Ode to the Captain

 Patrick Stewart had a long and varied career, but I imagine a lot of people of my generation and thereabouts first knew him as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

That show was truly formative for me as a kid - it came out when I was only a year old, so I started watching it after it had been running for a few seasons. It was the first "grown-up" TV show I ever really watched.

Stewart brought a gravitas that I know the rest of the cast talked about, pressuring them to step up their game, so to speak. A Shakespearean, former member of the RSC, Stewart had a classical style to his acting that afforded him immense statue on the screen (fitting for Star Trek's more traditionally stagey acting style).

But I think what really sticks with me is the way that he crafted this character who felt like what a man and a leader should be. The show experimented with making him kind of gruff and impersonal, but as the show evolved, this emotional distance was transformed into, instead, a kind of perfect professionalism.

There was something very traditional, in a sense, of having this wise older white man in charge of things, Stewart's baldness lending him an air of sagacity (despite the fact that he was only in his 40s when he started the role). But if we have (or at least some of us have) spent the last couple decades awakening to the dangers of patriarchy, Picard offers an alternative: a man who leads with confidence and wisdom, but the humility to respect and honor the strengths of those whom he leads and value their contributions to the team rather than lord over them with his position of authority.

Star Trek was always meant to portray a utopian future, where humanity had solved the institutional evils of greed, poverty, bigotry, and could turn our attention to higher goals, most notably a form of exploration built to avoid the evils of colonialism through safeguards like the Prime Directive.

In Picard, I think, Stewart built a character who embodied this hopeful future. A kind of platonic ideal of the worthy authority figure, who, among other things, knows precisely where his authority ends and does not overstep that line.

Stewart played many other roles, of course, even if Picard is probably his most iconic given how long he played him. While my family was in town for my college graduation, we saw him in Macbeth, where he gave a fantastic performance as the spiraling tyrant.

He was also an advocate for women, having survived a household with an abusive father, and worked to fight domestic abuse through philanthropy. Generally, it seems like he was a very kind and good person in addition to being a force on screen and stage.

He and Picard were both role models, and I'm sad to hear of his passing.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979 Miniseries)

 I don't know quite when I became so interested in spy dramas. Certainly as a middle-schooler and teenager I watched James Bond movies, but these are really just action movies with pretty unrealistic and ludicrous premises. James Bond belongs, I think, more in the realm of comic book superheroes. I think I could trace my interest to spy stories either with the release of Magic the Gathering's original "Ravnica, City of Guilds" set, which gave my favorite color-pairing the sinister and clandestine-to-an-extreme House Dimir, or perhaps it was actually the 2011 film adaptation of John Le Carré's most famous book starring Gary Oldman.

Watching the movie with my parents, my dad said it was good, but not quite as good as the miniseries starring Alec Guinness. Well, I finally got around to watching that miniseries, which is actually available on YouTube (though I have no idea if it is there legally - perhaps the people who hold the rights to it don't really care).

Anyway, this version tells the story over the course of four hours, compared to the film's more conventional two hours or so, which does leave more room, of course, to flesh things out. I'll be honest, though, there are a few scenes that feel a bit clumsy - there to serve up exposition in a pretty bald-faced way.

I, of course, already knew the story, having seen the more recent version. But it's a pretty good story: essentially, it's a mystery. George Smiley learns there is a mole (a term invented by Le Carré, or at least popularized by him, in this book) at "The Circus," the fictional headquarters of MI6. Smiley's late mentor, known only by his chosen code name of Control, had been trying to figure out which of the top officers at the Circus was working for the Soviets, but on an ill-fated mission he put together to try to figure it out, everything went wrong and it led to a scandal that exacerbated his existing health issues, leading ultimately to his death. Smiley, who was in fact one of Control's suspects (though one guesses in a sort of "covering all the bases" manner - after all, the people you trust the most are the ones that are best position to betray you) takes up the task of figuring out who it is.

The story has a lot of moving parts: the air is hazy with interpersonal drama and career ambitions. Again, trust is the most difficult thing to establish because, of course, the intelligence trade functions entirely on trust - and deceiving others into trusting you.

One of the really interesting things about Le Carré's fiction (perhaps more brutally centered in his debut novel, The Spy who Came in From the Cold) is how, as high-stakes as it feels to hope that Smiley can prevail and catch the mole, we're also reminded time and again that the Western powers are using all the same methods that the Soviets were (I'm sure that some historians will quibble with that, but at least everyone was/is doing things that would not be considered morally great.)

Again, the story is structured a bit like a mystery, gathering evidence and figuring out what, exactly, has happened, and how, and why.

But there's also this constant nagging doubt: the crux of the Soviet plot is that they've created a fake source of intelligence for the British that purports to be actually be an agent for the Brits within Soviet intelligence who is feeding intel to the UK - an agent codenamed Merlin, whose intelligence is codenamed Witchcraft. "Merlin" is given low-value intelligence, "chickenfeed" so that he can, ostensibly, convince his Soviet superiors that he's getting stuff out of the Brits while he's giving the Brits "gold dust." But, in fact, it's exactly the opposite: the mole in British intelligence sending back high-value intelligences while the value of Witchcraft gradually diminishes into chickenfeed and outright falsehoods. Indeed, there's even a suggestion that the entire plot isn't even there to get British intelligence, but to give the Brits something big they can exchange with the CIA for American intelligence, which the mole will then pass along to the Soviets.

In other words: there's no real "end goal" here, just a lot of careful positioning and laying the framework for future advantages.

Intelligence work, it would seem, at least in this era of the Cold War, was deadly and dangerous with benefits that were profoundly abstract.

Of course, the centerpiece of this story is George Smiley. Smiley is sort of the ideal spy - someone who is constantly observant, careful with his words, and has almost no real weaknesses to exploit, except for one pretty major one.

See, I think one of the things that Le Carré conveys with his fiction (at least in the little exposure I've had to it) is that the best spies are the ones that can minimize their humanity. But as we see in this story, people are still human, and that means that all the little imperfections and vulnerabilities that come with being a real human being make the spy game a particularly tough one to play.

In Smiley's case, it's his fraught marriage - my interpretation is that he loves his wife Ann, but they're basically separated and she has a constant parade of affairs with other men. Smiley fully understands that his marriage is the point of attack that his enemies can use, but knowing that doesn't make it go away. Others at the Circus have broader vulnerabilities, but no one is a robot, even if that might make them a better spy.

While the novel is 52 years old, so it's somewhat old news, I don't want to actually spoil it for those who haven't read it or seen the adaptations.

This miniseries does have the "UK television budget from the 70s" degree of production value, of course - high, I'm sure, for the time and those categories, but the 2011 film certainly looks way slicker. I would also, frankly, argue that as amazing as Guinness is, the film probably has the stronger ensemble, with such actors as Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds, Mark Strong, John Hurt, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, and of course Gary Oldman, who I do think is something of an heir to Guinness' chameleonic acting range.

Indeed, I suspect part of what got me in the mood for spy stories has been the new season of Slow Horses (which I think is a big improvement over the previous one. For posterity, the current season is its 6th). Slow Horses is fun, though I don't think it's nearly as smart as the Le Carré stories that influenced it. Still, it's fun to see Oldman playing a character who is in some ways the spiritual equivalent to George Smiley but in others ways his complete opposite.

One thing that's funny for me to consider is just how old everything looks, but then to consider that I was born less than a decade after this series came out. I do think there was a bit of a technological leap in the 1980s (probably a bigger one in the 1990s,) but it's remarkable how analog the technology was just seven years (or twelve if we're talking about the novel) before I was born. That said, I obviously don't have a ton of memories until the very tail end of the 80s. One of the ways in which a show like Slow Horses doesn't feel that much like these Le Carré stories is that, being set contemporarily, so much of the intelligence game is done in the digital world (because so much of life is done in the digital world, he wrote on a blog on the internet). People have to lock books away in safes or use razorblades to cut pages out.

If Le Carré wrote his fiction simply to process his experiences working in intelligence, that makes sense. If he wanted to basically send out anti-recruitment literature for anyone considering getting into such a field, that would also make a lot of sense. While I find this fiction compelling, I also feel very grateful that I've never stepped even close to this world, because I do really value having interpersonal relationships with people I don't need to worry about trusting. Again, it's a story in which normalcy and humanity is a liability. Really puts the Cold in Cold War.

Sugar's Second Season Finale Addresses the Arc Plot

 So, in The X-Files, there was this idea that was somewhat less common in TV in the early 90s: The Myth Arc. While the show primarily followed a case-of-the-week format, sending Scully and Mulder out to various places in the US investigating paranormal cases that could afford to be wrapped up neatly by the episode's end, on occasion you'd get "Myth Arc" episodes that dealt with the grand conspiracy covering up and working with would-be alien invaders.

In the early seasons, these episodes were amazing and exciting, cranking up the tension as we, along with our heroic FBI agents, wanted to learn more answers. By the later seasons, this plot had gotten so convoluted that it became sort of tiresome, though, and the show's more episodic format, which allowed for really wild creative and formalist swings, came into focus as the show's strong suit.

Sugar is structured very differently, of course: in its two seasons, Sugar investigates a pair of missing persons cases, though while the first season is more traditional in a "just where exactly is she?" kind of search, the question of where Ji Moon is in season two is less important than the question of how do we keep this schmuck from getting murdered?

But Sugar has a running arc story, and one that the show spends far less time focusing on. In two seasons, this is the only episode we've gotten that I think is primarily focused on his individual, personal story, with really more of an epilogue for the season plot.

(As an aside, I'm always shocked that more shows don't use the Buffy the Vampire Slayer format, which has episodic and seasonal plots, the but the series-wide arcs are really only broadly about the lives of its main characters rather than overcoming some specific antagonist.)

Of course, this being a mystery show, we'll do another spoiler cut here.

Wrapping Things Up in Sugar Season 2's Penultimate Episode?

 As I mentioned in an earlier post about this unusual mystery show, I've found some parallels with my favorite Christopher Nolan film (and among my favorite films period,) The Prestige. In that movie, which non-linearly (it's Nolan, naturally) traces the deadly rivalry between two turn-of-the-century magicians (can we still call 1900 the turn of the century if we just say 2000 was the turn of the millennium? As someone born, as the young kids would say now, "in the 1900s," it's easier for me if that terminology remains the same). The movie presents a formula for a magic trick, and then structures the film in a similar way.

I will say that I don't know if this terminology (The Pledge, the Turn, and the Prestige as the three "acts" of a magic trick) has any basis in the actual craft or was just invented for the novel upon which the film is based (Nolan would similarly present a bunch of internally consistent rules about dream logic in Inception that don't necessarily actually correspond to, you know, my experience of dreaming,) but it's a handy structure, foreshadowing that the film has not one, but two big plot twists, one of which is easier to anticipate than the other, and thus might lull the audience into thinking they'd outwitted the film much as a magician wants their audience to think they've figured out the trick, only to prove their earlier theory wrong.

What kind of show is Sugar?

Let's get into spoiler territory.

Sugar Season Two (First Three Episodes)

 The story of Sugar's first season, in which our strangely anti-Noirish Noir Detective John Sugar investigates the missing scion of a powerful Hollywood family, feels very classically Film Noir. Sugar is a man out of time, seemingly having based his entire persona on old-fashioned Hollywood leading men (a persona that fits quite nicely with Colin Farrel's classic leading-man looks).

Shows of this sort, where the main thrust of an entire season is about one big mystery, have a weird challenge in their second seasons: how different does the mystery get, and how much does it feel like the same show.

We're going to get into spoiler territories pretty quickly here, so I'll do a cut.

When It's Not Adding Up - Big Reveals in Sugar

 Film Noir is typically a subgenre of mystery. It's one that grew out of the trauma of World War II, a generation that had witnessed the utter, shocking evil that humanity was capable of inflicting upon itself. It's a cynical and bitter genre of storytelling that would later be echoed in the cyberpunk genre and has formed a kind of riff upon which other genres can build themselves.

It is kind of funny, though, that the genre became so prominent around the same time that post-War prosperity in America led to the sanitized suburban "Father Knows Best" and "Leave it to Beaver" optimism.

Noir is all about twists and turns, and betrayal is one of the key tropes that pops up within it. Sherlock never has to question whether Watson will be loyal to him and the mission of solving the crime, but in a Noir story, nothing is promised. We might have our heroic detective to trust, but everyone else is fair game.

And thus, it's a little funny that John Sugar has built his life around these tropes. He's so in love with the golden age of Hollywood (though he's not limited to it, at one point describing John Carpenter's The Thing to his doctor).

Following the case of missing woman Olivia Siegel, there are elements that don't really add up, moving parts here and questions that remain unanswered. That's fine, though. That's the genre.

Let's go into spoiler territory. Oh, and just to warn you, there will be spoilers for The Prestige as well.

The Enticingly Weird Neo-Noir of Sugar

 Having heard it was good, and now being done with both season two and Andor and season one of Widow's Bay, I decided to check out Sugar, the Colin Farrel-starring neo-noir series.

I live in Los Angeles, and while I didn't grow up here, both my parents did, and so it was our default destination for family vacations, visiting with grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. My dad, while born in Hungary, grew up in Hollywood, and until his parents were too old for us to come and stay with them, we'd often camp out in their apartment, which was just a block away from Paramount Studios.

I was a big cinephile as a kid (sadly kind of less so in adulthood,) and Hollywood not just as an industry but as a place has always loomed large in my world.

Going in, I wasn't sure if Sugar was set during the peak Hollywood days of the 40s and 50s, but it's actually set in modern day. The reason you might be fooled, though, is that its title character, John Sugar, is straight out of a classic Hollywood noir. A private detective who specializes in retrieving missing persons, we first see him in Japan tracking down the illegitimate son of a Yakuza boss.

Sugar dresses in fine suits and comports himself with movie-star poise (it doesn't hurt that Colin Farrel has decades as a successful Hollywood leading man under his belt). What's fascinating about him is that, as we see him go about his work, he seems to be profoundly, genuinely good as a person. Again, it's that old Hollywood leading man archetype, the principled, professional, and cool in the sense of never seeming to falter under pressure.

Sugar himself is a cinephile. When he meets a powerful film producer (James Cromwell, always welcome) whose granddaughter has gone missing, he says he's seen every one of his films at least 5 or 6 times.

What really draws me into the show is its unconventional editing. Among other flourishes, Sugar's investigation is interspersed with clips from classic movies, like Bogart as Sam Spade doing detective work just like Sugar is.

We get the sense that this is a person who has built his entire identity out of being that old Hollywood archetype, even if his methods involve high-tech gadgets in an era with smartphones. Upon returning to LA after his trip to Japan, he checks in with his manager/agent/coordinator, Ruby (Kirby Howell-Baptiste,) who does not play into any of the genre tropes that Sugar seems committed to embodying.

Two episodes in, the plot he's trying to solve doesn't, at least so far, seem to be all that unusual (though my current working theory is that the missing woman has been engaging in vigilante justice against killers of women) but the appeal of the show feels very much about our detective himself.

Now, I will say, I'm aware of a twist coming in the show that was spoiled by an AV Club review that was a little bit loosey-goosey with a pretty major spoiler. I'm trying to put it out of my mind and just take the show on its own merits, but it's a little hard to un-know what I know. I feel a little hesitant to even mention a spoiler here, but I'd say if you want to watch it fresh, be careful.

Also, watching the opening titles I was concerned that it may have been AI-generated, but a little cursory research has indicated that this was not the case, and the kind of irregular water-color-like animation was evidently done by humans, so... phew.

I don't know if I've made my position on AI stuff clear on this blog, but basically, the way I see it is that yes, there could potentially be some use for LLMs if it ever actually proves helpful in, like, developing new medicines or all the other things that AI boosters have promised us, but the primary way I see it being used is to further concentrate profits into the hands of the the capital class at the expense of labor, and to flood our attention with misinformation. Especially in the realm of art, I think that generating stuff via LLMs serves to do nothing other than deny real human artists the chance to share their labor and passion with the world. And for that reason, you shouldn't have any of that shit in your work.

Trolley Problems in Widow's Bay as the First Season Comes to a Close

 Once again, one of the greatest assets of Widow's Bay is its production design. In a storm shelter under town hall, there are posters on the wall of the infirmary that give guidance on treating various kinds of bites - snake bits, dog bites, and human bites. There's also a poster for "How to... subdue someone," and yes, the ellipsis is part of it.

Widow's Bay is a horror-comedy, but it does not skimp on the first part of that, with a plot that you could actually use for a more straightforward horror series. It's just these touches, and the character notes, which lend it a bit of silliness and fun.

In particular, the degree to which the culture of the island has normalized the weird is reminiscent of Welcome to Night Vale, a podcast that I was a fanatical listener to in the mid 2010s.

As we come into the finale, a terrible storm has struck the island, threatening to wipe away everything. All the townsfolk and tourists are crowded into this cramped shelter, and things are looking bad: much of the rations set aside are moldy, and the power is going in and out. And our main trio has one option to end the horror, but at a terrible cost.

Which we'll talk about behind a spoiler cut.

The True Threat Revealed as Andor Ends

 When Star Wars came out in 1977, it was an homage to the gee-whiz serial adventures of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon from about 40 years prior. It's interesting that we're now just short of 50 years past that original film. But Star Wars eclipsed its influences to become one of the most influential movies of all time, creating an aesthetic and language.

The idea of a "Death Star" is, if you hadn't grown up with the idea, kind of ludicrously over the top. It's such an arch name for a superweapon, and the fact that it requires a massive moon-sized space station to support the planet-destroying superlaser lifts the concept into the absurd heights of not-very-hard science fiction.

The denouement of Andor, in its final episode, after all the high-stakes blaster fights and explosions have run their course, is simply convincing the rational people in charge of the Rebellion that this is, in fact, a real thing that the Empire is building. That this cartoonishly evil plan is taking place in a world that Andor has redefined as existing within the rational and realistic.

Andor lovingly makes use of Star Wars' retrofuturistic aesthetic, its extremely analogue technology that is nonetheless so much more powerful than what we have (I find this particularly interesting as an evolution of the series given that the high-tech stuff in the movies looked pretty convincing to a 1970s audience, before digital technologies became commonplace and now ubiquitous). Luthen and Kleya's radio is operated by putting a bunch of giant plugs on cables into various sockets depending on the intended recipient. But at the same time, we have hovercars and seemingly sentient (at the very least sapient) droids.

After the horrors of Ghorman, we find ourselves in the final year of the story, BBY 1 (a dating system that does feel a bit contrived - sure it makes sense that dating things in comparison to the first movie makes sense, but surely in-universe they'd date it instead to something like the rise or fall of the Empire? The Battle of Yavin is certainly an important event, but I don't see us using the Battle of Stalingrad or D-Day as the basis for our calendar.)

And there's really just one last thing to cover. It all comes down to Lonni Jung.

Spoilers ahead:

The Tragedies of Ghorman

 I remember as a teenager, when I first saw Macbeth, I was puzzled as to why it was considered a "tragedy," because the title character is a villain protagonist, guilty of murder and tyranny. It's a tragedy with a happy ending, sort of.

Of course, my sense of what it means for things to be tragic grew more nuanced with my processing of that play - that the genre is more about the doom that is set in a character's fate, through flaws in their character that are not remedied in time. If a hero must overcome their flaws to emerge victorious in a happy ending, a tragic figure is one who fails to evolve.

I've been a bit cavalier about spoilers with Andor's second season - a season that was spoiled for me a year ago by endless flagrant spoilers posted on social media. So, these events didn't come as a surprise to me, but I'm going to try to exercise better propriety here.

Spoilers ahead.

Counting Down to Rebellion in Andor Season Two

 Despite being a Star Wars fanatic as a kid, I really never got that into the expanded universe, which in the Disney era has been relabeled "Legends," as its own separate continuity (sorry Jacen, Jaina, and Anakin Solo. You've been replaced by Ben - ok, yes, I did read like one of the Jedi Academy books).

So, the "Ghorman Massacre" is something I'm only aware of thanks to the broad pulp culture discourse around this show. And evidently, Andor makes a bit of a tweak to it - the operatic and over-the-top version of said massacre, in which Grand Moff Tarkin landed his ship on a giant crowd of peaceful protestors, is referred to in Andor, but it's evident that as atrocious as that is, the real horror is what we're building up to.

I've managed to take a break in the middle of a story arc, but Ghorman remains relevant for multiple arcs this season.

One of the fun things the show did was create a language for Ghorman. If you weren't listening closely, or didn't know any French, you might assume that the Ghor are just speaking français, but it's actually a constructed language, one that the actors deliver with such natural confidence that it feels real.

Obviously, the French Resistance is one of the most storied movements during World War II, an underground resistance to the brutal Nazi occupiers, romanticized as a youthful and obviously righteous group fighting against really staggering odds. It's also something that needed outside help, with the D-Day Invasions really beginning the liberation of France in earnest. It was the Free French who liberated Paris, but they had the Allied Forces at their backs when they did so.

Andor is about, among other things, building a resistance from the ground up. There are many time-jumps throughout the series that help us get there, but it's sort of a remarkable thing that any revolution ever really gathers enough steam to overthrow the existing system. One of the biggest problems is when the vast majority of people are simply trying to get by, living their lives, avoiding the notice of the regime. In season one, we see these discrete missions that benefit scattered resistance cells, but the idea of actually opposing the Empire seems beyond anyone's capabilities.

And there's impatience with that. When Andor arrives on Ghorman under the identity of Varian Skye, fashion designer, he meets with the Ghorman Resistance and tells them, basically, that their timing is wrong and that they're going to all get themselves killed if they try moving. Now, I've been quite thoroughly spoiled on a lot of what happens in season two, but I also think that we all know where this is going: Andor is right, but at the same time, something has to happen.

Indeed, we know, given that the Death Star does get built, that the mineral the Empire wants to strip-mine Ghorman for is going to be extracted, which means that the planet is going to collapse (even in its construction, the Death Star is responsible for the ruin of another planet) and those who cannot evacuate (and the Empire is not making any effort to evacuate the populace even by force) are just going to freaking die. Bye bye, friendly silk-producing spiders.

The Rebel Alliance is pretty scrappy even in the original trilogy: they're frequently on the run, moving from remote bases like Yavin to Hoth and eventually just existing as a fleet out in deep space. It's a bit glossed over how the transition from the Empire to the New Republic goes down: with the decapitation of the Empire and the loss of its most fearsome warrior, perhaps there's such disarray that the Rebels are able to simply move their shadow-government into place and re-establish some pre-Imperial institutions like the Senate (Mon Mothma's status as a former senator gives her some credibility to become the first leader of the New Republic. Man, makes me really wonder what a sequel trilogy that didn't immediately destroy the New Republic would have been like.)

The incredibly dark detail about Ghorman is that both sides are hoping for a massacre. The Empire wants to cultivate a violent resistance in order to justify a violent crackdown, while Luthen wants to provoke the Empire into excessive use of force in order to shock the conscience of the Galaxy.

I was at the very beginning of my sophomore year of high school when 9/11 happened, and I remember at the time thinking that the attack surely had failed in its goals, especially ten years later when US forces killed Bin Laden. While there was a lot of rhetoric coming from the terrorists at the time about shocking the American public into converting to Al Qaeda's radically fundamentalist version of Islam - something that was never going to happen - I now think that the resultant two decades of quagmire wars we got stuck in sort of proved the strategy effective. I mean, when I was a kid in the 90s, American military and geopolitical mastery was kind of unquestioned after the end of the Cold War, but we burned a ton of our credibility both as a force for global peace and as an actual military threat by getting sucked into two incredibly long conflicts. (Though these look like strategic master strokes compared to what we're doing with Iran these days).

But there is this real question: all of this posturing, all of this preparation has to lead to something. At some point, the trigger needs to be pulled and a resistance needs to turn into a rebellion, and that rebellion needs to at some point become a viable replacement for the regime that is.

That's not something that the original movies really concern themselves with, of course: it's far more about Luke's personal hero's journey and how he becomes the opposite equivalent of his father: if Vader is the Empire's most powerful warrior, a one-man army, then Luke becomes the Alliance's version of that, able to blow up their Death Star. Also, someone pointed out at some point that Luke's the only witness to what happened in the Emperor's throne room on the Second Death Star, so you see Luke walk in there in handcuffs and then emerges as the only survivor, you must think he's the most incredibly badass warrior the Galaxy has ever seen. (Funnily enough, the three people there kind of rock-paper-scissors, with Luke besting Vader, the Emperor incapacitating Luke, and Vader/Anakin killing the Emperor).

We know Andor's fate, of course - it lends a certain level of plot armor to him throughout the series but also a tinge of tragedy on top of all of the victories he accrues. He never gets to see the Death Star blown up, much less the fall of the Empire. It a tragic sense, he's not built to be one of the people who carries that victory into a new and reformed age.

The one character we know for certain will make it into that era is Mon Mothma, who becomes the Chancellor or Prime Minister or President or whatever the title is of the New Republic. But while Andor ultimately sacrifices his life to help defeat the Empire, Mothma seems to be sacrificing her family.

It's kind of fascinating, actually: the Empire has injected itself into the structures of the Old Republic, and while the original film has a throwaway line of the Emperor having the Senate dissolved, he uses it for a couple decades to enforce a sense of legitimacy to his regime. That dissolution could potentially give the New Republic an avenue to gain legitimacy by reinstituting it, but one wonders to what degree the New Republic needed to really clean house and rip out the roots of the Empire.

Anyway, eager to see more, but sad to realize that I think I only have four episodes left.

Finally Getting to See Andor Season 2

 Well, I've finally got access to Disney Plus again, and the first thing I rushed to do was start the second season of Andor.

As I'm sure I've written here before, I fell in love with Star Wars when I was in elementary school, watching the original trilogy on laser disc in a loop for a good chunk of 4th grade. My feelings toward the franchise were... altered by the prequel trilogy, and while I still have a great affection for that world, it wasn't the unadulterated fixation that it had been in my childhood.

Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm in the early 2010s more or less guaranteed a sequel trilogy, and while I thought the Force Awakens had a lot of promise and the Last Jedi did some very clever complication of the formula the sequels were hinting toward, the awkward U-turn that was the Rise of Skywalker felt like such a garbled mess that it left a really sour taste in my mouth. While I roll my eyes at my contemporaries who have tried to gaslight us all into thinking that the prequel trilogy was good, actually, I will say that while I fault the prequels for their poor execution of a truly different story that Lucas was trying to tell, the sequels wound up being a halfway-competent execution of an utterly unambitious story (again, which veered away from the ambitions of The Last Jedi).

Disney has tried to take the Marvel approach to Star Wars, with mixed results.

Look, I get that Star Wars has always been meant to appeal to a young audience. I got into it when I was 9. But as someone who is now 40, the idea of Star Wars has always held the potential, in my opinion, for more mature stories. And it's Andor, building off of the artistic success (and chutzpah) of Rogue One, that came out of left field to deliver that adult take on the Star Wars saga that I had been craving.

And let's be clear: this hits a lot harder when we're watching the United States descend into authoritarianism. The subversive thing about Star Wars, which seemed to fly over the heads of the Reagan-era people who embraced it as part of their own jingoistic, anti-communist politics, is that while the Empire is very Nazi Germany-coded, there are parts, like the fight against the Imperial forces on Endor, in which the Empire is standing in for US imperialism, with Lucas confirming in interviews that the Ewoks were basically like the Viet Cong fighting against America.

We've spent the last decade watching the stable order of how America is supposed to work collapse, with government agencies like ICE being unleashed upon the country to terrorize us into compliance. In the first arc of Andor's second season, Andor's friends (practically his family) are hiding out on an agrarian planet, working without documentation. While the planet seems idyllic (if probably a little boring - it's basically grain fields as far as the eye can see,) the safety it represents is torn apart when the Empire begins an inspection looking for undocumented workers.

We follow basically three threads in this first 3-episode arc. One with Bix, Brasso, Wilmon, and B2EMO on the farming world, one with Andor getting stuck on a jungle planet with the most dysfunctional rebel faction we've encountered, and one with Mon Mothma overseeing her daughter's wedding and realizing to what degree her personal life is falling apart as she secretly works for the rebellion.

Andor's plot, I think, was controversial because the people he's with are just such fuckwits. By the time of the original trilogy, the Rebellion is an organized, professional, and competent force. While we do see them getting massacred by Imperial troops frequently, the cause is not any real fault in the Rebels' methods - just a matter of being outgunned and outnumbered.

But one of the key ideas of Andor is that before the Rebel Alliance is an entity, the many, many factions that will form that alliance vary greatly in terms of how competent they are. And the Maya Pei brigade does not seem like it's going to be very helpful to the Rebellion.

We first see Andor when he's snuck into some sort of skunkworks-like place where new TIE fighters are being designed and tested. With the help of an asset inside, who is absolutely terrified at the fact that she's risking her life to help him steal the new prototype, Andor manages to break out (after fumbling through the controls of a ship that works differently than expected and having to fight his way out) but when he gets where he's supposed to hand the experimental fighter off, he finds that his contact isn't there, and instead, a ragtag group of rebels who did not get the message about his mission are waiting for him there.

This Maya Pei brigade, led, one learns, by the now-late Maya Pei, who evidently didn't declare a successor should something happen to her, has been stuck on this jungle planet for a couple days without food, their old ship (I model I vaguely think might have been in the prequels, so it's presumably an old ship) is wrecked on the surface. They see Andor in an Imperial flight jacket and assume he must be an Imperial, and so take him prisoner. But in-fighting leads to the brigade splitting into factions and killing a bunch of one another. Eventually, Andor takes advantage when the two sides try to reconcile to escape with the ship and leave them to the wild beasts of the planet. (A planet that I think is actually meant to be Yavin IV, where the rebel base is in the original movie.)

Sidelining the main character in this plot is... ok, it's a little tedious, but we're meant to feel it's tedious as much as Andor does. It demonstrates how resistance to an evil empire doesn't automatically make you competent or even particularly good people. There's ego and mistrust even when you're just a group of maybe 20 people on the outside. The level of management and organization required to corral an entire galaxy's worth of resistance cells is truly a monumental task, which at this point is basically being done entirely by Luthen and Kleya.

On Chandrila, Mon Mothma gets to briefly escape the politics of Coruscant to watch as her weirdly regressive trad-wife daughter (presumably an embrace of conservative traditions born out of rebellion against her busy senator mother) gets married into the sketchy Sculdun family. But as distressing as it is to see her relationship with her daughter disintegrate in front of her, her beloved childhood friend Tay, who has been helping to shield the money she has been moving around to help fund the rebellion, decides that he wants a bigger cut, blackmailing her.

Unfortunately for Tay, also at the wedding is antiquities dealer Luthen Rael, and when he finds out the position that Tay has put Mon and the rebellion as a whole in, the answer is clear: Tay leaves the wedding party early, and his driver is not his usual, but actually Cinta, whose mission is clearly to help Tay Kolma find his way to a lethal accident.

She has to stand by as one of her oldest friends is sent off to his doom, watch as her daughter embraces this life she always wished she could have avoided, and all while she needs to keep a bright smile on her face as the proud mother of the blushing bride.

Actually, the fourth storyline here has us keeping up with Syril and Dedra. Syril's weird obsession with Dedra has, actually, led the two of them into a romantic relationship. Syril has been doing well in his bureaucratic job on Coruscant. In a scene that truly flips our sympathies, when they have Eedy, Syril's mother, over for dinner, Dedra gives her a warning: that she has to stop being so terrible to her son or she'll never get to talk to him again.

It's honestly one of the rare times that we can kind of cheer for Dedra, because Syril's mother is the worst.

But lest we forget just what kind of person Dedra is, we actually open the season with her being invited to a super top-secret meeting in a mountain fortress somewhere remote. There, Director Krennec (the main villain of Rogue One, and head, as we'll discover in that movie, of the Death Star project) explains that the Empire needs a rare mineral for its "Energy Project," which can only be obtained in sufficient quantities from the planet Ghorman. Ghorman, a vaguely-French world, is not some backwater, but a culture famed for its luxurious textiles. The problem is that the mineral would have to be extracted in such quantities and with such haste that the planet itself could collapse.

And so, the meeting is there, essentially, to plan out a way to either get the Ghormans off their own planet, or more likely, to find a way to turn Galactic opinion against them enough that the Empire can justify massacring the planet's 800 thousand citizens.

While a pair of representatives from the "Ministry of Enlightenment," a sufficiently Orwellian name for the Empire's propaganda agency, suggest painting the Ghormans as snobs that are out of touch with the rest of the Empire, Dedra is the one who suggests empowering a militant resistance there to work as unwitting agents provacateurs and give the Empire an excuse to crack down.

So, yeah, as great as it is to see her telling off Eedy, let's not forget that Dedra Meero is fucking evil.

But if Dedra is the kind of person who just doesn't think morality has any basis in truth, Syril remains, I think, someone who is deeply misguided about what is "good." He gives a speech to an incoming employee at the Bureau of Standards about how it might all seem boring, but he did a lot of bureaucracy that caught some people... stealing. I mean, that... could be exciting, I guess? But for Syril, who believes that following the rules is so central to whether you're a good person or not, he must think that this was an act of epic heroism.

I did start episode four, which jumps a year ahead, but I haven't finished it yet, so I won't comment on it just yet.

Once again structured in these three-episode arcs, we're given a glimpse of what we can assume is a long and dense struggle against the Empire. Andor's time dealing with the Maya Pei Brigade is only notable in what happens when he finally returns to his family, and the terror and loss they suffer. (I doubt that they'll still be there by the time the Rebels establish their base on Yavin).

Star Wars was built, of course, to be a high-adventure throw-back to old serials like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, but I think the cultural impact Lucas achieved has inspired a lot of examination of the world that he created. While it should absolutely be the place for mythical heroes and spiritual forces, I'm so happy to see someone take the complex politics implied by the premise and really drill down into them with a series like this.

By reputation, I've heard that season two is an improvement on the excellent first season. It's a bit early for me to see if I agree, but I'm very happy to finally get to see it.

Widow's Bay

 I'm now six episodes in to Widow's Bay, a show on Apple TV. Set on the eponymous island somewhere off the coast of New England (and, refreshingly, actually shot there, apparently. I remember being frustrated when a scene from Lovecraft Country that pointed more or less to my hometown on the map, a suburb outside of Boston, was clearly shot down in Georgia).

Matthew Rhys stars as Mayor Tom Loftis, who is dedicated to promoting the island's potential as a tourist destination. The problem, though, is that while he's in total denial about it, the island is host to all manner of terrifying, horrible monsters and phenomena.

I'd say the show is a horror-comedy, but as it goes on, it leans pretty hard into the horror side of it. Loftis' own successes (hoping to make Widow's Bay the next Bar Harbor, a New York Times travel writer instead brands it as a new Martha's Vineyard) become a problem when the supernatural terrors become harder to deny.

The ever-present thorn in his side, who needs no convincing, is Wyck, a crazy old coot who is basically just right about things. Wyck is played by the eternally-good Stephen Root.

Rounding out the trio of the main cast is Patricia (Kate O'Flynn,) a kind of mousy woman who works at town hall and is something of a pariah because of her insistence that she survived an encounter with "The Boogeyman," a serial killer who murdered several of her classmates when she was a teenager. People seem to assume she made up her story to get attention, though given the genre of this show, I think the answer is probably more complicated.

The exact nature of all this horror is slowly being revealed - I've just watched an episode that takes place entirely as a flashback to colonial times (I could have the era slightly off,) which reveals more while still keeping us somewhat in the dark.

I'm enjoying the show a lot: among its best assets is fantastic production design. A series of mid-century board games at the local (haunted) inn - one of which is just called "Teeth" and the box simply contains a pair of pliers (a kind of Night-Vale-ian touch) or the very over-the-top 1960s-looking self-help book that focuses mostly on throwing a party (and with oddly anatomically correct images of a naked woman and partygoers snorting cocaine, which suggest perhaps the book isn't quite what it seems) are just brilliant bits of prop creation.

There's emotional stakes to the horror - we find that Tom is a single dad, and he's struggling terribly to keep his teenage son in line, while gnawed at by the rumor that those born on the island (like his son) will die if they leave. Also, the way that his wife left the picture is... well, it's a little more complicated than it first sounds like.

Anyway, just over the halfway point, I'm eager to see the rest of the show. It's just not the easiest thing to watch late at night.

The Backrooms and House of Leaves

 Oddly, shortly after making a little more progress into House of Leaves, the trailer for A24's Backrooms was released.

I don't know much about the movie's pedigree, so this is kind of just raw reaction: It feels kind of odd for there to be a movie of this. The Backrooms is this weird product of the internet, among the most popular and potent bits of Creepypasta. It's tied to the also-popular genre of Liminal Spaces, in which people share photos of oddly-lit, seemingly abandoned places, usually indoors, that evoke a sense of discomfort and familiarity to those of a certain generation (I remember seeing a video in which someone assumed that these liminal spaces wouldn't have meaning to those born before 1995, which is funny because I'm surprised that they have meaning for those born after. I went to Discovery Zone as a kid. Believe me, I know what it's like to spend hours in a windowless building with brightly-colored play structures.)

Anyway, while the Backrooms began as just an image with a caption that suggested a sort of out-of-bounds area of reality, like going outside the level in a video game and discovering some early draft of an area that players were never meant to see, it's also taken on a kind of collaborative elaboration online, with many people contributing to the mythos of the Backrooms, adding monsters and regions and levels to it.

I don't want to crap on anyone's creativity, but that impulse to flesh something out when it's so unnervingly vague is one I don't really agree with. Then again, maybe it's fine if we all agree that there's no true "canon" to any of this, and we are free to disregard ideas that might take away from what makes the central conceit compelling.

And that, I think, is why I don't know if I like the idea that there's a movie about them coming out. It's arguable what even counts as mainstream media these days - is a feature film genuinely going to reach a wider audience than a strange internet meme? I genuinely cannot say. But I think that there's a weird way in which making a movie with its characters kind of tries to put a box around the idea that declares this version the definitive one.

It's honestly a problem with adaptation in the first place: for example, I love Denis Villeneuve's Dune movies (as of this post, the third one has not yet come out, but we have a brief trailer). Part of why I think I love them is that, to me, they look very much like how I pictured the story playing out in my head - the brutalist palace in Arakeen, the used-future dustiness. But I know that some had more fantastical versions of it in their head when they read it, imagining something more like the visual design of David Lynch's version, or perhaps the wild and over-the-top design of the never-produced Jodorowsky's version. When an adaptation is a big success, it can push other interpretations to the side.

But here's the odd thing that I realized looking at this trailer:

The premise might actually be something like House of Leaves.

First, just to manage expectations: House of Leaves is famed less for the premise of its innermost narrative - the terror encountered by the Navidson family and those who went to explore the impossible labyrinth accessible through the house on Ash Tree Lane - than it is for the way in which the layers of narrative, between Navidson's documentary, Zampano's treatise, and Johnny Truant's annotations, mix and overlap and confound the reader until the book itself starts to feel like a labyrinth in which you've gotten lost.

I think it would be very hard to pull off what Mark Z. Danielewski does in his book with a film (not impossible - but I think you'd need a genius like David Lynch, and not the younger Lynch who made the 1984 Dune movie, to pull it off).

Still, the Backrooms movie seems to have one of its main characters (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, whom I tend to really like) discover this seam in reality in the back of an old furniture store and become obsessed with exploring the space beyond, bringing in the other characters much as Navidson does with his companions in House of Leaves.

House of Leaves came out in 2000, and was written over the course of ten years, so it's at least a little distant from the internet culture that gave rise to the Backrooms (despite what Gen Zers might mistakenly think, the internet did exist before 2000, but social media, at least in its current form, didn't).

Still, it's remarkable, thinking of these two premises, how similar they are. The labyrinth in House of Leaves isn't reminiscent of mid-century blandness, and is instead a kind of primordial, ancient grey stone (if I recall correctly) and rather than being poorly lit with fluorescent lights, it's utterly dark except for what light you bring in with you.

But man, isn't it interesting how compelling the idea of an extra-spatial labyrinth is? That a doorway might open and bring you into a place that shouldn't be able to fit where it does?

It makes me think of a few other horror classics: in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (speaking of adaptations that eclipsed the original work, and in doing so changed the consensus interpretation of the story's characters) there are shots in which young Danny Torrance is riding around the hotel on his Big Wheel, and we see him go around walls where there are hotel doors that cannot possibly lead into actual rooms because we've seen the other side of those walls, which ought to go out into a grand lobby.

There's also the Hounds of Tindalos, created by Frank Belknap Long Jr. in his 1929 short story of the same name, and then incorporated into the broader Cthulhu Mythos. The Hounds are "creatures of angles" whereas we and other natural things we're familiar with are "of curves." The Hounds of Tindalos can enter our reality through any sharp corners.

This is actually really interesting to me, because corners are places where 3D-rendering as you might see in a video game can sometimes expose seams that let you see through what are meant to be solid objects. The original Backrooms caption uses video game terminology, saying that if you "noclip out of reality" you'll wind up there. Noclip, as I understand it, is a essentially a command that allows something to pass through a 3D virtual environment without any collision, and thus able to pass through objects and walls that are meant to be solid.

The term "liminal space" comes from the study of mythology and folklore. Humans tend to place a great importance on in-between spaces, like meeting the Devil at a Crossroads. In Greek myth, the border between this world and the world of the dead is the River Styx, and there's a ritual of crossing that must be observed, paying Charon his toll of Obols (coins placed on the eyes of the dead as a funeral practice).

I find it interesting that the way that the term is used in the internet meme sense isn't quite the same: a poorly-lit indoor water park isn't necessarily a place of transition like a bridge or a subway station. I suppose instead, the liminality of the space is the uncanny border between the familiar and the strange. Like deja vu, there's a dissonance in which we feel both like we have been to this place, but no specific memory arrives.

I'm realizing it's 2 am as I write this sentence, and I probably ought to think about more comfortable things before I go to bed. Also, I don't know that I've really made a point here. But I just had some thoughts kicking around.

The VVitch

 Yeah, I know it's just a stylization thing, but I'm sticking with it.

I'm ten years late to the party, of course, but I finally got around to watching The Witch (stylization just for the post title). This was Robert Eggers' debut feature, and also was Anya Taylor-Joy's breakout role.

As a further note, I, like Eggers, am a New Englander originally, and I always appreciate a story taking place in my own "homeland" so to speak. Of course, the irony is that the towns and cities around which I grew up were founded by militant puritans, while I grew up in an environment that was largely secular and progressive - the number of Irish Catholics in Boston would surely send many puritans to roll in their graves.

I believe the movie was predominantly filmed in Canada, but it matches the overall type of woodland that I remember growing up around. Frequently, my parents would take us to Salem to visit the Peabody-Essex Museum, but of course the city is known mostly for its infamous witch trials.

I had seen Eggers' The Lighthouse a few years ago, and while I think this movie has a more straightforward narrative, it's the kind of film that has a lot of subtext and questions boiling under the surface.

The movies is a decade old, but just to be safe, I'll put in a spoiler cut.

The Gift of Affection

 Maybe it's far too early to start writing this.

Thirteen years ago, my best friend and I moved in with his then-girlfriend, now wife. She had a cat named Zuli. Zuli was short for Lapis Lazuli, a name made in reference to the Lazarus Long Robert Heinlein novels. Zuli was a black cat, and a small cat. She had been the runt of her litter, and remained small her entire life.

Zuli was an absolute princess - she loved getting attention, loved belly rubs, and loved to talk with us, meowing melodically in response to things we said. She was a social butterfly - whenever we had guests over, she would eagerly come into the room and even sit on guests' laps. In those early days of youthful energy, she would leap up to catch flying bugs, often successfully snagging them out of the air. Among her many nicknames was "Zuli the Ninja Cat."

For the first four years we lived here, Zuli was an only cat, and received undivided adoration from her three humans. Her happy place, I think, was sitting on the back of our old couch while the three of us watched a movie or TV show together. She would post up on the back of the couch, staring out the big glass sliding door at the back of our apartment in what I called The Eternal Vigil.

I didn't know much about cat behavior at the time. Early on, she would sit at the doorway to my room when I was at my desk late at night and stare at me, slowly blinking at me. Not knowing this particular bit of sign language, I thought she was trying to keep from falling asleep so that she could watch me. The truth was not far off the mark.

She was surprisingly communicative - she could meow in a tone that conveyed that she needed something specific, rather than just attention (or "'tention," as I would often call it - I think pets inspire people to come up with an entire lexicon. Maybe that's just me). One night, after our back door was left unlocked accidentally, our two younger cats got it open and were hanging out outside on the balcony. Zuli went to my room, woke me up with one of those really specific meows, and led me to the open door, where a very guilty pair of twins saw me and rushed back inside.

In her later years, she loved nothing more than to sit on my lap when I was in the living room, watching movies, playing video games, whatever I was doing didn't matter. She would climb up there and very insistently claim my lap as her spot. It was such a gift to feel her love there, that warmth and comfort she felt in my presence, that sense that the natural state of things was for us to all be there together.

She lived to be an old cat. She was 17. She lived pretty well for a long time and then declined very suddenly. Today we said goodbye to her.

I've known her for about a third of my life. She knew me for most of hers.

She was a beautiful, smart, deeply loving cat. I will always miss her.

Sinners

 I had heard good things about the movie, and while I think the Oscars are far from the metric one should judge films on, the fact that it broke the record on nominations was very impressive, so my best friend and I (he had already seen it) sat down and watched Ryan Coogler's vampire movie.

Sinners is a movie that, at its core, is pretty simple. It's a classic "besieged by monsters" movie, in which the main action (well, the back half of the movie) is primarily concerned with a group of desperate survivors trying to fend off an increasingly dangerous group of monsters, the cast dwindling (although not quite, because of the way the vampires work in this movie) as we're left to wonder who, if anyone, will survive.

One of the movie's most impressive feats is the characters Smoke and Stack, twin brothers both played my Michael B. Jordan, Coogler's constant collaborator. The technical wizardry, demonstrated early on in which Stack rolls a cigarette for Smoke, hands it to him, then lights the cigarette for him, pulled off so seamlessly that you could easily forget that that's the same actor on both sides of the frame, is complemented by Jordan fully realizing both brothers as distinct performances, so that the audience truly just accepts these as separate characters (costume choices aid in this, to be sure, but the performances do the heaviest lifting). It recalls Christian Bale's performance in The Prestige, though the nature of the performance is apparent from the characters' introduction.

Oddly, another movie that comes to mind here is From Dusk 'Til Dawn, which involves a diminishing group of survivors in a vampire-infested nightclub trying to make it to sunrise, and which also saves its supernatural reveal for its midpoint shift (well, almost - Sinners does introduce its villain, Remmick, in a scene in the first half of the movie, and his monstrous nature, but you're almost invited to forget you had seen that).

While the Smokestack twins are front-and-center, one could argue that the protagonist is Sammie, a musician who goes by Preacherboy because his father is a man of the cloth. The movie begins with his arrival at church, his beloved guitar reduced now to only a fretboard, covered in blood, and seeking his father's embrace, greeted with a presumably well-intended but missing-the-point exhortation to give up his music for a more pious path.

The rest of the movie (save the very end) is a flashback.

Smoke and Stack have come back to their home on the Mississippi Delta after fighting in World War One and then spending years in Chicago, apparently having ripped off the Italian and Irish mob up there, with enough cash to buy an old sawmill that they want to turn into a juke joint. The night that everything goes insane is their big opening night, with tons of people invited out there and Sammie, proving himself a brilliant musician, playing his first big, professional gig.

However, there are two important factors at play:

First, a man being chased early in the morning (just before sunrise) arrives at the house of a pair of southern white farmers (who notably have a klan hood in their home) begging to be let in, saying he's being chased by a group of Native Americans. Sure enough, a group of Choctaw hunters shows up at their door, and their leader calmly talks with the farmers despite their pointing guns in his face, asking after the man. Naturally, these racist assholes cover for the guy, and the hunters move on. Not long after, though, the man - Remmick - rips into the farmers' throats, drinking their blood and turning them into fellow vampires.

The way the vampires work in this movie is a little more akin to a zombie infection - there's no lengthy ritual, as in Dracula, in which someone must be compelled to drink the vampire's blood and then die. Here, it seems that anyone who is bitten and dies will, within minutes, become a vampire in their own right.

Furthermore, the vampires share something of a hive mind - Remmick gains the memories of all the people his brood turn, and they then all operate under a single will, which is his, which, in the case of these first two victims, honestly feels like an upgrade. But it does mean that there's no hesitation or doubt when a person is turned - they go from sympathetic human to fully-motivated-to-rip-throats vampire the moment they rise from the dead.

The other major supernatural element of the movie is the musical shamans known in various cultures as Filidh, Griots, or Firekeepers - the movie begins with illustrations and voiceover that speaks of these people who can, through their music, make a connection with spirits of the past and even the future.

And when Sammie takes the stage and performs his song, I Lied to You, we see this in action: as the music plays, dancing in the club and playing alongside him are other musicians from ancient Africa, but also from later in the 20th century, performing Funk and Hip Hop.

And this is why Remmick is here: as a vampire, he has been cut off from the spirits of his ancestors. We're never given an explicit origin period for him, but it's clear that he's many centuries old, from at the very least pre-English Ireland, but likely pre-Christian Ireland. Remmick wants to pull Sammie into his vampiric collective to appropriate this shamanic power and gain what his soul cannot have in his vampiric state.

Annie, Smoke's lover with whom he had a child that they lost in infancy, is also a magician of sorts, and explains that while a Haint might be a body reanimated by an evil spirit, where the body's original soul has moved on, a vampire has a trapped soul underneath the evil spirit that drives them. Thus, Remmick is something of a tragic figure in his own way.

In terms of plot, Remmick begins to pick off those who stray out of the club, turning them (vampires, like they do in a lot of vampire folklore, require an invitation to enter a building). Some of our core cast are turned surprisingly early, throwing the stakes into sharp relief.

The vampires are monstrous and evil, and it's particularly scary to see likable characters so quickly transformed into deadly threats. And yet, in a strange way, there's this kind of glimpse of something almost aspirational to them. The racial divides of the 1930s setting are irrelevant to the vampiric horde. In one of the movie's most iconic scenes, Remmick begins to sing staple Irish folk song The Rocky Road to Dublin, which serves almost as a battle song, and the people from the juke joint he's already turned dance around with him, singing along.

The hive mind is a distorted shadow of the way that music can synchronize peoples' emotions, creating a sense of fellowship and community. That was the whole point of the juke joint in the first place, after all.

I'm really curious to see what other peoples' takes are on the racial dynamics of the movie - obviously it's a primarily black group of people who are attacked by a white monster. But I think that there's a clever subversion of that assumption: one of the big problems with "whiteness" as a concept is that it's defined by negatives, more about who "isn't" than who is.

I'm half Jewish and roughly a quarter Irish (I think my grandfather might have also been partially Irish, and my grandmother, while mostly Irish, I think had a French ancestor somewhere in there,) which are both groups that have historically been deemed white sort of conditionally. To me, these identities are just part of the larger picture of who I am, but they are there.

Remmick initially tries to pass as another white southerner, and he fails to warrant an invite to the club when he first arrives playing music associated with Black southerners (I must plead ignorance on what genre it belongs to). The way he actually lulls Mary, Stack's childhood friend and lover, into coming out to him, is by playing Irish folk music - the specificity of something he's truly connected to, the authenticity, giving him the opening.

Now, obviously, that opening is to do something monstrous, and on a fundamental level, there's a degree of entitlement, appropriation, and rapaciousness that he has for this power belonging to a young Black man that, of course, fits in sadly consistently with how white people have treated others' cultures, bodies, and agency.

There are contradictory feelings here that I had watching the movie that I think are fully intentional: There's something tragically sympathetic about what Remmick is doing all of this for, even if he is a literal bloodsucking monster.

The title of the movie refers to the beauty of the "sinful" life that Sammie aspires to be a part of, despite the insistence of his father's piety. In their final confrontation, Remmick reflects that back on him - confronted in the pond outside of the club, Sammie begins reciting the Lord's Prayer, and Remmick joins him. Remmick explains that those words (whether it be the English version of the prayer or just the Christian prayer itself) elicit contradictory feelings in him - they bring him comfort even if he resents that they were forced upon his people. It echoes what Delta Slim (a fantastic Delroy Lindo), the older musician, says about how Christianity was forced upon Black people when they were taken as slaves, and yet we can see how even if forced upon them, some people, like Sammie's father, have found comfort and an identity in it.

There's a spirituality in the music that Sammie plays (and not just because he's a Griot), and in the social communion that he took part in. At the end of the movie (technically post-credits - I just watched a Patrick H. Willems video about the problems with such scenes, though this at least starts after only a few seconds of credits) we see Sammie as an old man in the early 90s, still playing the Blues, and as he tells... the people who come to visit him (er, don't want to spoil anything, though I feel like just saying this might have), up until the vampires showed up, Sammie was having the best night of his life.

The odd thing about this movie is that I don't think it's pretentious in the least. Ryan Coogler set out to make a solid horror/action movie, and he just happened to do it in such a way that layered in gorgeous period aesthetics, costumes, and music, actors giving fantastic performances, and rich, layered complex themes.

This is a movie that I think is finely made without being ostentatious (if I have one critique, it's the maybe heavier-than-they-need-to-be flashback inserts/montages that make it feel like the movie worries the audience isn't keeping up). It's the kind of solid-fundamentals filmmaking that feels like a breath of fresh air, and I can see why it got such a good reception.

The Tull Massacre: Revisiting The Dark Tower

(Heads up: there are going to be some spoilers in here for the ending of The Dark Tower series. It's been 22 years now, but I guess just, beware spoilers. I don't think I'm going to do a cut here.)

 One day when I was 17, I went to get a haircut at my regular barbershop the next town over. My mom drove me, as I didn't get a license until the summer before college, and as was her wont, we hung out in the bookstore around the corner from the shop after I was shorn.

There, I found myself enticed by the cover of The Dark Tower's second volume, the Drawing of the Three, its mysterious standing doorways capturing my curiosity. I had never read any Stephen King before, but decided to pick up the first book, the Gunslinger, along with George Orwell's 1984, which seemed a book I ought to read but to this day have never gotten around to (sadly, if anything, it feels even more relevant today).

The beginning of this insane epic full of time travel and journeying between alternate universes, is narrower in focus and brutally dark. The darkness of its opening, of course, was profoundly compelling to a teenager, for whom darkness can often feel revelatory. King wrote this when he was quite young as well - he began writing it in 1970, though it would first see print as five separate stories published in the late 70s and early 80s, when King had already established himself with novels like Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, and The Shining.

The version I read was published in 2003, and was a revision of the original 1982 complete trade paperback version, adding in edits that linked more closely with the books that King had written since, including the as-yet-unpublished final three books. I think the intent had been to do revisions to books 2, 3, and 4, but I'm not aware of his actually doing this.

Having never read the 1982 version, I can't be sure which details changed, but I have strong suspicions, like the mention of a maddened Taheen trying to get back to Algul Siento, or the strange sense of deja vu that Roland experiences in these early moments of his tale (more on that in a bit).

I've been reading the now-yellowed pages of the very same book I read in high school, which, along with the others, has a proud place on my bookshelf (my copy of Wizard and Glass is on an extended stay at a friend's house; we'll see if she ever starts reading it again). Strange, of course, to think that the year I read it was closer to the book's original publication than it is now to the time I first read it. I remember finding yellow-paged books from the 60s and 70s as a kid, and now the very ones I bought new are aged in the same way.

Anyway, there's an odd kind of nested narrative in the early part of The Gunslinger. We begin with Roland (not yet named) chasing the Man in Black across the desert, alone in the wilderness, on his desperate, grim hunt.

Given where the final book of the series (not counting the Wind Through the Keyhole) ends, it would seem that any earlier events ought to exist prior to Roland's endless cycle. And yet, Roland seems to be experiencing deja vu in those prior events, before he even enters "the apotheosis of all deserts." I'm not sure if this is an error, or perhaps the subconscious knowledge of the loop entering even his reminiscences.

Anyway, the point is that we start off going backwards, an element that is present in this first part of book one but not really a thing at all until the very end of the saga.

Roland shares a meal with a man named Brown, a lonesome "dweller" out on the fringes of what little society is left in that part of the world, who seems to just be a kind guy willing to share his water and cook up a meal for a traveler. There, at Brown's coaxing (though Roland seems to need to tell his story anyway,) the Gunslinger tells him the story of how he killed off every man, woman, and child in the village of Tull.

Roland stops in this miserable little town - a misery that seems to be just about as good as one can get in the dreadful world he inhabits - and discovers that his quarry, the Man in Black, has passed through. Shacking up with the tavern keeper, a tragically trapped, aging woman named Alice, he finds out from her, in the inner-most Matryoshka doll of this story, that the local drunk and weed-addict (Devil's Grass, which sounds like just marijuana but seems like its effects are closer to crystal meth) died, only for the Man in Black to show up and resurrect him. But Nort, the dark Lazarus of Tull, is still an addict, lamenting that the man could have raised him free and clear of his addictions, but chose not to.

Because the Man in Black, Walter O'Dim, and as we'll learn later, also Randall Flagg (among myriad other names) is an absolute douchebag.

Out of either pure spite or just a desire to put another complication in Roland's way, he gives Alice a code-word (the word is Nineteen, a number that becomes a recurring sign whose meaning is still very much up to interpretation) that will cause Nort to tell her what he saw in the land of the dead, things so terrible that she will beg for death when she finds out (and, sadly, she does).

Reading this the first time, I had really imagined that Roland's world was truly separate from our own, and that its post-apocalypse was one of a separate history. Revisiting it, though, it seems clearly implied that All-World is a post-apocalyptic future of our own world, or at least one nearly indistinguishable from ours (later on, we'll discover that the world that Jake, Susannah, and Eddie are from is not technically ours/Stephen King's, because of a couple of differences, like Eddie's version of Co-Op City is in Brooklyn, rather than the Bronx. I think that King merely got the detail wrong, but ran with this idea). But I also think that trying to find where Tull would be found on a map is probably impossible, as the breakdown of reality is implied to also make consistent maps kind of impossible. I'd guess it's meant to be somewhere in the former United States, but that's so very long ago (Roland's fallen kingdom of Gilead itself rose from the ashes of the previous civilization).

Anyway, Roland is at his worst in this book - truly an antihero, dedicated to his quest above all else. He muses at murdering Brown merely because of the possibility that he's somehow some kind of trap laid for him by the Man in Black, though he at least catches himself and realizes that this would make him just as monstrous as his quarry.

But boy, this shit gets dark.

He comes to Tull following the Man in Black's trail, and while he gets the story about Nort, he also finds out that a charismatic fire-and-brimstone preacher named Sylvia Pittston took over the local church after the previous preacher left town. Notably, she seems to have come from the direction the Man in Black went, and though she preaches using Christian language, it's evident that she's an agent of the Crimson King, the supernatural tyrant who is the series' ultimate antagonist.

She convinces the townsfolk that Roland is "The Interloper," or in other words, the devil/antichrist.

Roland realizes, while she's giving her sermon, that she is touched by the Crimson King, and is convinced she's carrying one of his demons in her womb, which leads to a disturbing scene in which Roland (brace yourself) forcibly performs an abortion on her with his gun.

Now, reading it again, it even seems that this wasn't actually necessary - that his violation of her body reveals that she was never carrying anything in the first place.

It's a deeply uncomfortable scene, and really tests our ability to see Roland as anything even remotely heroic, even if in theory he's trying to purge some evil monster.

What follows is... well, to me it feels worse, but I'll acknowledge that there's a special horror to the kind of bodily violation that Roland performs that might hit a lot of readers harder than the massacre that comes next.

Roland finds the town seemingly locked down in anticipation of a massive storm, but it turns out it's all a trap laid for him, organized by the preacher-woman. Attackers burst out of the buildings, and hold Alice hostage. She begs for death, having been unable to resist the dark urge to say the word to Nort, the untold horror she has received making her prefer an end (we're left to wonder why death is preferable to living with the knowledge of death's true nature,) and Roland's violent skills go to work immediately.

The entire populace of Tull comes after him, whipped up into a frenzy. One is also left to wonder whether this is mere persuasion or if some kind of magic has set them to killing the Gunslinger - Roland sees that there are only 25 people in attendance at Pittison's sermon, and yet he winds up killing 58 people, including 5 children.

It demonstrates that Roland is a profoundly capable killer (it does help that he's one of the few people who actually has guns in this world, but even with a pair of six-guns, that means he had to reload both guns 4 times even assuming he kills every target with a single shot). He doesn't get out of the fight unscathed, but only one injury is actually serious, and that he's still able to dress and bind afterward.

And in this town full of corpses, Roland rests, eats the rest of the (probably mutant) beef they have, and then finally moves on.

Having already read the book, this entire volume sees Roland failing to recover his humanity - though he bonds with Jake, Roland ultimately leaves him to his death in the name of the quest. It's in the later books, when forced by his Ka-Tet, his surrogate family, to allow his heart to open again, that he gets his chance at redemption.

But this bleak, dark introduction shows us where he's at when the story begins, and shows us just how far he has to go.

Finally Finishing Midnight Mass

 Whoo boy!

Well, it took me, like, months, but I finally watched the final episode of Midnight Mass.

I've now, in overlapping fashion (though I think I watched Bly Manor all in one go) seen the first three of five of Mike Flanagan's Netflix miniseries. I think I'm with the general consensus that Midnight Mass is the best of the three, with Hill House in second (a close second, actually - the two shows are doing very different things) and Bly Manor, while it has its charms, comes in a more distant third.

Midnight Mass is a story about community, religion, conformity, and the desire to take control of one's fate. Our focal character, returning us to Crockett Island, a tiny community off the coast of Massachusetts (I think? It's definitely New England, but it could be another state. I might just be biased as a native Bay-Stater myself), is Riley, who is haunted (not literally - this show isn't about ghosts, unlike the previous two) by the young woman he killed in a drunk-driving accident. Having spent time in prison, he's released back to his family on the remote island, and must contend with the horror of his crime and how it has come to make his community feel about him, but also how difficult it is to come back to a dying, insular community.

Flanagan, I believe, drew on a lot of his own life experiences, including having been raised Catholic but finding he didn't believe as he got older.

Crockett Island is one where community is built around the local Catholic church, St. Patrick's.

I've already largely summarized this plot here, so we'll skip ahead to the end past a spoiler cut (it's a few years old, but I think still within the statute of limitations on spoilers).

Ambiguity, Sacrifice, and Tropes: Digesting the Stranger Things Finale

 This is going to be a full-spoiler... rambling about the ending of Stranger Things.

The internet is a place that monetizes polarizing opinions. We've seen the absolute havoc that that's wrought on our politics, but it also applies to our cultural discourse (which is not wholly separate). My initial impressions of the end of the series was one of qualified satisfaction. The show as always a bit messy, and I fully expected it to have a messy ending.

But I do think there are some valid questions to be asked about the intent in the writing of the series and ending it in this way. The Duffer Brothers have been fairly emphatic that, while they intend to keep exploring the universe of this show, they don't intend to revisit any of its characters - so the stories of all our Hawkins gang should be seen as complete (though I could for sure see a spin-off having a cameo appearance of an established character, or even bringing one in as a regular if they felt it would help the narrative or draw viewers).

We'll start needing to get specific soon enough, so let's do a spoiler cut.

Stranger Things: The Right-Side Up

 First things first, I think the show sticks the landing. There's no flagrant last-minute swerve that confuses or confounds, the characters remain true to themselves.

My immediate point of comparison is with Game of Thrones, whose ending (the last two seasons in general, but in particular the final wrenching heel-turn for one of its core protagonists) took a wrecking ball to the good will it had built up over the previous 8 years.

Stranger Things, while it has had fewer episodes and seasons, was nevertheless "running" for even longer, nine years, and so there was a lot of pressure to live up to its expectations.

I literally finished it just a few minutes ago, so these are my raw impressions, but broadly speaking, I think the show manages to end in a satisfying way. I'll get into specifics beyond a spoiler cut.

Spoilers Ahead: