Rewatching Princess Bride in Memory of Rob Reiner

 It's amazing when a movie can turn its ostensible flaws into assets.

I think the first time I saw The Princess Bride I was maybe a little older than its official target audience - I might have been ten or something (the movie came out when I was 1, so I was too young to see it in theaters).

There's a lot of absolute cheese to the movie - its transparently "in a sound stage" sets, the super-fake synthesized score, and even Andre the Giant's "I'm not a professional actor" performance. Yet all of these details do nothing to diminish the film. If anything, they enhance it.

In the wake of, I'd assume, Star Wars, the 1980s saw a lot of fantasy films. But in a lot of ways, I think that the Princess Bride kind of predicted a movement toward fourth-wall breaking, self-awareness, and metacommentary that I remember as a key aspect of children's entertainment when I was growing up.

One of my favorite books was The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales by Jon Scieszka. Published in 1992, the book was a series of re-imagined children's tales with an ironic twist, like the main title story, which takes the Gingerbread Man and instead makes a man out of really stinky cheese that no one even wants to chase because his odor is so off-putting.

When its core plot elements are laid out, The Princess Bride is a bog-standard fantasy yarn (with very little in the way of actual magic). But basically every asset of the movie serves its core idea, which is to embrace the heightened emotions of fantasy (the romance between Wesley and Buttercup is unalloyed true love, capable of convincing anyone with a modicum of good within them to help their cause) and even push back on the urge to detach oneself from such strongly held emotions (the frame narrative with a young Fred Savage as a modern kid hearing the tale read by his grandfather, former angel Peter Falk, would, if written today, or perhaps about ten years ago, have the kid complaining initially that the book is "cringe") without surrendering a biting, clever wit.

The movie is so incredibly quotable, with brilliant lines and moments. (Liberally) adapted from the original book by its author, William Goldman (who also has a ton of other really impressive screenwriting credits, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men) the movie is also very economical.

In the movie's first act, when Buttercup is kidnapped by a group of thieves in a conspiracy to justify a war of aggression, we quickly come to understand that the lead criminal's two henchmen, Inigo and Fezzik, are actually quite decent guys. Inigo and Wesley (though not yet revealed to be him) are set to duel to the death, and yet their mutual respect and honor, and their appreciation for the art of swordsmanship, leads the two of them to what many have argued is the greatest sword fight in cinema as they more or less become good friends while ostensibly trying to kill one another (of course, in victory, Wesley merely knocks Inigo out). He and Fezzik have a shorter, but equally civil fight that ends with the benevolent bandit knocked out.

There's a real storybook kind of honor and chivalry at display, and Cary Elwes fits perfectly as a kind of reconstructed Errol Flynn-type.

The movie is just filled with charm - I even like that its fantasy world is quite slapdash, with fictional kingdoms like Florin and Guilder mentioned alongside such real places as Australia and Spain.

I have to imagine that among most Gen Xers and Millennials, at least, none of this is news to you. I don't know to what extent it's remained in the "staples of children's entertainment" zeitgeist for younger generations.

In the wake of his and Michele Reiner's horrifically tragic deaths, I've been reflecting on the incredible career Rob Reiner had as a director, and I'm struck by the amazing streak he had through the 80s and early 90s. His directorial debut was This is Spinal Tap (which more or less introduced the world to the mockumentary), and then he followed it with Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally..., Misery, and A Few Good Men, which are all classics (you could argue the hot streak continues with An American President, Ghosts of Mississippi, etc.) Not only were these really good movies, but they were all so varied and diverse in tone and subject matter. The guy just knew how to make a good film.

What Are the Joined in Pluribus?

 I'm now seven episodes into Pluribus (er, Plur1bus, I guess,) the new sci-fi show from Vince Gilligan, of Breaking Bad and Better Caul Saul fame (though I knew him first via The X-Files, where he wrote and produced, though Chris Carter created the series).

The premise, to reiterate, is that all but twelve people on Earth have been linked into a giant hive-mind after some scientists received a signal from aliens on a radio telescope and tried to recreate the chemical formula it transmitted. After this collective mind-link first takes over everyone at the laboratory, the hivemind eventually spreads a chemical agent over the entire world to link everyone up. It's not clear why Carol Sturka, fantasy romance author from Albuquerque, wasn't affected - maybe just some rare genetic thing - but the experience is one of utmost horror, especially because the affected people (aka most of humanity) are briefly incapacitated as it takes over, and Carol's partner (both business and romantic) Helen falls and cracks her skull on the pavement, ultimately dying from her injuries.

Carol is faced with an apocalyptic scenario, but shortly thereafter, the collective known as the Joined reach out to her, eager to be helpful and kind and see to her needs. They wish to discover a way to convert her to become one of them, but until they can, they want to make things as pleasant as possible.

The Joined are fascinating. It would be easy to ascribe to them some sinister intent, but time and time again, the show suggests that they truly think that they're better off the way they are, and we're shown again and again that they they seem incapable of doing the twelve remaining individuals any real harm.

The Joined send an individual named Zosia to act essentially as Carol's main liaison, a woman chosen because she looks the most like the way that Carol describes the romantic (male) pirate captain in her books. Carol had initially intended the captain to be a woman, but self-censored her queerness out of fear of not appealing to a broad audience. But because Helen was connected to the collective before she died, her knowledge of Carol's real story is now known to the entire world.

There's something actually kind of fantastical and appealing about being in Carol's position. We see another individual, M. Diabaté, who fully embraces the opportunity to play out his luxurious fantasies, acting as a James Bond-like gambler winning a several-million-dollar hand of poker with a royal flush and then going back to his casino suite with several gorgeous women to hang out naked in his hot tub. The Joined are eager to give him this fantasy. And I think we're left, as the audience, to wonder how exactly consent factors into this: do these women have agency to consent to this kind of thing? Is it the collective Joined will that is capable of consent?

We never get any evidence one way or another that the individuals really retain a personal consciousness. Information seems to be shared instantly between any connected people on the globe, but what the inner experience of that is like is a real question. I'm someone who thinks of consciousness as a pretty concrete thing, and that the information passing through a brain doesn't necessarily allow the merging or division of consciousness. But are there individuals trapped and screaming? It doesn't seem like it. Instead, the individuals just seem to be synced up when it comes to their goals and philosophy around the whole thing.

Unless they're building to a big season one finale reveal, I don't think that the Joined are anything other than what they say they are, and that while it's a truly alien way for humanity to suddenly start behaving, I think the very drama of the show is underpinned by the fact that the Joined are just trying to do their best. In this reading, there's actually something of a positive reading of humanity as a whole - that if we could truly know everything about the other people in the world, that we wouldn't have any reason for conflict, and we'd all value peace and cooperation.

There's naturally a reading of the show to see it as pitting collectivism versus individualism against one another. These have, of course, always been poles pulling at human culture in various ways, and often the basis for political divides (though not cleanly - conservatism in America at least tends to be very individualistic in terms of responsibility and the rewards we can reap, but collectivist when it comes to cultural expression, favoring a homogeny of religious and social custom).

And I think that there's a degree to which Carol exhibits a lot of the less attractive aspects of American culture, the way that she first excludes the non-English speakers when asking the Joined to gather up the other individuals (being self-centered enough to assume that it's only worthwhile if she can speak to them) or the way that she is so hostile to other points of view regarding whether this is actually a good thing or not.

All that said, I think we can cut Carol a lot of slack, because she  is also in the depths of grief, both for the world she knew but also the one person she really had in her life. While other individuals have their family and friends around them, albeit now linked up with the collective, Carol is profoundly isolated.

Still, one thing that I've been wondering about is whether there's another allegory at play here:

In the past couple years, LLMs, or large language models, have more or less absorbed the internet - already a kind of human hive mind, in some ways, or at least a vast, shared network of information and data unlike anything the world has ever seen.

LLMs have become a huge part of the global conversation about the future of technology and even the human race. What will they be capable of? What problems might they solve?

The notion, with an LLM, is that by connecting all of the information we've ever put out there on the internet and having a mechanism that can generate output that is profoundly convincing, as if a knowledgeable person were writing eloquently on whatever subject it's asked, that we might have some brilliant new tool that will utterly replace a great deal of the work that humans have needed to perform.

The Joined are almost like an LLM made out of the actual human race. They're extremely helpful and pleasant, and they seem to really know what they're talking about. Except that sometimes they don't really get it right. It might be something as innocuous as sending a room-temperature gatorade to Carol when she requests it, or it might be something as big of a problem as not being able to even harvest any vegetables because that would go against their "don't harm any living thing" programming, thus forcing them to ingest liquified human remains.

Oh yeah, that's a thing. And when Carol first discovers it, it seems like the bombshell that's finally going to convince the other individuals that this is horrifying, but they cop to it immediately, and explain that it's just a matter of caloric necessity to keep humanity from starving, and is hopefully some kind of temporary measure until they can come up with a sustainable option (currently they're only eating food that was already harvested or living off of fruit that falls of its own accord from the tree).

The Joined are, despite how coordinated and industrious they are, kind of helpless on a certain level. They're an imperfect system.

Personally, I'm an AI skeptic, which does make me feel more and more like I'm becoming one of the Carol Sturka-like alarmists in a world that's getting on with the program. My dad is a computer scientist who was a tenured professor at one of the world's top Computer Science departments (he went into the academic equivalent of retirement recently) and so he's naturally much more knowledgeable about all of this. But he's also been something of a skeptic - the thing about LLMs is that literally the only thing they're trying to do is come up with a plausible-sounding response. The fact that they often get the facts right is impressive, but he's advocated for a little of a "hold your horses" attitude on assuming that this is going to suddenly solve all of our problems, a big part of it being that we've created a system that builds its own systems that we aren't really privy to - we don't really have the window on its inner processes to trace how and why it has come to the conclusions it has (I'm paraphrasing here, of course, and I'm sure that there are lots of nuances and even elements of this that I'm getting flat out wrong).

I think it's possible, even probable, that LLMs could be used for really useful things. But A: I think that the current imaginings of how it could be used are corrupted by an ultra-capitalistic greed incentive that seeks to consolidate even more the means of production (now including intellectual labor) under a smaller and smaller billionaire elite and B: I think that our dream of creating genuine artificial sentience is priming us to see it where there is none. And C: the captains of industry have embraced this technology so quickly that it doesn't feel like the common people have been given the right to opt in, but must instead try as best as we can to opt out.

For all of the Joined's pleasant, accommodating, and ethical treatment of the individuals, the initial joining was all done with absolutely zero informed consent, spread instantly like a virus, in an act that killed millions of people (including Helen). At no point were these people (as in, nearly all the human species) asked if they wanted to be Joined. That's kind of the rot at the root of all of this. No one ever told you that the photos you posted to Facebook, or even to your family's Christmas website in 2003, were going to be used to train LLMs. How many people posting mirror selfies for a little boost of self-esteem thought that some part of their face was going to be taken, melded with others, and combined to form some AI-generated porn video?

Again, there's something almost aspirational about the Joined. Wouldn't it be nice if every hostile, violent urge was gone, if all the things we divide ourselves with dissolved away? Just what might humanity accomplish if we were all working as one?

And yet, that initial violation, the most horrific violation of agency, taints everything. I don't think Carol's wrong to hold that particular grudge.

The Mighty Nein

 I started playing D&D in 2015, having bought myself a set of the three core rulebooks for the then-relatively-new 5th Edition of the game (each edition being a pretty radical redesign of its rules) for my 29th birthday and finally wrangling a group of friends to start playing it (with myself running the games as the "Dungeon Master," which is not usually how people start playing this game - typically it's the more experienced players who run things and introduce others to it) in November of that year (meaning it's almost precisely 10 years since I started).

Around this time, a group of fairly prominent voice-actors started an "Actual Play" series (a term that I think came later) on Geek & Sundry called Critical Role. While they hadn't really invented the format - that honor probably goes to the folks at Penny Arcade, who teamed up with the creators of D&D to have Creative Director Chris Perkins run their "Acquisitions Incorporated" podcast to introduce the then-new 4th Edition. But Critical Role took off in popularity and made much bigger names of its voice actor cast (I think it's honestly been very good for their VO careers in animation and video games, and has contributed to the celebrity status that voice actors have now - I don't think as many people would know who Ben Starr, Jennifer English, or Neil Newbon were if it weren't for Critical Role expanding the profiles of folks like Matthew Mercer or Laura Bailey).

Critical Role famously broke records with a Kickstarter campaign to finance an animated adaptation of their first campaign, Vox Machina, getting fully funded with their modest 300k goal in less than an hour and going on to get 11 million in the first day (if memory serves). With the success of The Legend of Vox Machina, with a few seasons already out and two more coming to conclude the story, it was perhaps unsurprising that they'd move on to the character and plot of their second campaign, Mighty Nein.

For me, this is pretty exciting, as I think (and I think the general consensus agrees with this) that Mighty Nein is their best campaign to-date (admittedly of a relatively small sample size of 3 long-form campaigns. The fourth started just over a month ago, which saw a lot of format changes, with additions to the cast and a new Dungeon Master).

The Mighty Nein campaign takes place decades after Vox Machina, and on a distant continent, though still within the fantasy world of Exandria. Its heroes are somewhat more conflicted and complicated (though while the folks at CR insist they aren't heroes, I've actually tended to find them better people than the ones in Vox Machina, perhaps because they have to overcome dark pasts).

There was no crowdfunding necessary for this one - The Legend of Vox Machina was a big enough success that Amazon was willing to fund this one themselves. The show is also taking a somewhat different approach to the material, with a lot of details filled in that we never saw at the game table.

D&D is a storytelling game, but because it's a game, one of the general rules is that you tend to limit the "viewpoint" to the players' characters. Scenes that don't involve the characters the players are embodying tend to be learned about or alluded to indirectly. These games also tend to have the player characters stick together, because it's not very fun for a player to have to just sit and not participate while dramatic stuff is going on.

Of cousre, a TV show works differently, and the first episode, which dropped for free on YouTube before the official premiere, makes ample use of the format to tell the story at its own pace. Indeed, of the core, central characters in the eponymous group, we actually only see four of the founding seven, and one of them only in a brief tease right at the end.

However, we're introduced to the continent of Wildemount, where a long-simmering cold war has been fought between the Kyrn Dynasty and the Dwendalian Empire. While each of these factions has its heroic and villainous qualities, the inciting incident here is when a group of Volstruckers - mage-assassins who work for one of the Empire's shady and unchecked agencies, called the Cerberus Assembly, steal a priceless and religious artifact from the Kryn, an object that helps to facilitate and regulate the reincarnation of souls (the exact mechanics of this are something someone who has seen the campaign will know a lot more about than the show has revealed so far, though it also looks like there have been some tweaks to how it works. The key is that it's a deeply powerful, magical, and spiritual object).

The Volstruckers and the Assembly are clearly working without the oversight or knowledge of the Empire's king or ministers, and have triggered was is sure to be a bloody and destructive war.

Meanwhile, we're introduced to Beuaregard Lionett (Marisha Ray), a novice monk of the Cobalt Soul, an order dedicated to unearthing the truth and knowledge, and function as archivists and detectives. Beau is clearly a talented detective, but her hotheaded nature (and a general stuffiness amongst her superiors in the order) leaves her forced to work independently when she stumbles across evidence of this Volstrucker plot, at least until she finds a fellow monk, Dairon (Ming-Na Wen) who has been looking into the same grand conspiracy.

Meanwhile, we're introduced to Caleb Widowgast (Liam O'Brien), a sad and depressed vagrant whose motives aren't totally clear, though there is a wanted poster with his face on it that accuses him of murder. Initially marked by a little goblin thief named Nott the Brave (Sam Riegel,) the two wind up teaming up with one another when they realize it's better than going alone. Caleb, it turns out, is an arcanist of some skill, and the theft that Nott assists him with was actually to get the components required to cast a spell to conjure his beloved cat back to him. (Those who know the full story here are going to get pretty teary-eyed from this detail).

In addition to spending more time with non-central characters (including Trent Ikithon (Mark Strong), one of the leaders of the Cerberus Assembly and arguably the most evil character in all of Critical Role) the show also has expanded its runtime to a 40-minute show, more akin to a 1-hour drama, while Vox Machina has been in 20-minute segments.

We have yet to meet some of the core characters, and I imagine it will be a little while before the eponymous group truly takes form. But we do at least get a glimpse of one - Yasha Nydoorin (Ashley Johnson,) a towering barbarian currently under the influence of a magic rune on the back of her neck.

It was around the time that I started listening to Critical Role in podcast form that the Mighty Nein first premiered back in 2018, and unlike the Vox Machina campaign, which had been a home game for the players before they jumped in to do their initial Actual Play show on Geek & Sundry, Mighty Nein started with the momentum Critical Role had already gathered, with their own studio and everything, and with the characters truly just setting out on their journeys.

The show, similarly, is giving us the characters before we even met them in the game, with all the clashing personalities and awkwardness of coming together as a team there to be mined for dramatic heft.

While Vox Machina's conflict largely focused on global threats - the dragons of the Chroma Conclave and the insidious evil god known as the Whispered One (a.k.a. Vecna, who expanded into the broader pop culture consciousness thanks to Stranger Things, but has been one of the most enduring villains throughout D&D lore), the Mighty Nein are far less public-facing than Vox Machina, largely working on their own personal conflicts, even if these do wind up becoming world-threatening menaces.

Beau asks Dairon in this first episode why they would choose her to help uncover this conspiracy, and Dairon responds by saying that, as a nobody, no one will see her coming. This winds up being the whole M.O. of the Mighty Nein - heroes who work behind the scenes, saving people from threats that they might not even be aware of.

Anyway, I'm really excited to see more.

Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein

 Over two hundred years since it was written, Mary Shelley's masterpiece, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, remains one of the absolute classics of literature. Launching, effectively, both horror and science fiction as the genres they are today with a single novel, it's also a speculative exploration on the moralities of accelerating scientific progress.

For the past 96 years, of course, the most famous portrayal of Frankenstein's Monster was Boris Karloff's, with his iconic flat brow and neck-bolts, here portraying the creature as a mute, unintelligent brute. In 1994, Kenneth Branagh made a more faithful adaptation, with himself as the doctor and Robert De Niro as the creature. I suspect that this film was made in the wake of Francis Ford Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula," which had come out two years prior, and which sought to be a more faithful adaptation of Stoker's novel (hence the use of his name in the title of the film). Branagh's adaptation was "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," in the same format.

I've often said that I think Del Toro loves monsters the way a child loves a teddy bear. He clearly has a great affection for them. As we saw in his Oscar-winning riff on Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Shape of Water, he transforms the amphibious creature from a rapacious menace into something graceful, romantic, and possibly divine.

His Frankenstein - an inevitable project when considering his body of work - makes adaptational changes to the novel to reinforce this affection: Shelley's creature (whom I like to refer to as Adam, though I don't think he's ever given a proper name, except maybe being Victor Junior) does commit murder in his rage against his neglectful master. Despite these acts, Adam is still more sympathetic than his creator, who callously tosses him aside when he realizes the enormity of his magnum opus, and refuses to do anything to ease Adam's crippling loneliness.

The film reshuffles some of its plot elements, painting both a more sympathetic version of Adam (Jacob Elordi) and a more damning one of Victor (Oscar Isaac).

Actually, when the story-within-a-story begins, we get a rather sympathetic view of Victor in his childhood - he has a loving mother, but a distant father (played by Charles Dance, who has a lot of experience playing a shitty father). Both a Baron and a renowned doctor, Victor's father trains his son in medical science, but in a manner that is just straight-up abusive, physically striking him when he fails to remember the purpose of some piece of anatomy when he's maybe ten years old.

Victor's ailing mother dies when she goes into labor with his little brother William, and while it's not explicitly confirmed, it seems that Victor believes that his father erred on saving the baby over his mother (caesarian deliveries used to be very deadly for the mother).

This cycle of abuse is very much what the film focuses on. Unlike in the novel, Victor's immediate reaction to his creation's awakening is not one of sudden terror and loathing. Initially, he's overjoyed (especially because the entire venture looked like it had been sabotaged by circumstance). It's when Adam is slow to progress, unable to say anything other than his creator's name, that he becomes resentful and fears that his grand project was a failure. He stops looking to his creation with any kindness or enthusiasm.

In the novel, Elizabeth is a childhood friend of Victor's whom he eventually seeks to marry, only for her to be killed by Adam before the wedding. Here, Elizabeth (Mia Goth) is initially betrothed to his brother William (Felix Kammerer,) and not long after Adam's creation, she finds and befriends the creature, seeing him as the conscious, intelligent being that he is, rather than the "it" that Victor believes him to be.

Del Toro presents an Adam who is not just extremely resilient, but truly invincible, granted a regenerative ability on top of his hardiness that allows him to survive holding an exploding stick of dynamite, among other injuries. Victor's aim in his research is to fully defeat death itself, but in creating a truly immortal being, there is no means by which to undo his creation, nor any way for Adam to escape the pains of life.

While the novel has an Adam who is bent on revenge, tormenting Victor by slaying those around him, this film's version is nearly a perfect innocent - he does kill some people, but only in self-defense (sure, you could argue that an unkillable being can't kill in self-defense). The people around Victor who die are either killed by accident, or by Victor's own hand (and Victor multiple times blames Adam for deaths he has caused).

Victor ultimately, in this film, is someone who passes on the abuse that he received as a child. There's a popular saying: "Hurt people hurt people," and Victor surely seems to be an example of that. He is, also, someone who displays narcissistic tendencies, struggling to see others around him (not just Adam) as real people with all the inner life that he possesses.

It is Adam, the Creature, who has and seems to take the opportunity to bring the cycle of abuse to an end. Though he must soldier on with no end to his life, within that lack of closure, he has the opportunity to grow and become a far better man than his creator ever was.

As a minor note, the movie bumps the setting up to the 1850s (the novel was published in 1818) and has Victor study medicine in Edinburgh, Scotland. I recently watched the video series An Agony of Effort, by Charred Thermos, which analyzes the game Bloodborne as an extensive allegory for the development of modern medicine in the 19th century. Edinburgh was a real center of that research at the time, which also made it a hotbed for grave-robbing "Resurrectionists" that sold cadavers to medical researchers. In the film, Victor uses the impunity of money and aristocracy to quite overtly claim the remains of the executed or battle-slain, but it's a keen era in which to set the story.

Plur1bus

 I was vaguely aware of Vince Gilligan when, in 2008, the year that I graduated from college and moved out to California, my best friend and I watched through the entirety of The X-Files, a show that I'd been aware of growing up, but never actually seen. Gilligan was a frequent writer and director on that show. Later, of course, he'd make a far bigger name for himself specifically with his thrilling series about drugs and toxic masculinity, Breaking Bad, and its prequel/spin-off follow-up (which I have not seen yet) Better Call Saul.

In Pluribus (or, stylized as Plur1bus,) Gilligan returns to sci-fi with an interesting twist on Invasion of the Body Snatchers that asks: what if the pod people were super-polite?

The opening minutes of the series' pilot recall, to me, Stephen King's massive novel The Stand. In The Stand, the first half or so of the book shows how an engineered super-flu called "Captain Tripps" ravages humanity, killing off about 99.9% of the population. The small few survivors in the US, seemingly living by simple chance at having immunity to the virus, are then called separately to the side of two individuals, one representing good and the other evil.

In Pluribus, a group of scientists are shocked and thrilled to discover a genuine signal from an alien world, and after over a year of work, they determine that the signal contains an RNA sequence. Replicating that sequence, though, a mishap leads to the RNA spreading like a virus, swiftly taking over peoples' minds and compelling them to spread it.

Eventually, on one fateful night (though I guess it's day in other parts of the world,) the virus is spread to all of humanity.

We're introduced to Carol (Rhea Seehorn,) a successful fantasy-romance author who is deeply bitter and cynical about the ways she has chosen to sell out to make her books more popular, including hiding her own sexual orientation and original desire to make her novels' primary love interest a woman.

Helen, her partner, is clearly her better half, and someone she certainly relies upon to make it through life. Thus, when a strange pattern of airplanes flying overhead sends a nearby driver unconscious, crashing into a parked car, the most horrifying sequence starts in earnest: everyone around Carol starts to convulse, and Helen falls hard on the pavement outside the bar at which they were winding down from Carol's book tour.

Carol rushes to get help for her partner, but there's no one in a state to aid her, even when she drives to the hospital.

And then... everyone recovers. It's not clear to me if the infection itself kills Helen, or if the hard fall onto the pavement did (hitting her head). The point is, Carol finds herself alone amidst a mass of people who are now all walking and talking and speaking in unison.

She turns on the TV, and discovers that she is the sole person in all of America who has not been changed like this, and we find that the hive-mind now controlling the vast majority of humanity is... actually super nice and pleasant. They tell her that they're only there to help her, and they want to figure out why it was that she wasn't affected.

The "Joined" as they call themselves, are chilling in a way that the screaming pod-people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers aren't, because they're just so damned polite and understanding. They assure Carol is her own person, and free to do as she wishes, though they still make it clear that their intent is eventually to convert her as well.

We see the shocking coordination of this new Joined humanity - a woman in what I read as somewhere in the West Bank (though I'm probably wrong as it also seems near the Mediterranean coast, though maybe that's actually the Dead Sea?) cleans up corpses from the chaos that occurred when everyone was convulsing as the virus took over. (The juxtaposition between the modern structures of what I assume are Israeli settlements versus the cramped, dense houses of the Palestinians is potent, raising interesting doubts about whether a hive-mind that removes all the artificial divisions we've created amongst humanity is such a bad thing.) Without missing a beat, a young man comes and takes over her role, handing her his motorcycle helmet as she travels to an airport, gets into a plane, and flies to the US, where people are waiting to bathe, clothe, and do up her hair and make-up, all to present Carol with the person who most fit a feminine version of the art on the cover of her first novel depicting its romantic interest hunk, Rabad.

A few things are spelled out for us: while the signal that encoded this RNA sequence was alien in origin, the aliens don't seem to actually be actively involved in any of this. The sequence just creates a connection between anyone infected so that every body can access every mind in the network. The Joined claim that they cannot harm any living being intentionally (which does mean that everyone's going vegetarian as soon as the meat in peoples' fridges and freezers is eaten or goes bad,) and they don't push themselves on Carol, always stepping away when she asks them to.

As with so many stories of this ilk, we're invited to question whether individuality and free will are really worth all the problems they cause. After all, the moment that this takes humanity over, no one is murdering anyone anymore. Wars are all over, every prisoner is released.

We're given Carol as our main character, and she's a bit of a mess - she has clearly had problem with alcohol (hence why her car has a breathalyzer that is required to start it) and she's dismissive about all the fans who come to fawn over her books. While it might be there for some kind of ironic reason, she also has a Phrenology bust in her house. I think we're meant to really question: is she a good person?

When the Joined (primarily through "Rabad") agree to arrange a meeting with the five other people in the world (of 11) who speak English, Carol is shocked to find that they aren't nearly as upset as she is. Each has family that have all been Joined, and they seem to be ok with it. After all, the Joined are happy to cater to all of their needs.

Carol, of course, just lost the one person in her life who seemed to mean anything to her. One wonders how she would feel if Helen had survived, even if she was Joined (as the other Joined claim she was before she died - hence their insights into Carol's original intentions for the Rabad character).

I think it's also kind of interesting that she's the one American to be unaffected, and how that might inform her attitude.

Breaking Bad was very much an exploration of the toxicity of how men, and in particular, American men, are expected to behave. Walter White's evil comes from his need to be the alpha male - he can't stand that others are willing to help him when he's weakened by his cancer diagnosis, and his conflict with Gus Fring is largely due to his inability to be subordinate in any way to another person. Walter White has so many opportunities to avoid all the pain and death that he causes, but he isn't willing to take a path that doesn't make him the central paterfamilias.

I do wonder, then, if Carol's immediate assumption that the Joined are an evil that must be stopped, an attitude that is not shared by the other five English-speaking non-Joined, might be a comment on the extremist stance Americans tend to take toward individualism in contrast with the collective. I suppose that might make her seem more heroic if you have that gung-ho American outlook, but in my opinion, the "rugged individualism" so championed in American culture has, paradoxically, curtailed a lot of our freedoms by preventing collective action that might wean us from the power of corporate institutions.

I hate that I find myself boiling things down to a Left/Right political alignment so much these days - obviously reality and humanity is more complex than a one-dimensional spectrum. But I do think it's curious that the Joined, in their polite way of speaking, in their patience and affability, and in their vegetarian ethos, could be seen as a satire of progressive politics. (Funnily enough, the RNA sequence is spread through an aerosol distributed by planes overhead - literally chemtrails.)

At one point, Carol gets so angry at "Rabad" that she yells at her, and this sends the entire hive-mind into a minutes-long convulsion, which we discover caused the deaths of eleven million people. Should Carol feel guilty about this? Sure, it's rude to yell at people, but surely it's not murder.

I think, if you were so inclined, you could read this as a satire of the left-wing idea of needing "safe spaces," though I think that if that were your read, you'd be playing into an absurdist oversimplification of that concept that has become more of a right-wing talking point than a reality on the left.

What it reads, to my mind, is as emotional manipulation. An emotional abuser will often try to make themselves the victim, and make accusations of abuse out to be abuse itself.

I really don't know where the show is going with all of this. The most obvious path would be for the Joined to demonstrate greater and greater menace, perhaps pushing harder and harder for Carol to conform and manipulating her in more and more overt ways.

The alternative, though, that might be more original (though tricky to pull off) would be for the Joined to be exactly what they say they are: that they are truly just trying to do what's best for the other eleven humans, and that it's purely through Carol and the others that we'll get the conflict and drama of the series, up against a morally neutral force.

Still, I think it's a smart choice to make Carol a novelist. Carol is someone who has engaged in an artform that seeks to communicate something to readers - not just ideas, but a sense of world, of people. Her novels are fantastical, featuring pirates sailing on sand-ships across a purple desert. There is a joy in communicating ideas in this way, seeking always to find a more perfect way to share the feeling you have in your mind.

When we see the Joined acting with one another, no one ever speaks. No one needs to speak. Any information that one possesses, the rest do as well. With no challenge in communication, how can there be art?

Midnight Mass

 Suzy Eddie Izzard has a bit from one of her older stand-up specials that I always found quite funny: imagining Jesus returning to Heaven after the Resurrection, speaking with God the Father, and the Father reacting with shock and dismay that Jesus had introduced this idea that his followers should eat his body and drink his blood: "You've introduced cannibalism and vampirism on the first day of a new religion!"

The Eucharist is, if you're not Catholic or at least culturally familiar with Catholic practice, a really weird idea. At Mass, the priest transmutes the wafers and wine into what is believed to literally be the body and blood of Christ. And it is right there in the Gospels, where Jesus says that the bread and wine at the Last Supper are these things, and a pretty core tenet of Christianity is that you take Jesus at his word.

I guess I should state here that I don't really want to get into a judgmental space here. My mother was raised Catholic, and a lot of her side of the family are quite devout. (My mom's own beliefs were a little hard to pin down - I think she remained culturally at home within Catholicism but was agnostic in her belief in the supernatural. That she married an atheist Jew, my dad, spoke to her comfort stepping outside of that circle). The point is, lots of people have lots of beliefs that will look odd from an outside perspective, and I'm not here to single out Catholicism: I'm just here to comment on Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass.

Released in 2021, Midnight Mass was the third of a number of miniseries projects created by Mike Flanagan, following up The Haunting of Hill House and the Haunting of Bly Manor. While the previous two were loose adaptations of previous stories, I believe that Midnight Mass is a wholly original one.

Set on the (I'm assuming) fictional island of Crockett Isle, off the coast of New England, the story is about a community that is dying out because of economic and environmental devastation that is thrown into upheaval with the arrival of a new priest to take over the local Catholic church.

Father Paul Hill (Hamish Linklater) is warm and friendly, and more than anything energized, bringing an optimistic spirit of someone who has witnessed a miracle.

Oh, and also, he arrives on the island with a giant trunk that apparently has something alive within it.

Yes, this is a horror story, but three episodes in, the horror has been played quite slow. Largely, we're shown a tiny community that is very tight-knit and centered around the local church, which thus manages to create a few outsiders because of those who don't fit in as well to that religious community.

This, of course, is the paradox of organized religion. There are few institutions, maybe none, that are more effective at bringing people together in community, but because they are built around supernatural belief, those who cannot or will not conform to the expectations of that community will inevitably feel alienated. Those within the community see the solution as simply converting those outside of it: to those within, this seems like a warm act of love and welcome, while to those without, well, it feels like the invasion of the body snatchers.

Vampires, as monsters, are near-universal. Cultures across the world have monsters that drink peoples' blood. But I think there's a special resonance that these monsters have in cultures where Christianity is dominant, because there's this kind of weird perversion of that which is holy: Jesus offers up his blood for humanity to drink and benefit from, while vampires take the blood of their victims. That vampires in particular are often said to be thwarted by religious accoutrements - abjured by crucifixes, seared by holy water - really places them, as monsters, in that religious/spiritual context in a way that, at least by the current folklore/pop culture associations, is not true for something like a werewolf.

Vampires are sometimes depicted as leaning into this kind of blasphemous, sacrilegious appropriation of religious iconography and practice. On a straightforward level, this feels like a cruel kind of mockery of that which gives the devout comfort.

But I think there's a deeper horror inherent in it that veers into cosmic horror: what if it's no mockery, but the real deal? What if the benevolent salvation promised by religion is a facade over something horrific?

Fantastical stories are rife with cultists who have been fooled by demons or other monsters into thinking that service to their so-called savior will bring about salvation. But how much more horrifying would it be to discover that this was not limited to some minor, recent cult, but some major, mainstream religion?

Again, I don't want to offend anyone with sincere beliefs, but it's this kind of dread that even veers into cosmic horror that I think is really potent.

I'm only three episodes into the show's seven-episode run. But we have had some rather huge reveals regarding what is going on. The show is only four years old, so I think I'll do a spoiler cut:

Spoilers Ahead:

Superman

 I finally got around to seeing James Gunn's Superman, the film that launches the (mostly) rebooted DC Cinematic Universe, dispensing with the DCEU that began with Zach Snyder's Man of Steel for a DCU that treats its continuity similar to how Disney has been treating Star Wars' "Legends" content - that it's not canon until they say it is.

In terms of a cultural moment, Gunn's Superman arrives in a time that, like Superman's original comic debut, was threatened by the rise of fascism, though in the 1930s, fascism was seen primarily as something happening elsewhere in the world (though never forget that there were those in America who were big fans of Hitler, and in fact the Nazis took inspiration from Jim Crow policies in the US). Jews (though also homosexuals, Romani, and other minorities) were the primary scapegoats for fascists at the time, and Superman was created by two Jewish writers at a time when it would have been really great to have an incorruptible, invincible protector to stand up to evil.

I think one of the things about Gunn's take on Superman (and, naturally, one of the things that a certain subset of "fans" are not as happy about) is the strong emphasis on his moral drive. Superman spends this movie trying very hard to always do the right thing.

Much like 2022's The Batman (though I don't know if that will be reincorporated into the DCU or remain a stand-alone - when the trailers first came out, I scoffed "Oh yeah, that's what we really need, finally a dark and gritty take on Batman!" but I'll concede that I actually think the movie was decent, even if it tread a lot of the same paths as Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, albeit with a Fincherian visual design and a somberness that wasn't really part of Nolan's films,) the movie doesn't bother with an origin story. When the movie starts, Superman has been protecting the world for 3 years, and we skip past a lot of things: Clark and Lois are already dating, she already knows he's Superman, and he's already teamed up with other "metahumans." Basically, the movie goes: "yeah, you know all this stuff, let's get to the plot."

I think the reaction to this movie can't really be divorced from feelings about Snyder's take on Superman, as played by Henry Cavil (there was a whole clusterfuck regarding whether he was going to continue playing the role, now played by David Corenswet). Man of Steel came out a year after Nolan's final Dark Knight film, and took a lot of inspiration from Nolan's movies' darker and grittier world. Zach Snyder's take on Superman was as a kind of distant, mythic god-like figure, and there was a fair amount of criticism about the "Snyderverse" DCEU movies having a kind of callous attitude toward humanity. Superman infamously kills General Zod in Man of Steel to prevent him from killing an innocent family, but there were also complaints that the "flying right through skyscrapers" method that Superman employs in his fights in that likely caused tons of collateral damage.

In particular, this seemed to draw a strong contrast with Marvel's movies - even though MCU heroes rarely have a no-killing policy (Spider-Man does, but Iron Man and Captain America don't have such qualms as long as the people they're killing are deadly bad guys) where there was quite a bit of emphasis in The Avengers and Avengers Age of Ultron on their efforts to evacuate and protect civilians during their climactic battles.

Snyder's vision seemed less concerned with the role of a hero as a protector of the defenseless and innocent, and more as a superhuman force to clash against other superhuman forces as a kind of mythic and symbolic clash of good and evil. That element, of course, is always part of any superhero narrative, but the complaint some people felt was that there was a certain lack of humanism to Snyder's take on the genre.

I'm not here to condemn Snyder as a director (he's not really to my tastes, and I don't think he deserves the blame for fans who have made his movies an ideological banner to wave in our "everything has to be deeply polarizing" times) but only to talk about how I think Gunn's take seeks to reincorporate a lot of the elements that critics found missing from the previous cinematic incarnation.

In one of the film's many action set-pieces, Superman at one point flies in an grabs a squirrel that was in danger of being squashed by a massive kaiju. This was, apparently, something that Jame Gunn had to fight for after test screenings found it silly and superfluous.

But I think it's brilliant. People complain about Superman being boring because he's just good, near-invincible, nearly all-powerful, and unflawed as a person. But I think the movie either leans into these issues or questions how true they are to make Superman feel unique and fresh.

(I'll note that Chris Evan's portrayal of Steve Rogers showed that you can have a deeply principled, Capital H hero that is totally compelling on screen, and I have to imagine that they took notes.)

The squirrel shows that his goodness is not something to just list as a bullet point and move on from. This is a guy who holds himself to a profound, insanely high standard. Whether he sees it that way or whether he just feels a deep emotional need to protect people, the point is that he is the guy who would consider it a tragedy for an innocent creature to be killed when they could have been saved, no matter how humble.

While the Justice Gang (the trio of other superheroes who are fun but also emblematic of some of the movie's pacing issues and overstuffed nature) does kill that kaiju, Superman is the one who would really have preferred to take it down non-lethally, or at least find a less painful way to euthanize it. He understands that this skyscraper-sized creature is ultimately just an animal acting on instinct and not with malice.

Superman's status as a moral paragon, and even his old-fashioned expressions (he says, unironically, Golly at one point) give him a specificity.

In a scene that I imagine has generated a lot of "takes," he talks with Lois about listening to punk rock as a kid, and while they disagree on the quality of the peppy, poppy fictional punk band the Mighty Crabjoys that he liked, he argues that his choice to be idealistic, hopeful, and heroic in the face of cynicism and distrust, is his own act of rebellion, saying "maybe that's the real punk rock."

And, I mean, that's the thrust of the movie.

While in this movie, many things about the world are already established, including a fairly blasé attitude the citizens of Metropolis have toward superheroes fighting giant monsters on their streets (we're emphatically not doing origin stories, even for the public's knowledge of all this superhero stuff,) the true debut here is Superman's enmity with Lex Luthor.

Nicholas Hoult is an actor that I think is basically good in everything I ever seen him in. And his take on Lex Luthor is fascinating for a couple reasons.

On a surface level, yes, he's basically a tech-bro billionaire with an inflated sense of ego, catastrophically too much money and resources to spend on his pet projects, and with greater access and influence than he should have. It's an archetype that resonates with real-world would-be-supervillains today like a certain entrepreneur who bought a popular social media platform so that he could control what kind of speech was used on it.

But while I think many portrayals of Luthor in the past, at least in recent years, have made him out to be suave, cool-headed, and disarmingly "reasonable," Hoult's Luthor is just an absolute shit. He's a rat bastard, motivated by a searing hatred and resentment of Superman. His Luthor is never cool, never likable, never charming, and never granted a sympathetic motivation for his villainy. He just absolutely sucks. And it's great.

While I guess I never put in a spoiler cut here, I'll just say that Luthor's plot involves a twist that is not entirely dissimilar to the one in Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz, where suspected motivations are far simpler than they first appear.

Numerous choices, from aesthetics to the movie's ensemble, to the elements of the plot, all come together to emphatically lean in to comic-book goofiness. Not only does Krypto, the Super-Dog play a major role in the story, but we also have several Superman Robots manning the Fortress of Solitude. We have fully ditched the Dark Knight trilogy's "let's make this as realistic as possible" concepts, which makes sense given that, while Batman's superpowers are all technology and his own mental and physical conditioning and training, Superman's a space alien who somehow gets superpowers from being exposed to the yellow sun.

And that source of power actually serves as a major plot point.

While certainly far more resilient than a human being, and even most "metahumans," this Superman is not invincible. Our first look at him in the movie is when he plummets like a meteor in Antarctica bruised, bleeding, wheezing, and with numerous broken bones. We're told this is the first time he's ever lost a fight (and when we find out who his foe was later in the movie, this makes sense) and we actually spend the first few minutes of the movie watching him agonizingly undergo accelerated healing by having a bunch of magnifying lenses concentrate sunlight on him before he launches off to go in for round two over halfway across the world. (Yes, the Fortress of Solitude is in the Antarctic. I guess the melting ice caps make putting it on the North Pole less realistic. If only we had superheroes who could stop climate change.)

Again, I think there's a certain conversation here with Snyder's take on Superman as this ascended, untouchable mythic being. I should throw out the caveat here that the only DCEU movie I ever saw was the first Shazam movie, so I can't comment directly on Snyder's movies except second-hand, so take that big old grain of salt. Superman's invincibility is one of the main things that people claim makes him boring, and so to solve that problem, Gunn makes his Superman not quite as invincible. (Though I'll say that as someone who knows anything at all about physics, the notion that even Superman could survive floating in a river of antiprotons feels insane.) Yes, against most foes, Superman has the power to overcome them with ease, but it's a matter of scale.

At his core, Superman's strength (said pretty explicitly in the film) is that, despite his power, humanism is what drives him and actually makes him a hero. We get to spend a little time with the Kents, and it's clear that these are profoundly loving, supportive parents. A pep-talk by Jonathan Kent is what gives him the drive to keep going, and it becomes clear that these parents who took him in when he arrived on Earth as an infant are the reason why the planet has such a paragon to defend it (and other plot points that really re-emphasize this fact.)

It's interesting, because James Gunn made a name for himself in the superhero cinema landscape with dark deconstructions like Super, and later took the then-obscure Guardians of the Galaxy and made them some of the most popular superheroes in the MCU. Notably, with both that and his take on The Suicide Squad for DC, he made movies about anti-heroes finding a sense of family and belonging to become better and more heroic people.

In absolutely zero way is Superman an anti-hero. He's a superhero. He's the superhero. But I think that Gunn identifies humanism as the root of goodness (at least I do, but I don't think I'm just projecting here) and that guides both his bad-guys-make-good stories as well as his exploration of what the paragon of heroism ought to be. We can look at Superman and view him as someone who is always doing the right thing, always good, but internally, he's always struggling to be better. Indeed, when Lois points out that his initial warning to the leader of the aggressor country whose invasion he stopped could be construed, on a technical level, as torture and a death threat, he's utterly mortified. We never see this happen (it involves shoving the guy against a cactus and telling him that there would be consequences if he doesn't back off from his bellicose goals) but I imagine that this Superman is probably going to be a bit haunted by this, maybe for the rest of his life, fearing that he went too far, and likely looking back on it as an important example of how he needs to be better.

Superman isn't flawless. But I think the flaws are complicated and nuanced - his overwhelming goodness is good for the world, but I think he pays a steep price for it in that he can't really let himself relax. He's caught between the need to think through the long-term ramifications of his actions while also not getting bogged down in the kind of hesitations that prevent him from doing the right thing. People are going to die? That's an emergency that requires intervention. But it might also mean an international incident that's going to piss a whole lot of people off. And I think Superman knows that some people can become tunnel-visioned with their own moral sense and wind up doing bad things in the name of a greater good - and he struggles to monitor himself to ensure that he never falls into that trap, and perhaps needs people like Lois around him to question his actions and make sure that he's on the righteous path.

I do think we're at an interesting time regarding superhero cinema. It's been six years since Avengers: Endgame, the moment that now certainly feels like it was the grand finale of the golden age of the MCU. Marvel and Disney are kind of struggling to get back that feeling of appointment viewing they had through the 2010s (a pandemic that made going to the movie theater a no-go for a few years didn't help).

Gunn, of course, was one of the great success stories out of the MCU's mass film production machine, and what I have at least heard about his approach running DC Studios is encouraging (not only having an actual filmmaker running the studio, but also having a policy of "we need to have a good script before we try to make a movie" is the kind of no-brainer that nevertheless is often ignored by Hollywood, especially in the franchise film model).

And, given the state of the world and definitely the country, a nice dose of optimism is welcome. It's fucking scary to be an American right now, and there's a sense that we're losing something core to us that has been true for multiple generations.

Gunn's Superman might file off the serial numbers when it comes to actual real-world countries (especially because the warring, bordering countries about to go to war sound like, respectively, an Eastern European country and a state in India) but it's not ambiguous about the fact that Superman, as an alien, is also an immigrant, and that part of Luthor's hatred for him is from the notion that someone who "isn't one of us" can be so powerful and so beloved.

Frankly, I'm at a point where I fear that the overreach of our current government will try to punish a film studio for this mildly-left-of-center message, and given the capitulations that we've seen from various media companies in recent days, I wouldn't put it past them to at least try. (I also hope that some random guy with a blog won't be targeted for just being on the political left, but we're in stormy, uncharted waters here.)

That does really make you wonder, though: is this going to spark a new enthusiasm for the superhero genre that was so profoundly dominant for a good 11 years? I'm certain that Warner Bros. hopes so.

Of course, I never really had a problem with all the superhero movies coming out - it's only that I wish that other types of movies were given some space as well.

Superman is, honestly, part of the American mythos, and the reinterpretation of him as a character over nearly 90 years reflects, I think, how we see ourselves and our ideals. This is a version of that character I'm happy to see, especially given how much dread there is in the air these days.

Is it a strong start for a new cinematic universe?

I don't know. I think there's a little lack of focus. Superman makes sense as your DCU headliner, of course, and while Mr. Terrific lives up to his name, and many of the other side characters are fun (Nathan Fillion is great as Guy Gardner, the Green Lantern who's a bit of a dick.) While I think you could make the argument that this isn't so much a parade of back-door piloting (a problem that I think has really plagued the later years of the MCU) so much as just trying to establish that this is, from the start, a world where there are superheroes everywhere, I do think that the movie tries to stuff a lot of plot points and characters into a tight runtime, and maybe would have benefitted from some judicious cuts or some more room to breathe.

I also think that one of the smarter moves, I think, Gunn and Peter Safran could make with the DCU is to be less beholden to a "studio style." There's certainly a logic to trying to create a winning formula for these movies, but I also think that, especially after now 17 years of the current era of superheroic cinema, an approach that gives wider latitude to individual directors to make movies that build up their form and style in a way to match the story they're telling would be, possibly, the shot in the arm that the genre needs, or at the very least, something that allows audiences to move on from a stinker should one show up. The idea of a Clay-Face horror movie, which I think is on their docket, is promising in this regard.

Now, of course, I'd also love studios to be willing to make big-budget movies that are original stories, or at least to adapt stories that don't come from the world of superhero comics. When I was a kid, we got big movies like Jurrassic Park, the Fifth Element, and the Matrix. I don't need or want sequels to any of those, but I'd love an environment in which a kid growing up now can get in on the ground floor of some exciting new story, world, and set of characters.