It's a good thing I got most of the way through this before we started watching season 4 of The Expanse, which is likely to be my next post's subject.
My familiarity with The Witcher is primarily from playing the third game - about half of it (I really enjoyed the game but I got Bloodborne and that kind of took over my PS4 for a long time.)
Of course, while a casual observer might think Netflix poured a bunch of money into a video game adaptation, the new show is, in fact, the adaptation of the 1990s Polish fantasy novels upon which the games are based. It's not actually the first adaptation, as there were movies and I believe a TV show about 20 years ago in Poland.
But the games presumably gave the series enough name recognition for Netflix to make this show.
To cut to the chase:
I am enjoying the show quite a bit. I have only one episode left in its first season. Naturally, as a gritty, dark, and morally ambiguous fantasy show, The Witcher is going to draw comparisons to Game of Thrones, and I don't think that's even unfair. I'm sure that the success of GoT, not to mention its end leaving a big vacuum behind, were factors in the creation of this show.
But The Witcher is a different subgenre of fantasy - while GoT is Epic Fantasy, concerned with the broader politics and fate of kingdoms, that stuff mostly sits in the background for The Witcher, in which we follow the eponymous Geralt of Rivia, as well as the sorceress Yennefer of Vengeberg, through their personal journeys and trials. The show's third protagonist, Princess Cirilla, is the one whose story hints at a grander, epic narrative, but most of the season sees her simply fleeing after the horrific destruction of her home.
The plot is thus more capable of being episodic, even as the larger narrative develops over time. Geralt's story in particular is built to be episodic - based on short stories, but also built into his profession.
In this world, Witchers are monster-hunters. They travel from town to town and accept bounties to destroy otherworldly beasts. To do so, they've undergone mutations that have enhanced their strength and reflexes, as well as allowed them to drink performance-enhancing potions that would poison a normal person. On top of that, they have a bit of magic as well.
And that's one thing that's refreshing after eight seasons of Game of Thrones - this is a magic-saturated world. It's just as gritty and dark as Westeros (but minus any Stark-like family with a really strong moral code) but you do get to see sorcerers and monsters and such. I think the showrunners of GoT tried to dial down the magic of an already magic-sparse series, and it's nice to see a show that embraces the fact that, yes, this is undeniably fantasy.
Is it is clever as A Song of Ice and Fire?
That's, perhaps, a more difficult question to answer. I suspect no, but don't take that as a damning critique.
Another point of comparison: The Witcher revels in its license to show off nasty blood and gore as well as tons of naked ladies. GoT did this a ton, particularly in its early seasons, when it seemed that there was an anxiety that audiences might be bored by the fantasy exposition, and they distracted from this with tits. I don't know if a similar anxiety filled the producers of the Witcher, but to be fair, both series' gritty setting also strike back against, for example, the chaste sexlessness of Lord of the Rings.
There's a deep cynicism toward institutions throughout the show. Geralt was put through a torturous upbringing to turn him into a cold killing machine, Yennefer saw her friends sacrificed to empower the magic school that then wound up essentially pimping her out to various kings, and Ciri, who seems to have grown up thinking of her grandmother's kingdom as your classical "good fairytale kingdom," is forced to confront a far darker world that was, in part, made dark by her own beloved grandmother.
At the same time, the gifts that make Geralt and Yennefer such powerful players in this world, despite their fierce desire for independence, also leave them cold and lonely. This is a show about people who need to make a family for themselves, but the classical institutions that ought to provide that are failing utterly.
More obscure is the grander, supernatural plot at foot. We know that Ciri is more important than just being the only surviving heir to the throne of Cintra - the show portrays Cintra as pretty much no more important than any of the other northern kingdoms. But Ciri has some deep and mysterious magical power in her, suggesting the world's fate is at stake depending on what happens to her.
One thing that a viewer might not get at first is that the show is most definitely not in linear order. Geralt and Yennefer's stories may or may not be happening at the same time (I suspect Yennefer's starts at the earliest, though Geralt's well past his origins story when we first meet him) but it's only in the penultimate episode that we see Geralt's story catch up with the beginning of Ciri's - the fact that Geralt is actually there for what happens in the first episode colors those events in a rather exciting way, though given that Ciri has spent a season of the show on the run, things are unlikely to truly sync up until maybe even the end of the finale - which might be a little later than I'd have chosen to delay things. Given how important Geralt and Ciri's surrogate father-daughter bond is to the story, I wonder if maybe this could have happened earlier (though a second season makes me feel less worried about this.)
As a fix for gritty, dark fantasy, this is a really great thing to get into. The monsters are mostly pretty cool-looking (though one cursed knight with a hedgehog-like appearance feels a bit like a low-tier Buffy monster, which is unfortunate given the important part he plays in the narrative) and the characters are complex and interesting.
But fair warning: the song Geralt's bard friend Jaskier writes for him in an early episode is kind of dumb but will definitely get stuck in your head, which, to be fair, is rather appropriate for something written by Jaskier.
Tuesday, December 24, 2019
Monday, December 23, 2019
The Rise of Skywalker
Right there in the title is an odd choice: I hope we're past the statute of limitations on the previous entry in the Star Wars saga, The Last Jedi, because here's the big thing: at the end of Last Jedi, Luke dies, becoming one with the Force and trusting the legacy of the Jedi with Rey, whose personal ancestry wasn't important, but who carried within her a connection to the Force that could save a new generation.
I liked the Last Jedi, and the complaints about it hardened my admiration for it. I grew up on Star Wars - there was a period in late elementary school when I was watching two movies a day - I'd star with A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, and the next day I'd be watching Return of the Jedi and A New Hope again. There's a reason these movies are such cultural touchstones, and they are certainly a part of the mythological upbringing that formed my own fantasy tastes.
But I've come a long way since I was ten in terms of the complexity I want from my art. Star Wars worked so well in the first place largely because it was a pure distillation of Campbell's Hero's Journey. But of the original trilogy, the one I liked least as a kid but now recognize as the most interesting and effective movie, is The Empire Strikes Back. This is the one in which the Rebels are forced to flee, Han is captured, and Luke loses his big lightsaber duel with Darth Vader, only to realize that Vader has just been toying with him in an effort to corrupt and recruit him.
And I think it's a popular consensus that Empire was the best of them. It expanded a rather threadbare universe into something that felt lived-in and fleshed out.
So yes, I think that in the long run, if we're still talking about these sequels, Last Jedi will be considered the best. But that's just, like, my opinion, man.
My overall take on Rise of Skywalker is that it felt like this was the movie JJ Abrams had been planning (except that he was also banking on Carrie Fischer being alive) for IX when they made the Force Awakens. So I can't exactly fault him for making this one, and relying on the big plot twists it had.
The thing I cannot understand is how they let Rian Johnson make his daring, subversive, and audacious Last Jedi if they were planning on basically ignoring the ideas it brought up.
Let's go into spoiler space:
I liked the Last Jedi, and the complaints about it hardened my admiration for it. I grew up on Star Wars - there was a period in late elementary school when I was watching two movies a day - I'd star with A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, and the next day I'd be watching Return of the Jedi and A New Hope again. There's a reason these movies are such cultural touchstones, and they are certainly a part of the mythological upbringing that formed my own fantasy tastes.
But I've come a long way since I was ten in terms of the complexity I want from my art. Star Wars worked so well in the first place largely because it was a pure distillation of Campbell's Hero's Journey. But of the original trilogy, the one I liked least as a kid but now recognize as the most interesting and effective movie, is The Empire Strikes Back. This is the one in which the Rebels are forced to flee, Han is captured, and Luke loses his big lightsaber duel with Darth Vader, only to realize that Vader has just been toying with him in an effort to corrupt and recruit him.
And I think it's a popular consensus that Empire was the best of them. It expanded a rather threadbare universe into something that felt lived-in and fleshed out.
So yes, I think that in the long run, if we're still talking about these sequels, Last Jedi will be considered the best. But that's just, like, my opinion, man.
My overall take on Rise of Skywalker is that it felt like this was the movie JJ Abrams had been planning (except that he was also banking on Carrie Fischer being alive) for IX when they made the Force Awakens. So I can't exactly fault him for making this one, and relying on the big plot twists it had.
The thing I cannot understand is how they let Rian Johnson make his daring, subversive, and audacious Last Jedi if they were planning on basically ignoring the ideas it brought up.
Let's go into spoiler space:
Monday, December 16, 2019
Knives Out
Well, I thankfully managed to go see Knives Out while it is still in theaters. Directed by Rian Johnson, it's an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery with Daniel Craig playing the Poirot/Marple role - a charming and eccentric character named Benoit Blanc.
The story is about the family of Harlan Trombley, played by the legendary Christopher Plummer, a famous and successful mystery writer whose fortune has allowed his family to live comfortably under the illusion that they are all self-made successes.
On the night of his 85th birthday, Harlan ascends to his office, and when his housekeeper comes to bring him breakfast in the morning, he's dead, having apparently slashed his own throat.
As the police work on finishing up the investigation, a mysterious detective appears - one Benoit Blanc (Craig,) who seems to have some special insights into the tangled mess of a family.
Naturally, this is a mystery story, and is thus the demesne of twists and turns. I won't go too far into it, but one of the fascinating twists of the movie is that the circumstances of Harlan's death actually become quite apparent pretty early in the film. One might imagine that it then takes the form of dramatic irony - where we see the killer attempt to cover it up from the detective, the latter becoming something of a heroic antagonist.
But this relatively precedented subversion of the mystery genre is itself subverted once it becomes evident that there are pieces missing from the story we're told.
I can't say that I found the final twist particularly surprising - more a competently done unraveling of the engima. But it is well-acted, well-directed, and also has an allegorical underpinning that I find very interesting.
Let's go into the spoilers.
The story is about the family of Harlan Trombley, played by the legendary Christopher Plummer, a famous and successful mystery writer whose fortune has allowed his family to live comfortably under the illusion that they are all self-made successes.
On the night of his 85th birthday, Harlan ascends to his office, and when his housekeeper comes to bring him breakfast in the morning, he's dead, having apparently slashed his own throat.
As the police work on finishing up the investigation, a mysterious detective appears - one Benoit Blanc (Craig,) who seems to have some special insights into the tangled mess of a family.
Naturally, this is a mystery story, and is thus the demesne of twists and turns. I won't go too far into it, but one of the fascinating twists of the movie is that the circumstances of Harlan's death actually become quite apparent pretty early in the film. One might imagine that it then takes the form of dramatic irony - where we see the killer attempt to cover it up from the detective, the latter becoming something of a heroic antagonist.
But this relatively precedented subversion of the mystery genre is itself subverted once it becomes evident that there are pieces missing from the story we're told.
I can't say that I found the final twist particularly surprising - more a competently done unraveling of the engima. But it is well-acted, well-directed, and also has an allegorical underpinning that I find very interesting.
Let's go into the spoilers.
Wednesday, December 11, 2019
Franchise Filmmaking and the Shrinking of the Trilogy
Sequels have been a thing for a long time. While the historical reality of Homer as a single individual is dubious, the Odyssey could be considered a sequel to the Iliad (though one that shifts the focus not only to a relatively minor character from the first story but also changes the scope and tone of the story profoundly.)
If we want to talk about modern franchise filmmaking, one obviously needs to consider Star Wars.
In general, and even well after Star Wars came out, sequels tended to be sort of unplanned. You have a movie that does well - often, but not always in an action/sci-fi/fantasy genre, or comedy - and given its success, studios decide to make a sequel to cash in on the good will that the first movie inspired in the audience.
Often, the results are underwhelming and disappointing. If the filmmakers can't come up with an interesting new conflict to build the story around, they often just rehash things that came before. The first Austin Powers movie, for instance, felt really exciting and new (even as a send-up of 1960s spy movies) but its sequels relied more and more on schtick and variations on earlier jokes.
Star Wars, to my knowledge, was the first film franchise to be built to be a series - which is perhaps not entirely accurate. I believe the original film, which retroactively was called "A New Hope" when it came to video, was meant to stand on its own. It's remarkable, watching that film in isolation, how vaguely sketched the Empire and Rebellion is.
But the insane success of the original Star Wars in 1977 led to both The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi to get the go-ahead, and in 1980 and 1982, the rest of the original trilogy was completed.
Indeed, you could certainly argue that Return of the Jedi committed some of those "sequel sins" by rehashing the threat of a new Death Star. Return of the Jedi was, I think, the first Star Wars film to be pretty divisive (to those who already liked the series - given how Star Wars and Jaws a few years before kind of heralded the death of New Hollywood, a lot of people were pretty upset with it already.)
The thing is, Jedi closed a trilogy that felt massive and epic in scope. We watched Luke go from naive farm boy to Jedi Master and push his corrupted father to a last-minute redemption, all while we saw the great, evil, fascistic Empire collapse in a pyrotechnic display of heroism.
Star Wars set an expectation for franchise filmmaking that would not actually really take hold until about 20 years later. The release of the massively popular Harry Potter books led to a commitment by Warner Brothers to adapt all seven novels before the series was even finished. At around the same time, Peter Jackson unveiled his epic adaptation of the quintessential fantasy series, the Lord of the Rings.
Jackson initially pitched Rings as a two-film series, wary that a studio would be hesitant to commit to doing three films. However, in what was a shock in the 90s when it happened but now seems like standard practice, New Line eagerly encouraged him to flesh it out into a trilogy.
Unlike Star Wars or the Harry Potter movies, Lord of the Rings was produced as a single massive film, with over a year of principle photography. The result, of course, was a remarkably consistent feel, tone, and sense of world that spanned the trilogy.
And the other result was that the films came out in rapid succession. For my last three years of High School, every December we would get a new Lord of the Rings movie. Between that and Harry Potter, fantasy fiction became far more popular, and led to much less successful adaptations of the Chronicles of Narnia, the Golden Compass, and imitators like Percy Jackson. Less than a decade after Return of the King came out (I only just now noticed how the last entry in both Lord of the Rings and the original Star Wars trilogy are "Return of the X") we got Game of Thrones.
But as we saw with Harry Potter, the three-movie model was no longer the biggest game in town.
Indeed, Star Wars, by that point, had expanded into a larger franchise, with the prequel trilogy starting in 1999 with Episode One: The Phantom Menace.
The prequels are a thorny subject for internet rantings. As a 13-year-old when the first of them came out, I wanted them so badly to be good that I convinced myself they were. Indeed, it seems a lot of people did. But as the hype over new Star Wars movies gave way to an examination of the oddly amateurish storytelling in these massive-budgeted effects spectaculars, a bit of the magic was diluted.
Sure, there were people who were pissed about Ewok teddy bears defeating the Galactic Empire back in the day, and indeed there are people now who defend the prequels, but it certainly complicated Star Wars' legacy.
The thing is, Star Wars grew from three to six films.
But if we're going to talk franchises, we have to talk about Marvel.
Blasting onto the scene with 2008's Iron Man, the combination of Jon Favreau's playful direction and Robert Downey Jr.'s pitch-perfect Tony Stark, Marvel Studios hit the ground running with a B-tier superhero that, thanks to these films, would emerge as definitively A-tier.
The moment, however, that things took off was the first of the now-famous post-credits scenes, in which megastar Samuel L. Jackson, who had not yet appeared in the movie, showed up to talk to Tony about the Avengers Initiative, and the potential of the MCU first started to unfold.
Marvel's take on franchise filmmaking has been transformative, and insanely successful. But it's also something no one else has managed to pull off. We've seen longrunning series - how many James Bond movies are there? But they've always followed a throughline - a single protagonist, or a single ongoing story, like that of the Skywalker bloodline.
Marvel essentially created a franchise of franchises. Iron Man had an entire trilogy to himself, dealing with corporate intrigue and technological one-upsmanship. Meanwhile, Thor could have his science-fantasy mythological conflicts and Captain America his explorations on patriotism and ethical values. But part of the joy of these movies was always that you got to see them all get together. While Thor is fighting his evil death-god sister, Iron Man is preventing some super-soldiers from taking over the country, and Captain America is uncovering a vast conspiracy, they can all get together to fight aliens together.
There are 22 freaking movies that have come out from Marvel in just eleven years. There are trilogies and quadrilogies within that greater franchise, and the characters aren't even limited to their own distinct movies and the Avengers crossovers - Tony Stark is a big part of Spiderman Homecoming, for example.
The massive success of Marvel has, I think, been well-earned. Some of the early outings were mediocre, but by this point, you're pretty much guaranteed to have fun with them if you're willing to buy into the heightened superhero world. But it has done a strange thing when it comes to franchise filmmaking (not to mention other kinds of filmmaking.)
This month, we're seeing the release of The Rise of Skywalker, the third movie in the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Since The Force Awakens came out in 2015, there have been four Star Wars movies - essentially one a year. While two were one-offs - the shockingly and refreshingly bleak Rogue One and the callback-obsessed fanservice prequel Solo - we're now getting the conclusion of this sequel trilogy, with the story of Rey and Kylo Ren coming to its climax.
But it feels weirdly quick, doesn't it?
I mean, on its surface, it's not. There's just almost as much time that has passed between Force Awakens and Rise of Skywalker as there was between Star Wars and Return of the Jedi. We've had two long movies to watch this story develop.
But in this day and age, we expect to have more time with a character.
By the time Robert Downey Jr.'s last scene as Tony Stark ends, we've had nine whole movies in which he's played a major role - his trilogy, the Avengers quadrilogy, and major parts of both Captain America: Civil War and Spiderman: Homecoming.
There's a whole other post to write about the popularity of more serialized television storytelling that has grown in the last 20 years, but even in our movies, we're getting accustomed to having a ton of time to get to know a character before we see their story conclude.
But that leaves us in this strange position. The Rise of Skywalker should be a massive event - the conclusion to an epic trilogy that has been going on for five years. But it doesn't really feel like that, does it?
If we want to talk about modern franchise filmmaking, one obviously needs to consider Star Wars.
In general, and even well after Star Wars came out, sequels tended to be sort of unplanned. You have a movie that does well - often, but not always in an action/sci-fi/fantasy genre, or comedy - and given its success, studios decide to make a sequel to cash in on the good will that the first movie inspired in the audience.
Often, the results are underwhelming and disappointing. If the filmmakers can't come up with an interesting new conflict to build the story around, they often just rehash things that came before. The first Austin Powers movie, for instance, felt really exciting and new (even as a send-up of 1960s spy movies) but its sequels relied more and more on schtick and variations on earlier jokes.
Star Wars, to my knowledge, was the first film franchise to be built to be a series - which is perhaps not entirely accurate. I believe the original film, which retroactively was called "A New Hope" when it came to video, was meant to stand on its own. It's remarkable, watching that film in isolation, how vaguely sketched the Empire and Rebellion is.
But the insane success of the original Star Wars in 1977 led to both The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi to get the go-ahead, and in 1980 and 1982, the rest of the original trilogy was completed.
Indeed, you could certainly argue that Return of the Jedi committed some of those "sequel sins" by rehashing the threat of a new Death Star. Return of the Jedi was, I think, the first Star Wars film to be pretty divisive (to those who already liked the series - given how Star Wars and Jaws a few years before kind of heralded the death of New Hollywood, a lot of people were pretty upset with it already.)
The thing is, Jedi closed a trilogy that felt massive and epic in scope. We watched Luke go from naive farm boy to Jedi Master and push his corrupted father to a last-minute redemption, all while we saw the great, evil, fascistic Empire collapse in a pyrotechnic display of heroism.
Star Wars set an expectation for franchise filmmaking that would not actually really take hold until about 20 years later. The release of the massively popular Harry Potter books led to a commitment by Warner Brothers to adapt all seven novels before the series was even finished. At around the same time, Peter Jackson unveiled his epic adaptation of the quintessential fantasy series, the Lord of the Rings.
Jackson initially pitched Rings as a two-film series, wary that a studio would be hesitant to commit to doing three films. However, in what was a shock in the 90s when it happened but now seems like standard practice, New Line eagerly encouraged him to flesh it out into a trilogy.
Unlike Star Wars or the Harry Potter movies, Lord of the Rings was produced as a single massive film, with over a year of principle photography. The result, of course, was a remarkably consistent feel, tone, and sense of world that spanned the trilogy.
And the other result was that the films came out in rapid succession. For my last three years of High School, every December we would get a new Lord of the Rings movie. Between that and Harry Potter, fantasy fiction became far more popular, and led to much less successful adaptations of the Chronicles of Narnia, the Golden Compass, and imitators like Percy Jackson. Less than a decade after Return of the King came out (I only just now noticed how the last entry in both Lord of the Rings and the original Star Wars trilogy are "Return of the X") we got Game of Thrones.
But as we saw with Harry Potter, the three-movie model was no longer the biggest game in town.
Indeed, Star Wars, by that point, had expanded into a larger franchise, with the prequel trilogy starting in 1999 with Episode One: The Phantom Menace.
The prequels are a thorny subject for internet rantings. As a 13-year-old when the first of them came out, I wanted them so badly to be good that I convinced myself they were. Indeed, it seems a lot of people did. But as the hype over new Star Wars movies gave way to an examination of the oddly amateurish storytelling in these massive-budgeted effects spectaculars, a bit of the magic was diluted.
Sure, there were people who were pissed about Ewok teddy bears defeating the Galactic Empire back in the day, and indeed there are people now who defend the prequels, but it certainly complicated Star Wars' legacy.
The thing is, Star Wars grew from three to six films.
But if we're going to talk franchises, we have to talk about Marvel.
Blasting onto the scene with 2008's Iron Man, the combination of Jon Favreau's playful direction and Robert Downey Jr.'s pitch-perfect Tony Stark, Marvel Studios hit the ground running with a B-tier superhero that, thanks to these films, would emerge as definitively A-tier.
The moment, however, that things took off was the first of the now-famous post-credits scenes, in which megastar Samuel L. Jackson, who had not yet appeared in the movie, showed up to talk to Tony about the Avengers Initiative, and the potential of the MCU first started to unfold.
Marvel's take on franchise filmmaking has been transformative, and insanely successful. But it's also something no one else has managed to pull off. We've seen longrunning series - how many James Bond movies are there? But they've always followed a throughline - a single protagonist, or a single ongoing story, like that of the Skywalker bloodline.
Marvel essentially created a franchise of franchises. Iron Man had an entire trilogy to himself, dealing with corporate intrigue and technological one-upsmanship. Meanwhile, Thor could have his science-fantasy mythological conflicts and Captain America his explorations on patriotism and ethical values. But part of the joy of these movies was always that you got to see them all get together. While Thor is fighting his evil death-god sister, Iron Man is preventing some super-soldiers from taking over the country, and Captain America is uncovering a vast conspiracy, they can all get together to fight aliens together.
There are 22 freaking movies that have come out from Marvel in just eleven years. There are trilogies and quadrilogies within that greater franchise, and the characters aren't even limited to their own distinct movies and the Avengers crossovers - Tony Stark is a big part of Spiderman Homecoming, for example.
The massive success of Marvel has, I think, been well-earned. Some of the early outings were mediocre, but by this point, you're pretty much guaranteed to have fun with them if you're willing to buy into the heightened superhero world. But it has done a strange thing when it comes to franchise filmmaking (not to mention other kinds of filmmaking.)
This month, we're seeing the release of The Rise of Skywalker, the third movie in the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Since The Force Awakens came out in 2015, there have been four Star Wars movies - essentially one a year. While two were one-offs - the shockingly and refreshingly bleak Rogue One and the callback-obsessed fanservice prequel Solo - we're now getting the conclusion of this sequel trilogy, with the story of Rey and Kylo Ren coming to its climax.
But it feels weirdly quick, doesn't it?
I mean, on its surface, it's not. There's just almost as much time that has passed between Force Awakens and Rise of Skywalker as there was between Star Wars and Return of the Jedi. We've had two long movies to watch this story develop.
But in this day and age, we expect to have more time with a character.
By the time Robert Downey Jr.'s last scene as Tony Stark ends, we've had nine whole movies in which he's played a major role - his trilogy, the Avengers quadrilogy, and major parts of both Captain America: Civil War and Spiderman: Homecoming.
There's a whole other post to write about the popularity of more serialized television storytelling that has grown in the last 20 years, but even in our movies, we're getting accustomed to having a ton of time to get to know a character before we see their story conclude.
But that leaves us in this strange position. The Rise of Skywalker should be a massive event - the conclusion to an epic trilogy that has been going on for five years. But it doesn't really feel like that, does it?
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Watchmen Scrambles Our Preconceptions
The new HBO series Watchmen is based on the seminal graphic novel masterpiece by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. It is not an adaptation, and even the term "sequel" seems not quite appropriate. Instead, it's what I'd call an extrapolation.
Watchmen, the comic, imagines a version of the 1980s in which costumed vigilantes exist, but only one of them, Doctor Manhattan, actually has any superpowers. The former John Osterman utterly changes the balance of power, single-handedly winning the Vietnam War, while some of these so-called superheroes (The Comedian) prevent the Watergate scandal from sinking Nixon (it's implied he killed Woodward and Bernstein) and thus we get this odd alternate reality where Nixon is still President, getting past the two-term limit. The alternate-history elements to the story give it a disorienting feeling.
The new show takes this to the extreme.
Set primarily in Tulsa, OK, the series begins with a depiction of the 1921 destruction of "Black Wall Street," the neighborhood of Greenwood, where a race riot saw a massacre of black people in a neighborhood that had previously been a beacon of black prosperity.
This event really happened. If you hadn't known about it, you might think it was a part of Watchmen's alternate history, but it's true that white supremacists were literally dropping bombs from airplanes on an American city. I've read some reactions to the show that generally suggest a lot of the white audience is shocked to discover that really happened while black audiences tend to know about this. I'll admit that while I had heard about it, before watching this it was not at the forefront of my mind when thinking about race issues in American history, though it should probably occupy a pretty prominent position.
When we flash forward to the present day, we're presented with a scene that feels like it was written specifically to make us question our preconceptions about one of the prominent race issues we're talking about today, which is police violence.
On the same road that a young boy finds himself stranded after the car he was meant to escape Tulsa in crashes back in 1921, a white man is pulled over in his pickup truck. A police car drives up behind and the officer seems quite menacing. Then, we see that the police officer is a black man - and that he's wearing a big yellow mask over his nose, mouth, and ears.
There's a bit of subtle microaggressions that happen here, but given the role-reversal it's hard to clock which feel more menacing. We don't yet have the context to see that the cloth mask the driver has in his glovebox is, essentially, the new version of a Klan hood - based on the costume of the comic's antihero, Rorschach.
However, when the officer goes back to his car to run the guy's license and registration, he seems concerned. He requests access to his firearm - the first sign of a vastly different political reality that we'll be seeing more of - and is forced to answer a series of questions clearly designed to prevent excessive use of force. Just as he gets his gun out, however, bullets shower the windshield as the white driver has just emerged with a submachine gun.
This incident kicks things off an introduces us to the world.
Broadly, the world is far from the Nixonian right-wing landscape of the 80s comic. Instead, Nixon was followed by President Robert Redford - we got an actor president, but not the one that this realty got in the 80s. Redford, like Nixon, has been president for far longer than two terms. And it appears that he has remade much of America into a liberal dream. The cars are all electric, there are content warnings before violent television shows, and the government has finally, finally gotten around to paying reparations to the descendants of slaves and victims of racial violence.
These reparations are derided by right-wingers as "Redfordations," a term that has clearly become so charged politically that it can start fights in an elementary school. And it has clearly gone beyond that.
While the line between reparations and the birth of the "Seventh Kavalry," a white supremacist terrorist group, is not explicitly drawn, it seems likely. After all, just as the bombing of Black Wall Street demonstrated in the shared history between reality and Watchmen, prosperity for minorities - particularly black people - has always drawn a reaction of racial violence.
The Seventh Kavalry (named for Custer's unit, which was known for committing massacres against Native Americans) is most infamous for an incident called "White Night," when, at midnight on Christmas, members broke into the homes of Tulsa's police officers and murdered many in their sleep.
The show's protagonist, Angela Abar, was attacked that night, shot in the stomach after killing one of her assailants with a kitchen knife. Unlike the vast majority of surviving officers, Angela opted to stick with the police. But in the wake of this incident, the police were permitted - and even required - to hide their identities, wearing masks to conceal their identities and concocting fake careers to explain to others.
While the rank-and-file officers simply wear uniforms with masks, the detectives have their own personas. Angela becomes Sister Night, with a long coat, hood, mask, and airbrushed black paint over her eyes.
The use of the Greenwood massacre at the beginning is, I think, a key to the way the show begins to explore this alternate version of history. The bombing of Black Wall Street was essentially tolerated by law enforcement or even supported.
Yet, in the version of 2019 depicted in the show, the police force in Tulsa is apparently a very diverse one, but while officers are forced to deal with strict regulations that, in the first modern scene, nearly get an officer killed, we see that Angela, at least, is perfectly happy to set aside due process if it lets her beat some answers out of a Kavalry member. Meanwhile, trailer parks with white, right-wing residences are referred to as Nixonvilles. One such place (though perhaps more) have actual statues of Nixon standing above them. It remains to be seen what, exactly, the transition between Nixon and Redford looked like, but I suspect that it was contentious.
Indeed, one thing the show has played pretty close to the vest is the direct connections to the events of the comic. Given that those events happened about 35 years ago, it is perhaps not shocking that people aren't constantly talking about the giant squid that wiped out most of New York (though we get a quick picture of it when Tim Blake Nelson's "Looking Glass" is interrogating a suspect (the one that Angela then beats up.) Then again, at this point we don't cite 9/11 for every political point like we did in the decade or so that followed it, and that's much more recent.
For example, it's heavily, heavily hinted that Jeremy Irons, living in a manor house that we see both being temporarily constructed by Doctor Manhattan on Mars and also by Angela's adopted son Topher in some sort of floating lego-like metal bricks, is in fact Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias, aka the villain of the comic series.
Ozymandias custom-built a horrifying catastrophe in an effort to shock the Cold War into ending. And it's implied that he was basically successful. One of the detectives in Tulsa is a Russian guy who goes by "Red Knight," and when one of the Nixonville folks calls him a fascist, he angrily corrects them, identifying as a communist. One presumes, then, that the Soviet Union did not fall in this reality, though one wonders: has it reformed in ways that the current Russian Federation has not?
The point, I think, of all this world building, is that the modern era of Watchmen is just as complicated and thorny as ours is, but just in different ways. Critics seem to be enjoying it (as I am) and I think that if it takes off, it's likely to generate quite a lot of political analyses from all sides.
At the moment, the show feels very much like a puzzle-box, which can be a bit of a red flag for those who were very disappointed by the way Lost ended. Damon Lindelof is the creator on this one, though I think he earned a lot of credibility from Leftovers (which I saw the first few episodes of, but haven't finished.) There are tons of mysteries introduced in Watchmen's first two episodes, and that speaks more to plot than worldbuilding.
In a way that may or may not have been intentional, the comic was a bit of a Rorschach test. I've heard a lot of people who think of Rorschach as the clear hero of the story, and indeed it can be hard to condemn him if it means effectively endorsing what Ozymandias did. Even Doctor Manhattan, for all his omnipotence, is left in a position where the right thing to do isn't clear, and he kills Rorschach because he knows that there is no way he will be able to talk him out of following his principles - indeed, Rorschach's last words, telling Manhattan to kill him, suggest that even he knows that the lie that keeps the peace is worth preserving. But Rorschach's worldview is so profoundly toxic that you can't really call him "the good guy."
The uncomfortable and ambiguous morality of the story is one of the key things that makes Watchmen the default "best graphic novel of all time" to a lot of people. Right now, the show seems to build that into its world, but it remains to be seen how effectively it will do so with its plot - and even if that's its intention.
Watchmen, the comic, imagines a version of the 1980s in which costumed vigilantes exist, but only one of them, Doctor Manhattan, actually has any superpowers. The former John Osterman utterly changes the balance of power, single-handedly winning the Vietnam War, while some of these so-called superheroes (The Comedian) prevent the Watergate scandal from sinking Nixon (it's implied he killed Woodward and Bernstein) and thus we get this odd alternate reality where Nixon is still President, getting past the two-term limit. The alternate-history elements to the story give it a disorienting feeling.
The new show takes this to the extreme.
Set primarily in Tulsa, OK, the series begins with a depiction of the 1921 destruction of "Black Wall Street," the neighborhood of Greenwood, where a race riot saw a massacre of black people in a neighborhood that had previously been a beacon of black prosperity.
This event really happened. If you hadn't known about it, you might think it was a part of Watchmen's alternate history, but it's true that white supremacists were literally dropping bombs from airplanes on an American city. I've read some reactions to the show that generally suggest a lot of the white audience is shocked to discover that really happened while black audiences tend to know about this. I'll admit that while I had heard about it, before watching this it was not at the forefront of my mind when thinking about race issues in American history, though it should probably occupy a pretty prominent position.
When we flash forward to the present day, we're presented with a scene that feels like it was written specifically to make us question our preconceptions about one of the prominent race issues we're talking about today, which is police violence.
On the same road that a young boy finds himself stranded after the car he was meant to escape Tulsa in crashes back in 1921, a white man is pulled over in his pickup truck. A police car drives up behind and the officer seems quite menacing. Then, we see that the police officer is a black man - and that he's wearing a big yellow mask over his nose, mouth, and ears.
There's a bit of subtle microaggressions that happen here, but given the role-reversal it's hard to clock which feel more menacing. We don't yet have the context to see that the cloth mask the driver has in his glovebox is, essentially, the new version of a Klan hood - based on the costume of the comic's antihero, Rorschach.
However, when the officer goes back to his car to run the guy's license and registration, he seems concerned. He requests access to his firearm - the first sign of a vastly different political reality that we'll be seeing more of - and is forced to answer a series of questions clearly designed to prevent excessive use of force. Just as he gets his gun out, however, bullets shower the windshield as the white driver has just emerged with a submachine gun.
This incident kicks things off an introduces us to the world.
Broadly, the world is far from the Nixonian right-wing landscape of the 80s comic. Instead, Nixon was followed by President Robert Redford - we got an actor president, but not the one that this realty got in the 80s. Redford, like Nixon, has been president for far longer than two terms. And it appears that he has remade much of America into a liberal dream. The cars are all electric, there are content warnings before violent television shows, and the government has finally, finally gotten around to paying reparations to the descendants of slaves and victims of racial violence.
These reparations are derided by right-wingers as "Redfordations," a term that has clearly become so charged politically that it can start fights in an elementary school. And it has clearly gone beyond that.
While the line between reparations and the birth of the "Seventh Kavalry," a white supremacist terrorist group, is not explicitly drawn, it seems likely. After all, just as the bombing of Black Wall Street demonstrated in the shared history between reality and Watchmen, prosperity for minorities - particularly black people - has always drawn a reaction of racial violence.
The Seventh Kavalry (named for Custer's unit, which was known for committing massacres against Native Americans) is most infamous for an incident called "White Night," when, at midnight on Christmas, members broke into the homes of Tulsa's police officers and murdered many in their sleep.
The show's protagonist, Angela Abar, was attacked that night, shot in the stomach after killing one of her assailants with a kitchen knife. Unlike the vast majority of surviving officers, Angela opted to stick with the police. But in the wake of this incident, the police were permitted - and even required - to hide their identities, wearing masks to conceal their identities and concocting fake careers to explain to others.
While the rank-and-file officers simply wear uniforms with masks, the detectives have their own personas. Angela becomes Sister Night, with a long coat, hood, mask, and airbrushed black paint over her eyes.
The use of the Greenwood massacre at the beginning is, I think, a key to the way the show begins to explore this alternate version of history. The bombing of Black Wall Street was essentially tolerated by law enforcement or even supported.
Yet, in the version of 2019 depicted in the show, the police force in Tulsa is apparently a very diverse one, but while officers are forced to deal with strict regulations that, in the first modern scene, nearly get an officer killed, we see that Angela, at least, is perfectly happy to set aside due process if it lets her beat some answers out of a Kavalry member. Meanwhile, trailer parks with white, right-wing residences are referred to as Nixonvilles. One such place (though perhaps more) have actual statues of Nixon standing above them. It remains to be seen what, exactly, the transition between Nixon and Redford looked like, but I suspect that it was contentious.
Indeed, one thing the show has played pretty close to the vest is the direct connections to the events of the comic. Given that those events happened about 35 years ago, it is perhaps not shocking that people aren't constantly talking about the giant squid that wiped out most of New York (though we get a quick picture of it when Tim Blake Nelson's "Looking Glass" is interrogating a suspect (the one that Angela then beats up.) Then again, at this point we don't cite 9/11 for every political point like we did in the decade or so that followed it, and that's much more recent.
For example, it's heavily, heavily hinted that Jeremy Irons, living in a manor house that we see both being temporarily constructed by Doctor Manhattan on Mars and also by Angela's adopted son Topher in some sort of floating lego-like metal bricks, is in fact Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias, aka the villain of the comic series.
Ozymandias custom-built a horrifying catastrophe in an effort to shock the Cold War into ending. And it's implied that he was basically successful. One of the detectives in Tulsa is a Russian guy who goes by "Red Knight," and when one of the Nixonville folks calls him a fascist, he angrily corrects them, identifying as a communist. One presumes, then, that the Soviet Union did not fall in this reality, though one wonders: has it reformed in ways that the current Russian Federation has not?
The point, I think, of all this world building, is that the modern era of Watchmen is just as complicated and thorny as ours is, but just in different ways. Critics seem to be enjoying it (as I am) and I think that if it takes off, it's likely to generate quite a lot of political analyses from all sides.
At the moment, the show feels very much like a puzzle-box, which can be a bit of a red flag for those who were very disappointed by the way Lost ended. Damon Lindelof is the creator on this one, though I think he earned a lot of credibility from Leftovers (which I saw the first few episodes of, but haven't finished.) There are tons of mysteries introduced in Watchmen's first two episodes, and that speaks more to plot than worldbuilding.
In a way that may or may not have been intentional, the comic was a bit of a Rorschach test. I've heard a lot of people who think of Rorschach as the clear hero of the story, and indeed it can be hard to condemn him if it means effectively endorsing what Ozymandias did. Even Doctor Manhattan, for all his omnipotence, is left in a position where the right thing to do isn't clear, and he kills Rorschach because he knows that there is no way he will be able to talk him out of following his principles - indeed, Rorschach's last words, telling Manhattan to kill him, suggest that even he knows that the lie that keeps the peace is worth preserving. But Rorschach's worldview is so profoundly toxic that you can't really call him "the good guy."
The uncomfortable and ambiguous morality of the story is one of the key things that makes Watchmen the default "best graphic novel of all time" to a lot of people. Right now, the show seems to build that into its world, but it remains to be seen how effectively it will do so with its plot - and even if that's its intention.
Saturday, August 31, 2019
Legion's Third and Final Season Confronts the Irreversable
I'm about 2/3 of the way through Legion's final season.
After the flip of season two - in which our protagonist David finds himself the villain, having unleashed his most monstrous qualities in his fight against the Shadow King - season three puts us in an uncomfortable position: David is now at war with the rest of the cast, save Lenny, who now serves as the majordomo (I think she even uses that term) to David's new drug-fueled happy-thoughts cult that seems 1960s utopian but with a dangerous undercurrent of Manson-family menace.
David has, it seems, indulged in his most narcissistic impulses, and now has a fawning group of attractive young people surrounding him, worshipping him, and even calling him "daddy."
Meanwhile, Division III hunts him, and so David has sought out a Time Traveler.
Thus, the early parts of the show are seen through the eyes of Switch, a Chinese woman living in the US who is evidently the daughter of some powerful and emotionally distant "very important man." Switch is a mutant, like David, and her power is the ability to travel through time by opening doors into a somewhat literal time-corridor.
Thus, David recruits Switch so that when Division III comes and kills him, she can simply step back and warn him ahead of time.
But while David protests that all he wants to do is live in peace, there is still that pesky sense that he might end the world. And indeed, in his prosecution of his conflict with Farouk (who is now roaming free amongst Division III - which... is probably not a great thing) David has shown himself to be plenty monstrous in his own way.
David eventually discovers the truth about his parents, traveling back to his infancy and even prior to see what they were like. I actually don't know if we hear Professor X identified by name, but in case you forgot that this was technically an X-Men show (and you could be forgiven for that,) we find that, much as David and Syd had, David's parents met in a mental hospital some time in the late 40s (or possibly early 50s.)
I think it's important to note that showrunner Noah Hawley has placed the time period for the show as "some time in an alternate version of the 1960s and also the future." Granted, that would make David maybe a decade and a half younger than Dan Stevens, but I think the point is not to think too much about it. Anyway, we find that Charles was in the hospital probably on account of his telepathy - though he seems remarkably capable of hiding it, and one wonders why, exactly, he's committed there. David's mother, Gabrielle, however, is a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, and is left catatonic by the trauma. It's Charles' attention and communication with her that helps her get better, and the two escape the hospital together to begin a new life.
But when Charles goes down to North Africa to meet with Amahl Farouk, unaware of the Shadow King's treacherous nature, the Shadow King finds the infant David and infects him, despite David and Switch's time-traveling attempts to stop him. The sight of the sort-of-there David sends Gabrielle back into her catatonia.
The thing that's interesting here is that, while yes, David is a victim of the Shadow King, he's also fixated on making the problem something external - something that can be fixed by simply removing the interloper. And his sense of himself as the victim allows him to justify terrifying deeds.
In the last episode I saw (I have either three or four left, I think) Syd body-swaps with David in an attempt to put him down, but when she does so, she finds that while one personality - the "real David" is in her body, there are a vast number of other Davids inside - the eponymous Legion - and she loses control of the body.
It would be very comforting to think that all the bad things we've done were some foreign object that could be removed. But to truly believe that - that we're completely without fault for anything we've done - is the belief system of a narcissist, and it's that kind of belief that can lead to truly monstrous behavior.
There's another moral question that the show asks. David has justified a great deal of his monstrousness in his faith that, with time travel, he can undo what was done. He kills people in gruesome ways and violates others in similarly horrific ways. His actions toward Syd at the end of season two - effectively drugging and raping her, though it didn't occur to him that was what he was doing at the time - are things that he desperately wants not to have happened. And I think everyone can relate to that, even if we haven't done as heinous things. There are thousands of mistakes I've made or actions I wish I had taken that I no longer can, and the fantasy of a do-over is one of the most attractive ideas one can imagine.
But what does it mean to undo something? Does it absolve you of what you've done? And is the act of changing the past, in fact, a more terrible act of destruction than anything else you could do?
I think we like to imagine that if we changed the past, we'd simply see our memories shift but still fundamentally be us - but is that actually how it would happen?
One thought experiment I've often thought about is a sort of butterfly effect regarding time travel. Let's say that you could reset your life, go back to the moment you were born, but with all the memories you have of your current life. There are definitely things I'd do differently - like warn my mom about the cancer she'd get and encourage her to get surgery to remove the organ in which it developed. But I also have friends who are younger than I am. And is it possible that, in some very subtle way, my different actions could jostle things just so to prevent one of my younger friends from ever being born?
I mean, consider that a human starts as a separate sperm and egg, and that a massive number of sperm cells travel toward the egg, and only one actually fuses with it to become the zygote that will eventually develop into the person's body. And about half of those are male and half are female. Is it possible that some very subtle bump, some very small alteration to the environment could, over time, create enough of a difference to make, say, a Y chromosome sperm win the race instead of a X chromosome one? And while there are, of course, men with two Xs and women with XYs, their experience of gender is going to be very different than that of cisgender people, and thus create a totally different personality (and if they are cisgender, you could easily wind up with a man in one timeline where there had been a woman in the other.)
The point is that a lot of unexpected consequences could occur in trying to change the past - you'd probably change far more than you intend.
But the other moral question is what would happen to the original timeline.
Because it appears there are three scenarios here, and two are rather horrific.
One is that by changing the past, you travel to a new timeline, but the one you left behind still exists. And that means that any damage you did there remains - just that you, the time traveler, cease to exist.
The second, and to my mind most dreadful, is that when you create a new timeline, the old one is erased. Syd expresses this fear in an episode, that in creating a reality in which David was never sick, not only will their relationship and the love they share (because despite what he's done, she still... perhaps... loves him) but it would also mean annihilating that version of her - which is the only version of her she is.
The only good version of this would be if, somehow, the consciousness snapped back to the appropriate person when the change is made, and while I don't know if that's any less likely than the first two possibilities, it's not really a great gamble.
Switch listens to an audio book about how to be a time traveler, and at one point the book says that time travelers are the loneliest people in the universe. And I think there's some logic to that - because in a sense, with all the changes to the timeline one might enact, it would breed a certain sense of solipsism - other people only existing as you perceive them.
David has allowed his narcissism to breed a solipsistic worldview, but can we, the audience, agree with it?
After the flip of season two - in which our protagonist David finds himself the villain, having unleashed his most monstrous qualities in his fight against the Shadow King - season three puts us in an uncomfortable position: David is now at war with the rest of the cast, save Lenny, who now serves as the majordomo (I think she even uses that term) to David's new drug-fueled happy-thoughts cult that seems 1960s utopian but with a dangerous undercurrent of Manson-family menace.
David has, it seems, indulged in his most narcissistic impulses, and now has a fawning group of attractive young people surrounding him, worshipping him, and even calling him "daddy."
Meanwhile, Division III hunts him, and so David has sought out a Time Traveler.
Thus, the early parts of the show are seen through the eyes of Switch, a Chinese woman living in the US who is evidently the daughter of some powerful and emotionally distant "very important man." Switch is a mutant, like David, and her power is the ability to travel through time by opening doors into a somewhat literal time-corridor.
Thus, David recruits Switch so that when Division III comes and kills him, she can simply step back and warn him ahead of time.
But while David protests that all he wants to do is live in peace, there is still that pesky sense that he might end the world. And indeed, in his prosecution of his conflict with Farouk (who is now roaming free amongst Division III - which... is probably not a great thing) David has shown himself to be plenty monstrous in his own way.
David eventually discovers the truth about his parents, traveling back to his infancy and even prior to see what they were like. I actually don't know if we hear Professor X identified by name, but in case you forgot that this was technically an X-Men show (and you could be forgiven for that,) we find that, much as David and Syd had, David's parents met in a mental hospital some time in the late 40s (or possibly early 50s.)
I think it's important to note that showrunner Noah Hawley has placed the time period for the show as "some time in an alternate version of the 1960s and also the future." Granted, that would make David maybe a decade and a half younger than Dan Stevens, but I think the point is not to think too much about it. Anyway, we find that Charles was in the hospital probably on account of his telepathy - though he seems remarkably capable of hiding it, and one wonders why, exactly, he's committed there. David's mother, Gabrielle, however, is a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, and is left catatonic by the trauma. It's Charles' attention and communication with her that helps her get better, and the two escape the hospital together to begin a new life.
But when Charles goes down to North Africa to meet with Amahl Farouk, unaware of the Shadow King's treacherous nature, the Shadow King finds the infant David and infects him, despite David and Switch's time-traveling attempts to stop him. The sight of the sort-of-there David sends Gabrielle back into her catatonia.
The thing that's interesting here is that, while yes, David is a victim of the Shadow King, he's also fixated on making the problem something external - something that can be fixed by simply removing the interloper. And his sense of himself as the victim allows him to justify terrifying deeds.
In the last episode I saw (I have either three or four left, I think) Syd body-swaps with David in an attempt to put him down, but when she does so, she finds that while one personality - the "real David" is in her body, there are a vast number of other Davids inside - the eponymous Legion - and she loses control of the body.
It would be very comforting to think that all the bad things we've done were some foreign object that could be removed. But to truly believe that - that we're completely without fault for anything we've done - is the belief system of a narcissist, and it's that kind of belief that can lead to truly monstrous behavior.
There's another moral question that the show asks. David has justified a great deal of his monstrousness in his faith that, with time travel, he can undo what was done. He kills people in gruesome ways and violates others in similarly horrific ways. His actions toward Syd at the end of season two - effectively drugging and raping her, though it didn't occur to him that was what he was doing at the time - are things that he desperately wants not to have happened. And I think everyone can relate to that, even if we haven't done as heinous things. There are thousands of mistakes I've made or actions I wish I had taken that I no longer can, and the fantasy of a do-over is one of the most attractive ideas one can imagine.
But what does it mean to undo something? Does it absolve you of what you've done? And is the act of changing the past, in fact, a more terrible act of destruction than anything else you could do?
I think we like to imagine that if we changed the past, we'd simply see our memories shift but still fundamentally be us - but is that actually how it would happen?
One thought experiment I've often thought about is a sort of butterfly effect regarding time travel. Let's say that you could reset your life, go back to the moment you were born, but with all the memories you have of your current life. There are definitely things I'd do differently - like warn my mom about the cancer she'd get and encourage her to get surgery to remove the organ in which it developed. But I also have friends who are younger than I am. And is it possible that, in some very subtle way, my different actions could jostle things just so to prevent one of my younger friends from ever being born?
I mean, consider that a human starts as a separate sperm and egg, and that a massive number of sperm cells travel toward the egg, and only one actually fuses with it to become the zygote that will eventually develop into the person's body. And about half of those are male and half are female. Is it possible that some very subtle bump, some very small alteration to the environment could, over time, create enough of a difference to make, say, a Y chromosome sperm win the race instead of a X chromosome one? And while there are, of course, men with two Xs and women with XYs, their experience of gender is going to be very different than that of cisgender people, and thus create a totally different personality (and if they are cisgender, you could easily wind up with a man in one timeline where there had been a woman in the other.)
The point is that a lot of unexpected consequences could occur in trying to change the past - you'd probably change far more than you intend.
But the other moral question is what would happen to the original timeline.
Because it appears there are three scenarios here, and two are rather horrific.
One is that by changing the past, you travel to a new timeline, but the one you left behind still exists. And that means that any damage you did there remains - just that you, the time traveler, cease to exist.
The second, and to my mind most dreadful, is that when you create a new timeline, the old one is erased. Syd expresses this fear in an episode, that in creating a reality in which David was never sick, not only will their relationship and the love they share (because despite what he's done, she still... perhaps... loves him) but it would also mean annihilating that version of her - which is the only version of her she is.
The only good version of this would be if, somehow, the consciousness snapped back to the appropriate person when the change is made, and while I don't know if that's any less likely than the first two possibilities, it's not really a great gamble.
Switch listens to an audio book about how to be a time traveler, and at one point the book says that time travelers are the loneliest people in the universe. And I think there's some logic to that - because in a sense, with all the changes to the timeline one might enact, it would breed a certain sense of solipsism - other people only existing as you perceive them.
David has allowed his narcissism to breed a solipsistic worldview, but can we, the audience, agree with it?
Saturday, July 20, 2019
Familiar Faces Show Up in the Picard Trailer
I grew up on Star Trek TNG. Seriously, my sister has joked that our religion growing up was Star Trek. The show started the year after I was born, and I remember the grief I felt when the first show I loved actually ended - not realizing that was a rather normal thing (the other - primetime - show I watched at the time, the Simpsons, is of course still going about two decades after it maybe should have stopped.)
Anyway, Captain Picard was always my Star Trek captain, and when you say Star Trek, it's the Enterprise D that I think of.
I think it's either a really interesting or really terrible idea to bring him back. But I do think there is some good and rich storytelling to be seen about a hero who has grown old - Picard might be a weird choice, given that he was already a font of paternal wisdom 30 years ago (actually what I loved about the Last Jedi was how it examined Luke's transformation from youthful audience surrogate to old, grizzled master.)
Anyway, the trailer introduces some new characters, but also teases the presence of some old ones.
First is Data, who of course died in Nemesis, but apparently there was some sort of not-quite retcon in which his memories were transferred into another Soong android, effectively bringing him back. Brent Spiner always did a good work with a very hard job, and while I don't know if he'll actually be a major part of the show, I'm curious to see what Data's up to.
Much more surprisingly, Jeri Ryan's Seven of Nine shows up. At first, I found it bizarre, given that she and Picard have never interacted on screen. Seven of Nine showed up in Voyager season four as a Borg drone that the crew disconnected from the collective, and her journey to rediscover her humanity was probably the most interesting arc on that show (that's my opinion at least, as someone who watched through it over a decade after it ended.)
Picard's time as Locutus of the Borg was brief - just the cliffhanger between TNG's 3rd and 4th seasons - but the trauma of that event always stayed with Picard. (There's an episode early in season four when Picard returns to France after the ordeal while he's on leave which I found very boring as a kid but watching again as an adult found it to be really, really good) but it makes perfect sense that he and Seven would have reason to connect and compare experiences - one wonders if there's a support group, though I think the number of people to actually escape the collective is very low.
Anyway, the plot seems to center around some woman with a secret - very vague - and Picard finding he can't be satisfied in his retirement to the family vineyard. Get that man a starship and a crew!
I'll be curious to see the show, though given that it's on CBS All Access, I might have to find some workaround because I ain't getting another freaking streaming subscription.
Anyway, Captain Picard was always my Star Trek captain, and when you say Star Trek, it's the Enterprise D that I think of.
I think it's either a really interesting or really terrible idea to bring him back. But I do think there is some good and rich storytelling to be seen about a hero who has grown old - Picard might be a weird choice, given that he was already a font of paternal wisdom 30 years ago (actually what I loved about the Last Jedi was how it examined Luke's transformation from youthful audience surrogate to old, grizzled master.)
Anyway, the trailer introduces some new characters, but also teases the presence of some old ones.
First is Data, who of course died in Nemesis, but apparently there was some sort of not-quite retcon in which his memories were transferred into another Soong android, effectively bringing him back. Brent Spiner always did a good work with a very hard job, and while I don't know if he'll actually be a major part of the show, I'm curious to see what Data's up to.
Much more surprisingly, Jeri Ryan's Seven of Nine shows up. At first, I found it bizarre, given that she and Picard have never interacted on screen. Seven of Nine showed up in Voyager season four as a Borg drone that the crew disconnected from the collective, and her journey to rediscover her humanity was probably the most interesting arc on that show (that's my opinion at least, as someone who watched through it over a decade after it ended.)
Picard's time as Locutus of the Borg was brief - just the cliffhanger between TNG's 3rd and 4th seasons - but the trauma of that event always stayed with Picard. (There's an episode early in season four when Picard returns to France after the ordeal while he's on leave which I found very boring as a kid but watching again as an adult found it to be really, really good) but it makes perfect sense that he and Seven would have reason to connect and compare experiences - one wonders if there's a support group, though I think the number of people to actually escape the collective is very low.
Anyway, the plot seems to center around some woman with a secret - very vague - and Picard finding he can't be satisfied in his retirement to the family vineyard. Get that man a starship and a crew!
I'll be curious to see the show, though given that it's on CBS All Access, I might have to find some workaround because I ain't getting another freaking streaming subscription.
Marvel's Comic Con Announcements
After Spiderman: Far From Home (did I not make a post about that one? I liked it) we were left technically not knowing what would come next from Marvel. Given the massive climax that was Endgame, it made sense to give us a little breathing room. But that billion-dollar dream machine that lets Disney print money is gearing up with a boatload of announcements.
First, the obvious ones:
Black Widow is really happening.
Doctor Strange's sequel is called Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, which I AM IN FOR. (They say it'll be "scary" which... we'll see, but if that means really leaning into Lovecraftian elements, I'm excited.) Scarlet Witch will be in this, which seems a good fit.
Thor will be the first Marvel series to make it to four movies with Thor: Love and Thunder, which will bring back Natalie Portman as Jane Foster - and specifically the arc in which Jane becomes Thor (in the sense of gaining the divine powers - was Steve Rogers technically Thor for a bit during Endgame?) Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, and Taika Waititi as director are all returning, which sounds great to me!
The Eternals are also going to be a thing, with Salma Hayek, Bryan Tyree Henry, Angelina Jolie, Kumail Nanjiani, and Richard Madden starring. This is some hipster-level obscure Marvel stuff, but it's the MCU - you'll know them well soon enough (assuming this doesn't go all Inhumans on us.)
Biggest shock? There's a new motherfucking BLADE movie starring MAHERSHALA ALI. This means a few things: first, sorry Wesley Snipes, whose movies were actually the first successful Marvel-based films. Also it means that we're officially freeing up people in the Netflix shows to play other roles. If only they'd saved Mads Mikkelsen until after they got the rights to Fantastic Four back, because he'd be the perfect Doctor Doom! Anyway, point is: Mahershala Ali is going to be a badass dhampir (look it up) vampire-hunter.
Moving on: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings will be the Shang-Chi movie, and will apparently finally show us the real Mandarin that Ben Kingsley was so infamously pretending to be in Iron Man 3. (A move I found delightful, though I know some people were very pissed.) (UPDATE: the Mandarin is being played by TONY LEUNG, which is awesome.)
Is that everything? No! Apparently there are some details about the Disney+ shows, like how yes, the split-timeline version of Loki is how there's going to be a show for him. But I ain't getting yet another streaming subscription, so I guess I won't be seeing that on Disney's vertical-integration platform.
Anyway, fitting that Comic-Con is seeing Marvel slam so many things down onto the table that they've been keeping secret for so long.
First, the obvious ones:
Black Widow is really happening.
Doctor Strange's sequel is called Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, which I AM IN FOR. (They say it'll be "scary" which... we'll see, but if that means really leaning into Lovecraftian elements, I'm excited.) Scarlet Witch will be in this, which seems a good fit.
Thor will be the first Marvel series to make it to four movies with Thor: Love and Thunder, which will bring back Natalie Portman as Jane Foster - and specifically the arc in which Jane becomes Thor (in the sense of gaining the divine powers - was Steve Rogers technically Thor for a bit during Endgame?) Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, and Taika Waititi as director are all returning, which sounds great to me!
The Eternals are also going to be a thing, with Salma Hayek, Bryan Tyree Henry, Angelina Jolie, Kumail Nanjiani, and Richard Madden starring. This is some hipster-level obscure Marvel stuff, but it's the MCU - you'll know them well soon enough (assuming this doesn't go all Inhumans on us.)
Biggest shock? There's a new motherfucking BLADE movie starring MAHERSHALA ALI. This means a few things: first, sorry Wesley Snipes, whose movies were actually the first successful Marvel-based films. Also it means that we're officially freeing up people in the Netflix shows to play other roles. If only they'd saved Mads Mikkelsen until after they got the rights to Fantastic Four back, because he'd be the perfect Doctor Doom! Anyway, point is: Mahershala Ali is going to be a badass dhampir (look it up) vampire-hunter.
Moving on: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings will be the Shang-Chi movie, and will apparently finally show us the real Mandarin that Ben Kingsley was so infamously pretending to be in Iron Man 3. (A move I found delightful, though I know some people were very pissed.) (UPDATE: the Mandarin is being played by TONY LEUNG, which is awesome.)
Is that everything? No! Apparently there are some details about the Disney+ shows, like how yes, the split-timeline version of Loki is how there's going to be a show for him. But I ain't getting yet another streaming subscription, so I guess I won't be seeing that on Disney's vertical-integration platform.
Anyway, fitting that Comic-Con is seeing Marvel slam so many things down onto the table that they've been keeping secret for so long.
Friday, July 12, 2019
Stranger Things' Third Season Synthesizes Much of What Didn't Work in Season Two
When Stranger Things first popped up on Netflix, it came out of nowhere. These days any major show or movie tends to get a massive hype lead-in, with a year or more of promotions, speculation about casting and other details. But somehow, Stranger Things slipped in. Of its regular cast, Winona Ryder was probably the only one most people would recognize, and at a point in her career when she wasn't really at the center of Hollywood awareness.
But the show absolutely nailed spooky 1980s style as a hybrid of Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, and probably most directly Stephen King. After all, while King's Losers' Gang was from the '50s, many of us who grew up in the 80s or 90s imagined those groups of kids to be from our time - indeed, see how the recent film adaptation of IT placed the childhood period in the '80s so that the modern era could be the present.
Stranger Things nails a certain authenticity - not necessarily to the actual midwest in the 1980s, but the way that it felt as portrayed in movies from that era. Suburban streets at night, damp from rain or condensation, lit by the occasional streetlight but flanked by shadows.
General Spoiler Warning!
But the show absolutely nailed spooky 1980s style as a hybrid of Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, and probably most directly Stephen King. After all, while King's Losers' Gang was from the '50s, many of us who grew up in the 80s or 90s imagined those groups of kids to be from our time - indeed, see how the recent film adaptation of IT placed the childhood period in the '80s so that the modern era could be the present.
Stranger Things nails a certain authenticity - not necessarily to the actual midwest in the 1980s, but the way that it felt as portrayed in movies from that era. Suburban streets at night, damp from rain or condensation, lit by the occasional streetlight but flanked by shadows.
General Spoiler Warning!
Saturday, July 6, 2019
Stranger Things Goes to the Mall in Season Three
I've now seen the first two episodes of Stranger Things 3 (because they have to be special and not use the word "season.")
So here's the things about 80s nostalgia:
I was born in 1986, one year after this season is set. The Duffer Brothers, creators and showrunners of Stranger Things, were born in 1984 (they're my sister's age,) which makes the first season's setting in 1983 kind of interesting: it's just far enough to be prior to their lives.
See, as someone born in the mid 80s, I only really started to become aware of popular culture and my place in an evolving environment once the 90s came about.
But decades don't swap over to a whole new culture in one go - usually you don't really start to feel a difference in a decade's culture until toward the end of it, when you have the perspective to actually see where things changed. I mean, Grunge sure as hell killed Hair Metal (thank God) but a lot of the cultural signifiers - and in this season of Stranger Things, it's very much the new Starcourt Mall - persisted.
What's interesting here is that the mall as this cultural touchstone and public forum is a species that now, as we approach the 2020s (I know it's only next year but it still looks futuristic,) seems to be kind of dying out. I mean, when's the last time you went to a Sam Goody to pick up some CDs?
Television and movies and especially books persist past these decade constructs, and so even if I was only a baby in the mid 80s, the small town horror vibe of Stephen King was very much a part of my cultural consciousness in the 90s (obviously, King has continued to write all this time, so it's not like he's gone away.)
But yeah, even if the (to my eyes) putrid 80s fashion doesn't translate to my childhood experience, there's a lot about Stranger Things, through its previous seasons and this one so far, that feels familiar. We were playing Super Nintendo or N64 instead of Atari, but things weren't too different.
There is one thing that we sure as hell didn't worry about though, and that was the Russians. (Ironic, then, that they're such a concern now.)
My very first memory of the Cold War - even though I'd been to Communist Hungary for by second birthday to visit family - was its end, when, as a kindergartener getting ready for school, I saw a picture on the newspaper of a Russian soldier sitting on a curb and some announcement about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The scope of Stranger Things has generally expanded over time. In season one, we never got any scenes that took place outside of Hawkins Indiana or its Upside-Down equivalent.
As season 3 begins, we see what looks very much like the kind of experiments that were going on in the lab where El was imprisoned most of her life, and we might assume that the US Government is back to its old dirty tricks, despite seeming assurances that they were done with that last season. But of course, it's natural to imagine that if the US had discovered this other world, the Soviets might have as well.
With the rift closed at the end of the previous season, it's natural that our heroes would have assumed things were safe now - time to return to some degree of normalcy. But not only do we have those creepy Russians to worry about, but we've also got some genuinely fucked-up imagery as rats swarm into the basement of an abandoned steel mill and explode into puddles of disgusting ooze, which we later see is animate, very much like The Thing.
Last season, we were introduced to a few new characters, including Max - the cool redheaded girl that Lucas winds up with, and her abusive brother Billy. Billy is a monstrous bully, and while season one deconstructed the "rich asshole boyfriend" trope by making Steve Harrington actually a fundamentally decent guy when push came to shove, Billy was straight out of the Stephen King book of irredeemable douchebags, in the vein of Henry Bowers from IT.
His purpose in season 2 seemed to just be to be horrible, but in season 3, he's given a more prominent role - which at first seems like a bad thing, but again, taking inspiration from King, this time Billy is somehow possessed or indoctrinated by whatever new monster - maybe the "Mind Flayer" or some other evil presence from the Upside-Down. (D&D nerd aside: the Demogorgon is actually one of the most powerful demon lords in D&D lore (it's not a type of demon - it's a specific, particularly powerful demon,) whereas Mind Flayers, while certainly scary and dangerous, are not nearly as powerful individually. I kind of think that they should have used the term Beholder for the Mind Flayer, given its tendency to sit back and plan and observe from a distance. Beholders are also less powerful than Demogorgon, but whatever.)
The true nature of the Upside-Down remains fundamentally mysterious, but after being possessed (seemingly having some flesh-tube made out of dead rats shoved down his throat,) Billy has a vision of the Upside-Down in which a crowd of human-like forms approach him, their leader being a copy of him, but one that speaks with a deep and creepy voice. They want to "build" something, and I'm not really clear on whether Billy's eventually go the way of those rats, if he's going to start donating people to that fate, or if others are going to get possessed like he is.
Meanwhile, the rest of our regulars are just getting on with life. El and Mike have become an obnoxious teen couple, much to Hopper's chagrin (and as someone who has only recently stepped into the role of El's dad, he's been thrown into the deep end of being a single parent for a teenager - a role that even parents with a partner struggle with when they've raised a kid since birth.) Lucas and Max seem to have things figured out a lot better, despite Lucas' constant messing up (Max is just too good-natured, it seems, to let small mistakes ruin things.) When Mike makes some rookie mistakes with El after Hopper puts his paternal foot down around all this making out every day, El goes to Max for emotional support, and the two quickly develop a charming friendship.
Which, on one hand, almost seems like a course-correction after the two seemed to develop some kind of accidental romantic rivalry last season. But it's nice to see these two girls just be girls together.
Dustin returns from science camp with a questionably-real Mormon girlfriend from Utah, and is troubled to discover that his friends aren't as into the idea of contacting her via HAM radio. But when he stumbles upon some strange Russian broadcast, he brings it to Steve, aka his partner in the most unexpectedly delightful pairing from last season. Working with Steve's cool co-worker Robin (who manages to establish herself very quickly as a great addition to the cast) they figure out that it's some kind of code language, and that the broadcast was coming from the mall.
Finally, Will, a bit like Dustin, isn't so free of concern. Perhaps due to his horrible connection to the Upside-Down, he has a sense of the terrible things that are afoot, but not enough that he can say anything for certain.
God, there are a lot of characters to check in with. Joyce is still dealing with Bob's death, and though she gives some friendly advice, parent-to-parent, to Hopper, she isn't having his theoretically platonic but definitely not just platonic advances.
Basically, there's a lot of life going on, with the mall killing the old downtown businesses, and Cary Elwes as a douchey mayor who I'm sure will be involved in something disastrous later in the season. So far, only Billy and the unfortunate fellow lifeguard he has sacrificed (in one way or another) to this awful monstrosity are really aware of the oncoming horror.
Sidenote: I live in LA, and we've had a couple of big earthquakes over the last couple days (centered far away, so no major damage, but they've lasted pretty long each time.) Anyway, it's a weird place to be to start watching a show about terrible portals to a nightmarish otherworld.
So here's the things about 80s nostalgia:
I was born in 1986, one year after this season is set. The Duffer Brothers, creators and showrunners of Stranger Things, were born in 1984 (they're my sister's age,) which makes the first season's setting in 1983 kind of interesting: it's just far enough to be prior to their lives.
See, as someone born in the mid 80s, I only really started to become aware of popular culture and my place in an evolving environment once the 90s came about.
But decades don't swap over to a whole new culture in one go - usually you don't really start to feel a difference in a decade's culture until toward the end of it, when you have the perspective to actually see where things changed. I mean, Grunge sure as hell killed Hair Metal (thank God) but a lot of the cultural signifiers - and in this season of Stranger Things, it's very much the new Starcourt Mall - persisted.
What's interesting here is that the mall as this cultural touchstone and public forum is a species that now, as we approach the 2020s (I know it's only next year but it still looks futuristic,) seems to be kind of dying out. I mean, when's the last time you went to a Sam Goody to pick up some CDs?
Television and movies and especially books persist past these decade constructs, and so even if I was only a baby in the mid 80s, the small town horror vibe of Stephen King was very much a part of my cultural consciousness in the 90s (obviously, King has continued to write all this time, so it's not like he's gone away.)
But yeah, even if the (to my eyes) putrid 80s fashion doesn't translate to my childhood experience, there's a lot about Stranger Things, through its previous seasons and this one so far, that feels familiar. We were playing Super Nintendo or N64 instead of Atari, but things weren't too different.
There is one thing that we sure as hell didn't worry about though, and that was the Russians. (Ironic, then, that they're such a concern now.)
My very first memory of the Cold War - even though I'd been to Communist Hungary for by second birthday to visit family - was its end, when, as a kindergartener getting ready for school, I saw a picture on the newspaper of a Russian soldier sitting on a curb and some announcement about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The scope of Stranger Things has generally expanded over time. In season one, we never got any scenes that took place outside of Hawkins Indiana or its Upside-Down equivalent.
As season 3 begins, we see what looks very much like the kind of experiments that were going on in the lab where El was imprisoned most of her life, and we might assume that the US Government is back to its old dirty tricks, despite seeming assurances that they were done with that last season. But of course, it's natural to imagine that if the US had discovered this other world, the Soviets might have as well.
With the rift closed at the end of the previous season, it's natural that our heroes would have assumed things were safe now - time to return to some degree of normalcy. But not only do we have those creepy Russians to worry about, but we've also got some genuinely fucked-up imagery as rats swarm into the basement of an abandoned steel mill and explode into puddles of disgusting ooze, which we later see is animate, very much like The Thing.
Last season, we were introduced to a few new characters, including Max - the cool redheaded girl that Lucas winds up with, and her abusive brother Billy. Billy is a monstrous bully, and while season one deconstructed the "rich asshole boyfriend" trope by making Steve Harrington actually a fundamentally decent guy when push came to shove, Billy was straight out of the Stephen King book of irredeemable douchebags, in the vein of Henry Bowers from IT.
His purpose in season 2 seemed to just be to be horrible, but in season 3, he's given a more prominent role - which at first seems like a bad thing, but again, taking inspiration from King, this time Billy is somehow possessed or indoctrinated by whatever new monster - maybe the "Mind Flayer" or some other evil presence from the Upside-Down. (D&D nerd aside: the Demogorgon is actually one of the most powerful demon lords in D&D lore (it's not a type of demon - it's a specific, particularly powerful demon,) whereas Mind Flayers, while certainly scary and dangerous, are not nearly as powerful individually. I kind of think that they should have used the term Beholder for the Mind Flayer, given its tendency to sit back and plan and observe from a distance. Beholders are also less powerful than Demogorgon, but whatever.)
The true nature of the Upside-Down remains fundamentally mysterious, but after being possessed (seemingly having some flesh-tube made out of dead rats shoved down his throat,) Billy has a vision of the Upside-Down in which a crowd of human-like forms approach him, their leader being a copy of him, but one that speaks with a deep and creepy voice. They want to "build" something, and I'm not really clear on whether Billy's eventually go the way of those rats, if he's going to start donating people to that fate, or if others are going to get possessed like he is.
Meanwhile, the rest of our regulars are just getting on with life. El and Mike have become an obnoxious teen couple, much to Hopper's chagrin (and as someone who has only recently stepped into the role of El's dad, he's been thrown into the deep end of being a single parent for a teenager - a role that even parents with a partner struggle with when they've raised a kid since birth.) Lucas and Max seem to have things figured out a lot better, despite Lucas' constant messing up (Max is just too good-natured, it seems, to let small mistakes ruin things.) When Mike makes some rookie mistakes with El after Hopper puts his paternal foot down around all this making out every day, El goes to Max for emotional support, and the two quickly develop a charming friendship.
Which, on one hand, almost seems like a course-correction after the two seemed to develop some kind of accidental romantic rivalry last season. But it's nice to see these two girls just be girls together.
Dustin returns from science camp with a questionably-real Mormon girlfriend from Utah, and is troubled to discover that his friends aren't as into the idea of contacting her via HAM radio. But when he stumbles upon some strange Russian broadcast, he brings it to Steve, aka his partner in the most unexpectedly delightful pairing from last season. Working with Steve's cool co-worker Robin (who manages to establish herself very quickly as a great addition to the cast) they figure out that it's some kind of code language, and that the broadcast was coming from the mall.
Finally, Will, a bit like Dustin, isn't so free of concern. Perhaps due to his horrible connection to the Upside-Down, he has a sense of the terrible things that are afoot, but not enough that he can say anything for certain.
God, there are a lot of characters to check in with. Joyce is still dealing with Bob's death, and though she gives some friendly advice, parent-to-parent, to Hopper, she isn't having his theoretically platonic but definitely not just platonic advances.
Basically, there's a lot of life going on, with the mall killing the old downtown businesses, and Cary Elwes as a douchey mayor who I'm sure will be involved in something disastrous later in the season. So far, only Billy and the unfortunate fellow lifeguard he has sacrificed (in one way or another) to this awful monstrosity are really aware of the oncoming horror.
Sidenote: I live in LA, and we've had a couple of big earthquakes over the last couple days (centered far away, so no major damage, but they've lasted pretty long each time.) Anyway, it's a weird place to be to start watching a show about terrible portals to a nightmarish otherworld.
Friday, June 21, 2019
Barry's Return to Darkness Ends a Stellar Second Season
If I were to pitch Barry to someone who didn't know it, I might suggest that it's a bit like Breaking Bad, but a comedy. But that's not really accurate. Walter White pretty early on revealed himself as an evil man, and his justifications allowed him to commit more and more heinous things, with only the occasional effort to perform some kind of redemptive act.
Barry is about a man who wrestles with his evil nature, and wishes to be good.
We know Barry to be an expert killer - we see his first kills in a flashback of his time in Afghanistan, and we know that he has a unique talent for violence. And in this way, Barry is cursed by his greatest talent - his ability to dole out death. He would far rather have a productive talent - to be an artist, an actor. Even if he'll never be a great star, he just wants to define himself as something better, beautiful, and good. Like so many, he comes to Hollywood to reinvent himself, and so desperately wants to do that because the reality of what he is and what he has been is so horrible.
Season one of Barry ended with his murder of Janice Moss, the detective who had finally caught on to his criminal life. This act, and the earlier act of killing a former war buddy to prevent him from going to the cops, was an act of self-interested violence.
Because Barry does not want to be a bad person, but he also does not want to pay for his crimes by losing the new life that he's been trying to build for himself. To arrive in Los Angeles, connect with an acting teacher who, despite being sleazy in myriad ways, is still fundamentally caring and insightful, and to find happiness with a girlfriend who, while a bit self-centered and myopic, is ultimately just someone who is trying to find her own inner strength and be something more than just the victim she had been.
It's notable that season one ends with Barry's proclamation to himself that everything will be good and peaceful "starting... now!" after he kills Moss. Over the course of season two, at least until the finale, Barry does not kill anyone. Despite Fuches' hopes that he'll start killing for money again so that Fuches can take his 50% cut and Hank's desire for Barry's profound violent skills, Barry actually nearly makes it without ending another person's life.
He makes special efforts - he offers to take Ronnie Proxin to Chicago, and he offers training rather than direct action to Hank's Chechen mobsters. But all of his efforts at reforming his life come to an end when Fuches plays a hand Barry cannot deal with.
When Fuches discovers Janice's car, with her body stuffed in the trunk, he poses as a private detective and brings Gene to the site, showing him ultimate proof that the woman he loves is dead. Barry races to rescue Gene, thinking (not irrationally) that Fuches means to kill him to get to Barry. But Fuches, monstrous bastard that he is, doesn't actually wind up killing Gene - though he has framed him for Moss' murder and suggested he was going to kill himself over the guilt.
Barry does manage to save Gene by planting a medal Hank had given him in the car's trunk. "The Debt is Paid," offered by Hank as a way of saying thanks to Barry for his help, now seems to be an intimidating calling card that implicates their organization in Moss' death. Much as Barry had, in a Rube Goldberg-esque way, escaped Loach's extortion at the end of ronnie/lilly, this loose end is seemingly tied up.
But two things remain: Fuches has not only sold Barry out to Loach but also threatened an innocent man to get to Barry, and his fury finally gets the better of him.
Mere hours after Fuches has worked out a deal, settling the schism between Hank, Cristobal, and Esther, working his incredible skills of manipulation to avoid a bloodbath and hopefully get a taste of the profits, Barry shows up, coming for Fuches, but unleashing his horrific, nearly John Wick-level of violent talent upon the gathered gangs. Seemingly dozens of Burmese, Bolivian, and Chechen gangsters die in Barry's unstoppable rampage, including Esther. We even get a moment when Mayrbek, Barry's star pupil among the Chechens, pauses when he sees Barry burst in the door, thinking he is seeing a friend only to be shot in the head.
The thing is: the criminal world that pushes Barry to violence is itself governed by a strange and often comical set of rules and norms that makes them seem oddly harmless. Cristobal's endless patience with Hank's machinations, for example, seems to suggest that Barry's violence is something beyond even what these hardened gangsters are used to. Even Fuches, the devil on Barry's shoulder, does not wind up killing Gene. Is this because he has not capacity for violence, or is it just that he feels he can inflict more pain on Barry by putting Gene in legal peril?
My takeaway from ronnie/lilly was that Barry's epiphanic identification of Fuches as the source of evil in his life is actually self-serving and self-deluding. Barry would love to find that the darkness he participates in is something other than himself, something external that he will be free of if he simply cuts Fuches out of his life. Because of Fuches' insistences on insinuating himself into Barry's life, he's now come to the conclusion that he'll be forced to kill him.
But as attractive as the notion that, without Fuches, Barry would be free to live a happy and good life is, the truth is that Barry needs to take responsibility for his own choices. There was always another option. At this point, the way out of that life is to turn himself in, to sacrifice the better life he wants in order to exit the one he despises. But his desire for the new life is greater than his distaste for the old one, and so he will continue to struggle in this purgatorial mixture.
In the end, however, even if Fuches has been chased off for now and Gene is free of police suspicion, the cat has been let out of the bag. Fuches didn't kill Gene, but he may have killed the lie that allowed Gene to act as a father figure to Barry. "Barry Berkman did this" is the message whispered to Gene at the trunk of Janice's car.
And we are left to wonder how far Barry will go to protect his freedom, or how much he'll be willing to sacrifice to preserve this fundamentally good man.
Barry is about a man who wrestles with his evil nature, and wishes to be good.
We know Barry to be an expert killer - we see his first kills in a flashback of his time in Afghanistan, and we know that he has a unique talent for violence. And in this way, Barry is cursed by his greatest talent - his ability to dole out death. He would far rather have a productive talent - to be an artist, an actor. Even if he'll never be a great star, he just wants to define himself as something better, beautiful, and good. Like so many, he comes to Hollywood to reinvent himself, and so desperately wants to do that because the reality of what he is and what he has been is so horrible.
Season one of Barry ended with his murder of Janice Moss, the detective who had finally caught on to his criminal life. This act, and the earlier act of killing a former war buddy to prevent him from going to the cops, was an act of self-interested violence.
Because Barry does not want to be a bad person, but he also does not want to pay for his crimes by losing the new life that he's been trying to build for himself. To arrive in Los Angeles, connect with an acting teacher who, despite being sleazy in myriad ways, is still fundamentally caring and insightful, and to find happiness with a girlfriend who, while a bit self-centered and myopic, is ultimately just someone who is trying to find her own inner strength and be something more than just the victim she had been.
It's notable that season one ends with Barry's proclamation to himself that everything will be good and peaceful "starting... now!" after he kills Moss. Over the course of season two, at least until the finale, Barry does not kill anyone. Despite Fuches' hopes that he'll start killing for money again so that Fuches can take his 50% cut and Hank's desire for Barry's profound violent skills, Barry actually nearly makes it without ending another person's life.
He makes special efforts - he offers to take Ronnie Proxin to Chicago, and he offers training rather than direct action to Hank's Chechen mobsters. But all of his efforts at reforming his life come to an end when Fuches plays a hand Barry cannot deal with.
When Fuches discovers Janice's car, with her body stuffed in the trunk, he poses as a private detective and brings Gene to the site, showing him ultimate proof that the woman he loves is dead. Barry races to rescue Gene, thinking (not irrationally) that Fuches means to kill him to get to Barry. But Fuches, monstrous bastard that he is, doesn't actually wind up killing Gene - though he has framed him for Moss' murder and suggested he was going to kill himself over the guilt.
Barry does manage to save Gene by planting a medal Hank had given him in the car's trunk. "The Debt is Paid," offered by Hank as a way of saying thanks to Barry for his help, now seems to be an intimidating calling card that implicates their organization in Moss' death. Much as Barry had, in a Rube Goldberg-esque way, escaped Loach's extortion at the end of ronnie/lilly, this loose end is seemingly tied up.
But two things remain: Fuches has not only sold Barry out to Loach but also threatened an innocent man to get to Barry, and his fury finally gets the better of him.
Mere hours after Fuches has worked out a deal, settling the schism between Hank, Cristobal, and Esther, working his incredible skills of manipulation to avoid a bloodbath and hopefully get a taste of the profits, Barry shows up, coming for Fuches, but unleashing his horrific, nearly John Wick-level of violent talent upon the gathered gangs. Seemingly dozens of Burmese, Bolivian, and Chechen gangsters die in Barry's unstoppable rampage, including Esther. We even get a moment when Mayrbek, Barry's star pupil among the Chechens, pauses when he sees Barry burst in the door, thinking he is seeing a friend only to be shot in the head.
The thing is: the criminal world that pushes Barry to violence is itself governed by a strange and often comical set of rules and norms that makes them seem oddly harmless. Cristobal's endless patience with Hank's machinations, for example, seems to suggest that Barry's violence is something beyond even what these hardened gangsters are used to. Even Fuches, the devil on Barry's shoulder, does not wind up killing Gene. Is this because he has not capacity for violence, or is it just that he feels he can inflict more pain on Barry by putting Gene in legal peril?
My takeaway from ronnie/lilly was that Barry's epiphanic identification of Fuches as the source of evil in his life is actually self-serving and self-deluding. Barry would love to find that the darkness he participates in is something other than himself, something external that he will be free of if he simply cuts Fuches out of his life. Because of Fuches' insistences on insinuating himself into Barry's life, he's now come to the conclusion that he'll be forced to kill him.
But as attractive as the notion that, without Fuches, Barry would be free to live a happy and good life is, the truth is that Barry needs to take responsibility for his own choices. There was always another option. At this point, the way out of that life is to turn himself in, to sacrifice the better life he wants in order to exit the one he despises. But his desire for the new life is greater than his distaste for the old one, and so he will continue to struggle in this purgatorial mixture.
In the end, however, even if Fuches has been chased off for now and Gene is free of police suspicion, the cat has been let out of the bag. Fuches didn't kill Gene, but he may have killed the lie that allowed Gene to act as a father figure to Barry. "Barry Berkman did this" is the message whispered to Gene at the trunk of Janice's car.
And we are left to wonder how far Barry will go to protect his freedom, or how much he'll be willing to sacrifice to preserve this fundamentally good man.
Friday, June 14, 2019
In ronnie/lilly, Barry Becomes Something... Different. And Amazing
I realize I'm a month or so late on this, but I'm catching up on Barry, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite shows.
A number of very complex issues come to a fore in the episode prior to ronnie/lilly, called What!? (the titular line-reading by Bill Hader that ends that episode was an immense moment of comic relief to what had been a very stressful episode.)
I'm going to give this the spoiler cut because it's really worth watching this show and being surprised by its twists and turns.
A number of very complex issues come to a fore in the episode prior to ronnie/lilly, called What!? (the titular line-reading by Bill Hader that ends that episode was an immense moment of comic relief to what had been a very stressful episode.)
I'm going to give this the spoiler cut because it's really worth watching this show and being surprised by its twists and turns.
Thursday, June 13, 2019
Good Omens
The novel Good Omens is funny - which I mean in two senses. It's a funny book, written by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, both renowned fantasy writers, the latter of whom in particular is famed for his comedic take on the genre. And the novel is filled with humor - my elevator pitch for it would be "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Apocalypse" given its creatively silly tangents and humanistic absurdism. But it's also funny in the sense that it's clearly parodying the 1976 movie The Omen, a much more serious take on the premise of the antichrist being swapped into the family of an American diplomat. I don't know how lasting the influence of the Omen has been (I tried watching it once and found it dull) but it's notable that it has been nearly thirty years between the publication of this novel and the release of the new miniseries, while it had been only fourteen between the movie and the book.
Ultimately, while the arrival of the antichrist is a central aspect to the story, the core of it is the odd-couple relationship between Aziraphale and Crowley, an angel and a demon who have spent so much time on Earth that they've grown quite fond of the world and its humans and aren't all that stoked for this big, climactic apocalypse everything has supposedly been building toward.
Having spent so much time as opposite numbers - literally dating back to the Garden of Eden, where Crowley was the snake that tempted Eve and Aziraphale was the angel holding the flaming sword (until he felt sorry for the newly-banished Adam and Eve and gave them the sword as a parting gift) guarding the entrance - the two have spent more time together than in Heaven or Hell and have been enemies so long that they've become best friends. As they realized that each person balanced out the other's work, it became an excuse to kind of knock off work early and just enjoy the world.
The television miniseries scores an incredible casting coup. Michael Sheen plays Aziraphale and David Tennant plays Crowley. I may never have seen such precisely perfect casting before. Sheen nails Aziraphale's effete helplessness - a dorky guy who really just wants to read books and enjoy culture - and Tennant oozes rockstar cool even as he's dodging the demands of his more zealous demonic brethren. And the two have magnificent chemistry - one could interpret them as a bickering married couple who nevertheless have a clearly deep bond that they don't want to see broken by the outbreak of supernatural war.
There's an absurdist, almost dadaist quality to their efforts to prevent the apocalypse, particularly given that for several years, their plan to moderate the antichrist's upbringing to make sure he's not too evil but also not so good that people will notice that destiny is being disturbed, turns out to be a fool's errand because there was a mix-up when the children were swapped out, meaning that this kid is actually just the biological child of a random English couple while the real antichrist went to that family in the English countryside.
Of course, in this parodic version of the Omen story, the antichrist is not inherently evil - but he does have power to shape reality. The thing is, he's had a pretty normal upbringing for an 11-year-old English boy, so aside from having a clear leadership position amongst his three best friends, his desires are pretty standard for a boy his age.
The show holds pretty faithful to the book (I can't recall if the epilogue dealing with how Aziraphale and Crowley face punishment for their actions is from the book) with a couple of small changes. I would say that the entire series is quite enjoyable, but the brilliant casting of its two central leads leaves the rest of the show looking poorer in comparison. (I will say Jon Hamm is nearly as perfect casting for the Archangel Gabriel - who serves as Aziraphale's sort of corporate, falsely-friendly boss.)
While I'm a Gaiman fan (I keep meaning to read more Discworld books and form a stronger opinion on Pratchett) I think that the story and its style works a lot better in the fun tangents than in its master plot - something that was true of the book as well as the series. There's a bit of a feeling of anticlimax, even as things get very big toward the end, but if the story is an excuse to hang out with these fun characters, it feels very much worth it. Notably, in episode three, there's an extended sequence showing Aziraphale and Crowley's friendship developing over the ages, from Eden to Noah's Ark, Jesus' crucifixion, the Middle Ages, the French Revolution, and World War Two, which is an invention for the show and wonderful piece.
At six episodes, it's not a massive time investment anyway, and worth it for Sheen and Tennant alone.
Ultimately, while the arrival of the antichrist is a central aspect to the story, the core of it is the odd-couple relationship between Aziraphale and Crowley, an angel and a demon who have spent so much time on Earth that they've grown quite fond of the world and its humans and aren't all that stoked for this big, climactic apocalypse everything has supposedly been building toward.
Having spent so much time as opposite numbers - literally dating back to the Garden of Eden, where Crowley was the snake that tempted Eve and Aziraphale was the angel holding the flaming sword (until he felt sorry for the newly-banished Adam and Eve and gave them the sword as a parting gift) guarding the entrance - the two have spent more time together than in Heaven or Hell and have been enemies so long that they've become best friends. As they realized that each person balanced out the other's work, it became an excuse to kind of knock off work early and just enjoy the world.
The television miniseries scores an incredible casting coup. Michael Sheen plays Aziraphale and David Tennant plays Crowley. I may never have seen such precisely perfect casting before. Sheen nails Aziraphale's effete helplessness - a dorky guy who really just wants to read books and enjoy culture - and Tennant oozes rockstar cool even as he's dodging the demands of his more zealous demonic brethren. And the two have magnificent chemistry - one could interpret them as a bickering married couple who nevertheless have a clearly deep bond that they don't want to see broken by the outbreak of supernatural war.
There's an absurdist, almost dadaist quality to their efforts to prevent the apocalypse, particularly given that for several years, their plan to moderate the antichrist's upbringing to make sure he's not too evil but also not so good that people will notice that destiny is being disturbed, turns out to be a fool's errand because there was a mix-up when the children were swapped out, meaning that this kid is actually just the biological child of a random English couple while the real antichrist went to that family in the English countryside.
Of course, in this parodic version of the Omen story, the antichrist is not inherently evil - but he does have power to shape reality. The thing is, he's had a pretty normal upbringing for an 11-year-old English boy, so aside from having a clear leadership position amongst his three best friends, his desires are pretty standard for a boy his age.
The show holds pretty faithful to the book (I can't recall if the epilogue dealing with how Aziraphale and Crowley face punishment for their actions is from the book) with a couple of small changes. I would say that the entire series is quite enjoyable, but the brilliant casting of its two central leads leaves the rest of the show looking poorer in comparison. (I will say Jon Hamm is nearly as perfect casting for the Archangel Gabriel - who serves as Aziraphale's sort of corporate, falsely-friendly boss.)
While I'm a Gaiman fan (I keep meaning to read more Discworld books and form a stronger opinion on Pratchett) I think that the story and its style works a lot better in the fun tangents than in its master plot - something that was true of the book as well as the series. There's a bit of a feeling of anticlimax, even as things get very big toward the end, but if the story is an excuse to hang out with these fun characters, it feels very much worth it. Notably, in episode three, there's an extended sequence showing Aziraphale and Crowley's friendship developing over the ages, from Eden to Noah's Ark, Jesus' crucifixion, the Middle Ages, the French Revolution, and World War Two, which is an invention for the show and wonderful piece.
At six episodes, it's not a massive time investment anyway, and worth it for Sheen and Tennant alone.
Friday, June 7, 2019
What Makes a Good Twist?
The big twist ending is a trope that I first became fascinated by in the late 90s (and the early 00s, largely watching movies from the 90s.) Different movies have accomplished them in different ways, and I think there are a lot of different forms a twist can take.
I wrote a post not long ago about spoilers. Plot spoilers have always been a big deal - there's a story that someone walked out of the premiere of The Empire Strikes Back and said (and by the way, this one's past the statute of limitations) "I can't believe Darth Vader is Luke's father!" thus drawing the ire of the fans looking forward to their own viewing.
This post is going to have some spoilers, but generally not for anything that hasn't been around for over ten years. (And if I do get into other things, I'll put it behind a cut.)
But spoilers are, I think, a broader conversation than twists. Twists, naturally, can be spoiled, but so can other things. If you're, say, making a climactic film in an 11-year, 22 (or whatever the count was) film franchise, certain characters dying would be the grounds for spoilers, but it's not exactly a twist - when the stakes are raised and the threat is made out to be enormous, it's not surprising that some of the good guys might pay the ultimate cost. You might not want to know who does, but it's not exactly a twist.
Given that it's the subject of the post, let's talk about what it is, exactly, that we mean when we talk about a twist.
Often, it's sort of the opposite of dramatic irony. This term is used to describe situations where the characters are operating on limited information while the audience knows better. When Hamlet considers killing Claudius but decides against it given that his murderous uncle has just been praying and, he assumes, atoning spiritually for killing Hamlet's father, Hamlet decides he can't kill him now as it would result in Claudius going to heaven with a clean soul. Yet the audience knows that Claudius has found himself unable to ask forgiveness for his deeds, meaning he's still damned. Hamlet's failure to do the deed then is what leads to all the other deaths in the play.
A twist tends to involve some character - sometimes even the protagonist - having some vital piece of information that the audience knows nothing about, only for this information to be revealed later on.
But that's not really the complete picture.
I suppose such a thing could be a mild twist. But if we use that definition, it would mean that every Agatha Christie-style murder mystery has a twist ending, only because we know that someone's the murderer, but we don't know who that is until it's revealed in the end.
So we also have to take into account genre expectations.
Murder on the Orient Express is maybe the most famous of the Poirot mysteries by Christie. But the thing about it is that even within the mystery genre, it has a twist ending. Like most Poirot stories, a person is murdered (and as is often the case, someone who rightfully deserves a number of enemies.) Seemingly by coincidence, there are several different people who all have some connection to the victim - a mob boss - who are on the Orient Express with him when he is stabbed to death. Each has a motive to kill him, which is actually rather standard Agatha Christie fare. So, knowing the genre that she more or less invented, we expect to have Poirot's suspicions jump from suspect to suspect until he arrives at the final proof that tells us which of these people it is. But then there's the twist: they all did it. In this case, it's not exactly the character who has information that the audience doesn't, but instead it's that the author knows that the rules of locked-room mystery stories can be changed, while the audience is expecting them to remain consistent.
One of the best-executed twists, to my mind, is that of Fight Club. Fight Club, adapted from the Chuck Palahniuk novel, is thematically dense with ideas about capitalism, sexuality, misogyny, violence, and toxic masculinity. But it also contains a mind-blowing twist that has become something of a cliche by now (a TV show, which I won't name here because it's from more recent than 10 years ago, paid homage to Fight Club by playing a cover of Where is My Mind? which is the song that ends the film, while doing essentially the same big twist.) All throughout, the film has centered around the nameless narrator (and it's a tribute to the film that when you first watch it, you might not even realize you never got his name) and Tyler Durden, the charismatic ubermensch with whom he forms first the eponymous Fight Club and then the anarchist terrorist organization called Project Mayhem. When the narrator tries to stop the insanity that has gotten way out of hand, he comes to realize that Tyler Durden is not a real person - that Tyler is just a persona that has allowed him to act out his every unfettered, id-based impulse.
Now, here's the thing about Fight Club: I predicted the twist.
There is a scene somewhere in the middle of the movie when Marla, the woman who inadvertently helped to spawn the Tyler Durden persona, comes to see the narrator and speaks with him while Tyler is in the basement. When Marla asks who the narrator is speaking with, the movie just moves on, but I thought "hold on, wouldn't it be obvious that it was Tyler? Unless Tyler doesn't exist?"
So yes, I did predict the ending.
But it was not predictable. It was inevitable.
See, here's the thing: upon a second viewing, Fight Club seems to beat you over the head with the truth of the twist. From early on, you get lines like "Sometimes Tyler would speak for me." Or you'd see him popping up in single-frame flashes (spliced in, like the porn he inserts into children's movies) well before the Narrator actually meets him. In such a stylized movie, we're expected to simply dismiss these the first time around as anarchic stylistic touches. But the movie is actually screaming the truth at us, and yet the truth is so outlandish that we work hard to explain it away.
And that, to me, is the essence of a good twist.
The same friend who first recommended Fight Club also encouraged me to see Memento, which has its own twist. But the Christopher Nolan movie I like the most (sorry, Dark Knight) is the Prestige, which manages to use one massive twist to misdirect - not unlike a magician - from the even bigger one.
I previously wrote an extensive summary of the plot, but realized that would be about the length of the preceding post, so to boil it down: there is one twist in this movie that would normally seem to be the big one that leaves audiences talking about it. The film centers around the bitter rivalry between two stage magicians in the 1890s, Borden and Angier. But we eventually discover that Borden is, in fact, two different people.
This twist works similarly to Fight Club, in that on a second viewing, knowing what we know, the signs are obvious. Christian Bale gives subtly but distinctly different performances depending on which Borden twin he's portraying, to the extent that you can develop a sense of one brother who is ambitious and vengeful and the other who is humble and cares more for his wife and child.
But what's remarkable is that this twist is, itself, kind of a misdirection from the larger twist. And that twist is that The Prestige is a science fiction movie.
The lengths that the Bordens go to hide the fact that they are two people is remarkable. But then we discover that Angier bought what amounts to a cloning machine from Nikola Tesla. And we find that Angier has, essentially, been killing himself over and over in front of an audience in the hopes of luring Borden to be implicated in the death.
The horror of what Angier has done, and the shocking genre shift showing us how he accomplished it, pulls the rug out from under us. Perhaps we felt we were clever, maybe figuring out the truth about the Bordens because that's the kind of twist this sort of movie is expected to have.
And much like an expert magic trick, it uses our own cleverness against us.
And again, the twist is telegraphed - the title shot at the beginning of the movie is a field of top hats that have been duplicated by this device. Yet, perhaps like the single-frame splices of Tyler Durden, we might dismiss this as a metaphorical or stylistic image. We don't yet have the context to understand the profound significance of the image.
I don't know if it's just the movies I watched around that era or if there were a lot of those sorts of movies then. 1999, the year of Fight Club, also saw the release of the Sixth Sense, another movie famous for its massive twist.
The examples I've mentioned so far are, I think, examples of well-executed twists.
What's interesting is the way that films have shown themselves to be, actually, sort of short-form versions of storytelling. Television has become more novelistic, and a few prominent TV adaptations of novels have shown that you can tell much broader, more sweeping stories. I just watched Good Omens (which probably deserves its own post,) which was done as a 6-part miniseries (roughly 6 hours total.) Previously, I could imagine such a story being more likely to get a 2-hour big-screen adaptation, but TV is becoming a more popular medium for adaptation, maybe thanks to Game of Thrones.
But when it comes to twist-focused stories, film has the advantage of forcing you into a certain degree of narrative economy. If you watch something like, say, Lucky Number Slevin, you know that there's going to be some big reveal, and it's a joy to watch and wait for the truth to be unpacked.
Films are also generally seen in one sitting, which means that the twist ending is part and parcel with the entirety of the narrative. I think this part is particularly important when you talk about stories that really pull the rug out from under you regarding characters and their true natures.
Um, spoilers for Game of Thrones.
Thursday, May 30, 2019
What We Do In the Shadows Closes its First Season With Promises for the Future
Creating a television series out of the indie cult hit What We Do in the Shadows was not obviously going to work. While the movie mines a great deal of comedy out of its portrayal of a bunch of dorky, out-of-touch but nevertheless deadly vampires, it wasn't clear if it was the premise or the particular characters - two of whom were played by the film's creators - that made the movie so fun.
The show takes place in the same fictional world, and indeed we eventually see Viago, Vladislav, and Deacon pop up in a late-season episode to confirm this fact, but instead we follow three other vampires (actually four, counting energy vampire Colin Robinson, who's operating on entirely different rules but is still a vampire) whose dynamics and personalities are entirely different from the three of the movie. Yes, they deal with similar issues like rivalries with werewolves and the baggage of being centuries old in a modern world, as well as, you know, finding people to murder and drink their blood.
To a large extent, I think that the show does manage to replicate the charm of the original film, though its episodic nature means that sometimes it lands perfectly while at other times it comes up a little short.
But the developments of the finale, "Ancestry," promise exciting things moving forward in the next season.
I don't know that I'd really consider this a spoiler-heavy show, but just in case you feel that way, here's a spoiler cut.
The show takes place in the same fictional world, and indeed we eventually see Viago, Vladislav, and Deacon pop up in a late-season episode to confirm this fact, but instead we follow three other vampires (actually four, counting energy vampire Colin Robinson, who's operating on entirely different rules but is still a vampire) whose dynamics and personalities are entirely different from the three of the movie. Yes, they deal with similar issues like rivalries with werewolves and the baggage of being centuries old in a modern world, as well as, you know, finding people to murder and drink their blood.
To a large extent, I think that the show does manage to replicate the charm of the original film, though its episodic nature means that sometimes it lands perfectly while at other times it comes up a little short.
But the developments of the finale, "Ancestry," promise exciting things moving forward in the next season.
I don't know that I'd really consider this a spoiler-heavy show, but just in case you feel that way, here's a spoiler cut.
Saturday, May 25, 2019
Barry Season One and Protagonist-Centered Morality
I've just finished the first season of Barry. Despite ostensibly being a half-hour comedy, the show that I'm finding a desire to compare it with is Breaking Bad. I realize that might appear to be unfair to Barry, given that Breaking Bad has gone down as one of the best TV shows of all time, but I don't actually mean to say Barry compares poorly to it. Barry is doing similar things - a criminal character balancing their violent life with a mundane one - in opposite ways.
The premise: Barry is about the eponymous hit man (Bill Hader), a veteran of Afghanistan who has been working for a man named Fuches (Stephen Root), a friend of his (presumably deceased) father's who effectively acts as his agent, taking a 50% cut as he sells Barry's services to various people willing to pay.
Barry is sent on a job to Los Angeles to kill the guy who is fucking a Chechen gang leader's wife, but in tracking the guy, he comes across an acting class taught by Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) and, like so many who come to Hollywood, is entranced by the idea of acting. He meets Sally (Sarah Goldberg), one of the students in the class, and becomes invested in the idea of redefining himself, becoming an actor, and quitting his violent professional life.
Tonally, the show begins by milking the comedy out of such a premise, with jokes about the vapidity of Hollywood and a number of bizarre figures in the world of crime (NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan), one of the Chechens, is a stand-out the way he embodies a dopey, ultra-friendly face to the banality of evil.)
But even as we watch Barry, who is convinced that he is a good guy who kills bad guys, and that he's not fundamentally evil, grapple with his struggles to quit this life, we're invited to question both whether that's actually true and also whether Barry actually deserves redemption.
While Breaking Bad revealed relatively early that Walter White was a bad man looking for an excuse to do bad things, Barry clearly sees himself as someone who should and will at one point be able to life the life he feels is his destiny - to simply be an ex-Marine who served his country faithfully, and who now is settling into a happy life as a successful actor with his girlfriend Sally.
He's a man who wants redemption, but at the same time he's in denial about the monstrous things he has done. We like Barry - we see his goals and desires, and if it were any other person, we'd feel no conflict in sympathizing. But redemption requires acknowledging the problem. Barry wants to escape this violent world with his soul unscathed, but it's already scarred over.
Spoilers coming up.
The premise: Barry is about the eponymous hit man (Bill Hader), a veteran of Afghanistan who has been working for a man named Fuches (Stephen Root), a friend of his (presumably deceased) father's who effectively acts as his agent, taking a 50% cut as he sells Barry's services to various people willing to pay.
Barry is sent on a job to Los Angeles to kill the guy who is fucking a Chechen gang leader's wife, but in tracking the guy, he comes across an acting class taught by Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) and, like so many who come to Hollywood, is entranced by the idea of acting. He meets Sally (Sarah Goldberg), one of the students in the class, and becomes invested in the idea of redefining himself, becoming an actor, and quitting his violent professional life.
Tonally, the show begins by milking the comedy out of such a premise, with jokes about the vapidity of Hollywood and a number of bizarre figures in the world of crime (NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan), one of the Chechens, is a stand-out the way he embodies a dopey, ultra-friendly face to the banality of evil.)
But even as we watch Barry, who is convinced that he is a good guy who kills bad guys, and that he's not fundamentally evil, grapple with his struggles to quit this life, we're invited to question both whether that's actually true and also whether Barry actually deserves redemption.
While Breaking Bad revealed relatively early that Walter White was a bad man looking for an excuse to do bad things, Barry clearly sees himself as someone who should and will at one point be able to life the life he feels is his destiny - to simply be an ex-Marine who served his country faithfully, and who now is settling into a happy life as a successful actor with his girlfriend Sally.
He's a man who wants redemption, but at the same time he's in denial about the monstrous things he has done. We like Barry - we see his goals and desires, and if it were any other person, we'd feel no conflict in sympathizing. But redemption requires acknowledging the problem. Barry wants to escape this violent world with his soul unscathed, but it's already scarred over.
Spoilers coming up.
Friday, May 24, 2019
Why People Are So Angry About Entertainment These Days
I realize that title is a very ambitious one, and I'm not going to be able to get a totally satisfying explanation in this humble blog. But I think that there's a lot of vitriol and passionate anger over the direction various pieces of entertainment are going that seems worse than usual.
And maybe that's just the fallacy of things feeling more intense while they're happening.
Consider the Star Wars prequels. These days, it seems as if most people remember them as catastrophic artistic failures doomed by a brand and a creator who had grown beyond the reins of creative limitations and outside opinions. My recollection - as a middle schooler, at least when Phantom Menace came out - was that the initial response was positive. But over time - and not a ton of time - we kind of reevaluated the movies and started to question the decisions made in making them. My personal position on them is that I think George Lucas had grand ambitions for the prequels to represent a more complex, politically relevant, and nuanced backstory to his grand epic, but did not have the writing chops to make his characters feel real amidst the ideas and spectacle he wanted. So, while I don't mean to say there was no cynicism in those movies, I think that they were trying to be good and just, you know, failed to be.
Yet in a lot of ways, I think that the response to the prequels set the stage for the current outrage culture.
To be clear: outrage culture is not confined solely to entertainment. The current political moment (please let it end) is fueled by outrage. And the internet being, to paraphrase the Simpsons, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems, it has formed communities out of shared outrage. Indeed, disliking something grants people a kind of identity, whether it's the prequels, the new Star Wars movies, the state of World of Warcraft, the last season of Game of Thrones, or, you know, one political party or another. Or one ethnic group or another.
Yeah, that's the darkest extreme of this outrage culture. Racism is, I think, largely born out of a desire to identify with a group, and by defining yourself as the ones who want to, say, keep people who look a certain way or follow a certain religion out of your country, you can derive a sense of belonging.
But to step back from that can of worms, I think there are other elements at play as well.
One big one is franchising.
Sequels are nothing new. But a lot of the time, movie sequels were sort of afterthoughts. I don't think there are many people who liked the Lost World more than Jurassic Park. Similarly, while Men in Black was revelatory in how fun and funny it was, I imagine most people don't even remember what Men in Black II was about.
Basically, sequels of the post-Jaws/Star Wars era were largely bad, or rarely more than "meh." Star Wars was the big exception - even though I think some older fans found Return of the Jedi disappointing, Empire Strikes Back is seen as the gold standard for expanding a series, worldbuilding, and playing with tone.
But Star Wars also created a model that would shift the way we consume these stories, and I'm going to finally start getting to the point I actually intended to make with this post.
Star Wars started as a stand-alone film, but when Empire was announced, they also knew that Jedi was going to come after it. Empire came out in 1980, and Jedi in '82. Which means that watching Empire Strikes Back, you needed to form an opinion about a story that wasn't finished yet.
Twenty years later, the Lord of the Rings movies came out in December of 2001, 2002, and 2003. There was no question, when finishing the first movie, that there were two more coming later. They took a series of books that had been written together as one massive epic and kind of replicated the process in filmmaking. You knew that there was more of this story to tell because it had actually been shot as one massive film.
Not everything can be done that way, though.
Consider also the rise of prestige television. TV has become far more serialized, and Game of Thrones was a new strategy for adapting an epic fantasy series. With production design and visual effects you'd expect for a big-screen feature, Game of Thrones told its story over a course of time that dwarfed the 12-ish hour epic that was Lord of the Rings.
And given that we watched it over the course of nine years, it meant something very important:
We had to decide whether we liked it a long time ago.
Basically, when Ned Stark was getting his head cut off (spoilers?) most viewers had to, at that point, decide whether they were invested.
Now, certainly some people got off the train later, but it became something of an identity. OK Cupid, before the last season, allowed people to add a banner to their dating profiles identifying them as Game of Thrones fans.
Art is something people identify with. Think about how music genres tend to have their own fashions, despite there being no direct relationship between sound you generate and the clothing you wear.
And so, while hyping oneself up to expect perfection from some movie or show you like can lead to disappointment, the thing that turns that disappointment into rage is that people feel like there's some part of their identity that they've lost.
I mean, the Simpsons was a huge part of my childhood, up until about 2000. I think that stretch of the show is maybe the greatest television comedy of all time. But as the show changed and its humor lost its cleverness, I had to let go of it. It was painful.
But on the other hand - artists are constantly doubting themselves and struggling just to get the work done at all. Art is created by humans, and it's also subjective. You might have derived a certain meaning from a piece of art that is at odds with the artist's intentions. And while that can be just kind of interesting when you have a finished piece to examine, with a work in progress like a long-running series, it can lead to painful cognitive dissonance when you find that you and the artist were on diverging paths.
But no artist can anticipate every audience member's reactions and what they'll specifically invest in. I think it's on us to be able to take a step back, take a deep breath, and simply express rational disappointment if a series ends in a way we find unsatisfying. Anger is not the right emotion to derive from such an experience - or at least, if we do feel that way (we can't really help which emotions we feel) we need to recognize it for what it really means, and not, you know, send death threats to people involved in the production.
And maybe that's just the fallacy of things feeling more intense while they're happening.
Consider the Star Wars prequels. These days, it seems as if most people remember them as catastrophic artistic failures doomed by a brand and a creator who had grown beyond the reins of creative limitations and outside opinions. My recollection - as a middle schooler, at least when Phantom Menace came out - was that the initial response was positive. But over time - and not a ton of time - we kind of reevaluated the movies and started to question the decisions made in making them. My personal position on them is that I think George Lucas had grand ambitions for the prequels to represent a more complex, politically relevant, and nuanced backstory to his grand epic, but did not have the writing chops to make his characters feel real amidst the ideas and spectacle he wanted. So, while I don't mean to say there was no cynicism in those movies, I think that they were trying to be good and just, you know, failed to be.
Yet in a lot of ways, I think that the response to the prequels set the stage for the current outrage culture.
To be clear: outrage culture is not confined solely to entertainment. The current political moment (please let it end) is fueled by outrage. And the internet being, to paraphrase the Simpsons, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems, it has formed communities out of shared outrage. Indeed, disliking something grants people a kind of identity, whether it's the prequels, the new Star Wars movies, the state of World of Warcraft, the last season of Game of Thrones, or, you know, one political party or another. Or one ethnic group or another.
Yeah, that's the darkest extreme of this outrage culture. Racism is, I think, largely born out of a desire to identify with a group, and by defining yourself as the ones who want to, say, keep people who look a certain way or follow a certain religion out of your country, you can derive a sense of belonging.
But to step back from that can of worms, I think there are other elements at play as well.
One big one is franchising.
Sequels are nothing new. But a lot of the time, movie sequels were sort of afterthoughts. I don't think there are many people who liked the Lost World more than Jurassic Park. Similarly, while Men in Black was revelatory in how fun and funny it was, I imagine most people don't even remember what Men in Black II was about.
Basically, sequels of the post-Jaws/Star Wars era were largely bad, or rarely more than "meh." Star Wars was the big exception - even though I think some older fans found Return of the Jedi disappointing, Empire Strikes Back is seen as the gold standard for expanding a series, worldbuilding, and playing with tone.
But Star Wars also created a model that would shift the way we consume these stories, and I'm going to finally start getting to the point I actually intended to make with this post.
Star Wars started as a stand-alone film, but when Empire was announced, they also knew that Jedi was going to come after it. Empire came out in 1980, and Jedi in '82. Which means that watching Empire Strikes Back, you needed to form an opinion about a story that wasn't finished yet.
Twenty years later, the Lord of the Rings movies came out in December of 2001, 2002, and 2003. There was no question, when finishing the first movie, that there were two more coming later. They took a series of books that had been written together as one massive epic and kind of replicated the process in filmmaking. You knew that there was more of this story to tell because it had actually been shot as one massive film.
Not everything can be done that way, though.
Consider also the rise of prestige television. TV has become far more serialized, and Game of Thrones was a new strategy for adapting an epic fantasy series. With production design and visual effects you'd expect for a big-screen feature, Game of Thrones told its story over a course of time that dwarfed the 12-ish hour epic that was Lord of the Rings.
And given that we watched it over the course of nine years, it meant something very important:
We had to decide whether we liked it a long time ago.
Basically, when Ned Stark was getting his head cut off (spoilers?) most viewers had to, at that point, decide whether they were invested.
Now, certainly some people got off the train later, but it became something of an identity. OK Cupid, before the last season, allowed people to add a banner to their dating profiles identifying them as Game of Thrones fans.
Art is something people identify with. Think about how music genres tend to have their own fashions, despite there being no direct relationship between sound you generate and the clothing you wear.
And so, while hyping oneself up to expect perfection from some movie or show you like can lead to disappointment, the thing that turns that disappointment into rage is that people feel like there's some part of their identity that they've lost.
I mean, the Simpsons was a huge part of my childhood, up until about 2000. I think that stretch of the show is maybe the greatest television comedy of all time. But as the show changed and its humor lost its cleverness, I had to let go of it. It was painful.
But on the other hand - artists are constantly doubting themselves and struggling just to get the work done at all. Art is created by humans, and it's also subjective. You might have derived a certain meaning from a piece of art that is at odds with the artist's intentions. And while that can be just kind of interesting when you have a finished piece to examine, with a work in progress like a long-running series, it can lead to painful cognitive dissonance when you find that you and the artist were on diverging paths.
But no artist can anticipate every audience member's reactions and what they'll specifically invest in. I think it's on us to be able to take a step back, take a deep breath, and simply express rational disappointment if a series ends in a way we find unsatisfying. Anger is not the right emotion to derive from such an experience - or at least, if we do feel that way (we can't really help which emotions we feel) we need to recognize it for what it really means, and not, you know, send death threats to people involved in the production.
Monday, May 20, 2019
The Game of Thrones Comes to an End
I had two simultaneous feelings about the finale of Game of Thrones.
As an episode, aside from a couple logical leaps and one or two lines that seemed to say "eh, I know you'll have questions about this, but don't think about it too much," I thought the state of the world as things ended pretty much worked, given what had come before it.
But it's that "what came before it" that makes me feel a little less comfortable giving the series the golden seal I wanted to.
Obviously, we're going into spoiler territory. Pretty soon, GoT will be seen in its totality, as a fixed thing (which it already is, of course.)
But we're still well within the statute of limitations. So here comes the spoiler break.
As an episode, aside from a couple logical leaps and one or two lines that seemed to say "eh, I know you'll have questions about this, but don't think about it too much," I thought the state of the world as things ended pretty much worked, given what had come before it.
But it's that "what came before it" that makes me feel a little less comfortable giving the series the golden seal I wanted to.
Obviously, we're going into spoiler territory. Pretty soon, GoT will be seen in its totality, as a fixed thing (which it already is, of course.)
But we're still well within the statute of limitations. So here comes the spoiler break.
Wednesday, May 15, 2019
What We Do In the Shadows and Barry
With Game of Thrones rushing so quickly to its end that really devastating turns in character arcs are feeling unearned (ahem,) I've naturally got to be on the lookout for new shows to get into. The active shows I consider myself to be watching are Game of Thrones, The Good Place, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Expanse, and Legion, the latter of which is also heading to its final season soon. So here are two new ones that I've started watching!
What We Do in the Shadows is the long-teased television adaptation of the awesome cult-classic indie comedy by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi (the former known for Flight of the Conchords and actually Legion too, come to think of it, the latter probably best known now for directing Thor Ragnarok but who also directed a bunch of Conchords episodes.)
The movie and show are mockumentaries. The film follows a trio of vampires who live in Wellington along with their profoundly ancient fourth roommate Petyr, who is also a vampire but doesn't play as big of a role in the story. Basically, it's a bunch of blood-sucking monsters who nevertheless have all the usual problems of adult roommates living together more for convenience than anything else, and trying to get by in the modern era despite having grown up centuries ago.
The formula of the show is similar, in this case giving us a different spread of weirdly pathetic vampires in Staten Island. Laszlo is a foppish pervert, Nadja is a hopeless romantic, and Nandor is weirdly meek for a former warlord. Along with them is Colin Robinson, an "energy vampire" who doesn't have to follow the rules (like he can walk into the sun without bursting into flames) and feeds not off of blood, but off of the energy he drains out of people by boring them. There's also Guillermo, Nandor's familiar who is, like apparently all familiars, being strung along with the promise of becoming a vampire so that the vampire can have a devoted servant.
While it takes a couple episodes to get up to speed, the show basically works if you liked the movie - introducing new ideas and scenarios that our hapless vampiric friends stumble their way through. I'm enjoying it quite a bit, especially the most recent one I've seen, which involves a vampire trial that ropes in a ton of actors who have played vampires in movies and TV.
The other show I've started (four episodes in, I think,) is Barry. Starring Bill Hader, the show is about a hitman who, after being sent to LA to kill a personal trainer/aspiring actor who has been sleeping with some Chechen mobster's wife, winds up accidentally getting roped into an acting class and decides, like so many who come to our sunny burg, that he wants to give up his career and become an actor. Only that his career is murdering people.
The show strikes a remarkable balance between being an outrageous comedy while hinting at the tragedy of its protagonist's life - he's a veteran who clearly suffers from some sort of PTSD, and he's been manipulated into this violent lifestyle by someone who has offered to give him a sense of purpose.
The show's got Stephen Root and Henry Winkler. What more could you ask for?
Anyway, assuming I keep liking these shows, you might see more posts about them moving forward.
What We Do in the Shadows is the long-teased television adaptation of the awesome cult-classic indie comedy by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi (the former known for Flight of the Conchords and actually Legion too, come to think of it, the latter probably best known now for directing Thor Ragnarok but who also directed a bunch of Conchords episodes.)
The movie and show are mockumentaries. The film follows a trio of vampires who live in Wellington along with their profoundly ancient fourth roommate Petyr, who is also a vampire but doesn't play as big of a role in the story. Basically, it's a bunch of blood-sucking monsters who nevertheless have all the usual problems of adult roommates living together more for convenience than anything else, and trying to get by in the modern era despite having grown up centuries ago.
The formula of the show is similar, in this case giving us a different spread of weirdly pathetic vampires in Staten Island. Laszlo is a foppish pervert, Nadja is a hopeless romantic, and Nandor is weirdly meek for a former warlord. Along with them is Colin Robinson, an "energy vampire" who doesn't have to follow the rules (like he can walk into the sun without bursting into flames) and feeds not off of blood, but off of the energy he drains out of people by boring them. There's also Guillermo, Nandor's familiar who is, like apparently all familiars, being strung along with the promise of becoming a vampire so that the vampire can have a devoted servant.
While it takes a couple episodes to get up to speed, the show basically works if you liked the movie - introducing new ideas and scenarios that our hapless vampiric friends stumble their way through. I'm enjoying it quite a bit, especially the most recent one I've seen, which involves a vampire trial that ropes in a ton of actors who have played vampires in movies and TV.
The other show I've started (four episodes in, I think,) is Barry. Starring Bill Hader, the show is about a hitman who, after being sent to LA to kill a personal trainer/aspiring actor who has been sleeping with some Chechen mobster's wife, winds up accidentally getting roped into an acting class and decides, like so many who come to our sunny burg, that he wants to give up his career and become an actor. Only that his career is murdering people.
The show strikes a remarkable balance between being an outrageous comedy while hinting at the tragedy of its protagonist's life - he's a veteran who clearly suffers from some sort of PTSD, and he's been manipulated into this violent lifestyle by someone who has offered to give him a sense of purpose.
The show's got Stephen Root and Henry Winkler. What more could you ask for?
Anyway, assuming I keep liking these shows, you might see more posts about them moving forward.
Sunday, May 12, 2019
Game of Thrones... Uh... Boy
Well, after the climactic battle at Winterfell, we've come to the other major climax the show has been building to - the confrontation between Daenerys and her forces with those of Cersei.
And things go... differently than you might have guessed.
Big spoilers to follow, so, you know, beware.
And things go... differently than you might have guessed.
Big spoilers to follow, so, you know, beware.
Monday, May 6, 2019
With a New, Spoilery Trailer for Spider-Man: Far From Home, We Prepare for the End to Phase 3
Endgame was the culmination of eleven years of movies, the climax to a saga that had been building up ever since Tony Stark first built a mechanical suit in a cave in Afghanistan. But actually, echoing some of my thoughts about Game of Thrones, sometimes you need a big denouement for a story as large as these, and it seems like Far From Home will, in a way, serve as a bit of an epilogue to what has come before.
Naturally, we'll be getting more MCU movies, but Endgame's effects were so broad and huge that it makes sense for us to take some time and look at the repercussions. At the same time, Far From Home will of course have to be its own movie as well.
Now, this is ultimately a reaction to a trailer, but it's a trailer with spoilers for Endgame, with even a disclaimer by Tom Holland at the beginning telling you not to watch it if you haven't seen Endgame.
We are definitely still well within the statute of limitations on spoiling Endgame, so I'll make a cut.
Naturally, we'll be getting more MCU movies, but Endgame's effects were so broad and huge that it makes sense for us to take some time and look at the repercussions. At the same time, Far From Home will of course have to be its own movie as well.
Now, this is ultimately a reaction to a trailer, but it's a trailer with spoilers for Endgame, with even a disclaimer by Tom Holland at the beginning telling you not to watch it if you haven't seen Endgame.
We are definitely still well within the statute of limitations on spoiling Endgame, so I'll make a cut.
Hey Guys, There's Still a Chance for Death on Game of Thrones!
The Long Night felt like the climactic episode that all of Game of Thrones had been building to in its 8 seasons. Was it flawed, with a number of questionable decisions on the parts of the writers and staging? Certainly. Was it also big, epic, and thrilling? Also certainly. You'd be forgiven for thinking that the next three episodes were basically just denouement for the series.
Indeed, when you consider the proportion of time a feature film has to dedicate to its post-climax runtime, compared to what we usually expect from epic TV shows - in which one generally expects the series climax to happen in its finale, and then have to pay everything off in a much shorter span of time before you even consider the proportions of total story to time wrapping things up, it actually would make a lot of sense for shows to get their biggest climax out of the way a few episodes early.
In Breaking Bad, for example, I think you could make a solid argument that its ante-penultimate (that's third-last) episode Ozymandias is really the series climax. But it's still in the show's true finale that we get the final burst of action and resolution.
Tonight's episode, The Last of the Starks, feints at being pure denouement. Indeed, I had initially gotten the sense that they might have decided to kind of sandwich the Long Night between two much quieter episodes.
It doesn't really go that way.
Let's discuss after the break.
Indeed, when you consider the proportion of time a feature film has to dedicate to its post-climax runtime, compared to what we usually expect from epic TV shows - in which one generally expects the series climax to happen in its finale, and then have to pay everything off in a much shorter span of time before you even consider the proportions of total story to time wrapping things up, it actually would make a lot of sense for shows to get their biggest climax out of the way a few episodes early.
In Breaking Bad, for example, I think you could make a solid argument that its ante-penultimate (that's third-last) episode Ozymandias is really the series climax. But it's still in the show's true finale that we get the final burst of action and resolution.
Tonight's episode, The Last of the Starks, feints at being pure denouement. Indeed, I had initially gotten the sense that they might have decided to kind of sandwich the Long Night between two much quieter episodes.
It doesn't really go that way.
Let's discuss after the break.
Friday, May 3, 2019
My Only Big Problem With Endgame
Ok, as I said in the previous post, Avengers: Endgame was an incredibly well-executed finale to what has essentially been a 22-movie series - or, as my friend put it, the end of a 50-hour movie. It was suitably epic without losing sight of the characters and giving us enough fun and humor while still keeping the stakes the highest they've ever been.
You could hardly ask for a better ending to this saga. But, though hardly, there is one major flaw I see in with it. I don't want to talk about that flaw until after the cut, but there is a certain matter of emphasis that feels skewed. Let's just get into spoiler territory.
SPOILERS AHEAD.
You could hardly ask for a better ending to this saga. But, though hardly, there is one major flaw I see in with it. I don't want to talk about that flaw until after the cut, but there is a certain matter of emphasis that feels skewed. Let's just get into spoiler territory.
SPOILERS AHEAD.
Thursday, May 2, 2019
Avengers: Endgame
The MCU long ago cemented itself as one of the most important blockbuster film franchises in cinema history - standing amongst the likes of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and James Bond (who, let's be clear, is also a superhero.) But the degree to which this 11-year, 22-film project feels of a piece, and for it to come to such a massive, climactic conclusion (even with the promise that this is not the end,) is unprecedented.
Endgame is unprecedented in just how big it feels, which is impressive given that there's actually not a ton of action. Indeed, one of the real strengths of the Marvel movies is that they've known that the best action movies do the legwork to earn that action (with some exceptions that are almost pure action, like Mad Max: Fury Road.) The thing that's kept us invested in this utterly ridiculously massive franchise is the characters. We like Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff, and the rest just as much if not more than we like Iron Man, Captain America, or Black Widow.
It's something that a lot of imitators, trying to create their own cinematic universes, haven't been able to nail - they like the idea of the big, interconnected meta-series (and the obscene amounts of money that such a thing earns) but they don't have the mastery of coordination and the discipline to drill down to the core and ensure that at the very center are the human characters.
Naturally, everyone will find quibbles with any artistic project, and some will simply be disappointed that it wasn't the movie they had imagined in their head, or perhaps no movie could have lived up to their expectations.
But for me, and I imagine for the vast majority of people, Avengers: Endgame sticks the landing, giving us an epic, emotional culmination that feels powerful. So often, the endings to this sort of epic wind up feeling vaguely underwhelming for one reason or another. But you can feel the weight behind Endgame, and that it lands where it does is a remarkable feat.
Let's spoil things, shall we?
Endgame is unprecedented in just how big it feels, which is impressive given that there's actually not a ton of action. Indeed, one of the real strengths of the Marvel movies is that they've known that the best action movies do the legwork to earn that action (with some exceptions that are almost pure action, like Mad Max: Fury Road.) The thing that's kept us invested in this utterly ridiculously massive franchise is the characters. We like Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff, and the rest just as much if not more than we like Iron Man, Captain America, or Black Widow.
It's something that a lot of imitators, trying to create their own cinematic universes, haven't been able to nail - they like the idea of the big, interconnected meta-series (and the obscene amounts of money that such a thing earns) but they don't have the mastery of coordination and the discipline to drill down to the core and ensure that at the very center are the human characters.
Naturally, everyone will find quibbles with any artistic project, and some will simply be disappointed that it wasn't the movie they had imagined in their head, or perhaps no movie could have lived up to their expectations.
But for me, and I imagine for the vast majority of people, Avengers: Endgame sticks the landing, giving us an epic, emotional culmination that feels powerful. So often, the endings to this sort of epic wind up feeling vaguely underwhelming for one reason or another. But you can feel the weight behind Endgame, and that it lands where it does is a remarkable feat.
Let's spoil things, shall we?
Tuesday, April 30, 2019
My Take on Spoilers
These days, when social media have connected us, given each of us an opportunity to share our opinions or news we've discovered (this blog being an example,) there's a lot of discourse on the nature of "spoilers."
Stories having twists and turns is a device as old as stories themselves. Humans have always wanted to find some new clever spin on an existing structure, and so reversals gave birth to the true twist. But even if you don't have the kind of twist that recontextualizes everything that came before it, the fact is that stories, even those where we know roughly how they will end, can still surprise us. We might know how something is going to go but not want it to be a certainty until we've seen it for ourselves.
I still haven't seen Avengers: Endgame.
In all honesty, I think I'm less spoiler-conscious than a lot of people. I think part of the reason for this is that I get very emotionally invested in the stories I see/read/hear. If, for example, a character who we begin very much liking in a movie is revealed to be an evil villain all along, it can sometimes allow us to create a bit of a defense against that sort of betrayal. Similarly, if a major character is going to die, knowing ahead of time allows us to create a bit of emotional distance from the situation so that when it happens, we can feel less shocked and hurt.
Of course, the point of art (well, that's a huge subject of debate, but here's my take) is to evoke an emotional response. Yes, none of the people we've seen killed on Game of Thrones has actually died (or at least didn't die that way, I know there are at least a couple members of the cast who have died either of old age or cancer) but the exercise of engaging with a piece of art is to invest emotionally as if the characters were real. There's no real guy named Jon Snow (actually, there almost certainly is, but he's probably not anything like the character Kit Harrington plays) and yet we can worry for the Jon Snow who grew up as a bastard in Winterfell in the same way we'd worry for a cousin who's been shipped off to Iraq.
There is safety, of course, in fiction. Indeed, the concept of catharsis as a reason for watching drama (particularly tragedy) is that we get to experience that visceral, emotional pain but then leave the pain behind on the seat in the theater or between the covers of the book we just read.
The point, then, of these last few paragraphs, is to say that art can evoke very strong emotions, and sometimes those emotions get very intense. (I should also point out that they can trigger memories of real-life emotional pain sometimes as well. After my mom died in 2017, a few months later I was feeling sad and decided to watch Guardians of the Galaxy, a famously fun movie, only to forget that the very first scene is of its main character watching his mother die of cancer. To be honest, the absurdity of how on-the-nose that was for what I was dealing with made me laugh.)
Because that emotional response can be intense, sometimes spoilers can make it easier to watch a movie. Frankly, I felt I could enjoy Get Out more knowing the twists, because I was able to intellectualize it a bit more and admire the craftsmanship - which, as I said earlier in this blog, was masterful.
Indeed, Bertolt Brecht came up with a philosophy of drama that intentionally alienated the audience from the emotional aspects of his characters, drawing attention to the artifice of the work.
But a lot of people do not like spoilers. And I will defend that point of view as well.
The way I see it, a work of art need not be ephemeral. Yes, some people view the ephemeral as having value - liking works that you can only experience once, or that change each time you view it. Indeed, I would argue that each time you see a movie, for example, the experience is somewhat different, both because of external factors as well as the fact that you've seen the movie before.
I'd further suggest that if you watch a movie several times, each time the experience is less different than the one before it. Watching Star Wars with my sister (who had somehow not seen the original movies) I was shocked to find that, even over a decade since I last watched them, I could basically say every line before it was spoken, as I had seen them so many times as a kid (I didn't, of course, because that would have been incredibly annoying.)
What this means, then, is that the first time you see any movie, it's a unique experience. Frankly, even with spoilers, you'll still be seeing shots and scenes you've heard about and now actually be able to understand their nature for the first time (and even with a lot of spoilers, you're probably not going to know every beat of every scene.)
That first viewing is not necessarily going to be your best viewing (though obviously, most movies you're probably only going to see once) but it is a unique one. And even if you'll enjoy a movie more after you already know what the big twists and turns it's building to are, the viewing of that movie in which you don't know them is a unique experience.
So I do not begrudge viewers who want to get that first experience of the movie fresh.
Now, when it comes specifically to Endgame (can you tell I'm thinking about it a lot knowing I don't get to see it until Thursday?) it's kind of funny, because there are some spoilers that are just in the nature of knowing what a movie like this demands.
Infinity War's ending, in a vacuum, was incredibly bleak, but the fact that the MCU is such a massive and continuing franchise, and the fact that we already know new Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther, Spiderman, and I think Doctor Strange movies are coming, not to mention that I could never imagine Disney (or Marvel) to allow such a dark ending to remain in effect, suggests that Endgame has to find a way to reverse what happened. That's before we get to the heavy foreshadowing that this is all part of the plan - the fact that Doctor Strange claimed he saw only one version of events in which they succeeded and then gave the Time Stone to save a single person's life: you knew that this had to be part of that version.
The question is what we lose along the way. Basically, which of these characters with whom we've spent the last eleven years is going to wind up paying the ultimate price to save the universe.
I have my theories, but even though I think this is going to be one of those movies where knowing its trajectory might make it more fun, I do actually want to have that unique, first viewing experience.
So far, I haven't gotten any really firm spoilers. So let's try to keep it up.
Stories having twists and turns is a device as old as stories themselves. Humans have always wanted to find some new clever spin on an existing structure, and so reversals gave birth to the true twist. But even if you don't have the kind of twist that recontextualizes everything that came before it, the fact is that stories, even those where we know roughly how they will end, can still surprise us. We might know how something is going to go but not want it to be a certainty until we've seen it for ourselves.
I still haven't seen Avengers: Endgame.
In all honesty, I think I'm less spoiler-conscious than a lot of people. I think part of the reason for this is that I get very emotionally invested in the stories I see/read/hear. If, for example, a character who we begin very much liking in a movie is revealed to be an evil villain all along, it can sometimes allow us to create a bit of a defense against that sort of betrayal. Similarly, if a major character is going to die, knowing ahead of time allows us to create a bit of emotional distance from the situation so that when it happens, we can feel less shocked and hurt.
Of course, the point of art (well, that's a huge subject of debate, but here's my take) is to evoke an emotional response. Yes, none of the people we've seen killed on Game of Thrones has actually died (or at least didn't die that way, I know there are at least a couple members of the cast who have died either of old age or cancer) but the exercise of engaging with a piece of art is to invest emotionally as if the characters were real. There's no real guy named Jon Snow (actually, there almost certainly is, but he's probably not anything like the character Kit Harrington plays) and yet we can worry for the Jon Snow who grew up as a bastard in Winterfell in the same way we'd worry for a cousin who's been shipped off to Iraq.
There is safety, of course, in fiction. Indeed, the concept of catharsis as a reason for watching drama (particularly tragedy) is that we get to experience that visceral, emotional pain but then leave the pain behind on the seat in the theater or between the covers of the book we just read.
The point, then, of these last few paragraphs, is to say that art can evoke very strong emotions, and sometimes those emotions get very intense. (I should also point out that they can trigger memories of real-life emotional pain sometimes as well. After my mom died in 2017, a few months later I was feeling sad and decided to watch Guardians of the Galaxy, a famously fun movie, only to forget that the very first scene is of its main character watching his mother die of cancer. To be honest, the absurdity of how on-the-nose that was for what I was dealing with made me laugh.)
Because that emotional response can be intense, sometimes spoilers can make it easier to watch a movie. Frankly, I felt I could enjoy Get Out more knowing the twists, because I was able to intellectualize it a bit more and admire the craftsmanship - which, as I said earlier in this blog, was masterful.
Indeed, Bertolt Brecht came up with a philosophy of drama that intentionally alienated the audience from the emotional aspects of his characters, drawing attention to the artifice of the work.
But a lot of people do not like spoilers. And I will defend that point of view as well.
The way I see it, a work of art need not be ephemeral. Yes, some people view the ephemeral as having value - liking works that you can only experience once, or that change each time you view it. Indeed, I would argue that each time you see a movie, for example, the experience is somewhat different, both because of external factors as well as the fact that you've seen the movie before.
I'd further suggest that if you watch a movie several times, each time the experience is less different than the one before it. Watching Star Wars with my sister (who had somehow not seen the original movies) I was shocked to find that, even over a decade since I last watched them, I could basically say every line before it was spoken, as I had seen them so many times as a kid (I didn't, of course, because that would have been incredibly annoying.)
What this means, then, is that the first time you see any movie, it's a unique experience. Frankly, even with spoilers, you'll still be seeing shots and scenes you've heard about and now actually be able to understand their nature for the first time (and even with a lot of spoilers, you're probably not going to know every beat of every scene.)
That first viewing is not necessarily going to be your best viewing (though obviously, most movies you're probably only going to see once) but it is a unique one. And even if you'll enjoy a movie more after you already know what the big twists and turns it's building to are, the viewing of that movie in which you don't know them is a unique experience.
So I do not begrudge viewers who want to get that first experience of the movie fresh.
Now, when it comes specifically to Endgame (can you tell I'm thinking about it a lot knowing I don't get to see it until Thursday?) it's kind of funny, because there are some spoilers that are just in the nature of knowing what a movie like this demands.
Infinity War's ending, in a vacuum, was incredibly bleak, but the fact that the MCU is such a massive and continuing franchise, and the fact that we already know new Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther, Spiderman, and I think Doctor Strange movies are coming, not to mention that I could never imagine Disney (or Marvel) to allow such a dark ending to remain in effect, suggests that Endgame has to find a way to reverse what happened. That's before we get to the heavy foreshadowing that this is all part of the plan - the fact that Doctor Strange claimed he saw only one version of events in which they succeeded and then gave the Time Stone to save a single person's life: you knew that this had to be part of that version.
The question is what we lose along the way. Basically, which of these characters with whom we've spent the last eleven years is going to wind up paying the ultimate price to save the universe.
I have my theories, but even though I think this is going to be one of those movies where knowing its trajectory might make it more fun, I do actually want to have that unique, first viewing experience.
So far, I haven't gotten any really firm spoilers. So let's try to keep it up.
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