I might have met Donald Glover my freshman year of college. He was a senior when I was first there, but we were in a department with less than 300 students total, so while I don't actually remember if I specifically met him, it's possible. There, that's my celebrity brag, such as it is, as well as noting my jealousy for the success of a fellow Tisch alum (likewise, Rachel Bloom, though she was in a different department.)
I became aware of him as the celebrity he has become when I got into Community. While the entire cast of the show was fantastic (even Chevy Chase was mostly good, despite the sense I get that he hated being there) Glover's Troy Barnes was probably my favorite, with his combination of childlike naivete, absurd logical leaps, and underlying optimism and heart. Glover's comic timing was also on-point.
As Community was dying a slow death following the year Dan Harmon was (actually pretty appropriately) fired, Glover quit the show to pursue other projects, and he became something of a superstar - the guy got to be Lando Calrissien and nailed it, even if Solo itself was kind of the epitome of a well-made but ultimately pointless prequel. Then, there's his music, including the song currently stuck in my head, Redbone.
Glover's next TV project after Community was Atlanta, a show that defies definition. While I might be four years late, I've finally finished the first season, which... again, it's hard to really describe.
Ostensibly, it's about Earn, an Ivy-League dropout who has come home to Atlanta and struggles to provide for his daughter Lottie and ex-girlfriend Van. After his cousin Alfred starts to make it big as a rapper, Earn nudges his way into being Alfred's ("Paper Boi's") manager. The fourth regular cast member is Darius, Alfred's stoner roommate who might actually be some kind of mystical prophet.
The show changes format and tone frequently - one early episode focuses on Van and her dinner with an old friend that has them discussing the uncomfortable intersection of money, romance, gender relations, and race, while another has Darius convince Earn to invest a ton of his money in some very bizarre series of trades that won't pay off for months (I'm given to understand that this comes back in the second season) that feels a lot like that quest chain in Ocarina of Time you need to go through to get the Biggoron's Sword, or another episode that ends with a shooting at a club and a shot of club-goers getting hit with a literally invisible car.
The show is a half-hour comedy... sort of? But there's a stream-of-consciousness element to it that again, defies definition. One episode is a Charlie-Rose-like talk show on some sort of alternate-universe BET, complete with fake commercials (my favorite being one in which a guy buys an Arizona Ice T at a convenience store and gets charged 1.49, only for both the customer and the cashier to express shared confusion, given that it literally says 99 cents on the can).
There are times when the show feels like a character-based, grounded story about what it's like to be black in America, and other times when it feels like an episode of Welcome to Night Vale.
When talking about it before its premiere, Glover described the show as Twin Peaks about rappers. I don't know that the show creates the same sort of unified setting-as-character, but it's possible that instead, it's just taking the entire country or world as its surreal land of weirdos that don't make sense.
There's another season for me to watch, and I'm curious/scared to see the infamous Teddy Perkins episode. But the show is one of those pieces that sits with you, and forces you to figure out what exactly it is that you're watching, which I tend to like.
Thursday, May 28, 2020
Wednesday, May 27, 2020
Looking Back at Community
With its recent availability on Netflix, Community has been somewhat more in the public consciousness than it had been recently. Starting in 2009, the show was the creation of Dan Harmon, who I'd previously known from Channel 101, a website where people would compete with short-length webseries (also where I first encountered the Lonely Island, before they took over SNL with their Digital Shorts.)
I started watching Community a bit into its first season, and I came to really love the show. The humor was just my style, and I loved the way that it had the fun of being subversively playing with TV show conventions while still having a really beautiful core of loving one another despite all how extremely weird we all are. The show got a reputation for its pop-culture parodies and references, such as its famous paintball episodes (which helped propel the Russo Brothers to helm Marvel's biggest Avengers movies) but I always felt its emotional honesty amidst all the ridiculous silliness was its greatest strength.
I grew up with shows like Seinfeld, and another beloved hit from my early adulthood was Arrested Development, which both mined humor from deconstructing the idea of a sitcom in making its cast full of unlikeable, awful people. But in Community, I feel there was something of a reconstruction, avoiding the cloying sentimentality of Reagan-era 1980s sitcoms that Seinfeld had revolutionarily rejected with its "no hugging, no learning" ethos, but still giving us characters we could feel emotionally attached to.
People always talk about high-concept episodes like the first paintball action-movie pastiche, Modern Warfare, but my favorite might be Mixology Certification, in which a night at a bar for Troy's 21st birthday and the alcohol consumed leads to the study group learning a lot of things about themselves, most not exactly flattering.
Behind the scenes, Community is an oddly mixed bag. On one hand, most of the cast, to this day, remains in touch and they seem to still be friends. On the other, Harmon and Chevy Chase, the famous ringer who played Pierce Hawthorne for four seasons, famously detested one another. When Harmon was fired after the third season, the general impression was that NBC had bet on Chase's star power, though as Harmon eventually revealed, it had been because he had sexually harassed one of the show's writers, Meagan Ganz. That Harmon was the one who brought this to public attention, and Ganz's public acceptance of his apology, helped Harmon's career survive the scandal, but it does leave an uncomfortable shadow on the show's history.
Never a ratings juggernaut, the show struggled a bit to survive Harmon's firing, and after the fourth season, Chevy Chase quit. Through lobbying by star Joel McHale, Harmon was re-hired for a fifth season, but midway through, Donald Glover, probably the biggest breakout star of the show (though other alums have had quite a bit of success since then, like Alison Brie's starring role on GLOW) quit the show. With new cast members rotating in, the show was still good, but had lost some of its early season magic.
Still, it's the sort of thing that time has a way of smoothing out. I'm in the middle of a re-watch and I'm curious to see how the latter seasons hold up. The early ones absolutely do.
One of the great strengths of the show is its setting. Like many of my favorite sitcoms (or, in the cast of Welcome to Night Vale, podcasts,) Community takes its setting - Greendale Community College - and makes it a character in its own right. Greendale is relentlessly crappy, underperforming, a total joke, but also kind of lovely. Regularly, the absurdity of the classes that they offer (I particularly love when a professor climbs a ladder, and the camera follows him up to see that, high up on the blackboard is written the class's name: "Ladders," which he underlines, eliciting a round of applause by the excited students) and the Dean's many, many absurd school events (like an Oktoberfest Pop-and-lock-athon) make it clear that the place is desperately trying to be a great place, despite its inescapable crappiness. And isn't that just like all of us?
And that setting is embodied by an ever-expanding cast of characters, like sketchy weirdo Star-Burns (played by veteran comedy writer Dino Stamatopoulos) or perpetually freaked-out Gareth, or ancient agent of chaos, Leonard.
It makes me feel painfully old to realize that this show started eleven years ago (and has been over for five) but rewatching it has felt like meeting up with a friend I haven't seen in a while. Indeed, the show seems to touch some deep reality about friendship in a way few other pieces of art have.
Anyway, I like Community.
I started watching Community a bit into its first season, and I came to really love the show. The humor was just my style, and I loved the way that it had the fun of being subversively playing with TV show conventions while still having a really beautiful core of loving one another despite all how extremely weird we all are. The show got a reputation for its pop-culture parodies and references, such as its famous paintball episodes (which helped propel the Russo Brothers to helm Marvel's biggest Avengers movies) but I always felt its emotional honesty amidst all the ridiculous silliness was its greatest strength.
I grew up with shows like Seinfeld, and another beloved hit from my early adulthood was Arrested Development, which both mined humor from deconstructing the idea of a sitcom in making its cast full of unlikeable, awful people. But in Community, I feel there was something of a reconstruction, avoiding the cloying sentimentality of Reagan-era 1980s sitcoms that Seinfeld had revolutionarily rejected with its "no hugging, no learning" ethos, but still giving us characters we could feel emotionally attached to.
People always talk about high-concept episodes like the first paintball action-movie pastiche, Modern Warfare, but my favorite might be Mixology Certification, in which a night at a bar for Troy's 21st birthday and the alcohol consumed leads to the study group learning a lot of things about themselves, most not exactly flattering.
Behind the scenes, Community is an oddly mixed bag. On one hand, most of the cast, to this day, remains in touch and they seem to still be friends. On the other, Harmon and Chevy Chase, the famous ringer who played Pierce Hawthorne for four seasons, famously detested one another. When Harmon was fired after the third season, the general impression was that NBC had bet on Chase's star power, though as Harmon eventually revealed, it had been because he had sexually harassed one of the show's writers, Meagan Ganz. That Harmon was the one who brought this to public attention, and Ganz's public acceptance of his apology, helped Harmon's career survive the scandal, but it does leave an uncomfortable shadow on the show's history.
Never a ratings juggernaut, the show struggled a bit to survive Harmon's firing, and after the fourth season, Chevy Chase quit. Through lobbying by star Joel McHale, Harmon was re-hired for a fifth season, but midway through, Donald Glover, probably the biggest breakout star of the show (though other alums have had quite a bit of success since then, like Alison Brie's starring role on GLOW) quit the show. With new cast members rotating in, the show was still good, but had lost some of its early season magic.
Still, it's the sort of thing that time has a way of smoothing out. I'm in the middle of a re-watch and I'm curious to see how the latter seasons hold up. The early ones absolutely do.
One of the great strengths of the show is its setting. Like many of my favorite sitcoms (or, in the cast of Welcome to Night Vale, podcasts,) Community takes its setting - Greendale Community College - and makes it a character in its own right. Greendale is relentlessly crappy, underperforming, a total joke, but also kind of lovely. Regularly, the absurdity of the classes that they offer (I particularly love when a professor climbs a ladder, and the camera follows him up to see that, high up on the blackboard is written the class's name: "Ladders," which he underlines, eliciting a round of applause by the excited students) and the Dean's many, many absurd school events (like an Oktoberfest Pop-and-lock-athon) make it clear that the place is desperately trying to be a great place, despite its inescapable crappiness. And isn't that just like all of us?
And that setting is embodied by an ever-expanding cast of characters, like sketchy weirdo Star-Burns (played by veteran comedy writer Dino Stamatopoulos) or perpetually freaked-out Gareth, or ancient agent of chaos, Leonard.
It makes me feel painfully old to realize that this show started eleven years ago (and has been over for five) but rewatching it has felt like meeting up with a friend I haven't seen in a while. Indeed, the show seems to touch some deep reality about friendship in a way few other pieces of art have.
Anyway, I like Community.
Wednesday, May 13, 2020
A Song of Ice and Fire versus Game of Thrones
Though it feels like a decade ago, Game of Thrones, the massive HBO phenomenon, ended last year in a way that left, I think, a fair number of people unsatisfied. Partially, I think it's in how quickly things are settled, the baffling notion that Bran, of all people, seems to the characters to be the "obvious" choice to become king, and the penultimate heartbreaking and a bit out-of-left-field descent into murderous madness of Daenerys.
Oh, by the way, spoilers for a show that ended a year ago and everyone was talking about.
Game of Thrones exploded into public consciousness in 2011, bringing movie-level production quality to television with a fantasy series that was not afraid to be unrelentingly hard-R with nudity and graphic violence. And the show helped to popularize the series of books upon which it was based, George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, already a titan within the genre, but not in the mainstream.
The first of his books, A Game of Thrones, was published in 1996, and the fifth in a planned series of seven game out in 2011, just a few months after the show premiered.
In the nine years since A Dance with Dragons, the subsequent book, the Winds of Winter, has yet to come out. As such, once the show caught up with the books, it was forced to push forward and effectively "adapt" Martin's outline rather than actual books.
The show ultimately brought the plots that had been started in the books to a conclusion, and I'm relatively confident that some of the major story beats - including Daenerys' transformation (or, arguably, reveal) as a dangerous villain - were part of the plan.
I'm not really here to talk about the relative merits of the show versus the book - I think the show was very good for most of its run, and it's a bit of a shame that the shaky ending has killed a lot of the enthusiasm for the property as a whole.
Instead, what I'm kind of fascinated by is the amount of detail found in the books.
Despite getting ten hours per season to tell its story, it's clear that just about every screen adaptation of a book requires cutting things down. I recently listened to a Quinn's Ideas YouTube video/podcast episode about the connections to Lovecraft found in A Song of Ice and Fire, and one of the commenters made a really good point: that Martin overwhelms the reader with detail so that major hints are buried among other details.
Martin's (as far as I know unnamed) world is profoundly dense with history and details in a way someone who had only watched the show - or even who had only read through the books for the main plot - might not realize.
On its surface, A Song of Ice and Fire is a low-magic fantasy setting. While the supernatural certianly exists, it's something the the average person never deals with. The introduction of dragons at the end of the first book, or the looming threat of the undead, are the major supernatural elements of the story, while most of the courtly intrigue and conflicts between Lannisters and Starks involves no magic whatsoever.
But Martin's world is absolutely filled with odd magical elements. Not just that, but also a suggestion that many other strange things are going on in the background.
Here's an example that is pointed out in the video referenced above:
The Ironborn's connections to Cthulhu are pretty obvious if you know anything about that most iconic figure from Lovecraft's works. Their house words of "What is dead may never die" are a pretty clear reference to the Necronomicon quote from Call of Cthulhu: "What is dead may eternal lie, but with strange aeons, even death may die." That, and their house sigil is the kraken, which pretty accurately describes Cthulhu's head. And they worship the "drowned god," which makes sense given Cthulhu lies at the bottom of the ocean in his deathly sleep.
But another point they make is that this could explain the size of Harrenhall, the massive castle that seems to curse anyone occupying it. Harrenhall is the largest castle in Westeros, and has a super spooky vibe given that the guy who built it was burned alive by dragons despite building it to be this impregnable citadel.
But, as the commenters point out, Harren, who built the castle, was an Ironborn king, and it seems possible that he was trying to re-create his drowned god's city on the surface. If we assume the drowned god is basically Cthulhu, then he presumably lives in some terrifying, R'lyeh-like city - a city of utterly massive size and strange angles that don't seem to make sense with a human understanding of geometry. Is that really what Harrenhall is? And is it possible that this is the source of the curse - not just Harren's death, but its connection to a Lovecraftian deity?
It's remarkable how much posthumous characters play a big role in A Song of Ice and Fire. Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark - confirmed in the show to be Jon Snow's actual parents - both have numerous stories surrounding them that flesh them out as a character. For instance, there's a masked knight at a tournament (I believe the one in which Jaime swears his fealty to Aerys) in which a "knight of the Laughing Tree" shows up, and it's subtly hinted that this knight was actually Lyanna, competing in disguise because she was a woman.
The point is, the books are just dripping with massive amounts of detail that would never be economical to fit into any screen adaptation.
To me, it also explains why it would be so hard for Martin to finish his books - we're expecting him to wrap up the 20 or so character plots that we're thinking about, while he's got about a hundred going on in the background.
Great though the show was in its early seasons, I do now wonder if it was wise to start the adaptation before the books were complete. I wonder if Martin, not as distracted by the demands of fame and the reactions to the show, would have had an easier time keeping up with the books.
But I also think that, even if you've watched the show, it's probably worth reading the books anyway, given the massive trove of stories contained within.
Oh, by the way, spoilers for a show that ended a year ago and everyone was talking about.
Game of Thrones exploded into public consciousness in 2011, bringing movie-level production quality to television with a fantasy series that was not afraid to be unrelentingly hard-R with nudity and graphic violence. And the show helped to popularize the series of books upon which it was based, George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, already a titan within the genre, but not in the mainstream.
The first of his books, A Game of Thrones, was published in 1996, and the fifth in a planned series of seven game out in 2011, just a few months after the show premiered.
In the nine years since A Dance with Dragons, the subsequent book, the Winds of Winter, has yet to come out. As such, once the show caught up with the books, it was forced to push forward and effectively "adapt" Martin's outline rather than actual books.
The show ultimately brought the plots that had been started in the books to a conclusion, and I'm relatively confident that some of the major story beats - including Daenerys' transformation (or, arguably, reveal) as a dangerous villain - were part of the plan.
I'm not really here to talk about the relative merits of the show versus the book - I think the show was very good for most of its run, and it's a bit of a shame that the shaky ending has killed a lot of the enthusiasm for the property as a whole.
Instead, what I'm kind of fascinated by is the amount of detail found in the books.
Despite getting ten hours per season to tell its story, it's clear that just about every screen adaptation of a book requires cutting things down. I recently listened to a Quinn's Ideas YouTube video/podcast episode about the connections to Lovecraft found in A Song of Ice and Fire, and one of the commenters made a really good point: that Martin overwhelms the reader with detail so that major hints are buried among other details.
Martin's (as far as I know unnamed) world is profoundly dense with history and details in a way someone who had only watched the show - or even who had only read through the books for the main plot - might not realize.
On its surface, A Song of Ice and Fire is a low-magic fantasy setting. While the supernatural certianly exists, it's something the the average person never deals with. The introduction of dragons at the end of the first book, or the looming threat of the undead, are the major supernatural elements of the story, while most of the courtly intrigue and conflicts between Lannisters and Starks involves no magic whatsoever.
But Martin's world is absolutely filled with odd magical elements. Not just that, but also a suggestion that many other strange things are going on in the background.
Here's an example that is pointed out in the video referenced above:
The Ironborn's connections to Cthulhu are pretty obvious if you know anything about that most iconic figure from Lovecraft's works. Their house words of "What is dead may never die" are a pretty clear reference to the Necronomicon quote from Call of Cthulhu: "What is dead may eternal lie, but with strange aeons, even death may die." That, and their house sigil is the kraken, which pretty accurately describes Cthulhu's head. And they worship the "drowned god," which makes sense given Cthulhu lies at the bottom of the ocean in his deathly sleep.
But another point they make is that this could explain the size of Harrenhall, the massive castle that seems to curse anyone occupying it. Harrenhall is the largest castle in Westeros, and has a super spooky vibe given that the guy who built it was burned alive by dragons despite building it to be this impregnable citadel.
But, as the commenters point out, Harren, who built the castle, was an Ironborn king, and it seems possible that he was trying to re-create his drowned god's city on the surface. If we assume the drowned god is basically Cthulhu, then he presumably lives in some terrifying, R'lyeh-like city - a city of utterly massive size and strange angles that don't seem to make sense with a human understanding of geometry. Is that really what Harrenhall is? And is it possible that this is the source of the curse - not just Harren's death, but its connection to a Lovecraftian deity?
It's remarkable how much posthumous characters play a big role in A Song of Ice and Fire. Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark - confirmed in the show to be Jon Snow's actual parents - both have numerous stories surrounding them that flesh them out as a character. For instance, there's a masked knight at a tournament (I believe the one in which Jaime swears his fealty to Aerys) in which a "knight of the Laughing Tree" shows up, and it's subtly hinted that this knight was actually Lyanna, competing in disguise because she was a woman.
The point is, the books are just dripping with massive amounts of detail that would never be economical to fit into any screen adaptation.
To me, it also explains why it would be so hard for Martin to finish his books - we're expecting him to wrap up the 20 or so character plots that we're thinking about, while he's got about a hundred going on in the background.
Great though the show was in its early seasons, I do now wonder if it was wise to start the adaptation before the books were complete. I wonder if Martin, not as distracted by the demands of fame and the reactions to the show, would have had an easier time keeping up with the books.
But I also think that, even if you've watched the show, it's probably worth reading the books anyway, given the massive trove of stories contained within.
Tuesday, May 5, 2020
Dune, and Good's Capacity for Evil
I'll confess I've started writing and abandoned a number of posts about Dune for the past few weeks after seeing Vanity Fair's photos of the cast in costume for Denis Villeneuve's upcoming adaptation of the seminal science fiction (maybe science fantasy) opus by Frank Herbert.
Dune is immense, both in that it's a rather long book, itself the first entry in a six-part series (Herbert died before he could bring it to a conclusion, though given the scale of the narrative the only true "conclusion" would be the ending that the protagonists are trying to prevent, namely the extinction of humanity) and in that the broad scope of its themes incorporates all of human society, projected essentially indefinitely into the future.
I'm going to avoid summarizing it at all, because it's a very complex story and premise, and I don't want to get bogged down in the many details one needs to fully understand the scope of the story. Suffice it to say - it's on a grand scale. The fourth book (which I haven't actually read - I've only read the first three) takes place over the course of 3,500 years.
At the core of Dune is an examination of the creation of myth, and the dirty truth about messianic saviors.
Western culture is obsessed with saviors (I don't mean to say that other cultures aren't, but it's the one that I'm most familiar with and the one Herbert belonged to) - we can see that especially in religion. Figures like Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed are all larger-than-life, paragons of virtue that those who follow them seek to emulate. While the Jewish tradition awaits a messianic figure to reestablish the Kingdom of Israel and rebuilding of the Temple (something that has been a lot more politically complicated since the founding of the modern State of Israel) and Christianity awaits a second coming of Christ, the expectation is always for perfection - that the arrival of this figure would mean a perfect vindication of religious beliefs and a utopian future to follow.
History's greatest villains, of course, have typically framed their arrival in the same way - through loyalty and faith in the tyrant, they promise an ideal transformation of civilization. To those who are not under such a zealous sway, the loyalty that people show to such people can be baffling and infuriating. Of course, this creates a tribalistic divide that often leads to bloodshed - after all, if you've embraced someone as a paragon of perfect virtue, wouldn't any opposition to that person then, inherently, be a rejection of virtue (aka Evil?)
Whatever skeptical interpretations of someone like Jesus you might believe in - for example, that he's a fictional character invented by Greek philosophers to spread their worldview - from the text, at least, Jesus seems to have the right ethics if you're a lefty-liberal who believes in non-violence, helping the poor, and standing up to the rich and powerful. So why, then, is there this divide in a culture that was, not long ago, pretty uniformly Christian?
That's more than I can answer here, but let's look at the fictionalized example of Paul Atreides.
As a head of state, member of the nobility, and military leader, Paul shares more with the story of Mohammed - which I'll just come out and say I cannot speak as intelligently about as I live in a culture where Islam is a minority religion, and a mistrusted and feared one at that, so I don't have a lot of cultural context to speak about Islam directly. Still, Paul, and his Atreides family, is introduced as a clearly upstanding one within the context of Dune's broader social order.
Paul's father, Leto, is a skilled politician in that he has managed to secure the loyalty of his people not through threats of violence, but by generally providing for them and keeping them safe. When the Atreides are sent to Arrakis to take over the crucially important planet's Spice mining operations, he makes an effort to reach out to the indigenous Fremen people and learn about their culture to better rule that world.
That being said, it's strongly suggested that Leto does this as a political tactic - things are easier and safer for him when people genuinely like him, and so he goes out of his way to be likable - such as when he orders a bunch of spice miners to abandon their expensive mobile facility rather than risk losing them to a Sandworm attack (of course, the precious spice would have been lost anyway, so it's not as if there was any big sacrifice to this move.) This act of heroism helped ingratiate him to Liet-Kynes, the de facto leader of the Fremen people.
One could accuse him of cynicism, but it would take the tone of complaints I remember Romney making after Obama beat him in 2012 - claiming that the poor had voted for Obama because of "gifts" he had given them in terms of beneficial policies. Is it cynical to give your people what they want? Or to treat your people with empathy?
Though Leto is liked, Paul, in escaping a coup that kills his father and most of his supporters, comes to hide out with the Fremen and winds up living up to prophecies of a messianic savior in their culture. These prophecies, of course, were manufactured by the Bene Gesserit, an all-female organization that his mother belongs to, but nevertheless, he meets their criteria, and when it comes time for Paul to lead the Fremen in liberating Arrakis from the evil Harkonnens, the prophecy is fulfilled.
Paul kills off the last of the Harkonnens (except not really, as it's revealed that his mother, Jessica, is actually the daughter of Vladimir Harkonnen, meaning Paul is just as much a Harkonnen as the villainous Feyd Rautha he fights in a duel at the end of the first book) and forces the Emperor to wed his daughter to him, thus making him heir to the Imperial throne.
Paul, who has fought back against evil plotters who sought to control him or kill him, has raised up a long-oppressed people, and promises to bring a better world to the Imperium. And it would seem that all of that is going to be wonderful and good.
Except.
Paul, in his time with the Fremen, undergoes a ritual with a drug related to the Spice that grants him prescience. He can see the future, whether through some kind of perfect awareness and ability to calculate how society will act (he's been raised by his father to be a Mentat, which are the human computers that have replaced digital ones after the long-ago Butlerian Jihad) or if he's gotten some mystical precognition is left deliberately fuzzy, but he can see the consequences of his actions.
And the horrible thing is that, while what he has done has, ultimately, been good for the universe, there's still going to be billions of deaths as a result. The Fremen, their faith vindicated by Paul's victory, go out into the universe to spread faith in "Muad'dib," but as mentioned before, those who are so zealous in their faith can see skepticism as sacrilige, and even before they do it, Paul can foresee the murderous jihad that the Fremen will wage against the rest of humanity.
Worse still, he has to let them do it, and even encourage and order them to do so, because the prescience he is granted shows him every branching path the future might take, and that means a narrower and narrower path of what he must do to prevent the extinction of humanity.
The story of Jesus is one of profound self-sacrifice and nonviolence. Jesus gives himself up to be executed in one of the most horrifying and gruesome ways that humans have invented (the word "excruciating" essentially means the kind of pain one would feel being crucified) as a message to stand up to the powerful and not fear death. But others have, in Jesus's name, had people killed and tortured in similarly horrific ways. Wars have been waged in his name, and people have even fought over differences in interpretation of his message (very subtle ones, too.)
It's hard to say what the world would be like now if it hadn't been for the rise of Christianity. There were several other nascent religions arising in the Roman Empire at the time that Christianity became prominent. Had Constantine chosen, say, Mithraism instead, which was a soldier's religion that involved being baptized in blood by having a bull slaughtered over you, might we have descended into a horrific fascist nightmare (you know, more than we have in this timeline?) The problem with such narratives, of course, is that people can defend all manner of terrible things by claiming some "ends justify the means" mentality, such as when a taxi driver tried to argue that black people were better off for having been enslaved and brought to America (which... ooh boy that was an awkward conversation, though I'm glad I had the presence of mind to tell him he was wrong.)
And yet, when the scale is arbitrarily large - a universe colonized by humanity where a planet of billions being slain is not going to cause all of civilization to collapse, and where the longterm goals are in the "how far can we imagine in the future" range - moral questions do become a complex thing.
Paul Atreides goes through a classic hero's journey, and yet Herbert insists on questioning and undercutting the very notion of heroes. Eventually, Paul's son Leto II undergoes a transformation into something inhuman and becomes the God-Emperor, the most brutal tyrant humanity has ever - and if he succeeds, will ever - seen. Leto II's goal is to wean humanity off of this desire for a savior, and even as his 3,500-year plan comes to fruition, he has his doubts that his goals were all worth the pain, suffering, and death that he inflicted.
It's natural to bring up Star Wars when talking about Dune. The high fantasy-like feel of Dune's futuristic feudalism is an obvious point of comparison with Star Wars, not to mention a prominent desert planet and a galactic empire (though Dune's claims to be universal.) The original trilogy had a much easier hero to embrace - Luke is never in it for his own power. He wants to fight to free the Galaxy, but he's not in it to become the new Emperor - he wants to leave the political power to others, and just throw off the oppression of the Empire and redeem his father.
Ironically, the sequel series (which I think was primarily for Disney to capitalize on having acquired one of the most profitable film franchises of all time) manages to introduce some of the complicated issues that Dune deals with. Luke, for instance, has to grapple with the fact his own messianic reputation led to the overconfidence that failed his nephew and undid all the good that he and his friends had accomplished in their youth.
Even though you can read the first Dune novel as a purely heroic story of good triumphing over evil, doing so would mean ignoring the core of its themes - that humanity is messier than such things, and the greatest good can wind up inflicting terrible evils.
There's also stuff about capitalism, environmentalism, and transhumanism, but those are all subjects I can't fit in this post.
Dune is immense, both in that it's a rather long book, itself the first entry in a six-part series (Herbert died before he could bring it to a conclusion, though given the scale of the narrative the only true "conclusion" would be the ending that the protagonists are trying to prevent, namely the extinction of humanity) and in that the broad scope of its themes incorporates all of human society, projected essentially indefinitely into the future.
I'm going to avoid summarizing it at all, because it's a very complex story and premise, and I don't want to get bogged down in the many details one needs to fully understand the scope of the story. Suffice it to say - it's on a grand scale. The fourth book (which I haven't actually read - I've only read the first three) takes place over the course of 3,500 years.
At the core of Dune is an examination of the creation of myth, and the dirty truth about messianic saviors.
Western culture is obsessed with saviors (I don't mean to say that other cultures aren't, but it's the one that I'm most familiar with and the one Herbert belonged to) - we can see that especially in religion. Figures like Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed are all larger-than-life, paragons of virtue that those who follow them seek to emulate. While the Jewish tradition awaits a messianic figure to reestablish the Kingdom of Israel and rebuilding of the Temple (something that has been a lot more politically complicated since the founding of the modern State of Israel) and Christianity awaits a second coming of Christ, the expectation is always for perfection - that the arrival of this figure would mean a perfect vindication of religious beliefs and a utopian future to follow.
History's greatest villains, of course, have typically framed their arrival in the same way - through loyalty and faith in the tyrant, they promise an ideal transformation of civilization. To those who are not under such a zealous sway, the loyalty that people show to such people can be baffling and infuriating. Of course, this creates a tribalistic divide that often leads to bloodshed - after all, if you've embraced someone as a paragon of perfect virtue, wouldn't any opposition to that person then, inherently, be a rejection of virtue (aka Evil?)
Whatever skeptical interpretations of someone like Jesus you might believe in - for example, that he's a fictional character invented by Greek philosophers to spread their worldview - from the text, at least, Jesus seems to have the right ethics if you're a lefty-liberal who believes in non-violence, helping the poor, and standing up to the rich and powerful. So why, then, is there this divide in a culture that was, not long ago, pretty uniformly Christian?
That's more than I can answer here, but let's look at the fictionalized example of Paul Atreides.
As a head of state, member of the nobility, and military leader, Paul shares more with the story of Mohammed - which I'll just come out and say I cannot speak as intelligently about as I live in a culture where Islam is a minority religion, and a mistrusted and feared one at that, so I don't have a lot of cultural context to speak about Islam directly. Still, Paul, and his Atreides family, is introduced as a clearly upstanding one within the context of Dune's broader social order.
Paul's father, Leto, is a skilled politician in that he has managed to secure the loyalty of his people not through threats of violence, but by generally providing for them and keeping them safe. When the Atreides are sent to Arrakis to take over the crucially important planet's Spice mining operations, he makes an effort to reach out to the indigenous Fremen people and learn about their culture to better rule that world.
That being said, it's strongly suggested that Leto does this as a political tactic - things are easier and safer for him when people genuinely like him, and so he goes out of his way to be likable - such as when he orders a bunch of spice miners to abandon their expensive mobile facility rather than risk losing them to a Sandworm attack (of course, the precious spice would have been lost anyway, so it's not as if there was any big sacrifice to this move.) This act of heroism helped ingratiate him to Liet-Kynes, the de facto leader of the Fremen people.
One could accuse him of cynicism, but it would take the tone of complaints I remember Romney making after Obama beat him in 2012 - claiming that the poor had voted for Obama because of "gifts" he had given them in terms of beneficial policies. Is it cynical to give your people what they want? Or to treat your people with empathy?
Though Leto is liked, Paul, in escaping a coup that kills his father and most of his supporters, comes to hide out with the Fremen and winds up living up to prophecies of a messianic savior in their culture. These prophecies, of course, were manufactured by the Bene Gesserit, an all-female organization that his mother belongs to, but nevertheless, he meets their criteria, and when it comes time for Paul to lead the Fremen in liberating Arrakis from the evil Harkonnens, the prophecy is fulfilled.
Paul kills off the last of the Harkonnens (except not really, as it's revealed that his mother, Jessica, is actually the daughter of Vladimir Harkonnen, meaning Paul is just as much a Harkonnen as the villainous Feyd Rautha he fights in a duel at the end of the first book) and forces the Emperor to wed his daughter to him, thus making him heir to the Imperial throne.
Paul, who has fought back against evil plotters who sought to control him or kill him, has raised up a long-oppressed people, and promises to bring a better world to the Imperium. And it would seem that all of that is going to be wonderful and good.
Except.
Paul, in his time with the Fremen, undergoes a ritual with a drug related to the Spice that grants him prescience. He can see the future, whether through some kind of perfect awareness and ability to calculate how society will act (he's been raised by his father to be a Mentat, which are the human computers that have replaced digital ones after the long-ago Butlerian Jihad) or if he's gotten some mystical precognition is left deliberately fuzzy, but he can see the consequences of his actions.
And the horrible thing is that, while what he has done has, ultimately, been good for the universe, there's still going to be billions of deaths as a result. The Fremen, their faith vindicated by Paul's victory, go out into the universe to spread faith in "Muad'dib," but as mentioned before, those who are so zealous in their faith can see skepticism as sacrilige, and even before they do it, Paul can foresee the murderous jihad that the Fremen will wage against the rest of humanity.
Worse still, he has to let them do it, and even encourage and order them to do so, because the prescience he is granted shows him every branching path the future might take, and that means a narrower and narrower path of what he must do to prevent the extinction of humanity.
The story of Jesus is one of profound self-sacrifice and nonviolence. Jesus gives himself up to be executed in one of the most horrifying and gruesome ways that humans have invented (the word "excruciating" essentially means the kind of pain one would feel being crucified) as a message to stand up to the powerful and not fear death. But others have, in Jesus's name, had people killed and tortured in similarly horrific ways. Wars have been waged in his name, and people have even fought over differences in interpretation of his message (very subtle ones, too.)
It's hard to say what the world would be like now if it hadn't been for the rise of Christianity. There were several other nascent religions arising in the Roman Empire at the time that Christianity became prominent. Had Constantine chosen, say, Mithraism instead, which was a soldier's religion that involved being baptized in blood by having a bull slaughtered over you, might we have descended into a horrific fascist nightmare (you know, more than we have in this timeline?) The problem with such narratives, of course, is that people can defend all manner of terrible things by claiming some "ends justify the means" mentality, such as when a taxi driver tried to argue that black people were better off for having been enslaved and brought to America (which... ooh boy that was an awkward conversation, though I'm glad I had the presence of mind to tell him he was wrong.)
And yet, when the scale is arbitrarily large - a universe colonized by humanity where a planet of billions being slain is not going to cause all of civilization to collapse, and where the longterm goals are in the "how far can we imagine in the future" range - moral questions do become a complex thing.
Paul Atreides goes through a classic hero's journey, and yet Herbert insists on questioning and undercutting the very notion of heroes. Eventually, Paul's son Leto II undergoes a transformation into something inhuman and becomes the God-Emperor, the most brutal tyrant humanity has ever - and if he succeeds, will ever - seen. Leto II's goal is to wean humanity off of this desire for a savior, and even as his 3,500-year plan comes to fruition, he has his doubts that his goals were all worth the pain, suffering, and death that he inflicted.
It's natural to bring up Star Wars when talking about Dune. The high fantasy-like feel of Dune's futuristic feudalism is an obvious point of comparison with Star Wars, not to mention a prominent desert planet and a galactic empire (though Dune's claims to be universal.) The original trilogy had a much easier hero to embrace - Luke is never in it for his own power. He wants to fight to free the Galaxy, but he's not in it to become the new Emperor - he wants to leave the political power to others, and just throw off the oppression of the Empire and redeem his father.
Ironically, the sequel series (which I think was primarily for Disney to capitalize on having acquired one of the most profitable film franchises of all time) manages to introduce some of the complicated issues that Dune deals with. Luke, for instance, has to grapple with the fact his own messianic reputation led to the overconfidence that failed his nephew and undid all the good that he and his friends had accomplished in their youth.
Even though you can read the first Dune novel as a purely heroic story of good triumphing over evil, doing so would mean ignoring the core of its themes - that humanity is messier than such things, and the greatest good can wind up inflicting terrible evils.
There's also stuff about capitalism, environmentalism, and transhumanism, but those are all subjects I can't fit in this post.
The Mandalorian, Elemental Storytelling, and Exposition
I'm a little over halfway (I think) into The Mandalorian's short first season. Something of a flagship release for Disney Plus, you can tell that cash was poured into this show by the truckload, boasting artistic direction and cinematography that rivals the massive-budgeted films (though it's probably helped by not having quite as many massive space battles, given the smaller scale.)
The show has been pretty universally popular, despite how polarizing the sequel trilogy was. Why is that?
My sense is that it's because it taps into something deep, elemental, and mythic about what makes Star Wars appealing in the first place.
We've become accustomed to twisty, complex plots, particularly given the influence of J.J. Abrams, who certainly had other claims to fame before it, but is probably became really prominent in Hollywood after creating Lost, a show that was famous for its, well, complex and convoluted plot (I'd note, however, that the show was really more the product of Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof's leadership, and it's been really interesting to see how Lindelof in particular seems to have learned a lot of lessons from that project, delivering much more satisfying conclusions in The Leftovers - which I haven't seen all of - and the Watchmen miniseries - which I have.)
Lucas himself wrote far more complicated stories with the Star Wars prequels, and, at the risk of beating a dead horse, the complications did not really ring satisfying the way the original movies did.
This all leads to a very difficult question: What is Star Wars?
There are a lot of answers to that: a blockbuster franchise made to sell toys, a distillation of various global cultural influences into an American melting pot of a mythos, an examination of heroism and villainy, a rallying cry to make baby boomers feel better about themselves after the terrible trauma of Vietnam (the war itself or the fact we lost, depending on who you ask,) or Lucas' Tarantino-esque desire to remake his favorite movies all at once.
Star Wars ran away with our imaginations, and thousands of artists and creators have contributed to the broad canon of this fictional universe. That means that yes, every single weird-looking alien in the Mos Eisely cantina scene from the original movie has a name and some sort of backstory.
And it also means that a bit part - Boba Fett, the bounty hunter from Empire Strikes Back and a bit of Return of the Jedi - has had an entire culture around him invented and detailed, entirely based on the iconic design of his badass armor.
I've often semi-joked that the fantasy genre is for audiences who like exposition. I mean, which nerds among us didn't get chills up their spines when we first saw the Fellowship of the Ring and heard Cate Blanchette detailing the history of the creation of the One Ring? Usually, the rule for writing is to try to make exposition invisible - you need people to know the facts so they can understand what's going on, but you want to show, rather than telling. But fantasy is a genre where you can often get away with telling, usually because the exposition is giving you such unusual, otherworldly information that the very idea of it is interesting in and of itself.
But, if you can do that subtly, without calling attention to your exposition with, say, a giant scrolling wall of text at the beginning of your movie, and still get across the big fantasy ideas, you might be onto something huge.
Indeed, despite starting with a scrolling wall of text, the first movie's very first shot is a fantastic example of showing rather than telling. We see a spaceship rush by, lasers blasting back at whatever is pursuing it. And then we see the tip of the ship that's chasing it. And then more of it. And more. And more. And more. There's a principle in comedy where you can do a running gag long enough where it's funny, then stops being funny, and then becomes funny again. This effectively does the opposite. The Star Destroyer is huge, and then it's comically huge, and then it's menacingly huge before we finally see the end of it. And with that, you get a sense of the oppressive scale of this galactic empire, and you're immediately on board with the rebellion seconds into the movie proper.
The first movie is also intriguing to watch in a vacuum, pretending you don't know everything you found out in the subsequent ten films. Things are left extremely vague - what does the rebellion look like? What came before the empire? Hell, who even leads the empire? (We don't see the Emperor until the second movie, and until it got special-editioned, we didn't even have Iam McDiarmid in the role until Jedi.) Given what we find out later on, it's kind of shocking how much Grand Moff Tarkin seems to be Vader's superior, which expanded universe sources have had to work had to justify.
The movies have tended to focus in on the Skywalker saga - following Anakin and Luke, and then Ben. And while you can bet your ass I wanted Jedi force powers as a kid (ok, honestly, I'd still like them) one element of the series that always seemed to resonate was the dangerous outskirts of the Galaxy. Yes, there's a whole futuristic civilization there, but we're introduced to Luke on Tatooine, which is portrayed as some mixture of small-town America, the Wild West, and Arrakis from Dune. The lawless frontier, while seemingly not that important to the larger-scale conflicts with the fascistic Empire and its remnants later on, is also where Star Wars seems to be most comfortable.
So, the Mandalorian chooses that as its setting.
And, borrowing a tone and storytelling style from the Spaghetti westerns that inspired much of Star Wars' western feel (particularly adapting the scumminess of it into Star Wars' "used future" aesthetic,) the Mandalorian is far more concerned with showing than telling. Indeed, the main characters, at least early in the season, don't have names. There's the eponymous Mandalorian (Mando for short) and The Child. One of the core members of the cast is a Henson-made puppet who never speaks. And Mando is fairly terse himself.
What that allows is for storytelling that is primarily visual, or at least non-verbal. And I don't know what it is, but for some reason that style of cinematic storytelling is always very impressive.
Indeed, it makes me think of a number of critically-acclaimed action movies that have come out within the last ten years. Mad Max Fury Road, as an example. That's a story in which you could watch it without knowing english and still probably get it.
Now, where I'm at, the show is starting to hint at deeper and more complex plots, but for the time being, it's rather simple - bounty hunter has a moral crisis and finds himself on the run from his colleagues. But the show is just a pleasure to look at, with a fantastic score aping Ennio Morricone by Ludwig Gorranson. I almost worry about the show getting bogged down in complicated and convoluted character dynamics as it goes on, because right now it's so pure.
And that, to me, is what makes Star Wars so resonant. I've sometimes thought that Americans are always looking for the most iconic, mythic, and quintessential expression of something in our art, and Star Wars hits something very close to that core. It's as if we're trying to best represent the actual shadow puppet in Plato's cave.
Even though its premise and plot are quite different from other Star Wars stories we've seen, the Mandalorian (so far) seems to be resonating with that purity that the original movie so effectively achieved.
The show has been pretty universally popular, despite how polarizing the sequel trilogy was. Why is that?
My sense is that it's because it taps into something deep, elemental, and mythic about what makes Star Wars appealing in the first place.
We've become accustomed to twisty, complex plots, particularly given the influence of J.J. Abrams, who certainly had other claims to fame before it, but is probably became really prominent in Hollywood after creating Lost, a show that was famous for its, well, complex and convoluted plot (I'd note, however, that the show was really more the product of Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof's leadership, and it's been really interesting to see how Lindelof in particular seems to have learned a lot of lessons from that project, delivering much more satisfying conclusions in The Leftovers - which I haven't seen all of - and the Watchmen miniseries - which I have.)
Lucas himself wrote far more complicated stories with the Star Wars prequels, and, at the risk of beating a dead horse, the complications did not really ring satisfying the way the original movies did.
This all leads to a very difficult question: What is Star Wars?
There are a lot of answers to that: a blockbuster franchise made to sell toys, a distillation of various global cultural influences into an American melting pot of a mythos, an examination of heroism and villainy, a rallying cry to make baby boomers feel better about themselves after the terrible trauma of Vietnam (the war itself or the fact we lost, depending on who you ask,) or Lucas' Tarantino-esque desire to remake his favorite movies all at once.
Star Wars ran away with our imaginations, and thousands of artists and creators have contributed to the broad canon of this fictional universe. That means that yes, every single weird-looking alien in the Mos Eisely cantina scene from the original movie has a name and some sort of backstory.
And it also means that a bit part - Boba Fett, the bounty hunter from Empire Strikes Back and a bit of Return of the Jedi - has had an entire culture around him invented and detailed, entirely based on the iconic design of his badass armor.
I've often semi-joked that the fantasy genre is for audiences who like exposition. I mean, which nerds among us didn't get chills up their spines when we first saw the Fellowship of the Ring and heard Cate Blanchette detailing the history of the creation of the One Ring? Usually, the rule for writing is to try to make exposition invisible - you need people to know the facts so they can understand what's going on, but you want to show, rather than telling. But fantasy is a genre where you can often get away with telling, usually because the exposition is giving you such unusual, otherworldly information that the very idea of it is interesting in and of itself.
But, if you can do that subtly, without calling attention to your exposition with, say, a giant scrolling wall of text at the beginning of your movie, and still get across the big fantasy ideas, you might be onto something huge.
Indeed, despite starting with a scrolling wall of text, the first movie's very first shot is a fantastic example of showing rather than telling. We see a spaceship rush by, lasers blasting back at whatever is pursuing it. And then we see the tip of the ship that's chasing it. And then more of it. And more. And more. And more. There's a principle in comedy where you can do a running gag long enough where it's funny, then stops being funny, and then becomes funny again. This effectively does the opposite. The Star Destroyer is huge, and then it's comically huge, and then it's menacingly huge before we finally see the end of it. And with that, you get a sense of the oppressive scale of this galactic empire, and you're immediately on board with the rebellion seconds into the movie proper.
The first movie is also intriguing to watch in a vacuum, pretending you don't know everything you found out in the subsequent ten films. Things are left extremely vague - what does the rebellion look like? What came before the empire? Hell, who even leads the empire? (We don't see the Emperor until the second movie, and until it got special-editioned, we didn't even have Iam McDiarmid in the role until Jedi.) Given what we find out later on, it's kind of shocking how much Grand Moff Tarkin seems to be Vader's superior, which expanded universe sources have had to work had to justify.
The movies have tended to focus in on the Skywalker saga - following Anakin and Luke, and then Ben. And while you can bet your ass I wanted Jedi force powers as a kid (ok, honestly, I'd still like them) one element of the series that always seemed to resonate was the dangerous outskirts of the Galaxy. Yes, there's a whole futuristic civilization there, but we're introduced to Luke on Tatooine, which is portrayed as some mixture of small-town America, the Wild West, and Arrakis from Dune. The lawless frontier, while seemingly not that important to the larger-scale conflicts with the fascistic Empire and its remnants later on, is also where Star Wars seems to be most comfortable.
So, the Mandalorian chooses that as its setting.
And, borrowing a tone and storytelling style from the Spaghetti westerns that inspired much of Star Wars' western feel (particularly adapting the scumminess of it into Star Wars' "used future" aesthetic,) the Mandalorian is far more concerned with showing than telling. Indeed, the main characters, at least early in the season, don't have names. There's the eponymous Mandalorian (Mando for short) and The Child. One of the core members of the cast is a Henson-made puppet who never speaks. And Mando is fairly terse himself.
What that allows is for storytelling that is primarily visual, or at least non-verbal. And I don't know what it is, but for some reason that style of cinematic storytelling is always very impressive.
Indeed, it makes me think of a number of critically-acclaimed action movies that have come out within the last ten years. Mad Max Fury Road, as an example. That's a story in which you could watch it without knowing english and still probably get it.
Now, where I'm at, the show is starting to hint at deeper and more complex plots, but for the time being, it's rather simple - bounty hunter has a moral crisis and finds himself on the run from his colleagues. But the show is just a pleasure to look at, with a fantastic score aping Ennio Morricone by Ludwig Gorranson. I almost worry about the show getting bogged down in complicated and convoluted character dynamics as it goes on, because right now it's so pure.
And that, to me, is what makes Star Wars so resonant. I've sometimes thought that Americans are always looking for the most iconic, mythic, and quintessential expression of something in our art, and Star Wars hits something very close to that core. It's as if we're trying to best represent the actual shadow puppet in Plato's cave.
Even though its premise and plot are quite different from other Star Wars stories we've seen, the Mandalorian (so far) seems to be resonating with that purity that the original movie so effectively achieved.
Saturday, May 2, 2020
The Mandalorian (Yes, I'm Late to This Party)
Finally getting access to Disney Plus, I naturally went and started watching The Mandalorian, the Star Wars TV show that you probably heard a lot of people raving about several months ago.
Having now watched the first three episodes, I can see why they were:
A lot of people refer to Star Wars as a Space Western, but I've always found that that's not quite accurate. Sure, it starts with a farm boy out in the desert, but about halfway through the first movie, it stops being that. Arguably, the sequences back on Tatooine in Return of the Jedi pick up a bit of that vibe once again, but I really think that the series is far more in the fantasy genre - Jabba is just as easily a sleazy warlord as he is a western gang boss. And the other elements - the epic war, the mystical awakening - fits much more with the fantasy genre (obviously owing a lot to Dune, though with a far simpler take on morality and less about the political implications of messianic saviors).
This show, however, is a Space Western.
Set five years after Return of the Jedi (or at least 5 years after the Empire's fall - which I think officially means after the Battle of Jakku,) the Mandalorian is about a bounty hunter from the eponymous culture. Established early on as an unscrupulous professional, he takes a job from some imperial remnant led by a guy played by Werner Herzog (awesomely) only to have a moral crisis when he realizes that the "50-year-old" mark is actually just a kid (he seems to be the same species as Yoda, hence all the Baby Yoda memes).
The gorgeous desert landscapes, the rough, small towns, and an amazing score that is all 60s/70s spaghetti western throwback, and even the fact that you have a bunch of unrepentant Imperials still up to their bad behavior like a bunch of Confederates in the 1880s all fits in really well with the Western vibe the show oozes.
The show is really a cinematic experience, and it sets up some very interesting challenges that it manages to meet and surpass. For example: we never see the title character's face (except for flashbacks to him as a child). Pedro Pascal, who made an amazing impression as Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones, manages to convey a coherent and compelling character with just body movement and voice.
The scripts are also written cinematically - I got about halfway through the second episode before I realized that no one had actually spoken yet (aside from some Jawas speaking their alien language). I'm always delighted when a movie can make use of all its unique capabilities to tell a story without dialogue, and this show does just that.
While it's not divorced from the mystical side of Star Wars, we haven't actually heard the word Jedi so far, and instead, there's been a greater focus on fleshing out the Mandalorian culture.
Because here's the thing: Boba Fett was popular entirely because of his armor. He's not actually an interesting character in the original trilogy (and Lucas' instinct to tie his backstory deeply into the grander plot was, I think, like a lot of prequel choices, not a great one) but clearly, the mysterious and iconic armor ignited fans' imagination.
Here, we get a look at Mandalorian culture: they're a people in hiding, after some sort of purge from decades earlier (one assumes it was the Empire, though I suppose we'll see). One element of their culture is that they never take their helmets off (though I wonder how that works for, like, hygiene and how Mando doesn't have a giant beard growing out of his helmet). There's a group of them who live under the town where Mando (the nickname for the main character, given that we don't actually get a name for him) gets his bounty contracts. The person who seems to be their leader is a sort of blacksmith - she melts down the fancy alloy that is apparently a key part of their culture - Beskar Steel - and makes armor that seems to actually work against blasters in a way that Stormtrooper armor never did. I could be wrong, but it might even be implied that Mandalorians are all orphans adopted by the tribe, which our title character certainly seems to be.
What's exciting about the show is that it delves into the grittier world that Star Wars always implied. It's obviously not the first Star Wars-related product to do so, but seeing it with peak TV production values and Disney money behind it makes it feel rather fresh.
While I don't think anyone was terribly surprised, I think most of us were a bit disappointed in Rise of Skywalker - it seemed unable to please both those of us who liked Last Jedi's subversive nature and those who preferred Force Awakens' sticking to the formula. So far, The Mandalorian has the advantage of being a much smaller-scale story.
Of course, what I find a little funny is how this show is invoking a sort of pop culture nostalgia for movies that were coming out not much earlier than the original Star Wars. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which has got to be the quintessential spaghetti western, came out just ten years before the original Star Wars. I also really find the presence of Werner Herzog to be a kind of brilliant and hilarious inclusion, given the degree to which I associate him with "brilliant, 'real' cinema" that people often hold up as the direct opposite of Star Wars (though I think a true cinephile has room to love both).
Tonally fantastic, I'm curious to see how complex the narrative here gets, and while I like a convoluted plot as well as the next man, I wonder how well this show can thread the needle of maintaining its simplicity while remaining engaging.
Having now watched the first three episodes, I can see why they were:
A lot of people refer to Star Wars as a Space Western, but I've always found that that's not quite accurate. Sure, it starts with a farm boy out in the desert, but about halfway through the first movie, it stops being that. Arguably, the sequences back on Tatooine in Return of the Jedi pick up a bit of that vibe once again, but I really think that the series is far more in the fantasy genre - Jabba is just as easily a sleazy warlord as he is a western gang boss. And the other elements - the epic war, the mystical awakening - fits much more with the fantasy genre (obviously owing a lot to Dune, though with a far simpler take on morality and less about the political implications of messianic saviors).
This show, however, is a Space Western.
Set five years after Return of the Jedi (or at least 5 years after the Empire's fall - which I think officially means after the Battle of Jakku,) the Mandalorian is about a bounty hunter from the eponymous culture. Established early on as an unscrupulous professional, he takes a job from some imperial remnant led by a guy played by Werner Herzog (awesomely) only to have a moral crisis when he realizes that the "50-year-old" mark is actually just a kid (he seems to be the same species as Yoda, hence all the Baby Yoda memes).
The gorgeous desert landscapes, the rough, small towns, and an amazing score that is all 60s/70s spaghetti western throwback, and even the fact that you have a bunch of unrepentant Imperials still up to their bad behavior like a bunch of Confederates in the 1880s all fits in really well with the Western vibe the show oozes.
The show is really a cinematic experience, and it sets up some very interesting challenges that it manages to meet and surpass. For example: we never see the title character's face (except for flashbacks to him as a child). Pedro Pascal, who made an amazing impression as Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones, manages to convey a coherent and compelling character with just body movement and voice.
The scripts are also written cinematically - I got about halfway through the second episode before I realized that no one had actually spoken yet (aside from some Jawas speaking their alien language). I'm always delighted when a movie can make use of all its unique capabilities to tell a story without dialogue, and this show does just that.
While it's not divorced from the mystical side of Star Wars, we haven't actually heard the word Jedi so far, and instead, there's been a greater focus on fleshing out the Mandalorian culture.
Because here's the thing: Boba Fett was popular entirely because of his armor. He's not actually an interesting character in the original trilogy (and Lucas' instinct to tie his backstory deeply into the grander plot was, I think, like a lot of prequel choices, not a great one) but clearly, the mysterious and iconic armor ignited fans' imagination.
Here, we get a look at Mandalorian culture: they're a people in hiding, after some sort of purge from decades earlier (one assumes it was the Empire, though I suppose we'll see). One element of their culture is that they never take their helmets off (though I wonder how that works for, like, hygiene and how Mando doesn't have a giant beard growing out of his helmet). There's a group of them who live under the town where Mando (the nickname for the main character, given that we don't actually get a name for him) gets his bounty contracts. The person who seems to be their leader is a sort of blacksmith - she melts down the fancy alloy that is apparently a key part of their culture - Beskar Steel - and makes armor that seems to actually work against blasters in a way that Stormtrooper armor never did. I could be wrong, but it might even be implied that Mandalorians are all orphans adopted by the tribe, which our title character certainly seems to be.
What's exciting about the show is that it delves into the grittier world that Star Wars always implied. It's obviously not the first Star Wars-related product to do so, but seeing it with peak TV production values and Disney money behind it makes it feel rather fresh.
While I don't think anyone was terribly surprised, I think most of us were a bit disappointed in Rise of Skywalker - it seemed unable to please both those of us who liked Last Jedi's subversive nature and those who preferred Force Awakens' sticking to the formula. So far, The Mandalorian has the advantage of being a much smaller-scale story.
Of course, what I find a little funny is how this show is invoking a sort of pop culture nostalgia for movies that were coming out not much earlier than the original Star Wars. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which has got to be the quintessential spaghetti western, came out just ten years before the original Star Wars. I also really find the presence of Werner Herzog to be a kind of brilliant and hilarious inclusion, given the degree to which I associate him with "brilliant, 'real' cinema" that people often hold up as the direct opposite of Star Wars (though I think a true cinephile has room to love both).
Tonally fantastic, I'm curious to see how complex the narrative here gets, and while I like a convoluted plot as well as the next man, I wonder how well this show can thread the needle of maintaining its simplicity while remaining engaging.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)