big deals,”— “You want to get married?”/ “No, I’m helping my family…”—indicates the level of indifference to other lives and other lights.

On the other hand, when later in the day the protagonist stages another probe of a lone wolf toiling in the mountainous desert, he finds in his interpersonal repertoire some vestiges of the charm of simple surroundings. A plant has gone belly-up and one last employee, a security guard living in a watch-tower with a purchase upon better days, welcomes him to his perch. “Come on up!” The visitor far more at home with elevators in urban concerns, complains (along the same reflexive softness we will see in the media fixture in The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), apropos of a milk-maid working in a dark cave), “How can you climb this ladder? You’re used to it?”/ “Yes…” This example of the full-scale sensual ordeal and deal which life grants us exposes in the displeased entity his soft abstractedness. On struggling to the shed where the semi-hermit lives, the protagonist briefly acknowledges that there’s some charm in the domestic dimension of the vigil. “What a nice place.” The settler, perhaps being modest, insists, “It’s nothing but earth and dust…” This prompts the assisted-burial zealot to maintain that his plans for joining the earth are alert to environmental priorities. “Earth gives us all the good things.” The host accommodates his guest’s obsession (“So, according to you, all good things return to the earth…”); but, on a dime, the apprentice-recruiter drops the poetry for the cold, hard cash. The solitary but congenial loner (his soccer star poster on the wall implying that the radio sending out echoey pop music includes his being a fan of maximal body and soul) is cooking an omelette for the visitor. The latter’s cheesy, “It isn’t worthy of you” [implying he could come into some big bucks and let some loser do the cooking] is redolent of the priority perhaps tempered but predominant. Just as the U.C.L.A. self-starter was clearly no one’s apprentice, the rooted high-flyer was not about to trade his depths for anything the soft schemer might suggest. Rounding out this “no deal” is a truck unloading gravel down a ridge adjacent to the nest. It frightens the dealer. But we and the inhabitant can see the point of taking time to watch how the cloud of dust from the truck’s load comes as a blessing.

Between those two genuine attractions, the figure who sees himself as a worthy (a pisser) does a full recruitment upon a diffident young soldier; and it is the Nobody enthusiasm and the salt of the dusty earth enthusiasm which key the specifics of this hyper-complicated self-destruction. Perhaps a significant factor of this film’s renown and honor consists in its narrative linearity as generating a sense of suspense as to the outcome of the protagonist’s most unusual endeavor. Like Hossein’s desperate scam in Close-Up and the boy’s ditching his mother, in Ten, anti-climax is the rule for Kiarostami. But whereas in those films the inconsequentiality of the melodrama is clearly telegraphed, in Taste of Cherry no such all-clear has been provided. We seem to have a “gripping” crisis hugely overshadowing the man from U.C.L.A. Getting this right calls for appreciation of irony and appreciation that there are little things which mean a lot.

The hunter sees the soldier plodding through the arid wastes and sells him on a ride. He’d been walking since early morning from his distant family home, and he was to report soon for overnight sentry duty (another and very different watchman). In addition to his fatigue, the gentle warrior has readily described himself as badly paid. So tentatively has the passenger presented himself, that the recruiter must digress to check into whether the Iranian military is a going concern. (Questionable soldiering adds to the perplexity in Close-Up.) Rather than closely appreciate the young night owl’s being a work in progress, the quick-results-man, perhaps telling himself that the talent pool has never been worse, runs past the reluctant hero the way it should be. “I had fun when I did my military service. It was the best time of my life… I met good friends…[all this bonhomie contributing to the sophistication of the violence]. Up at 4 a.m., and the Major would start counting” [at which the troopers would belt out a rousing burst of energy]. “Forceful counting is the best!” Then, on hearing a feeble example of the chanting of the march from the rural questioner, he decries, “Soldiers don’t count like that!” At which, the quiet passenger maintains, “I can’t help it,” his own confusion and the driver’s manic simplism swirling about. The boy demands the point of this off-tune presumptuousness; and the first clarification is more annoying noise. “In ten minutes you can earn six months’ pay… Forget the job; it’s the pay that matters… Do I look nuts?” The deal is easy to describe. He’ll take a lethal amount of sleeping pills [as if he were ever awake], go to an open grave nearby where they’ve come close to; and the employee will, early in the morning, either cover his body with soil or—should he have changed his mind and fudged the overdose—pull him out. Either way, he’s in the money. From the perspective of the driver, this is a business transaction. From the perspective of the passenger, who is far from a doctrinal religionist, this is creepy and being more crap coming from powerful idiots. “I can’t do this,” he insists, making no effort to reach the intuitively-discerned already-dead stranger. Sophistry in invoking the boy’s Kurdish warrior ancestry cannot reach the emotive levels being occupied. His response to such poison is to run away. A military faux pas, perhaps; but an incident, far from the first, far from the last, of a transcending courage.

Two other inductees come into the mix, far more in the capacity of their callings than their being called to act as bit parts in a deadly, and hopefully memorable, sensation. The Afghan watchman has a friend and compatriot who studies as a seminarian. Immediately on hearing of such an entity who might not be as averse to making an advantageous though dubious deal as the tough nuts he’d been up against, he drives to the man with all the answers, brings him on board and gets down to the game of advantage they both care a lot about. (Ironically, it comes to light that the young divine has sought out the watchman because the latter has a reputation for withstanding loneliness. The wheeler-dealer also quickly declares that he too has suffered from loneliness. But he’s a man who probes nothing but the consummation of his Big Adventure.) Not surprisingly, the dogmatist, similarly strapped for cash, flatly refuses to assist the snuff. We’re left then with doctrinaire maintenance of a power bloc being far more damaging to the world at large than to an edition of a snake-oil salesman. In countering such a wall, the hater attends more fully to his losing battle. “You believe God gives life and takes it when he sees fit. But there comes a time when a [supposedly more reflective] man can’t go on. He’s exhausted and he can’t wait for God. So he decides to act himself… You can’t feel what I feel…”

That latter assertion gives us ingredients of the protagonist’s outer limits of integral, uncanny discernment, the rigors and solitariness of which prompting him to run away in a form of retreat far more dreary than that of the young trooper. Taste of Cherry could be called a war movie (95% of which takes place in endless, First World War stony soil and trenches), in accordance with the helmsman’s Persian acquaintance with the evergreen disclosures of Heraclitus (who lived around 500 BC), who put out a little poem, indicating, “War is the father of all and the king of all; and some he has made gods and some men, some slaves and some free.” The pillar of holiness tells the deserter, “What you want wouldn’t be just.” The final candidate to assist in the trick packs a somewhat different sense of the just, being a scientist, in fact. But his calculations amount to a similar bankruptcy, very apt in bringing this vanity to a screeching halt. On the dusty road again, the schemer comes to a busy mineral deposit. He steps out of the vehicle going nowhere he wants to go, and the glorious black shadows he casts upon the tan surfaces are lost on him. Always focused on the worst, he comes to the living end in the form of a taxidermist having killed some quails for the sake of a forthcoming lecture at a museum of natural history. This latter apparition has materialized (like the teeming, omnipresent mainstream of calculative rightness) while our protagonist was experiencing a bit of depressive vertigo out amongst the delicious but untasted shadows. He’s an elderly acolyte of the dependability of useful facts and clichés, regardless of their wizened comprehensiveness. Noticing that his chauffeur is out of sorts, he goes into an extended lecture to dispel the heresy that the culture of natural science could be anything but a bowl of cherries. “To catch something, do it properly, with all your heart! Keep your feelings for more [scientifically] essential things. Specialization is the watchword. If a man wants to help, he ought to do it differently [than a failed method]. If you don’t explain your problem, who can help you? It’s either a family problem or debts. Every problem has its solution…” Surmising that his new acquaintance is suicidal, he has a Ted Talk ready to let the good times roll: He was, soon after his marriage, bedevilled by so many setbacks that he had become a great believer in suicide. One night, carrying a rope, he made his way to a mulberry tree, but was unable to install a noose. What he did put into play, though, was the very enjoyable taste of the berries, along with the sun gorgeously rising over a mountain top. He brought some mulberries back home for his wife to enjoy as well. “The mulberry saved my life! I don’t know your problem. If I did, I could recommend a doctor.” (Subsequently, he demonstrates how modern medicine can make big problems become little problems. A sufferer tells the expert he experiences great pain all over his body where he touches some alarming organs. The Good News man of science reduces the horror to the broken finger he’s been poking himself with.) “My dear man, your mind is ill. There’s nothing wrong with you. Change your outlook! The world isn’t the way you see it! Look at things positively. Life is like a train that keeps moving forward; and death waits at the terminus. The main thing is to think hard…” [and thinking hard might be a cyclical rather than lineal phenomenon]. This encouragement to communication from one who feels that going into preferences is an absolute waste of energy, while definitely facile and a function of someone who’s only too fond of hearing his own voice, does contain ripples of goodwill. But this brilliantly modulated strangulation of the pretense of truly heartfelt passion—coming along to the self-conscious and trite, “You want to give up the taste of cherries?” –speaks not really to the transaction the scientist is, despite diplomatic reflexes, glad to benefit from (to assist a seriously sick child); but to those of the viewers getting a blue-chip hit of the irrevocable shallowness of scientific culture, as dogmatic a blindness (as indifferent to full-scale phenomena) as religion. The final preparatory contact in this latter labor of official death finds the protagonist U-turning back to the museum to insist the hireling bring two stones to throw at him, hunkered down in the hole. “I might be asleep but still alive…Shake my shoulders. Perhaps I’ll be alive!” We have heard from the lab scholar, apropos of the class of taxidermy, “Don’t cut too deeply or the innards will spill out…” [you won’t have a pretty conversation-piece].

There’s little chance of cutting deeply, displaying guts, from this partnership. Consequently, after we behold the calculator finalizing his preparations—from a vantage point outside his hotel room and looking through a window which affords moonlight on the outer walls and shadows of foliage dovetailing with the clean lines of the structure—and taxiing to the open grave, there is a ravishing view of the moon and clouds which he sees but does not really see; there is lightning and thunder (way too earthy for him) ripping across the landscape where the dull and the swift have given us so much to ponder, and where now frightened birds cry, knowing, as they do, how closeness to death is their reality and their gift. There is a melodramatic pause and then a bum’s rush out, strikingly becoming Kiarostami and his crew in rude, off-focus video in the morning, blaring out Louis Armstrong and his “Hot Five,” with their version of the jazz/ Dixieland funeral march, “St. James’ Infirmary.” The actor playing the protagonist wanders by, no longer in the loop; and what rounds out the skirmishing is a regiment at quick-time chanting out their drill (versions of which we’ve just seen plenty); and then invited by the director to relax in the foliage, recalling the undermotivated troopers in Close-Up. That the jazz is part circus parade/ part dirge neatly sums up what this gift of a film has to offer.

#abbas kiarostami

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