#i think less about the trope itself more of the ideology the character holds if that makes sense

[milkteahoe]

How well do your different ships fit into the same tropes

[narrativelysignificantturtleduck]

so a while ago @volkswagonblues left a reply on this post saying that jeong jeong was an example of "someone who is ideologically 'right' but whose character is absolutely not likeable, or at least not in the mainstream fandom-popular way". i started writing this response, but i totally forgot it was in my drafts until i wrote my iroh analysis. it doesn't seem right for me to have an iroh analysis post and not a jeong jeong one so here it is, the jeong jeong character analysis nobody asked for:

volkswagonblues's response hits on exactly why i find his character so fascinating - he's good, but he's absolutely not nice or well-adjusted about it. and he's definitely not mainstream-fandom "likable". it's rare that i see hate for one of my minor character faves (one of the benefits of having them), but i have actually seen people say they don't like jeong jeong. mostly, it centers around him being "wrong" about firebending, as opposed to the sun warriors. i can see where that comes from. jeong jeong has the noticable accent and proverb-y speeches of the ~mystical asian master~ trope, but his viewpoint comes off as pretty harsh and simplistic. this can confuse an audience expecting easy answers from a kids show - are you supposed to see him as wise or not? for me, i think asking "are jeong jeong's beliefs wrong?" is the wrong question. instead, you should ask: "why does jeong jeong have those beliefs?"

and the more you think about that, the more you see that he isn't actually wrong. firebending is the only type of bending where the bender produces the element from their own body rather than using their surroundings. it is someone imposing their will on the world, even more so than the other forms of bending. iroh sums this up nicely:

"Fire is the element of power. The people of the Fire Nation have desire and will, and the energy to drive and achieve what they want."

there's nothing wrong with that in theory, but in the show, this drive and power manifests as the fire nation's imperialist conquest, and the goal they're trying to achieve is world domination. as a former high-ranking military official, jeong jeong has seen firsthand the ways firebenders use their power to hurt people. the culmination of the fire nation's ideology is a plan to burn the entire earth kingdom to the ground - exactly the kind of wide-scale destruction he describes in his first cautionary speech:

"Without the bender, a rock will not throw itself! But fire will spread and destroy everything in its path if one does not have the will to control it!"

you could say that firebending is misused by the fire nation, but that feels like a No True Scotsman fallacy ("that's not true firebending!"). the fact is, firebending's unique qualities fall in line with the nation's imperialist ideology. jeong jeong hates his bending because it is inextricably tied to the war he hates.

like many, i once thought a trip to the sun warriors would be healing for jeong jeong, but i've since realized that's not what he needs. jeong jeong is perfectly aware that firebending isn't always destructive - he counsels restraint and control, not total suppression, and he even alludes to sun warrior beliefs:

"Feel the heat of the sun. It is the greatest source of fire. Yet, it is in complete balance with nature!"

going to see some dragons who tell him that firebending is about the sun and life won't change his mind. 'of course it's not inherently evil,' he'll say. 'but it has been used in terrible ways'. his feelings aren't about firebending in the abstract. they're about firebending as it is used. that it has the capacity to support an ideology of conquest, that he and others have given into its destructive side and committed such atrocities with it. he's right to hate that. (i also feel like he'd resent the sun warrior civilization for their isolationism. i mean, i would, if i'd put my life on the line to fight against my nation and it turned out there were a bunch of people who agreed with me but did nothing about it.)

so if jeong jeong and the sun warriors aren't philosophically opposed (except re: their involvement in the war), why does his view of firebending seem so much harsher? because - and here we come back to the original point - he's not likeable. he's a strict teacher and plenty of us (especially if we were kids when we watched the show) have a knee-jerk negative reaction to that. his speeches about the danger of fire are grandiose. but here's the thing: the speech where he says the most derogatory things about firebending is not one where he's teaching. it's one where he opens up to katara:

"I've always wished I were blessed like you - free from this burning curse."

this reveal that he wants to be a waterbender means that everything he says to her about his bending is less about what he believes about firebending in general and more about his own personal struggles. and in that context, it's heartbreaking:

"It forces those of us burdened with its care to walk a razor's edge between humanity and savagery. Eventually, we are torn apart."

this is the core of it all - jeong jeong doesn't just hate the fire nation and its war, he hates himself, hates that he holds that destructive power inside him. he doesn't seem to struggle with the act of bending (another reason why the sun warriors wouldn't necessarily be any help) but he clearly doesn't want to do it, probably because it reminds him of when he did terrible things with it. no wonder he calls it a curse.

and so here's what we're left with: jeong jeong leaves the fire nation military because he is right that the war is wrong, and he counsels control and restraint in opposition to the imperialist ideology of constant expansion and conquest. however, he is severely traumatized and full of guilt from his participation in said imperialist conquest, and that means he comes off as harsh and overly negative. right, but not likeable.

while i was writing this post, i was rewatching a lot of clips from the show, and i got curious about his voice actor, who i suspected was actually asian (unlike most of the voice actors). it turned out i was correct - his name is keone young, and he's had a very long career - but he's hawaiian and doesn't have the accent that probably made me guess that. he has this to say about how he portrays the one-dimensional accented characters he often plays:

“I want to portray that person with an accent who is real instead of a stereotyped version of it," he said. "I’ve always wanted to see myself as the one the story revolved around so that it was my story not your story. I always try to convey I have some kind of philosophy or point of view.”

(read the full interview here)

i bring this up because while i think jeong jeong's memorability can partially be attributed to the atla writers giving him a cool backstory and dramatic lines, what keone young says here about taking a character who's a bit of a stereotype and making them seem real, with their own philosophy and point of view...well, that's exactly jeong jeong. despite his limited screentime, we get a clear picture of who he is and what he believes. and who he is is someone who fully embodies his radically anti-imperialist politics, who has come to his beliefs from traumatic experience that's made him bitter. as the atla renaissance pushes us to reevaluate these children's cartoon characters with older eyes and modern-day politics, it's worth looking at a striking minor character like jeong jeong, who might not be fandom-likable but who has a lot of depth to offer and a perspective worth considering.

[rhythmic-idealist]

@dragonofyang reblogged your post and added: “rhythmic-idealist: I’ve talked about this before but I’m thinking...”

I think this is a really excellently-put analysis, because the ancestors as thematic devices is something I really wish Homestuck had expanded on if only to explore avenues such as this. I definitely feel like the text (intentionally or not on Hussie’s part) makes the point about hemophobia and bigotry, but then fails to properly bring it home the way it deserved, especially since one of the main themes of the comic itself is that challenging the status quo of arcs/destiny/etc. is something we can and should do because there is more to life than accepting your fate. In fact I’d even argue that fighting fate is what can really develop a character and a story.

Kankri grew up in a world of “niceness”. Where he’s coddled and cared for and the people are good to him, but he’s ultimately denied his own agency. Instead of overt oppression the way the Signless endured, he grew up in a world of microaggressions and a thousand cuts to his independence. People insisting he not do things or let others help him because it’s their job, regardless of whether he is physically capable or not. He’s not allowed to challenge himself because his destiny is to be cared for and kept in a gilded cage.

The Signless, meanwhile, grew up in a world where if you were off-spectrum, you’ll die and so will everyone you know, everyone you had contact with, and probably their neighbors for good measure and whatever passersby pissed off the subjuggulator doing you in. So in this world, kindness is a radical thing, and the Signless had this unique perspective of being able to remember a world where he, once upon a time, was taken care of and treated with (some) respect as an individual, even if not as an agent with his own free will. Anything is better than the overt violence of Alternia.

And with all the dialogue about free will and fate throughout (but especially toward the end), it would’ve been really beautiful to me to see this addressed more fully as well.

But it’s hard to figure out how to word it since Hussie and the text itself are very closely linked thanks to Homestuck’s unique history/creation, so I totally get your struggle there. I had a hard time figuring out how to respond to you partially because of that. I suppose you could arguably say that the canon text is given to us via an unreliable narration, given the general snark of the omniscient narration, and the deep character flaws that influence the story whenever we follow one specific character’s point of view. I don’t quite remember what character(s) we follow when we get that framing about how Beforus’ softness ruined Kankri, but given how he himself feels about his position in Beforan society, it’s entirely possible the framing is partially due to a character’s viewpoint, so arguing with the text itself is totally appropriate since it’s challenging specific biases characters hold thanks to their upbringing.

I appreciate your response SO much dragonofyang; I didn't say that enough below so I'm taking the time to again right now.

This is a really interesting comment to me and I appreciate it a lot. I think that in response to your point about what framed Kankri like that.... I had to stop and think about that. We get introduced to Kankri through Meenah, and interact with him as Karkat, Latula, and Porrim- and Meenah again, as he later jumps into a conversation she and Horuss are having (and Cro... nus.....? I think?). But I don’t think the framing.... is actually inherently in any of those characters, so what is it?

I think what frames Kankri that was is his existence as satire, and the fact that he’s being interjected into a conversation with context.

If Kankri was just a person, that would be one thing. But we know, immediately, that Kankri is a joke about Tumblr SJWs, in a broader joke about 1) Tumblr users (the nature of Bubblr), and 2) various internet-user tropes in general.

So there already is a joke about soft snowflake SJWs. There already is a perception that SJWs are sheltered from the real problems of the world, and that being less sheltered would help them- to the point that people think that things like trigger warnings, people asking that you use the proper language about their gender and orientation, and other things that are either accessibility tools or seeking a kinder but not fake, playing-pretend, or damaging world are bad.

There’s already this perception that softness creates sheltered people with no character development and trauma helps people build character, and with characters like Kankri and the Signless, they would fundamentally be inserted into that conversation whether Kankri was an intentional joke about it or not. And then, when deciding what to do about that- Kankri became a joke that targeted things that fundamentally upheld the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”/“not only are all SJWs actually bad and damaging, but the reason they’re bad and damaging is because they were too soft and sheltered in their safe spaces” mentality.

And I am trying to be fair to Homestuck. More than I have tried to give benefit of the doubt, in the past. If you left Openbound with that impression, it could have been to play along with your those preexisting statements just to pull the rug from under you- like how you thought for a while (I admit to the fact that I did) that Bro training Dave sucked, but was just cartoon logic, and then the rug was pulled from under you and it was actually just abuse because abuse is real in this universe because these are people.

Kankri could have been set up to surface level enforce the idea that soft places generate what actual flaws he has (inconsistent ideology, weaponizing the language of progressive ideology against people he has personal grudges against, expending more care on looking right and sounding right than how you’re actually impacting people, playing oppression olympics) and then subverted with a jump back to look at Beforus properly- oho, no, look at all these little seeds I’ve planted, it is actually a complex web of oppressive forces, emotional safeguards built against them, poor resources and influences, and propaganda that did this. This is actually what happens when you build a planet that tries to softly coddle someone to sleep every time a hint of non-logic-based emotion slips into their argument. This is actually what happens when you beat down someone’s ability to emotionally connect with the people who need them most. This is actually what happens when you take someone who is primed to be The Signless and make them more terrified of being wrong than of the fallout their actions have on their friends. (And more. I don’t want to make this way longer than it is but please please know I know I know it’s more.)

But it didn’t.

So I can stand here and know that the seeds were planted, but they didn’t even- it doesn’t even clarify at any point to me whether they were planted intentionally, and at the end of the day, in terms of which messages I would ever hold Homestuck responsible for- whether the seeds for this argument were planted intentionally or not doesn’t matter to me. Right now, if they were, it would just be plausible deniability, in a joke that punches down and laughs not only at the places Kankri was wrong but several of the ones in which he was right or trying in the right way.

So anyway, I hold canon responsible for laughing at trigger warnings and MOGAI/“unusual” LGBTQ+ identities and (arguably, I need to fact check this) activism that isn’t (White) Feminism First, Everything Else After, etc.

Whether it’s saying that Beforus’s softness made the Signless into Kankri is I guess not the same as that, so I got off topic for a second.

But that last long paragraph, “the seeds were planted but-,” is what explains why I feel like I’m arguing with the text instead of explaining its authorial intent. The lens you were talking about turns out to be the fact that Kankri is satire, in a world that already has one extremely common way to satirize this thing, which Kankri wound up matching- despite any other content about him, because that content hasn’t been used to subvert this or twist against this- beat for beat.

[safflowerseason]

Veep and Political Parties

In response to some Anon inquiries that @casliyn sent my way…essentially, what are Dan and Amy’s political views? 

This is a great question that really gets at the heart of some fundamental issues about what Veep tried to accomplish as a television show (and how it changed after S4). As usual, I went off in another mini-essay about Veep and American politics, so this time I inserted the “Keep Reading” link in order to preserve everyone’s timelines. But if you’re so inclined...keep reading :-) 

One of the central conceits of Veep is that political parties are never explicitly mentioned, and I believe that decision drew mixed views from critics?? (I didn’t watch when it first premiered, so I don’t have any of the original reviews on hand.) The decision to never mention party names vs. mentioning them is kind of a lose-lose in terms of criticism…the West Wing was criticized for doing the opposite of Veep, after all. Both choices open certain narrative doors and close others. 

Also, a lot has changed since the show first premiered. Watching the show now, it seems obvious that Selina belongs to the more liberal political party, because the current conservative party has become a party unwilling to abide by or protect democratic norms. As a result, the choice to not mention any parties by name seems a bit…problematic, or at the very least a big cop-out. But in 2011-2012, everyone could still assume that both parties chose to operate on the same playing field, just with contrasting political ideologies. 

Anyway, to the question at hand: Dan and Amy’s political affiliations, and therefore, Selina’s…you can’t really talk about politics on Veep without talking about Selina. 

Ultimately, the answer really depends on which “era” of the show you choose to refer to, S1-S4 or S5-S7.

In the Iannucci era of the show, especially early on, there are evident hints that Selina has more liberal political views. In S1, she and Amy work on a Clean Jobs bill and Selina is interested in progressive issues such as access to abortion and childcare for women in the workplace (these issues are considered “progressive” in the US *rolls eyes*). The fact that she was chosen to be vice president in spite of being a woman and divorced seems significant well. There are also a bunch of small asides that suggest a more liberal political outlook, like Dan disdainfully talking about the Drudge Report. Based on these hints, if you wanted, you could make the assumption that Amy and Dan work for the equivalent of the Democratic Party in the Veep universe, and therefore hold more socially liberal views. 

But that’s not really the point of the show, is it? In the very first episode, Selina is presented to the audience with a more typically liberal legislative goal, and almost immediately, we learn that she can’t get it as easily as she thought. This is the primary struggle in S1-S4 of Veep. The characters attempt to balance their political convictions and goals with the structural demands of a political system that severely constrains what they are able to say and accomplish in order to remain in power. In S1, the Clean Jobs bill gets scrapped because the President’s legislative agenda takes precedence over Selina’s. What other steps can she take in order to achieve her goals? Will she decide to take them? Political affiliation is just the beginning of the story.

However, what is crucial is that the very notion of a political party still matters in these seasons (for the most part). Selina learns in Ep. 1.01 that a good chunk of her party leadership is in the pocket of the plastics industry (and therefore oil), which means her Clean Jobs bill is going to have less support than she thought. In Episode 3.02, it’s a game-changer that POTUS has just come out in favor of limiting abortion access, because he’s the leader of Selina’s political party and she can’t just brush off what he says. In 3.03, Doyle informs Selina that he will make sure the senior members of the party abandon her if she puts childcare in her campaign kick-off speech. You have the sense in S1-S4 of Veep that “the party” is a political force that Selina can’t escape, one that binds her to men she can’t stand and whose political goals are different from hers, like Doyle and Furlong. In Ep 2.09, she tells Amy she’ll run against POTUS to “save the party from itself.”

As for Dan and Amy, their jobs as political strategists are to score wins for their bosses, even when it means ignoring their private political convictions. Amy criticizes O’Brien’s white supremacist politics, but goes and strikes a deal with him anyway. Dan is pro-choice, but pushes Selina to say whatever she thinks will win her more political support. Even for Dan, who spends half of S2 thinking about leaving Selina’s office, there’s never a question that he might bail for someone like O’Brien. Instead, he’s thinking about jumping ship for the current darling of the party, Danny Chung. Dan Egan is known in D.C. as a political strategist for the [X] Party, and that fundamentally shapes his career path. 

All this complicated nuance goes away in the Mandel era of the show. He would probably say that no one in Veep has any political convictions, or that they sacrificed them long ago. In Mandel’s vision of Veep, what a politician believes does not matter. Politicians and the people who work for them will say whatever they have to in order to gain power. Political affiliations of the characters are meaningless. What’s more, they can do and say whatever they want because the system allows them to do so. Voters, parties, political interest groups, and even elections are as meaningless a politician’s convictions. This is a very one-dimensional (and I would say fundamentally uninteresting) vision of politics.

One of my favorite television critics, Emily Nussbaum, said on Twitter that she always thought the decision to not mention the political parties by name was a bit of a cop-out. But in S7, it worked in the show’s favor because the parties essentially disappear and the primary election is just this crazed feeding frenzy between separate egotistical and power-hungry individuals. 

I would argue that this captured the sensibility of Trumpian politics, but doesn’t actually get at what really happens with political primaries. What we witnessed in the 2016 Republican primary was a battle for the soul of Republican party. That Trump, with his hybrid brand of demagogic and racist populism, won it easily indicated all kinds of ominous things to come. The same thing is happening now in the Democratic primary. There’s a fundamental fight over how the party should reinvent itself in the wake of the specific threats posed by Trump and others like him. That’s why there are twenty people running for one nomination.

How different would the final season of Veep had been if the show had seriously explored the the stakes of primary elections? The show dances around the idea a bit with Kemi and Selina, but in the end just goes for the lazy “millenials are whiny” trope. In what world do Buddy and Selina exist in the same political party? In what world did Amy voluntarily work for him—not to mention agree to marry him—if he was really a religious bigot all along? The creative team seemed so insistent on spotlighting the primary elections. Why waste the opportunity to say something really interesting and specific about them as a dimension of American political life? To me, that seems far more interesting and relevant than jokes about how election tampering is actually necessary for winning. 

[douxreviews]

Star Trek: Discovery - ‘New Eden’ Review

Pike: "If you're telling me that this ship can skip across the universe on a highway made of mushrooms, I kind of have to take it on faith."

By nature I love brevity: Though the improvements to Discovery as a whole continue to do their work, this episode is bogged down by its attempt at religious themes when it lacks a clear understanding of religion.

'New Eden' starts out with the same log that closed out last week's 'Brother.' The opening scene with Burnham and Pike is a good example of the new status quo aboard the Disco. The friendlier, more team-oriented leadership of Captain Pike combined with the more relaxed, less anxious tone of the series as a whole make the scenes on the Disco herself work well. The character interactions were good, particularly between Saru and Tilly. I also thought the final solution looked really cool, even if there are numerous science gripes one could take. It was fairly obvious that Tilly's friend wasn't real, and once we found out it was a friend from her childhood, I guessed that she was dead. Still, that didn't make their interactions any less fun to watch, and the moment Tilly figures out that May is dead was sufficiently creepy. I think it's Mary Wiseman's expression that really sells it.

My chief gripe with the episode lies in the scenes set on the planet. To explain fully why I don't like these sequences, I'll have to get pretty in depth with philosophy. If you're not interested in reading all that, the TL;DR is that the episode fails to understand religion or religious people enough to portray them realistically, and that its attempts to stay above religious disagreements and not take sides lead it to unintentionally choose a different side entirely. There's a lot more to unpack than just that, though, and that's really the bulk of what I have to say about this episode, so continue on if you are interested in engaging your philosophical side.

There's an old story about five blind wise men wandering through the desert. After a time, they come across an elephant, and unable to see it, they reach out to touch the creature. The first grabs hold of the leg and declares, 'The elephant is like a tree.' The second grabs hold of the trunk and says, 'No, the elephant is like a snake.' The third grabs hold of the tail and corrects both, 'No, the elephant is like a rope.' The fourth grabs hold of the ear and informs them, 'The elephant is actually like a heavy piece of leather.' And the final one grabs hold of the elephant's side and says, 'It's clear the elephant is like a wall.' The five blind wise men go on their way, arguing about who is right and really knows what the elephant is like.

Anyone who's ever sat through a philosophy class will tell you the purpose of the story and its moral: the five blind wise men cannot agree on what the elephant is like because none of them has the full picture. Each has a piece of the puzzle, but none of them can see the totality of the elephant. This is then used as an analogy for God. No one religion can have the whole picture because we are all blind wise men who have only a part of it right. From the ideological basis that this story illustrates have come a multitude of pluralistic movements and systems of thought. Someone who has a 'Coexist' bumper sticker on their car or who describes themself as 'Generally spiritual, but not confined to any religion' probably derives their worldview from this basic concept. Though I happen to disagree with this idea of God, I won't argue this here. The problem comes when this is touted as a religious awakening that all religious people should agree with and get behind.

Let me ask you this: how do you know that the five blind wise men all have only a part of the puzzle? How do you know that the whole elephant isn't really like a rope, or a tree? The answer, of course, is because you know what the elephant is really like. It's because you can see. So someone who takes this analogy from the story of the five blind wise men and the elephant makes the following claim: Of all the many people on Earth who have searched for the truth, I alone can see. This is, of course, the central claim of anyone who believes they know what God is like. So the 'Coexist' spirituality is itself a religion, with its own view of God, though perhaps a view that's not definitively established. And because it is a separate religion in and of itself, it contradicts the other religions that it often claims to incorporate into its beliefs.

A monotheistic religion, like Christianity or Judaism or Islam, explicitly requires that its deity be the only true deity, and the only correct view of that deity. No one who truly believes in the Biblical God or Yahweh or Allah would ever decide that, just because everyone in their group believes something different, their true savior must be a part of all of those beliefs. The expectation that this will occur assumes both that all religions are essentially compatible with each other and that the amalgamation of these religions is a true cooperation of all of them rather than a separate religion itself. Both assumptions are false.

The resulting misconception of religion makes 'New Eden' somewhat hard to watch for a religious person like myself. Going the route of a combination of every religion is a clear attempt to not have to choose a side, but in the very attempt it chooses a side all its own. And making it so much about sides creates the friction between belief systems we see nowadays. Instead of pretending we all believe essentially the same thing, let's recognize where we disagree and be human beings together apart from that. Of course you should try to convince people if you truly believe you are right - it's an important question - but if you can't live with someone who makes a different choice about where they put their faith, you're in for a difficult life. This, along with the whole science vs. faith theme - a trope that needs to die - make all of the sequences on the planet fall flat and far short of where they could be.

The execution of this episode was perfectly fine, I just didn't like the writing choices they made on the planet. Jonathan Frakes continues to serve as a competent and proficient director, and all the acting was good. Sonequa Martin-Green seems to have settled into the role of Burnham much more this season, which I appreciate, and all our main characters continue to do well.

Strange New Worlds:

The planet was called Terralysium by its inhabitants. What we saw of it seemed like a fairly run-of-the-mill small country town.

New Life and New Civilizations:

The Red Angel continues to overshadow the season. It's also possible that the being who looks like May is actually some other creature. As far as civilizations go, the New Edeners fell flat.

Pensees:

-Spock is in a psych ward at Starbase 5. Huh.

-Pike has already redecorated his ready room so it has seats.

-I liked Stamets' fears that he'll see Culber in the network and won't be able to leave. Since Wilson Cruz is a regular this season, expect more of that.

-So, after all that pluralistic vague religion, mushrooms are the source of eternal life? Okay then.

-We heard a bit about WWIII, an event well-documented in Trek history.

-Lt. Owosekun grew up in a Luddite community, huh? I bet her parents weren't too thrilled with her decision to join the high-tech Starfleet.

-If the asteroid material weighs so much, how was Burnham able to hold a chunk of it last episode?

-It was great to see Saru acting as a mentor to Tilly. More, please; those are my two favorite characters!

-Stamets knew exactly what was going on on the bridge before he even entered. Hmmm...

-So, it's quite the coincidence that the Red Angel happened to grab a group of soldiers that contained at least one Christian, one Jew, one Muslim, one Buddhist, one Hindu, one Shintoist, and one Wiccan. Seems unlikely that you'd find that sort of cross-section of religions in any group of soldiers. Also, every one of them had a copy of their scripture on them at the time?

-I love Detmer's reaction to Tilly's plan. Actually, I just love Detmer in general.

-The one bit of religious theme/imagery I really appreciated was at the end when Jacob plugs the power source into the church and the lights turn on. They'd said that the reason pilgrimages had stopped was because the lights were off, and here science solved that problem. Science fueled faith, which is a cooperation of the two that you don't often see in television.

-I'm surprised they so easily used the spore drive. I thought after the end of last season it would take a whole lot for them to use it again.

Quotes:

Saru: "Before we can care for others, we must care for ourselves."

Tilly: "No, I think your orders are probably good. I need to go pass out now."

Pike: "Don't make me laugh." Burnham: "Fortunately for you, I was raised on Vulcan. We don't do funny." Pike: *laughs*

Burnham: "Sir, I learned the hard way what not following orders can lead to."

3 out of 6 fungi of eternal life.

CoramDeo got tired of sitting around and picking blackberries.

[nicklloydnow]

“Stakhanov shattered this norm by a staggering 1,400%. But the sheer quantity involved was not the whole story. It was Stakhanov's achievement as an individual that became the most meaningful aspect of this episode. And the work ethic he embodied then—which spread all over the USSR—has been invoked by managers in the West ever since.

Stakhanov's personal striving, commitment, potential and passion led to the emergence of a new ideal figure in the imagination of Stalin's Communist Party. He even made the cover of Time magazine in 1935 as the figurehead of a new workers movement dedicated to increasing production. Stakhanov became the embodiment of a new human type and the beginning of a new social and political trend known as "Stakhanovism."

That trend still holds sway in the workplaces of today—what are human resources, after all? Management language is replete with the same rhetoric used in the 1930s by the Communist Party. It could even be argued that the atmosphere of Stakhanovite enthusiasm is even more intense today than it was in Soviet Russia. It thrives in the jargon of Human Resource Management (HRM), as its constant calls to express our passion, individual creativity, innovation and talents echo down through management structures.

(…)

The Stakhanovites' celebrity-status offered enormous ideological opportunities. It allowed the rise of production quotas. Yet this rise had to remain moderate, otherwise Stakhanovites could not be maintained as an elite. And, as an elite, Stakhanovites themselves had to be subjected to a limitation: how many top performers could really be accommodated before the very idea collapsed into normality? So quotas were engineered in a way which we might recognise today: by the forced distribution or "stack ranking" of all employees according to their performance.

After all, how many high-performers can there be at any one time? The former CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch, suggested 20% (no more, no less) every year. Indeed, the Civil Service in the UK operated on this principle until 2019 but used a 25% top performer quota. In 2013, Welch claimed this system was "nuanced and humane," that it was all "about building great teams and great companies through consistency, transparency and candor" as opposed to "corporate plots, secrecy or purges." Welch's argument was, however, always flawed. Any forced distribution system inextricably leads to exclusion and marginalisation of those who fall in the lower categories. Far from humane, these systems are always, inherently, threatening and ruthless.

Something that often gets forgotten is that Stalinism itself was centred on an ideal of the individual soul and will: what is there that "I" am not able to do? Stakhanov fitted perfectly this ideal. Western culture has been telling itself the same ever since—"the possibilities are endless".

This was the logic of the Stakhanovite Movement in the 1930s. But it is also the logic of contemporary popular and corporate cultures, whose messages are now everywhere. Promises that "possibilities are endless," that potential is "limitless," or that you can craft any future you want, can now be found in "inspirational" posts on social media, in management consultancy speil and in just about every graduate job advertisement. One management consultancy firm even calls itself Infinite Possibilities.

Indeed, these very sentences made it on to a seemingly minor coffee coaster used by Deloitte in the early 2000s for their graduate management scheme. On one side it said: "The possibilities are endless." While on the other side, it challenged the reader to take control of destiny itself: "It's your future. How far will you take it?"

Insignificant though these objects may appear, a discerning future archaeologist would know that they carry a most fateful kind of thinking, driving employees now as much as it drove Stakhanovites.

But are these serious propositions, or just ironic tropes? Since the 1980s, management vocabularies have grown almost incessantly in this respect. The rapid proliferation of fashionable management trends follows the increased preoccupation with the pursuit of "endless possibilities," of new and unlimited horizons of self-expression and self-actualisation.

It is in this light that we have to show our selves as worthy members of corporate cultures. Pursuing endless possibilities becomes central to our everyday working lives. The human type created by that Soviet ideology so many decades ago, now seems to gaze at us from mission statements, values and commitments in meeting rooms, headquarters and cafeterias—but also through every website and every public expression of corporate identity.

Stakhanovism's essence was a new form of individuality, of self-involvement in work. And it is this form that now finds its home as much in offices, executive suites, corporate campuses, as in schools and universities. Stakhanovism has become a movement of the individual soul. But what does an office worker actually produce and what do Stakhanovites look like today?

(…)

The dangers of failing to appear extraordinary, talented or creative were significant. The series showed how working life descends into unending personal, private and public struggles. In them, every character loses a sense of direction and personal integrity. Trust disappears and their very sense of self increasingly dissolves.

Normal days of work, normal shifts, no longer exist. Workers have to perform endlessly, gesturing so that they look committed, passionate and creative. These things are compulsory if employees are to retain some legitimacy in the workplace. So working life carries the weight of potentially determining a person's sense of worth in every glance exchanged and in every inflection of seemingly insignificant interactions—whether in a board room, over a sandwich or a cup of coffee.

Friendships become impossible because human connection is no longer desirable since trusting others weakens anyone whose success is at stake. Nobody wants to fall out of the Stakhanovite society of hyper-performing top talents. Performance appraisals that may lead to dismissal are a scary prospect. (…)

We asked these questions in detail in our research which charted the evolution of performance management systems and the cultures they create over two decades. We found that performance appraisals are becoming more public (just as in Industry), involving staff in 360-degree systems in which every individual is rated anonymously by colleagues, managers and even clients on multiple dimensions of personal qualities.

Management systems focusing on individual personality are now combining with the latest technologies to become permanent. Ways of reporting continuously on every aspect of our personality at work are increasingly seen as central to mobilising "creativity" and "innovation."

And so it might be that the atmosphere of Stakhanovite competition today is more dangerous than in 1930s Soviet Russia. It is even more pernicious because it is now driven by a confrontation between people, a confrontation between the worth of "me" against the worth of "you" as human beings—not just between the worth of what "I am able to do" against what "you are able to do." It is a matter of a direct encounter of personal characters and their own sense of worth that has become the medium of competitive, high-performance work cultures.

(…)

But the truth is that people do have limits. They do now, just as they did in the USSR in the 1930s. Possibilities are not infinite. Working towards goals of endless performance, growth and personal potential is simply not possible. Everything is finite.

Who we are and who we become when we work are actually fundamental and very concrete aspects of our everyday lives. Stakhanovite models of high-performance have become the register and rhythm of our working lives even though we no longer remember who Stakhanov was.”

[theseerasures]

Top 5 changes you’d make for TLJ

let it be known that i tried FOR DAYS to make this into a coherent list rather than a disjointed series of essays (ironic given the movie i’m talking about) but you know what!! i’m gonna play this by ear and release responses by parts.

i feel like it’s maybe important for me to preface this for the general audience with the fact that i did, overall, love The Last Jedi. the reasons why have to do mostly with who i am as a person, and while i’d be happy to expound on the general differences between what i find interesting vs. what is good vs. what is socially responsible, this isn’t really the place for it. there is a LOT to criticize in the movie tho, so let’s get started with

ONE: From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!!!

this one is about Rian Johnson.

or more specifically, it’s about Rian Johnson vs. JJ Abrams as storytellers. this video touches on some of what i’m going to be talking about, but to be perfectly honest i find its explanation of ~potential vs. kinetic energy in filmmaking~ unsatisfying and unnecessarily pretentious. i don’t think the issue has to do with how Rian and JJ tell their stories at all, but what kinds of stories they’re interested in telling in the first place.

that video was right when it came to JJ–his primary focus as a writer is on the mystery box. more broadly, JJ is interested in actualizing the genre concept so that a story could revolve around it. Lost was ABOUT its own genre: being trapped on a mysterious, magical island that only gets more mysterious and magical propels the conflict. Alias was ABOUT spies in much the same way–the show was at its best when it was about aliases. this is not to say that his characters are bland or even secondary to the plot, but you do get the sense that they were selected because of how they’d react to the central situation–Jack is a man of science, Locke is a man of faith, they react to the mysteries of the island in divergent ways, so on and so forth.

this all sounds dumb and basic–like of course a genre guy would use genre to service the story–but what sets JJ apart is that he’s really good at reviving the potential of specific concepts and tropes and reminding us why we liked them in the first place. the success of his stories tend to rely on some metafictional baggage, on justifying why something was able to capture the zeitgeist. this is what makes him an appealing rebooter. the reason TFA was so great was the Star-Wars-ness of it all; not just invoking iconography like Masked Evil Dude with a Secret and the Death Star, but using that stuff to drive the plot in a way that we hadn’t seen before and reinforcing that there’s still untapped potential in the old story structures. the characters he introduced were, similarly, people who would act and react in interesting ways to a Star War: Poe embedded deep in the Resistance, Finn unwillingly falling into rebellion, Rey finding her place in a mystical destiny, etc etc. it’s all a remix, but it was a damn good one, and it reminded people why they loved Star Wars in the first place.

the problem with bringing in Rian Johnson as the followup act to JJ Abrams is that Rian Johnson doesn’t really give a shit about any of that.

it’s not that he’s incapable of letting ideas and plot issues simmer, it’s that i think Rian Johnson is at his core an ideas guy–his movies tend to be about archetypes and ideologies coming into conflict, about older ideas being torn open and examined and (only sometimes) rebuilt. he’s certainly capable of writing effective characters and dialogue, but on the whole that stuff is in service to exploring some kind of philosophical issue or idea. characters Stand for something in Rian Johnson movies–not in the sense that they have certain convictions that they hold tightly to, but in that they are often embodied by those convictions. his approach to genre works in much the same way; they’re helpful tools to explore certain ideas, but they don’t usually form the core of the narrative itself.

this makes him GREAT for Star Wars in one way but horrible for TLJ in a different way. on the one hand, this ‘verse has been replete with the kind of binaries that Rian loves to poke at: Light and Dark, order and rebellion, etc. on the other hand, his kind of hyper-scrutiny on Societal Norms or Western Thought or whatever else works best in a very controlled environment. Looper, for example, worked great in its discussion of selfishness/selflessness, fate/free will because the movie was a tiny beaker where two of the three leads literally played different iterations of the same character. TLJ worked substantially LESS well because–well, it’s a fucking sequel in a sequel trilogy that relies on affirming some of the meta-baggage the franchise has been carrying around for literal decades.

this is why the movie not only glossed over and shelved a lot of pre-existing questions and issues that we wanted to see more of, but also gave us a lot of padding that felt kind of unnecessary. Rian Johnson is fundamentally uninterested in franchise-related questions like what the fuck happened with Snoke and Ben or where the fuck are the Knights of Ren or where the fuck does Phasma disappear to for 4/5ths of every film; his main interest in making this movie were a series of philosophical issues dealing with historiography, personal/political stakes, and the methodology of war. to do that he had to introduce new conflicts, create new characters to an already bloated cast so they can act as ideological foils to our heroes, and (in one case) make kind of baffling assumptions about how pre-existing characters had developed offscreen. this is not to say that the ideas themselves were boring and the movie was wholly bad, but a lot of interesting ideas were very shoddily packaged as we alternated between feeling like really important stuff just kind of zipped by and being bored by all the NEW pipe that Rian wanted to lay so he could get to whatever ideological showdown he wanted to have.

so, yeah: i think Rian Johnson could do a lot of cool things in this franchise and am glad he’s doing the new trilogy where he can navel-gaze to his heart’s content, but i don’t think he was a very consistent following act for JJ Abrams (or honestly, for any part of the Star Wars sequel reunion tour). nix him, and if you can’t bring back JJ or Lawrence Kasdan, then at least bring in a seasoned franchise guy who’s willing to work with more of the pre-existing material.

(probably Justin Lin tbh)

[ryanmeft]

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald Movie Review

The Harry Potter universe is on the short list of fictional worlds that can sustain even a weak film, and that’s good, because with the second installment in the Fantastic Beasts series, it has to do just that. The constantly magical world---humongous felines that look like living Chinese dragons, mail rooms that shift like moving skyscrapers---and the typically stellar casting help get us through a story that is trying too hard to stretch a vulnerable franchise, replete with uninspiring plot twists and broken pacing.

Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) ended the last movie without any real over-arching goals he could call his own, and the labor of this movie is to give him some. To that end, it adds several characters and plot elements not even hinted at in the last one, probably because that movie needed to stand alone in case it underperformed. Among these: Newt’s brother, Theseus (Callum Turner), who is in the department of Magical Cops, and wants Newt to join him there. I’m not exactly sure why, as the latter doesn’t seem built for it, and not only does the film never elaborate, but Theseus and Newt’s relationship is all over the board, going from “Come work with me” to treating him like a fugitive and back again without much in the way of mooring. Also new is a sense of overarching story, which was teased with a questionable Johnny Deep surprise appearance in the last film. That story involves dark wizard Grindelwald attempting to rule over non-magic users so wizards can come out of the shadows, and manipulating a boy named Credence (Ezra Miller) into using his power to transform into a really angry dark cloud to do it. Newt’s hamstrung by an order not to leave Britain, which is a convenient excuse to drop Dumbledore into the mix. He’s played by Jude Law as much more of a cloak and dagger character than the wise old mentor of the Potter books. Zoe Kravitz debuts as Leta Lestrange, a former flame of Newt’s who has ended up engaged to his bro. Claudia Kim is Nagini---yes, that Nagini, and her addition is strange in an uncomfortable rather than a curious way. Returning cast include Katherine Waterston as Scamander’s estranged love interest Tina, and Alison Sudol and Dan Fogler as a couple dealing with a ban on wizards and non-wizards marrying.

I said of the previous film that “This movie is all about the beasts,” and praised the incredible level of visual creativity on-hand, including an absolutely spectacular world for magical monsters hidden inside a briefcase. That world returns, and now includes Victoria Yeates as Newt’s completely lovable, hideously underutilized assistant; there is a scene in which she revels in being doused by the waters from a pond containing a friendly sea monster that made me wish she was in the movie more and others in it less. Some favorite beasts return, but the only new one of serious consideration is that, well, fantastic dragon cat.

I also predicted it would be impossible for J.K. Rowling, who wrote the movie, and long-time Potterverse director David Yates to resist loading future sequels with fan service. I was right. Whereas the first film was caught up in the wonder of the beasts themselves and was a hell of a fun ride despite pretensions at world-building, this one is all about those pretensions. They occasionally almost work. To my great surprise, Jude Law is excellent as a young Dumbledore---in fact, he is a highlight. The movie wisely does not try to copy the character as he existed in the books or original movies, instead leaning full in to the idea that in his youth, he could be far more openly manipulative and willing to play chess with people. He’s still a good guy, of course, but he’s a good guy with more rough edges, and Law’s casting is spot on. Depp isn’t as horribly miscast as I expected him to be, though he’s rarely allowed to sink his teeth in. Grindelwald at this juncture is not so much his own character as a somewhat less creepy Voldemort, one whose plot is a tiny bit more complex and driven by a very warped ideology. If there’s more to his character that sets him apart, the team seems to be storing that up for later. 

Therein lies the trouble: with a planned five films in this series, it feels as if the Potter team is not just holding over their best cards for the next entries, but most of their good cards, too. Whereas Rowling, with the original series, almost always knew exactly where to drop in a new mystery or how to answer an old one and rarely resorted to filler, The Crimes of Grindelwald is often an advertisement for later entries. A return visit to Hogwarts that should have had fans squealing is neutered by the fact that nothing enticing happens there, while Grindelwald’s menace is fangless and mostly consists of him making speeches. Particularly annoying is the tease at the end of the film, which might have been something except that it relies on retconning an original-book plot point rather than expanding on one. Since there’s no possible way anyone could have thought of it, it left me feeling confused and cheated rather than anticipating the payoff to come in two years. All this build-up is at the expense of some of the more interesting characters, particularly Waterston, whose Tina is relegated to irrelevance.

All is not lost. There’s a lot of complaints about CGi ruining film, but the Potter franchise has always slapped those down, offering, by itself, a world that justifies the computer-animated era. It continues to do so here, and while the darker portents of the story aren’t fully served, the artists behind them give us a world that is. Secret meeting places hidden in cemeteries, glossy tiled floors of a new Ministry of Magic, and a particularly thrilling semi-cold opener succeed in setting a tone that could be really compelling if the story can catch up. My favorite bit was a carnival sideshow for magical freak acts like those still popular in the film’s 1920’s setting; it’s a marvelous combination of the wondrous and the seedy.

Unlike many, I don’t find Redmayne dull as a protagonist. I think after the rather cliche Chosen One trope that Harry often was (you know it’s true; the supporting cast made those stories), Newt’s more reserved, less action-hero persona works. When Redmayne needs to communicate the many emotions seething under the skin, however, he effectively does so with clipped replies and by giving the character an inability to make eye contact. I’m a fan of non-traditional heroes.

I often over-analyze the Potter universe, and that’s for two very good reasons. The first is that it is easily the most influential and important literary fantasy world to come down the pike since Tolkien put a Hobbit in a hole in the ground, and the second is I’m a big, big fan of Harry Potter. I probably know more about the genealogies and history of Rowling’s world than I strictly should. That’s why a review like this is a challenge to write. I like Newt and his friends. I like the beasts. I wanted to love this movie. I did at times. As a whole, though, I felt like I was being offered a stretched-out middle chapter that was mostly meant to placate me before the main course. And that’s something I never felt about the originals.

Verdict: Average

Note: I don’t use stars, but here are my possible verdicts.

Must-See

Highly Recommended

Recommended

Average

Not Recommended

Avoid like the Plague

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 All images are property of the people what own the movie.

[propshophannah]

how does it feel to be promoting and perpetuating the ideas of an author whose characters are transphobic, inconsistent, and abusive? whose books have little to no main characters that are people of color or in lgbtq+ relationships? who defends the creation of a toxic and hypermasculine culture that could have been prevented but is instead persistent? i don't get how you can wholeheartedly defend a series like that.

Hi @wespers! And this must be your first time to my blog. Welcome! And thank you for your question. I really appreciate it. I am actually very vocal about the problems in Maas’s books, but I do enjoy them. But I understand a few things about the world that help me approach the issues that are present in her books in a constructive, meaningful way. 

I wholeheartedly understand that not everyone grew up the way I did, and that not everyone has the same life experiences as me. I wholeheartedly understand that racism can be so deeply ingrained that we are unable to see it when we, ourselves, perpetuate it. I wholeheartedly understand that it would be ignorant of me to assume that other people are just as informed about the world as I am, and to assume that they hold the same ideologies I do. I wholeheartedly understand that I would be just as ignorant as the people/ideas that I advocate against, if I did not acknowledge that their upbringing and life experiences informed how they interact with, and approached, the world. And I also understand that their opinions and thoughts are no less valid than mine.

And that’s a tough pill to swallow. But it’s part of maturing and understanding that there is no right or wrong way to be.

Things are not black and white. The idea of black and white—of us and them, of male and female, of homosexual and heterosexual, of right and wrong—of sitting in opposition to one another is a lie.

That things are ever as simples as left and right or black and white is informed by a thick history of colonialism. Everything sits on a spectrum. Sexuality is a spectrum. Gender is a spectrum. Black and white, and right and wrong all sit on spectrums that are informed by culture and society and history and how we, as individuals, mediate our place in the world. Books and authors are no different.

Nothing is ever as easy as a choice between one or the other—and if anything ever is that easy, we should run away. Because the easy path is always the wrong one. Easy doesn’t learn or grow, it’s stagnant. The easy path is the one that got is into this mess in the first place.

I understand that with age, life experience, and education we can learn to be more tolerant, and understanding, and open minded, and ultimately more enlightened about the world, and the people, around us. So I understand that sometimes what an author intends to come across, and what does come across, might not fall in line. I understand that racism can be so deeply ingrained that people can’t see it, or how they perpetuate it. I understand that the normative category is by definition ignorant of itself. I understand what I might be reading when I pick up a book written by a white author who lives in the middle of Pennsylvania. But I understand that I can’t ask Maas to be a table, when she’s always been a chair. Because I understand that I can’t change other people. But if I don’t like something, or don’t agree with it, I can change myself and my actions.

We can’t change other people, but we can change ourselves.

And, for me, that means, I get on Tumblr, and while I post my thoughts about a book, I’m careful not to ignore the things I find problematic about the book.

And that also means, that when I see people who follow me or who always reblog me say something against the LGBTQ community, or that harm the LGBTQ community (which happened today), I speak up. When I see something against the claim that “tan” people don’t exist in the real world as racially unique from “black” and “white” (which also happened today), I speak up. It also means I speak up when I see a reading of the text that does not fall in line with the version of the book I read (which also happened today), because understanding the scope of literature (and the human condition) and the many ways it can be read, and the metaphors and symbolism can help us understand characters and actions better and more meaningfully.

I have digressed on other posts about the hyper masculinity in Maas’s books (I have a post coming up this week that will touch on it as it references a scene on ACOMAF). I have digressed and defended characters who have done horrible things, but who themselves are not horrible, but mentally ill. I have also digressed that one person’s favorite trope, or personal kink, and be another person’s “oh, hell no!” And the point is, that we have to be open to understanding one another. To want to honestly get to know where others who think differently than us come from. And I honestly love that you left this comment, and I respect the hell out of you for leaving it with your name and not anonymously, because it becomes so much more of a meaningful, teachable moment for us. And anyone else who reads this.

So to answer your first question “how does it feel to be promoting and perpetuating the ideas of an author whose characters are transphobic, inconsistent, and abusive?”

It feels good. Because I blog and perpetuate and promote the things that are problematic along with the things that are not. And I have had people PM me, and even openly tag me, and say thanks for opening their eyes to the problems or the beauty in the books. I have had people message me in a language I don’t even speak, to say thank you for defending people like then as POC. I have even had a PUBLISHED AUTHOR (whose books I love) PM me to say that she is going to do better to represent the spectrum of sexuality and POC because she realized she hadn’t represented them as meaningful or as up front as she could, or as she wanted to. Like, that was a fucking moment for me. (I’m grinning just thinking about how screaming/ridiculous/fangirl I became when I got that message.)

It’s always  fucking moment though. You leaving this ask was also a fucking moment. Because if we don’t have these conversations, then who will? If we don’t learn to see eye to eye, or to find common ground, or to respectfully disagree, then how we can’t expect anyone else to do the same?

So thanks for reaching out. I appreciate it.

[mediagrubber-blog]

Art for *whose* sake?

[post under construction] ART: The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination to produce work to be appreciated primarily for its truth, its beauty, or its moral, emotional, and/or philosophical power. (Granted, truth/beauty/etc. can be freakin’ impossible to define...) POLITICS: The assumptions or principles relating to or inherent in a sphere, theory, or thing, especially when concerned with power and status in a society. The relationship between politics and aesthetics—and/or ideology and aesthetics—is pretty thorny, to put it mildly. Some argue the two should be kept separate. Others argue they’re inseparable. The first group—whose battle cry is often “art for art’s sake!”—often seem determined to cling to a willfully oblivious, amoral, antagonism-for-its-own-sake, “art justifies anything” attitude. Now, I’m no moral paragon, but I tend to find myself siding with the second group. They strike me as a saner, more responsible, more self-aware (and less reckless) bunch. This doesn’t mean art shouldn’t provoke, shouldn’t upset our sensibilities, ruffle our feathers, go against the grain, challenge bourgeois pieties, etc. Good art can’t shy away from uncomfortable truths, uncomfortable realities—should in fact actively pursue and interrogate the darker, messier sides of human nature, should be unafraid to question dearly held beliefs, etc. Shouldn’t hold back, shouldn’t hide. “Write naked,” Denis Johnson says. Flawless characters tend to be kind of boring/non-interesting. So, just because (e.g.) a character says caustic things or behaves badly doesn’t mean the artist necessarily endorses those thoughts or actions ... even if such details happen to be semi-autobiographical. (The artist might be attempting to take a good hard confessional look in the mirror by being fully honest, upfront, self-critical.) The writer/filmmaker/whatever might, in other words, be trying to make a good-faith effort to genuinely try to understand and explore a person’s motivations, sans judgment—but also without valorizing, without letting themselves or others off the hook, and without reverting to an a-critical, “anything goes” permissiveness. (See for example the dog-abuse scene in Rachel Cusk’s Outline.) But. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between art that aims to take human complexity and imperfection seriously (that itself tries to engage in empathetic critique**), on one hand, and on the other hand stuff that just revels in the darkness (nihilism, sadism, anarchy, chauvinism, XYZ-phobia, materialism, etc.). Further, sometimes the latter tries to pass itself off as the former and needs to be called out. This is why I’m aligned with Group Two. Members of which include the following: The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda (George Orwell) The “period of ten years or so in which literature, even poetry, was mixed up with pamphleteering did a great service to literary criticism, because it destroyed the illusion of pure aestheticism. It reminded us that propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose—a political, social and religious purpose—that our aesthetic judgements are always coloured by our prejudices and beliefs. It debunked art for art's sake.” Trying to separate aesthetics and politics is (at least to me) a bit like trying to justify certain unjust social facts or arrangements by referring to “the natural order of things.” Important, I think, to try to remember this: The New Nature (Jedediah Purdy): “To invoke nature’s self-evident meaning for human projects is to engage in a kind of politics that tries, like certain openly religious arguments, to lift itself above politics, to deny its political character while using that denial as a form of persuasion.” Self-Aware Self-Awareness (Andrew Martin) “[T]here was a very deliberate effort—maybe overly deliberate, in that I’ve tipped the scales so strongly in their favor—to have a set of really dynamic intellectual women at the center of the novel. There’s obviously this trope in literature of the male writer who succeeds by being awful to everyone around him. Both the men and women in the book are reading these post-war writers who define that attitude—Mailer and Roth and Updike, all of whom I admire to varying degrees despite their huge blind spots—and there’s an ongoing tradition of sexist bullshit in literature, which I’m trying to engage with and push back against. I did want to capture the fact that most of the successful professional writers I’m close with in real life are women, and many of the lousy-acting male writers are less productive, or at least less interesting, than their female counterparts. I think it’s a reflection of reality rather than ideology, though there’s no way to take one’s politics out of it, probably.” And, as always, there’s this guy to keep us honest: Orientalism (Edward Said) “Most humanist scholars are, I think, perfectly happy with the notion that texts exist in contexts, that there is such a thing as intertextuality, that the pressures of conventions, predecessors, and rhetorical styles limit what Walter Benjamin once called the ‘overtaxing of the productive person in the name of … the principle of ‘creativity,’ ’ in which the poet is believed on his own, and out of his pure mind, to have brought forth his work. Yet there is a reluctance to allow that political, institutional, and ideological constraints act in the same manner on the individual author. A humanist will believe it to be an interesting fact to any interpreter of [the French novelist/playwright] Balzac that he was influenced in the Comédie humaine by the conflict between Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier, but the same sort of pressure on Balzac of deeply reactionary monarchism is felt in some vague way to demean his literary ‘genius’ and therefore to be less worth serious study.” But of course, it doesn’t (this is Said’s point) “demean” Balzac to attend to such pressures. It just gives us a fuller picture. Just like (and here I��m perhaps treading into more contestable waters) the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s indefensible political sympathies don’t automatically disqualify his philosophy—though such sympathies do of course mean it’s incumbent upon us to take a note from people like “the pragmatist thinkers such as [Bruno] Latour and Richard Rorty,” whose tactic, despite “rely[ing] on [Heidegger] heavily,” is to “mock him relentlessly” (JDP, Marvelous Clouds, p. 38-9). IN SUM: Art, ideology, politics: they’re so related they’re not allowed to date each other. ** These asterisks are here b/c I can’t resist including a relevant passage from Tony Tulathimutte’s novel, Private Citizens, that I think serves as a vaguely satirical counterpoint to the idea that all people deserve unconditional sympathy:        “ ... the workshop had reserved all its venom for [Linda]—the story’s ... characters were ‘easy targets,’ ‘flat little dominoes’ that ‘the author’ set up just to topple over. Worst of all, her writing lacked ‘empathy.’        Although prohibited from speaking during her critique, Linda cleared her throat and said to please spare her the bugbear of empathy—if they didn’t want to read about easy targets, people should stop being easy targets.” (pp. 78-9)

[janvba2film-blog]

Post R: Collated Quotes

Never Sleep Again:

“Speaks to these adolescent fears of not having control“ + “you can only trust other kids of your own age“ - These delve into the messages and values of the film, thus relating to themes Craven may repeat in films.

“Universal theme of the bad dream, the nightmare, and the boogeyman“ - Robert Englund. Once again exploring thematic motifs of the film. This is important when approaching the topic of auteur as the theory suggests a director will repeat behaviours and themes across their work to enforce that they are an individual when it comes to filmmaking.

“I wanted to do a strong, female lead who didn’t trip over“ - Wes Craven: this is important as it is one of the classic horror tropes, and there is a line in Scream which directly relates to this. “The survivor girl, one of the classic leading ingredients in contemporary horror“ - Englund: this supports the point but the phrasing brings into question.

“A lot of monsters of the past were misunderstood - they were quite innocent - Freddy was not innocent” - This quote is significant because it brings Wes’ contribution to horror into perspective.

Apparently they had to “soft-pedal” a lot of the sexuality (such as the paedophilic aspect) in the film to get it passed the MPAA and audiences, showing me that sexuality is definitely a strong theme in Wes’ work.

[In regards to NoES 3: Dream Warriors]

“Using a sexuality trap” (in reference to Joey’s trap). This may establish a section on theme.

“If an original character is in the sequel usually they don’t last until the end because they either aged, or the studio would feel like “Now we have to have new characters”” – Craven. He believes this to be a feature of his direction, as an auteur (not self-professed).

“The fact that they made Freddy more and more jokey took him farther and farther away from that child-molester thing that kind of sticks to you in a way you don’t like” – Craven; Wes was not in control and so the character changed

[In regards to New Nightmare]

“Wes has a very narrow mind in the sense that “this is what will scare people” and a very broad mind to “extract”” – Mark Irwin (cinematographer). Commentary of Craven’s style.

“Nancy and Freddy’s relationship has always had a sexual component” – Langenkampf in reference to ‘Lust’ on the wall. Possible link to the topic of theme, in particular sexuality.

“I think it was the pre-cursor to, like, ‘Scream’. ‘New Nightmare’ was made for the people who made the film; kind of adults. ‘Scream’ was made for the audience who watches the film, and those were the central characters.”. An argument against Craven not being an auteur in regards to ‘Scream’, as Craven already had experience in this sort of field.

The Film Genre Book

“whilst drawing inspiration from influential films such as Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Virgin Spring’“ - This is not the first time Craven’s name has been attached to this director. He is obviously inspired by him, so I must explore how much influence has been taken in regards to auteur theory.

“His films…establish editor/writer/director Craven as an auteur…whose works tested both the censors and audience sensibilities and expectations of the horror genre.” - It is often mentioned that Craven reshapes horror and pushes its limits, perhaps it is not completely techniques that provide him with the titles and more to do with his attitude towards horror.

The book notes how previous horror monsters were a victim of circumstance, or had some sympathetic angle to them, but Freddy does not - “he is ugly inside and out”- yet he is a cultural icon. This not only links to Wes’ innovation but also the public’s contribution to Freddy and the series. “No longer was there a clear delineation between good and bad [after the 70s]. If we could no longer trust our leaders then why not cheer for Freddy?”

‘The Final Girl’: the one girl in the film who fights, resist and survives the killer-monster. The final girl…dominates the action, and is thus masculinised. [In] the slasher film like…Nightmare on Elm Street [1984]…the final girl becomes her own saviour. - Christine Gledhill, The Cinema Book 2nd Edition, Ed. Pam Cook & Mieke Bernink, Bfi Publishing, 1999. This is interesting because it raises the question of if Wes took inspiration or inspired it with his debut film.

Scream: The Inside Story

“We took every single horror rule and broke it.” – Wes Craven

“I think what makes the ‘Scream’ films original is the fact that they look at themselves and they look at the horror genre itself, and I think that was a very new concept” – Neve Campbell (Sydney Prescott)

“It was very, very acutely of aware of the genre and kind of slightly announcing to the audience, kind of: ‘We know what you’re thinking and you better hide under your seats because we’re gonna do something different’.” – Wes Craven

“Scream was so brilliant and so smart and funny, but it took the deaths and the scares very, very seriously” - Eli Roth, a new-gen horror director; “It was finally a movie where the characters had seen other movies”. Possible insight into fusion genre (Horror+comedy) or Craven taking horror itself in a new direction.

“One of the most successful elements of the movie was the mystery element, and ‘Scream’ taps into that, and it taps into that beautifully.” - Patrick Lussier. This is important in the exploration of genre as this delves into genre fusion.

Wes craven wasn’t interested for a while. He didn’t want to do “another slasher movie”. This just goes to show the power of ‘Scream’s misdirection and genre-bending. Although it was only because Drew Barrymore came on-board.

“Wes Craven has influenced horror in the 70s, with ‘Last House On the Left’, in the 80s, with ‘Nightmare on Elm Street. You cannot overstate how incredibly influential Wes Craven has been to the horror genre and has continually made horror movies for different generations that feel so contemporary.” - Eli Roth. Such praise from a contemporary horror director indicates the influence Craven has had in the genre. However, Wes did not write Scream, so can he truly be given credit?

Subversive Horror Cinema

As is mentioned in ‘The American Nightmare’, Wes’ disgust for the image of children in Vietnam running after being exposed to Napalm inspired the forced stripping and raping of Mari. Another example of Vietnam inspiring Craven was the 1968 image of the execution of Vietcong soldier Nguyem Van Lem - “That methodical execution style was translated right to the shooting of Mari at the lake”. This is important to me because it makes me wonder if Wes is concerned less with auteurship and more about testing his audiences.

“The Last House on the Left arose partly from the desire, on Craven’s part, to capture the same kind of raw reality as the documentary footage coming out of Vietnam that Craven suspected was being censored” + “It was a time when all the rules were out the window, when everybody was trying to break the hold of censorship“ - Craven relayed to David A Szulkin. This is reflected in the graphic nature of the scenes and truly speaks about what Craven intended his film to do.

“Although the Vietnam footage was censored, Craven felt that it was candid about violence in a way that Hollywood cinema was not. Craven […] objected on moral grounds to the sanitization of violence by Hollywood, and saw it as part of the ideological apparatus that enabled the State to condition Soldiers for warfare. “The more you can know about violence, the more you can walk away from it and not be attracted to it.” Craven stated in 1999.“ This whole passage speaks about the underlying messages and values in the film.

“Part of the film’s power is to create empathy between the audience and the villains, which makes it impossible for us to view them - despite their sadism - as inhuman. Conversely, the film shows the process by which normally empathetic people, such as the Collingwoods, can demonize others in order to justify acts of vengeance. The film examines the way in which a nation casts its enemies as “other” in order to vindicate warfare; and at the same time, in creating empathy between the audience and the villains […], Last House on the Left reflects what Adam Lowenstein describes as the tendency of 1970s counterculture to identify with the demonized other”

The Horror Film

According to Paul Wells, ‘Scream’ is undoubtedly a postmodern horror film, however, to him he feels strongly that by becoming self-referential po-mo horrors “abdicate [their] political responsibility to reflect upon, critique, or challenge its surrounding (and non-generic) culture”. If this it true it contrasts very much with Wes’ earlier style. “Becoming preoccupied with genre conventions rather than external anxieties“. This contrasts with what Wes said - “we need to stop externalizing our anxieties and take a look within ourselves“

Wells goes on to complain that through the safety of franchising (or ‘MacDonaldisation’ as George Ritzer (1998) puts it) horror films lose there socio-cultural vitality and relevance. This is relevant as two of my films spawned sequels, and this is one of the valid comments of this approach.

He also mentions that ‘Scream’ is “sub-Frankensteinian” as its trivialisation of death through conventional arcs cause it to lose its meaning; it is now just a game for the initiated, thus causing it to lose all significance and appeal to the social anxieties of a wider audience. An example of this is Randy’s speech, or the fact that ‘Halloween’ plays during the final murder-spree.

Wes Craven’s Influence in Making the Horror Genre Subversive

“The horror genre, Stephen King once wrote, is innately reactionary, preying on fears of the evil outsider entering communities and lives uninvited. At first, that seems like exactly what Craven is doing here. Krug, with his charisma and hippie-ish affectations, is an obvious stand in for Charles Manson, who’d been convicted only a year before (although weirdly enough, the film is an acknowledged loose remake of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring). “Mothers, keep your girls at home,” to quote Nick Cave, appears to be Craven’s message.” - This contains a useful quote by Stephen King, a horror master in the eyes of many, which may be useful when writing about the genre and comparing it to Craven’s style. Not only that but there is a mention of Charles Manson, once again proving that he likes to take inspiration from real-life events. And finally, it makes mention of one of Wes’ key inspirations - Ingmar Bergman’s work - even mentioning that it is a “loose remake”.

“This sounds like it could be part of the same reactionary fantasy—the conservative traditional family unit meting out justice to that which violated it—but the way Craven shoots it, it’s not remotely triumphant.Instead, it’s the same sickness that their victims represent infecting them.” - This is very much related to Wes’ social commentary on the Vietnam war, in which there was no clear delineation between good and bad and there was all-out savagery on both sides. The article also argues that Craven speaking out against “right-wing vengeance that had taken hold in Death Wish-era America— [which] was almost completely lost in the shuffle” was later explored in the Nightmare series through the fact that the ‘wholesome’ neighbourhood burning a paedophilic child murderer alive was somehow okay. This also relates to Subversive Horror Cinema.

Origins of an auteur - Wes Craven

“Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left was released at a time film directors really began to push the boundaries to what you can show on screen. Much like what Wes Craven did in The Last House on the Left, Sam Peckinpah pushed the censors to braking point with a realistic depiction of sexual and violent content in his sadistic and controversial 1971 film Straw Dogs (which could so easily be mistaken as a Wes Craven film).” - Was this a style start by or adopted by Craven? Was he a product of the times?

“The Last House on the Left was Craven’s debut film, it’s a notorious and quite shocking film but one that’s not actually that good. The film’s biggest flaw is the woeful misjudgement of the tone as the film’s jumps from the torture and humiliation of the girls in the woods to a pair of bumbling cops falling off a truck that’s full of clucking chickens. The film was very low budget (about $78,000) and it shows with its crap sound and visual quality, but there are moments that would be deeply horrifying if Craven didn’t misjudge the tone of the film as much as he did.” - Wes came to become an iconic director for the genre of horror, showing that he had indeed learned from his mistakes, and as he went on he found the balance between comedy and horror showing that this is a recurring technique of his (important for genre), but this brings into question his auteur status when looking at his later films; the filmmaking must be of a higher tier than what is standard, which I fear for in regards to Wes.

“Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984 ($1.8million budget) which, like many films of that era (such as Friday the 13th and Halloween), dealt with sexual promiscuity in teenagers.” - Was Wes’ choice of subject a product of the times or did he already have something in mind beforehand?

“One underlying theme between all three movies is how middle class American suburbia deal with savagery.” - This is an important aspect to analyse in the case of whether or not he is an auteur. {…} “Once again, Scream is set in middle class America and once again deals with violence and once again focuses on a female character under attack by her male attacker”

The Cinema Book

“There have been important variations in the nature and volume of teenpics since the early 1960s. I the late 1960s and early 1970s, ‘youth movies’ rew much more on an imagine of counter-cultural rebellion than on an image of irresponsible juvenile delinquency. And as ‘the boundaries between counter (film) culture and mainstream (film) culture all but evaporated, (Doherty, 1986, p. 233), films like The Graduate (1967), Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces(1970) mounted serious critiques of the parent culture. Following a crisis wrought by overproduction in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in the wake of a counter-culture in general decline, the industry resumed production of teenpicks in regular numbers in the late 1970s and 1980s. Some like Halloween (1978), Night of the Comet (1984) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), were low-budget horror, sci-fi and slasher films.” - Obviously I will Paraphrase this, but the basic idea is a question of whether or not Wes’ decisions for his film were of his own or a product of the time. This idea of Wes being inspired by the times is very obviously a key argument I can make in my essay as this idea is present in this source especially. I did not dedicate an entire post to this because I could only find one useful quote in the book.

So the Theory Goes - Autuer: Wes Craven

“Craven almost always worked within horror, with the only real exception being the musical drama Music of the Heart. However, his use of horror is always combined with a range of subgenres which can include thriller, fantasy, mystery or even some elements of comedy.” - This article seems to suggest that he is more of a genre director from my understanding, despite the title.

“One of the more prominent themes within Craven’s work is that of the psychological idea of the villain. His films tend to subvert the idea of the villain/hero leading the viewer to believe they are completely aware of a situation before abruptly leading us in a different direction. One of the clearest examples of this can be seen in his directorial debut The Last House on the Left where our initial antagonists are Krug et al. However, by the end of the film, we see Mari Collingwood’s parents take on this role.” - Many of the sources I have agree with this point.

“Wes Craven’s general style of filmmaking is visually similar to a number of horror film-makers. The conventional use of camera angles, editing to create scares and using lighting to enhance a scene are all evident within his work. However, […] his understanding of the genre and the conventions have allowed him to use them to his advantage. This is most notable in his film series Scream where he dictates to the audience the conventions of the genre which had become familiar to audiences and then used this as a way to drive the narrative, attempting to break each of these clichés. For example Scream’s Sidney loses her virginity despite the fact a friend has already noted that the No. 1 rule of horror-movie survival: “Sex equals death.” Yet this generic convention never comes to pass.” - It is important to note that the sex scene is inter-cut into the rules being explained. This whole paragraph is relevant to the argument of whether Wes is a genre director or an auteur.

The article describes Wes’ filmmaking techniques as generic, stating that it is in fact his use of unique storytelling and character development which offer him the place of auteur. “ With narratives that involve witty villains, the indication of convention, an ability to use sub-genres to great effect and his females are not the dim-witted, hysterical token characters so often seen within horror. Although Craven has directed films written by others, such as Red Eye, the films he chose to direct share similar themes to those he has written and therefore help to indicate his narrative preferences.”. First of all, this quote addresses the important aspects of his narrative style and directorial style (such as the use of subgenres), but, more importantly, it makes mention of the great counterargument for most auteur directors: that they did not write the story. Instead the article shows to us that Wes chose the like of Scream and Red Eye because it suits his directorial style. However, for the case of Scream it has been stated that he only finally came on to the project because of the inclusion of Drew Barrymore.

The article ends by using the term “auteur of the genre”, which is helpful because it offers a blend of both auteurship and genre director. I must do further research into this concept.

Film Genre Reader III

“No critic, obviously, can be free from a structure of values, nor can he or she afford to withdraw from the struggles and tensions of living to some position of “aesthetic” contemplation.” - This tells me that, despite being an individual filmmaker in their own right, people are still confined to some aspects of the process, such as genre.

“One of the greatest obstacles to any fruitful theory of genre has been the tendency to treat the genres as discrete. An ideological approach might suggest why they can’t be, however hard they may appear to try: at best, they represent different strategies for dealing with the same ideological tensions.” - This is relevant because it suggests that, while working within a genre, an auteur cannot help but follow the steps of it. This is important because Wes works primarily in horror, questioning whether or not he can reach the level of auteur.

“It is probable that a genre is “pure” (i.e., safe) only in its simplest, archetypal, most aesthetically deprived and intellectually contemptible form” - This tells me that piece of film may be more than just its genre if it strays far enough from its roots, while still confining itself to its roots. This is important because it saves Wes from being just a genre director.

“The strong contrast presented by the two films [It’s a Wonderful Life and Shadow of a Doubt] testifies to the decisive effect of the intervention of a clearly defined artistic personalty in an ideological-generic structure.” - This helps me because it argues that a director has the ability to take a film beyond its genre by adding in their personality. Could this reign true for a script (Scream) as well?

Trespassing Bergman

“I think more than almost anybody else he was very religious and it felt like a religion that felt similar to the one I had come out of so: very strict and kind of, um, and very channeled lives and, you know, not doing anything that would displease God and having your children in line.” - Wes felt a connection in the way that he used religion in his films. However, Wes defied religion while Ingram embraced it. 

Wes Craven: the mainstream horror maestro inspired by Ingmar Bergman

“he was electrified by the work of directors like Ingmar Bergman: it was this that inspired him to go into film-making and he had the idea of remaking Bergman’s 1960 film Virgin Spring as The Last House on the Left in 1972″ - It brings into question whether or not Wes can claim his influential horror movie as his.

“Wes Craven could be said to have invented, or at least popularised the modern rape-revenge genre and ironically did so in the same era when the name “Bergman” became a widely understood talk-show punchline for jokes about Hollywood trash vs highbrow Europeans.” - Once again, Craven is linked to influence from Bergman.

The ‘Nightmare On Elm Street’ Series Is Deeper Than You Know

“ The viewer is even present for a scene representative of Nancy’s first period. As Nancy lays in the bathtub asleep, Freddy’s clawed glove breaks through the surface of the water between her open legs. This isn’t just one of the most intense scenes in horror history. It’s clear foreshadowing of all the trouble that’s about to happen between your legs.”

New American Teenagers

“Nancy and Glen, who never consummate their relationship despite plenty of opportunity, can be understood better as brother and sister than as boyfriend and girlfriend, which, of course, would not preclude sexual desire”. This is important because I am aiming to support Robin Wood’s concept that a director’s personal touch to a film elevates it beyond a genre film. I plan on linking this to the themes of sexuality in the other films and arguing that this tendency to put violence and sexuality in his films is a rebellion against his repressed religious childhood upbringing.