By an odd and sad coincidence, I saw Rogue One the day that Carrie Fisher passed away. Of the original Star Wars trilogy's trifecta of main characters, Fisher's Princess Leia is the closest tied to the events of the film. Indeed, this odd tangent-interquel ties itself so directly to the original Star Wars that one could play A New Hope immediately after it and more or less be a continuous story, albeit one that would abruptly shift its focus to different characters.
The ultimate result of Rogue One is, of course, already known. That's the nature of any kind of prequel or interquel (the chronology of the Star Wars films has been messy ever since the prequels and will only continue to grow more so as these "Star Wars Stories" go on.)
Rogue One is in many ways a proof of concept - they want to make more Star Wars movies. But while the cynic (who is not entirely incorrect) would say that the primary motivation for this is money (Disney wants to get more than three movies out of their 4-billion dollar purchase) I also think that, with generations of artists who grew up loving the Star Wars universe, people want to try different takes on it.
Much like Marvel's vast comic universe, which has stories and characters as bright and optimistic as old Captain America and as dark and disturbed as the Punisher, the Star Wars universe has always seems ripe for alternate takes. The expanded universe, primarily in novels but also comics, has allowed what could be called glorified fan fiction to show us different sides of that world. Rogue One is the first instance of a film being made in the same vein - we're seeing the Star Wars universe expanded.
This is a movie that, apart from a couple of brief cameos, doesn't really concern the Skywalker family. The hero isn't a Jedi, and in fact, the morals are murkier. Most importantly, this is not a movie about people with destinies chosen by a mystical fate. Yes, the Force does play a role, but it looks a lot more like real-world religion, where your own beliefs will shape what you see with your own eyes (or other senses, as the most devout character in the movie is blind.)
It's also a movie that finds a reason to care about people who aren't the most important people in the galaxy. Ultimately, the events of the film would warrant maybe a page or a paragraph in a history textbook, and are basically two sentences in the original movie's opening crawl, but to the people involved in the story, it's the most important event in any of their lives.
To get some thumbs-up/thumbs-down criticism out of the way before I jump into spoilers, I'll say that mostly I'm still digesting it. Characterization suffers a bit from having a ton of characters to keep track of as well as the somewhat procedural nature of the story (you could argue it's kind of a heist movie, though I think it's more accurate to call it a War Movie, ironically in a way that the main series isn't, really, despite being called Star Wars. I would take the PG-13 rating seriously, as this is absolutely darker than the typical Star Wars movies. So if the lack of depth to its characters is its biggest flaw, I'd say it's biggest positive is the addition of some much-needed nuance to the Star Wars universe, with a more realistic (and fractured) Rebellion that doesn't always act like totally good guys and also a world where there's real grunt-work to be done while Luke and Darth Vader are swinging around their lightsabers.
And now, spoilers. And they are pretty big, so be warned.
Tuesday, December 27, 2016
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
Westworld and Moral Obligation to the Dubiously Sentient
So I realize I'm late to the party here. My HBO source dried up a while ago and I only realized today that HBO will let you watch the first episode for free. But while I've never seen the Michael Crichton movie the show is based on, I was pretty sure that I would have to check out the Westworld show as soon as I saw a preview.
I've only seen the first episode, but already I have a lot of thoughts, and not all of them are going to fit in this post.
One of my philosophical fixations has always been the nature of consciousness and by extension sentience. Like Descartes, I think that one's own consciousness is the purest philosophical axiom. Without a consciousness, we could not even be there to think about other philosophical questions. I don't think that the existence of the consciousness automatically leads to conclusions about the existence of God or guarantees the immortality of the soul (a term I consider to be just a religious way about talking about the consciousness) the way that Descartes does, even if I hope for both of those to prove true.
But nowhere within science fiction is the question of consciousness more central than when we talk about artificial intelligence. You see it from Asimov's robot stories to Data on Star Trek TNG to recent movies like Ex Machina.
Throughout history, we have built tools, but they have almost always been for mechanical purposes - making physical labor easier rather than mental labor. While we had things like abacuses for a long time as well, the birth of the computer age accelerated technology's approach to intelligence.
We generally have a sense - perhaps an instinct - that if we are the ones to construct an information-processing machine, if we understand its underlying logic, that it will not be sentient. We see ourselves as a separate kind of entity, imbued with something that a machine could never have - this spark of consciousness.
There's a concept in philosophy called a philosophical zombie. This is the basic idea: imagine a person who behaves exactly as you would expect a human being to behave. You hit them on the toe, they yelp in pain. You tell them a funny joke, they laugh. You ask them about the latest Marvel movie and they talk about how cool they found all the psychedelic imagery (at the time of this post, the most recent one was Doctor Strange.) But in this hypothetical, while the person's behavior is indistinguishable from any other person's, we know (simply because these are the parameters of the hypothetical) that there is no experience of this person's conscious thoughts. They don't truly see things - they instead process the information that the receptors on their retinas take in and then add that to the other information processing in their brain which will then output a set of behaviors.
Now, would it be wrong to kill this person?
This raises a question of why we consider murder to be morally wrong - arguably the cardinal moral wrong in our moral universe. I think that most of us would agree that it is because death, as well as the pain associated with the disruption of the body's systems, are undesirable. We fear the pain of a mortal injury and we also fear the potential oblivion that death could bring.
A philosophical zombie would show a semblance of fear or pain if threatened with such an action, but by definition, it would not truly experience them.
So does that make it ok?
I can't really say. I'm inclined to lean toward no, the argument being that even if there is no real fear or pain being inflicted on an entity that can experience such things, that the action taken is reflected in the person taking the action.
But I also play video games.
Video games as a medium are not intrinsically violent, but they tend to take the form of violent adventures. Even the most kid-friendly games, like the Super Mario Bros. series, primarily has its cartoon mascot employ violence against enemies. Frankly, you can trace this back a lot farther. Chess, arguably the most iconic game in the world, takes the form of a highly abstracted battle between two kingdoms. The goal of the game is to kill the enemy's king. "Checkmate" is really a bastardization of "Shah Mat," which means "the king is dead."
Still, a chess piece is generally very few steps removed from a hunk of plastic, stone, or whatever you used to make it. I don't think anyone but the most devoted animist would consider the pieces to actually be sentient beings who cared if they were killed or not.
(EDIT: One can also point out that while the king chess piece is "killed," it is not a true death. The piece can return to life, as it were, when a new game begins. So perhaps a chess piece is merely an actor playing a role. As anguished as Hamlet might be as he uncovers the truth of his father's murder and eventually dies from poison, the actor playing Hamlet is probably having a great time.)
And the NPCs (non-player characters) in video games are ultimately a whole lot less sophisticated than a human mind. Even in games where computer AI is more sophisticated, it's still just essentially working from a flowchart.
In Westworld, we're clearly meant to question whether its automatons - called "Hosts" - are sentient. Given that they are played by human actors, the show pushes toward affirming that. But there's an interesting scene in which the park's creator, Robert Ford (who shares the name with a figure from American Western history) is down in "cold storage" where the defunct hosts are kept. He's having a drink with one of the older models. And while this character is also played by a human actor, his movements are far jerkier, and his dialogue a lot more repetitive. It becomes apparent that the hosts here are really just an evolution of the kind of Disneyland audio-animatronics that presumably inspired Crichton in the first place.
The convincing realism of the host characters becomes apparent as simply a refinement of the system. They have become increasingly sophisticated through constant reprogramming. In an early scene, some of the designers are exploring the new "revelries" that Ford has added to the programming, adding unique gestures that are generated procedurally from a host's memories. We're long past the point where the hosts are staying to a strict script, but that's not really pure sci-fi given that we've got computers doing this kind of procedural generation to create unpredictable behaviors and products already.
As the hosts approach closer and closer to realistic human behavior, we're forced to confront an unsettling truth:
We are also machines.
Our brains are networks of neurons that send electrical signals to each other. Ultimately we're also operating from a flowchart that takes input (our senses) and produces an output (our behaviors.) Our bodies are basically incredibly complicated chemical processes, resulting in life as we know it.
But if you ask me, that is not a sad commentary on what it means to be a living human, and is instead a profound endorsement of the power of machines. Because as I stated at the beginning of this post: consciousness is where all of our philosophical ideas must ultimately grow out of. We must be conscious beings for out thoughts to have any substance to them. And if organic machines can produce or tap into consciousness, then why should we assume that artificial machines could not do the same?
(EDIT: To return to the earlier edit, the hosts are, in a sense, actors playing roles. We see that hosts can play multiple roles - Dolores' father for example had previously been used as the leader of a cult of cannibals out in the desert, a very different kind of character than the one we see in this first episode - but in a sense, these hosts are forced into the most extreme forms of method acting. We don't know if there is a sentience within to know if they are acting or not, but in a sense, aren't they just the people they are programmed to be?)
I've only seen the first episode, but already I have a lot of thoughts, and not all of them are going to fit in this post.
One of my philosophical fixations has always been the nature of consciousness and by extension sentience. Like Descartes, I think that one's own consciousness is the purest philosophical axiom. Without a consciousness, we could not even be there to think about other philosophical questions. I don't think that the existence of the consciousness automatically leads to conclusions about the existence of God or guarantees the immortality of the soul (a term I consider to be just a religious way about talking about the consciousness) the way that Descartes does, even if I hope for both of those to prove true.
But nowhere within science fiction is the question of consciousness more central than when we talk about artificial intelligence. You see it from Asimov's robot stories to Data on Star Trek TNG to recent movies like Ex Machina.
Throughout history, we have built tools, but they have almost always been for mechanical purposes - making physical labor easier rather than mental labor. While we had things like abacuses for a long time as well, the birth of the computer age accelerated technology's approach to intelligence.
We generally have a sense - perhaps an instinct - that if we are the ones to construct an information-processing machine, if we understand its underlying logic, that it will not be sentient. We see ourselves as a separate kind of entity, imbued with something that a machine could never have - this spark of consciousness.
There's a concept in philosophy called a philosophical zombie. This is the basic idea: imagine a person who behaves exactly as you would expect a human being to behave. You hit them on the toe, they yelp in pain. You tell them a funny joke, they laugh. You ask them about the latest Marvel movie and they talk about how cool they found all the psychedelic imagery (at the time of this post, the most recent one was Doctor Strange.) But in this hypothetical, while the person's behavior is indistinguishable from any other person's, we know (simply because these are the parameters of the hypothetical) that there is no experience of this person's conscious thoughts. They don't truly see things - they instead process the information that the receptors on their retinas take in and then add that to the other information processing in their brain which will then output a set of behaviors.
Now, would it be wrong to kill this person?
This raises a question of why we consider murder to be morally wrong - arguably the cardinal moral wrong in our moral universe. I think that most of us would agree that it is because death, as well as the pain associated with the disruption of the body's systems, are undesirable. We fear the pain of a mortal injury and we also fear the potential oblivion that death could bring.
A philosophical zombie would show a semblance of fear or pain if threatened with such an action, but by definition, it would not truly experience them.
So does that make it ok?
I can't really say. I'm inclined to lean toward no, the argument being that even if there is no real fear or pain being inflicted on an entity that can experience such things, that the action taken is reflected in the person taking the action.
But I also play video games.
Video games as a medium are not intrinsically violent, but they tend to take the form of violent adventures. Even the most kid-friendly games, like the Super Mario Bros. series, primarily has its cartoon mascot employ violence against enemies. Frankly, you can trace this back a lot farther. Chess, arguably the most iconic game in the world, takes the form of a highly abstracted battle between two kingdoms. The goal of the game is to kill the enemy's king. "Checkmate" is really a bastardization of "Shah Mat," which means "the king is dead."
Still, a chess piece is generally very few steps removed from a hunk of plastic, stone, or whatever you used to make it. I don't think anyone but the most devoted animist would consider the pieces to actually be sentient beings who cared if they were killed or not.
(EDIT: One can also point out that while the king chess piece is "killed," it is not a true death. The piece can return to life, as it were, when a new game begins. So perhaps a chess piece is merely an actor playing a role. As anguished as Hamlet might be as he uncovers the truth of his father's murder and eventually dies from poison, the actor playing Hamlet is probably having a great time.)
And the NPCs (non-player characters) in video games are ultimately a whole lot less sophisticated than a human mind. Even in games where computer AI is more sophisticated, it's still just essentially working from a flowchart.
In Westworld, we're clearly meant to question whether its automatons - called "Hosts" - are sentient. Given that they are played by human actors, the show pushes toward affirming that. But there's an interesting scene in which the park's creator, Robert Ford (who shares the name with a figure from American Western history) is down in "cold storage" where the defunct hosts are kept. He's having a drink with one of the older models. And while this character is also played by a human actor, his movements are far jerkier, and his dialogue a lot more repetitive. It becomes apparent that the hosts here are really just an evolution of the kind of Disneyland audio-animatronics that presumably inspired Crichton in the first place.
The convincing realism of the host characters becomes apparent as simply a refinement of the system. They have become increasingly sophisticated through constant reprogramming. In an early scene, some of the designers are exploring the new "revelries" that Ford has added to the programming, adding unique gestures that are generated procedurally from a host's memories. We're long past the point where the hosts are staying to a strict script, but that's not really pure sci-fi given that we've got computers doing this kind of procedural generation to create unpredictable behaviors and products already.
As the hosts approach closer and closer to realistic human behavior, we're forced to confront an unsettling truth:
We are also machines.
Our brains are networks of neurons that send electrical signals to each other. Ultimately we're also operating from a flowchart that takes input (our senses) and produces an output (our behaviors.) Our bodies are basically incredibly complicated chemical processes, resulting in life as we know it.
But if you ask me, that is not a sad commentary on what it means to be a living human, and is instead a profound endorsement of the power of machines. Because as I stated at the beginning of this post: consciousness is where all of our philosophical ideas must ultimately grow out of. We must be conscious beings for out thoughts to have any substance to them. And if organic machines can produce or tap into consciousness, then why should we assume that artificial machines could not do the same?
(EDIT: To return to the earlier edit, the hosts are, in a sense, actors playing roles. We see that hosts can play multiple roles - Dolores' father for example had previously been used as the leader of a cult of cannibals out in the desert, a very different kind of character than the one we see in this first episode - but in a sense, these hosts are forced into the most extreme forms of method acting. We don't know if there is a sentience within to know if they are acting or not, but in a sense, aren't they just the people they are programmed to be?)
Friday, November 4, 2016
Doctor Strange
When it comes to genre fiction, Marvel films have tended toward the science-fiction side of the spectrum. Oh, it's very soft sci-fi to be sure, but the implication is that everything has a rational explanation - Iron Man's suit is a piece of technology, same with those of Black Panther and Ant-Man. Captain America and the Hulk are both the results of chemical treatments that affected their physiologies. Hawkeye and Black Widow are just really good at their jobs. The sole exception has been Thor, but even he downplays the "literal Norse god" angle and really considers himself to be part of a civilization so advanced that the difference between magic and technology is irrelevant.
Doctor Strange is unapologetically fantasy - and in fact it is only by rejecting philosophical materialism that Steven Strange is able to master the mystic arts.
The movie is Doctor Strange's origin story, but it's probably for the best because the audience really needs to be primed on the whole other level of reality in which he's operating. Strange begins the film as a world-famous neurosurgeon, clearly at the top of his field and very, very well aware of this fact. He's egotistical but somewhat untouchable due to his skills. However, when he makes the mistake of texting while driving (seriously, don't) he gets in a nasty car accident from which he is lucky to have escaped alive. His hands - the precise instruments of his greatness - are severely damaged, effectively spelling an end to his career as a surgeon.
After exhausting western medicine's capabilities, he finds out that a patient he rejected (largely because the man's problem seemed incurable) is out playing basketball when he should be a paraplegic. The man tells him to seek out a place in Katmandu where he can learn more.
Desperate, Strange spends the last of his money to get to this place, where he meets the Ancient One. To step outside of the narrative for a moment, this character was originally an asian man and is written and performed here as a white woman. It's Tilda Swinton, so it's a good performance, but given the historical underrepresentation of asian characters played by asian actors, it's a little uncomfortable. It's one of those things that wouldn't be a problem on its own, but given that one of the previews played before the movie was The Great Wall, starring a white American and a latino American in a film set in China, clearly there's a pattern. Thankfully there is at least one asian character played by an actual asian actor, but Hollywood in general could be a lot better about this.
Anyway, the Ancient One quickly disproves Strange's philosophical materialist worldview by sending him on a mind-bending trip through multiple dimensions, and it's here that the movie really shows its biggest strength:
The movie is trippy as balls.
While it's not the first time we've had mind-bending visuals in a Marvel movie (see the subatomic world in Ant-Man) this one really takes us into new levels of insanity, like seeing Benedict Cumberbatch's Steven Strange watch his fingers sprout hands of their own, then have hands emerge from his own body, dragging him down into a pit that turns out to be the pupil of his own eye.
The film's villain, played by Mads Mikkelsen (whose performance in Hannibal has made me a huge fan of his,) warps space around him, creating M. C. Escher-like twists in the architecture of the world that make fighting him a complicated exercise in reconciling multiple dimensions.
Plot-wise we're not too far outside the typical Marvel formula. One could argue that Strange's journey from self-centered egotism to self-sacrificing heroism is pretty much the same arc we've seen Tony Stark go through. But A: the formula works, and B: the visuals of this movie alone more than earn its place in the Marvel canon.
I'll confess that I've totally bought in to the Marvel Cinematic Universe - the movies feel like comfort food to me, and while yeah, they're not the most cerebrally challenging films, they're damned fun. I'm eager to see Strange interact with other members of the Cinematic Universe, though again, he's on a much higher level of power than pretty much anything we've seen before. The first post-credits scene involves a tease for Thor: Ragnarok, and while a literal Norse god is probably capable of at least understanding what Strange goes through, it'll be pretty funny to see him interacting with like, Hawkeye.
Some imagined dialogue:
"I bend reality and interact with infinite dimensions to safeguard our reality from the infinite dangers that threaten it."
"I shoot things with a bow and arrow."
Saturday, October 1, 2016
Luke Cage
Luke Cage was one of the many great things about Marvel's Jessica Jones series on Netflix. Marvel's Netflix shows - which sort of exist as a MCU annex - have a very different feel from their movies. For one thing, they are absolutely aimed at adult audiences as opposed to the movies' "depending on how ok you are with your kids seeing fantasy-violence" age range.
These shows deal with local problems - all in New York because Marvel doesn't really think of there as being any cities in the US other than New York and maybe D.C. (sorry, Bostonian with a chip on his shoulder here.) The villains are not world-ending cosmic monstrosities - instead they're typically just well-organized criminals or in the case of Kilgrave from Jessica Jones, a sociopath with the worst possible superpower for a sociopath to have.
Anyway, Luke Cage was a welcome presence in Jessica Jones, and given that he's a well-established superhero in his own right (predating Jessica Jones by three decades or so, I believe,) it makes perfect sense that we're getting a series built around him.
I don't think you can possibly ignore the power and relevance of the imagery in this series. While racial violence has been a constant throughout American history, the nation's attention has finally turned (even as a depressingly large number of people try to deny or rationalize it) to the danger of being a black man in America. We get what seems like weekly stories of unarmed black men getting shot by cops. As a white man, I had lived most of my life unaware of just how pervasive this condition of oppression remains. I'm still haunted by the story of Trayvon Martin, whose death seemed like something out of a horror movie, and a teenager walking around late at night with snacks from a convenience store very closely describes how I spent a lot of time with my friends around that age.
Seeing Luke Cage as a black man (certainly not as young as Martin, but not all the victims of these racially-motivated killings have been) wearing a hoodie who is immune to bullets is the sort of empowering fantasy that I think was achieved when Jewish comic creators invented Captain America and Superman (the latter having an origin story based on that of Moses) as invincible heroes to fight the Nazis. It doesn't solve the problem, of course, but it provides a degree of catharsis.
I'm currently at a shift slightly past halfway through this season, but I'll tread carefully around spoilers.
The story picks up a few months after season one of Jessica Jones. Luke has attempted to move on with his life, moving up to Harlem and working a couple simple, cash-only jobs - sweeping up hair at Pop's Barbershop and washing dishes at the Harlem's Paradise nightclub.
Pop is a reformed gangster who has tried to make his shop a beacon of hope for kids in the community, where they can see men at work being role models, and Pop also coaches kids in basketball. Harlem's Paradise is run by Cornell Stokes, known often as Cottonmouth, but he hates that name. Stokes is a would-be Kingpin, running various criminal enterprises that he inherited from his legendary aunt Mama Maybel. His cousin, Mariah, is on the legitimate side of things, and is a councilwoman for the neighborhood. Mariah has a grand project to revitalize Harlem and ensure that the black residents are not run out of the neighborhood by encroaching gentrification, but her methods rely heavily on her cousin's criminal activities.
At first, Luke is nearly lost in the mix, as the pilot puts a lot of work into setting up the board, introducing these figures as well as Misty Knight, whom Luke sleeps with and later discovers is actually a detective who has been looking into Cottonmouth.
Luke gets pulled into the mix when some of the kids who hang around the barbershop have the stupid idea to stick up a weapons deal between Cottonmouth's people and the Puerto Rican Colon syndicate. Pop asks Luke to save one of the kids - the son of an old friend who died decades back - and the repercussions of Luke's interference leads to a war between Power Man and Cottonmouth.
The plot is a little similar to that of Daredevil's first season, but with a backdrop of rich themes of black identity and the complicated effects of racism and the American Dream on the world of organized crimes. Still, there are deeper forces at work that where I am at in the series, we're only beginning to get deeper into. One of the really enigmatic figures, for example, is a man named Shades, who comes to work for Cottonmouth as a kind of ambassador from a different, far more powerful criminal overlord called Diamondback (Cottonmouth is also a type of snake, right? Lots of snake metaphors.)
My immediate gut reaction to talk about Diamondback is that it's Wilson Fisk, but given that we've heard references to him as well without such a code name, and also the fact that Fisk is in prison (not that that means he's not still powerful - see Daredevil Season Two) I feel like there's got to be some trick up their sleeves.
We do find out more about Luke Cage's origin in episode four, though we sort of get the back half of his origin story, kind of handwaving the acquisition of his powers. We know why he changed his name (from Carl Lucas) and why he's always on the move, but the steps necessary to put him where he was when he got his powers are still a little hazy.
Anyway, Netflix is bugging at the moment, which is why I've taken this break in my binge-watch, but I'll probably post more when I've finished the season.
These shows deal with local problems - all in New York because Marvel doesn't really think of there as being any cities in the US other than New York and maybe D.C. (sorry, Bostonian with a chip on his shoulder here.) The villains are not world-ending cosmic monstrosities - instead they're typically just well-organized criminals or in the case of Kilgrave from Jessica Jones, a sociopath with the worst possible superpower for a sociopath to have.
Anyway, Luke Cage was a welcome presence in Jessica Jones, and given that he's a well-established superhero in his own right (predating Jessica Jones by three decades or so, I believe,) it makes perfect sense that we're getting a series built around him.
I don't think you can possibly ignore the power and relevance of the imagery in this series. While racial violence has been a constant throughout American history, the nation's attention has finally turned (even as a depressingly large number of people try to deny or rationalize it) to the danger of being a black man in America. We get what seems like weekly stories of unarmed black men getting shot by cops. As a white man, I had lived most of my life unaware of just how pervasive this condition of oppression remains. I'm still haunted by the story of Trayvon Martin, whose death seemed like something out of a horror movie, and a teenager walking around late at night with snacks from a convenience store very closely describes how I spent a lot of time with my friends around that age.
Seeing Luke Cage as a black man (certainly not as young as Martin, but not all the victims of these racially-motivated killings have been) wearing a hoodie who is immune to bullets is the sort of empowering fantasy that I think was achieved when Jewish comic creators invented Captain America and Superman (the latter having an origin story based on that of Moses) as invincible heroes to fight the Nazis. It doesn't solve the problem, of course, but it provides a degree of catharsis.
I'm currently at a shift slightly past halfway through this season, but I'll tread carefully around spoilers.
The story picks up a few months after season one of Jessica Jones. Luke has attempted to move on with his life, moving up to Harlem and working a couple simple, cash-only jobs - sweeping up hair at Pop's Barbershop and washing dishes at the Harlem's Paradise nightclub.
Pop is a reformed gangster who has tried to make his shop a beacon of hope for kids in the community, where they can see men at work being role models, and Pop also coaches kids in basketball. Harlem's Paradise is run by Cornell Stokes, known often as Cottonmouth, but he hates that name. Stokes is a would-be Kingpin, running various criminal enterprises that he inherited from his legendary aunt Mama Maybel. His cousin, Mariah, is on the legitimate side of things, and is a councilwoman for the neighborhood. Mariah has a grand project to revitalize Harlem and ensure that the black residents are not run out of the neighborhood by encroaching gentrification, but her methods rely heavily on her cousin's criminal activities.
At first, Luke is nearly lost in the mix, as the pilot puts a lot of work into setting up the board, introducing these figures as well as Misty Knight, whom Luke sleeps with and later discovers is actually a detective who has been looking into Cottonmouth.
Luke gets pulled into the mix when some of the kids who hang around the barbershop have the stupid idea to stick up a weapons deal between Cottonmouth's people and the Puerto Rican Colon syndicate. Pop asks Luke to save one of the kids - the son of an old friend who died decades back - and the repercussions of Luke's interference leads to a war between Power Man and Cottonmouth.
The plot is a little similar to that of Daredevil's first season, but with a backdrop of rich themes of black identity and the complicated effects of racism and the American Dream on the world of organized crimes. Still, there are deeper forces at work that where I am at in the series, we're only beginning to get deeper into. One of the really enigmatic figures, for example, is a man named Shades, who comes to work for Cottonmouth as a kind of ambassador from a different, far more powerful criminal overlord called Diamondback (Cottonmouth is also a type of snake, right? Lots of snake metaphors.)
My immediate gut reaction to talk about Diamondback is that it's Wilson Fisk, but given that we've heard references to him as well without such a code name, and also the fact that Fisk is in prison (not that that means he's not still powerful - see Daredevil Season Two) I feel like there's got to be some trick up their sleeves.
We do find out more about Luke Cage's origin in episode four, though we sort of get the back half of his origin story, kind of handwaving the acquisition of his powers. We know why he changed his name (from Carl Lucas) and why he's always on the move, but the steps necessary to put him where he was when he got his powers are still a little hazy.
Anyway, Netflix is bugging at the moment, which is why I've taken this break in my binge-watch, but I'll probably post more when I've finished the season.
Thursday, August 18, 2016
Mr. Robot Pulls the Rug Out in the Last Two Episodes
Oh boy, what a weird pair of episodes. Masters & Slaves and Handshake (I'm just going to write the simple versions of the titles for the sake of it not being a pain to write) play some real interesting games with our understanding of what is happening in the world of the show.
Obviously, spoilers, so let's do a cut.
Obviously, spoilers, so let's do a cut.
Thursday, August 4, 2016
Mr. Robot's Logic Bomb Invites Horror Back Into the Series
Fsociety are the most wanted people in the world (well, them and Tyrell Wellick, though he might have technically joined before disappearing) but they didn't commit an act of violence. The effects of their little revolution are far-reaching, and the responses to it - particularly that of a conspiracy theorist who thinks Gideon was some sort of "crisis actor" and thus worth of death - have been far from joyous.
Last night's episode is filled with revelations, but also a growing sense that the hack has been co-opted by some very sinister people. Elliot and his team are idealists, but they're also operating in an underworld - and arguably an "overworld" - that plays with even higher stakes.
Dominique DiPierro - Dom for short - has been something of an alternate protagonist, even if she is technically an antagonist. She's an FBI agent who is, as she describes herself, disgusted by the evil of the world but also obsessed with it. That's our main explanation of why she wound up in law enforcement.
As part of the team dealing with the 5/9 hack - a name that implies an act of horrific destruction like 9/11 - she has been doing quite well. She's the one who found the arcade where fsociety would meet, and after working out of the E Corp offices, her team is now on their way to China to look at the other facilities hit by the Dark Army - the allied hacker group run by Whiterose that was instrumental in making sure that 5/9 happened.
In Beijing, Dom sees a couple of people wearing the scary Dark Army dragon masks - a kind of more malevolent version of fsociety's gilded-age-businessman masks. And when she comes to meet with the Chinese government officials, among them is Mr. Jiang, the Minister for Internal Security, who we know as Whiterose.
We knew at the end of last season that Whiterose runs in some very high circles indeed, but what are her motivations? Indeed, in the real world a lot of high profile hacks that hit American systems originate in China (we don't hear much about American hacks against China, though whether that's because we're not as good or far better at it, or that the Chinese media just doesn't report on it, is anyone's guess.) So it's actually not at all hard to believe that the Dark Army might, in fact, get its checks from the People's Republic of China.
Dom wanders off at the obligatory inter-agency social function and finds herself in Whiterose's hall of clocks - a collection that really drives home her obsession with punctuality. Whiterose even invites Dom to look at her dresses - claiming of course that they are her sister's, a sister that Dom is aware does not exist.
In this moment, perhaps Whiterose reveals too much of herself. Her passion for these symbols of her feminine identity perhaps causes cracks in her masculine facade.
The next day, in the episode's penultimate scene (though it is almost of a piece with its final scene,) a simple morning hangover erupts into a burst of horrific violence, when Dom and her fellow FBI agents are attacked by a death squad wielding submachine guns. Her friend (whose name I didn't quite catch) is riddled with bullets before we even know how to process what is happening, and soon a dozen people are lying dead in the hotel lobby. Dom manages to take cover and even wound an attacker with a fallen agent's gun. The attacker immediately shoots himself in the head - this is clearly a black op being carried out by an extremely dedicated group.
Was this Whiterose? Was Dom the target? We are left with no conclusion - we know that she is alive at the end of the episode, but only one of the attackers is dead and we don't know how many there are.
Elliot is gradually finding his way back into the hacking world. Accepting Ray's offer to help him with his server transfer at Mr. Robot's behest, Elliot puts together a hack that will erase evidence of his and his peoples' role in the 5/9 hack.
The thing is, Ray (and it is so weird seeing Craig Robinson in a role like this) is not just some friendly neighbor with a computer. Needing help from the former IT guy (who is still badly injured from the beating he received,) Elliot begins to understand what kind of operation that Ray is running - it's a black market for drugs, weapons, assassins, and child slaves.
All he needed was a terminal, but Elliot's righteous fury is such a defining part of him that even as Mr. Robot urges him to leave it alone, he begins concocting a plan to destroy Ray and his network.
But Ray's ahead of him, and Elliot finds himself pulled out of bed in the middle of the night, beaten by Ray's goons. Just like Dom, we're left in a precarious position. What are they going to do to Elliot? Is this beating a warning, or are they ready to terminate the relationship in a hideously violent way?
In a sense, Elliot has kind of been stuck in a side-plot of his own show - that's what it means to lay low, I guess - but this threatening jolt might be enough to push him out. He just needs to escape the anger of a seemingly friendly monster.
There are other major plots - Darlene is commanding her fsociety people, though it's not clear how effective her acts of protest will be. Angela is getting swept closer and closer into Elliot's plans, even as he tries to keep her safely away. And Johanna demonstrates this week exactly the kind of coldhearted person she is as she has a panicking accomplice murdered to keep covering up... we're still not totally sure.
I really wonder when we're going to see Tyrell again - they could drag it out for a season, but I kind of hope we get some better explanation sooner rather than later.
The world of Mr. Robot is expanding, but whether the lows of black market slavers or the highs of the Chinese government, none of it is very pretty.
Last night's episode is filled with revelations, but also a growing sense that the hack has been co-opted by some very sinister people. Elliot and his team are idealists, but they're also operating in an underworld - and arguably an "overworld" - that plays with even higher stakes.
Dominique DiPierro - Dom for short - has been something of an alternate protagonist, even if she is technically an antagonist. She's an FBI agent who is, as she describes herself, disgusted by the evil of the world but also obsessed with it. That's our main explanation of why she wound up in law enforcement.
As part of the team dealing with the 5/9 hack - a name that implies an act of horrific destruction like 9/11 - she has been doing quite well. She's the one who found the arcade where fsociety would meet, and after working out of the E Corp offices, her team is now on their way to China to look at the other facilities hit by the Dark Army - the allied hacker group run by Whiterose that was instrumental in making sure that 5/9 happened.
In Beijing, Dom sees a couple of people wearing the scary Dark Army dragon masks - a kind of more malevolent version of fsociety's gilded-age-businessman masks. And when she comes to meet with the Chinese government officials, among them is Mr. Jiang, the Minister for Internal Security, who we know as Whiterose.
We knew at the end of last season that Whiterose runs in some very high circles indeed, but what are her motivations? Indeed, in the real world a lot of high profile hacks that hit American systems originate in China (we don't hear much about American hacks against China, though whether that's because we're not as good or far better at it, or that the Chinese media just doesn't report on it, is anyone's guess.) So it's actually not at all hard to believe that the Dark Army might, in fact, get its checks from the People's Republic of China.
Dom wanders off at the obligatory inter-agency social function and finds herself in Whiterose's hall of clocks - a collection that really drives home her obsession with punctuality. Whiterose even invites Dom to look at her dresses - claiming of course that they are her sister's, a sister that Dom is aware does not exist.
In this moment, perhaps Whiterose reveals too much of herself. Her passion for these symbols of her feminine identity perhaps causes cracks in her masculine facade.
The next day, in the episode's penultimate scene (though it is almost of a piece with its final scene,) a simple morning hangover erupts into a burst of horrific violence, when Dom and her fellow FBI agents are attacked by a death squad wielding submachine guns. Her friend (whose name I didn't quite catch) is riddled with bullets before we even know how to process what is happening, and soon a dozen people are lying dead in the hotel lobby. Dom manages to take cover and even wound an attacker with a fallen agent's gun. The attacker immediately shoots himself in the head - this is clearly a black op being carried out by an extremely dedicated group.
Was this Whiterose? Was Dom the target? We are left with no conclusion - we know that she is alive at the end of the episode, but only one of the attackers is dead and we don't know how many there are.
Elliot is gradually finding his way back into the hacking world. Accepting Ray's offer to help him with his server transfer at Mr. Robot's behest, Elliot puts together a hack that will erase evidence of his and his peoples' role in the 5/9 hack.
The thing is, Ray (and it is so weird seeing Craig Robinson in a role like this) is not just some friendly neighbor with a computer. Needing help from the former IT guy (who is still badly injured from the beating he received,) Elliot begins to understand what kind of operation that Ray is running - it's a black market for drugs, weapons, assassins, and child slaves.
All he needed was a terminal, but Elliot's righteous fury is such a defining part of him that even as Mr. Robot urges him to leave it alone, he begins concocting a plan to destroy Ray and his network.
But Ray's ahead of him, and Elliot finds himself pulled out of bed in the middle of the night, beaten by Ray's goons. Just like Dom, we're left in a precarious position. What are they going to do to Elliot? Is this beating a warning, or are they ready to terminate the relationship in a hideously violent way?
In a sense, Elliot has kind of been stuck in a side-plot of his own show - that's what it means to lay low, I guess - but this threatening jolt might be enough to push him out. He just needs to escape the anger of a seemingly friendly monster.
There are other major plots - Darlene is commanding her fsociety people, though it's not clear how effective her acts of protest will be. Angela is getting swept closer and closer into Elliot's plans, even as he tries to keep her safely away. And Johanna demonstrates this week exactly the kind of coldhearted person she is as she has a panicking accomplice murdered to keep covering up... we're still not totally sure.
I really wonder when we're going to see Tyrell again - they could drag it out for a season, but I kind of hope we get some better explanation sooner rather than later.
The world of Mr. Robot is expanding, but whether the lows of black market slavers or the highs of the Chinese government, none of it is very pretty.
Friday, July 15, 2016
Mr. Robot: unm4sk-pt1.tc and unm4sk-pt2.tc
So I started watching The Americans, and there will be a write-up of that eventually, but Mr. Robot's second season has begun, and I managed to see the premiere (on the USA Network website. Sometimes the answer's so simple it takes you forever to think of it.)
Mr. Robot has a big challenge in its second season. The first season was definitely one of these cohesive wholes that banked on big twists and reveals, and built itself all around one major future event - the hack to destroy EvilCorp's debt records.
The revelations toward the end of the season - not just the most telegraphed twist (which Eliot even angrily accuses the audience of withholding from him,) but several others that either got revealed out of the blue or set up greater mysteries.
Before I go on, I'm going to do a spoiler cut just in case.
Mr. Robot has a big challenge in its second season. The first season was definitely one of these cohesive wholes that banked on big twists and reveals, and built itself all around one major future event - the hack to destroy EvilCorp's debt records.
The revelations toward the end of the season - not just the most telegraphed twist (which Eliot even angrily accuses the audience of withholding from him,) but several others that either got revealed out of the blue or set up greater mysteries.
Before I go on, I'm going to do a spoiler cut just in case.
Thursday, June 30, 2016
Mr. Robot Season One
I was intrigued after a couple episodes of USA's Mr. Robot, but damn if I'm not hooked. This is Fincherian work of mystery that keeps you guessing and shocked throughout the series, and I'm eager to get started on Season Two (which either just started or is starting soon - there are billboards all over LA.)
Given the twists and turns of the show, let's do a spoiler break just to be safe.
Given the twists and turns of the show, let's do a spoiler break just to be safe.
Tuesday, June 28, 2016
The Direct Political Allegories of A Song of Ice and FIre/Game of Thrones
A Song of Ice and Fire is primarily notable in the way that it deconstructs fantasy tropes - the righteous hero does not always win and power is more about knowing how to take it than deserving it. It's successful as a series because of the strength of its characters - not only are heroes like Daenerys and Tyrion layered and interesting, but villains like Cersei (mainly Cersei) are also given understandable, if reprehensible, motivations.
But another thing I find really interesting is how this medieval fantasy drama that borrows heavily from British history (the Red Wedding is based on a real event called the Black Dinner that happened in Scotland) also draws very strong parallels with current events in America.
GRRM is an American author, and I think Americans have an interesting relationship with medieval Europe. In a way, the arrival of Europeans in the Americas (well, not counting the Vikings) was the end of the medieval era. As a country, many of us can look back to ancestors who lived through feudal societies, but our government was founded in part to prevent the problems of the feudal system from troubling us. If the Enlightenment was the intellectual movement that pulled Europe out of the middle ages, the US was founded to embody those new ideals.
Obviously, there have been failures in that regard, but Martin has done a great job of creating allegories of events from the last fifty years in his dragon-and-ice-zombie-filled fantasy world.
Let's take Daenerys' conquest of Slaver's Bay. You could easily draw this as a parallel to the Iraq War. Now, her conquest actually predates both 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, as that happens in A Storm of Swords (2000.) However, we next find out how the occupation of Mereen is going in 2011 in A Dance with Dragons, which shows that conquest is one thing, but nation-building is a whole other thing.
Daenerys' conquest feels pretty unequivocally good - the three city-states of Slaver's Bay are built on... well, slavery. Daenerys has picked up a strong moral compass somewhere (perhaps the domination by her brother gave her some idea of what it felt like not to be in control of one's life) and decides to eradicate the institution of slavery. She's got a clear villain in the slavers, just as we had a clear villain in Saddam Hussein (and as false as the stated motivations for invading Iraq were, I'd never argue Hussein was a good guy.)
But actually occupying Mereen, she finds that the situation is a lot more complicated. There is a whole system of factions in place and she learns that just because you toppled a corrupt system does not mean that good will inevitably prevail. While the show has, at this point, left Mereen in seemingly good hands, the book has left off with the city in chaos. You've got the Sons of the Harpy, for example, who could be called terrorists, but view themselves as freedom fighters. They are, after all, resisting a foreign occupation. It's not even clear that the Sons of the Harpy are really the same people who supported the Masters, and for all we know, they could have been some radical faction the Masters were keeping subdued.
There's also the problem of an exit strategy. Daenerys is more or less using Mereen as a dry run to learn how to rule a civilization. But first of all, that means that she is explicitly putting the value of Mereen and its people as less than those of Westeros. It also means that she's going to leave at some point, so the whole cult of personality she's developed needs to be transferred to some local leader who can be trusted to keep things from descending into chaos. Good luck with that.
The Lannisters are Old Money. They're traditional conservatives in a lot of way - they have a great deal of wealth and power, and they consider this a mandate to do with that wealth and power what they will. The Lannisters consider themselves better than basically anyone else, which is part of the reason why Tyrion's black sheep antics (not to mention his physical condition) is a glaring reminder of how false this narrative is.
With Joffrey and Tywin dead, the latter at the hands of Tyrion, and with the Tyrells moving in and proving far more popular with the people because of the aid that they're providing (I wouldn't go so far as to call the Tyrells socialists, but they are freely giving food to starving poor people, something that wouldn't even occur to Cersei,) Cersei makes the decision to embrace religious fundamentalists. The "Sparrows" are almost the polar opposites of the Lannisters - nameless, poor, extremely religious. The wars waged by the Lannisters have left a lot of the common people impoverished and desperate for some feeling of strength and power, not to mention food and care.
And the High Sparrow is providing these people with something. Cersei makes the calculation that these religious populists would be a powerful check to the Tyrells' liberal generosity (something she views, probably not incorrectly, as a way to grab power.)
By drumming up support for the Sparrows, Cersei does manage to score against her theoretical enemies (people who to any sane person would seem like useful allies) but she winds up getting utterly screwed as the Sparrows and the newly empowered Faith Militant swiftly grow too powerful to control. Soon, Cersei is finding herself under their control, and forced to do her humiliating Walk of Shame.
This is basically what Nixon and Reagan did to the Republican Party. Liberal programs like the New Deal had empowered liberal democrats in the United States as the American economy had flourished in the middle of the century. Nixon capitalized on racist sentiments in the South to transform a huge swath of former Dixiecrats into loyal Republican voters. This process would continue with Reagan as the Republican party embraced the Religious Right - a fringe group that before then had had very little influence in American politics. Nixon and Reagan were both representatives of the old "Captains of Industry" style of conservatism - one that wanted lower taxes and greater freedom for big business to thrive and run things.
But now look at the 2016 election. A year ago, the safe bet was that Jeb Bush was going to be the nominee for the Republican Party, continuing this corporate party leadership that we saw with his brother W and their dad in the late 80s/early 90s. Not only did Jeb lose the nomination, he dropped out pretty early. The Republican party tried to rally around someone with classical conservative values, but even though Marco Rubio stayed in for a while, he ultimately was a distant third to religious fundamentalist Ted Cruz and gasbag and potential fascist Donald Trump. Just like Cersei, they found a populist figure for people on their side of the political spectrum to rally around, but in doing so, they cut themselves out of the loop.
Finally, let's talk about the White Walkers. The world is consumed in political maneuvering, with various people claiming their right to take the throne and all trying to manipulate or double-cross each other to get their hands on power.
But in the background, there's a far bigger issue. One that is associated with shifting temperatures and could be an existential threat to human life.
The Night's Watch is a tiny fragment of what it once was, and no one really cares about it because it's there to protect us from things that most people don't even believe exists. Even when evidence is presented to those in power, like when Alliser Thorne shows up in King's Landing with wight's hand in a jar, people don't believe him.
The problem seems to be occurring elsewhere, and so people don't think it's a problem.
You know, kind of like climate change.
Despite the fact that the scientific community overwhelmingly believes that climate change is A. largely the result of human activity and B. will have devastating longterm effects on the planet, there is a huge portion of our political leadership that isn't even arguing about what steps we should take to deal with it, but is actually arguing that the problem doesn't even exist.
This despite the fact that we've known about the dangers of global warming and climate change for over fifty years and the whole reason the Night's Watch was established in the first place was to deal with the White Walkers.
So while you've got people like Donald Trump arguing that the biggest danger to America is Mexican immigrants and you've got people like Cersei Lannister who believe the top priority for the Seven Kingdoms is to ensure that the Lannisters don't cede any power whatsoever to anyone else, even their allies, there's this massive threat that could make all such concerns totally moot.
But another thing I find really interesting is how this medieval fantasy drama that borrows heavily from British history (the Red Wedding is based on a real event called the Black Dinner that happened in Scotland) also draws very strong parallels with current events in America.
GRRM is an American author, and I think Americans have an interesting relationship with medieval Europe. In a way, the arrival of Europeans in the Americas (well, not counting the Vikings) was the end of the medieval era. As a country, many of us can look back to ancestors who lived through feudal societies, but our government was founded in part to prevent the problems of the feudal system from troubling us. If the Enlightenment was the intellectual movement that pulled Europe out of the middle ages, the US was founded to embody those new ideals.
Obviously, there have been failures in that regard, but Martin has done a great job of creating allegories of events from the last fifty years in his dragon-and-ice-zombie-filled fantasy world.
Let's take Daenerys' conquest of Slaver's Bay. You could easily draw this as a parallel to the Iraq War. Now, her conquest actually predates both 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, as that happens in A Storm of Swords (2000.) However, we next find out how the occupation of Mereen is going in 2011 in A Dance with Dragons, which shows that conquest is one thing, but nation-building is a whole other thing.
Daenerys' conquest feels pretty unequivocally good - the three city-states of Slaver's Bay are built on... well, slavery. Daenerys has picked up a strong moral compass somewhere (perhaps the domination by her brother gave her some idea of what it felt like not to be in control of one's life) and decides to eradicate the institution of slavery. She's got a clear villain in the slavers, just as we had a clear villain in Saddam Hussein (and as false as the stated motivations for invading Iraq were, I'd never argue Hussein was a good guy.)
But actually occupying Mereen, she finds that the situation is a lot more complicated. There is a whole system of factions in place and she learns that just because you toppled a corrupt system does not mean that good will inevitably prevail. While the show has, at this point, left Mereen in seemingly good hands, the book has left off with the city in chaos. You've got the Sons of the Harpy, for example, who could be called terrorists, but view themselves as freedom fighters. They are, after all, resisting a foreign occupation. It's not even clear that the Sons of the Harpy are really the same people who supported the Masters, and for all we know, they could have been some radical faction the Masters were keeping subdued.
There's also the problem of an exit strategy. Daenerys is more or less using Mereen as a dry run to learn how to rule a civilization. But first of all, that means that she is explicitly putting the value of Mereen and its people as less than those of Westeros. It also means that she's going to leave at some point, so the whole cult of personality she's developed needs to be transferred to some local leader who can be trusted to keep things from descending into chaos. Good luck with that.
The Lannisters are Old Money. They're traditional conservatives in a lot of way - they have a great deal of wealth and power, and they consider this a mandate to do with that wealth and power what they will. The Lannisters consider themselves better than basically anyone else, which is part of the reason why Tyrion's black sheep antics (not to mention his physical condition) is a glaring reminder of how false this narrative is.
With Joffrey and Tywin dead, the latter at the hands of Tyrion, and with the Tyrells moving in and proving far more popular with the people because of the aid that they're providing (I wouldn't go so far as to call the Tyrells socialists, but they are freely giving food to starving poor people, something that wouldn't even occur to Cersei,) Cersei makes the decision to embrace religious fundamentalists. The "Sparrows" are almost the polar opposites of the Lannisters - nameless, poor, extremely religious. The wars waged by the Lannisters have left a lot of the common people impoverished and desperate for some feeling of strength and power, not to mention food and care.
And the High Sparrow is providing these people with something. Cersei makes the calculation that these religious populists would be a powerful check to the Tyrells' liberal generosity (something she views, probably not incorrectly, as a way to grab power.)
By drumming up support for the Sparrows, Cersei does manage to score against her theoretical enemies (people who to any sane person would seem like useful allies) but she winds up getting utterly screwed as the Sparrows and the newly empowered Faith Militant swiftly grow too powerful to control. Soon, Cersei is finding herself under their control, and forced to do her humiliating Walk of Shame.
This is basically what Nixon and Reagan did to the Republican Party. Liberal programs like the New Deal had empowered liberal democrats in the United States as the American economy had flourished in the middle of the century. Nixon capitalized on racist sentiments in the South to transform a huge swath of former Dixiecrats into loyal Republican voters. This process would continue with Reagan as the Republican party embraced the Religious Right - a fringe group that before then had had very little influence in American politics. Nixon and Reagan were both representatives of the old "Captains of Industry" style of conservatism - one that wanted lower taxes and greater freedom for big business to thrive and run things.
But now look at the 2016 election. A year ago, the safe bet was that Jeb Bush was going to be the nominee for the Republican Party, continuing this corporate party leadership that we saw with his brother W and their dad in the late 80s/early 90s. Not only did Jeb lose the nomination, he dropped out pretty early. The Republican party tried to rally around someone with classical conservative values, but even though Marco Rubio stayed in for a while, he ultimately was a distant third to religious fundamentalist Ted Cruz and gasbag and potential fascist Donald Trump. Just like Cersei, they found a populist figure for people on their side of the political spectrum to rally around, but in doing so, they cut themselves out of the loop.
Finally, let's talk about the White Walkers. The world is consumed in political maneuvering, with various people claiming their right to take the throne and all trying to manipulate or double-cross each other to get their hands on power.
But in the background, there's a far bigger issue. One that is associated with shifting temperatures and could be an existential threat to human life.
The Night's Watch is a tiny fragment of what it once was, and no one really cares about it because it's there to protect us from things that most people don't even believe exists. Even when evidence is presented to those in power, like when Alliser Thorne shows up in King's Landing with wight's hand in a jar, people don't believe him.
The problem seems to be occurring elsewhere, and so people don't think it's a problem.
You know, kind of like climate change.
Despite the fact that the scientific community overwhelmingly believes that climate change is A. largely the result of human activity and B. will have devastating longterm effects on the planet, there is a huge portion of our political leadership that isn't even arguing about what steps we should take to deal with it, but is actually arguing that the problem doesn't even exist.
This despite the fact that we've known about the dangers of global warming and climate change for over fifty years and the whole reason the Night's Watch was established in the first place was to deal with the White Walkers.
So while you've got people like Donald Trump arguing that the biggest danger to America is Mexican immigrants and you've got people like Cersei Lannister who believe the top priority for the Seven Kingdoms is to ensure that the Lannisters don't cede any power whatsoever to anyone else, even their allies, there's this massive threat that could make all such concerns totally moot.
Monday, June 27, 2016
The Great Houses of Westeros After Game of Thrones Season Six
There are really nine important Westerosi houses in Game of Thrones - some of the lesser houses like Frey or Bolton have certainly had big impacts, but to start with, you can pretty easily assign houses by region. Sure, you have some situations where houses like Tyrell actually weren't always in charge there - they took over the Reach from the Gardners - but we have a few houses we started with and now we can look at where they are.
Game of Thrones Season Six Ends With a HOLY SHIT
This season of Game of Thrones has been primarily stories that surpass where things have gone in the books. The show's writers have had to work from the skeletal outline that George R R Martin gave them, but we don't know how much has been their invention and how much awaits us within the book, The Winds of Winter.
But we'll talk about the episode, The Winds of Winter, and how a whole ton of stuff has happened.
But we'll talk about the episode, The Winds of Winter, and how a whole ton of stuff has happened.
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
Mr Robot
Now that it is available on Amazon Prime, I've watched the first two episodes of USA's Mr. Robot, and I have to say I'm intrigued.
One of the things I find really interesting about the modern world is that the strange technological landscape predicted by cyberpunk writers in the 1980s is basically here. Consider Anonymous, an anarchic pseudo-collective of hackers that don't seem all that removed from an organization you might see in Ghost in the Shell.
As always with science fiction, some of the more outlandish things have not come to pass and a lot of the biggest technological developments have been subtler than were predicted - writers may have imagined more cybernetic prostheses and fewer social media networks - but the notion that we have shifted culturally to a place where computers are totally ubiquitous is absolutely a reality. When I go to the bathroom I have a highly sophisticated computer that is thinner than a pack of cards that I can use to communicate with people all over the world. This thing has a camera - actually two cameras - and microphones that I have some sense of control over but for all I know, I don't. Indeed, with "Hey Siri" active on my iPhone, the implication is that the microphone is always listening to me so that it can open up this UI element when I give the activation phrase. (Sometimes it will mishear me, or, more humorously, a podcast I'm listening to on the actual phone, and activate by mistake.)
So Cyberpunk is kind of moot in that it's no longer really science fiction. Not only is nearly every business or organization in some way an online entity, but we've also had a steady erosion of regulations to prevent massive corporations from taking over the economy. That move toward deregulation started in the Reagan years, just as the Cyberpunk genre did (ok, technically there seem to be some antecedents in the 70s, but the genre clearly took off in the 80s.) Consider how powerful companies like Google and Facebook are, as they are basically the gatekeepers to information.
I don't know if there's ever really been a famous deconstruction of the Cyberpunk genre - the genre is arguably a deconstruction of the kind of utopian science fiction of the mid 20th century (not that much of that is really utopian if you read it closely) - but Mr. Robot kind of feels like a reconstruction in that it adjusts for the fact that now that most Americans (and people from other developed countries) know a fair amount about computers, so a lot of the mystique and flat-out bullshit we saw in the computer-hacker science fiction of the 80s and 90s has been toned down or eliminated.
What we have instead is a study of our protagonist, Eliot Alderton. Eliot speaks to the audience, justified as part of the diagesis by making the audience the fictional character Eliot has invented to talk to and share his thoughts with. One very clear influence here is David Fincher, particularly Fight Club. Eliot experiences the same corporate disillusionment as that movie's nameless protagonist, but adjusted for a world that has become significantly more troubled than it was in the late 90s.
While I love Fight Club, it is kind of funny in retrospect that it, like many other 1999 films (I'm thinking primarily The Matrix and Office Space - both of which I also like,) is about how horrible it is that we all have jobs.
The subsequent seventeen years have seen a lot of negative changes regarding economic security (and national security,) but also as information has become more readily accessible, we've paradoxically become more aware of how little influence we have in what is theoretically a free and democratic society. As a contemporary example, consider the latest failure to pass gun control measures that a vast majority of Americans support after this latest horrific mass shooting.
So Mr. Robot gives us a protagonist who is suffering tremendously from the state of the world, on top of his own emotional problems that may be either the result of the breakdown of his relationship with his father or mental illness that he is unable to treat effectively.
Eliot is paranoid, but as the old saying goes, that doesn't mean They are not after him.
Eliot makes contact with a group of hackers who are clearly modeled on Anonymous led by a mysterious man who we know only as Mr. Robot. Mr. Robot, played by Christian Slater, is Eliot's Tyler Durden, offering him a new way to strike back at the society that has been constructed in the interest of corporate greed.
But much like Tyler Durden, it becomes clear pretty soon that what Mr. Robot represents might not be a better solution. Outrage and frustration can lead people to act and try to change the world for the better, which is generally something we think of as a good thing. But consider that fascists and fundamentalists are also motivated by outrage and frustration. And with a charismatic leader like Tyler Durden or Mr. Robot, it's very easy for people to lose perspective and become the kind of monsters that they set out to defeat.
I'm only two episodes in, but I'm really intrigued.
One of the things I find really interesting about the modern world is that the strange technological landscape predicted by cyberpunk writers in the 1980s is basically here. Consider Anonymous, an anarchic pseudo-collective of hackers that don't seem all that removed from an organization you might see in Ghost in the Shell.
As always with science fiction, some of the more outlandish things have not come to pass and a lot of the biggest technological developments have been subtler than were predicted - writers may have imagined more cybernetic prostheses and fewer social media networks - but the notion that we have shifted culturally to a place where computers are totally ubiquitous is absolutely a reality. When I go to the bathroom I have a highly sophisticated computer that is thinner than a pack of cards that I can use to communicate with people all over the world. This thing has a camera - actually two cameras - and microphones that I have some sense of control over but for all I know, I don't. Indeed, with "Hey Siri" active on my iPhone, the implication is that the microphone is always listening to me so that it can open up this UI element when I give the activation phrase. (Sometimes it will mishear me, or, more humorously, a podcast I'm listening to on the actual phone, and activate by mistake.)
So Cyberpunk is kind of moot in that it's no longer really science fiction. Not only is nearly every business or organization in some way an online entity, but we've also had a steady erosion of regulations to prevent massive corporations from taking over the economy. That move toward deregulation started in the Reagan years, just as the Cyberpunk genre did (ok, technically there seem to be some antecedents in the 70s, but the genre clearly took off in the 80s.) Consider how powerful companies like Google and Facebook are, as they are basically the gatekeepers to information.
I don't know if there's ever really been a famous deconstruction of the Cyberpunk genre - the genre is arguably a deconstruction of the kind of utopian science fiction of the mid 20th century (not that much of that is really utopian if you read it closely) - but Mr. Robot kind of feels like a reconstruction in that it adjusts for the fact that now that most Americans (and people from other developed countries) know a fair amount about computers, so a lot of the mystique and flat-out bullshit we saw in the computer-hacker science fiction of the 80s and 90s has been toned down or eliminated.
What we have instead is a study of our protagonist, Eliot Alderton. Eliot speaks to the audience, justified as part of the diagesis by making the audience the fictional character Eliot has invented to talk to and share his thoughts with. One very clear influence here is David Fincher, particularly Fight Club. Eliot experiences the same corporate disillusionment as that movie's nameless protagonist, but adjusted for a world that has become significantly more troubled than it was in the late 90s.
While I love Fight Club, it is kind of funny in retrospect that it, like many other 1999 films (I'm thinking primarily The Matrix and Office Space - both of which I also like,) is about how horrible it is that we all have jobs.
The subsequent seventeen years have seen a lot of negative changes regarding economic security (and national security,) but also as information has become more readily accessible, we've paradoxically become more aware of how little influence we have in what is theoretically a free and democratic society. As a contemporary example, consider the latest failure to pass gun control measures that a vast majority of Americans support after this latest horrific mass shooting.
So Mr. Robot gives us a protagonist who is suffering tremendously from the state of the world, on top of his own emotional problems that may be either the result of the breakdown of his relationship with his father or mental illness that he is unable to treat effectively.
Eliot is paranoid, but as the old saying goes, that doesn't mean They are not after him.
Eliot makes contact with a group of hackers who are clearly modeled on Anonymous led by a mysterious man who we know only as Mr. Robot. Mr. Robot, played by Christian Slater, is Eliot's Tyler Durden, offering him a new way to strike back at the society that has been constructed in the interest of corporate greed.
But much like Tyler Durden, it becomes clear pretty soon that what Mr. Robot represents might not be a better solution. Outrage and frustration can lead people to act and try to change the world for the better, which is generally something we think of as a good thing. But consider that fascists and fundamentalists are also motivated by outrage and frustration. And with a charismatic leader like Tyler Durden or Mr. Robot, it's very easy for people to lose perspective and become the kind of monsters that they set out to defeat.
I'm only two episodes in, but I'm really intrigued.
Monday, June 20, 2016
A Big Battle on Game of Thrones
The Battle of the Bastards is an odd episode. In a way, it's shares the even-numbered season's ninth episode tradition of a major battle on which the episode focuses, (haha, yes, that's accurate,) but it splits a little of that focus to deal with an other, less dire (or maybe more dire?) battle. There's also basically no ambiguity in either of these battles. The Starks fight the Boltons - basically Lawful Good versus Chaotic Evil - and Daenerys fights off the Masters - basically Neutral Good versus Lawful Evil. While the battle at the Wall had us rooting pretty firmly for Jon and the Night's Watch, we still liked Ygritte, Tormund, and Mance.
So let's talk about this episode:
Spoilers to follow.
So let's talk about this episode:
Spoilers to follow.
Wednesday, June 1, 2016
Conflict Deferred on Game of Thrones
This most recent episode, which I believe puts us just over the halfway point of this past-the-books season, mostly served to push forward the major plots of that I expect will come to a climax in episode nine, as is custom.
Not a ton happens, though we do meet some new characters, and one book character who they had "skipped." One of the biggest events that the last two seasons have been building to... almost happened, but then did not. There's a fair amount to unpack, so let's unpack it:
Spoilers:
Not a ton happens, though we do meet some new characters, and one book character who they had "skipped." One of the biggest events that the last two seasons have been building to... almost happened, but then did not. There's a fair amount to unpack, so let's unpack it:
Spoilers:
Sunday, May 22, 2016
Massive Lore Reveals and Something Super Sad in Game of Thrones This Week
I think we should always be a little suspicious when things seem to be going even somewhat all right in Game of Thrones. Granted, if the series isn't going to be gut-punch bummer in the end, there's got to be some kind of turnaround, but given the stakes - Ice Zombie invasion, to be specific - some of the more mundane political problems are going to need to get resolved in some way.
Season Six has definitely been pushing in the direction of resolving major storylines, and today we got some clarifications and serious developments on a few fronts.
Let's talk about them after the spoiler break.
Season Six has definitely been pushing in the direction of resolving major storylines, and today we got some clarifications and serious developments on a few fronts.
Let's talk about them after the spoiler break.
Thursday, May 19, 2016
A Stephen King Tweet That Might Spoil A Huge Detail About the Dark Tower
So yeah, spoilers. I'm going to be talking spoilers from the end of the final book (which, you know, twelve years old, so I could make a statute of limitations argument here) and also a recent tweet by Stephen King that probably won't mean anything unless you've read that book, but also could give us details about the upcoming movie, details you'd still not really understand unless you knew how the final book ends.
We good?
Spoilers:
We good?
Spoilers:
Wednesday, May 18, 2016
Contemplating the Upcoming Star Trek Show
Star Trek was a cult-classic TV show in the 60s that lasted only a couple seasons but developed such a rabidly enthusiastic fanbase (including Martin Luther King, who loved egalitarian future the show envisioned and convinced Nichelle Nichols to stay on as Uhura because she was a positive role model for both people of color and all women) that it became one of the biggest science fiction franchises in the history of the genre.
Revived in a series of feature films in the 80s (well, the first was in the 70s,) mixing well with the new Star Wars series, Star Trek returned to television in 1987 with The Next Generation. TNG, to be frank, sucked in the first couple seasons, but by its end (thanks in large part to a great cast led by Patrick Stewart) you could argue that it surpassed the original series (given that I was born in '86, Next Gen was Star Trek to me.) The success of Next Generation spawned two other series that overlapped, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. After the end of Voyager, there was the prequel series Enterprise, which I actually think was not terrible (though its opening credits music, which traded symphonic classical arrangements established by the earlier shows for a maudlin soft-rock piece of garbage absolutely was,) but Enterprise didn't catch on, and actually the Star Trek television armada fell apart just as the Golden Age of Television was getting started.
It's actually this factor more than anything that makes me extremely curious about the new Star Trek show.
Obviously, Paramount is capitalizing on the success of the new JJ Abrams movie series. But while there's fun to be had in those movies, they really don't have the kind of puzzle-like sci-fi storytelling or deep-nerd world-building that works so effectively in a TV format. I also think that the fact that it's an alternate-universe retelling of Kirk, Spock, and company really demonstrates that they're going more for brand recognition than showing us something new (Into Darkness was particularly guilty in this sense.)
But Star Trek works better as a TV show than movies (consider the Next Gen movies, of which maybe First Contact is good, and Nemesis almost made Tom Hardy quit acting. Yes, did you know he was the bad guy in that movie?) And given that it's Bryan Fuller who is running the show (previous works include Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, and the insane work of gruesome genius, Hannibal,) there's reason to be excited.
TV audiences these days are far more into long-term storytelling, something that Star Trek flirted with in the past, but rarely committed to. The closest we saw was Deep Space Nine, which had an arc about the Dominion for over half of its time on the air, but still mostly stuck with episodic plots for individual episodes.
I'd still expect some individual space adventures - not every show has to be novelistic as the Wire or Game of Thrones - but given that audiences are far more comfortable (and in the age of Hulu, capable) of keeping up with an ongoing story, we could see some deep plotting with a new Star Trek show.
There's also the opportunity to explore issues that are more public today than they were even fifteen years ago. On Enterprise, Dominic Keating, who played Malcolm Reed, said that he wanted to play his character as a gay man, but that the producers insisted that he be straight. In a fairly short amount of time, the cultural tide has shifted massively, and the idea that Star Trek's utopian egalitarian future wouldn't have openly gay people serving in Starfleet is laughable. Hell, the Secretary of the Army in the United States right now is gay, and unless we undergo some horrible backslide into medieval fanaticism, it seems like we'd have way more gay people on Starships in the 22nd, 23rd, or 24th Century.
Given that Bryan Fuller is himself gay, I can't imagine they aren't going to address this.
The other really big question for this series is when. Well, that coupled with "which timeline?"
The movies exist in an alternate timeline - making it technically not a reboot of the series and not wiping out everything that Trekkies have loved since the 60s. (I guess Enterprise would still be canon in both, given that the event that splits the timeline happens after that.) I wonder, then, if Paramount is going to try to push more of that, allowing them to tie the show with the movies in a kind of shared cinematic universe (something they of course did already with the 90s-Trek.)
But I know that the big Trek fans (myself included) would prefer to see more of the familiar timeline. We don't want to go through all the same stuff we saw before. In fact, I think a more radical departure - perhaps jumping ahead to the 25th Century, much as TNG jumped a century beyond the original series - would give the writers plenty of wiggle room while still being able to use stuff that came from earlier shows. We could get little updates about what's going on with the defeated Dominion, or what the state of the Borg are after what Janeway did to them. And of course, even though Star Trek '09 is mostly in an alternate timeline, in the original one, Romulus was destroyed. Holy crap would it be cool to have a Romulan crew member who has to overcome the distrust of his or her crewmates after the Romulan survivors were spread to the winds.
This could be a really cool, modern update to the Star Trek universe, and hopefully one that is truer to the spirit of the series than the recent movies have been.
Revived in a series of feature films in the 80s (well, the first was in the 70s,) mixing well with the new Star Wars series, Star Trek returned to television in 1987 with The Next Generation. TNG, to be frank, sucked in the first couple seasons, but by its end (thanks in large part to a great cast led by Patrick Stewart) you could argue that it surpassed the original series (given that I was born in '86, Next Gen was Star Trek to me.) The success of Next Generation spawned two other series that overlapped, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. After the end of Voyager, there was the prequel series Enterprise, which I actually think was not terrible (though its opening credits music, which traded symphonic classical arrangements established by the earlier shows for a maudlin soft-rock piece of garbage absolutely was,) but Enterprise didn't catch on, and actually the Star Trek television armada fell apart just as the Golden Age of Television was getting started.
It's actually this factor more than anything that makes me extremely curious about the new Star Trek show.
Obviously, Paramount is capitalizing on the success of the new JJ Abrams movie series. But while there's fun to be had in those movies, they really don't have the kind of puzzle-like sci-fi storytelling or deep-nerd world-building that works so effectively in a TV format. I also think that the fact that it's an alternate-universe retelling of Kirk, Spock, and company really demonstrates that they're going more for brand recognition than showing us something new (Into Darkness was particularly guilty in this sense.)
But Star Trek works better as a TV show than movies (consider the Next Gen movies, of which maybe First Contact is good, and Nemesis almost made Tom Hardy quit acting. Yes, did you know he was the bad guy in that movie?) And given that it's Bryan Fuller who is running the show (previous works include Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, and the insane work of gruesome genius, Hannibal,) there's reason to be excited.
TV audiences these days are far more into long-term storytelling, something that Star Trek flirted with in the past, but rarely committed to. The closest we saw was Deep Space Nine, which had an arc about the Dominion for over half of its time on the air, but still mostly stuck with episodic plots for individual episodes.
I'd still expect some individual space adventures - not every show has to be novelistic as the Wire or Game of Thrones - but given that audiences are far more comfortable (and in the age of Hulu, capable) of keeping up with an ongoing story, we could see some deep plotting with a new Star Trek show.
There's also the opportunity to explore issues that are more public today than they were even fifteen years ago. On Enterprise, Dominic Keating, who played Malcolm Reed, said that he wanted to play his character as a gay man, but that the producers insisted that he be straight. In a fairly short amount of time, the cultural tide has shifted massively, and the idea that Star Trek's utopian egalitarian future wouldn't have openly gay people serving in Starfleet is laughable. Hell, the Secretary of the Army in the United States right now is gay, and unless we undergo some horrible backslide into medieval fanaticism, it seems like we'd have way more gay people on Starships in the 22nd, 23rd, or 24th Century.
Given that Bryan Fuller is himself gay, I can't imagine they aren't going to address this.
The other really big question for this series is when. Well, that coupled with "which timeline?"
The movies exist in an alternate timeline - making it technically not a reboot of the series and not wiping out everything that Trekkies have loved since the 60s. (I guess Enterprise would still be canon in both, given that the event that splits the timeline happens after that.) I wonder, then, if Paramount is going to try to push more of that, allowing them to tie the show with the movies in a kind of shared cinematic universe (something they of course did already with the 90s-Trek.)
But I know that the big Trek fans (myself included) would prefer to see more of the familiar timeline. We don't want to go through all the same stuff we saw before. In fact, I think a more radical departure - perhaps jumping ahead to the 25th Century, much as TNG jumped a century beyond the original series - would give the writers plenty of wiggle room while still being able to use stuff that came from earlier shows. We could get little updates about what's going on with the defeated Dominion, or what the state of the Borg are after what Janeway did to them. And of course, even though Star Trek '09 is mostly in an alternate timeline, in the original one, Romulus was destroyed. Holy crap would it be cool to have a Romulan crew member who has to overcome the distrust of his or her crewmates after the Romulan survivors were spread to the winds.
This could be a really cool, modern update to the Star Trek universe, and hopefully one that is truer to the spirit of the series than the recent movies have been.
Leveling Up In Game of Thrones This Week
Saw this week's episode a bit later than usual, but here's what we've got:
Game of Thrones is one of those stories that is so long that the tight plotting of the earlier installments was captivating but as one gets farther in, it starts to feel like the show is holding out on you. Really, I think the dirty secret of all storytelling is that the beginnings of stories are better than the endings. Season one got to hint at things like magic, dragons, ice zombies, and pull the rug out from under us with the death of the protagonist. You could argue that the story has been a slowly-unfolding tragedy, but if you look to Shakespeare, you'll notice that even in his tragic tales, the bad guy also gets what's coming to him. Hamlet dies, sure, but so does Claudius. Othello does kill Desdemona, but Iago has been caught and exposed for the treacherous bastard he is and is due for a hanging or whatever method of execution they used in Venice at the time.
So the early tragedies of Ned's death and then the Red Wedding have stoked the fires, making us yearn for vengeance. Sure, Joffrey, Tywin, and many other villains have died, but their deaths have been largely just the catalyst for new problems. It's not enough that the villains pay - we want to see our heroes empowered.
Spoilers for this latest episode beyond the cut.
Game of Thrones is one of those stories that is so long that the tight plotting of the earlier installments was captivating but as one gets farther in, it starts to feel like the show is holding out on you. Really, I think the dirty secret of all storytelling is that the beginnings of stories are better than the endings. Season one got to hint at things like magic, dragons, ice zombies, and pull the rug out from under us with the death of the protagonist. You could argue that the story has been a slowly-unfolding tragedy, but if you look to Shakespeare, you'll notice that even in his tragic tales, the bad guy also gets what's coming to him. Hamlet dies, sure, but so does Claudius. Othello does kill Desdemona, but Iago has been caught and exposed for the treacherous bastard he is and is due for a hanging or whatever method of execution they used in Venice at the time.
So the early tragedies of Ned's death and then the Red Wedding have stoked the fires, making us yearn for vengeance. Sure, Joffrey, Tywin, and many other villains have died, but their deaths have been largely just the catalyst for new problems. It's not enough that the villains pay - we want to see our heroes empowered.
Spoilers for this latest episode beyond the cut.
Monday, May 9, 2016
Slower Developments in This Week's Game of Thrones
After last week, in which the most anticipated thing in the series happened, things slowed down by a bit. We're definitely getting things set up for future conflict, and while there was a serious tease of revelations to come regarding R+L=J theories, we didn't get the answers we were hoping to get (though we did get to see a pretty badass fight-scene.)
Spoilers to follow.
Spoilers to follow.
Friday, May 6, 2016
Captain America: Civil War
Given the current political climate, the idea of superheroes battling one another instead of obvious villains makes sense. The country is extraordinarily polarized, and we've seen people who earlier were willing to compromise and moderate their stances veering off to the extreme ends of their political wings (something I contend is happening far more with one side than the other, but that's a discussion for a different day, and probably not on this blog.)
Thankfully, Captain America: Civil War doesn't make it too simple to choose a side. Ultimately the movie seems to land more on the title character's side of things, but there's reasonable arguments to be made for either side, even if there are flaws in execution.
It's also not really analogous to right-wing and left-wing either. Whatever your political persuasion, you might find yourself siding with one side or another. The two central heroes who are in conflict do kind of represent different sides of America - Tony Stark is the Libertarian hero worthy of an Ayn Rand novel while Steve Rogers is a New Deal Brooklyn kid who fights fascists and likes to stick up for the little guy (having been the little guy, he's very much a "lift as we climb" kind of hero.) But their positions, and specifically their actions in this story, complicate the simple political affiliations that also happen to sync up with their costumes' primary colors.
Before I get into spoilers, I'll say that Marvel has pulled off an impressive feat. This is a movie that has nearly every big-screen hero from the MCU (minus Thor and Hulk, and of course the Guardians of the Galaxy) and adds more to the mix, yet manages to avoid becoming unwieldy by grounding it in personal relationships.
While there are some massive fights in the movie, the spectacle really serves the characters. This might be the most character-driven Marvel movie to date, which makes sense given that the main conflict is between Cap and Iron Man. I still might like Winter Soldier better, but this one is definitely a good addition to the MCU.
So let us now go spoilery.
Thankfully, Captain America: Civil War doesn't make it too simple to choose a side. Ultimately the movie seems to land more on the title character's side of things, but there's reasonable arguments to be made for either side, even if there are flaws in execution.
It's also not really analogous to right-wing and left-wing either. Whatever your political persuasion, you might find yourself siding with one side or another. The two central heroes who are in conflict do kind of represent different sides of America - Tony Stark is the Libertarian hero worthy of an Ayn Rand novel while Steve Rogers is a New Deal Brooklyn kid who fights fascists and likes to stick up for the little guy (having been the little guy, he's very much a "lift as we climb" kind of hero.) But their positions, and specifically their actions in this story, complicate the simple political affiliations that also happen to sync up with their costumes' primary colors.
Before I get into spoilers, I'll say that Marvel has pulled off an impressive feat. This is a movie that has nearly every big-screen hero from the MCU (minus Thor and Hulk, and of course the Guardians of the Galaxy) and adds more to the mix, yet manages to avoid becoming unwieldy by grounding it in personal relationships.
While there are some massive fights in the movie, the spectacle really serves the characters. This might be the most character-driven Marvel movie to date, which makes sense given that the main conflict is between Cap and Iron Man. I still might like Winter Soldier better, but this one is definitely a good addition to the MCU.
So let us now go spoilery.
Tuesday, May 3, 2016
A Good Twist, a Bad Twist or not really a Twist? Regarding Recent Television Events
Lots of stories have big twists. The thing is, there are good twists and bad twists.
There are degrees of goodness to big twists, and degrees of badness. The worst are the ones that don't make sense and don't affect the story in any meaningful way - or alternatively completely invalidate the entire story you've been watching.
The best, I think, are the ones that you can predict if you're paying a lot of attention. Aw jeez, we're really going to have to go to a spoiler cut. So, meet me behind the cut.
There are degrees of goodness to big twists, and degrees of badness. The worst are the ones that don't make sense and don't affect the story in any meaningful way - or alternatively completely invalidate the entire story you've been watching.
The best, I think, are the ones that you can predict if you're paying a lot of attention. Aw jeez, we're really going to have to go to a spoiler cut. So, meet me behind the cut.
Sunday, May 1, 2016
Game of Thrones Cuts to the Chase in Episode 6.2
One of the dangers of serialized storytelling is that big moments often require a build-up to land as important, but too much build-up can feel like stalling. Dany's stay in Mereen has infamously (even in George R. R. Martin's opinion) felt like stalling for her inevitable invasion of Westeros.
Let's talk about tonight's episode after the spoiler break.
Let's talk about tonight's episode after the spoiler break.
Thursday, April 28, 2016
Some Worries on the Horizon for the Dark Tower Film
With the news of the movie and the fantastic casting news surrounding it, I've found myself obsessing a little over the series (I finally read The Wind Through the Keyhole and started to catch up on the Marvel comic series that tells the story of Roland's early days, filling in gaps between the flashbacks we got in The Gunslinger and Wizard and Glass.)
This obsession has also seen me looking into the details surrounding the film, and there's a bit of cause for concern.
Admittedly, adapting this series outside of a Game of Thrones-style HBO series (and even then it'd be tricky, what with Eddie and Susannah not coming in until book two) is going to mean some stuff is will need to be streamlined.
But supposedly shooting is going to be only seven weeks - which seems low for such a sprawling epic. There are also interviews that suggest that most of the movie will be taking place in our world (well, presumably the "not-quite-our-world" where Co-Op City is in Brooklyn, but close enough.) Now, tons of the Dark Tower takes place in New York and New England, but I do think that we'll need to see some of Mid-World to get a sense of the epic scope of the series.
I will be watching the situation carefully.
This obsession has also seen me looking into the details surrounding the film, and there's a bit of cause for concern.
Admittedly, adapting this series outside of a Game of Thrones-style HBO series (and even then it'd be tricky, what with Eddie and Susannah not coming in until book two) is going to mean some stuff is will need to be streamlined.
But supposedly shooting is going to be only seven weeks - which seems low for such a sprawling epic. There are also interviews that suggest that most of the movie will be taking place in our world (well, presumably the "not-quite-our-world" where Co-Op City is in Brooklyn, but close enough.) Now, tons of the Dark Tower takes place in New York and New England, but I do think that we'll need to see some of Mid-World to get a sense of the epic scope of the series.
I will be watching the situation carefully.
Sunday, April 24, 2016
Game of Thrones Returns with a Follow-Up to Season 5
Game of Thrones is officially off the rails. While there's still some existing material in the story of the Iron Islands from the books, most of the major plot lines (and let's be honest, the Iron Islands don't yet seem too major) were caught up at the end of last season. So the show is now in the position of revealing new stories - we don't know how much of this is from George R R Martin's talks with the show runners and how much of it is just the writers coming up with new stuff, but no one (other than the show's cast and crew, who obviously shot all this stuff already) now has an advanced knowledge of the plot.
Season 6, Episode 1 starts off the season a bit slow - basically, we get a bunch of immediate aftermath stuff.
The Wall:
We begin with the bled-out body of Jon Snow. Yes, he's dead, of course, but notably they haven't yet burned his body. Davos finds the body and takes it with Dolorous Edd and some of the other loyal Nights Watch brothers. Thorne addresses the men, confessing to his treason, but arguing that he's saved the Watch. He has the support of the other officers (no head Maester, given that Aemon is dead and Sam is only just on his way to Old Town.) There's certainly plenty of loyalists to Jon Snow, but there's no one except for the small group barricaded inside a small room with Jon's body (and Snow) being led by default by Davos around which a counter-mutiny could spring forth. Edd's out, and honestly I forgot what his plan was, but it might involve talking to Melisandre.
Speaking of old Mel, and I mean Old. She's clearly pretty down after both Stannis' death and Jon's. We also find out that that choker she wears makes her look about fifty years younger than she actually is. So, naked old lady (though I think that was Carice Van Houten in make-up.) My words when this was revealed: "Of course she's ancient!"
King's Landing:
Cerise is all excited for Myrcella to come back when a Dornish ship sails into port. But when she sees Jaime and a shroud-covered body on the boat coming in, she realizes what has happened. The breaking of Cersei continues.
Meanwhile, Margaery is still in jail. Not too much development there.
Dorne:
Ok, here some stuff happens. First off, Doran gets a raven telling him about Myrcella's death (damn combination of auto-correct and Martin's just-slightly-different naming conventions,) and just as he does, Elaria Sand stabs him in the heart while one of the Sand Snakes back-stabs Areo Hotah (man, I doubt those who haven't read the books would even know that he has a name.) On the ship back from King's Landing, Trystane is mourning his would-be wife. But not for long, because the two accompanying Sand Snakes come to kill him, and he gets a spear through the back of the head and out the front in this week's most gruesome death.
So the coup in Dorne is in full swing. Too bad Doran didn't get to really do anything.
Winterfell (and Environs:)
Sansa and Theon (I think we can start calling him that again) run from Ramsay's dogs while Ramsay has a moment where he seems almost human, mourning for... that equally sadistic chick who isn't in the books and whose name I can't... Miranda! Mourning Miranda. But then he tells the Maester to feed her to the dogs instead of giving her a proper burial, so, you know, Ramsay's gotta Ramsay.
Anyway, Theon and Sansa flee the Bolton hounds and hound masters, but they're caught despite a desperate icy-river ford. It looks like things are screwed when... Brienne and Podrick come to the rescue! And yes, I did make a "Podrick Brings the Payne" joke when he stuck a sword through one of the Bolton men. Theon even gets a kill, saving Podrick when he's knocked down. Sansa (wisely) accepts Brienne's service this time, and Theon seems to have earned her trust a bit.
Mereen (and Environs:)
The leftover Daenerys party talk over strategy. Mereen's in trouble, between the Sons of the Harpy and slaves who feel she abandoned them (which... yeah kind of.) And there are Red Priests showing up to preach to those people (basically saying Dany was the catalyst, now they have to take the power of flame into their own hands.) Oh, and someone has burned all the ships in the harbor, so it might take a little longer to launch the invasion of Westeros.
Tyrion is left behind with Grey Worm, Missandei, and Varys (the others don't know he's there, I think,) while Daario and Jorah (whose Greyscale infection is spreading along his arm) try to track her, finding the ring she dropped at the end of last season.
Dany is captured by the Dothraki and brought before Khal Maro. Once she reveals she's Drogo's widow, they stop all their talk of murder and rape, but while that's, you know, a step in the right direction, they do insist she go back to Vaes Dothrak to join the Dosh Khaleen - the widows of Khals who serves as a kind of ruling council for the Dothraki but also aren't allowed to leave.
Braavos:
Arya is on the streets as a blind beggar, but it seems this is only part of her training. The Waif (no longer wearing the Jaqen H'gar face - and just to be clear, the Kindly Man at the House of Black and White probably never was Jaqen H'gar. In fact, Jaqen H'gar was probably never Jaqen H'gar. But I wonder if this means that Tom Wiaschiha isn't going to be on the show...? Or maybe he'll be in Sam's story down in Old Town (oh yeah, there's a plot that the show hasn't done. Though it's barely done anything with that in the books either.) Anyway, Arya's still going to get some training, but it'll be extra hard because she's blind.
So as a premiere, this honestly isn't the most mind-blowing. The Melisandre reveal was pretty good, one of those twists you feel stupid for not figuring out beforehand (though what impact it will have is probably minimal.) They're really pushing for Dorne to be a thing, which... well, if you have to, I guess. With the Tyrells unlikely the help thanks to the whole church imprisonment thing, war with the Boltons now on the table (given the brief marriage to the smuggled-out-of-King's-Landing Sansa,) a coming war with Dorne could be really devastating for the Lannisters, and I don't think Cersei is going to even be in power by the time Daenerys gets to Westerns.
I'm hoping next week we get some of the trippy tree-druid stuff with Brann, as we've been waiting since season 4 for that stuff. I think Melisandre reviving Jon is still very much on the table.
It's great that Sansa/Theon and Brienne/Podrick have linked up, but I really don't know where they'll go. Castle Black is not safe territory for them, though they have no reason to know that yet. However, the next-on segment suggests the Boltons might march against Castle Black, which... could actually have some positive effects, as we'd have Bolton vs Thorne, possibly giving Davos (and even Jon, if he does get revived) time to escape.
Oh, was Edd going to get the Wildlings? That might have been it.
Anyway, Clusterfuck is Coming up in the North. Looking forward to next week!
Season 6, Episode 1 starts off the season a bit slow - basically, we get a bunch of immediate aftermath stuff.
The Wall:
We begin with the bled-out body of Jon Snow. Yes, he's dead, of course, but notably they haven't yet burned his body. Davos finds the body and takes it with Dolorous Edd and some of the other loyal Nights Watch brothers. Thorne addresses the men, confessing to his treason, but arguing that he's saved the Watch. He has the support of the other officers (no head Maester, given that Aemon is dead and Sam is only just on his way to Old Town.) There's certainly plenty of loyalists to Jon Snow, but there's no one except for the small group barricaded inside a small room with Jon's body (and Snow) being led by default by Davos around which a counter-mutiny could spring forth. Edd's out, and honestly I forgot what his plan was, but it might involve talking to Melisandre.
Speaking of old Mel, and I mean Old. She's clearly pretty down after both Stannis' death and Jon's. We also find out that that choker she wears makes her look about fifty years younger than she actually is. So, naked old lady (though I think that was Carice Van Houten in make-up.) My words when this was revealed: "Of course she's ancient!"
King's Landing:
Cerise is all excited for Myrcella to come back when a Dornish ship sails into port. But when she sees Jaime and a shroud-covered body on the boat coming in, she realizes what has happened. The breaking of Cersei continues.
Meanwhile, Margaery is still in jail. Not too much development there.
Dorne:
Ok, here some stuff happens. First off, Doran gets a raven telling him about Myrcella's death (damn combination of auto-correct and Martin's just-slightly-different naming conventions,) and just as he does, Elaria Sand stabs him in the heart while one of the Sand Snakes back-stabs Areo Hotah (man, I doubt those who haven't read the books would even know that he has a name.) On the ship back from King's Landing, Trystane is mourning his would-be wife. But not for long, because the two accompanying Sand Snakes come to kill him, and he gets a spear through the back of the head and out the front in this week's most gruesome death.
So the coup in Dorne is in full swing. Too bad Doran didn't get to really do anything.
Winterfell (and Environs:)
Sansa and Theon (I think we can start calling him that again) run from Ramsay's dogs while Ramsay has a moment where he seems almost human, mourning for... that equally sadistic chick who isn't in the books and whose name I can't... Miranda! Mourning Miranda. But then he tells the Maester to feed her to the dogs instead of giving her a proper burial, so, you know, Ramsay's gotta Ramsay.
Anyway, Theon and Sansa flee the Bolton hounds and hound masters, but they're caught despite a desperate icy-river ford. It looks like things are screwed when... Brienne and Podrick come to the rescue! And yes, I did make a "Podrick Brings the Payne" joke when he stuck a sword through one of the Bolton men. Theon even gets a kill, saving Podrick when he's knocked down. Sansa (wisely) accepts Brienne's service this time, and Theon seems to have earned her trust a bit.
Mereen (and Environs:)
The leftover Daenerys party talk over strategy. Mereen's in trouble, between the Sons of the Harpy and slaves who feel she abandoned them (which... yeah kind of.) And there are Red Priests showing up to preach to those people (basically saying Dany was the catalyst, now they have to take the power of flame into their own hands.) Oh, and someone has burned all the ships in the harbor, so it might take a little longer to launch the invasion of Westeros.
Tyrion is left behind with Grey Worm, Missandei, and Varys (the others don't know he's there, I think,) while Daario and Jorah (whose Greyscale infection is spreading along his arm) try to track her, finding the ring she dropped at the end of last season.
Dany is captured by the Dothraki and brought before Khal Maro. Once she reveals she's Drogo's widow, they stop all their talk of murder and rape, but while that's, you know, a step in the right direction, they do insist she go back to Vaes Dothrak to join the Dosh Khaleen - the widows of Khals who serves as a kind of ruling council for the Dothraki but also aren't allowed to leave.
Braavos:
Arya is on the streets as a blind beggar, but it seems this is only part of her training. The Waif (no longer wearing the Jaqen H'gar face - and just to be clear, the Kindly Man at the House of Black and White probably never was Jaqen H'gar. In fact, Jaqen H'gar was probably never Jaqen H'gar. But I wonder if this means that Tom Wiaschiha isn't going to be on the show...? Or maybe he'll be in Sam's story down in Old Town (oh yeah, there's a plot that the show hasn't done. Though it's barely done anything with that in the books either.) Anyway, Arya's still going to get some training, but it'll be extra hard because she's blind.
So as a premiere, this honestly isn't the most mind-blowing. The Melisandre reveal was pretty good, one of those twists you feel stupid for not figuring out beforehand (though what impact it will have is probably minimal.) They're really pushing for Dorne to be a thing, which... well, if you have to, I guess. With the Tyrells unlikely the help thanks to the whole church imprisonment thing, war with the Boltons now on the table (given the brief marriage to the smuggled-out-of-King's-Landing Sansa,) a coming war with Dorne could be really devastating for the Lannisters, and I don't think Cersei is going to even be in power by the time Daenerys gets to Westerns.
I'm hoping next week we get some of the trippy tree-druid stuff with Brann, as we've been waiting since season 4 for that stuff. I think Melisandre reviving Jon is still very much on the table.
It's great that Sansa/Theon and Brienne/Podrick have linked up, but I really don't know where they'll go. Castle Black is not safe territory for them, though they have no reason to know that yet. However, the next-on segment suggests the Boltons might march against Castle Black, which... could actually have some positive effects, as we'd have Bolton vs Thorne, possibly giving Davos (and even Jon, if he does get revived) time to escape.
Oh, was Edd going to get the Wildlings? That might have been it.
Anyway, Clusterfuck is Coming up in the North. Looking forward to next week!
Thursday, April 21, 2016
On The Dark Tower Adaptation
The Dark Tower is important to me. I read Lord of the Rings early in High School and I've read the Song of Ice and Fire books... well, basically after the first season of the show came out. But the Dark Tower is hand-down the most influential and important fantasy series to me personally. I was wary of getting in to King's 2011 interquel, the Wind Through the Keyhole, but now that I've picked it up finally, I find myself falling back into and in love with the series.
Oh, it's certainly flawed. While I liked Wolves of the Calla a lot, I think the three-book series dismount was maybe rushed (King clearly wanted to finish it before he died after getting hit by that truck, but thankfully the man is still around and still writing, so perhaps he could have afforded to take more time.) I remember being nearly furious with the "Coda" ending after the ending that I had both expected and wanted had pretty much happened with the end of the "final" chapter (King does warn the reader, to be fair, that perhaps we should remain outside the Tower.)
While I've wanted a screen adaptation since reading the books, I've also grown to appreciate how difficult that would be to pull off. Game of Thrones has shown that television might be the better medium for adapting such enormous works, and while The Dark Tower books are perhaps not as dense as Martin's thousand-character epic, I'd still want to see proper time given to each character and not lose things like Roland's backstory, or the details of the World that has Moved On.
The project has been in development for so long that it's almost hard to believe it's actually happening.
Idris Elba as Roland certainly came as a bit of a surprise, given that the character as written is white. But looking at Elba's previous performances (I'm thinking John Luther particularly,) I can definitely see him pulling off the intense competence and callous pragmatism that makes Roland such a dangerous protagonist to friend and foe alike. This will certainly change his relationship with the Detta Walker half of Susannah's personality a bit, assuming she gets that same backstory, but overall, I'm really excited to see what Elba does with the role.
Matthew McConaughey as the Man in Black is, well, perfect. The odd thing here is I remember hearing that they were making a remake of The Stand and would be casting him as Randall Flagg, which again, is perfect, because they're the same person. Still, Walter O'Dim plays quite a different role from Flagg in this story (actually, that's confusing, because when he appears in Wizard and Glass he is going by the name Flagg, and possibly later in book seven,) but I think that if McConaughey can channel his Rust Cohle nihilism into aggressive malevolence (which shouldn't be hard,) I really think he should be perfect.
Beyond casting, though, what I wonder about is structure. On IMDB, there's no casting information for Eddie or Susannah, but there is for Jake, which suggests to me that they might truly be just doing The Gunslinger as the first movie.
That's a fine place to start, of course, and it's really important as a sort of groundwork-laying for the rest of the batshit crazy series, but it could certainly stand to be polished up a bit. I really wonder how closely the movie (hopefully movies - there's no telling how well it will do) will stick with the overall plot, especially since Wizard and Glass is a seven-hundred page book with a five-hundred page flashback, and at the end of book five, the existence of the series as a series of books becomes part of the plot itself. Also, Song of Susannah, if I remember correctly, doesn't really have much happening in it. And Drawing of the Three is basically an entire novel of character introductions.
I hope that it all works out, but I also don't really know how they could pull it off, let alone whether they will or not. I really hope they do.
I guess we'll find out next year.
Oh, it's certainly flawed. While I liked Wolves of the Calla a lot, I think the three-book series dismount was maybe rushed (King clearly wanted to finish it before he died after getting hit by that truck, but thankfully the man is still around and still writing, so perhaps he could have afforded to take more time.) I remember being nearly furious with the "Coda" ending after the ending that I had both expected and wanted had pretty much happened with the end of the "final" chapter (King does warn the reader, to be fair, that perhaps we should remain outside the Tower.)
While I've wanted a screen adaptation since reading the books, I've also grown to appreciate how difficult that would be to pull off. Game of Thrones has shown that television might be the better medium for adapting such enormous works, and while The Dark Tower books are perhaps not as dense as Martin's thousand-character epic, I'd still want to see proper time given to each character and not lose things like Roland's backstory, or the details of the World that has Moved On.
The project has been in development for so long that it's almost hard to believe it's actually happening.
Idris Elba as Roland certainly came as a bit of a surprise, given that the character as written is white. But looking at Elba's previous performances (I'm thinking John Luther particularly,) I can definitely see him pulling off the intense competence and callous pragmatism that makes Roland such a dangerous protagonist to friend and foe alike. This will certainly change his relationship with the Detta Walker half of Susannah's personality a bit, assuming she gets that same backstory, but overall, I'm really excited to see what Elba does with the role.
Matthew McConaughey as the Man in Black is, well, perfect. The odd thing here is I remember hearing that they were making a remake of The Stand and would be casting him as Randall Flagg, which again, is perfect, because they're the same person. Still, Walter O'Dim plays quite a different role from Flagg in this story (actually, that's confusing, because when he appears in Wizard and Glass he is going by the name Flagg, and possibly later in book seven,) but I think that if McConaughey can channel his Rust Cohle nihilism into aggressive malevolence (which shouldn't be hard,) I really think he should be perfect.
Beyond casting, though, what I wonder about is structure. On IMDB, there's no casting information for Eddie or Susannah, but there is for Jake, which suggests to me that they might truly be just doing The Gunslinger as the first movie.
That's a fine place to start, of course, and it's really important as a sort of groundwork-laying for the rest of the batshit crazy series, but it could certainly stand to be polished up a bit. I really wonder how closely the movie (hopefully movies - there's no telling how well it will do) will stick with the overall plot, especially since Wizard and Glass is a seven-hundred page book with a five-hundred page flashback, and at the end of book five, the existence of the series as a series of books becomes part of the plot itself. Also, Song of Susannah, if I remember correctly, doesn't really have much happening in it. And Drawing of the Three is basically an entire novel of character introductions.
I hope that it all works out, but I also don't really know how they could pull it off, let alone whether they will or not. I really hope they do.
I guess we'll find out next year.
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
The Magician's Land
I just, in roughly 24 hours, read through The Magician's Land, the third book in The Magicians Trilogy.
In what is probably always a bad idea, I shortly thereafter read not only a review (which I mostly agreed with) but also the comment section beneath said review.
Though I was never a big Narnia fan (in fact, I've never read the entirety of any of the books - just the first couple chapters of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - I'd say that I might have subconsciously rejected Lewis' insistent prostheltyzing except that I was fully unaware of it and probably hadn't gotten far enough to really be exposed to it) I'm certainly the kind of person who can relate a lot to the books' protagonist, Quentin Coldwater. I, too, am a fantasy-loving nerd who wishes the world were filled with mystery and hidden power that could be tapped by, essentially, having the kind of obsessive personality that such a nerd tends to have. The first book in the series is a pretty nasty gut-punch for folks like us - essentially giving Quentin everything he's dreamed of, but leaving him unsatisfied at best and devastated at worst.
While that first book does end on a last-page reversal that allows for the possibility of happiness in Quentin's future, it's still pretty bleak.
In some ways, the first book stands on its own the easiest (not uncommon for the first volumes of series that are often not written to be part of a series - take Dune for example.) That said, when reading it I was sort of frustrated by its lack of plot - it sped through years of events in a kind of episodic format until one of the earlier episodes was called back to in the end. Partially it feels spread out because of the dual-world-building going on. The secret, Potter-esque magical world built up with Brakebills University doesn't quite pay off because everything is whisked away to the Narnia-equivalent Fillory.
The second book has pretty much two different plots going on - one that runs parallel with the first book, giving Julia - who had been a very minor character in book one - a thorough and harrowing backstory. The other plot is perhaps thinner, starting with a Quentin who has at least something to enjoy despite the loss he suffered in the first book and ends with him finally, truly becoming the hero of his own story, with devastating consequences.
So then book three spreads the plot between a few more characters - actually, Julia kind of drops back into the minor roles, though you could argue that she had a full, satisfying arc in the second book, and why mess with a good thing? Ultimately, though, Quentin is finally given the opportunity to tie up his loose ends. In a way, the ultimate consummation of his fantasies is achieved, and he has the maturity to recognize this.
I'm wondering about throwing up a spoiler tag here, just because I feel like I should touch on the specifics of what happens at the end of the book. Yeah, let's do that.
Spoilers.
In what is probably always a bad idea, I shortly thereafter read not only a review (which I mostly agreed with) but also the comment section beneath said review.
Though I was never a big Narnia fan (in fact, I've never read the entirety of any of the books - just the first couple chapters of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - I'd say that I might have subconsciously rejected Lewis' insistent prostheltyzing except that I was fully unaware of it and probably hadn't gotten far enough to really be exposed to it) I'm certainly the kind of person who can relate a lot to the books' protagonist, Quentin Coldwater. I, too, am a fantasy-loving nerd who wishes the world were filled with mystery and hidden power that could be tapped by, essentially, having the kind of obsessive personality that such a nerd tends to have. The first book in the series is a pretty nasty gut-punch for folks like us - essentially giving Quentin everything he's dreamed of, but leaving him unsatisfied at best and devastated at worst.
While that first book does end on a last-page reversal that allows for the possibility of happiness in Quentin's future, it's still pretty bleak.
In some ways, the first book stands on its own the easiest (not uncommon for the first volumes of series that are often not written to be part of a series - take Dune for example.) That said, when reading it I was sort of frustrated by its lack of plot - it sped through years of events in a kind of episodic format until one of the earlier episodes was called back to in the end. Partially it feels spread out because of the dual-world-building going on. The secret, Potter-esque magical world built up with Brakebills University doesn't quite pay off because everything is whisked away to the Narnia-equivalent Fillory.
The second book has pretty much two different plots going on - one that runs parallel with the first book, giving Julia - who had been a very minor character in book one - a thorough and harrowing backstory. The other plot is perhaps thinner, starting with a Quentin who has at least something to enjoy despite the loss he suffered in the first book and ends with him finally, truly becoming the hero of his own story, with devastating consequences.
So then book three spreads the plot between a few more characters - actually, Julia kind of drops back into the minor roles, though you could argue that she had a full, satisfying arc in the second book, and why mess with a good thing? Ultimately, though, Quentin is finally given the opportunity to tie up his loose ends. In a way, the ultimate consummation of his fantasies is achieved, and he has the maturity to recognize this.
I'm wondering about throwing up a spoiler tag here, just because I feel like I should touch on the specifics of what happens at the end of the book. Yeah, let's do that.
Spoilers.
Sunday, April 10, 2016
Solipsism and Time Travel: Stephen King's 11/22/63
Thanks in large part to the Hulu series (which has finished, though I have yet to see the final episode,) I picked up Stephen King's 11/22/63 and have been reading it. It might be unfashionable to admit (though I also feel like so-called low culture has become less taboo in recent years) but King's one of my favorite authors. (Actually, I think he's one of those authors whose popularity and prolificness make him a default target for snobs - in a few decades he'll be considered a great of American literature, if he isn't already.) The Dark Tower series was an enormous influence on me - the novel set in Otherworld that I've been working on (and procrastinating around) since I was 17 and is the backbone of the setting around which my Dispatches from Otherworld stories revolve began as a pretty bald-faced attempt to write my own unofficial Roland Deschain story.
King hasn't been quite as prominent since he semi-quasi-pseudo retired after the last Dark Tower book, but his story about time travel and Lee Harvey Oswald is probably the most well-respected thing he's written in recent years.
I haven't finished the novel yet (in fact, I'm nearly synchronized with the penultimate episode of the show) but it's got me thinking about Time Travel.
If you ever read the first post on this blog about its namesake, you'll know that I've been a time-travel obsessive since I was little. No, I don't think that there have been any time travelers throughout history and I think that it might actually just be a physical impossibility. But as grounds for thought experiments, it's basically my mind's favorite park to stroll through on a spring afternoon.
King is not a science fiction writer. There's no attempt to explain any kind of technology that allows the protagonist of his novel to go back in time, which is fine by me. There's a place for sci-fi that goes into deep detail about how things are done (The Martian, for example, is such hard sci-fi that it almost comes off as not being sci-fi at all.) But I suppose because I am someone who believes in a rational universe that obeys all these physical laws without variation but also simultaneously find such a universe kind of boring, I gladly welcome King's supernatural mystery.
I classify King as a dark fantasy writer (the line between dark fantasy and horror is a faint one, but I think he's on the fantasy side of it,) but one of the things I love about his style is that it doesn't get caught up in clarifying things. There might be godlike beings that oppose or aid our heroes, but they're left so abstract that we feel like we can instead pay attention to the people.
King also devises a pretty unusual style of time travel for his story. Every time travel story has to make a decision about how it works. Most often you get the Back to the Future style, where the past can be changed, but the heroes must worry about paradoxes that result of their changes. Twelve Monkeys is one in which the past is unchanged - if you travel back into the past, you always did, and so even if you take an active role in the past, you aren't changing it because you were always there in the first place. These allow what I think of as "weak paradoxes," like a piece of information spawning itself (like the Song of Storms in Zelda: Ocarina of Time) but do not allow "strong paradoxes" like the grandfather paradox because the fact that you are there in the first place means that your grandfather clearly lived to conceive your parent.
But 11/22/63 makes things rigid yet malleable in a way that sets aside a lot of these questions in favor of far weirder ones.
In the story, there is a doorway in a diner that allows one to enter the exact same moment in 1958 (1960 on the TV show) every time you go down. You can spend as much time as you want in the past, with time progressing normally after that moment in 1958 for you, and once you feel like going back, you can walk back up through the doorway and come out and see the future adjusted by your actions. On the modern side of the doorway, no matter whether you spent two seconds or two decades in the past, only two minutes will have passed in the modern world.
Step in again, and you're back in 1958, and anything you did to the past the last time around is wiped clean.
So first off, this means that there is a "real" version of history. If you just hop in and out, barring some really shocking butterfly effect (though given enough time, maybe that would accumulate one,) it will reset things to that real version.
It also means duplication is possible. The main character, Jake, is introduced to the doorway by Al, the owner of the diner in which the door is found. The guy sells $1.50 "Fatburgers" that a lot of people steer clear of due to the low cost, fearing there must be something wrong with the meat.
But in fact, the meat is fine, and it's super-cheap because he buys it in 1958. And not only is he buying 1958 ground beef, but he's also buying the exact same beef over and over. He knows it's good because it's literally the same cow (or cows) that his customers are consuming over and over. That same (poor, butchered) cow is being eaten multiple times by all his customers. On his second (well, technically third, but the first was just to show him the doorway in the first place) time through, Jake finds himself buying a blue shirt. The salesman comments that it's clearly his favorite color, given the shirt he's currently wearing. In the narration, Jake mentions that in fact, the shirt he is wearing is actually the same shirt that he's currently wearing.
Shirts and the meat of a cow who dies before all this duplication occurs are amusing in a head-spinning sort of way, but when it comes to people, really big questions start to come up. People (not just JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald) live or die based on the actions that Jake takes while in the past. If he's truly wiping the board clean with each reset, what does that mean for the consciousness of those people?
We would generally imagine that our fellow human beings have an internal conscious experience - call it a soul if you want. So while the experience of the time traveler (and it would seem those who are near the doorway, like diner owner Al and... maybe... the "Yellow Card Man" in 1958, a drunk who is by the doorway and is the only one who seems aware of Jake's interloper status) accounts for all the changes made in history (if we assume that's all the Yellow Card Man is, then perhaps he's nuts because all those changes are happening simultaneously in his experience) everyone else in the world seems only aware of the version of history they're currently living.
But if we consider them the same person they were in previous iterations, that raises the following question: When do they experience the change? Obviously they don't remember it, but is there a kind of blink, and one goes from being crippled and brain-damaged to healthy and living a better life? Does one go from whatever the consciousness experiences in death (if anything) to suddenly alive or vice versa?
Or perhaps our consciousness experiences time in a more sophisticated way than the brains that actually process our thoughts can. This is a whole other can of worms, but I've often been fascinated by the idea that we might actually perceive things that we nevertheless can't actually think about because our brains aren't the things perceiving them. But that's for another day.
The idea of multiple timelines has always kind of implied that there's a sort of perpendicular dimension of time. We generally think of the universe in terms of three spatial dimensions and one time dimension. But multiple timelines could kind of give width as well as the familiar length to the flow of time.
Yet in a way this is horrific in its own way. I actually thought about this when watching, of all things, the second Austin Powers movie. In it, Dr. Evil travels back to the 60s in a plan to... something about defeating Powers while he's cryogenically frozen (I haven't watched this movie in like 16 years.) His henchman cheer him on as he jumps through his time machine portal, but I remember thinking that there were only two things that they could expect to happen. Either Dr. Evil comes out the thing looking disappointed, or he just never arrives.
Because if he changed the past, then he never would have been incentivized to do this in the first place. He must fail, or more horrifically, he must cease to exist entirely. If he moves on to a timeline in which he is successful, then all those henchmen are left behind in a timeline Dr. Evil will never return to.
Or most horrifically of all, those people, and that entire universe, cease to exist.
Unless people have transdimensional consciousnesses, these acts of time travel are inherently kind of solipsistic. From your perspective, if you are saving a loved one from some horrible injury or disease (something I have sadly been forced to consider in recent weeks,) going and warning them or rescuing them armed with your foreknowledge looks from your perspective like you've saved that person and all is now well.
But there are serious possibilities that you're actually abandoning that person and merely happily replacing them with another person who is very similar.
Jumping timelines like this is a little like something I wrote about in a college philosophy class in an essay titled "Riker's Complaint." In Star Trek: The Next Generation, we discover that due to a transporter accident, there was a perfect duplicate made of Will Riker on another planet. Setting aside the horror that is the Star Trek transporter (which should really be called the Cloner/Murderer,) the duplicate (who goes by his middle name to become Tom Riker to make things less confusing) was left behind because his cremates were perfectly satisfied with the Riker they had.
If time travel creates all these duplicates (and the Fatburger seems to imply that, at least if you take them back with you, it does) then you run into the scary possibility that you're actually leaving behind a universe of Tom Rikers every time you take another crack at changing the past.
The solipsism comes in if you basically don't mind that. If you're the only conscious being, then the existence of the duplicates doesn't really worry you. A solipsist believes that the universe exists for their benefit (mind you, solipsism is impossible to disprove, and I don't think that solipsism inherently makes you a bad person, as long as you recognize that even if you are the only conscious being, it feels bad to be an asshole to people,) so in a sense, a timeline that they can never return to and never perceive again is philosophically indistinguishable from one that merely doesn't exist, or one that has been changed into the one they currently inhabit.
Narratively, King seems to imply that the timeline does change, and that however alien and incomprehensible the experience might be, the people in that changing timeline are the same people. But the Fatburger does introduce some doubt into that. There's multiples of that meat. Are we to believe that there's not a universe to correspond to each hunk of it?
(EDIT)
Having now finished the book, the explanation of what the Yellow/Orange/Black/Green Card Man (Men) are (vague though it is) actually makes some of these thoughts text, rather than subtext. Still, always good for a bit of writing to provoke some new thoughts.
King hasn't been quite as prominent since he semi-quasi-pseudo retired after the last Dark Tower book, but his story about time travel and Lee Harvey Oswald is probably the most well-respected thing he's written in recent years.
I haven't finished the novel yet (in fact, I'm nearly synchronized with the penultimate episode of the show) but it's got me thinking about Time Travel.
If you ever read the first post on this blog about its namesake, you'll know that I've been a time-travel obsessive since I was little. No, I don't think that there have been any time travelers throughout history and I think that it might actually just be a physical impossibility. But as grounds for thought experiments, it's basically my mind's favorite park to stroll through on a spring afternoon.
King is not a science fiction writer. There's no attempt to explain any kind of technology that allows the protagonist of his novel to go back in time, which is fine by me. There's a place for sci-fi that goes into deep detail about how things are done (The Martian, for example, is such hard sci-fi that it almost comes off as not being sci-fi at all.) But I suppose because I am someone who believes in a rational universe that obeys all these physical laws without variation but also simultaneously find such a universe kind of boring, I gladly welcome King's supernatural mystery.
I classify King as a dark fantasy writer (the line between dark fantasy and horror is a faint one, but I think he's on the fantasy side of it,) but one of the things I love about his style is that it doesn't get caught up in clarifying things. There might be godlike beings that oppose or aid our heroes, but they're left so abstract that we feel like we can instead pay attention to the people.
King also devises a pretty unusual style of time travel for his story. Every time travel story has to make a decision about how it works. Most often you get the Back to the Future style, where the past can be changed, but the heroes must worry about paradoxes that result of their changes. Twelve Monkeys is one in which the past is unchanged - if you travel back into the past, you always did, and so even if you take an active role in the past, you aren't changing it because you were always there in the first place. These allow what I think of as "weak paradoxes," like a piece of information spawning itself (like the Song of Storms in Zelda: Ocarina of Time) but do not allow "strong paradoxes" like the grandfather paradox because the fact that you are there in the first place means that your grandfather clearly lived to conceive your parent.
But 11/22/63 makes things rigid yet malleable in a way that sets aside a lot of these questions in favor of far weirder ones.
In the story, there is a doorway in a diner that allows one to enter the exact same moment in 1958 (1960 on the TV show) every time you go down. You can spend as much time as you want in the past, with time progressing normally after that moment in 1958 for you, and once you feel like going back, you can walk back up through the doorway and come out and see the future adjusted by your actions. On the modern side of the doorway, no matter whether you spent two seconds or two decades in the past, only two minutes will have passed in the modern world.
Step in again, and you're back in 1958, and anything you did to the past the last time around is wiped clean.
So first off, this means that there is a "real" version of history. If you just hop in and out, barring some really shocking butterfly effect (though given enough time, maybe that would accumulate one,) it will reset things to that real version.
It also means duplication is possible. The main character, Jake, is introduced to the doorway by Al, the owner of the diner in which the door is found. The guy sells $1.50 "Fatburgers" that a lot of people steer clear of due to the low cost, fearing there must be something wrong with the meat.
But in fact, the meat is fine, and it's super-cheap because he buys it in 1958. And not only is he buying 1958 ground beef, but he's also buying the exact same beef over and over. He knows it's good because it's literally the same cow (or cows) that his customers are consuming over and over. That same (poor, butchered) cow is being eaten multiple times by all his customers. On his second (well, technically third, but the first was just to show him the doorway in the first place) time through, Jake finds himself buying a blue shirt. The salesman comments that it's clearly his favorite color, given the shirt he's currently wearing. In the narration, Jake mentions that in fact, the shirt he is wearing is actually the same shirt that he's currently wearing.
Shirts and the meat of a cow who dies before all this duplication occurs are amusing in a head-spinning sort of way, but when it comes to people, really big questions start to come up. People (not just JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald) live or die based on the actions that Jake takes while in the past. If he's truly wiping the board clean with each reset, what does that mean for the consciousness of those people?
We would generally imagine that our fellow human beings have an internal conscious experience - call it a soul if you want. So while the experience of the time traveler (and it would seem those who are near the doorway, like diner owner Al and... maybe... the "Yellow Card Man" in 1958, a drunk who is by the doorway and is the only one who seems aware of Jake's interloper status) accounts for all the changes made in history (if we assume that's all the Yellow Card Man is, then perhaps he's nuts because all those changes are happening simultaneously in his experience) everyone else in the world seems only aware of the version of history they're currently living.
But if we consider them the same person they were in previous iterations, that raises the following question: When do they experience the change? Obviously they don't remember it, but is there a kind of blink, and one goes from being crippled and brain-damaged to healthy and living a better life? Does one go from whatever the consciousness experiences in death (if anything) to suddenly alive or vice versa?
Or perhaps our consciousness experiences time in a more sophisticated way than the brains that actually process our thoughts can. This is a whole other can of worms, but I've often been fascinated by the idea that we might actually perceive things that we nevertheless can't actually think about because our brains aren't the things perceiving them. But that's for another day.
The idea of multiple timelines has always kind of implied that there's a sort of perpendicular dimension of time. We generally think of the universe in terms of three spatial dimensions and one time dimension. But multiple timelines could kind of give width as well as the familiar length to the flow of time.
Yet in a way this is horrific in its own way. I actually thought about this when watching, of all things, the second Austin Powers movie. In it, Dr. Evil travels back to the 60s in a plan to... something about defeating Powers while he's cryogenically frozen (I haven't watched this movie in like 16 years.) His henchman cheer him on as he jumps through his time machine portal, but I remember thinking that there were only two things that they could expect to happen. Either Dr. Evil comes out the thing looking disappointed, or he just never arrives.
Because if he changed the past, then he never would have been incentivized to do this in the first place. He must fail, or more horrifically, he must cease to exist entirely. If he moves on to a timeline in which he is successful, then all those henchmen are left behind in a timeline Dr. Evil will never return to.
Or most horrifically of all, those people, and that entire universe, cease to exist.
Unless people have transdimensional consciousnesses, these acts of time travel are inherently kind of solipsistic. From your perspective, if you are saving a loved one from some horrible injury or disease (something I have sadly been forced to consider in recent weeks,) going and warning them or rescuing them armed with your foreknowledge looks from your perspective like you've saved that person and all is now well.
But there are serious possibilities that you're actually abandoning that person and merely happily replacing them with another person who is very similar.
Jumping timelines like this is a little like something I wrote about in a college philosophy class in an essay titled "Riker's Complaint." In Star Trek: The Next Generation, we discover that due to a transporter accident, there was a perfect duplicate made of Will Riker on another planet. Setting aside the horror that is the Star Trek transporter (which should really be called the Cloner/Murderer,) the duplicate (who goes by his middle name to become Tom Riker to make things less confusing) was left behind because his cremates were perfectly satisfied with the Riker they had.
If time travel creates all these duplicates (and the Fatburger seems to imply that, at least if you take them back with you, it does) then you run into the scary possibility that you're actually leaving behind a universe of Tom Rikers every time you take another crack at changing the past.
The solipsism comes in if you basically don't mind that. If you're the only conscious being, then the existence of the duplicates doesn't really worry you. A solipsist believes that the universe exists for their benefit (mind you, solipsism is impossible to disprove, and I don't think that solipsism inherently makes you a bad person, as long as you recognize that even if you are the only conscious being, it feels bad to be an asshole to people,) so in a sense, a timeline that they can never return to and never perceive again is philosophically indistinguishable from one that merely doesn't exist, or one that has been changed into the one they currently inhabit.
Narratively, King seems to imply that the timeline does change, and that however alien and incomprehensible the experience might be, the people in that changing timeline are the same people. But the Fatburger does introduce some doubt into that. There's multiples of that meat. Are we to believe that there's not a universe to correspond to each hunk of it?
(EDIT)
Having now finished the book, the explanation of what the Yellow/Orange/Black/Green Card Man (Men) are (vague though it is) actually makes some of these thoughts text, rather than subtext. Still, always good for a bit of writing to provoke some new thoughts.
Thursday, March 24, 2016
About Batman vs. Superman - Not a Review
This is not a review. I haven't seen Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice. If I were to say this was a review, I'd be obligated to see the movie before I started talking about it. But this isn't a review. In a way, it's an explanation for why I'm not interested in seeing it. The reviews that have come in have seemed to confirm my suspicions about the movie. There's another big movie coming about a conflict between a clean-cut guy with super-strength who represents an idealized version of old-fashioned values fighting against a genius with no true superpowers who still manages to go toe-to-toe with those who do because of his vast wealth and ability to use that wealth to arm himself with gadgets, and I sure as shit am going to see that one.
Why is Marvel so much better at film adaptations these days? You can basically go into any Marvel movie and at least have fun (ok, maybe not in the Incredible Hulk, and the Thor movies just barely squeak by thanks to Tom Hiddleston.)
The popularity of Dark and Gritty style was a clear reaction to 9/11. For a brief period before then, The Matrix had defined the look and feel of action movies - dark, yes, but slick. This was in a period where the biggest threat seemed to be boredom and malaise - a society where people weren't feeling challenged. But once we started this era of terrorism, people weren't going to be satisfied with action heroes looking like they had just come from a fashion show. Jason Bourne was the new action hero (despite coming from novels written well before that period.)
The Dark and Gritty led to two very influential reboots. Casino Royale and Batman Begins took two series that had plummeted into excessive camp (their immediate antecedents were Batman and Robin and Die Another Day.) In both cases, they hit the reset button.
Casino Royale and Batman Begins are both origin stories for characters who had been part of film series with vague continuity. James Bond had been played by five actors over about 40 years at the time (not counting the original Casino Royale, which was a weird parody of the series.) Sometimes the series admitted the existence of other movies, but usually only within the same actor's tenure. Still, Casino Royale began a reboot that truly erased all previous Bond movies from its continuity (though the continued casting of Judi Dench as M confuses the hell out of any attempt at figuring out a timeline - unless you just imagine that her Brosnan-era M and Craig-era M are from entirely different continuities and she was just such good casting that they kept her.) The Bond movies pre-reboot had gotten into a deadly escalation spiral, where gadgets had to be one-upped until we had straight sci-fi like the invisible car. Rebooting allowed them to get rid of that embarrassing stuff, with the only science fiction element being Bond's continued sanity, apparent lack of venereal diseases, and the fact that he's not dead (in Skyfall, there is no explanation for how he's still alive after Moneypenny accidentally sniped him off of a train off of a bridge into a ravine other than "he's Jame's Bond.")
Tim Burton's Batman is very much a product of its time (the Prince soundtrack... I won't say it hasn't aged well, in case you're into that sort of thing, but man does it date the movie.) Still, it was a genuine attempt to replicate the feeling of the comics on screen, and the heightened reality of Burton's Gotham was fun. He did another movie, but then we got Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, where they seemed to take the idea of a heightened reality and just blew it all the way into camp. Christopher Nolan wiped the board clean and started anew, attempting to ground Batman in a version of Gotham that felt more like the real world. I wrote a few months ago about how the first of the "Dark Knight" trilogy actually had more of that heightened feeling - not quite Burton-level, but not our reality - and then pushed the Dark Knight into a realm that felt very much like it could be a real city dealing with a real terrorist threat.
Nolan's Batman trilogy stripped things down so that we could see the most stone-cold badass version of Batman. It had its flaws, of course. Nolan suffers from convolution disease, which sometimes serves him well (The Prestige is one of my favorite movies) but sometimes leaves you with a bit of a mess on your hands (Dark Knight Rises.)
Nolan co-produced Man of Steel - DC's attempt to do for Superman what Nolan had done for Batman. There was one recent Superman movie, directed by Bryan Singer of X-Men fame. Singer actually deserves a lot of credit for the current popularity of superhero movies, given that his first X-Men kind of kicked it off (Sam Raimi's Spiderman was a big deal as well.) But for whatever reason, Superman Returns did not do well, and never really led anywhere in terms of franchise.
The problem, though, is that Man of Steel (which, full disclosure, I haven't seen) took "do for Superman what Nolan did for Batman" way too literally, creating a bleak, colorless world where Superman is a force of destruction. He doesn't go out of his way to hurt any innocents as far as I know, but given that Superman is supposed to be the epitome of the lawful good, always strives to do the right thing kind of hero, it's pretty surprising that he doesn't seem to be doing much to actually save people. There's cinematic precedence in the Marvel movies, after all. The Avengers spend most of their time in the Battle of New York protecting civilians and getting them out of harm's way. In Age of Ultron, there's a huge amount of screen time in the climax devoted to getting people onto the little hover-skiffs to get them out of the city before it is destroyed. Captain America has out-Supermanned Superman.
And I think it's because there's some sort of disconnect between WB, DC, and Zac Snyder, who has been given the reins to what they're trying to make into the DCCU.
Marvel Studios, even after being bought by Disney, has always striven to make sure that the superheroes feel right. Captain America I think is their biggest success. They manage to make him a good person with "Boy Scout" values that nevertheless knows how to handle himself in complex situations like the threat of Hydra in Winter Soldier. But while the Captain is a beacon of reservation-free Red White and Blue in a series of movies that test that patriotism but ultimately affirm it, Marvel can also have characters like the Punisher exist in the far darker and more disturbing segment of the world that exists within their "Netflix-verse." The Captain can have his relatively bloodless combat against clearly evil villains while Daredevil aspires to that while finding himself in a much darker and gruesome setting.
The point being: you can have both, but you should know which tone works for which character.
I've only seen two Zac Snyder movies. The first was 300, which I saw in college before it even came out in theaters. It was clear that Snyder had seen Robert Rodriguez's (and Frank Miller's, who got a directorial credit) Sin City and basically just did 300 in the same way - a kind of direct comic book translation. But I've got problems with both films, to be honest, because I think there's something fascistic about Miller's obsession with violence and domination as the sole ethical constant in the universe. 300 in particular bothered me because of the unsettling parallels between its story and the contemporary state of the Iraq War - in which the Spartan senator who doesn't want to send more troops to back up the 300 is actually a cowardly traitor, this being at a time when George W. Bush was trying to secure a "Surge" in Iraq and there was still a culture of jingoism that labeled anyone critical of the war as "letting the terrorists win."
The fact that Snyder wants to make a movie of the Fountainhead certainly backs up my theory that this is a guy who wants to tell America extreme-right-wing fables.
The other I saw was Watchmen. To be honest, I thought it was a decent adaptation. I was even fine with the way they handled Doctor Manhattan's role in Ozymandias' plot. I only saw it the one time, though. I don't think I could tell you precisely what Alan Moore was going for in that story - in truth, he was probably going for a whole lot of things - but I know there are some readers who erroneously think that Rorschach - the crypto-fascist who has a Punisher-like facility with brutally murdering the "bad guys" - is the book's true hero. My interpretation has always been that the book has no true hero, and that every one of the superheroes ultimately fails the people they intend to protect.
Having only seen the movie once, I probably projected my interpretation of the book onto the movie, and so the fact that most of the plot points were translated pretty directly was enough to satisfy me.
So is Zac Snyder the problem here? It seems that what draws him to these comic book movies is the idea of clashing Titans - figures that are larger than life and more exciting than the little people who can't destroy buildings. There's a place for that, but I'd argue that it misses the point of, perhaps not all superheroes, but certainly its two most iconic examples.
Superman, I think, represents a being who is greater than any person, but within that greatness is also a greater capacity for compassion. The fact that he is so much more powerful a being than we mere mortals is counter-balanced by the fact that he has a superhuman power to care about us. That makes him the paragon, and that's why he deserves to be in stories that affirm the message of optimism he represents. A lot of filmmakers have interpreted him as a Christ figure, which works fine for this. But I think it's important to remember that his creators were Jewish, and Superman's origin story was based on Moses. This is not a guy who suffers through misery to shoulder our sins (as an aside, I actually think the teachings are way more important than the Passion for Christianity,) but a guy who does his best to live as an example for the people who follow him, with the hope of a promised land somewhere down his path.
Batman works in a dark setting. Nolan proved that. But that's what makes him a good foil to Superman. Batman has a strong moral code, but he's not a role model. He's there to make the people who usually strike fear into the hearts of the innocent feel that fear themselves. The problem is that if Superman's already living in this bleak and depressing world, then what does the darkness that Batman brings really add to the story?
I think that there was this switch that got flipped in 2001 where we decided that a story couldn't tell us anything important unless it was dark and gritty, and that upbeat and colorful storytelling was just a kind of opiate to distract us from the truth. But in the time since then, surely we've learned that this dark and gritty stuff can be just as much of a distraction. Convincing us that everything is terrible can be just as useful to some people as convincing us that everything is perfectly fine. Nuance requires a consideration of both of these aspects of life. And if we're talking about comic book movies, I think Marvel's getting the balance right while DC is not.
Why is Marvel so much better at film adaptations these days? You can basically go into any Marvel movie and at least have fun (ok, maybe not in the Incredible Hulk, and the Thor movies just barely squeak by thanks to Tom Hiddleston.)
The popularity of Dark and Gritty style was a clear reaction to 9/11. For a brief period before then, The Matrix had defined the look and feel of action movies - dark, yes, but slick. This was in a period where the biggest threat seemed to be boredom and malaise - a society where people weren't feeling challenged. But once we started this era of terrorism, people weren't going to be satisfied with action heroes looking like they had just come from a fashion show. Jason Bourne was the new action hero (despite coming from novels written well before that period.)
The Dark and Gritty led to two very influential reboots. Casino Royale and Batman Begins took two series that had plummeted into excessive camp (their immediate antecedents were Batman and Robin and Die Another Day.) In both cases, they hit the reset button.
Casino Royale and Batman Begins are both origin stories for characters who had been part of film series with vague continuity. James Bond had been played by five actors over about 40 years at the time (not counting the original Casino Royale, which was a weird parody of the series.) Sometimes the series admitted the existence of other movies, but usually only within the same actor's tenure. Still, Casino Royale began a reboot that truly erased all previous Bond movies from its continuity (though the continued casting of Judi Dench as M confuses the hell out of any attempt at figuring out a timeline - unless you just imagine that her Brosnan-era M and Craig-era M are from entirely different continuities and she was just such good casting that they kept her.) The Bond movies pre-reboot had gotten into a deadly escalation spiral, where gadgets had to be one-upped until we had straight sci-fi like the invisible car. Rebooting allowed them to get rid of that embarrassing stuff, with the only science fiction element being Bond's continued sanity, apparent lack of venereal diseases, and the fact that he's not dead (in Skyfall, there is no explanation for how he's still alive after Moneypenny accidentally sniped him off of a train off of a bridge into a ravine other than "he's Jame's Bond.")
Tim Burton's Batman is very much a product of its time (the Prince soundtrack... I won't say it hasn't aged well, in case you're into that sort of thing, but man does it date the movie.) Still, it was a genuine attempt to replicate the feeling of the comics on screen, and the heightened reality of Burton's Gotham was fun. He did another movie, but then we got Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, where they seemed to take the idea of a heightened reality and just blew it all the way into camp. Christopher Nolan wiped the board clean and started anew, attempting to ground Batman in a version of Gotham that felt more like the real world. I wrote a few months ago about how the first of the "Dark Knight" trilogy actually had more of that heightened feeling - not quite Burton-level, but not our reality - and then pushed the Dark Knight into a realm that felt very much like it could be a real city dealing with a real terrorist threat.
Nolan's Batman trilogy stripped things down so that we could see the most stone-cold badass version of Batman. It had its flaws, of course. Nolan suffers from convolution disease, which sometimes serves him well (The Prestige is one of my favorite movies) but sometimes leaves you with a bit of a mess on your hands (Dark Knight Rises.)
Nolan co-produced Man of Steel - DC's attempt to do for Superman what Nolan had done for Batman. There was one recent Superman movie, directed by Bryan Singer of X-Men fame. Singer actually deserves a lot of credit for the current popularity of superhero movies, given that his first X-Men kind of kicked it off (Sam Raimi's Spiderman was a big deal as well.) But for whatever reason, Superman Returns did not do well, and never really led anywhere in terms of franchise.
The problem, though, is that Man of Steel (which, full disclosure, I haven't seen) took "do for Superman what Nolan did for Batman" way too literally, creating a bleak, colorless world where Superman is a force of destruction. He doesn't go out of his way to hurt any innocents as far as I know, but given that Superman is supposed to be the epitome of the lawful good, always strives to do the right thing kind of hero, it's pretty surprising that he doesn't seem to be doing much to actually save people. There's cinematic precedence in the Marvel movies, after all. The Avengers spend most of their time in the Battle of New York protecting civilians and getting them out of harm's way. In Age of Ultron, there's a huge amount of screen time in the climax devoted to getting people onto the little hover-skiffs to get them out of the city before it is destroyed. Captain America has out-Supermanned Superman.
And I think it's because there's some sort of disconnect between WB, DC, and Zac Snyder, who has been given the reins to what they're trying to make into the DCCU.
Marvel Studios, even after being bought by Disney, has always striven to make sure that the superheroes feel right. Captain America I think is their biggest success. They manage to make him a good person with "Boy Scout" values that nevertheless knows how to handle himself in complex situations like the threat of Hydra in Winter Soldier. But while the Captain is a beacon of reservation-free Red White and Blue in a series of movies that test that patriotism but ultimately affirm it, Marvel can also have characters like the Punisher exist in the far darker and more disturbing segment of the world that exists within their "Netflix-verse." The Captain can have his relatively bloodless combat against clearly evil villains while Daredevil aspires to that while finding himself in a much darker and gruesome setting.
The point being: you can have both, but you should know which tone works for which character.
I've only seen two Zac Snyder movies. The first was 300, which I saw in college before it even came out in theaters. It was clear that Snyder had seen Robert Rodriguez's (and Frank Miller's, who got a directorial credit) Sin City and basically just did 300 in the same way - a kind of direct comic book translation. But I've got problems with both films, to be honest, because I think there's something fascistic about Miller's obsession with violence and domination as the sole ethical constant in the universe. 300 in particular bothered me because of the unsettling parallels between its story and the contemporary state of the Iraq War - in which the Spartan senator who doesn't want to send more troops to back up the 300 is actually a cowardly traitor, this being at a time when George W. Bush was trying to secure a "Surge" in Iraq and there was still a culture of jingoism that labeled anyone critical of the war as "letting the terrorists win."
The fact that Snyder wants to make a movie of the Fountainhead certainly backs up my theory that this is a guy who wants to tell America extreme-right-wing fables.
The other I saw was Watchmen. To be honest, I thought it was a decent adaptation. I was even fine with the way they handled Doctor Manhattan's role in Ozymandias' plot. I only saw it the one time, though. I don't think I could tell you precisely what Alan Moore was going for in that story - in truth, he was probably going for a whole lot of things - but I know there are some readers who erroneously think that Rorschach - the crypto-fascist who has a Punisher-like facility with brutally murdering the "bad guys" - is the book's true hero. My interpretation has always been that the book has no true hero, and that every one of the superheroes ultimately fails the people they intend to protect.
Having only seen the movie once, I probably projected my interpretation of the book onto the movie, and so the fact that most of the plot points were translated pretty directly was enough to satisfy me.
So is Zac Snyder the problem here? It seems that what draws him to these comic book movies is the idea of clashing Titans - figures that are larger than life and more exciting than the little people who can't destroy buildings. There's a place for that, but I'd argue that it misses the point of, perhaps not all superheroes, but certainly its two most iconic examples.
Superman, I think, represents a being who is greater than any person, but within that greatness is also a greater capacity for compassion. The fact that he is so much more powerful a being than we mere mortals is counter-balanced by the fact that he has a superhuman power to care about us. That makes him the paragon, and that's why he deserves to be in stories that affirm the message of optimism he represents. A lot of filmmakers have interpreted him as a Christ figure, which works fine for this. But I think it's important to remember that his creators were Jewish, and Superman's origin story was based on Moses. This is not a guy who suffers through misery to shoulder our sins (as an aside, I actually think the teachings are way more important than the Passion for Christianity,) but a guy who does his best to live as an example for the people who follow him, with the hope of a promised land somewhere down his path.
Batman works in a dark setting. Nolan proved that. But that's what makes him a good foil to Superman. Batman has a strong moral code, but he's not a role model. He's there to make the people who usually strike fear into the hearts of the innocent feel that fear themselves. The problem is that if Superman's already living in this bleak and depressing world, then what does the darkness that Batman brings really add to the story?
I think that there was this switch that got flipped in 2001 where we decided that a story couldn't tell us anything important unless it was dark and gritty, and that upbeat and colorful storytelling was just a kind of opiate to distract us from the truth. But in the time since then, surely we've learned that this dark and gritty stuff can be just as much of a distraction. Convincing us that everything is terrible can be just as useful to some people as convincing us that everything is perfectly fine. Nuance requires a consideration of both of these aspects of life. And if we're talking about comic book movies, I think Marvel's getting the balance right while DC is not.
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
The Magicians and Book-to-Television Adaptation
Game of Thrones showed that you can do a pretty good adaptation of a novel by turning it into a television series. Game of Thrones does cut a significant portion of the novels, but if you compare their current 50-hour set (with ten more coming soon) to even a generous 8-movie series (assuming they follow the Harry Potter novel and split the last book - though maybe that's only for YA stuff,) you'd still find yourself with a tiny fraction of what you could get on TV.
I had heard about The Magicians, but it was only after I watched the pilot episode that I picked up the first book and started reading it. I'm currently a bit over halfway through the second book in the series.
It's very clear that the show is not following the book's plot directly. There is a similar primary threat and certainly some familiar scenarios, but some of the main cast is totally different, and they are of course trying to cover Julia's backstory in the first season instead of waiting for the second, as the books do. But much like what's happening in Brakebills, Julia is dealing with a very different plot.
Being familiar with an original work makes watching an adaptation tricky. Most of the time, you find yourself disappointed, often because things are changed so significantly. Sometimes, there's a sort of weird uncanny valley feeling - for example, I watched the movie version of John Dies at the End shortly after reading the book, and was shocked to see the plot appear almost word-for-word faithful until it suddenly bridged the gap between an event about halfway in to events that were maybe the final fifth of the story. It made perfect sense - they couldn't do the book's three major adventures in a single film, and they managed to stitch it together decently, but it was still a strange feeling.
The Magicians, the novel, is actually pretty light on plot (in stark contrast with the second novel, the Magician King, which feels very structured.) It's really more about Quentin Coldwater's disastrous lack of satisfaction with all the awesome (literally awesome) things life has given to him, and thus has a fairly episodic structure.
The show tosses away a lot of the book's events and even shuffles out some of the characters for new ones. Josh is nowhere to be seen, while Janet seems to have simply been renamed Margot and there's a whole new character named Kady. Dynamics are shifted as well, integrating Penny into the main cast. Some of that's practical - novelists can throw in a new character easily, whereas shows have to cast someone and keep them interested enough to stay on.
So really, what is preserved is the personality of the characters (with some changes - show Quentin is a bit more likable than the one in the book) and much of the series lore. In the book, the reemergence of The Beast and the revelation of who it really is was designed to catch us just after we might have filed away those questions as no longer important (though I totally called who it was.) On the show, the Beast serves as a clearer Big Bad of season one.
Even though I'm a neophyte to the books (being really only halfway through the series,) part of me bristles at these changes. On the other hand, the show seems to be having more fun. One of the sort of masochistic elements of the books is that it's clearly written for readers who enjoy fantasy literature, but it then more or less chastises us for wanting to live in a magical world. It's a novel approach to the genre and earned through the characterization, but it casts a bleak light on any thoughts of escapism. The show is plenty dark (in fact, that darkness has been ramped up quicker than it was in the books,) but somehow manages to maintain the idea that, yes, even if you learn magic you have to find a way to deal with your shit, but having magic will not inherently fuck your shit up.
I had heard about The Magicians, but it was only after I watched the pilot episode that I picked up the first book and started reading it. I'm currently a bit over halfway through the second book in the series.
It's very clear that the show is not following the book's plot directly. There is a similar primary threat and certainly some familiar scenarios, but some of the main cast is totally different, and they are of course trying to cover Julia's backstory in the first season instead of waiting for the second, as the books do. But much like what's happening in Brakebills, Julia is dealing with a very different plot.
Being familiar with an original work makes watching an adaptation tricky. Most of the time, you find yourself disappointed, often because things are changed so significantly. Sometimes, there's a sort of weird uncanny valley feeling - for example, I watched the movie version of John Dies at the End shortly after reading the book, and was shocked to see the plot appear almost word-for-word faithful until it suddenly bridged the gap between an event about halfway in to events that were maybe the final fifth of the story. It made perfect sense - they couldn't do the book's three major adventures in a single film, and they managed to stitch it together decently, but it was still a strange feeling.
The Magicians, the novel, is actually pretty light on plot (in stark contrast with the second novel, the Magician King, which feels very structured.) It's really more about Quentin Coldwater's disastrous lack of satisfaction with all the awesome (literally awesome) things life has given to him, and thus has a fairly episodic structure.
The show tosses away a lot of the book's events and even shuffles out some of the characters for new ones. Josh is nowhere to be seen, while Janet seems to have simply been renamed Margot and there's a whole new character named Kady. Dynamics are shifted as well, integrating Penny into the main cast. Some of that's practical - novelists can throw in a new character easily, whereas shows have to cast someone and keep them interested enough to stay on.
So really, what is preserved is the personality of the characters (with some changes - show Quentin is a bit more likable than the one in the book) and much of the series lore. In the book, the reemergence of The Beast and the revelation of who it really is was designed to catch us just after we might have filed away those questions as no longer important (though I totally called who it was.) On the show, the Beast serves as a clearer Big Bad of season one.
Even though I'm a neophyte to the books (being really only halfway through the series,) part of me bristles at these changes. On the other hand, the show seems to be having more fun. One of the sort of masochistic elements of the books is that it's clearly written for readers who enjoy fantasy literature, but it then more or less chastises us for wanting to live in a magical world. It's a novel approach to the genre and earned through the characterization, but it casts a bleak light on any thoughts of escapism. The show is plenty dark (in fact, that darkness has been ramped up quicker than it was in the books,) but somehow manages to maintain the idea that, yes, even if you learn magic you have to find a way to deal with your shit, but having magic will not inherently fuck your shit up.
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