Given that this movie has been out for only a day and a half or so, I'm going to put a big spoiler buffer paragraph here.
The Last Jedi is the middle piece of the sequel trilogy, written and directed by Rian Johnson. Johnson made a name for himself with the indie movie Brick (which I actually saw right when it came out,) a Noir detective film set in a high school with teenage characters that managed to have its cake (be a gritty noir film) and eat it too (deriving humor from its unusual setting and the shrunken power spectrum of teenagers.) I actually haven't seen his other original films, but he also earned a lot of respect directing television, like some of the best episodes of Breaking Bad (including the legendary Ozymandias.)
So what do I think of his take on Star Wars? The truth is that I'm still digesting it, but I think in a good way.
SPOILERS AHEAD:
Saturday, December 16, 2017
Sunday, November 12, 2017
A Year of Heartbreak
After my mother died this summer, I decided to chalk up 2017 as a loss. There was no way I was going to be able to turn this period of time into a good part of my life, and circumstances in the world seemed to confirm my attitude that this was not a good time.
But superstition makes me feel strangely guilty for the subsequent misfortunes to fall this year. I know that rationally, my surrender to the awfulness of 2017 has nothing to do with the events that occurred within it, but it almost seems like fate took my decision and then decided to pile on more.
I realize this is fairly solipsistic to imagine that these misfortunes are mine - I am in relatively good health (knock on wood) and am not under any serious financial strain. But I do have the distinct feeling that the world is falling apart around me.
A few weeks ago, my grandmother followed her daughter. My grandma was 94 (she had recently had her birthday) and so while I generally think most people would prefer living forever, if we are living in a world where we must accept aging and mortality as inevitablilites, then that seems like a non-tragic age to die.
But today I discovered that a dear friend of mine from college died last week. We had not kept in touch very well - even in this age of social media, one can lean on the crutch of just seeing an old friend's facebook posts rather than actually engaging with them actively. But she was a very special person to me nonetheless.
I'm still in shock about this, having only found out about an hour ago. Perhaps it is unwise to write this post now, but I'm feeling raw and putting my words on screen is an attempt at something therapeutic.
I went a very long time before anyone I knew died. I was thirteen when my grandfather died, and before that, death had been a pure, terrifying abstract. I knew that death could come for people of any age, but the general assumption that I've always lived by was the idea that I, and most people I knew, would make it to old age. That's the promise that we make by living in modern society, though it is one that is broken all the time.
I felt my mother was far too young to die at 67. As far as I was concerned, she was owed another thirty years. We're supposed to be progressing as a species, and so if I had two grandparents that made it into their 90s, then surely my parents should both live to be over 100. I'll still hold that hope for my father, but the ship has sailed on my mother.
But to see someone my age, a bright spark of cheer and kindness, who took me on in friendship despite all of my insecurities and anxieties, taken less than ten years after we graduated from college is a shock that fills me with a kind of scraping grief I can hardly articulate.
We didn't really have mutual friends, which means that I can't really talk to anyone about this in detail. I guess that's why I felt the need to make this post. I'm tossing my thoughts into the electronic aether.
But superstition makes me feel strangely guilty for the subsequent misfortunes to fall this year. I know that rationally, my surrender to the awfulness of 2017 has nothing to do with the events that occurred within it, but it almost seems like fate took my decision and then decided to pile on more.
I realize this is fairly solipsistic to imagine that these misfortunes are mine - I am in relatively good health (knock on wood) and am not under any serious financial strain. But I do have the distinct feeling that the world is falling apart around me.
A few weeks ago, my grandmother followed her daughter. My grandma was 94 (she had recently had her birthday) and so while I generally think most people would prefer living forever, if we are living in a world where we must accept aging and mortality as inevitablilites, then that seems like a non-tragic age to die.
But today I discovered that a dear friend of mine from college died last week. We had not kept in touch very well - even in this age of social media, one can lean on the crutch of just seeing an old friend's facebook posts rather than actually engaging with them actively. But she was a very special person to me nonetheless.
I'm still in shock about this, having only found out about an hour ago. Perhaps it is unwise to write this post now, but I'm feeling raw and putting my words on screen is an attempt at something therapeutic.
I went a very long time before anyone I knew died. I was thirteen when my grandfather died, and before that, death had been a pure, terrifying abstract. I knew that death could come for people of any age, but the general assumption that I've always lived by was the idea that I, and most people I knew, would make it to old age. That's the promise that we make by living in modern society, though it is one that is broken all the time.
I felt my mother was far too young to die at 67. As far as I was concerned, she was owed another thirty years. We're supposed to be progressing as a species, and so if I had two grandparents that made it into their 90s, then surely my parents should both live to be over 100. I'll still hold that hope for my father, but the ship has sailed on my mother.
But to see someone my age, a bright spark of cheer and kindness, who took me on in friendship despite all of my insecurities and anxieties, taken less than ten years after we graduated from college is a shock that fills me with a kind of scraping grief I can hardly articulate.
We didn't really have mutual friends, which means that I can't really talk to anyone about this in detail. I guess that's why I felt the need to make this post. I'm tossing my thoughts into the electronic aether.
Sunday, October 29, 2017
Stranger Things 2
Yes, the second season of Stranger Things is officially called Stranger Things 2, as if it is a sequel rather than a continuation of a cohesive story. In this day and age, when serialized storytelling is the norm, and we have a lot of big-screen films that feel more like episodes of an ongoing narrative than self-contained plots, the line between sequels and continuations is blurry.
Spoilers Ahead:
Spoilers Ahead:
Tuesday, October 17, 2017
Rewatching Stranger Things Season One
Partially in anticipation of the new season coming out later this month, and also out of a desire to revisit the show, I watched the first (and only for the next week and a half I guess) season of Stranger Things.
The show kind of came out of nowhere last year, dropping on Netflix with little build-up but then caught on like wildfire. Why was it so popular? And did it deserve it?
Well, first off, let's talk about importance as a series. Stranger Things is absolutely a throwback - it's set in 1983 and is meant to evoke the tone and feel of movies and other fiction coming out of that era, particularly, I would say, the works of Stephen Spielberg, Stephen King, and John Carpenter.
The Duffer Brothers, who created the series and directed I believe every episode, were born in 1984, which I think is significant. As someone born in 1986, I have a similar connection to the 1980s - we were quite young during the actual decade, but the pop culture that arose within the decade certainly shaped a lot of what we were exposed to growing up in the 90s. So while I might not have been aware of President Reagan while he was in office, the decade's sort of cultural gestalt was the foundation upon which I built the rest of my understanding of culture that came after (to give an example, it wasn't until fairly recently that I really understood that Dana Carvey's Church Lady character was directly a parody of the then-recent ascent of the Religious Right. For me, growing up, there was always a politically powerful group of fundamentalists in the US.)
Anyway, as something as a nostalgia piece, or an attempt (and a successful one, I'd say) to engage with the cultural moment of one's birth, the show does risk being solely referential, not really contributing anything new to the culture of the 2010s other than a wistful look back at an earlier era. The question, then, is whether Stranger Things really brings anything new to the table. If you time-traveled back to the 80s and showed someone this, would they see something different and unique from the other stuff they had at the time? (Other than the 2010 visual effects, the serialized television format, and shockingly well-done age makeup on Winona Ryder, who was of course just becoming - or about to become - a famous teen actor.)
I'm not sure I can really claim that the hypothetical 1980s person would find something unique here. On the other hand, that could be my jaded self ignoring what we have here. Deconstruction is not always a unique move, but I think that given the masterful imitation of the 1980s aesthetic (the woodsy suburb of Hawkins, Indiana, seems perfect for a story like this,) there are some attitudes that have shifted.
I really think the portrayal of Joyce Byers, the mother of the missing kid Will, is fascinating from a feminist perspective. Joyce is confronted with incredible (as in literally not believable) evidence that her son is alive, speaking to her through electric lights in her house. It would be one thing if Joyce was portrayed as tough-as-nails and that anyone who thinks she's just going crazy is purely motivated by a sexist belief that all women are emotionally unstable. But the thing is, Joyce is emotionally unstable. That doesn't mean she's wrong. And in fact, Joyce fights through her anxieties in order to do some practical and resourceful things, like creating the alphabet board on her wall so that Will can communicate more clearly with her. Her voice may waver and she might feel like she's at wit's end, but even while dealing with that, she holds on to a truth that is not just a matter of faith, but a rational response to the evidence with which she has been presented.
Another character I find really interesting is Steve, Nancy's popular (in that sense of how the "cool kids" in a High School can have a clique of only like four people and somehow claim supremacy) new boyfriend. We get many, many signs that Steve is an asshole, and in a lot of ways he is. But while you would often see such a character become more overtly abusive and then get killed by a monster in a Stephen King novel (for the record, I like Stephen King, but I'm going with his most stereotypical tropes here) to free Nancy up for quiet but kind Jonathan, in this case we see Steve make real efforts to make up for his behavior, even helping to fight off the monster in the end. In fact, one of the most classic "bully" moments for him is actually not totally unjustified. When he finds out that Jonathan was taking pictures of his house the night Nancy slept with him, including a revealing one of her, he destroys the pictures and breaks the camera to punish Jonathan for what was, actually, a pretty serious invasion of privacy. Does he do it in a seriously douchey way? Yes. But it's not totally unjustified.
But novelty is not everything, and I think that what Stranger Things lacks in innovation (and I'm open to arguments that it is, in fact, innovative in ways I haven't noticed) it makes up in quality.
Child actors are a tough bet, but Stranger Things manages to have a fantastic cast, with Millie Bobby Brown stealing the show as Eleven, the girl with psychic powers who is desperately trying to make sense of the new world she has escaped into.
But what the show manages to do is give just about every character something interesting to do and gets a great performance out of the actor. There are a couple exceptions (Mike and Nancy's mom feels like she was meant to be a bigger part) but over all, it's a great ensemble. And in fact, it's hard to pick out a particular protagonist, but the show does not suffer from this.
What we have instead is a group of people all falling into this mystery in their own ways, which makes the finale so exciting as we have all the plot threads tying together right as things plunge fully into the dark world of the Upside Down.
One other note is that the 1980s setting is absolutely pervasive in the feel of the show, but doesn't tend to call attention to itself. In fact, that's a big part of why I think the show feels authentic - you don't see movies today constantly call attention to the fact that they've been made in this era. Every decade takes maybe another full decade to figure out what it was like (hell, the 90s are only just starting to coalesce into something people can identify,) and Stranger Things manages to create a background setting that feels familiar and normal, even though it's a version of normal that's 30 years old.
I'm super excited to see season two. Tonally and thematically I'm not too worried, though given how well season one fits together as a single story, I do think the Duffer Brothers had a pretty huge challenge in creating a story for the next season. I guess we'll find out how they did in about ten days.
The show kind of came out of nowhere last year, dropping on Netflix with little build-up but then caught on like wildfire. Why was it so popular? And did it deserve it?
Well, first off, let's talk about importance as a series. Stranger Things is absolutely a throwback - it's set in 1983 and is meant to evoke the tone and feel of movies and other fiction coming out of that era, particularly, I would say, the works of Stephen Spielberg, Stephen King, and John Carpenter.
The Duffer Brothers, who created the series and directed I believe every episode, were born in 1984, which I think is significant. As someone born in 1986, I have a similar connection to the 1980s - we were quite young during the actual decade, but the pop culture that arose within the decade certainly shaped a lot of what we were exposed to growing up in the 90s. So while I might not have been aware of President Reagan while he was in office, the decade's sort of cultural gestalt was the foundation upon which I built the rest of my understanding of culture that came after (to give an example, it wasn't until fairly recently that I really understood that Dana Carvey's Church Lady character was directly a parody of the then-recent ascent of the Religious Right. For me, growing up, there was always a politically powerful group of fundamentalists in the US.)
Anyway, as something as a nostalgia piece, or an attempt (and a successful one, I'd say) to engage with the cultural moment of one's birth, the show does risk being solely referential, not really contributing anything new to the culture of the 2010s other than a wistful look back at an earlier era. The question, then, is whether Stranger Things really brings anything new to the table. If you time-traveled back to the 80s and showed someone this, would they see something different and unique from the other stuff they had at the time? (Other than the 2010 visual effects, the serialized television format, and shockingly well-done age makeup on Winona Ryder, who was of course just becoming - or about to become - a famous teen actor.)
I'm not sure I can really claim that the hypothetical 1980s person would find something unique here. On the other hand, that could be my jaded self ignoring what we have here. Deconstruction is not always a unique move, but I think that given the masterful imitation of the 1980s aesthetic (the woodsy suburb of Hawkins, Indiana, seems perfect for a story like this,) there are some attitudes that have shifted.
I really think the portrayal of Joyce Byers, the mother of the missing kid Will, is fascinating from a feminist perspective. Joyce is confronted with incredible (as in literally not believable) evidence that her son is alive, speaking to her through electric lights in her house. It would be one thing if Joyce was portrayed as tough-as-nails and that anyone who thinks she's just going crazy is purely motivated by a sexist belief that all women are emotionally unstable. But the thing is, Joyce is emotionally unstable. That doesn't mean she's wrong. And in fact, Joyce fights through her anxieties in order to do some practical and resourceful things, like creating the alphabet board on her wall so that Will can communicate more clearly with her. Her voice may waver and she might feel like she's at wit's end, but even while dealing with that, she holds on to a truth that is not just a matter of faith, but a rational response to the evidence with which she has been presented.
Another character I find really interesting is Steve, Nancy's popular (in that sense of how the "cool kids" in a High School can have a clique of only like four people and somehow claim supremacy) new boyfriend. We get many, many signs that Steve is an asshole, and in a lot of ways he is. But while you would often see such a character become more overtly abusive and then get killed by a monster in a Stephen King novel (for the record, I like Stephen King, but I'm going with his most stereotypical tropes here) to free Nancy up for quiet but kind Jonathan, in this case we see Steve make real efforts to make up for his behavior, even helping to fight off the monster in the end. In fact, one of the most classic "bully" moments for him is actually not totally unjustified. When he finds out that Jonathan was taking pictures of his house the night Nancy slept with him, including a revealing one of her, he destroys the pictures and breaks the camera to punish Jonathan for what was, actually, a pretty serious invasion of privacy. Does he do it in a seriously douchey way? Yes. But it's not totally unjustified.
But novelty is not everything, and I think that what Stranger Things lacks in innovation (and I'm open to arguments that it is, in fact, innovative in ways I haven't noticed) it makes up in quality.
Child actors are a tough bet, but Stranger Things manages to have a fantastic cast, with Millie Bobby Brown stealing the show as Eleven, the girl with psychic powers who is desperately trying to make sense of the new world she has escaped into.
But what the show manages to do is give just about every character something interesting to do and gets a great performance out of the actor. There are a couple exceptions (Mike and Nancy's mom feels like she was meant to be a bigger part) but over all, it's a great ensemble. And in fact, it's hard to pick out a particular protagonist, but the show does not suffer from this.
What we have instead is a group of people all falling into this mystery in their own ways, which makes the finale so exciting as we have all the plot threads tying together right as things plunge fully into the dark world of the Upside Down.
One other note is that the 1980s setting is absolutely pervasive in the feel of the show, but doesn't tend to call attention to itself. In fact, that's a big part of why I think the show feels authentic - you don't see movies today constantly call attention to the fact that they've been made in this era. Every decade takes maybe another full decade to figure out what it was like (hell, the 90s are only just starting to coalesce into something people can identify,) and Stranger Things manages to create a background setting that feels familiar and normal, even though it's a version of normal that's 30 years old.
I'm super excited to see season two. Tonally and thematically I'm not too worried, though given how well season one fits together as a single story, I do think the Duffer Brothers had a pretty huge challenge in creating a story for the next season. I guess we'll find out how they did in about ten days.
Friday, October 13, 2017
Blade Runner 2049
Blade Runner is one of those movies that I was never totally crazy about. I liked it the first time I saw it, but there was something about it's uber-80s vision of the future that never really clicked with me. While a lot of 80s pop culture holds a warm place in my heart (the original Star Wars was in the 70s, but Empire and Jedi were 80s,) I've always held a slight disdain for the general 80s aesthetic - the synthetic, the over-manicured excess, the audible hollowness in much of the music. Yeah, I was born then, but I really felt more at home in the grungy, warmer 90s (I guess the 90s also held the "Xtreme" aesthetic, but I think that was later in the decade.) (I realize we could get into a whole series of posts about comparing the aesthetic of one decade or another, as if they had only one.)
Anyway, Blade Runner was a Film Noir by way of that 80s aesthetic. It replaced the sort of muted jazz with synth and created an utterly miserable (and oddly rain-soaked) Los Angeles where its protagonist's job was essentially finding and murdering undesirables.
Blade Runner 2049 certainly continues with these ideas, but I think there are a lot of new ideas about the real world that get floated - like the way that abusive and oppressive systems coerce the oppressed into complicity.
The sequel does some world building to fill out the gap between the original and itself, suggesting that after Tyrell's death, there was a revolution by replicants, leaving nearly all of them wiped out, along with a blackout on digital data. Eventually, the Wallace corporation bought out Tyrell and created a new line of obedient replicants. And the protagonist of this film, sometimes called K (the first letter in his serial number) or Joe, is a replicant who is also a Blade Runner.
One of the most popular fan theories for the original movie was that Deckard was actually a replicant himself. This movie more or less buries that idea, but it kind of meets people halfway by confirming early on that Ryan Gosling's K is one. His search for identity and meaning is the through line of the film.
I don't really want to go too much into the details here, but K's life and his travails in this story really hammer home the horrific dystopia that Blade Runner 2049 imagines. It's a bleak movie, but in a kind of Children of Men-like way, makes standing up to that bleakness the act of heroes.
And though this is obviously not a direct adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story (though I'm given to understand even the original movie deviated significantly from the Dick story,) it does play with a major theme Dick was interested in, namely how you can know what you think you know.
Anyway, Blade Runner was a Film Noir by way of that 80s aesthetic. It replaced the sort of muted jazz with synth and created an utterly miserable (and oddly rain-soaked) Los Angeles where its protagonist's job was essentially finding and murdering undesirables.
Blade Runner 2049 certainly continues with these ideas, but I think there are a lot of new ideas about the real world that get floated - like the way that abusive and oppressive systems coerce the oppressed into complicity.
The sequel does some world building to fill out the gap between the original and itself, suggesting that after Tyrell's death, there was a revolution by replicants, leaving nearly all of them wiped out, along with a blackout on digital data. Eventually, the Wallace corporation bought out Tyrell and created a new line of obedient replicants. And the protagonist of this film, sometimes called K (the first letter in his serial number) or Joe, is a replicant who is also a Blade Runner.
One of the most popular fan theories for the original movie was that Deckard was actually a replicant himself. This movie more or less buries that idea, but it kind of meets people halfway by confirming early on that Ryan Gosling's K is one. His search for identity and meaning is the through line of the film.
I don't really want to go too much into the details here, but K's life and his travails in this story really hammer home the horrific dystopia that Blade Runner 2049 imagines. It's a bleak movie, but in a kind of Children of Men-like way, makes standing up to that bleakness the act of heroes.
And though this is obviously not a direct adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story (though I'm given to understand even the original movie deviated significantly from the Dick story,) it does play with a major theme Dick was interested in, namely how you can know what you think you know.
Sunday, October 1, 2017
Star Trek Discovery
For the first time since the early 00s, we have a new Star Trek... TV?... show. One of the barriers to entry here is that CBS is counting on this show to carry their new streaming service as we see the world pioneered by Netflix fragmenting into a mess that will probably wind up eating itself up to the detriment of viewers until someone comes up with a new solution.
Ahem.
But the show:
This sounds like an advertising slogan, but this is very much Star Trek like you've never seen before. And that is going to probably generate mixed reactions.
There are two big differences in the way that Discovery works compared with other Star Trek shows. First of all, it is darker. Now, it's true that Deep Space Nine took us into some dark territories - introducing Section 31 and having Sisko tacitly order an assassination (or at least not do anything about it after it is done) - so you could argue that this isn't entirely unique. But Discovery has a sense of desperation and also mystery that we haven't really seen in Star Trek before.
That tone of mystery is tied closely to the other big change: this is a show with one clear protagonist. While the captains of the earlier shows (remember that Sisko gets promoted sometime in the middle of DS9) were always kind of at the center of their casts, the typical form was to give each of the major characters plenty of focus and never really make any declarative moves about who we should be looking at the most. This is not true of Discovery, where Michael Burnam is absolutely the lens through which we see the show.
And that allows for mystery, because after a two-part pilot in which she is court-martialed and sentenced to life in prison (though you've got to imagine the Federation has parole for good behavior, even in extreme cases,) Michael's prison-transport is rescued by the Discovery, which is a brand-new Federation ship doing some very mysterious things.
We get a bunch of odd moments as she's led aboard, such as crew members with black badges (in contrast, I think, with the gold, red, and blue designations that we've seen on other shows.) We also get a "Black Alert" while Michael is going to bed on her first night on the ship.
Even the technobabble is, in this case, meant to be confusing. What are they doing on Discovery? What is all the secrecy for?
We meet Captain Gabriel Lorca, who even jokes about how the lighting in his ready room (lowered due to an injury to his eyes) lends him an air of mystery. That mystery persists as he seems to be vetting Michael for a position on his crew, even though she's supposed to be going to jail.
Lorca eventually convinces Michael that they are working on research to bring a swift end to the war with the Klingons - one that she more or less started in the pilot - and that this largely takes the form of things with nonviolent applications - that he is furthering the mission of Starfleet.
But it becomes very clear by the end of the episode that something very different is going on, and that at best, Lorca is some Section 31 agent or at least someone in that vein. It's also highly possible that he's a deranged madman - the kind of character who is usually an evil admiral in the other shows. But this time, he's the captain of the ship on which this show will take place!
The first three episodes I think really function as the entryway into the show and establish the premise. It's not flawless - Michael is shoehorned in as Spock's foster-sister, which would raise some serious Mary Sue alerts (I believe the original Mary Sue was, in fact, from a piece of Star Trek fanfic) except that Sonequa Martin-Green balances her nose-to-the-grindstone Vulcan calm with a deep human drive to act when it is necessary. We have a really interesting situation where we'll have a principled outlaw working on a ship commanded by a captain who seems to be violating the central tenets of his position.
Ahem.
But the show:
This sounds like an advertising slogan, but this is very much Star Trek like you've never seen before. And that is going to probably generate mixed reactions.
There are two big differences in the way that Discovery works compared with other Star Trek shows. First of all, it is darker. Now, it's true that Deep Space Nine took us into some dark territories - introducing Section 31 and having Sisko tacitly order an assassination (or at least not do anything about it after it is done) - so you could argue that this isn't entirely unique. But Discovery has a sense of desperation and also mystery that we haven't really seen in Star Trek before.
That tone of mystery is tied closely to the other big change: this is a show with one clear protagonist. While the captains of the earlier shows (remember that Sisko gets promoted sometime in the middle of DS9) were always kind of at the center of their casts, the typical form was to give each of the major characters plenty of focus and never really make any declarative moves about who we should be looking at the most. This is not true of Discovery, where Michael Burnam is absolutely the lens through which we see the show.
And that allows for mystery, because after a two-part pilot in which she is court-martialed and sentenced to life in prison (though you've got to imagine the Federation has parole for good behavior, even in extreme cases,) Michael's prison-transport is rescued by the Discovery, which is a brand-new Federation ship doing some very mysterious things.
We get a bunch of odd moments as she's led aboard, such as crew members with black badges (in contrast, I think, with the gold, red, and blue designations that we've seen on other shows.) We also get a "Black Alert" while Michael is going to bed on her first night on the ship.
Even the technobabble is, in this case, meant to be confusing. What are they doing on Discovery? What is all the secrecy for?
We meet Captain Gabriel Lorca, who even jokes about how the lighting in his ready room (lowered due to an injury to his eyes) lends him an air of mystery. That mystery persists as he seems to be vetting Michael for a position on his crew, even though she's supposed to be going to jail.
Lorca eventually convinces Michael that they are working on research to bring a swift end to the war with the Klingons - one that she more or less started in the pilot - and that this largely takes the form of things with nonviolent applications - that he is furthering the mission of Starfleet.
But it becomes very clear by the end of the episode that something very different is going on, and that at best, Lorca is some Section 31 agent or at least someone in that vein. It's also highly possible that he's a deranged madman - the kind of character who is usually an evil admiral in the other shows. But this time, he's the captain of the ship on which this show will take place!
The first three episodes I think really function as the entryway into the show and establish the premise. It's not flawless - Michael is shoehorned in as Spock's foster-sister, which would raise some serious Mary Sue alerts (I believe the original Mary Sue was, in fact, from a piece of Star Trek fanfic) except that Sonequa Martin-Green balances her nose-to-the-grindstone Vulcan calm with a deep human drive to act when it is necessary. We have a really interesting situation where we'll have a principled outlaw working on a ship commanded by a captain who seems to be violating the central tenets of his position.
Saturday, September 16, 2017
It
The only thing that really disappoints me about the movie adaptation of It is that the other would-be major Stephen King adaptation this summer, The Dark Tower, was such a disappointment in comparison. I've said before how the Dark Tower series (a seven-book epic of immense proportions that should never have been boiled down into a 90-minute movie) was one of my biggest artistic influences, but while The Dark Tower is King's magnum opus, It is probably the quintessential Stephen King story.
How do we define that?
Well, King is a fan of Lovecraft's, but he's also got a humanistic appreciation for actual people. The strength of his stories is that he has relatable people with their own idiosyncrasies dealing with the kind of cosmic horror threats that he assails them with. Putting things on that human level might seem to lessen the scale of the threat, but the fundamentally unexplained aspects of his monsters opens the door to the Lovecraftian horror that is such an influence on him.
But while Lovecraft was going for a kind of pure horror, King also thematically ties his horror to the human experience, and It is about how being a kid is fucking scary.
If you'll forgive a dive into the mythos surrounding It - something that the movie only references without saying anything explicit about it - the entity that most commonly manifests as Pennywise the Dancing Clown is really an incomprehensible monster from the Todash darkness - the primeval void that exists between universes and was pushed back by the rise of the Dark Tower and the beginning of the universe as we know it. At one point in the movie, we see the "deadlights" within Pennywise, which I understand to be the kind of origin within the Todash that It comes from.
But the exact rules surrounding It - when and where It can strike, and what it means to truly defeat It - are not really explained, and so a bunch of Junior High students are forced to figure it out on their own.
This adaptation, which comes out twenty-seven years after the book, moves the action one rung up in the cycle - rather than kids in the 1950s coming back to deal with It again in the '80s, here we have kids in the 80s who will, presumably, come back in the teens to deal with It as adults.
It's an interesting choice, because while King was clearly thinking of his own childhood, his horror shaped the childhoods of a later generation (as someone born in the 80s, I can't really count myself as one of that generation, though the lingering pop culture of the 80s certainly informed my 90s upbringing.) So even though this is technically a big change to the setting, it still feels fundamentally Kingsian.
The movie, which is already fairly long, is really only half the story, dealing with the childhood crisis of its "Losers Gang." Presumably we'll see a bunch of 40-year-old actors in a sequel I'm almost certain will happen. In a way that's a shame, as the child actors here are quite good. But as a friend remarked, often horror films are somewhat lazy in their production, but this movie really seems to have put the effort into making its many monstrous scenarios feel uniquely terrifying and gives at least some of its characters strong arcs and personalities.
Fundamentally, while the monster is the center-stage threat, It is largely about the way that children have to deal with darkness in their lives. Parents can be abusive - either by physically (and it's strongly implied, sexually) assaulting them, or through possessive over-protectiveness. Adults can ignore children in need, and bullies don't necessarily draw the line at merely punching and stealing lunch money.
I honestly think a big part of growing up is learning to tune out fears - not to fully rid yourself of them, but to kind of grow numb to them. There's a kind of callus that builds up that kids have not yet developed. And that makes them more sensitive - both in the good way, in that they might actually care about problems adults don't want to deal with, but also in the bad way, which makes them more susceptible to a monster that preys on fear (and that could be a true monster or a human monster.)
I'm kind of meandering at this point, but if you want my quick review: It is a well-made horror film that is definitely scary. If you're not into seeing children in peril, well, you might want to sit this one out. This movie gets that Stephen King tone down very well - a mix of horror, nostalgia, and ultimately faith in humanity to stand up to evil.
How do we define that?
Well, King is a fan of Lovecraft's, but he's also got a humanistic appreciation for actual people. The strength of his stories is that he has relatable people with their own idiosyncrasies dealing with the kind of cosmic horror threats that he assails them with. Putting things on that human level might seem to lessen the scale of the threat, but the fundamentally unexplained aspects of his monsters opens the door to the Lovecraftian horror that is such an influence on him.
But while Lovecraft was going for a kind of pure horror, King also thematically ties his horror to the human experience, and It is about how being a kid is fucking scary.
If you'll forgive a dive into the mythos surrounding It - something that the movie only references without saying anything explicit about it - the entity that most commonly manifests as Pennywise the Dancing Clown is really an incomprehensible monster from the Todash darkness - the primeval void that exists between universes and was pushed back by the rise of the Dark Tower and the beginning of the universe as we know it. At one point in the movie, we see the "deadlights" within Pennywise, which I understand to be the kind of origin within the Todash that It comes from.
But the exact rules surrounding It - when and where It can strike, and what it means to truly defeat It - are not really explained, and so a bunch of Junior High students are forced to figure it out on their own.
This adaptation, which comes out twenty-seven years after the book, moves the action one rung up in the cycle - rather than kids in the 1950s coming back to deal with It again in the '80s, here we have kids in the 80s who will, presumably, come back in the teens to deal with It as adults.
It's an interesting choice, because while King was clearly thinking of his own childhood, his horror shaped the childhoods of a later generation (as someone born in the 80s, I can't really count myself as one of that generation, though the lingering pop culture of the 80s certainly informed my 90s upbringing.) So even though this is technically a big change to the setting, it still feels fundamentally Kingsian.
The movie, which is already fairly long, is really only half the story, dealing with the childhood crisis of its "Losers Gang." Presumably we'll see a bunch of 40-year-old actors in a sequel I'm almost certain will happen. In a way that's a shame, as the child actors here are quite good. But as a friend remarked, often horror films are somewhat lazy in their production, but this movie really seems to have put the effort into making its many monstrous scenarios feel uniquely terrifying and gives at least some of its characters strong arcs and personalities.
Fundamentally, while the monster is the center-stage threat, It is largely about the way that children have to deal with darkness in their lives. Parents can be abusive - either by physically (and it's strongly implied, sexually) assaulting them, or through possessive over-protectiveness. Adults can ignore children in need, and bullies don't necessarily draw the line at merely punching and stealing lunch money.
I honestly think a big part of growing up is learning to tune out fears - not to fully rid yourself of them, but to kind of grow numb to them. There's a kind of callus that builds up that kids have not yet developed. And that makes them more sensitive - both in the good way, in that they might actually care about problems adults don't want to deal with, but also in the bad way, which makes them more susceptible to a monster that preys on fear (and that could be a true monster or a human monster.)
I'm kind of meandering at this point, but if you want my quick review: It is a well-made horror film that is definitely scary. If you're not into seeing children in peril, well, you might want to sit this one out. This movie gets that Stephen King tone down very well - a mix of horror, nostalgia, and ultimately faith in humanity to stand up to evil.
Monday, August 28, 2017
Game of Thrones' Penultimate Season Ends in Inevitability and Grand Confirmations
For the spoiler-conscious, let's just take a moment to talk about themes. Much of the drama of Game of Thrones and the books from which the show is adapted surrounds characters' motivations and ambitions, and their relative skill in playing the eponymous Game. Ned Stark, our original protagonist, was a classic hero. Honest, noble, generous, principled. He was a good father and a good ruler of his realm. But his unwillingness to play the game ruthlessly cost him his life. Had he seized power and controlled the narrative surrounding the discovery of Joffrey's true parentage and known not to trust Littlefinger so easily, he might have made a real go of it, and perhaps he would have succeeded... in putting Stannis on the throne (oh boy, yeah, that might not have worked so well either.)
The thing is, the very first sequence in the series has nothing to do with court intrigue. Before we know about Winterfell or King's Landing, the Iron Throne, or the history of the Targaryens and Robert's Rebellion, we see a trio of rangers in a snowy landscape who discover a wilding village that has been wiped out, their corpses arranged in a horrible sigil, and soon thereafter, a zombie girl and a much more frightening White Walker comes and kills two of them while the third flees.
The undead have always been a part of the story, even as we are distracted by other conflicts.
The thing is, the very first sequence in the series has nothing to do with court intrigue. Before we know about Winterfell or King's Landing, the Iron Throne, or the history of the Targaryens and Robert's Rebellion, we see a trio of rangers in a snowy landscape who discover a wilding village that has been wiped out, their corpses arranged in a horrible sigil, and soon thereafter, a zombie girl and a much more frightening White Walker comes and kills two of them while the third flees.
The undead have always been a part of the story, even as we are distracted by other conflicts.
Monday, August 7, 2017
Starks in Winterfell on Game of Thrones
It's been a while since I did an episode update, but last night's seemed big enough that it required discussion.
This season seems to be continuing with the fast forward momentum the show has developed since surpassing the events of Martin's books. With only what's left of this short season and next year's short season, certain things we've been waiting to happen for a long time are finally coming to fruition. The pieces are not only getting put in place, but moving and performing the functions we'd always expected them to do.
In Winterfell, every surviving person with the last name Stark is finally home (and Jon is, it seems, more or less safe where he is for now.) Sansa and Arya are both shocked to see how their siblings have changed in this time: Sansa becoming a lady of real power and authority, Arya becoming a seriously skilled fighter with hints at dark things she's done, rather than had done to her. Bran, on the other hand, has lost his humanity in the name of taking on his mystical powers. He'll do what needs to be done to fight the White Walkers, but his specific affections for his family or even Meera, who sacrificed nearly everything in order to get him safely north of the wall and back, are no longer there, or at least no longer relevant to his behavior.
What is delicious, though, is that Littlefinger looks more or less fucked. Petyr Baelish has felt like a smaller presence on the show than he does in the books, where he has always seemed (to me) like he could be the main human antagonist (a role Cersei takes in the show - not to say she doesn't have a shot at the title in the books as well.) He is, however, working very hard to get his hooks in each of the Starks. This is a guy who still wants to sit on the Iron Throne, but how he plans to eventually accomplishes this remains highly mysterious.
The problem is that the Stark kids have all been through so much shit that his manipulations are going to fall flat. Sansa knows him too well (selling her to Ramsay was not a good move,) Arya is a badass assassin, and Bran can literally see his entire past, knowing exactly what he plans and what kind of person he is. When Littlefinger gives Bran the dagger that nearly killed him in season one, clearly trying to set himself up as some kind of protector or mentor to Bran, the Three-Eyed Raven responds with Littlefinger's most famous philosophical statement - one made in private with Varys, who is not the sort to blab unless it serves his agenda - "Chaos is a Ladder."
If that dagger (now wielded by Arya) does not find its way into Littlefinger's body, I'll be shocked.
With Dany's allies largely eliminated, she has chosen to play her best card. Jon gives her wise advice to avoid melting King's Landing under a hail of dragonfire (reminding her, even though I don't think he ever heard her say it explicitly, that she doesn't want to be Queen of the Ashes) and so instead she attacks Jaime's caravan taking food from the Reach to King's Landing. Mind you, the gold got there just fine (there's one seeming throwaway line.)
This does manage to be a battle where none of our well-known characters die (as far as I know, Sam's brother Dickon is still alive as well) but between the Dothraki coming at the Lannister and Tarly forces like the "Indians" in a Western and Daenerys and Drogon dropping fire like napalm on the closed ranks of Jaime's army, it's a pretty clear victory for Daenerys, who really needed one.
Here's the thing:
Blowing up gold would have been fine. Food, not so much.
Also, Bronn shot Drogon with the "scorpion" (aka ballista) that Qyburn designed. Drogon seemed to shake off the hit like it was only a flesh wound (yes, I know that all wounds are flesh wounds, and the shoulder is a vulnerable place for anyone) but given that Qyburn was involved, there's a chance there was poison on that bolt, so I'm worried for Drogon.
Jaime attempts one suicidal charge to try to kill either Dany or Drogon with a spear, but just as he's about to get a face full of dragonfire, someone (not sure if it was Bronn or Dickon) tackles him into the nearby lake - safe from the fire, yes, but also sinking into the water in full plate armor, so...
We know that Tyrion is also watching the battle from a nearby hill, and he's desperately hoping for Jaime to just run away - for all his flaws, Jaime was always kind to Tyrion, and Tyrion I'm sure would rather have Jaime bend the knee and join their side, even if he doesn't think it would happen.
Still, after this battle, assuming Jaime doesn't just drown, which would be anticlimactic, we're likely to see a rather agonized interaction between the Lannister brothers. Jaime is unlikely to switch sides just because he was beaten - he's actually probably the Lannister most loyal to family, and even if he loves his brother, he's unlikely to forgive him for killing their father. Even though he knows Cersei is unhinged, she's still his, er, favorite sibling.
While I worry for Drogon, I think this battle also really demonstrates how absurdly effective having a dragon to ride in on changes the math on warfare. The cavalry charge, which historically has been a powerful battle-ending move, only served as a means to get the soldiers to line up close to each other, allowing Drogon to kill that many more people in a single breath. But let's hope that there are still some left alive to flame-broil the undead up north.
This season seems to be continuing with the fast forward momentum the show has developed since surpassing the events of Martin's books. With only what's left of this short season and next year's short season, certain things we've been waiting to happen for a long time are finally coming to fruition. The pieces are not only getting put in place, but moving and performing the functions we'd always expected them to do.
In Winterfell, every surviving person with the last name Stark is finally home (and Jon is, it seems, more or less safe where he is for now.) Sansa and Arya are both shocked to see how their siblings have changed in this time: Sansa becoming a lady of real power and authority, Arya becoming a seriously skilled fighter with hints at dark things she's done, rather than had done to her. Bran, on the other hand, has lost his humanity in the name of taking on his mystical powers. He'll do what needs to be done to fight the White Walkers, but his specific affections for his family or even Meera, who sacrificed nearly everything in order to get him safely north of the wall and back, are no longer there, or at least no longer relevant to his behavior.
What is delicious, though, is that Littlefinger looks more or less fucked. Petyr Baelish has felt like a smaller presence on the show than he does in the books, where he has always seemed (to me) like he could be the main human antagonist (a role Cersei takes in the show - not to say she doesn't have a shot at the title in the books as well.) He is, however, working very hard to get his hooks in each of the Starks. This is a guy who still wants to sit on the Iron Throne, but how he plans to eventually accomplishes this remains highly mysterious.
The problem is that the Stark kids have all been through so much shit that his manipulations are going to fall flat. Sansa knows him too well (selling her to Ramsay was not a good move,) Arya is a badass assassin, and Bran can literally see his entire past, knowing exactly what he plans and what kind of person he is. When Littlefinger gives Bran the dagger that nearly killed him in season one, clearly trying to set himself up as some kind of protector or mentor to Bran, the Three-Eyed Raven responds with Littlefinger's most famous philosophical statement - one made in private with Varys, who is not the sort to blab unless it serves his agenda - "Chaos is a Ladder."
If that dagger (now wielded by Arya) does not find its way into Littlefinger's body, I'll be shocked.
With Dany's allies largely eliminated, she has chosen to play her best card. Jon gives her wise advice to avoid melting King's Landing under a hail of dragonfire (reminding her, even though I don't think he ever heard her say it explicitly, that she doesn't want to be Queen of the Ashes) and so instead she attacks Jaime's caravan taking food from the Reach to King's Landing. Mind you, the gold got there just fine (there's one seeming throwaway line.)
This does manage to be a battle where none of our well-known characters die (as far as I know, Sam's brother Dickon is still alive as well) but between the Dothraki coming at the Lannister and Tarly forces like the "Indians" in a Western and Daenerys and Drogon dropping fire like napalm on the closed ranks of Jaime's army, it's a pretty clear victory for Daenerys, who really needed one.
Here's the thing:
Blowing up gold would have been fine. Food, not so much.
Also, Bronn shot Drogon with the "scorpion" (aka ballista) that Qyburn designed. Drogon seemed to shake off the hit like it was only a flesh wound (yes, I know that all wounds are flesh wounds, and the shoulder is a vulnerable place for anyone) but given that Qyburn was involved, there's a chance there was poison on that bolt, so I'm worried for Drogon.
Jaime attempts one suicidal charge to try to kill either Dany or Drogon with a spear, but just as he's about to get a face full of dragonfire, someone (not sure if it was Bronn or Dickon) tackles him into the nearby lake - safe from the fire, yes, but also sinking into the water in full plate armor, so...
We know that Tyrion is also watching the battle from a nearby hill, and he's desperately hoping for Jaime to just run away - for all his flaws, Jaime was always kind to Tyrion, and Tyrion I'm sure would rather have Jaime bend the knee and join their side, even if he doesn't think it would happen.
Still, after this battle, assuming Jaime doesn't just drown, which would be anticlimactic, we're likely to see a rather agonized interaction between the Lannister brothers. Jaime is unlikely to switch sides just because he was beaten - he's actually probably the Lannister most loyal to family, and even if he loves his brother, he's unlikely to forgive him for killing their father. Even though he knows Cersei is unhinged, she's still his, er, favorite sibling.
While I worry for Drogon, I think this battle also really demonstrates how absurdly effective having a dragon to ride in on changes the math on warfare. The cavalry charge, which historically has been a powerful battle-ending move, only served as a means to get the soldiers to line up close to each other, allowing Drogon to kill that many more people in a single breath. But let's hope that there are still some left alive to flame-broil the undead up north.
Sunday, July 23, 2017
The Gift of Stories
It is difficult, I think, to write about deeply personal things on a public journal like this one. But given that, more than the other blogs I keep, this one is far more about my own life as a writer, it seemed impossible to write anything here before I addressed my current period of grief and mourning.
My mother died on the night of July 3rd. She had been diagnosed with cancer about fifteen months earlier, and while I tried to remain optimistic through much of the ordeal, the form she had was both rare and aggressive, and no treatment was sufficient to prevent it from taking her life. Nearly three weeks later, I'm still partially in shock, even though the reason I came back to Massachusetts was to be there with her when she passed. My parents were the pillars on which my life was built, and to see one of them crumble and now reckon with what life looks like without my mother in it is a dizzying, agonizing experience.
My mother had practiced law, but much like me, her soul was that of a writer. She wrote short stories and novellas, and had been working on a magnum opus set in the early days of the United States for over a decade when she died. My mom introduced be to classical mythology at a young age, and one of my most treasured sources of stories is the illustrated D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths.
Our taste in stories was certainly different - I have always tended toward speculative fiction: science fiction and fantasy, while my mother was engrossed with the intricacies of history. She was fascinated by the minutiae of daily life as well as the birth of new ideas and philosophies. In her last days, I found myself discovering how unusually refined her taste was, and how it all tied into her appreciation of the interwoven strands of history.
My mother was many things to many people, mostly a friend and caretaker. The oldest of eight children, she managed to be the most diplomatic and empathetic. To me, she was also many things, but relevant here was the fact that she was my primary appreciator. She read my stories, and she encouraged me with her attention. She worried for Ana Sweeney, and she called Jack Milton a hero. In a sense, I wrote for her. She had shared such wonderful stories with me, and I felt I needed to create my own to give in return.
Whether she exists in a form that can continue to read my stories or not, the pain that I will have to live with is that I will never be able to know - that she read it, what she thought of it. I will have to keep writing, though, in the hope that somehow, the stories will reach her.
My mother died on the night of July 3rd. She had been diagnosed with cancer about fifteen months earlier, and while I tried to remain optimistic through much of the ordeal, the form she had was both rare and aggressive, and no treatment was sufficient to prevent it from taking her life. Nearly three weeks later, I'm still partially in shock, even though the reason I came back to Massachusetts was to be there with her when she passed. My parents were the pillars on which my life was built, and to see one of them crumble and now reckon with what life looks like without my mother in it is a dizzying, agonizing experience.
My mother had practiced law, but much like me, her soul was that of a writer. She wrote short stories and novellas, and had been working on a magnum opus set in the early days of the United States for over a decade when she died. My mom introduced be to classical mythology at a young age, and one of my most treasured sources of stories is the illustrated D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths.
Our taste in stories was certainly different - I have always tended toward speculative fiction: science fiction and fantasy, while my mother was engrossed with the intricacies of history. She was fascinated by the minutiae of daily life as well as the birth of new ideas and philosophies. In her last days, I found myself discovering how unusually refined her taste was, and how it all tied into her appreciation of the interwoven strands of history.
My mother was many things to many people, mostly a friend and caretaker. The oldest of eight children, she managed to be the most diplomatic and empathetic. To me, she was also many things, but relevant here was the fact that she was my primary appreciator. She read my stories, and she encouraged me with her attention. She worried for Ana Sweeney, and she called Jack Milton a hero. In a sense, I wrote for her. She had shared such wonderful stories with me, and I felt I needed to create my own to give in return.
Whether she exists in a form that can continue to read my stories or not, the pain that I will have to live with is that I will never be able to know - that she read it, what she thought of it. I will have to keep writing, though, in the hope that somehow, the stories will reach her.
Thursday, June 15, 2017
Otherworldly Horror Distracts from the Mundane
In a period of sadness and a family crisis that will not end well, I have taken some refuge in fiction. I realize that this is the sort of refuge that, as a friend in college from England told me, the English find in tea. She explained that to an English person, tea was used to celebrate joy and to mitigate bad moods - it is a panacea so universal that it can augment the desirable even as it ameliorates the regrettable.
Fiction, particularly that which falls under the umbrella of speculative fiction, is my universal drug of choice.
Continuing to make my gradual way through a collection of Lovecraft works, I seem not to have hit the more famous stories, reading recently on the plane back to Boston both The Call of Cthulhu and The Colour Out of Space.
The former I had actually read before, though some new details resolved into focus on a second reading. The major one being the implication of multiple murders. Previously I had attributed the deaths of the Cthulhu witnesses to a kind of supernatural despair, but reading the story again I now feel inclined to interpret the deaths of the narrator's uncle, the Norwegian sailor who actually saw Cthulhu, and the narrator himself to all be the work of the global Cthulhu cult, eager to silence anyone who would dare unravel their secret truths.
In an odd sense, this actually makes the whole thing seem... slightly... less terrifying. Though it also hints at a more complex story that might have been if Lovecraft had chosen to write a full-length novel. The story is actually a kind of assembly of related anecdotes, all second-hand knowledge at most to the narrator. But what is very clear about this story is that it was here that Lovecraft really began laying down the world-building for his mythos, while other stories like the Shunned House and the Colour Out of Space just hint at it.
The Colour Out of Space is definitely creepy. Like a lot of these stories, there's a kind of second-handedness to the narration. The story is basically about a story told by a guy in rural Massachusetts (west of Arkham, which appears to be based on Salem) who recalls looking into the case of a family whose lives were utterly destroyed after a meteorite landed on their property. The meteorite, it becomes clear over the course of the story, was carrying some alien entity that drained the life-force out of everything near, and drove the family insane, driving at least two of the boys in the family (and several local animals) to drown themselves in a well that the entity seemed to be inhabiting.
Creepier still is that, while the "blasted heath" as the blighted remains of the family's property is now called, is thankfully about to be flooded over to make a reservoir, that reservoir is going to provide water for Arkham, and it seems like drinking said water would be a very, very, very bad idea for anyone.
Oddly, the effect that the unnamed alien that emits an otherworldly color (or colour, as the title suggests) has on its victims is actually reminiscent of Metroids from the popular game series (though as far as I know Metroids don't have psychic abilities.) I wonder if they were inspired at all by this story. I know that the main inspiration for Metroid was the Alien series, which itself was, I would think, heavily Lovecraft-inspired, so it could be that there's a transitive property there.
Friday, June 2, 2017
A Taste of Lovecraft
Given his influence on the horror, science fiction, and fantasy genres (even Tolkien borrowed ideas from him) I figured it was time I read a significant amount of H. P. Lovecraft. I got a collection of his short stories, and it has been interesting so far.
The book was assembled by Joyce Carol Oates, and the first three stories (the stories I have read) are The Outsider, The Music of Erich Zann, and The Rats in the Walls.
I'm enjoying the writing, with some important caveats. One of the really strange things I'm noticing is the similarity to a lot of writing I do. As Oates points out in her introduction, Lovecraft had a fascination with setting and atmosphere, often favoring an establishment of mood over nuanced characters. While I strive to make my characters interesting, I do think that this element of storytelling does draw me. I think my favorite story of the three I've read is the Music of Erich Zann.
In this story, the narrator recounts living in a tall house on a narrow and steep street in "the city" (one assumes Paris or at least somewhere in France.) His upstairs neighbor is a mute musician named Erich Zann, and the narrator is drawn to meet him after hearing incredibly strange but beautiful music coming from Zann's attic apartment.
Ultimately, of course, it turns out that this strangest of music is not coming from Zann, but from some unfathomable void that his window opens out into - not the city skyline that the narrator would have reasonably assumed.
The "of course" there is a consequence of Lovecraft's influence. Having been an establishing trope codifier, some of the "twist" endings to his stories wind up feeling rote and familiar, but I wonder if they felt original when first written. The Outsider's ending, when the narrator describes, in italics, the sensation of touching the horrific monster's hand was, in fact, the act of touching a cold glass mirror, seems utterly hackneyed, though of course there is fascinating imagined geography to the bizarre underground (or other-planar) castle that the narrator grew up in.
Two stories in, I was pleasantly enjoying the work, but the Rats in the Walls confronted me with one of the biggest problems with Lovecraft, namely his racism. Not only does the protagonist have a beloved cat named N---Man, but there seems to be a kind of matter-of-fact acceptance of phrenology as a respectable science. (The story's ending is also very abrupt, with the madness that descends on the narrator and mentions of Nyarlathotep coming sort of out of the blue, as if Lovecraft was thinking "hm... how do I end this?")
I had compared Lovecraft to Poe in an earlier post, and I think that comparison is apt. Lovecraft was clearly working from the Gothic Horror template, and was fascinated by the notion of protagonists reduced to madmen - his modification of the genre was the extrapolation of a universe built on madness - that there was a material cause for madness rather than guilt, trauma, or cruelty.
The book was assembled by Joyce Carol Oates, and the first three stories (the stories I have read) are The Outsider, The Music of Erich Zann, and The Rats in the Walls.
I'm enjoying the writing, with some important caveats. One of the really strange things I'm noticing is the similarity to a lot of writing I do. As Oates points out in her introduction, Lovecraft had a fascination with setting and atmosphere, often favoring an establishment of mood over nuanced characters. While I strive to make my characters interesting, I do think that this element of storytelling does draw me. I think my favorite story of the three I've read is the Music of Erich Zann.
In this story, the narrator recounts living in a tall house on a narrow and steep street in "the city" (one assumes Paris or at least somewhere in France.) His upstairs neighbor is a mute musician named Erich Zann, and the narrator is drawn to meet him after hearing incredibly strange but beautiful music coming from Zann's attic apartment.
Ultimately, of course, it turns out that this strangest of music is not coming from Zann, but from some unfathomable void that his window opens out into - not the city skyline that the narrator would have reasonably assumed.
The "of course" there is a consequence of Lovecraft's influence. Having been an establishing trope codifier, some of the "twist" endings to his stories wind up feeling rote and familiar, but I wonder if they felt original when first written. The Outsider's ending, when the narrator describes, in italics, the sensation of touching the horrific monster's hand was, in fact, the act of touching a cold glass mirror, seems utterly hackneyed, though of course there is fascinating imagined geography to the bizarre underground (or other-planar) castle that the narrator grew up in.
Two stories in, I was pleasantly enjoying the work, but the Rats in the Walls confronted me with one of the biggest problems with Lovecraft, namely his racism. Not only does the protagonist have a beloved cat named N---Man, but there seems to be a kind of matter-of-fact acceptance of phrenology as a respectable science. (The story's ending is also very abrupt, with the madness that descends on the narrator and mentions of Nyarlathotep coming sort of out of the blue, as if Lovecraft was thinking "hm... how do I end this?")
I had compared Lovecraft to Poe in an earlier post, and I think that comparison is apt. Lovecraft was clearly working from the Gothic Horror template, and was fascinated by the notion of protagonists reduced to madmen - his modification of the genre was the extrapolation of a universe built on madness - that there was a material cause for madness rather than guilt, trauma, or cruelty.
Thursday, June 1, 2017
A Story About Huntokar Drops A Huge Amount of Night Vale Lore
Apparently it's Huntokar, not Huntocar. I got close!
Anyway, in the latest Welcome to Night Vale episode, we actually don't hear anything from Cecil. Instead, we merely get a confession of responsibility from Huntokar, one of the gods of the Night Vale multiverse.
We also get confirmation that the Woman From Italy, the Distant Prince, the Glow Cloud, and apparently, collectively, the Five-Headed Dragons, are also gods.
Huntokar is the Destroyer, but she never intended to be. In fact, among these gods, she's the only benevolent one. There are an infinite number of Night Vales - all towns within the small desert valley that she declared her domain when the gods were picking areas (ironically, the Woman From Italy is everywhere except Italy.) She's the object of Bloodstone worship, and they honored her with ceremonies wearing the soft-meat crowns. But it was the first Night Vale that she created that led to the current disaster.
It was her primary Night Vale that was threatened with obliteration in 1983 by a Soviet missile launch, but in attempting to protect her city, she shattered reality, causing every variation of Night Vale to collapse in on itself.
Now I don't exactly know if this means that the Night Vale we've spent our time in has been that combined Night Vale or if the effects of the events she is describing are only now manifesting. It could be that this combination of Night Vales is why the town is so weird (though the existence of these strange gods prior to Night Vale suggests that there's plenty of weirdness to go around.)
The shattering reality in the last episode does now seem to have an explanation, and how Cecil could be meeting his nonexistent brother. We're getting close to the "season finale," but I think it's remarkable how much backstory is revealed in today's episode - backstory that I frankly never expected to get from Night Vale.
Anyway, in the latest Welcome to Night Vale episode, we actually don't hear anything from Cecil. Instead, we merely get a confession of responsibility from Huntokar, one of the gods of the Night Vale multiverse.
We also get confirmation that the Woman From Italy, the Distant Prince, the Glow Cloud, and apparently, collectively, the Five-Headed Dragons, are also gods.
Huntokar is the Destroyer, but she never intended to be. In fact, among these gods, she's the only benevolent one. There are an infinite number of Night Vales - all towns within the small desert valley that she declared her domain when the gods were picking areas (ironically, the Woman From Italy is everywhere except Italy.) She's the object of Bloodstone worship, and they honored her with ceremonies wearing the soft-meat crowns. But it was the first Night Vale that she created that led to the current disaster.
It was her primary Night Vale that was threatened with obliteration in 1983 by a Soviet missile launch, but in attempting to protect her city, she shattered reality, causing every variation of Night Vale to collapse in on itself.
Now I don't exactly know if this means that the Night Vale we've spent our time in has been that combined Night Vale or if the effects of the events she is describing are only now manifesting. It could be that this combination of Night Vales is why the town is so weird (though the existence of these strange gods prior to Night Vale suggests that there's plenty of weirdness to go around.)
The shattering reality in the last episode does now seem to have an explanation, and how Cecil could be meeting his nonexistent brother. We're getting close to the "season finale," but I think it's remarkable how much backstory is revealed in today's episode - backstory that I frankly never expected to get from Night Vale.
Tuesday, May 23, 2017
Twin Peaks, David Lynch, and Cosmic Horror
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to finish the first episode of the new season, though I think I got a fair way into it.
Twin Peaks means a lot of things to different people, but the core aspect of it that I always tended to focus on was that particularly Lynchian weirdness. In a lot of ways, I think Lynch's style of horror is an evolution of Lovecraft. H. P. Lovecraft's horror was all about the mysterious vast and unknowable cosmos, taking the form of hideous monsters that were far weirder than the kind of standard monsters of mythology and gothic horror.
While Cthulhu is the most famous of Lovecraft's creations, the one that I think is the most interesting conceptually is Nyarlathotep. Most of Lovecraft's mythos concerns creatures that look far removed from our own evolutionary path. But Nyarlathotep, at least in one of its forms, appears as a human being - sometimes with inhuman features like midnight-black skin (which, considering Lovecraft's racism, has unfortunate implications,) but ultimately in a humanoid form far closer to our own than even Cthulhu (who, for a Lovecraftian monster, is way closer to human-shaped than most.)
In a sense, Nyarlathotep is a way to have a creature more akin to the Devil or Antichrist in Christianity without abandoning the alien-ness of the overall mythos. Stephen King's Randall Flagg is a similar concept - a creature that walks the earth looking fully like a human, but who spreads death and chaos like a ball of pure evil. In fact, Randall Flagg is even referred to as Nyarlathotep in the Stand, though in the Dark Tower series we eventually find out he's ultimately just a very evil human being (or more likely former human being.)
Anyway, David Lynch's work, and specifically Twin Peaks, has beings that take this mundane appearance and alien nature very seriously. BOB, the evil spirit that possesses Leland Palmer and forces him to rape and murder his own daughter (uh... spoilers I guess?) looks like a normal human being in his "true" form (actually a set dresser named Frank Silva.) But BOB seems to exist purely to inflict suffering in the world - and in fact, even the "good" spirits of the Lodges are implied to also subsist on this suffering (if you watch Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.)
In the first episode of this revived season, we find that Dale Cooper is still in the Black Lodge (or maybe the White Lodge? Or they're the same thing?) but that his doppelgänger from the end of the original season has been living as some sort of powerful criminal with various people at his command, several of whom he kills (I imagine there's an article to be written about how the only two young women we see at least up to the point I've gotten in the pilot wind up getting violently killed while naked or scantily clad, but I'm not going to unpack that here.)
Interestingly, the Fake Cooper actually looks and dresses almost exactly as Stephen King describes Randall Flagg (at least in The Stand - in the Dark Tower series, at least at the beginning, he is described looking just about as he does in the upcoming movie.)
Now, Fake Cooper isn't exactly BOB - he's referred to as Cooper's doppelgänger, and there's another evil doppelgänger in the Lodge of the Arm (who I believe is the Man from Another Place, which could explain why the Man was looking for "garmonbozia" in Fire Walk With Me when previously he seemed like a benevolent figure.)
Fake Cooper clarifies in a conversation with some of his minions that he does not "need" anything. He merely "wants" things. This does emphasize his alien nature, though one could also interpret this as some kind of denial. Either way, he's terrifying.
Where King and even, to an extent, Lovecraft, generally use inscrutability as an element to their plots, the plot itself tends to be relatively straightforward, and in King, there's often some sort of victory against evil (while considered one of the greats of the horror genre, I'd actually describe King as more of a Dark Fantasy writer - and I mean this as a high compliment, to be clear.)
But with David Lynch, even what truly happened often remains a mystery in his stories. For example, you could interpret Mulholland Drive's first half to be the dying dream of the protagonist of the second half (which really bummed me out when I watched it,) but you could read it a lot weirder than that.
In Lovecraft, exposure to this enormous cosmos of strange godlike beings, characters often fall into a depressive madness. But in a way, Lynch creates narratives that flit along on dream logic in a way we imagine an insane mind would see things.
And in doing so, Lynch imbues mundane objects and figures with the same kind of existential dread that can come from a being like Yog-Sothoth.
And frankly, looking at my own writing, I can kind of see his influence on my works, even if a lot of it was more through cultural osmosis and perhaps the collective unconscious, as I didn't see any Lynch until I was a sophomore in college and a lot of the Lynchian imagery I use I came up with before then.
Twin Peaks means a lot of things to different people, but the core aspect of it that I always tended to focus on was that particularly Lynchian weirdness. In a lot of ways, I think Lynch's style of horror is an evolution of Lovecraft. H. P. Lovecraft's horror was all about the mysterious vast and unknowable cosmos, taking the form of hideous monsters that were far weirder than the kind of standard monsters of mythology and gothic horror.
While Cthulhu is the most famous of Lovecraft's creations, the one that I think is the most interesting conceptually is Nyarlathotep. Most of Lovecraft's mythos concerns creatures that look far removed from our own evolutionary path. But Nyarlathotep, at least in one of its forms, appears as a human being - sometimes with inhuman features like midnight-black skin (which, considering Lovecraft's racism, has unfortunate implications,) but ultimately in a humanoid form far closer to our own than even Cthulhu (who, for a Lovecraftian monster, is way closer to human-shaped than most.)
In a sense, Nyarlathotep is a way to have a creature more akin to the Devil or Antichrist in Christianity without abandoning the alien-ness of the overall mythos. Stephen King's Randall Flagg is a similar concept - a creature that walks the earth looking fully like a human, but who spreads death and chaos like a ball of pure evil. In fact, Randall Flagg is even referred to as Nyarlathotep in the Stand, though in the Dark Tower series we eventually find out he's ultimately just a very evil human being (or more likely former human being.)
Anyway, David Lynch's work, and specifically Twin Peaks, has beings that take this mundane appearance and alien nature very seriously. BOB, the evil spirit that possesses Leland Palmer and forces him to rape and murder his own daughter (uh... spoilers I guess?) looks like a normal human being in his "true" form (actually a set dresser named Frank Silva.) But BOB seems to exist purely to inflict suffering in the world - and in fact, even the "good" spirits of the Lodges are implied to also subsist on this suffering (if you watch Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.)
In the first episode of this revived season, we find that Dale Cooper is still in the Black Lodge (or maybe the White Lodge? Or they're the same thing?) but that his doppelgänger from the end of the original season has been living as some sort of powerful criminal with various people at his command, several of whom he kills (I imagine there's an article to be written about how the only two young women we see at least up to the point I've gotten in the pilot wind up getting violently killed while naked or scantily clad, but I'm not going to unpack that here.)
Interestingly, the Fake Cooper actually looks and dresses almost exactly as Stephen King describes Randall Flagg (at least in The Stand - in the Dark Tower series, at least at the beginning, he is described looking just about as he does in the upcoming movie.)
Now, Fake Cooper isn't exactly BOB - he's referred to as Cooper's doppelgänger, and there's another evil doppelgänger in the Lodge of the Arm (who I believe is the Man from Another Place, which could explain why the Man was looking for "garmonbozia" in Fire Walk With Me when previously he seemed like a benevolent figure.)
Fake Cooper clarifies in a conversation with some of his minions that he does not "need" anything. He merely "wants" things. This does emphasize his alien nature, though one could also interpret this as some kind of denial. Either way, he's terrifying.
Where King and even, to an extent, Lovecraft, generally use inscrutability as an element to their plots, the plot itself tends to be relatively straightforward, and in King, there's often some sort of victory against evil (while considered one of the greats of the horror genre, I'd actually describe King as more of a Dark Fantasy writer - and I mean this as a high compliment, to be clear.)
But with David Lynch, even what truly happened often remains a mystery in his stories. For example, you could interpret Mulholland Drive's first half to be the dying dream of the protagonist of the second half (which really bummed me out when I watched it,) but you could read it a lot weirder than that.
In Lovecraft, exposure to this enormous cosmos of strange godlike beings, characters often fall into a depressive madness. But in a way, Lynch creates narratives that flit along on dream logic in a way we imagine an insane mind would see things.
And in doing so, Lynch imbues mundane objects and figures with the same kind of existential dread that can come from a being like Yog-Sothoth.
And frankly, looking at my own writing, I can kind of see his influence on my works, even if a lot of it was more through cultural osmosis and perhaps the collective unconscious, as I didn't see any Lynch until I was a sophomore in college and a lot of the Lynchian imagery I use I came up with before then.
Sunday, May 21, 2017
American Gods takes us through Laura Moon's Revenant Journey
Laura Moon was never a happy person.
The story of American Gods begins with Shadow going through incredible trauma. Released after three years in prison, he finds out not only that his wife is dead, or that his best friend is dead, but that the two of them were having an affair.
It's a pretty standard tale - the affair when a spouse is in prison - but what we find in this episode, "Git Gone," is that Shadow idealized his life with Laura long before his prison sentence. The episode goes way back to before Laura had even met Shadow, and we get a glimpse of her life - she's a blackjack dealer in an indian casino where they don't even want her to shuffle her cards by hand anymore - something she likes to do (and what I interpret to probably be the reason she got that job in the first place.) Laura literally attempts to kill herself that night, closing the lid on her hot tub and filling the enclosed space with insecticide, though she obviously stops before she succeeds.
She meets Shadow when he attempts to do a little sleight-of-hand grift on her, and what begins as a hypothetical pitch for her to help him do a heist turns into flirting, sex, and then a relationship and marriage.
And Shadow's into it. He gets a job at Laura's friend's husband's gym and is happy as long as he's with Laura.
But Laura is not. The underlying problem hasn't been addressed, and as much as she loves Shadow (which she believes she does, and... I think if you believe you love someone that's love, though it doesn't mean you won't do shitty things to them) her own depression has not gone away. Chillingly, during a montage of "happy relationship stuff," when Shadow is going out to the store Laura asks him to buy some bug spray, which for us and for Laura has some more obviously dire connotations.
Ultimately, Laura proposes that the long-abandoned plan to rob the casino is the only way she's going to feel happy - getting enough money to move somewhere better and quit her terrible job.
And it's this robbery that get Shadow arrested, and rather than have her plead for her part in the failed heist, Shadow instead takes double the sentence to keep Laura out of prison.
And then, her cat dies, and when Robbie comes to bury it for her, their affair begins - a totally unhealthy affair that Laura seems to know is a bad idea but won't stop. And it's this affair that gets both her and Robbie killed (thankfully not shown in the same graphic detail that we saw with Scott Thompson's random friendly recovering alcoholic last time.)
Now, the character details are clearly important going forward, but one might have inferred all that detail. This is where things get interesting.
Laura, after seeing her own dead body while her spirit hovers above the wreck, winds up in that crazy desert otherworld that we saw Anubis measuring the old Egyptian woman's soul in (also maybe the place where the cab driver was transported while the djinni was fucking him?) Laura is obviously not really tied to Egypt, which does make me quibble a little with the fact that it's Anubis that meets her in the afterlife, but ultimately, the death god informs her that her soul is heading toward darkness, because she has no beliefs. Darkness is represented as her old hot tub with a can of "Git Gone," which again, is filled with existential dread. (Side note: I really wonder what an agnostic would get as an afterlife in this show.)
But before Anubis can force her there, the lucky coin Mad Sweeney accidentally gave to Shadow yanks her back into her body, and she has to zombie her way out of her grave.
And now Shadow shines like a beacon for her in an otherwise colorless world. She tracks him down as soon as she's out of her grave and kills the "Children" who had lynched him (in the end of the first episode.) Hiding from him, her arm falls off, and she attempts to repair it at her grieving friend Audrey's house, where we get a simultaneously hilarious and intense scene where Audrey (who has literally complained to Shadow that she'll never be able to get any sense of closure because anything she says to Laura or Robbie will just fall on dead ears) finds her and reacts with exactly the same amount of abject horror as any normal person would.
As Laura sets about her plan to track down Shadow and actually tell her she's, you know, back, she and Audrey almost run into a man walking his dog. Except it's not a man and it's not a dog. It's Mr. Jaquel and Mr. Ibis - aka Anubis and Thoth. As undertakers, they are well equipped to more substantially repair Laura's body, though Mr. Jaquel warns Laura that when she is done with her task, he will take her into the darkness.
But in a way, her revival has changed something fundamentally in Laura. She has a purpose now, and Shadow is something to believe in. Her life before was defined by a soul-crushing routine, and it's clear that her affair with Robbie, just like the failed bank heist, were just desperate attempts to break that routine. But the routine is as dead as she is, and in finding and protecting Shadow, she has an active thing to do.
This version of events is elaborated a great deal more than it is in the books, and I'm really curious to see the Laura side of the story (even if I'm also slightly sad that we didn't see Mr. Wednesday this week - though we did see his ravens, Huginn and Muninn, flying over the SUV before the accident.)
The story of American Gods begins with Shadow going through incredible trauma. Released after three years in prison, he finds out not only that his wife is dead, or that his best friend is dead, but that the two of them were having an affair.
It's a pretty standard tale - the affair when a spouse is in prison - but what we find in this episode, "Git Gone," is that Shadow idealized his life with Laura long before his prison sentence. The episode goes way back to before Laura had even met Shadow, and we get a glimpse of her life - she's a blackjack dealer in an indian casino where they don't even want her to shuffle her cards by hand anymore - something she likes to do (and what I interpret to probably be the reason she got that job in the first place.) Laura literally attempts to kill herself that night, closing the lid on her hot tub and filling the enclosed space with insecticide, though she obviously stops before she succeeds.
She meets Shadow when he attempts to do a little sleight-of-hand grift on her, and what begins as a hypothetical pitch for her to help him do a heist turns into flirting, sex, and then a relationship and marriage.
And Shadow's into it. He gets a job at Laura's friend's husband's gym and is happy as long as he's with Laura.
But Laura is not. The underlying problem hasn't been addressed, and as much as she loves Shadow (which she believes she does, and... I think if you believe you love someone that's love, though it doesn't mean you won't do shitty things to them) her own depression has not gone away. Chillingly, during a montage of "happy relationship stuff," when Shadow is going out to the store Laura asks him to buy some bug spray, which for us and for Laura has some more obviously dire connotations.
Ultimately, Laura proposes that the long-abandoned plan to rob the casino is the only way she's going to feel happy - getting enough money to move somewhere better and quit her terrible job.
And it's this robbery that get Shadow arrested, and rather than have her plead for her part in the failed heist, Shadow instead takes double the sentence to keep Laura out of prison.
And then, her cat dies, and when Robbie comes to bury it for her, their affair begins - a totally unhealthy affair that Laura seems to know is a bad idea but won't stop. And it's this affair that gets both her and Robbie killed (thankfully not shown in the same graphic detail that we saw with Scott Thompson's random friendly recovering alcoholic last time.)
Now, the character details are clearly important going forward, but one might have inferred all that detail. This is where things get interesting.
Laura, after seeing her own dead body while her spirit hovers above the wreck, winds up in that crazy desert otherworld that we saw Anubis measuring the old Egyptian woman's soul in (also maybe the place where the cab driver was transported while the djinni was fucking him?) Laura is obviously not really tied to Egypt, which does make me quibble a little with the fact that it's Anubis that meets her in the afterlife, but ultimately, the death god informs her that her soul is heading toward darkness, because she has no beliefs. Darkness is represented as her old hot tub with a can of "Git Gone," which again, is filled with existential dread. (Side note: I really wonder what an agnostic would get as an afterlife in this show.)
But before Anubis can force her there, the lucky coin Mad Sweeney accidentally gave to Shadow yanks her back into her body, and she has to zombie her way out of her grave.
And now Shadow shines like a beacon for her in an otherwise colorless world. She tracks him down as soon as she's out of her grave and kills the "Children" who had lynched him (in the end of the first episode.) Hiding from him, her arm falls off, and she attempts to repair it at her grieving friend Audrey's house, where we get a simultaneously hilarious and intense scene where Audrey (who has literally complained to Shadow that she'll never be able to get any sense of closure because anything she says to Laura or Robbie will just fall on dead ears) finds her and reacts with exactly the same amount of abject horror as any normal person would.
As Laura sets about her plan to track down Shadow and actually tell her she's, you know, back, she and Audrey almost run into a man walking his dog. Except it's not a man and it's not a dog. It's Mr. Jaquel and Mr. Ibis - aka Anubis and Thoth. As undertakers, they are well equipped to more substantially repair Laura's body, though Mr. Jaquel warns Laura that when she is done with her task, he will take her into the darkness.
But in a way, her revival has changed something fundamentally in Laura. She has a purpose now, and Shadow is something to believe in. Her life before was defined by a soul-crushing routine, and it's clear that her affair with Robbie, just like the failed bank heist, were just desperate attempts to break that routine. But the routine is as dead as she is, and in finding and protecting Shadow, she has an active thing to do.
This version of events is elaborated a great deal more than it is in the books, and I'm really curious to see the Laura side of the story (even if I'm also slightly sad that we didn't see Mr. Wednesday this week - though we did see his ravens, Huginn and Muninn, flying over the SUV before the accident.)
Wednesday, May 17, 2017
Cecil's Brother and Praxis Burgers on the Latest Welcome to Night Vale/Alice Isn't Dead
Welcome to Night Vale is certainly horror-based, but usually, the horrific stuff is played for laughs. It's impressive that the show can weave back and forth between taking its horror seriously and making it silly or even endearing (like the fact that the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home is probably evil, but generally doesn't do anything beyond annoying mischief.)
Anyway, the point is: probably the scariest the show has ever gotten was an episode called Cassette. In this, Cecil discovers some old audio tapes of his time as a kid. Some of the details don't add up with his own recollections, like that he doesn't (if I recall correctly, he doesn't even remember being a NVR intern - though he was destined to run the show after Leonard Burton retired.)
Of course, the two biggest details that are mentioned in Cassette are that A: the recordings mention his having a brother and B: Cecil seems to be killed by some kind of monster while looking at a mirror.
Now, this "season" of WTNV has kind of had two through lines - that of Huntocar and the tiny civilization (which we now know is a tiny, seemingly more "normal" other than the after effects of being buried under the bowling alley version of Night Vale, and that of the Distant Prince and residents of Night Vale remembering alternate realities.
So in the recent "Cal," the eponymous, seemingly non-existent brother shows up at Cecil's home, and a whole other set of memories floods into him - he's not married in this version of reality, and he's even still partially in the closet to his brother. I think his sister Abby might not even exist in this version of events (which of course means his niece Janice doesn't either.)
With tears in the fabric of reality showing up, all linked to the Distant Prince, it seems, one has to wonder what exactly is going on, and if it has anything to do with the fact that the tiny civilization is actually another version of Night Vale.
One thing it does do is seemingly negate one frightful theory I had about the episode Cassette - that the Cecil we've been listening to is actually the monster that killed the real Cecil. If the Cassettes are from a different reality, then our Cecil at least seems to be... who he is. This actually also could explain how Leonard Burton was able to fill in for Cecil even though one of the old tapes he played was Cecil reporting on Leonard's grisly death (something I just wrote off as Night Vale weirdness, which I'm 100% not ruling out.)
Anyway, apparently we're getting "A Story About Huntocar" at the beginning of June, and if it's anything like "A Story About You" or "A Story About Them," it'll be great. (Also, given that both of those episodes deal with agents stealing buildings from the tiny civilization - agents, I assume, of a Vague Yet Menacing Government Agency - it would make sense for it to be of the same style.)
On Alice Isn't Dead, we get a second appearance of Praxis Industries. In the first season's episode "The Factory by the Sea," Keisha (not yet known by that name) makes a delivery to a factory that seems to have a single employee, who rapidly ages during her visit until she realizes that the lumber she had delivered was actually his coffin, which he drifts away in.
The second appearance of Praxis takes a different form, but there's a similarly uncanny element. In "Chain," Keisha and Sylvia visit a fast food place called Praxis, in which the same brother and sister appear in every restaurant. They're absolutely the same people - they remember the two visitors and even have a drawing Sylvia made.
In the end, the Praxis restaurant closes - and we can be confident that this means that every location is gone.
Given that Alice Isn't Dead is an examination of American culture, it makes a lot of sense to examine the way that we're drawn to these chains - little pockets of familiarity that you can find anywhere.
It's a rich theme to examine, especially these days, when the ideas of monoculture and multiculture are in tremendous conflict. And given that this is a show about a (black, assuming that the character shares the ethnicity of the performer) lesbian going around rural parts of the country (in other words, the most conservative parts of the country) looking for her wife - a designation that wasn't even permitted only a couple years ago - there's certainly interesting questions about what sort of familiarity we can expect as we travel the country.
I remember reading in some interview that Praxis will play a big role in Alice Isn't Dead's mythos. So far, at least, both episodes featuring it appear to be standalone episodes, and in each, Praxis seems like a very different sort of company.
Now, Praxis is a real word, meaning, essentially, the process of putting a theory or idea into practice. So what does that tell us? In both episodes, there's a high concept to what Praxis represents - we see a man literally working in a factory for his whole life (that happens to go by as Keisha watches) and in this episode, we get the most literal manifestation of the familiarity chains bank on. Is Praxis all about taking these ideas and making them real?
A lot remains to be discovered about the nature of these companies - Bay and Creek Shipping, Praxis, and of course Thistle (assuming that's not "dealt with" at the end of season one.)
Anyway, the point is: probably the scariest the show has ever gotten was an episode called Cassette. In this, Cecil discovers some old audio tapes of his time as a kid. Some of the details don't add up with his own recollections, like that he doesn't (if I recall correctly, he doesn't even remember being a NVR intern - though he was destined to run the show after Leonard Burton retired.)
Of course, the two biggest details that are mentioned in Cassette are that A: the recordings mention his having a brother and B: Cecil seems to be killed by some kind of monster while looking at a mirror.
Now, this "season" of WTNV has kind of had two through lines - that of Huntocar and the tiny civilization (which we now know is a tiny, seemingly more "normal" other than the after effects of being buried under the bowling alley version of Night Vale, and that of the Distant Prince and residents of Night Vale remembering alternate realities.
So in the recent "Cal," the eponymous, seemingly non-existent brother shows up at Cecil's home, and a whole other set of memories floods into him - he's not married in this version of reality, and he's even still partially in the closet to his brother. I think his sister Abby might not even exist in this version of events (which of course means his niece Janice doesn't either.)
With tears in the fabric of reality showing up, all linked to the Distant Prince, it seems, one has to wonder what exactly is going on, and if it has anything to do with the fact that the tiny civilization is actually another version of Night Vale.
One thing it does do is seemingly negate one frightful theory I had about the episode Cassette - that the Cecil we've been listening to is actually the monster that killed the real Cecil. If the Cassettes are from a different reality, then our Cecil at least seems to be... who he is. This actually also could explain how Leonard Burton was able to fill in for Cecil even though one of the old tapes he played was Cecil reporting on Leonard's grisly death (something I just wrote off as Night Vale weirdness, which I'm 100% not ruling out.)
Anyway, apparently we're getting "A Story About Huntocar" at the beginning of June, and if it's anything like "A Story About You" or "A Story About Them," it'll be great. (Also, given that both of those episodes deal with agents stealing buildings from the tiny civilization - agents, I assume, of a Vague Yet Menacing Government Agency - it would make sense for it to be of the same style.)
On Alice Isn't Dead, we get a second appearance of Praxis Industries. In the first season's episode "The Factory by the Sea," Keisha (not yet known by that name) makes a delivery to a factory that seems to have a single employee, who rapidly ages during her visit until she realizes that the lumber she had delivered was actually his coffin, which he drifts away in.
The second appearance of Praxis takes a different form, but there's a similarly uncanny element. In "Chain," Keisha and Sylvia visit a fast food place called Praxis, in which the same brother and sister appear in every restaurant. They're absolutely the same people - they remember the two visitors and even have a drawing Sylvia made.
In the end, the Praxis restaurant closes - and we can be confident that this means that every location is gone.
Given that Alice Isn't Dead is an examination of American culture, it makes a lot of sense to examine the way that we're drawn to these chains - little pockets of familiarity that you can find anywhere.
It's a rich theme to examine, especially these days, when the ideas of monoculture and multiculture are in tremendous conflict. And given that this is a show about a (black, assuming that the character shares the ethnicity of the performer) lesbian going around rural parts of the country (in other words, the most conservative parts of the country) looking for her wife - a designation that wasn't even permitted only a couple years ago - there's certainly interesting questions about what sort of familiarity we can expect as we travel the country.
I remember reading in some interview that Praxis will play a big role in Alice Isn't Dead's mythos. So far, at least, both episodes featuring it appear to be standalone episodes, and in each, Praxis seems like a very different sort of company.
Now, Praxis is a real word, meaning, essentially, the process of putting a theory or idea into practice. So what does that tell us? In both episodes, there's a high concept to what Praxis represents - we see a man literally working in a factory for his whole life (that happens to go by as Keisha watches) and in this episode, we get the most literal manifestation of the familiarity chains bank on. Is Praxis all about taking these ideas and making them real?
A lot remains to be discovered about the nature of these companies - Bay and Creek Shipping, Praxis, and of course Thistle (assuming that's not "dealt with" at the end of season one.)
Friday, May 5, 2017
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Guardians of the Galaxy was Marvel's amazing out-of-left-field success - one of their most popular movies that took a totally obscure series that few had ever heard of, and made it into one of the biggest hits of the last decade.
The movie distinguished itself in a couple ways, even if the Marvel formula and the movie's ties to the greater cinematic universe were familiar (in fact, this seems to be the only movie where there are characters who have actually heard of Thanos.) For one thing, it is a space adventure. Now, the upcoming Thor: Ragnarok absolutely looks like it will be blending Thor's realm-hopping with space travel (and this is probably how they'll get the Guardians in with the Avengers for the giant Infinity War crossover,) but the change in setting has allowed Guardians to stand on its own. The fact that James Gunn has a lot more creative control than most Marvel directors also gives the movies a stronger identity (I mourn the Edgar Wright Ant-Man that might have been.)
Guardians is also willing to be goofier than the other Marvel movies. Now, to be clear, Marvel has wisely avoided making grimdark movies where everyone is a bummer (looking at you, DC,) and there's always a sense of humor (one of the reasons the Incredible Hulk is kind of forgotten is that it wasn't all that fun - also with Edward Norton replaced by Mark Ruffalo, it's easier to imagine that it's just not part of the canon in the same way, though they did get William Hurt to come back.) But aside from just having a sense of humor, the world of the Guardians is just more heightened. You can have a huge colony inside the skull of a space-god. You can have a planet of totally-human-looking aliens. You can have proper names like Yondu, Xandar, Drax, Groot, and Rocket Raccoon.
One of the things that made the Avengers so good is that the characters' personalities were all drawn so strongly, and the interactions between these leads of their own movies had a kind of chemical reaction that improved the whole thing. Guardians has a pretty large cast - the first film is split between five protagonists - but the characters are, again, drawn well enough on their own that seeing their interactions is a blast.
Volume Two is, I'd argue, more character-based than the first movie. There is a terrible threat for the heroes to overcome, but that threat carries with it serious emotional baggage. If that hasn't been a big enough spoiler for you, let's go past the cut.
The movie distinguished itself in a couple ways, even if the Marvel formula and the movie's ties to the greater cinematic universe were familiar (in fact, this seems to be the only movie where there are characters who have actually heard of Thanos.) For one thing, it is a space adventure. Now, the upcoming Thor: Ragnarok absolutely looks like it will be blending Thor's realm-hopping with space travel (and this is probably how they'll get the Guardians in with the Avengers for the giant Infinity War crossover,) but the change in setting has allowed Guardians to stand on its own. The fact that James Gunn has a lot more creative control than most Marvel directors also gives the movies a stronger identity (I mourn the Edgar Wright Ant-Man that might have been.)
Guardians is also willing to be goofier than the other Marvel movies. Now, to be clear, Marvel has wisely avoided making grimdark movies where everyone is a bummer (looking at you, DC,) and there's always a sense of humor (one of the reasons the Incredible Hulk is kind of forgotten is that it wasn't all that fun - also with Edward Norton replaced by Mark Ruffalo, it's easier to imagine that it's just not part of the canon in the same way, though they did get William Hurt to come back.) But aside from just having a sense of humor, the world of the Guardians is just more heightened. You can have a huge colony inside the skull of a space-god. You can have a planet of totally-human-looking aliens. You can have proper names like Yondu, Xandar, Drax, Groot, and Rocket Raccoon.
One of the things that made the Avengers so good is that the characters' personalities were all drawn so strongly, and the interactions between these leads of their own movies had a kind of chemical reaction that improved the whole thing. Guardians has a pretty large cast - the first film is split between five protagonists - but the characters are, again, drawn well enough on their own that seeing their interactions is a blast.
Volume Two is, I'd argue, more character-based than the first movie. There is a terrible threat for the heroes to overcome, but that threat carries with it serious emotional baggage. If that hasn't been a big enough spoiler for you, let's go past the cut.
Wednesday, May 3, 2017
Breaking Down the Dark Tower Trailer Because I Am Complicit in Hollywood's Fanboy-Based Marketing Strategies
Such a huge part of the way Hollywood has co-opted nerd culture is the way that they have gotten people to gush about movies they haven't seen yet because it represents an adaptation of something that means something a lot to them and adapting it suggests a validation of that love.
So here I go!
While I think it's not supposed to officially release for a couple hours, some Youtube channel put up the Dark Tower trailer, and I watched it.
The trailer does some pretty heavy exposition - it explains Gunslingers, explains the Dark Tower's role explicitly (though it's important to far more than just Earth and Mid-World, Jake, but I get that we want to keep things relatively simple.)
We get three characters: Roland, the Man in Black, and Jake Chambers. The stakes are established (MiB wants to destroy the Tower, doing so would destroy both Earth and Mid-World.) So now let's get into the nitty-gritty.
In the books, there were always hints that Mid-World was a future version of our world - the fact that Jake, Susannah, and Eddie were all from different times kind of allowed for Roland to simply be from the far future. The movie seems to be steering more toward other world - there's an alien sky with a couple of enormous moons in one shot (I can't remember all the different moon names in the books, which I always interpreted to be different phases, but they could have just been different objects.)
Jake in the movie appears to be from our era, rather than the 1970s, which frankly is fine, because other than Susannah's (well, Odetta's) civil rights background, the eras didn't play a huge part in the plot (and you could easily make Odetta's activism something modern - though to be clear, it doesn't look like Susannah or Eddie are going to be in this movie, just as they weren't in the first book.)
Still, this is clearly not just a straight adaptation of the Gunslinger (for one thing, they've explicitly said this is a sequel to the series, not a straight adaptation, which if you've read the books is actually perfectly possible, and allows for big changes to the story without breaking the books' canon.)
The movie looks like it's borrowing elements from The Wastelands, as we see Jake already dealing with his psychologist misinterpreting his visions (and we get a little shout-out to Kubrick's version of the Shining, with a photo of the Overlook Hotel on the psychologist's desk - one of, I'm sure, a million references to other King works.) We also see the haunted house that serves as Jake's portal into Mid-World in that book, though the trailer implies this becomes a two-way gate that allows Roland to first travel to Earth.
Anyway, unless they go the Marvel route and release like three trailers, I think this is all we're going to get until the movie's summer release.
So here I go!
While I think it's not supposed to officially release for a couple hours, some Youtube channel put up the Dark Tower trailer, and I watched it.
The trailer does some pretty heavy exposition - it explains Gunslingers, explains the Dark Tower's role explicitly (though it's important to far more than just Earth and Mid-World, Jake, but I get that we want to keep things relatively simple.)
We get three characters: Roland, the Man in Black, and Jake Chambers. The stakes are established (MiB wants to destroy the Tower, doing so would destroy both Earth and Mid-World.) So now let's get into the nitty-gritty.
In the books, there were always hints that Mid-World was a future version of our world - the fact that Jake, Susannah, and Eddie were all from different times kind of allowed for Roland to simply be from the far future. The movie seems to be steering more toward other world - there's an alien sky with a couple of enormous moons in one shot (I can't remember all the different moon names in the books, which I always interpreted to be different phases, but they could have just been different objects.)
Jake in the movie appears to be from our era, rather than the 1970s, which frankly is fine, because other than Susannah's (well, Odetta's) civil rights background, the eras didn't play a huge part in the plot (and you could easily make Odetta's activism something modern - though to be clear, it doesn't look like Susannah or Eddie are going to be in this movie, just as they weren't in the first book.)
Still, this is clearly not just a straight adaptation of the Gunslinger (for one thing, they've explicitly said this is a sequel to the series, not a straight adaptation, which if you've read the books is actually perfectly possible, and allows for big changes to the story without breaking the books' canon.)
The movie looks like it's borrowing elements from The Wastelands, as we see Jake already dealing with his psychologist misinterpreting his visions (and we get a little shout-out to Kubrick's version of the Shining, with a photo of the Overlook Hotel on the psychologist's desk - one of, I'm sure, a million references to other King works.) We also see the haunted house that serves as Jake's portal into Mid-World in that book, though the trailer implies this becomes a two-way gate that allows Roland to first travel to Earth.
Anyway, unless they go the Marvel route and release like three trailers, I think this is all we're going to get until the movie's summer release.
Monday, May 1, 2017
Night Vale's Ghost Stories and The Missing Sky
Sometimes I do episode-by-episode posts about my favorite TV shows, or at least periodical season analyses. I'm probably going to do so for American Gods, which as I said in the previous post is one of my biggest creative influences.
But I can't exclude the podcast Welcome to Night Vale from my influences either - in a way, it kind of coalesced a lot of the things I'd always subconsciously been interested in - the supernatural as something weirder and more ambiguous and modern than typical fantasy tends to go for. Given that I came up with the idea of The House (a prominent force existing within my Otherworld setting) way back in 2006 or so, I wouldn't say that Night Vale was the first thing that made me fascinated with ancient conspiracies, but it is one of those works of art that make me go "damn, I wish I were the one who created that."
Anyway, this is all a long and convoluted way of saying that I think I might start doing episodic posts about Welcome to Night Vale (I might also do Alice Isn't Dead, the second podcast done by the Night Vale Presents team, which I also love.)
For a brief refresher if all of this is unknown to you, Welcome to Night Vale is a podcast that started in 2012 that takes the form of a community radio broadcast in a small town in the American southwest. The elevator pitch version if it is that it's a town where all conspiracy theories are true, but to get a little more in-depth, it's a town where eldritch abominations serve key civic functions, shadowy government agencies act in the open, massive corporations double as murderous cults, and basically everyone's understanding of what "normal" is is very, very different than ours, like the fact that worshipping "bloodstones" is thought of as the mainstream religion and people who believe that mountains exist are considered fringe nut jobs. The show is a mix of surreal humor, weird science fiction, and cosmic horror, with the kind of ever-expanding small-town cast that you see in shows like the Simpsons and Parks and Recreation.
Anyway, for me to go into all the specifics of what has happened over the course of the show here would be absurd, so I'll just assume that if that caught your interest, you'll listen to the podcast from the start.
Spoilers to follow.
Ghost Stories is the most recently finished live show (there's another one currently touring) and the recording finally went up for sale. Like most live shows, this one kind of sits loosely within the show's continuity. I believe there are references to the death of Old Woman Josie, but for the most part this kind of works anywhere.
As is often he case, the city is having a competition for citizens to tell the best ghost story, with the prize being, apparently, to be murdered and eaten by the city council and eaten (and thus turned into a ghost!) Of course the stories told are generally absurd and not really, like, real ghost stories. But over the course of the show, Cecil tells a story about a man who picks up what seems to be some ghost that lures drivers to pick her up and driver her home, from whence the driver never returns.
Ultimately, what is revealed is that Cecil is actually telling a very mundane story about the day of his mother's funeral, and makes a point about how ghost stories actually make us feel better by telling us that there is something that comes after death, and that meaning can still persist beyond the expiration of our mortal bodies. Knowing that would be a great comfort, but the truth is that we can't know, and we are left with unresolved questions and disappointments and if there is a meaning, it eludes us.
I've got to say that this story hit me pretty damn hard, as the prospect of losing a parent relatively soon is currently looming over my family. Nothing, really, is more terrifying that the idea of death, and believing that our conscious cores live on, even if it is in some scary manner, is ultimately a comfort. It allows us to mitigate and shrink death into just some object in the background and not an impenetrable wall we are all speeding toward.
On the other hand, today's new episode, the Missing Sky, was disturbing in more plot-related ways.
We get a pretty standard WTNV broadcast at first, but at some point, the sound shifts and we hear a tinnier, seemingly distant broadcast of a different episode. It's still definitely Cecil announcing the news, and it still seems to be coming from Night Vale, but there are odd things going on - primarily, this version of Night Vale seems to be a far more normal town (at first,) with the angels currently squatting in Old Woman Josie's house replaced with a woman named Erika with an angel tattoo on her arm, described as an old friend of Josie's, squatting there instead. Pamela Winchell is still mayor, and both John and Jim Peters work on their farm together. Even the Weather Report is an actual weather report that mentions temperatures and wind.
But something terrible happened to this version of Night Vale. There is talk about an attack by something, with an apparently controversial memorial to those fallen (who include Cecil's brother-in-law and best friend, Steve Carlsberg) that takes the form of a massive foot. And before this attack, the first thing that happened was that the sky disappeared, and the city was cut off from the outside world. This Night Vale is holding parades in honor of the people who volunteered to defend the city from the abomination that arrived that day a few years ago.
Meanwhile, in the normal Night Vale, Carlos goes to investigate these strange popping sounds coming from underground.
So through the episode, we're left wondering what exactly the nature of this other Night Vale is. We know that this Cecil never met Carlos. We also know that the city seems to be somewhat less outlandish, at least until the sky disappeared. I was thinking first that it could be a time jump, but the fact that Pamela Winchell was still mayor seemed to make that unlikely, and the fact that Jim Peters was not off fighting in the Blood Space War suggested that this had to be an alternate reality.
However, as it turns out, it's not an alternate universe, and it's not a different time. This other Night Vale is, in fact, the tiny civilization that lives under lane 5 at the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex. And the abomination that they remember from all those years ago was actually Carlos, whom the people of this miniature Night Vale nearly killed in the "season finale" of the podcast's first year.
So what the hell?
Big questions to be asked: if this tiny Night Vale is, apart from the whole missing sky thing and the worship of Huntocar, relatively normal, is this actually the real Night Vale? Tiny Cecil talks about how the city was cut off from the rest of the world when the sky was taken, but one of the themes of the show has generally been that big Night Vale isn't that easy to get into or out of anyway.
I'm assuming that the sky going missing was the construction of the bowling alley over the city. Is there a bowling alley or a Teddy Williams in this smaller Night Vale?
I definitely think this could tie into a lot of stuff from this year of the podcast - the alternate memories people have in the Ash Lake episode could be memories from each person's tiny doppelgängers.
Also, we know that Huntocar is associated with the train that arrives in the first episode of the year - which is also the train that the bandits that Lucia Tereschenko (no idea if I'm spelling that right) was working for took over - bandits who seem likely to be the predecessors of the Vague Yet Menacing Government Agency, whom we know from A Story of You have been stealing buildings from the tiny civilization and burying them out in the desert. (I'm assuming the Man Who Is Not Short and the Man Who Is Not Tall are from the VYMGA.)
I realize that this is all making me sound like a conspiracy nut (which I'm sure is by design,) but there's some kind of connection between Huntocar, the deer-faced rail enthusiasts who installed the Night Vale subway system (who share the deer-face of Huntocar and also communicate through proprietary message-cockroaches) and the train. Huntocar even tells Cecil about the fact that the VYMGA is taking their buildings.
So... what it all adds up to is anyone's guess. Like last year's Strangers, this story is slowly building up to something, and I think today's episode was a big push forward, but I still don't really know what it could all mean. (For example, I thought the Distant Prince might have been involved at first, but that's seeming less likely - maybe they'll save him for a later "season.")
But I can't exclude the podcast Welcome to Night Vale from my influences either - in a way, it kind of coalesced a lot of the things I'd always subconsciously been interested in - the supernatural as something weirder and more ambiguous and modern than typical fantasy tends to go for. Given that I came up with the idea of The House (a prominent force existing within my Otherworld setting) way back in 2006 or so, I wouldn't say that Night Vale was the first thing that made me fascinated with ancient conspiracies, but it is one of those works of art that make me go "damn, I wish I were the one who created that."
Anyway, this is all a long and convoluted way of saying that I think I might start doing episodic posts about Welcome to Night Vale (I might also do Alice Isn't Dead, the second podcast done by the Night Vale Presents team, which I also love.)
For a brief refresher if all of this is unknown to you, Welcome to Night Vale is a podcast that started in 2012 that takes the form of a community radio broadcast in a small town in the American southwest. The elevator pitch version if it is that it's a town where all conspiracy theories are true, but to get a little more in-depth, it's a town where eldritch abominations serve key civic functions, shadowy government agencies act in the open, massive corporations double as murderous cults, and basically everyone's understanding of what "normal" is is very, very different than ours, like the fact that worshipping "bloodstones" is thought of as the mainstream religion and people who believe that mountains exist are considered fringe nut jobs. The show is a mix of surreal humor, weird science fiction, and cosmic horror, with the kind of ever-expanding small-town cast that you see in shows like the Simpsons and Parks and Recreation.
Anyway, for me to go into all the specifics of what has happened over the course of the show here would be absurd, so I'll just assume that if that caught your interest, you'll listen to the podcast from the start.
Spoilers to follow.
Ghost Stories is the most recently finished live show (there's another one currently touring) and the recording finally went up for sale. Like most live shows, this one kind of sits loosely within the show's continuity. I believe there are references to the death of Old Woman Josie, but for the most part this kind of works anywhere.
As is often he case, the city is having a competition for citizens to tell the best ghost story, with the prize being, apparently, to be murdered and eaten by the city council and eaten (and thus turned into a ghost!) Of course the stories told are generally absurd and not really, like, real ghost stories. But over the course of the show, Cecil tells a story about a man who picks up what seems to be some ghost that lures drivers to pick her up and driver her home, from whence the driver never returns.
Ultimately, what is revealed is that Cecil is actually telling a very mundane story about the day of his mother's funeral, and makes a point about how ghost stories actually make us feel better by telling us that there is something that comes after death, and that meaning can still persist beyond the expiration of our mortal bodies. Knowing that would be a great comfort, but the truth is that we can't know, and we are left with unresolved questions and disappointments and if there is a meaning, it eludes us.
I've got to say that this story hit me pretty damn hard, as the prospect of losing a parent relatively soon is currently looming over my family. Nothing, really, is more terrifying that the idea of death, and believing that our conscious cores live on, even if it is in some scary manner, is ultimately a comfort. It allows us to mitigate and shrink death into just some object in the background and not an impenetrable wall we are all speeding toward.
On the other hand, today's new episode, the Missing Sky, was disturbing in more plot-related ways.
We get a pretty standard WTNV broadcast at first, but at some point, the sound shifts and we hear a tinnier, seemingly distant broadcast of a different episode. It's still definitely Cecil announcing the news, and it still seems to be coming from Night Vale, but there are odd things going on - primarily, this version of Night Vale seems to be a far more normal town (at first,) with the angels currently squatting in Old Woman Josie's house replaced with a woman named Erika with an angel tattoo on her arm, described as an old friend of Josie's, squatting there instead. Pamela Winchell is still mayor, and both John and Jim Peters work on their farm together. Even the Weather Report is an actual weather report that mentions temperatures and wind.
But something terrible happened to this version of Night Vale. There is talk about an attack by something, with an apparently controversial memorial to those fallen (who include Cecil's brother-in-law and best friend, Steve Carlsberg) that takes the form of a massive foot. And before this attack, the first thing that happened was that the sky disappeared, and the city was cut off from the outside world. This Night Vale is holding parades in honor of the people who volunteered to defend the city from the abomination that arrived that day a few years ago.
Meanwhile, in the normal Night Vale, Carlos goes to investigate these strange popping sounds coming from underground.
So through the episode, we're left wondering what exactly the nature of this other Night Vale is. We know that this Cecil never met Carlos. We also know that the city seems to be somewhat less outlandish, at least until the sky disappeared. I was thinking first that it could be a time jump, but the fact that Pamela Winchell was still mayor seemed to make that unlikely, and the fact that Jim Peters was not off fighting in the Blood Space War suggested that this had to be an alternate reality.
However, as it turns out, it's not an alternate universe, and it's not a different time. This other Night Vale is, in fact, the tiny civilization that lives under lane 5 at the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex. And the abomination that they remember from all those years ago was actually Carlos, whom the people of this miniature Night Vale nearly killed in the "season finale" of the podcast's first year.
So what the hell?
Big questions to be asked: if this tiny Night Vale is, apart from the whole missing sky thing and the worship of Huntocar, relatively normal, is this actually the real Night Vale? Tiny Cecil talks about how the city was cut off from the rest of the world when the sky was taken, but one of the themes of the show has generally been that big Night Vale isn't that easy to get into or out of anyway.
I'm assuming that the sky going missing was the construction of the bowling alley over the city. Is there a bowling alley or a Teddy Williams in this smaller Night Vale?
I definitely think this could tie into a lot of stuff from this year of the podcast - the alternate memories people have in the Ash Lake episode could be memories from each person's tiny doppelgängers.
Also, we know that Huntocar is associated with the train that arrives in the first episode of the year - which is also the train that the bandits that Lucia Tereschenko (no idea if I'm spelling that right) was working for took over - bandits who seem likely to be the predecessors of the Vague Yet Menacing Government Agency, whom we know from A Story of You have been stealing buildings from the tiny civilization and burying them out in the desert. (I'm assuming the Man Who Is Not Short and the Man Who Is Not Tall are from the VYMGA.)
I realize that this is all making me sound like a conspiracy nut (which I'm sure is by design,) but there's some kind of connection between Huntocar, the deer-faced rail enthusiasts who installed the Night Vale subway system (who share the deer-face of Huntocar and also communicate through proprietary message-cockroaches) and the train. Huntocar even tells Cecil about the fact that the VYMGA is taking their buildings.
So... what it all adds up to is anyone's guess. Like last year's Strangers, this story is slowly building up to something, and I think today's episode was a big push forward, but I still don't really know what it could all mean. (For example, I thought the Distant Prince might have been involved at first, but that's seeming less likely - maybe they'll save him for a later "season.")
Sunday, April 30, 2017
American Gods
American Gods is one of my favorite books, though I think I only read it the one time, probably early in college (so 2004-2006-ish.) The juxtaposition and mixture of the magical and the mundane - in a way that wasn't just the usual half-assed Magical Realism - really grabbed me. While I think I cite Stephen King's Dark Tower series as a huge influence on me (which I started reading in my senior year of high school and finished when the last book came out in my first year of college) American Gods also has to be up there on my list - top five at least.
It's a little crazy that this year both of these stories are getting screen adaptations, and while I don't know what to expect of the Dark Tower (the shots I'm seeing from the set are all way too urban, without enough crazy desert otherworld for my tastes) I was hugely excited to see that Bryan Fuller was the one bringing this story to the screen.
I of course loved Hannibal (a lot of posts on this blog are about that show) and I was a fan of both Dead Like Me and Pushing Daisies. The surreal aesthetic Fuller developed for Hannibal, though, works absolutely perfectly for American Gods, giving me the sensation of really seeing the book as I imagined it in my head right up there on-screen.
So far, the pilot has kept pretty close to the book (as I recall it at least.) The protagonist is Shadow Moon, who is introduced in prison awaiting his release. Near the end of year three of his six year sentence, Shadow is getting out on good behavior. His wife Laura is waiting for him to come home, and his friend Robbie has set him up with a job right out prison. So everything is on track, but something doesn't feel right. Shadow confesses both to his cellmate Low-Key and Laura on the phone that he feels like there's an axe hanging over his head.
And then the axe falls - Shadow is called into the warden's office where he is informed that his wife died in a car accident, and that they are letting him go early so he can attend his wife's funeral.
Dealing with various air travel inconveniences, Shadow meets a conman with whom he shares a first class row on an airplane. The man introduces himself as Mr. Wednesday, offering Shadow a job if he wants it.
Shadow declines, but when his flight stops due to weather, he chooses to drive the rest of the way, winding up in a strange bar that looks like a giant alligator head. It's here that he meets Mr. Wednesday again, as well as a guy named Mad Sweeney, a super-tall leprechaun (or so he claims.) Sweeney provokes Shadow to fight him, and for his trouble, leaves him a golden coin.
It's at this bar that Shadow discovers that Robbie died too, and his job prospects are gone. After losing a coin flip he rigged to win, Shadow agrees to work for Mr. Wednesday.
Shadow goes to Laura's funeral, where Robbie's wife Audrey informs him that their late spouses were having an affair with one another.
When Laura is buried, Shadow tosses his coin onto the fresh dirt on her coffin, and unseen by him, it sinks into the earth.
And then Shadow is abducted by a strange being who book readers know is called the Technical Boy, who discerns that Shadow is truly loyal to the man who hired him, and attempts to have him killed. Shadow is beaten by faceless creatures that seem to be made of digital polygons and is hanged from a tree, nearly dying until some mysterious protector brutally tears the faceless "children" apart.
Of course, it's been a long time since I read the book, but I think this more or less tracks with what was in the source material. I do think that they've expanded the role of Audrey a bit (in the book we basically get the one exchange at the funeral, but I think they've talked about making her more of a character in this.) We do get the horrifying introduction to Bilquis in this episode (which seems like a direct translation of what's in the book) as well as a prologue that depicts the first arrival of Odin in America. The "Coming to America" segments from the book are likely to show up as these sorts of vignettes.
There's a lot to talk about thematically here (especially given that most of the characters in this story are almost literally walking themes) and also some questions about what constitutes a spoiler for a seventeen year old book, but I'm going to leave this post with just my general reaction: I'm super happy this show exists and I love how it looks and I'm really excited to see more.
(EDIT: Ok, one theme thing I had to mention: Shadow is haunted by hanging imagery - he and Low-Key talk about gallows humor, the (presumably white-supremacist) inmates give him lynching gestures as he walks by, and ultimately, the Technical Boy's goons hang him from a tree. Given that this is a story about an African American man dealing with the mythology and power of America's past, one can't ignore the physical threat that black people in this country have been under from the beginning. But in addition to this violent hatred, the noose and hanging imagery also ties things to Odin, who was the gallows god and who hanged himself from the World Tree as a sacrifice to himself to gain wisdom and knowledge - and who is the subject of the Coming to America prologue.)
It's a little crazy that this year both of these stories are getting screen adaptations, and while I don't know what to expect of the Dark Tower (the shots I'm seeing from the set are all way too urban, without enough crazy desert otherworld for my tastes) I was hugely excited to see that Bryan Fuller was the one bringing this story to the screen.
I of course loved Hannibal (a lot of posts on this blog are about that show) and I was a fan of both Dead Like Me and Pushing Daisies. The surreal aesthetic Fuller developed for Hannibal, though, works absolutely perfectly for American Gods, giving me the sensation of really seeing the book as I imagined it in my head right up there on-screen.
So far, the pilot has kept pretty close to the book (as I recall it at least.) The protagonist is Shadow Moon, who is introduced in prison awaiting his release. Near the end of year three of his six year sentence, Shadow is getting out on good behavior. His wife Laura is waiting for him to come home, and his friend Robbie has set him up with a job right out prison. So everything is on track, but something doesn't feel right. Shadow confesses both to his cellmate Low-Key and Laura on the phone that he feels like there's an axe hanging over his head.
And then the axe falls - Shadow is called into the warden's office where he is informed that his wife died in a car accident, and that they are letting him go early so he can attend his wife's funeral.
Dealing with various air travel inconveniences, Shadow meets a conman with whom he shares a first class row on an airplane. The man introduces himself as Mr. Wednesday, offering Shadow a job if he wants it.
Shadow declines, but when his flight stops due to weather, he chooses to drive the rest of the way, winding up in a strange bar that looks like a giant alligator head. It's here that he meets Mr. Wednesday again, as well as a guy named Mad Sweeney, a super-tall leprechaun (or so he claims.) Sweeney provokes Shadow to fight him, and for his trouble, leaves him a golden coin.
It's at this bar that Shadow discovers that Robbie died too, and his job prospects are gone. After losing a coin flip he rigged to win, Shadow agrees to work for Mr. Wednesday.
Shadow goes to Laura's funeral, where Robbie's wife Audrey informs him that their late spouses were having an affair with one another.
When Laura is buried, Shadow tosses his coin onto the fresh dirt on her coffin, and unseen by him, it sinks into the earth.
And then Shadow is abducted by a strange being who book readers know is called the Technical Boy, who discerns that Shadow is truly loyal to the man who hired him, and attempts to have him killed. Shadow is beaten by faceless creatures that seem to be made of digital polygons and is hanged from a tree, nearly dying until some mysterious protector brutally tears the faceless "children" apart.
Of course, it's been a long time since I read the book, but I think this more or less tracks with what was in the source material. I do think that they've expanded the role of Audrey a bit (in the book we basically get the one exchange at the funeral, but I think they've talked about making her more of a character in this.) We do get the horrifying introduction to Bilquis in this episode (which seems like a direct translation of what's in the book) as well as a prologue that depicts the first arrival of Odin in America. The "Coming to America" segments from the book are likely to show up as these sorts of vignettes.
There's a lot to talk about thematically here (especially given that most of the characters in this story are almost literally walking themes) and also some questions about what constitutes a spoiler for a seventeen year old book, but I'm going to leave this post with just my general reaction: I'm super happy this show exists and I love how it looks and I'm really excited to see more.
(EDIT: Ok, one theme thing I had to mention: Shadow is haunted by hanging imagery - he and Low-Key talk about gallows humor, the (presumably white-supremacist) inmates give him lynching gestures as he walks by, and ultimately, the Technical Boy's goons hang him from a tree. Given that this is a story about an African American man dealing with the mythology and power of America's past, one can't ignore the physical threat that black people in this country have been under from the beginning. But in addition to this violent hatred, the noose and hanging imagery also ties things to Odin, who was the gallows god and who hanged himself from the World Tree as a sacrifice to himself to gain wisdom and knowledge - and who is the subject of the Coming to America prologue.)
Saturday, April 1, 2017
Some Ominous Plants on The Expanse's Cascade
While searching Ganymede station for Prax's (Meng's? I'm not sure if we're referring to him by his last name or nickname) daughter and the doctor that might know something about the grand protomolecule conspiracy, the botanist notes that the oxygen-scrubbing plants have been fed distilled water, which, of course, is not what a healthy plant ought to get.
If you've never tried, distilled water tastes literally like nothing. It's an odd sensation, but given that water is basically the medium for everything our bodies ingest, when you drink distilled water, there's just no taste whatsoever to it (other than whatever is already in your mouth.)
Prax (I'm going with that one!) notes that on Earth, where there are tons of redundancies, one group of plants dying out isn't going to kill the planet. But in an artificial environment, every piece has to rely on every other piece. And once one part of the system goes, the things that rely on that part will start to go, and you get a cascade.
The Solar System of the Expanse is something of a delicate ecosystem. Sure, there's the threat of war between Mars and Earth (something that the incident on Ganymede threatens to spark,) but the main thing that has prevented the war up until now is the fact that the system requires so much cooperation to function. Mars is on its way, maybe, but it's still a far way off from being a self-sustaining planet where people can actually grow food outside. The Belt has been exploited to provide raw materials for the Inner Planets.
But even Earth, which has been cast as a paradise compared to the rest of the system, is actually struggling. We've seen Earth almost entirely from the perspective of Avasarala, but remember that she is one of the most powerful people on the planet (I don't know if we have a formal title for her, but she's third in line for the leadership of the UN.) Once Bobbie Draper escapes the Martian embassy and goes to explore New York, she comes across miserable masses, barely living off of government assistance and clearly lacking a lot of the medical help they need.
The cause of Earth's problems is not entirely clear - I think you can project your own politics onto the setting - but one thing we've known from the start is that Earth's massive population relies on the resources of the solar system to survive.
So what is the meaning of this scene with the plants?
The arrival of the protomolecule has thrown the already-tense system into chaos. And given that outside Earth, and to an extent even Earth itself, is reliant on an artificial ecosystem with very little room for redundancy, what will the ramifications of these events mean for the human race?
The Expanse is not, I think, utterly cynical. We have heroes worth rooting for, even if they're flawed and broken people. But have we already reached the beginning of a cascade? Will Holden's heroics, Avasarala's brilliance, Draper's integrity, or - fingers crossed - Miller's resurrected blue alien hive mind abilities (a man can hope, dammit!) be enough to keep humanity from collapsing in on itself?
If you've never tried, distilled water tastes literally like nothing. It's an odd sensation, but given that water is basically the medium for everything our bodies ingest, when you drink distilled water, there's just no taste whatsoever to it (other than whatever is already in your mouth.)
Prax (I'm going with that one!) notes that on Earth, where there are tons of redundancies, one group of plants dying out isn't going to kill the planet. But in an artificial environment, every piece has to rely on every other piece. And once one part of the system goes, the things that rely on that part will start to go, and you get a cascade.
The Solar System of the Expanse is something of a delicate ecosystem. Sure, there's the threat of war between Mars and Earth (something that the incident on Ganymede threatens to spark,) but the main thing that has prevented the war up until now is the fact that the system requires so much cooperation to function. Mars is on its way, maybe, but it's still a far way off from being a self-sustaining planet where people can actually grow food outside. The Belt has been exploited to provide raw materials for the Inner Planets.
But even Earth, which has been cast as a paradise compared to the rest of the system, is actually struggling. We've seen Earth almost entirely from the perspective of Avasarala, but remember that she is one of the most powerful people on the planet (I don't know if we have a formal title for her, but she's third in line for the leadership of the UN.) Once Bobbie Draper escapes the Martian embassy and goes to explore New York, she comes across miserable masses, barely living off of government assistance and clearly lacking a lot of the medical help they need.
The cause of Earth's problems is not entirely clear - I think you can project your own politics onto the setting - but one thing we've known from the start is that Earth's massive population relies on the resources of the solar system to survive.
So what is the meaning of this scene with the plants?
The arrival of the protomolecule has thrown the already-tense system into chaos. And given that outside Earth, and to an extent even Earth itself, is reliant on an artificial ecosystem with very little room for redundancy, what will the ramifications of these events mean for the human race?
The Expanse is not, I think, utterly cynical. We have heroes worth rooting for, even if they're flawed and broken people. But have we already reached the beginning of a cascade? Will Holden's heroics, Avasarala's brilliance, Draper's integrity, or - fingers crossed - Miller's resurrected blue alien hive mind abilities (a man can hope, dammit!) be enough to keep humanity from collapsing in on itself?
Friday, March 31, 2017
Rethinking the Enemy on Legion's Season One Finale
Legion has finished its first season with a climactic confrontation between the various factions at work - in the outside world, Division Three mounts an assault on Summerland, led by the surprisingly non-dead interrogator, who we know know is named Clark. Meanwhile, attempts are made to separate the Shadow King from David permanently, and Lenny ain't about to let them do that without a fight.
In a sense, the finale does suffer a bit from a premise that makes the build-up far more interesting than any conclusion could be, and visualizing mental battles is never all that easy. But the show does a pretty good job of it. We're left with an ending that doesn't actually take anyone off the board, but the pieces have been moved in ways that we're sure to see big changes in season two.
First off, the episode begins with a surprising perspective. We watch as Clark, who has been covered with burns over 40% of his body, wakes up in a hospital bed watched over by his husband and son. Oh yeah, I guess shady government agents also have lives and loved ones! While I don't think we really get enough of his or Division Three's worldview to feel their methods are justified, we do get a sense of how much of their actions are motivated by fear - not irrational fear, but a logical, rational sense of terror that there's no real upper limit on the power of these potential threats, something David represents perfectly.
Still, not knowing how powerful and in-control David is, their attack on Summerland is kind of pathetic. The faceless goons Clark brings wind up immediately overwhelmed by David's telekinesis. Clark is then a prisoner, and while he's still able to give his superiors (which include the aforementioned husband) a live-feed of what he sees, he plays it cool and winds up keeping the truce while the Summerland crew try to work on the Shadow King.
And ultimately this work is unsuccessful. The parasite is slowly erased from David's mind, but then it starts to fight back, turning David on himself and threatening to kill him. As Lenny taunts Syd in the White Room, it's hard to un-make soup, and she/he/it has been a part of David for practically his whole life. The roots go deep.
This prompts Syd to take a new approach. Syd goes into the room where David is strapped to a chair and kisses him, swapping bodies and allowing the Shadow King into her own. The Shadow King then quickly transfers into Kerry's body (the mechanics are slightly unclear to me here - can whoever is temporarily occupying Syd's body after she has used her power then use Syd's power on someone else? Or, more likely, is this the Shadow King only transferring into Kerry, thus leaving an unoccupied David to fight her?) Anyway, the two have their epic confrontation - waves of psychic energy smashing into each other. And David emerges victorious - only for the essence of the Shadow King to fly right into a wrong-place-wrong-time Oliver.
Amid all the chaos, newly possessed Oliver (who had only just remembered Melanie's name) walks away and gets in a car.
So the Shadow King has been excised from David, but now possesses Oliver. Division Three has been forced to stop their assault (and David suggests to Clark that they've really got to start working together now.) It looks like we'll have a Jemaine Clement/Aubrey Plaza road trip in season two, for which I cannot wait.
And then, in a mid-credits scene (this is the thing all comic book properties have to do now I guess) some weird little flying robot pokéballs David into it, and that's our cliffhanger.
A lot of questions remain about Legion. The visuals that represented David's fractured mind were one of the main draws to the show. How fractured will it remain now that the Shadow King is no longer part of him? Also, how much of an X-men show will this be, and how much will it remain its own thing?
In a sense, the finale does suffer a bit from a premise that makes the build-up far more interesting than any conclusion could be, and visualizing mental battles is never all that easy. But the show does a pretty good job of it. We're left with an ending that doesn't actually take anyone off the board, but the pieces have been moved in ways that we're sure to see big changes in season two.
First off, the episode begins with a surprising perspective. We watch as Clark, who has been covered with burns over 40% of his body, wakes up in a hospital bed watched over by his husband and son. Oh yeah, I guess shady government agents also have lives and loved ones! While I don't think we really get enough of his or Division Three's worldview to feel their methods are justified, we do get a sense of how much of their actions are motivated by fear - not irrational fear, but a logical, rational sense of terror that there's no real upper limit on the power of these potential threats, something David represents perfectly.
Still, not knowing how powerful and in-control David is, their attack on Summerland is kind of pathetic. The faceless goons Clark brings wind up immediately overwhelmed by David's telekinesis. Clark is then a prisoner, and while he's still able to give his superiors (which include the aforementioned husband) a live-feed of what he sees, he plays it cool and winds up keeping the truce while the Summerland crew try to work on the Shadow King.
And ultimately this work is unsuccessful. The parasite is slowly erased from David's mind, but then it starts to fight back, turning David on himself and threatening to kill him. As Lenny taunts Syd in the White Room, it's hard to un-make soup, and she/he/it has been a part of David for practically his whole life. The roots go deep.
This prompts Syd to take a new approach. Syd goes into the room where David is strapped to a chair and kisses him, swapping bodies and allowing the Shadow King into her own. The Shadow King then quickly transfers into Kerry's body (the mechanics are slightly unclear to me here - can whoever is temporarily occupying Syd's body after she has used her power then use Syd's power on someone else? Or, more likely, is this the Shadow King only transferring into Kerry, thus leaving an unoccupied David to fight her?) Anyway, the two have their epic confrontation - waves of psychic energy smashing into each other. And David emerges victorious - only for the essence of the Shadow King to fly right into a wrong-place-wrong-time Oliver.
Amid all the chaos, newly possessed Oliver (who had only just remembered Melanie's name) walks away and gets in a car.
So the Shadow King has been excised from David, but now possesses Oliver. Division Three has been forced to stop their assault (and David suggests to Clark that they've really got to start working together now.) It looks like we'll have a Jemaine Clement/Aubrey Plaza road trip in season two, for which I cannot wait.
And then, in a mid-credits scene (this is the thing all comic book properties have to do now I guess) some weird little flying robot pokéballs David into it, and that's our cliffhanger.
A lot of questions remain about Legion. The visuals that represented David's fractured mind were one of the main draws to the show. How fractured will it remain now that the Shadow King is no longer part of him? Also, how much of an X-men show will this be, and how much will it remain its own thing?
Friday, March 24, 2017
And... All Caught Up on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
Yeah, I've been back home in MA and have had more time on my hands than even I tend to have, so don't judge me.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is, in a lot of ways, a deconstruction of the romantic comedy. But in another way, it is a dark and devastating romance. But here's the thing: the will-they-won't-they is not about any of the men in Rebecca Bunch's life - it's about herself. Can this poor, broken woman learn to love herself? Can she live happily ever after, but with herself?
And holy crap do I ship those two.
The title of the show, as we've discussed before and as was mentioned in season one's opening title song, is a sexist term that the show is all about exploring and deconstructing. Rachel Bloom creates a character that is so well-conceived and well-performed that we can't help but sympathize with her. She's the sort of character who might be peripheral on other shows. Sure, we do tend to empathize with the main characters on a show, but unlike Seinfeld or It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the mission of this show is for us to see the likable, good person buried under all this toxic behavior and psychology.
The last few episodes of season two see Rebecca get back with Josh, get engaged, and plan an absurdly quick marriage. And the proposal comes literally right as Rebecca is about to finally start delving into her problems with Dr. Akopian. Her man problems - problems that even saw her committing arson and being institutionalized in the finale's big reveal (well, one of the big reveals) - are all just symptomatic of her self-esteem issues.
By so many standards, Rebecca is a success. She's a brilliant lawyer with two Ivy League colleges on her resume (though the reason there are two and not one is actually significant to her problems as it turns out.) And while the central motivation for her move to West Covina was unhealthy, it's a good thing she realized her life in New York was not what she wanted it to be.
She diagnosed the problem: she was unhappy, but chose a terrible prescription.
And there were two major factors at work: one being the relationships with her parents, particularly her father (not that my parents are perfect, but judging from how many characters on TV have issues with their dads, I've got to count myself lucky. Actually, I appreciate that Greg had a good relationship with his.) The other being the narratives that we love. And look, I think the shows I post about make it clear I have a pretty standard guy-nerd set of tastes, and you do not see me rushing off to every rom-com that makes it to the theaters.
But the toxic idealized narratives of the romantic comedy that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is all about tearing down can affect anyone, regardless of your gender or orientation. There's something so appealing about the idea that another person could fix you - that a mix of sex and affection and having someone to be with you all the time will allow your underlying problems to melt away. I've sure as hell daydreamed about women I've had crushes on coming in and breaking me out of whatever rut I'm in (the manic pixie dream girl trope is all about this,) but that sort of thinking gets you stuck in place.
So, it might be kind of out of left field, and maybe it's because I've been watching one show while bingeing the other (and I'm about to hit that serious show-withdrawal) but in a very odd way, there's a parallel with Legion here.
Stick with me.
In this week's episode of Legion (and spoiler alert for those of you in the CEGF/Legion Venn diagram,) David finally starts to learn to take some control of his power once he looks inward and personifies his rational mind as another version of himself. They talk things out, and doing so allows David to become grounded enough that he can break out of his, in this case literal, mental prison and actualize his powers.
What Rebecca Bunch needs is to step outside of herself, take a look, and learn to be happy with who she is in a relative vacuum - not by the standards of who she's currently attached to. And it should probably be a duet.
Of course, we can't go there yet (just as David can't have total control of his powers yet) because then the series would end. On the other hand, CEGF is also about subverting the idea that there are happy endings - having everything wrapped up neatly is another one of those toxic fantasies. And we have seen Rebecca make real progress, only for her to backslide.
But even with backslides, progress can be made. Rebecca needs to learn that the idea that all of her problems will disappear is something that just won't ever happen. But she can reduce them, and she can get herself into a place where she can deal with them as they come. And that's as good as it'll get, but it's not bad.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is, in a lot of ways, a deconstruction of the romantic comedy. But in another way, it is a dark and devastating romance. But here's the thing: the will-they-won't-they is not about any of the men in Rebecca Bunch's life - it's about herself. Can this poor, broken woman learn to love herself? Can she live happily ever after, but with herself?
And holy crap do I ship those two.
The title of the show, as we've discussed before and as was mentioned in season one's opening title song, is a sexist term that the show is all about exploring and deconstructing. Rachel Bloom creates a character that is so well-conceived and well-performed that we can't help but sympathize with her. She's the sort of character who might be peripheral on other shows. Sure, we do tend to empathize with the main characters on a show, but unlike Seinfeld or It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the mission of this show is for us to see the likable, good person buried under all this toxic behavior and psychology.
The last few episodes of season two see Rebecca get back with Josh, get engaged, and plan an absurdly quick marriage. And the proposal comes literally right as Rebecca is about to finally start delving into her problems with Dr. Akopian. Her man problems - problems that even saw her committing arson and being institutionalized in the finale's big reveal (well, one of the big reveals) - are all just symptomatic of her self-esteem issues.
By so many standards, Rebecca is a success. She's a brilliant lawyer with two Ivy League colleges on her resume (though the reason there are two and not one is actually significant to her problems as it turns out.) And while the central motivation for her move to West Covina was unhealthy, it's a good thing she realized her life in New York was not what she wanted it to be.
She diagnosed the problem: she was unhappy, but chose a terrible prescription.
And there were two major factors at work: one being the relationships with her parents, particularly her father (not that my parents are perfect, but judging from how many characters on TV have issues with their dads, I've got to count myself lucky. Actually, I appreciate that Greg had a good relationship with his.) The other being the narratives that we love. And look, I think the shows I post about make it clear I have a pretty standard guy-nerd set of tastes, and you do not see me rushing off to every rom-com that makes it to the theaters.
But the toxic idealized narratives of the romantic comedy that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is all about tearing down can affect anyone, regardless of your gender or orientation. There's something so appealing about the idea that another person could fix you - that a mix of sex and affection and having someone to be with you all the time will allow your underlying problems to melt away. I've sure as hell daydreamed about women I've had crushes on coming in and breaking me out of whatever rut I'm in (the manic pixie dream girl trope is all about this,) but that sort of thinking gets you stuck in place.
So, it might be kind of out of left field, and maybe it's because I've been watching one show while bingeing the other (and I'm about to hit that serious show-withdrawal) but in a very odd way, there's a parallel with Legion here.
Stick with me.
In this week's episode of Legion (and spoiler alert for those of you in the CEGF/Legion Venn diagram,) David finally starts to learn to take some control of his power once he looks inward and personifies his rational mind as another version of himself. They talk things out, and doing so allows David to become grounded enough that he can break out of his, in this case literal, mental prison and actualize his powers.
What Rebecca Bunch needs is to step outside of herself, take a look, and learn to be happy with who she is in a relative vacuum - not by the standards of who she's currently attached to. And it should probably be a duet.
Of course, we can't go there yet (just as David can't have total control of his powers yet) because then the series would end. On the other hand, CEGF is also about subverting the idea that there are happy endings - having everything wrapped up neatly is another one of those toxic fantasies. And we have seen Rebecca make real progress, only for her to backslide.
But even with backslides, progress can be made. Rebecca needs to learn that the idea that all of her problems will disappear is something that just won't ever happen. But she can reduce them, and she can get herself into a place where she can deal with them as they come. And that's as good as it'll get, but it's not bad.
Thursday, March 23, 2017
The Expanse - The Weeping Somnambulist
One of the great features of the Expanse is the way that they tell small stories of individuals who aren't part of the main cast of characters in order to flesh out the world. And this week, we got the crew of the Weeping Somnambulist, a freighter bringing emergency supplies to the survivors on Ganymede.
As the episode begins, they're boarded by a pair of Martian marines who seem, like many of these patrols, to be nothing but abusive to the Belters they stop. They threaten to impound the ship despite there being no problems with its cargo or registration, at which point one of the married-couple crew tears off a marine's mask and we realize: oh hey, that's Holden. And the other is Amos.
Yes, as it turns out, the Roci crew are looking for a less conspicuous ride to get to Ganymede, where they'll take Prax to find his daughter and her conspiracy-linked pediatrician.
The fact that the Somnambulist becomes a shooting gallery at the end of the episode, with the husband dead in the crossfire, is not strictly speaking the fault of the Roci folks - they are boarded by the thugs who would have been there anyway, and it's likely that both of these innocent belters would have been murdered had Holden and Amos not stepped in, but it also shows how going after the big picture the way Holden and Co do, they're not going to be able to save everyone, and they shouldn't expect everyone to love them for it.
While the Roci gets to Ganymede, Bobbie Draper arrives on Earth.
The Martians have a culture of strength - compulsory military service and an ethic that detests those who are not working. Earth, as we and Bobbie learn from Avasarala, has a majority of unemployed citizens who live on government assistance. They aren't simply lazy - one does not get the impression that the average Earther can afford the home and clothes that Avasarala has - but Earth just doesn't have the opportunities that are found on a planet united in its goal to terraform.
But physically, Martians are weaker. It's just a simple fact: their physiology is not used to the high gravity and bright light on Earth (Mars is twice the distance from the sun as Earth, and thus would, I think, get a quarter the sunlight.) So as Bobbie arrives on planet that birthed her species, a fellow Martian collapses and vomits and she is nearly blinded by the glare of the sun (she declines to wear sunglasses as they've all been advised.)
She is there to testify at the peace summit where Erinwright and Avasarala are meeting with the guy I assume is the Martian ambassador in a lavish building somewhere on Central Park West.
Bobbie gives her testimony, but the Martian narrative singles out the Earth-born member of her crew as the cause of the incident, attempting to place the blame all on one marine who has to prove himself loyal to Mars by taking out a bunch of Earthers.
But when Avasarala calls her back in for questioning, Bobbie lets slip the detail about the soldier who wasn't wearing a suit. She returns to the official story soon enough, but you can bet your ass that Avasarala caught that detail.
Meanwhile, Avasarala's scientist friend has traveled to Venus to take a look at the impact crater Eros left on the planet's surface. After having some minor arguments with the Naval officer running the research ship, they arrive at the crater to find it full of biological activity.
So yeah, I don't think we're done with the Eros protomolecule. Bad for humanity, but if it means we could see Miller again in some form, I'd be pretty happy about that!
As the episode begins, they're boarded by a pair of Martian marines who seem, like many of these patrols, to be nothing but abusive to the Belters they stop. They threaten to impound the ship despite there being no problems with its cargo or registration, at which point one of the married-couple crew tears off a marine's mask and we realize: oh hey, that's Holden. And the other is Amos.
Yes, as it turns out, the Roci crew are looking for a less conspicuous ride to get to Ganymede, where they'll take Prax to find his daughter and her conspiracy-linked pediatrician.
The fact that the Somnambulist becomes a shooting gallery at the end of the episode, with the husband dead in the crossfire, is not strictly speaking the fault of the Roci folks - they are boarded by the thugs who would have been there anyway, and it's likely that both of these innocent belters would have been murdered had Holden and Amos not stepped in, but it also shows how going after the big picture the way Holden and Co do, they're not going to be able to save everyone, and they shouldn't expect everyone to love them for it.
While the Roci gets to Ganymede, Bobbie Draper arrives on Earth.
The Martians have a culture of strength - compulsory military service and an ethic that detests those who are not working. Earth, as we and Bobbie learn from Avasarala, has a majority of unemployed citizens who live on government assistance. They aren't simply lazy - one does not get the impression that the average Earther can afford the home and clothes that Avasarala has - but Earth just doesn't have the opportunities that are found on a planet united in its goal to terraform.
But physically, Martians are weaker. It's just a simple fact: their physiology is not used to the high gravity and bright light on Earth (Mars is twice the distance from the sun as Earth, and thus would, I think, get a quarter the sunlight.) So as Bobbie arrives on planet that birthed her species, a fellow Martian collapses and vomits and she is nearly blinded by the glare of the sun (she declines to wear sunglasses as they've all been advised.)
She is there to testify at the peace summit where Erinwright and Avasarala are meeting with the guy I assume is the Martian ambassador in a lavish building somewhere on Central Park West.
Bobbie gives her testimony, but the Martian narrative singles out the Earth-born member of her crew as the cause of the incident, attempting to place the blame all on one marine who has to prove himself loyal to Mars by taking out a bunch of Earthers.
But when Avasarala calls her back in for questioning, Bobbie lets slip the detail about the soldier who wasn't wearing a suit. She returns to the official story soon enough, but you can bet your ass that Avasarala caught that detail.
Meanwhile, Avasarala's scientist friend has traveled to Venus to take a look at the impact crater Eros left on the planet's surface. After having some minor arguments with the Naval officer running the research ship, they arrive at the crater to find it full of biological activity.
So yeah, I don't think we're done with the Eros protomolecule. Bad for humanity, but if it means we could see Miller again in some form, I'd be pretty happy about that!
Legion Chapter Seven
Legion's style is so strong that we've gotten pretty far into the season without any real exposition.
I've often posited that Fantasy and Science Fiction are genres for people who love exposition. Largely thanks to Anthony Stewart Head, some of the best times on Buffy the Vampire Slayer were when Giles was cracking open some obscure book and explaining to the Scooby gang (weird now thinking that Sarah Michelle Gellar was in that live-action Scooby Doo movie) what the rules were with the demonic monster of the week.
Legion is set in the X-Men universe (and of course the comics are in the larger Marvel universe, but Fox and Disney have a legal wall between them, which is why we've seen two Quicksilvers in recent years) but for most of its run, the show has felt independent of them. Things have existed in a hazy, hallucinogenic vacuum that allows for Jemaine Clement's beatnik Oliver and a struggle against Division Three by a vaguely-defined group at Summerland that does not feel at all like X-Men, even if it's a group of good-guy mutants.
In chapter seven, we actually do get some solid connections. Cary and Oliver discuss what Lenny actually is, and we get confirmation that the parasite is in fact Ahmal Farouk, the Shadow King (though I'm given to understand that technically Farouk is just the previous victim of the parasitic Shadow King.)
David, while trapped in the mind-coffin Lenny sent him to last episode, manifests his rational thoughts as another version of himself (allowing Dan Stevens to use his actual English accent - at least I think that's his natural accent.) We learn that Lenny (I prefer to refer to the parasite by that name and by the female pronoun out of deference to Aubrey Plaza's amazing performance) is trying to get Amy to reveal something about the night David arrived in their home, and in that flashback we get a pretty clear confirmation that David's biological father is truly Charles Xavier.
Discussing things with his rational mind, David susses out (or at least speculates in a way that we can probably expect to be accurate) that Lenny is this parasite, and that his father (whom David gives a hilariously on-point Patrick Stewart accent) must have fought. Through David, the Shadow King would be able to feed on the world, but Lenny needs his power, and David is beginning to realize that power.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Summerland crew manage to break through their imprisonment and hatch a plan to rescue David and Syd from the bullets gradually heading toward them. Syd and Kerry are nearly killed by the Eye, and then they're confronted by Lenny in one of the weirdest and most awesome moments in the show - when everything becomes a silent movie for... well, some reason.
Lenny, apparently bored of the Eye, crumples him up in a horrifically disturbing way, and then turns her attention to Syd and Kerry, but not before Rudy - who has been bleeding out upstairs all this time after being stabbed and impersonated by the Eye - tackles her and rescues the two women.
But ultimately, it is Cary's device and David's nascent control over his power that allows him to imprison Lenny and take control of the situation. As everyone is restored to their bodies and time begins to move forward again, David catches the bullets heading toward them in his hand as if they were traveling at a leisurely pace.
Lenny appears trapped, and the crew is ready to go home, taking Rudy on a stretcher.
Things are mostly working out, and even Oliver has escaped the astral plane (though he is still missing his memories) but as David and Cary head to the lab to see if they can find a more permanent solution than the high-tech wreath that's isolating the Shadow King in his head, Division Three shows up, along with the interviewer who was only partially flash-fried, and who is now pretty happy to see everyone but David dead.
And in the anger over this threat, Lenny is starting to crack her way out of her own mind-coffin.
We have one more episode this season, but I have some suspicions about what might go down.
Apparently in the comics, the way David works is that he has multiple personalities, each with their own powers. Might David absorb his own parasite, turning Lenny into a useful (though dangerous) aspect of his own psyche? If it means keeping Aubrey Plaza in the cast, I'm all for it. We've seen that when Lenny's in control, David can annihilate the likes of Division Three with ease (an almost cartoonish ease) - something that the current situation would probably call for. But even if the Shadow King itself is killed by David absorbing him, it means that David would carry this vindictive, evil aspect with him forever.
Which would suck for him, but set up great stories for the future.
I've often posited that Fantasy and Science Fiction are genres for people who love exposition. Largely thanks to Anthony Stewart Head, some of the best times on Buffy the Vampire Slayer were when Giles was cracking open some obscure book and explaining to the Scooby gang (weird now thinking that Sarah Michelle Gellar was in that live-action Scooby Doo movie) what the rules were with the demonic monster of the week.
Legion is set in the X-Men universe (and of course the comics are in the larger Marvel universe, but Fox and Disney have a legal wall between them, which is why we've seen two Quicksilvers in recent years) but for most of its run, the show has felt independent of them. Things have existed in a hazy, hallucinogenic vacuum that allows for Jemaine Clement's beatnik Oliver and a struggle against Division Three by a vaguely-defined group at Summerland that does not feel at all like X-Men, even if it's a group of good-guy mutants.
In chapter seven, we actually do get some solid connections. Cary and Oliver discuss what Lenny actually is, and we get confirmation that the parasite is in fact Ahmal Farouk, the Shadow King (though I'm given to understand that technically Farouk is just the previous victim of the parasitic Shadow King.)
David, while trapped in the mind-coffin Lenny sent him to last episode, manifests his rational thoughts as another version of himself (allowing Dan Stevens to use his actual English accent - at least I think that's his natural accent.) We learn that Lenny (I prefer to refer to the parasite by that name and by the female pronoun out of deference to Aubrey Plaza's amazing performance) is trying to get Amy to reveal something about the night David arrived in their home, and in that flashback we get a pretty clear confirmation that David's biological father is truly Charles Xavier.
Discussing things with his rational mind, David susses out (or at least speculates in a way that we can probably expect to be accurate) that Lenny is this parasite, and that his father (whom David gives a hilariously on-point Patrick Stewart accent) must have fought. Through David, the Shadow King would be able to feed on the world, but Lenny needs his power, and David is beginning to realize that power.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Summerland crew manage to break through their imprisonment and hatch a plan to rescue David and Syd from the bullets gradually heading toward them. Syd and Kerry are nearly killed by the Eye, and then they're confronted by Lenny in one of the weirdest and most awesome moments in the show - when everything becomes a silent movie for... well, some reason.
Lenny, apparently bored of the Eye, crumples him up in a horrifically disturbing way, and then turns her attention to Syd and Kerry, but not before Rudy - who has been bleeding out upstairs all this time after being stabbed and impersonated by the Eye - tackles her and rescues the two women.
But ultimately, it is Cary's device and David's nascent control over his power that allows him to imprison Lenny and take control of the situation. As everyone is restored to their bodies and time begins to move forward again, David catches the bullets heading toward them in his hand as if they were traveling at a leisurely pace.
Lenny appears trapped, and the crew is ready to go home, taking Rudy on a stretcher.
Things are mostly working out, and even Oliver has escaped the astral plane (though he is still missing his memories) but as David and Cary head to the lab to see if they can find a more permanent solution than the high-tech wreath that's isolating the Shadow King in his head, Division Three shows up, along with the interviewer who was only partially flash-fried, and who is now pretty happy to see everyone but David dead.
And in the anger over this threat, Lenny is starting to crack her way out of her own mind-coffin.
We have one more episode this season, but I have some suspicions about what might go down.
Apparently in the comics, the way David works is that he has multiple personalities, each with their own powers. Might David absorb his own parasite, turning Lenny into a useful (though dangerous) aspect of his own psyche? If it means keeping Aubrey Plaza in the cast, I'm all for it. We've seen that when Lenny's in control, David can annihilate the likes of Division Three with ease (an almost cartoonish ease) - something that the current situation would probably call for. But even if the Shadow King itself is killed by David absorbing him, it means that David would carry this vindictive, evil aspect with him forever.
Which would suck for him, but set up great stories for the future.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
I'm late to the party here, but I'm glad I came.
As someone who is not where he wishes he was professionally, I do have a certain jealousy toward people who have passed through similar orbits as mine and gone on to do respected, famous work. Renaissance man Donald Glover, for instance, was in the same department as me at Tisch (though I think three years ahead, so if I met him, it was only in passing during my freshman year.) Anyway, add Rachel Bloom to the list of super-talented people who went to school with me (though I think she was in the acting program) of whom I am super-jealous but also vaguely proud (not that I ever knew her personally.) And the fact that she's a year younger... oh hell, it's not a healthy way to think about those things.
So speaking of unhealthy ways of thinking about things (all that was totally just a segue and totally not a confession of a real problem I have...):
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a show co-created, executive produced, and starring Rachel Bloom. It is about a successful New York lawyer named Rebecca Bunch who abandons her life there to move to West Covina, California (an LA suburb) after discovering that her summer camp boyfriend from her teenage years Josh Chan lives there.
Rebecca is a conundrum, full of contradictions. She is well-meaning, but she has deep-rooted problems that drive her to utterly absurd and sometimes criminal lengths. In fact, her pursuit of Josh Chan is, well, stalking.
But this show is deeply empathetic. In fact, the show's premise is all about subverting its title, which the opening theme (more on music in a moment) calls out as a sexist term. Actually, I think a lot of the early marketing sort of leaned in to the sexist portrayal of Rebecca that the show is ultimately about subverting.
So not only do we see where Rebecca's coming from, and ultimately want what's best for her (which I'm thinking at the end of season one is for her to take some time not trying to be in a relationship at all and working on standing on her own two feet) but we also see how every character is messed up in their own ways.
Greg, Josh's best friend who is presented through much of the season as a far more viable romantic interest for Rebecca, is himself a big pile of problems, such as his affected apathy which is actually a way to cover up for his fear of failure (as long as he doesn't try, he can convince himself that if he was trying he'd succeed in every endeavor, something that does ring a few familiar bells for this blogger.) Paula, Rebecca's new best friend and Josh-stalking enabler, is so obsessed with living through Rebecca's delusions vicariously that she winds up being kind of terrifying, all because her own life is so mundane and dull.
And even Josh, who is so idealized in Rebecca's mind, is messed up in his own ways. He's in denial about the fact that he's an adult, so focused on retaining the comforts of his teenage years - sticking with his high school girlfriend (who domineers him) and insisting on keeping his other relationships in a blissful stasis.
In the first season we do already see some positive movements - Rebecca's new boss, for instance, realizes he's bisexual (and man, how often do you see a male bisexual character on a network TV show?) and seems to mostly come out of the season in a better place than where he started. For all of Rebecca's hurricane-like effect on her social circle in West Covina, the net effect might actually wind up being a positive.
And in the midst of all this character drama, we have an incredibly funny show that is also a musical.
Rachel Bloom made a name for herself doing viral music videos on YouTube, and is a huge musical theater nerd, and the show's cast is filled with Broadway veterans. So what we get are some inspired music numbers - about one or two an episode - that are often the funniest part of a very funny show (also sometimes the most devastating, like a number called "You Stupid Bitch.) This show is all about subversion, so for example, in the first episode there's a number called "The Sexy Getting Ready Song" in which the rapper who comes in at the bridge realizes how absurdly complicated and painful the process is for women to conform to our society's standards of beauty that he has a serious moment of reflection and then spends the end-of-episode tag calling up women he's dated and apologizing for perpetuating the patriarchal double-standards.
The music is kinda-sorta explained as Rebecca's imagination (we hear her singing "for real" occasionally and let's just say Rebecca is not Rachel Bloom) except that if that's the case, the other characters must do the same thing.
I've got to confess: while I was absolutely a theater kid in high school, I wasn't much of a musical theater fanatic. I was never one to listen to musical theater scores as my primary listening music (I think I had the soundtrack to Urinetown, but it wasn't a go-to CD like Californication.) But I tend to love people who love musical theater, and this show is so clever with its musical numbers that I can't help but enjoy them.
Obviously there's a lot more left to the show that I haven't seen (there's a whole season two on Netflix that I haven't watched yet,) but the characters are so well-drawn, the writing so clever, and the performances so fantastic that I'm eager to see more.
As someone who is not where he wishes he was professionally, I do have a certain jealousy toward people who have passed through similar orbits as mine and gone on to do respected, famous work. Renaissance man Donald Glover, for instance, was in the same department as me at Tisch (though I think three years ahead, so if I met him, it was only in passing during my freshman year.) Anyway, add Rachel Bloom to the list of super-talented people who went to school with me (though I think she was in the acting program) of whom I am super-jealous but also vaguely proud (not that I ever knew her personally.) And the fact that she's a year younger... oh hell, it's not a healthy way to think about those things.
So speaking of unhealthy ways of thinking about things (all that was totally just a segue and totally not a confession of a real problem I have...):
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a show co-created, executive produced, and starring Rachel Bloom. It is about a successful New York lawyer named Rebecca Bunch who abandons her life there to move to West Covina, California (an LA suburb) after discovering that her summer camp boyfriend from her teenage years Josh Chan lives there.
Rebecca is a conundrum, full of contradictions. She is well-meaning, but she has deep-rooted problems that drive her to utterly absurd and sometimes criminal lengths. In fact, her pursuit of Josh Chan is, well, stalking.
But this show is deeply empathetic. In fact, the show's premise is all about subverting its title, which the opening theme (more on music in a moment) calls out as a sexist term. Actually, I think a lot of the early marketing sort of leaned in to the sexist portrayal of Rebecca that the show is ultimately about subverting.
So not only do we see where Rebecca's coming from, and ultimately want what's best for her (which I'm thinking at the end of season one is for her to take some time not trying to be in a relationship at all and working on standing on her own two feet) but we also see how every character is messed up in their own ways.
Greg, Josh's best friend who is presented through much of the season as a far more viable romantic interest for Rebecca, is himself a big pile of problems, such as his affected apathy which is actually a way to cover up for his fear of failure (as long as he doesn't try, he can convince himself that if he was trying he'd succeed in every endeavor, something that does ring a few familiar bells for this blogger.) Paula, Rebecca's new best friend and Josh-stalking enabler, is so obsessed with living through Rebecca's delusions vicariously that she winds up being kind of terrifying, all because her own life is so mundane and dull.
And even Josh, who is so idealized in Rebecca's mind, is messed up in his own ways. He's in denial about the fact that he's an adult, so focused on retaining the comforts of his teenage years - sticking with his high school girlfriend (who domineers him) and insisting on keeping his other relationships in a blissful stasis.
In the first season we do already see some positive movements - Rebecca's new boss, for instance, realizes he's bisexual (and man, how often do you see a male bisexual character on a network TV show?) and seems to mostly come out of the season in a better place than where he started. For all of Rebecca's hurricane-like effect on her social circle in West Covina, the net effect might actually wind up being a positive.
And in the midst of all this character drama, we have an incredibly funny show that is also a musical.
Rachel Bloom made a name for herself doing viral music videos on YouTube, and is a huge musical theater nerd, and the show's cast is filled with Broadway veterans. So what we get are some inspired music numbers - about one or two an episode - that are often the funniest part of a very funny show (also sometimes the most devastating, like a number called "You Stupid Bitch.) This show is all about subversion, so for example, in the first episode there's a number called "The Sexy Getting Ready Song" in which the rapper who comes in at the bridge realizes how absurdly complicated and painful the process is for women to conform to our society's standards of beauty that he has a serious moment of reflection and then spends the end-of-episode tag calling up women he's dated and apologizing for perpetuating the patriarchal double-standards.
The music is kinda-sorta explained as Rebecca's imagination (we hear her singing "for real" occasionally and let's just say Rebecca is not Rachel Bloom) except that if that's the case, the other characters must do the same thing.
I've got to confess: while I was absolutely a theater kid in high school, I wasn't much of a musical theater fanatic. I was never one to listen to musical theater scores as my primary listening music (I think I had the soundtrack to Urinetown, but it wasn't a go-to CD like Californication.) But I tend to love people who love musical theater, and this show is so clever with its musical numbers that I can't help but enjoy them.
Obviously there's a lot more left to the show that I haven't seen (there's a whole season two on Netflix that I haven't watched yet,) but the characters are so well-drawn, the writing so clever, and the performances so fantastic that I'm eager to see more.
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