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.
Thursday, June 30, 2016
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:
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