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letterboxd · 3 years

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Life Detained.

The Mauritanian director Kevin Macdonald talks with Jack Moulton about researching Guantanamo Bay’s top secrets, Tahar Rahim’s method-acting techniques, the ingenuity of humanity during the pandemic, and his favorite Scottish films.

“You’ve got to understand that for a Muslim man like Tahar, this role has a much greater significance than it does for you or me.” —Kevin Macdonald

It’s not uncommon for a director to release two films in one year, but Academy-Award winning—for his 1999 documentary One Day in September—director Kevin Macdonald is guilty of this achievement multiple times. Ten years ago, he released his first crowd-sourced documentary Life in a Day and the period epic The Eagle within months of each other. A decade on, he’s done it again.

The Scottish director (and grandson of legendary filmmaker Emeric Pressburger) released both his Life in a Day follow-up and the legal drama The Mauritanian this month. The latter tells the story of Guantanamo Bay detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi (sometimes written as Salahi), who was held and tortured in the notorious US detention center for fourteen years without a charge. The film, adapted from Slahi’s 2015 memoir Guantánamo Diary, features Jodie Foster and Shailene Woodley as his defense attorneys Nancy Hollander and Teri Duncan, with Benedict Cumberbatch, who also signed on as the film’s producer, playing prosecutor Lt. Stuart Couch.

Benedict Cumberbatch as prosecutor Lt. Stuart Couch in ‘The Mauritanian’.

The Mauritanian also introduces French star Tahar Rahim to a global audience, in the role of Slahi. “The ensemble is excellent across the board,” writes Zach Gilbert, “while Tahar Rahim is best in show overall, bringing honorable heart and humanity to his role [of] the titular mistreated prisoner.”

Much of the story is filmed as an office-based legal thriller involving thick files, intense conversations, and Jodie Foster’s very bright lipstick. Macdonald expertly employs aspect ratio to signify narrative shifts into scenes recreating Slahi’s vivid recollections of torture and his achingly brief conversations with unseen fellow detainees.

Qualifying for this year’s awards season due to extended deadlines, The Mauritanian has already earned Golden Globe nominations for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress for Rahim and Foster respectively. Slahi remains unable to travel due to no-fly lists, but he was a valuable resource to the production, providing an accurate and rare depiction of a sympathetic Muslim character in an American film.

It was the eve of Life in a Day 2020’s Sundance Film Festival premiere when we Zoomed with Macdonald. Behind him, we spied a full set of the Italian posters for Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic Blow-Up. As it turns out, he’s not a fan of the film—only the posters—so we got him talking about his desert-island top ten after a few questions about his new film.

The attention to detail on Guantanamo Bay in The Mauritanian is impressive. There are procedures depicted that you rarely see on-screen. How did you conduct your research? Obviously Guantanamo Bay is a place which the American government spends a great deal of effort keeping secret. It was important to Mohamedou and me that we depicted the reality of the procedures as accurately as we possibly could. That research came primarily from Mohamedou who has an incredible memory. He drew sketches and made videos of himself lying down in spaces and showing how he could stretch half his arm out [in his cell]. There are a lot of photographs on the internet of Guantanamo Bay which are [fake] and others are from a later period because the place developed a lot over the years since it started in 2002 and Mohamedou was able to [identify] which photos were rooms, courtyards and medical centers he had been in.

Director Kevin Macdonald on set with Jodie Foster.

How did you approach creating an honest representation of the graphic torture scenes, without putting the audience through it as well? Whenever films about this period are [made] they’re always from the point of view of the Americans and this time we’re with Mohamedou. You can’t underestimate the fact that there have really been no mainstream American cinematic portrayals of Muslims at all, so in portraying a sympathetic Muslim character who’s also accused of terrorism, you’re pushing some hot buttons with people. It was important that those people who are uncomfortable with him understand why he confessed to what he confessed.

Everything you see in the film is what happened; the only difference is that they weren’t wearing masks of cats and Shrek-like creatures, they wore Star Wars masks of Yoda and Luke Skywalker in this very perverse fucked-up version of American pop culture. Obviously, we couldn’t get the rights to those. Actually, I don’t feel that it is graphic. There is more violence in your average Marvel movie. It’s psychologically disturbing because you’re experiencing this disorientating lighting, the [heavy-metal] music, and he’s being told his mother’s going to be raped and he’s flashing back to his childhood. To be empathizing with this character and then to see them to be so cruelly treated is so deeply disturbing.

How did you prepare Tahar Rahim for his convincing portrayal of such intense pain and suffering? Tahar went through a great deal of discomfort in order to achieve it. He felt that to give a performance that had any chance of being truthful, he needed to experience a little bit of what Mohamedou had suffered, so throughout the movie he would insist on wearing real shackles which made his leg bleed and give him blisters. I would plead with him to put on rubber ones and he would say “no, I have to do this so I’m not just play-acting”.

He starved himself for about three weeks leading up to a torture sequence—he had lost an awful amount of weight and he was really unsteady on his legs. I was very worried about it and I got him nutritionists and doctors but he was determined to stick with that. You’ve got to understand that for a Muslim man like Tahar, this role has a much greater significance than it does for you or me. He felt a great weight of responsibility to do this correctly, not just for Mohamedou, but he was speaking for the whole Muslim world in a way.

Jodie Foster and Shailene Woodley as defense attorneys in ‘The Mauritanian’.

What compels you to study this period in time? Mohamedou was released a couple of weeks before Trump came to power in 2016, so the story is still ongoing for him. He’s still being harassed by the American government and he’s not allowed to travel because he’s on these no-fly lists. I didn’t want to make a movie that was saying “George W. Bush is terrible”. We’ve been there, we’ve done that. This is looking back with a little bit of distance and saying “here’s the principles that we can learn from when you sidestep the rule of law”—what it takes to stand up like Lt. Stuart Couch did when everyone else around you is going along with something that’s really terrible.

You see that around Trump with the choices within the Republican Party to stand up and say they’re going to sacrifice their careers to do the right thing. It is a hard thing when there’s this mass hysteria in the air. The basic principles that the lawyer [characters] are representing is not about analyzing and replaying what happened after 9/11, they’re directly related in a bigger way to the world we all inhabit.

Did anything surprise you in how your subjects for Life in a Day 2020 addressed the pandemic? One of the most affecting characters in the film is an American who lost his home and business because of the pandemic, so he’s living in his car. He seems very depressed when you meet him for the first time, then later he’s telling us there’s something that’s giving him joy in his life. He brings out all these drones with these cameras on them and puts on this VR headset and loses himself by flying through the trees. I thought that was such a great metaphor for the way that human ingenuity has enabled us to survive and thrive during the pandemic.

I get the feeling of resilience from [the film]. This is a more thoughtful film than the original one. I see this as a movie of [us] being beware of our susceptibility to disease and ultimately to death and mortality, [and] how we’ve found these consolations as human beings. To me, it’s a really profound thing. It also speaks to the main theme of the film which is how we’re all so similar, same as The Mauritanian. It’s confronting you with all these people and saying we fundamentally all share the basic things that underpin our lives and the differences between us are much less important than the things we have in common.

Let’s go from Life in a Day to your life in film. What’s a Scottish film that you love but you feel is very overlooked or underrated? That’s really hard because there aren’t many Scottish films and there aren’t many good ones. Gregory’s Girl is the greatest Scottish film ever made—it’s the bible for life for me. That’s very well-known, so I would have to say Bill Forsyth’s previous film That Sinking Feeling, which was self-funded and made on 16mm black-and-white. It has some of the same actors and characters as Gregory’s Girl in it. Or my grandfather Emeric Pressberger’s film I Know Where I’m Going! which is a rare romantic comedy set in Scotland.

John Gordon Sinclair and Dee Hepburn in Bill Forsyth’s ‘Gregory’s Girl’ (1980).

Which film made you want to become a filmmaker? I think it was Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, which is one of the top five documentaries ever made and in my top ten desert-island movies.

What else is in your desert-island top ten? Oh god, don’t! I knew you were going to ask me that. I’ll give a few. I would say there would have to be something by Preston Sturges—maybe The Lady Eve or The Palm Beach Story. There would have to be a film written by my grandfather, so probably The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which is the best British film ever made. There would have to be Singin’ in the Rain, which is the most purely joyful film I’ve ever seen. There would probably be The Battle of Algiers, which I rewatched recently and was an inspiration on The Mauritanian. Citizen Kane I also rewatched in anticipation of watching Mank, of which I was very disappointed. I thought it completely missed the point and was kind of boring.

Which was the best film released in 2020 for you? I thought the Russian film Dear Comrades! was really stunning. It was made by a director [Andrei Konchalovsky] in his 80s who first worked with Andrei Tarkovsky back in the late 1950s. He co-scripted Ivan’s Childhood. I would love to make my masterpiece when I’m 86 too!

Related content

Films with Muslim characters

Movies that pass the Riz test

Scottish Cinema—a regularly updated list

Follow Jack on Letterboxd

‘The Mauritanian’ is in select US cinemas and virtual theaters now, and on SVOD from March 2. ‘Life in a Day 2020’ is available to stream free on YouTube, as is the original.

#kevin macdonald #michelangelo antonioni #scottish film #scottish director #emeric pressburger #the mauritanian #jodie foster #tahir rahim #tahar rahim #french actor #guantanamo bay #muslim representation #muslims on film #benedict cumberbatch #guantanamo diary #life in one day #life in one day 2020 #life in one day film #letterboxd

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coraxaviary · 3 years

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An Essay on POC and Fics

[ORIGINALLY A WRITER ASK GAME]: Ramble about any fic-related thing you want!

(AKA me explaining in long-form why June is white, complete with some drama and a lot of rambling. Do not feel obligated to read).

I’ve never talked about this extensively, but I want to discuss ethnic minority OFCs in fics. Specifically, SiA. I originally was going to make June partially nonwhite. And I ran into problems.

I really found myself worrying about relatability. If a character is POC, I thought it would ruin immersion for people who are looking for an OFC fic to lose themselves in. It’s no secret that I’m Asian-American, and I was originally all for making the character part Asian. It’s ironic that I was worried about immersion when outside of fic spaces, I argue unendingly for Asians to be cast as leads and stereotype-defying roles. Because any POC is also just a person who can be as “relatable” as any white character, theoretically. I feel a little hypocritical, but at the same time it’s true.

When I watched The Walking Dead, Glenn was my absolute favorite. Because he was Korean-American. And for the first time, I watched a major (Asian!) character in a show become hailed as a man defined not by his race, but for his achievements and his personality. If Glenn was white, he still would’ve been one of my favorites. But seeing Asians portrayed as... normal people shouldn’t be this rare. However, it is, at least in mainstream America.

The issue with creating POC characters is racism. That’s always the issue, isn’t it? Racism has been ingrained into every system and cultural dynamic, globally. The remnants of colonialism are alive and well, and the treatment of POC people, generally, is far from sterling.

Thus it became almost impossible for me to justify creating an Asian-American (or, for that matter, any other POC) OFC. They would be defined by race, because back in the 40s, any American ethnic minority had no choice but to be characterized by their appearance. It still happens today. And I wanted the focus to be on humanity, war, bonds, and gender. Not race, because race is unpleasant to talk about. It wouldn’t be fun for me to be researching 1940s race discrimination to create a character who must overcome that too. I’m not looking to undergo an identity crisis in the pursuit of a fic aimed at social justice. I just want to write something fun.

Fic is created, many times, by minority groups, including POC. However, like any institution, it’s white-centric. And I don’t fault it for that. Most media in the mainstream is white-centric and thus it makes perfect sense for the works created based on the material to be also that way. But I felt like I was betraying myself by writing fic and not taking a chance to diversify the narrative.

Because if a significant part of my irl advocacy is attempting to champion race diversity, and I don’t take that chance in the fandom space, am I a hypocrite?

The fault of this culture, and this struggle, is not with me. It’s with the centuries and ages of oppression and typecasting and discrimination in the pages of world history. It’s unavoidable.

However, to be kind of frank, it sucks to have to consider these things when all I wanna do is write a self-indulgent narrative about WWII boyfriends. I want to just be myself and imagine a fun time with my favorite characters. But I know, deep down, that anyone who is not white would not have been accepted into the group. I decided to just circumvent all these problems by writing a white character.

And it’s not true to the narrative if I wrote a POC OFC and then bent all the other characters OOC and forced them to be non-problematic. Because I know, regrettably, that the norm back then (and still in some areas) is casual racism. It was only 1948 when the American Army officially desegregated. You can watch The Pacific for yourself and find out what the Americans called Japanese people. The racial slurs, I’ll admit, made me uncomfortable despite how much I love the series. Army culture in the 40s towards a woman who is also a racial minority would have been egregious. And that’s not fun to write about in a fic.

I can’t not think about race -- not forever, at least. I don’t have that luxury. I do acknowledge that I, as an Asian-Amerian, benefit from a white-centric culture that has designated us (condescendingly) as a “model minority” and as an exception race. Systemic racism is less impactful towards Asians. This is, however, not to discount the terrible history of Asian-American discrimination that is not immediately apparent (I have been told that not everyone is educated of the existence of the Japanese-American internment or other examples of irrefutable discrimination). There is history in my family of experiencing both ends of the Asian-American experience: as a “model” and also discriminated against as a perceived threat (or a scapegoat, if you will, for the Vietnam war and other matters).

I went through a phase (as many American POC do) of wanting to be white when I was very young. I don’t know exactly why. Is it because the American identity is so deeply rooted in the striking visual of the white settler, despite the deep history of the continent in indigenous people? Is it because diversity is (or was) not common in the mainstream -- when we didn’t have people like Glenn at the forefront of media representation but instead had stereotyped caricatures like Mr. Yunioshi? I didn’t know what it meant to be beautiful back then unless the portrait was of caucasian features. I have a distinct memory of complaining to my mother when I was about five or six years old that I didn’t like my black hair, and I think my way of thinking unconsciously had to do more with my Asian heritage than the actual color. I cannot tell you honestly what specifically caused this type of thinking, but it’s more widespread than you’d think among POC children.

So this is why I am a POC and yet I choose to write a white protagonist. Historical fiction always contains complexities: decisions that must be made with the wisest discernment that I don’t feel like I can always make. History is a burden upon us all. The present will never be free of the past, and it’s our job as writers to navigate the gray patches between interpretation and accurate portrayal. Sometimes it seems like an insurmountable task, and sometimes it’s as if I can forget about my POC-ness altogether and lose myself in my OFC without thinking about heritage or discrimination.

But here we are, writing fanfiction of WWII heroes who come from a different time and a different era.

It had to have felt different back then, don’t you think? When I think of the forties, I think of patriotism and B-24s and victory; I think of a feeling of hope tinged with despair. I think of radios and dance halls and tragic heroes and the glory of soldiers dropping from the sky, backlit like angels and tasked with democracy and hope and things that are right and true. I think of a time where Americans united for good.

But this is a glamorized version of history. It’s the enjoyable version, we all know. And it genuinely consisted partially of these snippets of greatness, but there was a larger part that lay, vast, underneath the golden panorama that sometimes we forget about. And I think the WWII fic-writing community is keenly conscious of this aspect. I see it in the writing that we all so lovingly produce: a lot of us understand, at least on a surface level, that war is not glamorous and that the times were still as turbulent as they are today.

It’s something we all must grapple with.

And this, in a slightly dramatic fashion, is my personal conflict of being a person of color, and choosing to write a white character for the sake of joy and fun.

Thank you for reading if you got to the end! I love you all :)

(Partially inspired by this post by @rhovanian, but mostly my own ruminations based on the brief time I have existed on this earth).

#not writing #SiA #literally an essay idk

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emdop · 5 years

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The Fuckening: Modern YA Fantasy Misunderstands Feminism and Effective Plot Structure

Alright, mother fuckers, buckle up. Like most book lovers, I read many books and I’m always searching for the next one that will make me develop a hyper-fixation. Nothing beats the rush of finding media so good that time loses all meaning and you’d sell your soul for the next hit of content. The amazingness directly results from being rare. So in between the moments of stuffing your face full of your favorite characters, the other books are read. The ones that could have been good but aren’t successful. The ones with the lying, beautiful covers used to lure readers into forking over crumpled cash while hugging the hopefully precious gem. Then, all the words are read and the covers are closed, and there’s only the silence of disappointment and mediocrity.

Anyway, I read a book. Shocking, I know. It had so much promise and as I delved into the first fifty pages; I thought I found a winner. Then it started to sink in a massive Titanic kind of way. This book was Wicked Saints by Emily A. Duncan (this essay/rant will have spoilers and will discuss the ending). I’m prefacing this rant with a disclaimer, not because I’m trying to side-step backlash, but because I feel it’s worth mentioning. This is all my opinion and if you loved this book with all your heart, that’s awesome! I understand why someone would spend time reading, writing, and engaging with it. It’s possible to recognize the weaknesses of a piece of media and still like it; I just happen to not like it because of those weaknesses. Returning to my point, the pitfalls, mistakes, and blandness of this book are rampant throughout Young Adult literature, particularly in Fantasy. As a writer myself, I’m not immune to committing the same sins, but I think it’s valuable to examine why and how these unfortunate tropes keep appearing. I have several points I want to explore in this essay, but the main two are the pretend feminist values and poor writing craft.

Part One: YA Book Feminism and Bland Female Characters

Wicked Saints is marketed as a book about a girl who can communicate with gods and draw power from them. Her magic is rare in a world full of blood magic users and as the war between her country, Kalayazin, and the opposing force, Tranavia, clashes on her front porch, readers are led to believe that she’s an integral part of how this war will end. I was here for this. I was so ready to scream about this book to anyone who will listen. Now, I’m screaming about it for a different reason.

Nadya, our human incarnation of the god’s Walkie-Talkie, is not like other girls. She’s special and powerful and exceptional. At first, I bought this lie, much like I did with every other book like this one. I thought, finally, here’s a badass heroine who will take charge of her life and wield her powers to create a lasting peace or at least kill everyone. When the readers meet Nadya, she’s living in a monastery to hide from Tranavians since her magic is so rare and powerful, they’re sure to seek her destruction. Then, they find her, or rather Tranavia’s prince, Serefin, (a boy-general, because adults don’t exist in YA) does. Serefin tries to kill Nadya, but she escapes with help of Forgettable Best Friend.

Lately, I’m reading a trend of books that build a “strong” female narrator by giving her some sass, adding a rare but useless magic, and having her not die. Then they slap words like empowering, feminist, or well-crafted into the marketing campaign and call it good representation. This isn’t quite what happened with Wicked Saints, but I had the impression that Nadya would be more than what she actually was in the book. The hardback cover has the words “Let them fear her,” engraved into it for gods’ sake. I thought she was going to at least do something.

Okay, there was one time she did something. While on the run from Serefin and the other Tranavians, Nadya and Forgettable Best Friend find a group of misfits being attacked. Nadya, in the confusion of who’s an enemy and who’s an ally, asks the gods for help. One responds by vanishing all light for like ten minutes or something. This scene is one reason I bought the lie that Nadya was going to be a Bad Ass Mother Fucker, but this is the only time I remember her using any kind of significant power. In fact, once the plot gets going, Nadya is cut off from her powers almost entirely. I’ll get to that later. Back to the group of misfits, which includes a broody, yet totally handsome Tranavian, Malachiasz, and bam, we’ve found the love interest. Malachiasz is a Vulture which I understood as a privatized military group that’s ruthless, skilled, and detached from the world (no family or friends). So, Nadya hates him on site, but Malachiasz has defected and has like emotion now. They argue a bunch and exchange heated glances.

Now that we’ve introduced our male characters (Serefin, Malachiasz, and some other dude in the misfit group), our plot gets going. There’s nothing wrong with introducing characters to start a plot, that’s how story-telling works. What I’m finding frustrating in this book and many others like it, is that the male characters make most of the decisions. They show the most autonomy and participate in the drama/action. Serefin is leading an army, making command decisions, and drinking copious amounts of alcohol (I don’t have time to get into the drinking to drown your feelings is Not Good argument, but know that this book doesn’t call out his addict behavior). Malachiasz and his band of friends are planning to assassinate the king. The female characters have run away, observed, and turned out the lights. Where is the girl who’s inspiring fear in the gods themselves? Where is the girl who’s fighting for justice and her future? Granted we’re only a hundred pages in at this point, so I’ll excuse it for now.

In the meantime, the king calls Serefin back to the palace for Rawalyk, an event where noble women compete against each other to win the prince’s hand in marriage. Nadya and crew travel to Tranavia and disguise themselves as people participating in the event. I forgot to mention that the Tranavians only use blood magic and hate the gods, and in an effort to keep them out, the king put a barrier around the country, which keeps Nadya from using her powers. Convenient. And so very disappointing. As per their plan, Nadya has to get close enough to the king to kill him, so she uses Rawalyk to gain access. Nadya offends one of the other suitors and the suitor challenges her to an Agni Kai—sorry, different story, a duel, rather. Nadya has to pretend to use blood magic, so she can hide her true identity. Near the point of winning the duel, Nadya realizes it’s to the death, but she doesn’t want to kill the girl, so she tells her she’ll spare her. Then, Malachiasz uses his magic to end the girl’s life. Again, there are male characters forcing the plot forward while the female character’s agency is stripped.

We’re now over two hundred pages in and Nadya hasn’t done shit except for worry about her crush and follow other people. Our narrator is a “powerful” girl, but the most interesting characters are boys and only male characters move the plot forward. I guess, who needs a personality or autonomy when you can have a love interest? To make matters worse, in the middle of all this crap, she’s thinking about her male best friend who died, but is coming back in book two, and not even Forgettable Best Friend who is actively trying to help them. Nadia thinks to herself “Kostya. You’re doing this for Kostya, she reminded herself,” (Duncan 256). Kostya was in this book for like five pages, who the fuck is this bitch? Why does anyone care? Why can’t she be going on this quest for herself, for her country, for her supposedly beloved gods?

YA Fantasies keep prioritizing and valuing the actions of male characters over female ones. There are exceptions, but they only prove the rule. I’ve seen this repeatedly in books like City of Bones, Caraval, Shadow & Bone, Harry Potter, and now Wicked Saints. Some of those books are my favorite books, but if I never critique them, I’ll never want better or search for books that do more. I want to see more YA fantasies treat female characters like their male ones. I want female characters who participate in the narrative, make mistakes, experience success, and, I don’t know, have some ambition and goals. They should use their talents and be integral to the plot, because Wicked Saints’ plot still could have happened without Nadya.

Part Two: Character Development and Effective Plot Structure

Let’s get into this dumpster fire of an ending. While staying at the palace and pretending to be a suitor to the prince, Nadya uncovers parts of Malachiasz’s past and finds out he’s the leader of the Vultures who’s disappeared for reasons unknown. Nayda gets captured and tortured and learns that her gods may not be who she thinks they are, and she has her own power that she can always use. And does she use it? Not really. She questions everything, but not Malachiasz. Him, she makes out with. Nadya’s group and Serefin’s converge and they trust each other because they both want the same thing: the king dead. Serefin knows his father is trying to kill him and uses the help of the misfits, including, plot twist, his cousin, Malachiasz.

Serefin doesn’t understand why his father wants to marry him off and plotting to kill him at the same time, and eventually, Malachiasz talks about his past. He became the leader of the Vultures and was researching the gods when he figured out, in theory, how to become one. He gave this information to the king and you can imagine how a narcissistic king will feel about that. Malachiasz regrets his actions and runs away. Part of the process of becoming a god involves ingesting the blood of powerful magic users, hence the Rawalyk event and Nadya’s torture; they were collecting blood from the suitors. The king also has to sacrifice the prince to complete his goals. Together, they come up with a plan to corner the king while he’s attempting to perform the ceremony to become a god and kill him.

It all goes spectacularly wrong. Serefin gets captured and killed by his father, but he doesn’t die? I don’t know; there were a lot of moths involved and I was very confused. Malachiasz and Nadya go after the king and there’s a mediocre fight scene. Nadya kills the king but not after like three pages of her debating why Malachiasz is just chilling on the throne and watching this all happen. Malachiasz betrays the group, taking the power for himself. Nadya has the nerve to be surprised and heartbroken. He turns into a bird-like thing and flies out the window into the darkness.

The only time Nadya uses her own magic to do something it turns out to be in service to a male character’s goals. I’m tired and I hope you are too. Anyway, this section’s purpose is to look at effective plot structure. Wicked Saints meanders for three hundred pages trying to tie together a book about war, marriage competition, and religion. When the plot points all converge for the last eighty pages, we ultimately learn nothing more than we did at page 200. If this is a book about villains than why are minimally bad things happening? Why did no one die except for the throw away character at the book’s beginning? Why aren’t there more consequences for the character’s actions? My questions are answered by pointing at the poor plot structure and terrible character development. This book is run by boring characters whose actions don’t amount to anything, and that’s when they actually do something. Characters should evolve or devolve depending on the narrative. They should enact the plot, not have the plot happen to them. The few times we get characters changing, it’s followed by the most basic plot twists. Looking at Malachiasz in particular, we meet him while he’s plotting to kill the king with his new acquaintances, then he meets Nadya. She calls him a monster a million times, and he doesn’t deny it. They plot to kill the king again. By the end, we find out he’s only in this for himself and surprise, he’s not a good guy! Did not see that coming.

Continuing my rant on Malachiasz, Wicked Saints has one of the poorest representations of anxiety that I have seen in a long time. (Note: right after this I read Truly Devious and boy, the whip lash I had from that transition. From one the worst to one of the absolute best). Before I rip into this terrible character development, let me discuss two things: one, I don’t know if the author suffers from anxiety. It’s possible that Duncan experiences it very differently than me, and this may be good rep for someone else (I have my doubts about this since I can shred it like wet tissue paper, but I’m willing to mention this possibility). Two, considering Malachiasz’s turn to The Dark Side, it may have been purposeful bad representation. Essentially, he never had anxiety, just needed Nadya to trust him. Okay, with that out of the way, let me scream this: ANXIETY IS NOT CUTE. IT’S NOT A FUN, QUIRKY CHARACTER TRAIT. PLEASE FOR LOVE OF MEDUSA, STOP USING MENTAL ILLNESS AS A CRUTCH FOR YOUR INABILITY TO WRITE COMPLEX CHARACTERS.

The only thing we know about his anxiety is that he bites his nails. Sigh. I’m sorry it’s just that the more I think about it, the angrier I get. Wicked Saints came in an OwlCrate box and in the letter from the author to the reader she describes Malachiasz as “a boy whose earnest anxiety hides monstrous secrets.” Except anxiety doesn’t hide what you’re feeling, in fact it often puts your deepest fears on display for other people to see and usually at the worst moment. Anxiety has a million symptoms, many of which can be observed from the outside and thus easily incorporated from the point of view of a non-anxious character. Here’s a list: panic attacks, hyperventilating, shaking, hypervigilance, irritability, restlessness, sweating, tense muscles, difficulty sleeping, and fatigue. Sometimes Malachiasz displays fatigue and irritability, but it’s when the other characters are in the same headspace, so it doesn’t count, because it can easily be chocked up to circumstance, not mental illness.

If we ignore the author’s implication that his anxiety is earnest and assume that he faked it to gain Nadya’s trust, we get to a problem. The book never explores how he lied or parses through where he’s genuine, so, I have to assume that he was supposed to have anxiety. He’s called a monster so many times I got irritated. Aside the fact that it’s offensive to make the only mentally ill character a “monster,” it’s downright annoying to read a million times. Malachiaz is an attempt at a morally gray character. He makes decisions that only benefit himself, but sometimes he saves lives or kisses a girl, so some parts of him are still good. I’m okay with that, what I’m not okay with is piss poor characterization. People with anxiety can be bad! But if you make your villain anxious, it should be for a better reason than he needed a personality.

After I finished this book, I looked through some Good Reads reviews and many of the users pointed out something I hadn’t noticed. To use the blood magic, characters had to cut themselves, and reviewers found they didn’t like how this glorified self-harm. Many suggested that a trigger warning for self-harm should be placed at the beginning or the magic system should have been handled with more sensitivity. As someone who does not have personal experience with self-harm, I won’t elaborate and instead let other people make of it what they will.

There were two parts of the book’s description that sold me on it: one, the girl talks to gods, and two, a star-crossed romance. We already know how disappointed I was about that first plot point, now let’s talk about the other disappointment of the day. A fantastic rule going around on the internet goes “if they have to kiss for you to know they’re in love, it’s not good romance.”

I will say something that may offend many people, but hopefully you’ll stick with me. Young Adult Fantasy books have bad romances. They’re underdeveloped, poorly crafted, and overused. Romance is my favorite genre, and I love seeing it in other types of books, but many times YA fantasies have the worst romances. Despite being constantly undervalued, romance sells and adding it to books usually helps pique people’s interest. But you don’t just “add” it to your book, because romance is hard to write. Hold on, I need that in capital letters. ROMANCE IS HARD TO WRITE. Good romance comes from nuance, established trust, chemistry, and gradual character developments. If a writer doesn’t do those things, you get insta-love, which isn’t satisfying or believable.

Wicked Saints tries to do an enemies-to-lovers trope. Nadya and Malachiasz don’t spend enough time together to develop a proper friendship much less a romance. They have legitimate reasons to hate each other and neither of them seem to change enough for it to be justified that their feelings have evolved. Nadya loses contact with the gods, but that should serve as a crisis of her own faith, not an automatic belief in something else. Her willingness to ignore Malachiasz’s obvious red flags is beyond frustrating and I can’t believe the book wanted me to be surprised that he betrayed the group at the end. Anyway, it’s time to make some conclusions, otherwise this essay/rant will never end.

Part Three: How Did We Get Here?

Wicked Saints is not the first to do these exact mistakes, and it’s here because of its predecessors. What other books do we know that have a Russian culture theme, a useless female narrator, and a love interest who’s bad? That’s right. I’m about to bring up the internet’s infamous Grisha trilogy. Throughout my entire reading experience, I was struck by the similarities of these books to the point where I was sure I was reading a fanfiction AU of Shadow and Bone. These books are so similar it had me wondering about plagiarism (I’m mostly kidding about that). The Grisha trilogy and Wicked Saints use the same tired tropes and rely on the readers need to self-insert to make up for the narrator’s lack of personality.

How do we get books that shout about feminism but don’t incorporate it? Books are written by humans and humans live in a flawed world. Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum and so many of the things we create are flawed. Sometimes, what we meant to write isn’t what is written. An author may have every intention of creating strong, complex female characters, but through the difficulty of writing, poor planning, and a host of other reasons, the result is a bland, useless character. Many times, these characters are touted for having magnificent powers, but they never seem to use them or if they do its only in small ways. This happens, in part, because if the character is all-powerful then there’d be no plot, so to create tension the author takes the power away, scales it back, or adds an obstacle in the way of using said power. This is all well and great, but it often leaves readers feeling like the book duped them into believing this character is special. People don’t like to feel as though they’ve been lied to. In my opinion, “Gotcha” plots and character developments result from bad writing. With Wicked Saints there weren’t “Gotcha” moments so much as there were “please stop being a dumb bitch” moments. Nadya wanted to fall in love Malachiasz and the whole time I kept asking myself why. He’s a saltine with pretty eyes and fucked up nails. Then there’s Serefin who instead of dealing with his problems, he gets drunk. His big plot point is that he doesn’t die and turns into a swarm of moths for a while which would have been cool if they explained it in any kind of manner.

Stopping the proceeding rant, I should make conclusions and end this before it gets more out of hand. YA fantasies aren’t progressing the way they should, and you could point to several books that do incredible things, but they’re in the minority. YA authors need to make their narrators complex and fully formed instead of literal sawdust. We need authors to create better female and non-binary characters who have the same agency as their male counterparts. They should stop including romance in the first book. Let the characters grow and breathe for a hot second. Gradual bonds made through several books are always more satisfying and well-crafted than a rushed romance in book one. Also, people in the publishing industry, please, please, please use sensitivity readers. Or maybe search for books written by Own Voice authors. I know for a fact there are incredible writers creating amazing works out there. I’ve interacted with them. Someone publish their books before my head explodes.

Tag list: @weathershade @queenoffloweryhell @raywritesblog @saistudies @vesaeris-writes

#writeblr #books #book review #wicked saints #rant #long post #essay #ya fiction #ya fantasy #mentions self harm #problems in ya #writing is hard #i'm tired #lit essay #ranting about literature

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battlestar-royco · 5 years

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let’s talk about tropes

here’s a little (little?!) post on tropes, as promised!

some tropes i hate and why i hate them

love triangles: this one’s pretty simple and obvious. love triangles are unrealistic and toxic. they romanticize emotional cheating, and they cause nasty ship wars in fandoms, especially when two of the points in the triangle are women. often, the “losing” point of the triangle is a one-dimensional throwaway character who either gets killed off or accepts their fate and steps back for the “winner” to take over. this dynamic can get especially problematic when the “loser” is a woc and the “winner” is white, when the “loser” is an lgbtq+ character, and/or when the “loser” has no purpose other than to create drama for two other fleshed out characters. the character often ends up being hated for bad writing and “getting in the way” of the endgame ship. yikes. the only valid resolution to love triangles, imo, is a polyamorous relationship!!!

girl hate: it’s rare to see nice friendships and romances between women, and often this trope is used to drive an unnecessary wedge between two female characters who would have otherwise been great friends. i don’t mind when two women/girls are in conflict with one another for an interesting reason, but i absolutely hate when the conflict is based on something stereotypical and boring. the “girl hate” conflict is always based on something misogynistic, unrealistic, and/or stupid--like a man, looks, sexual practices, or a contrived competition. this is especially gross when the men in the story act as the voices of reason in the conflict, patronizing the women and teaching them how to be nice and use logic.

“strong female characters”: many writers mistake “strong” characters for characters who employ violence, sassiness, and masculine attributes to get what they want. I’m so over it. all I want is nuanced representation of women that doesn’t reduce them to a love interest or a sex object who looks down on other women. strength comes in many forms, and everyone defines it and identifies with it differently.

miscommunication: this has to be one of the laziest forms of prolonging drama, when two characters are fighting because of something that could easily be solved if they were locked in a room together for five minutes.

incest/incest-adjacent romances: this should go without saying, but we’re for some god-awful reason going through a period where incestuous relationships/fake-outs (ie, you’re in love with him? too bad he’s your brother. oh wait, it’s revealed that he’s not!/you two are blood related but you either never met or you went through a period of separation, so that means you can fall in love) are heavily romanticized or used to create extra drama, and it’s just unnecessary and not cute. i think authors use this to add some sort of edge or uniqueness to their writing, but it’s just so toxic and a complete turn-off for me.

aesthetic oppression: (term inspired by and similar to “aesthetic conflict,” thanks kat) when an author throws in some sort of oppression that is experienced by people in real life, but they either don’t address the oppression thoroughly or they only use it to add some sort of edge to their story and further a character’s romance, death, redemption arc, etc. for example, the homophobia in GOT season 6, which reduced loras to a walking stereotype of a gay man before he was subjugated by the church sept and blown up, and the patriarchy in ACOTAR that only exists to show how feminist rhysand is.

boys/men fighting, having tantrums, or expressing themselves through violence: it’s fine for male characters to fight every once in a while, but i just hate that this seems to be exclusively employed with male characters and it is used as a solution or reaction to problems when realistically, men are much more nuanced. men cry. they might be alone or in front of others. they might cry into their pillow or on a friend’s shoulder. fictional men add violence and anger to their sadness because the authors don’t want to emasculate them, but that’s a stupid goal and crying doesn’t affect someone’s gender. smashing your belongings when you are upset is unhealthy and potentially dangerous, and so is physically fighting others over trivial or patriarchal issues (ie a woman) when conversation could be/is probably much more compelling and effective. it’s important to show men that anger isn’t always the first emotion to feel under duress and that they don’t have to express their feelings by punching walls or throwing their belongings across the room. (also?! practically? YOU’RE RUINING YOUR OWN FUCKING STUFF AND/OR YOUR ROOMMATE/FRIEND/PARTNER’S STUFF, YOU ASSHOLE.)

sexy immortals: immortality can be used in clever and entertaining ways, but i feel like a lot of the immortals i’ve been seeing lately run in the same vein as the twilight vampires, which is to say: unearthly beautiful (aka conventionally attractive), overly sexy (aka stalking a love interest for the sake of “attraction”), apparently 16-25 years old (aka accessible to grown women who read/write ya).

uninvolved parents or non-existent guardian figures: sometimes young characters don’t have parents and that’s fine; some of my favorite books are about characters with one parent or no parents. but i still feel like we’re coming out of a period where it was very popular to kill off the parents (especially moms) at the beginning or before the story starts. i really want to see more exploration of characters with parents, or at least see the characters without parents make significant relationships with adults or react appropriately to the loss of their parents.

one-off character deaths: when a character enters one chapter or episode of a book/show just to immediately die for cheap emotional manipulation. this character is also sooooo often a marginalized person, and it’s super predictable and tired. try harder, author/screenwriter!

some tropes i love and why i love them

special snowflake/chosen one: I can’t explain it. I know it’s so cliche and one of the most hated ones out there, but I love when this trope is done right. I’m not a big fan of the chosen ones who have a special destiny, especially if the mc is a white boy, because that’s been done a million times before. but I’m a sucker for that one character who comes upon an unexpected special ability/object/creature or connection to a force of good/evil/nature and has to contend with that. They’ve been Chosen and they’re completely unprepared, and it’s gonna change their life trajectory and relationships and maybe even political climate.

woobies!!!: I feel like this trope is so underrated and it’s one of my favorites of all time. I absolutely love rooting for that one character who’s too good for any of the shit they’ve been through and Deserves Better^TM, but they manage to survive and grow against all odds.

found family: i love that authors are expanding the concept of family and unconventional narratives about love. the found family trope is so charming and relatable to many readers, and it’s great to see seemingly contrary characters come together to find a loving home together that isn’t necessarily romantic.

soft characters: it’s rare (though increasingly less rare, fortunately) to find soft boys, aka male characters who are compassionate, funny, kind, pensive, and/or quiet instead of brash, loud, violent, and angry. i know so many boys and men who fall all along the spectrum of masculinity, and it would be great to see more characters who represent that, especially because male characters are typically forced to express their masculinity in one way. i also absolutely love seeing women being equally as soft and kind--with the exception of ASOIAF!sansa, i feel like this kind of character has been cast aside for the sassy, rebellious, empowered^TM female character who isn’t like other girls and wields a bunch of weapons. i’d really like to see more female characters whose strengths come from empathy, intelligence, and emotion.

unique relationships within a friend group/ensemble: this one is marginally related to my love of found families. not only do i really like tight, strong friend groups, but i also like when each of the friends within that group has a different and compelling dynamic (hostile, romantic, friendly, tragic, whatever may have you) that can carry a scene or an arc. unique relationships between all the characters in an ensemble adds so much dimensionality to a story.

complex guardian figures: this mostly applies to ya, but i think it can also be said for many adult books and tv shows. adult characters often get flattened or sidelined for romance or action plots when in reality almost everyone has parent/guardian relationships, and these relationships are the source of so much complexity. that complexity may mean love, found family, anger, patronization, manipulation, and more, and all these things will be expressed differently based on the characters in question. for example, look at the difference between eleven and hopper from stranger things and harry and dumbledore from harry potter. hopper and dumbledore are so different and each of them carry darkness and baggage that comes out on the kids for better and worse. bonus points if the guardian is a woman, because these types of relationships between girls and women are relatively rare to the ones between boys and men.

anti-heroes/anti-villains: i think this is another one that goes without explaining. we’re all the hero of our own story, after all. if an author can successfully convince me to root for a character who i know is wrong but believes they’re in the right, or for a character who does the wrong things for the right reasons, there’s a good chance that i think very highly of that author.

stoic, bitter, angry characters: if there’s one character in the ensemble who has any of these traits, there’s a good chance they’ll be my favorite, especially if that character is a woman. usually this character’s journey is about what makes them vulnerable and how they become close with the most unlikely companions or form a special relationship with a foil character. it makes the audience feel like we’re being let in on a secret, specifically about that character.

and that’s about it! my inbox is always open to talk more in depth about any of these and more, so let me know. thanks so much for 700, you all are great :D

#maxine talks tropes

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thecorteztwins · 4 years

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what are some under used marvel female characters youd love to see in the rpc?

HMMMOkay, so I’m trying to think OBJECTIVELY here and not just rattle off the female characters that I personally like, and more “I’m surprised that there’s not more blogs for this character, whether or not I personally am a fan” ....because I missed the “you’d love to see in the RPC” bit because I’m dumb, and then I wrote this whole list without regards for that part. So this came out as less “female characters I personally want” (who would all be stupidly obscure and irrelevant anyway) and more “female characters I think the RPC should give some more love to, whether I personally am into them or not”:Definitely ALL the girls in the New Mutants and Generation X! I see a fair few blogs for Magik and Jubilee, but I really don’t see any for the others. I get why Magik is going to be more popular---she’s in more stuff, she’s currently much more relevant in the comics, and her backstory is so goddamn compelling---but that doesn’t mean the others shouldn’t have ANY blogs out there. Wolfsbane, Magma, Karma, and Moonstar are all extremely complex and compelling characters with their own struggles and triumphs too, and I think they deserve just as much love. Likewise, I get why Jubilee will naturally get more blogs than Husk, Monet, and Penance (depending if you count Penny as a separate character or not...) due to her being in more stuff, having bigger arcs, etc. But it still surprises there’s NO blogs around for those ladies! I know there was that Monet blog awhile ago, and @badmusesdoitwell had an Amara that’s now part of their multimuse, as well as a Rahne, but that’s still nowhere near enough love in the RPC for these Junior X-Ladies, in my opinion. Speaking of Generation X, I’m also a bit surprised no one has picked Cordelia Frost up, given that we’ve got plenty of background canon for her via Emma’s history yet Cordelia herself has LOTS of room to go nuts with headcanons, like it’s just the perfect opportunity! And I’m sure lots of Emma blogs, of which there are MANY, would love their little sister around for some family threads. Fuck, I would pick her up myself if I were more into Emma and the Frost family as a whole. She’s hardly the most relevant, recent, or even interesting character around, she’s done very little and shown up very briefly, but the fact she’s related to Emma Frost makes me think SOMEONE would have an interest in her.Madelyne Pryor, for sure. Like, I love Maddy, but it’s not just my favoritism talking here. I think she’s pretty decently well-known in the comics fandom, and she’s a tragic villain, which usually pulls people in big-time. She’s got a grudge against the good guys, and it’s actually more legitimate than most, which I’d think would also attract people, since a lot of villains fans like to blame the good guys no matter what and THEY’D ACTUALLY HAVE A GOOD ARGUMENT HERE? Plus she has very strong connections to other, more popular canons, with a ton of fodder for angst and drama threads, which people just LOVE. I have seen a few Maddy blogs pop up in the past, and I always get so excited, but they never seem to last very long :CDr. Moira MacTaggert deserves ALL the love and respect in the world/fandom! She’s been a staunch supporter of mutants since day one, she’s a total badass, she’s super smart, she calls Xavier out on his shit ALL THE TIME, she’s the survivor of an abusive husband, she had to make terrible choices about her son that no mother should ever have to and then live with the consequences of those choices, and SHE GOES AFTER A KELPIE WITH A GODDAMN MACHINE GUN! She’s been a part of the X-Men comics for such a long time, and is very significant in them, it really surprises me that I’ve never seen a blog for her besides just ONE and it was for the XMCU sexy American CIA agent Moira, who is NOT Moira in my book and NEVER WILL BE. Speaking of, Moira will ALWAYS be human to me, I think making her a mutant all along REALLY undermines a big part of her character as just an unyielding mutant ally. Though I think her being human, combined with being an older female who isn’t anyone’s love interest (unless she’s, gasp, getting in the way of CHERIK aka the ultimate fandom sin how dare she the harlot -.-), is probably WHY she’s so damn ignored -.-Frenzy hasn’t been in THE most recent stuff, but she’s still been relevant recent enough that I think one or two blogs around would have happened if she weren’t black. Yeah, I hate to be THIS person, but any black character who isn’t Storm doesn’t get love, for all that the RPC likes to yell about being diverse and progressive. Remember all the Captain America and Iron Man and Hulk and Quicksilver blogs that popped up after their movies? Yeah I saw like ONE T’challa blog after Black Panther came out. Then again, I’ve yet to see blogs for Pixie or Firestar either, who are white, and I feel like they both were fairly interesting and well-known in fandom? Same for the Academy X girls like Sofia Mantega, Mercury, and Wallflower. Luna Maximoff FOR SURE. It SHOCKS me I haven’t see more than a couple short-lived blogs around for her, just given her family connections. Now, I don’t think a character deserves love just because of who they’re related to---in fact it annoys me when a characters gets a ton of attention and it’s very obviously just for that---but Luna has SO MUCH going on? The problems between her parents, her mother being absent so much, her father exposing her to the Mists, dealing with her powers, being a child of two very different worlds and cultures, it just goes on and on. Luna has had to grow up so fast, she’s such a strange and stoic child as a result, and though her situation is very fantastical, having to be the mature one at an early age because all the adults in your life won’t be is something a lot of people have to cope with and I think would find relatable; I especially love how she lives in this world where there’s no bad guys, like neither Crystal nor Pietro were the villains in her situation, just hurting messed up people, which she also recognized in Magneto and maybe also even Maximus . And there’s so much that could be explored with her too that hasn’t been in canon yet---for instance, her choice to identify with her Inhuman heritage and why that is, and the journey of identifying with your heritage but also looking at the horrible things in their history, I think that’s a story that a LOT of people from MANY backgrounds can relate to. It surprises and frustrates me that both writers and fandom don’t really seem to care about her or remember she exists; one the only two blogs I ever saw for her seriously got someone asking them “why would you make such a weird OC” like SERIOUSLY! Luna needs more love, big time. Any female Avenger that’s not Wanda or Natasha. I don’t read Avengers, I’m just an X-Men fan, but I know they exist and they shouldn’t have to be in a movie to get love. Ditto for She-Hulk, I’m not a Hulk reader but I know she’s a prominent character who has been around a long time and has a very developed personality and stories of her own, yet I’ve only ever seen her on @getreadytosmash‘s multi. I’ve also never really read Alpha Flight, but its main ladies ---Snowbird, Aurora, Vindicator---all seem awesome in their own different ways. Alpha Flight isn’t very popular to begin with, of course, so I don’t expect them to have as many blogs as, say, major X-ladies, but I think one apiece or so would be very justified.KWANNON!! I actually get why we didn’t have any blogs for her BEFORE now, because we knew NOTHING about her, she was just a very tragic prop for Betsty’s body-swap plot and a way to give her insta-ninja-skills, but now she’s come back and has HER OWN NEW SERIES in which we’re finally learning who she is and her background, I hope to see a blog or two around for her eventually!Destiny aka Irene Adler. Like. Do I even need to explain WHY? I think people just don’t want to play an OLD woman, especially one whose primary/only ship is going to be with another woman.Maaaaybe Clea Strange? I don’t know shit about her, never read Dr. Strange, but like, people make blogs for Sigyn literally just because she’s Loki’s wife, and Clea at least seems to like...DO stuff? IDK, not sure on this on, but figured I’d make an honorable mention.Siryn, Boom Boom, and Dr. Cecilia Reyes are all X-Ladies that I really don’t know much about. Like I know basic things like their powers but I don’t know their story arcs and such. But as with Clea and the Avengers ladies and She-Hulk, I just have a HUNCH there’s a lot there getting ignored by fans.Silhouette Chord is a longtime member of The New Warriors, and, like Alpha Flight, New Warriors doesn’t really have a fanbase on Tumblr to speak of, so it’s not surprising to me she’s not got any love here. And even within the pages of her own comics, she’s generally pushed aside, underused, and underdeveloped compared to the other characters, generally more a prop for her boyfriend’s stories than anything else. But she DOES have a personality, a REALLY cool backstory, and she’s like...look, the RPC claims to love diversity and representation and all that, right? Silhouette is a mixed-race WOC (half Black, half Cambodian, and I have NEVER seen another Marvel character of Cambodian heritage who wasn’t connected to her) who is also very visibly physically disabled, her legs are completely paralyzed and she is never without her braces/crutches, yet she still fights PHYSICALLY (something very rare for physically disabled characters, they usually are more like Oracle or Prof X) and is depicted in a sexual relationship, and there’s never any kind of fuss or angst about it or anything treating her as delicate or less than or anything like that. She’s just completely adjusted to it in a way that’s very rare in media. And like I said, she’s not a flat character, I’m not saying she should be more popular just for ticking off the diversity boxes, she manages to be really intriguing to me despite how little focus the writers give her, and I think that she and the other New Warrior girls (Firestar and Namorita) have a lot to offer the RPC. But I have to give a special shoutout to Sil since she’s my fave, as the neglected ones alway are.Meggan Puceanu is probably most familiar to folks here as Kurt’s love interest in Age of X, but she’s been around since the 80s. She’s a longtime member of Excalibur, and she’s just...fascinating. She’s a Romanichal mutant (though often hinted to have magical/mystical heritage too, perhaps fairy like Pixie) who has empathic, elemental, and shapeshifting capabilities. However, her empathic and shapeshifting tend to overlap, so she changes her form (and her mind) according to the feelings, fears, and desires of others. So for instance, there’s this one time where a group of men are checking her out, and she feels that “They love me...I want...to love them in return!” and she morphs into this sexxed-up version of hersef on the spot. This isn’t played for kinkiness or laughs either; Meggan’s identity struggles are a HUGE part of her character. She has no idea who she is because her powers make her reflect and respond to the feelings of others around her, internally and externally. She doesn’t even know what she actually really LOOKS like because of this; her powers were present since birth, causing her to grow fur instantly as an infant due to it being winter. This caused her parents to keep her locked up in the camper trailer, where she was raised alone with the TV (she’s also illiterate, which causes her to feel dumb a lot) and as more and more people around her spread rumors about the monstrous child inside, she psychically absorbed those beliefs and her physical form changed to reflect them, making her more and more monstrous as she got older. She didn’t know she was a shapeshifter, she just really thought she was a hideous monster. And even when she found out the truth, she STILL didn’t know what she really looked like, as the beautiful form she took on (basically Pamela Anderson with elf ears) was to please her boyfriend Captain Britain (whom she is really unhealthily dependent on starting out because of her situation)Meggan is insecure, she doesn’t know who she is, she has to cling to a man in order to have anything because no one else has ever loved her, she easily becomes jealous of other women near him, she gets made fun of for being a bimbo and she often feels she is because she can’t read or understand “clever words” due to her isolated upbringing...and she gets through this! She develops! She becomes STRONGER and she becomes SECURE and she gains CONTROL of her powers and SHE KICKS ASS and she FORMS AN IDENTITY! And then Meggan SACRIFICED HER LIFE to buy time for Captain Britain, Psylocke, and Rachel Summers to repair the tear in reality caused by House of M. She ends up lost between dimensions and TRAPPED IN HELL, where she uses her empathy to rally the lesser demons against THE LORDS OF HELL ITSELF and wages a war IN HELL for which her demon followers dub her “Gloriana” and she forms a sanctuary there called “Elysium” where souls can escape torment! AND THEN SHE FINDS HER WAY HOME!THIS WOMAN KICKED ASS IN HELL AND WON!! Like she just goes through SUCH an arc, and I admit I have not read it myself yet, she’s on my list of characters to read EVERYTHING on and I’m still only familiar with her very insecure Excalibur days (which I love a lot, I just feel so much for Meggan and her struggles, I think she’s very much a reflection of a LOT of real-world issues, ranging from mental illnesses to just EXISTING as a woman) but I already have a ton of feelings about her and I think she’s more than prominent and accomplished enough to merit more attention in the RPC. And this is less of an “actually has reasons the RPC should love her” character, because really there’s no reason they should, she’s not prominent or relevant or or anything, but more an interesting “did you know”---did you know there was a “young female Wolverine clone” in the comics BEFORE Laura Kinney? Avery Connor! She pre-dates Laura by a year and has a VERY similar story, yet she never took off in popularity and very few people know her. You can read about her HERE on my Marvel blog. Again, would not say there’s actually any reason she’s earned love from the RPC like, say, Meggan or Luna, but I just thought I’d toss that in as a tidbit for the Logan family fans, as I know there are many.(Also, cheating because these are dudes, but: I’m not a Banshee fan but I am surprised I’ve never seen a blog for him, nor for Sunfire. Or for 616 Pyro. Or...)

#marvel #marvel rpc #xmen #x men #out of cortez #shattered-catalyst

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rutilation · 5 years

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Well Cairn, going off established precedent, you have to start by slowly accruing some highly symbolic gemstone prosthetics. Just pretend that this is part seven of jojo and start competing with Phos to see who can obtain the most religiously significant body parts. Whoever has the most by the time the seventh meteor hits wins!

So about this chapter…

The part of this chapter that really merits discussion is one I kind of have trouble parsing—so much so I ended up rewriting this essay a couple times. Neither Cairngorm nor Aechmea are very forthright characters, which means you have to chase after subtext in order to guess at what’s really being communicated, and this chapter seems to really lean into that approach to dialogue. Which is to say, I’m kind of unsure of my interpretation of this chapter. But if I just throw in the towel now out of fear of misinterpreting my favorite problematic rock, then Ichikawa wins, and I can’t let her and her vaguely menacing self-portrait get the better of me.

At the start of the second half of the chapter, Cairn seems quite content, but the longer the (rather one-sided) conversation goes on, the more distressed they become. While it’s not made explicit what’s upsetting them, my take is that Aechmea’s attitude in this scene makes it harder for Cairngorm to manage their cognitive dissonance toward him. I’ve mentioned several times before that a number of things Cairngorm says and does indicate that they realize that Aechmea is shady and perhaps not operating in their best interest, but they don’t want to admit that to themselves. As long as Aechmea remains ambiguous, they can pretend that everything’s fine. I think that Cairn’s steadily increasing dismay over the course of the chapter is because pretty much everything Aechmea says here threatens to clarify those ambiguities, and said ambiguities resolve themselves in a way that Cairn isn’t terribly pleased with. Let’s take it from the top.

First, let’s address the initial stretch of the conversation. Aechmea implies that he doesn’t actually see any value in the gender roles he’s been encouraging Cairn to adopt, seeing them instead as simplistic tools to keep the other Lunarians occupied—mere bread and circuses. But while Cairn may not understand the implications of said gender roles, the fact that they made Cairn feel special and loved was enough to make them invested in the whole concept. So, for Aechmea to imply that it was all an act designed to provide fleeting, cheap entertainment for the other Lunarians probably feels like a slap in the face to Cairn.

In the same breath, he gently tells Cairn that he plans on isolating them in a compound on the most remote of the six moons, and that that’s his idea of granting Cairn freedom. This makes it completely clear that what Cairn said to him in chapter 71 went in one ear and out the other: Cairn wants to finally have agency and can’t abide doing nothing while everyone else is struggling, and Aechmea responds by making a drastic decision about their life without their input, one which will cut them off from the conflict they want to help resolve. As one might expect, Cairn doesn’t seem happy to hear this.

This next section of the conversation in which Aechmea tells them he’s loved them before they came to the moon also follows the pattern of being full of understated subtext that I apparently require two weeks to untangle and draw a conclusion from. It’s seems clear from their distraught expression, trembling, and the fact that they incredulously bring it up again a few minutes later that what Aechmea is saying upsets them. If I had to wager a guess, it’s because the implications are concerning regardless of whether or not Aechmea’s words are true. His claim is ludicrous and Cairn doesn’t want to believe that he’d try to feed them a bald-faced lie, but if he’s not lying then the implications are equally unsettling. I think Cairngorm is most comfortable believing that their meeting with Aechmea was a happy accident, because the alternative is that he was romancing them all while hiding ulterior motives. (Not that it really needs to be reiterated at this point, but these pages make my skin crawl, especially when you look back on Phos’s first day on the moon—with Aechmea trying to butter them up by them by telling them how special they are.)

Anyway, let’s assume for the sake of argument that Aechmea’s statement wasn’t complete bullshit, and that he had some sort of interest in Cairngorm before meeting them. The fact that he kept their old arm indicates that there’s something to what he said, as does the fact that he feels the need to distract Cairn with creepy makeouts when they try and press him for answers on this topic a few pages later. There are a couple of ways I could see it going, so I’m going to go on a tangent for a minute, and try to speculate on what might have piqued Aechmea’s interest in Cairn. I don’t feel that predicting future plot-events is really my forte, but sometimes I can’t resist trying to decipher a good puzzle.

Everyone connected to Phos is of interest to him, including Cairngorm. Several pivotal moments in Phos’s development have happened in front of the Lunarians, (I’m specifically thinking of the drama with Ventricosus and Phos’s gold arms.) It’s quite possible that Aechmea took an interest in the fact that one of the seemingly static gems was rapidly changing, and I think this line in chapter 54 alludes to this. As a result, he predicted that Phos’s path would cross his sooner or later, and didn’t dust their captured partners. I’ve said before that it is really suspicious that he happened to have a “fake” piece of Antarc on his person when Phos got to the moon. Even if it was artificial, there was no reason for him to have it made in the first place or for him to be carting it around unless he already had Phos on the brain. The fact that he apparently kept Cairngorm’s original arm makes me think that that piece of Antarc may not have been artificial at all, and that maybe he didn’t dust Antarc, Ghost, or Phos’s head in order to have some leverage over Phos later.

Another possibility is that he took interest in Ghost and Cairn’s unique condition on account of those mysterious gem experiments that he was running before Phos got to the moon. Since he was apparently trying (and failing) to create new gems by combing pieces of shattered gems with synthetic material, the fact that there was a gem who was a complete person despite being essentially a thin sheet of quartz may have been of interest to them. The main reason I think this might hold some weight is because the Lunarians were rather particular about nabbing Ghost instead of Caringorm in chapter 37. By the end of the fight, Cairn was completely wrecked, and the Lunarians could have easily taken them both before the other gems made it to the vessel. But instead, they pushed Cairn off as soon as they had collected Ghost. To compound this, they don’t usually try to sheer off the gems’ bodies in layers; they just try and shatter them. Which makes me think that they were specifically trying to get Ghost in this scene and leave Cairn behind, and that Aechmea later decided to keep their arm on a whim along with the pieces of Ghost. If this ends up being the case, then that begs the question of how the Lunarians could possibly know that Cairn and Ghost are two separate people; it’s not really something they could observe at a distance, especially since Cairn apparently rarely had control of their body. If this ends up being the route this subplot takes, you guys on team Obsidian-is-a-Lunarian-spy may be able to add this to your pile of evidence.

Following this is the triumphant return of the Highly Symbolic Arm, the importance of which I’ve been harping on for a while now. It’s also at this point in the conversation that Cairn is most visibly distressed. I’m of two minds regarding what this sequence is communicating. They are clearly quite opposed to reattaching their original arm at the expense of their replacement, but it’s not clear which replacement they’re holding onto. It’s possible that this is the same replacement arm they’ve had since their introduction, but it’s also possible that they got rid of that arm the night they came to the moon—it is after all a physical representation of their involvement in Phos/Ghost/Lapis three-ring circus. This page in chapter 69 would seem to imply the latter. That being said, Ichikawa has already established that Cairn’s replacement arm acts finicky whenever it has to be reattached—so it’s also possible that they still have the same arm they did before; the sequence of events is hazy enough that it could be read either way.

Needless to say, the sentiment behind Cairn being almost violently opposed to getting rid of their replacement arm changes significantly depending on whether or not that’s the arm Phos gave up their head to save, or an arm Aechmea gave them when they arrived on the moon. At the moment, I really can’t say one way or another. But I’m pretty sure this isn’t the last we’ve heard of Cairn’s left arm, so for now I’m content to wait and see.

All that being said, I think the emotion behind the action is clear: desperation. Whether that arm is one that Cairn associates with Phos or Aechmea, they are clearly desperate to cling to the connection it represents. Keeping in mind that just about everything Aechmea says in the chapter up to this point drives a wedge between himself and Cairn, I think that in this moment Cairn is forced to grapple with the idea of being truly alone, and out of all the characters, they’re the most ill-equipped to deal with that. I think I touched on this in my essay focused on them, but to reiterate: in spite of their desire for autonomy, Cairn cannot seem to envision themselves outside of another’s shadow. Whether they’re acting like Antarc for Phos or like an anime-waifu for Aechmea, they’re never really acting like themselves—whoever that might be. This is a bit of a tangent, but the way they’ve conceived of themselves in relation to Ghost is also kind of off-putting. They referred to Ghost as their “other self” in chapter 67, and if you’ve gotten the official translation of volume 6, you can see that they also refer to Ghost in similar terms in chapter 38. This has a rather concerning implication about their self-image or lack thereof.

The point is, they find a sense of stability and self-worth in tailoring themselves to the desires of others, and they see reattaching their original arm and discarding the replacement and everything it represents as tantamount to abandoning the (terrible) coping mechanism that’s keeping them somewhat functional.

Which makes this a very ironic moment for them to decide that they want to disappear along with Aechmea. I don’t know a whole lot about Buddhism, but I do know that one is supposed to let go of all attachments in order to attain nirvana. But in this scene, Cairn is conceiving of nirvana as a means to an end in order remain forever attached to Aechmea (and in the short term: relevant enough to his interests to avoid being banished to the farthest moon.)

The way I see it, if and when Cairn becomes enlightened enough to have any hope of disappearing, they’ll probably have grown past the desire to follow Aechmea off a cliff like a lemming in the first place. So I don’t see them getting what they want any time soon. What I am concerned about is the pattern of self-destructive behavior that lies behind this. While reading this chapter, it struck me that whenever Cairn is presented with a stressful or upsetting situation with no obvious solution, their first instinct is to—as Aechmea so succinctly put it—relinquish themselves. When a poor decision on their part ended with Phos losing their head, they wanted to give up their own head. When Phos didn’t wake up, they wanted to throw themselves into the ice floes. When Phos ends up devastated in chapter 67, they want to renounce their own personhood and pretend to be Antarc. This chapter also follows the same pattern: when faced with the upsetting possibility that Aechmea wants to set them aside like a toy he’s grown tired of, Cairn panics and responds with the most self-destructive possible solution to their problem. I think that until this underlying malaise is actually dealt with, they’re just going to keep circling back to the same “solution” over and over. It doesn’t matter so much that Cairn is currently about as enlightened as a cornflake; when the chips are down, they probably won’t let that stop them from essentially trying to kill themselves once again.

Well that was harrowing to write, but with all the melodrama out of the way, let’s delve into the real meat of this chapter.

We know that gems don’t have teeth or tongues, but I’ve also wondered for the longest time…do gems have nostrils? This shot from the anime makes it seem as if Phos does not have nostrils, but it’s hard to tell when everything is so stylized.

Thankfully, best boy Barbata has given us the answer. Here we can see that light is pouring out of the orifices on their heads, but conspicuously, there is no light coming from their noses; ergo, gems don’t have nostrils. No nostrils allowed in fanart from now on you guys, it’s now officially as much of a faux pas as drawing them with pores or teeth.

#houseki no kuni #land of the lustrous #sorry this is late #iirc ichikawa once said that she tries to have at least one lighthearted comedic moment per chapter #because a spoonful of sugar helps the horror go down #she sure utilized that technique to its fullest this chapter amiright

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boglog · 6 years

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HILL HOUSE NOTES !!

Objectively speaking, I like the show as a weird crossover between Transparent and American Horror Story but there are always some cons :/ One thing I will say is that I find it hard to review horror bc I'm too busy swimming in cortisol to notice plot holes but I watched the scary scenes w subtitles and no audio and that will have to do!!!

Cons:

The diologue is occasionally awful.

Scratch that it's terrible and the more the show goes on the more it nears Grey's Anatomy levels of nauseating

Firstly, there are way too many name drops esp when there are only two characters in the room, sometimes even one sentence after another, it's exhausting.

i.e. 'Stay right here, honey. I'm going to talk to the police now sweetie, I'll be right back.' // 'You eat people, Steve. You are a parasite, Steve.'

Second of all, 'Don't do that ever again. Don't do that. Where were you? I thought the house thingy got you.' kids don't talk like this. I know irl children tend to imitate the adults around them but the sheer amount of stock cliches these child actors are required to say is incredible

And honestly overall there's too much talking period. There are dozens of scenes where a character monologues for almost five minutes!!!!

I loved mind doppelgänger Leigh's speech but really let's tally it up: we've got Mrs Dudley's monologue, Olivia monologues a few times, Theo's monologue, Luke 2 or three monologues, one from Shirley, Hugh is not much of a talker so thank god they were consistent. And of course a lot of these are important to the story and even close to entertaining (see also: Nell yelling at Steve) but it's way too much and anything actually significant is diluted in this deluge of info-dump-y speeches

Why god??? Why?

Like this is television not radio but I guess it's another case of Forced Diegesis when summarising w flashbacks would actually be way easier on my psyche but Tacky for these Kinematic Auteurs

I would've liked a more in depth exploration of Olivia and her childhood experiences of paranormal tragedy to give us a better context for her morally grey slip into an evil mother

Still somewhat peeved at how, bc of supernatural instinct, we can justify Theo and CPS taking a child away from her home. Obviously the show can't waste so much time on what's only supposed to be a quick detour into Theo's character and it works within the world of the show given that the guy did confess but portrayals of police, first responders, social workers, ad nauseum making snap descisions like that is Not Good for people's real world perception of their rights. Just sayin.

Maybe a scene where Steve and Hugh apologise for being garbage humans or something idk that would've been nice

This show has many layers and interpretations which could either skew towards clever ambiguity or clumsy indescision and while I'm leaning toward the former, I will say it does go a little all over the place for me.

Are the Crains' superpowers genetic, from their mother? Did it come from the house? Why is the house was so vindictive? What does it want? Or is it more symbolic of the emptiness inside the characters? Why is Olivia decidedly an over controlling mother but Nell is an innocent? Is really the only thing Steve had to do to save his marriage was reverse the vasectomy? Nell died of her own paradoxical haunting that began when she was six so was the cause ultimately a sadness within herself before the house of strictly the house's pull?

Like it's v unclear (probably deliberately) wether or not the story was Psychosis All Along or it was the house's vendetta or bc the Crains specifically are a supernatural mutant family

We never find out what Nell does for a living and I'm curious

Finally: it's really white sometimes. Like. Painfully white. Granted, the Crains come close to my favourite kind of white person, the quirky dysfunctional family of adult children scattered all over the country who only reunite at their dead sister's funeral. Still, the POC tally up to two love interests (one of which DIES), one cop, one naïve widow, and one poor daughter-less foster parent. One could argue only a middle class white family would stay in a haunted house for so long ://

Pros

The show juggles seven characters and two plots flawlessly. Each character is recognisable w a distinct personality after about only two episodes, the nonlinear structure as we alternate between the present day frame story and the main plot in flashbacks before ultimately converging when the family reunites at the house for the last time is not only clear but parses its information in way that's not only not confusing but strengthens the tension and dread. Even while they show the flashbacks' ending (w Olivia and later Nell's death) as well as the epilogue, the build up still feels entirely justified. This is peak plotting right there.

Furthermore, Nell's ghost still manages to be in the spotlight with some jumpscares even after we know who she is

My soul pretty much left my body when Nell's ghost attempts to bond w her sisters via screaming as they argue in the car

A quintessential microcosm of the show's representation of time and memory is Nell's final speech: whimsically disjointed at first, poignant and clear by the end

It's a horror show that is completely dedicated to its characters (and I'm sure some of you already know my love of dysfunctional families) and centres around human themes of connection, mourning, and trauma and the necessity of vulnerability and letting go in order to live a full life. That's very rare in horror where we usually get gratuitous gore with a small spattering of sentimental scenes to further the gore.

Olivia's Forever House served as an excellent symbol for her need to control, the house's monicker implying her fear of change.

An incomplete but not bad portrayal of trauma, a decent addition to the topical and ever-expanding mental illness discourse

Also ft. meta commentary on writers

In the beginning, Olivia really was portrayed as a concerned mother who was always trying to be considerate of her children's emotional well-being despite her occasional snaps. One has to wonder wether her slip into an irrational need to control might reflect society's paradoxically oppressive expectations of motherhood: to have absolute control of your children while also being a benevolent saviour to them 24/7. I mean in all fairness to Olivia, she was working and raising 5 kids. I'd lose my marbles too.

Or maybe I'm giving the creators too much credit and they were only angling for an Other Mother thing. I like this Foucaultian nihilism though so we're gonna go w that.

The show's acknowledgment of Useless Dad and Entitled Eldest Son syndrome.

Spat my tea when doppelgänger Leigh ripped Steve a new one, and since she's a representation of his psyche maybe that means that Steve himself has gained some self awareness. (He should still... apologise to his family....)

I mean they were really spot-on with how birth order family drama goes.

Human portrayal of a lesbian as an adult and a child! As tumblr user Lesbeet said, this is very rare and deftly done!

Theo doing literally anything

Shirl is p adorable

Theo and Shirl: the comedy duo we absolutely need in our lives

Arthur and Nell's romance is joining Up's prologue in the golden vault of world's greatest ten minute love montages. (Both of which ended in tragédie. ☹️)

Shirl's AU dream sequence, which unlike the others, presents us with an extramarital faux pas that we were not previously aware of, manages to seem totally appropriate for her character

The set and costume design are perfect for the primordial fear of the unknown aesthetic the show was going for. Fairy flappers! Gothic stairwells! Punk rock leather gloves! A McMansion that doubles as a funeral home! Motels! A curvilinear LA mansion! The absolutely insane brutalist million dollar rehab centre! Oh boy!!!

Accurate mortician portrayal: they really do gotta wire the corpses' mouths shut. Those damn chatty dead people.

Tldr:

Diologue is lengthy and cheesy while the characters are Too White. The rare portrayals of POC and how social services work were lacklustre. 👎

The show's incredible ambition and dedication to its characters and themes of trauma, dysfunctional family relationships, and the consequences of coping via trying to control your life is amazing. Theo, especially, is amazing. It's a very goth show with clinically depressed ghosts.👍

#the haunting of hill house #haunting of hill house #hohh #thohh #mike flanagan #hohh spoilers #onion post #colour text #u #c

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scifigeneration · 6 years

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What Hollywood gets right and wrong about hacking

by Catherine Flick

Gone phishin’. www.shutterstock.com

Spoiler warnings for Mr. Robot, Arrow and Blackhat

Technology is everywhere we look, so it’s no surprise that the films and TV we enjoy are similarly obsessed. That’s not to say they manage to get it right when it comes to portraying tech accurately however – and one of their worst areas is computer hacking.

I’ve been a Linux system administrator in and out of industry for 20 years. That means I ensure all kinds of internet services such as email, websites and news systems run smoothly, and preferably don’t get hacked. My current job is to research the ethics and social impact of technology, so I love seeing anything tech-related come up in pop culture.

The operating system that only seems to exist in movies (let’s call it “MovieOS”) is fascinating – the constant beeping, the clicking with every key pressed, the impossibly long progress bars, the helpful warning alerts, not to mention the ability to zoom in forever on digital images without losing clarity.

But it’s the hacking scenes that get me. Every single time.

Expectations versus reality

Hacking is most often portrayed as a frantic exercise, with fast-paced music to raise the tension while boxes flash up on screen. In one episode of the fantasy series Arrow however, the protagonists are able to continue “hacking” despite not being able to see their screens, and eventually this ridiculous hack-war turns into a tennis match with both hackers sending power surges back and forth until the antagonist’s computer is blown up.

It’s pretty far-fetched but hacking as a means of destruction isn’t fictional and it has been portrayed better in the tech drama series Mr. Robot. In one episode, the protagonist Elliot uses a planted device to upload software onto back-up energy storage devices owned by the shadowy corporation, ECorp. This software is then used to trigger explosions – entirely reasonable as these gadgets usually use lead acid batteries which can emit explosive hydrogen gas when overcharged.

Most of the time though, MovieOS capabilities don’t accurately reflect the abilities or uses of real-life operating systems. Being able to draw a line between fantasy and reality is useful in film, but it can also cause problems when dealing with people’s expectations of computers and their understanding of how hacking works, particularly common hacks that non-technical people are vulnerable to.

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Mr. Robot is a rare example in its accurate depictions of hacking.

Making hacking look realistic

Aside from MovieOS, which is usually custom designed as a series of screenshots or animations, Linux is one of the most beloved operating systems of set designers. There’s loads of typing involved, the software prints obscure-looking outputs and it’s frequently used by “real” hackers.

One of the more popular programs to show for hacking purposes in film is Nmap, a scanner which can detect who is using a computer network. Nmap is popular because it produces reams of text which scroll past in the way we’ve become used to seeing any complicated computer wizardry, and it can theoretically be used for a wide range of hacking activity, such as looking for open ports that might be exploitable, so it actually has some legitimate “geek cred” too.

Mr. Robot offers the most accurate depictions of hacking because it recognises that humans are frequently the weakest links in security. E-mail phishing scams, impersonation of staff or other manipulations of social norms and expectations are often more successful than technical efforts and, with the costs of phishing attacks often significant, it’s no wonder they are used so frequently.

In a reasonable effort at realism, the film Blackhat (2015) attempted to show how email phishing could be used to get someone’s password, but it’s unlikely someone working at the National Security Agency (NSA) would fall for such a scam.

Still, when this kind of social engineering is shown accurately in films or TV it can raise awareness of common methods and help people recognise attempts before it’s too late.

Phishing involves scammers trying to extract valuable personal data from victims, usually via email. www.shutterstock.com

The perils of being too accurate

Accurate representations can cause problems as well however. After Wargames came out in 1983, the US brought in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (1984) out of fear that hackers might attempt to replicate attacks made in the film . When The Matrix Reloaded featured realistic use of Nmap in 2003, the Scotland Yard Computer Crime Unit in the UK released a press release warning would-be hackers away from emulating the film.

The depictions of hackers up against “The Man” or a large company with dubious moral values sets up a romanticised view of hacking, which remains illegal and, generally speaking, unethical. A recently updated set of ethical guidelines for computing professionals states that people should “access computing and communication resources only when authorised or when compelled by the public good”, noting that if the latter reason is used as justification that “extraordinary precautions must be taken to avoid harm to others”.

Hackers like Elliot in Mr. Robot may indeed have some moral high ground to take on big corporations, but as we’ve seen throughout the show, his methods can also have disastrous impacts on innocent people.

So while it’s good to have realistic depictions of hacking, it’s sometimes better to just laugh off how terrible they are. Personally, I’d like to see more complete pictures of what hacking is like – and have realistic consequences depicted as well. Mr. Robot is definitely the frontrunner here, but there is room in TV and film for more realistic and critical views of technology and society.

About The Author

Catherine Flick is a Senior Lecturer in Computing & Social Responsibility at De Montfort University

This article was originally published on The Conversation, a Sci Fi Generation content partner.

#technology #technopolitics #cybersecurity #hacking #computer science

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pass-the-bechdel · 6 years

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Homicide: Life on the Street season five full review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

36.36% (eight of twenty-two).

What is the average percentage per episode of female characters with names and lines?

31.18%

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

Three (episode twelve ‘Betrayal’ (40%), episode sixteen ‘Valentine’s Day’ (41.17%), and episode seventeen ‘Kaddish’ (50%)).

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

Zero.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Fifty-three. Fifteen who appeared in more than one episode, two who appeared in at least half the episodes, and one who appeared in every episode.

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

ONE HUNDRED. Twenty-six who appeared in more than one episode, seven who appeared in at least half the episodes, and four who appeared in every episode.

Positive Content Status:

The overall quality of the representation is changing with the quality of the show itself; it’s still solidly good stuff, and there are some distinct highlights across the season, but in totality it feels less incisive than it has in the past, and less self-aware (average rating of 3.09).

General Season Quality:

As above - still solidly good stuff, some distinct highlights, but less incisive and less self-aware as the writing caves to the pressure to be more generic and ‘traditionally entertaining’. There’s still no single episode here that I would call ‘bad’, but the comparison to previous seasons definitely comes up lacking.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

My opening credit sequence!!! Let us all take a moment to bow our heads and remember the scratchy black-and-white montage of the original, CLASSIC opening titles, with the faces of the characters looming ominously out of the shadows. It set the mood for the show perfectly, it was iconic, it was perfect. In their increasingly hilarious desperation to make the show into something flashy and generic for the masses, the network has henceforth replaced that wonderful sequence with a bizarre rainbow array of neon lights and random crime-y words overlaying stock images of crime-y stuff, complete with nice, glowing, DEEPLY NINETIES shots of the cast being zoomed past the camera. It’s awful. It’s funny. It’s infinitely more dated than the original titles could ever have been. And it has abso-fucking-lutely nothing to do with the show. No grainy shots of Baltimore landmarks. No artistic interplay of light and darkness. No barking dog (how DARE they take that from me!). Where the old sequence prepared the viewer for a show about serious unlovely business, this replacement caws: “CRIME! CRIME CRIME! Bright colours! Pretty people! Crime stuff! Popping, exciting, colourful crime! Nineties! CRIME!” Welcome to season five of Homicide: Life on the Street. It’s not as good as the previous seasons.

Now, in fairness, the show hasn’t changed in any major fundamental way (which makes that new opening credits sequence even more embarrassing, like the execs really thought a ‘cool’ header would convince audiences that the show was hip and fun now), and this is still both solid viewing in its own right, and better viewing than most of its contemporaries (and a lot of what’s on today, for sure). I’d also like to acknowledge something that is kinda being lost in translation due to my (STILL TERRIBLE) decision to make these posts summary-only, and that’s the actual number of named-and-speaking female characters per episode. Because the average when compared to the number of men on the floor isn’t that inspiring (as noted in previous posts, it’s still shockingly high compared to the standard set by other shows of the time/genre), but the number, independent of its comparison to men? The most common incidence this season was to have seven female characters in any given episode (eight of the twenty-two episodes this season boast that many). There are two episodes this season with eight women in compliment, and four others which managed six; the lowest number of women in any episode was three (which happened twice). Of course, when the flip side of that is a number of men which only once dipped into single digits (’Kaddish’, a balanced eight and eight), you still wind up with a less than thrilling average. But having six or more women around for the vast majority of the season? That’s practically unheard of, even in most modern shows - even some female-driven shows don’t always boast so many, though they make up for it (usually) with 1. less male characters, and 2. more story and screen time for their female characters - I won’t pretend that Homicide’s women get a comparable amount of narrative time and attention as its men, but it is not to their exclusion. To have so many women around is especially rare in anything male-dominated or masculine-coded (like, oh, everything that counts within the ‘crime’ genre), and for far too many shows, three women in an episode is a surprisingly large number, not the absolute minimum. Whatever other criticisms I have (and I’ve got ‘em!) for this season, that thing I’ve acknowledged before, about how this show manages to be fairly nonchalantly inclusive of women despite the odds? That still holds true.

MEANWHILE, IN CRITICISM LAND: this season feels a lot more serialised than previous seasons have, and I - normally a vocal supporter of serialised television over episodic - do not love it. The episodic nature of the show is a given - cases come and go - and as such, the thing that increases the serialised approach here is an increase in personal dramas, and specifically, an increase in narratives that take place outside of work and sometimes entirely independent of it. Obviously, the characters always had personal lives, and sometimes their personal lives impacted their work, and sometimes that impact rolled out in a protracted fashion over multiple episodes or even a whole swathe of a season (I’m mostly thinking about the disaster of Beau Felton’s marriage and his descent into alcoholism which formed such a significant part of his story in season three). The difference was that in previous seasons, these personal life developments felt more like they existed simply because these things happen in real life, and the focus was predominantly on the way that such events interact with the work the characters do, because that’s what the show is about, after all: life as a homicide detective, not life as a person who also incidentally happens to be a cop. I don’t hate any of what they were doing in this season, and some of it has serious merit, but altogether it does feel a lot more dramatic and distracting than what has come before, more manufactured, and more like it exists to create conflict in the characters lives instead of just letting them be who and what they are, and let the story come naturally from that.

We’ll start with Pembleton: in the season four finale, Pembleton had a stroke. This season begins with his first day back on the job - such as it is - and it’s not smooth sailing. Pembleton’s ability to perform his duties is physically impaired, he’s limping, he doesn’t have a full range of motion, he can’t drive, and he’s stuck on desk duty until he can re-qualify on the gun range. But he’s also having cognitive difficulties: he has a major stutter, his memory struggles even on small things like names, numbers, or simple spelling that he has known since childhood, and his mind wanders or makes leaps not pertinent to his current situation (as when he fails his first attempt at the gun range after becoming distracted by the dual meaning of the word ‘magazine’). Remembering Stan Bolander being evaluated before receiving approval to return to active duty after being shot in season three, it’s hard to imagine Pembleton receiving the same seal of approval under these circumstances. By the end of the season, he’s getting along just fine and it’s like the stroke never happened, and whether that degree of recovery is realistic or not, I feel like it’s unrealistic for him to have been sent back to work when he was not even close to being capable of actually doing the work. I feel like the writers were too busy indulging in the range of side-effects that a stroke can have in order to make the consequences dramatic, they overplayed the whole idea and then had to walk it back in order to have the character be functional within the narrative. Pembleton’s stroke has everything to do with the dramatic potential of disabilities, but nothing to do with a realistic assessment of the long-term consequences those disabilities might have on his ability to work or play like he used to, and that’s a sad disappointment for the veracity this show once represented.

Meanwhile - though I welcome the decision to include Pembleton’s wife Mary in the story more often - the strain on the Pembleton marriage reaches critical mass, and it’s not hard to see why: though Pembleton says the words out loud to other characters (”Mary’s been so good with everything”, etc), he’s erratic, self-absorbed, and inconsiderate in his home life, and his behaviour toward Mary reflects little gratitude or even recognition for the colossal amount of work that she has put in to both caring for Frank after his stroke, and caring for their newborn child born not long before said stroke. Mary is an unsung superhero in the Pembleton home, and it’s understandable that Frank is very preoccupied with his own recovery, but it’s not acceptable that he fails to respect the struggle that Mary has been through at his side. Even after she leaves him, Frank doesn’t really seem to acknowledge his own shortcomings - Mary didn’t leave him because he had a stroke and she couldn’t deal (he was ‘better’ by this point), she left him because she was done with being ignored and having herself and their child treated like completely secondary considerations in Frank’s life, after his own self-image - and when he petitions Mary to return, it’s still all in terms of what having his family around means to HIM. He’s miserably eating Mary’s cooking from the freezer and feeling sorry about the fact that she’s not there to make him more, and he wants her back because he loves her, sure, but also because being a husband and father is part of his self-image, and that’s what his entire personal arc this season boils down to, stroke, job, separation, and all: it’s about Frank Pembleton’s all-important concept of self, to the exclusion of any concern, respect, or basic recognition for the other people in his life and their own wants or needs or value as individuals whose lives do not actually revolve around him.

Pembleton also has dramas with his partner Bayliss, which is par for the course at this point and mostly pretty useless as a result: how many times has one or the other of them declare that they don’t want to be partners anymore, and then they dance around one another for several episodes before admitting that, yeah, actually they do want to work together after all? Brodie hangs a lantern on it, but that doesn’t make it any more compelling to watch. What is more compelling - and actually a well-earned character revelation which makes a huge amount of sense when compared to past evidence - is Bayliss’ confession that he was sexually abused by his uncle when he was a child. Bayliss actually mentioned it - in an obfuscated fashion, substituting ‘cousin’ for ‘uncle’ and claiming not to remember what happened - back in season three when he and Pembleton were talking about whether or not they’d ever had a gay-questioning moment, and in that context we can see how Bayliss’ homophobia has manifested from that experience, as well as his disdain for anything he considers sexually ‘perverse’ - Pembleton has accused Bayliss of being sexually repressed on more than one occasion, and this revelation shows us that the repression is not out of ignorance or puritanism so much as it is a gut reaction to anything which reminds him of the childhood abuse he has tried so hard to hide. That doesn’t make it ok for him to be a homophobe, but it explains, and it’s necessary for Bayliss to make peace with his past in order to be open-minded and understanding of others moving forward. As much as I applaud that storytelling, the decision to have Bayliss ‘confront’ his uncle and then start taking care of the man after seeing the squalor in which he now lives kinda turns my stomach. It would be one thing, to have Bayliss take the high road and decide that compassion was more important than hate, forgiving his uncle and then moving on with his life, but what he does instead involves physical and emotional labour for his uncle’s comfort, it has cost in money, energy, and the potential to jeopardise Bayliss’ job as he is repeatedly ‘out on errands’ instead of working, and on one occasion the uncle even calls him at work and asks him to come out to his place NOW and bring him stuff, which Bayliss does after initially refusing. The whole situation plays not like compassionate forgiveness and healing (even though the show frames it that way), it looks and smells exactly like the uncle taking advantage of Bayliss’ good nature for his own gain (not just enjoying what he is given, but actively demanding and pushing for more), and that is alarming and disturbing. Of all the ways this particular facet of the plot could have played out, I am extremely troubled that this is what they went for, without any reflection upon the decision.

In a whole ‘nother direction, we have Kellerman, and his partnership with Lewis, and y’all, I am baffled. Kellerman spends half of the season on administrative duties, like Pembleton, but in his case it’s because he’s being investigated by the FBI for allegations of corruption dating back to his time in the arson unit. As with the rest of the story decisions in this season, I don’t object to this on principle, it isn’t a bad narrative arc or piece of character exploration (or deconstruction, as it turns out), but I am kinda amazed and confused that the show took BOTH of its power couples partnerships out of commission for half the season (in Lewis and Kellerman’s case, it’s actually effectively the entire season - they only partner onscreen for four cases, and one of those is a single scene, not an actual episode plot). After the Lewis/Kellerman partnership was such a breath of fresh air last season, I can’t help but feel like their separation this season was a completely deliberate decision to stop them from, what? Stepping on Bayliss/Pembleton’s toes? Bayliss and Pembleton are the only surviving partnership from the show’s first season, and even then they were framed as the ‘main’ partnership on the show - did someone get antsy about the fact that season four had used Lewis/Kellerman so effectively? Did they shoot themselves in the foot on purpose? It certainly fucking feels that way to me. It feels like they tanked Kellerman’s whole character and ruined his partnership with Lewis so that Bayliss/Pembleton could still be the big shots, and that’s very unnecessary; part of what made the first season work so well was that the cast felt more balanced, and even if there was kiiinda a ‘main’ partnership, that didn’t stop the rest of the partnerships from having almost equal footing and almost equal representation in episodes. Lewis/Kellerman has been the only pairing since the originals that has felt meaningful, like there’s a real working chemistry between the characters and not just ‘these two were written together for the episode, because’ (as with, say, Munch/Russert in the second half of last season, which I often forget was even a thing because it was such a nonentity). I’m so mad about this. Pro tip: I will get madder, next season.

Anyway: Kellerman’s arc. It’s not bad, in and of itself (though I could have absolutely done without the ill-advised visit from the Kellerman brothers, that was crap from every angle). But surely, having Kellerman’s life/career unravel regardless of his innocence is an arc they could have achieved in a more intensified fashion, one that sidelined him for less of the season? Surely there was a better way to do this than to just waste him for eleven episodes? I’m not going to wish away the arc in its entirety, because despite being mostly frustrating, it did deliver us the best episode of the season in the form of ‘Have a Conscience’, Kellerman’s first episode back on the job after being cleared of any wrongdoing, and the only episode to truly use the Lewis/Kellerman partnership in the way that the previous season did. Down on the seeming futility of their work and the lingering damage that has been done to his reputation, Kellerman contemplates suicide, and for twenty minutes of screen time, Lewis works his way around to talking him down. The show hasn’t done this kind of contained, lengthy, focused storytelling since the unparalleled ‘Three Men and Adena’ back in season one, and it is a more than welcome return to that format, volatile and tense and insightful, sometimes ugly, but always honest. And it hits all those good male bonding beats, all that lovely vulnerability in Kellerman that made me so happy in season four, and both Lewis’ desire to be open and connecting in the moment, and his tendency to spook and shut down after things get too real (there’s something really heartbreaking about Lewis’ discomfort in the following episode, when Kellerman tells him not to worry because he’s seeking professional help - as much as Lewis is haunted by Crosetti’s death and the question of whether or not he could have done anything to prevent it, he can barely look Kellerman in the eye after being confronted with what it means to help someone through crisis). For one episode, though, we have Lewis and Kellerman as we loved them in season four, being honest about their feelings and listening and supporting one another, and when Lewis gives Kellerman his jacket to keep him warm out in the chilly open air, it feels natural and right, it feels truthful, all toxic masculinity set aside so that they can get through this thing, like partners, like friends. That episode, I wouldn’t trade for a less dramatic Kellerman arc; the rest of his content in the season? Could have been better. Could have been so much better.

The other thing Kellerman had going on this season was a romance, which wasn’t too bad because the basic chemistry was there and the romance itself didn’t override or derail any other stories happening, so I’m not gonna go into it: the important thing is who the romance was with, and that would be Dr Juliana Cox, the new chief medical examiner and the new Other Woman on the show since Russert is largely absent for the majority of the season. Cox is pretty great, which was a bit of a surprise to me since I had never like Michelle Forbes in anything before and I was worried she’d ruin everything (nothing against her as an actor, she’s just always played aggressively disagreeable characters any other time I’ve seen her so I was accustomed to going ‘URGH, it’s you’). Not unlike when they introduced Russert, they do overplay Cox’s identity as a Strong Independent Woman when she first shows up, but I’m ok with it since they use the opportunity to have Cox call men out on their bullshit (the case in her introductory episode involves murdered prostitutes) and lay down the law like a total boss. It may be a little heavy-handed, but it gets the job done, and in fairness, that degree of mettle and ready combativeness if tested doesn’t dissipate over the course of the season, nor does it feel unrealistic: the true test for any new character introduced to this show is whether or not they have the naturalism and believability to fit in, and I approve Cox on those grounds: she is a character deserving of this show at its best.

To wrap this discussion with a few more gripes and one last nod of praise: one of the problems with the more serialised storytelling and the way it revolves around the personal lives of select characters is the huge void this creates between the cast members who seem ‘important’, and the ones who don’t. Howard is still a great, self-possessed character, but the lack of any narrative for her - personal or professional - in this season is egregious. Because previous seasons were more balanced in their attention and harped on long-term personal arcs less, it didn’t matter if a character didn’t seem to have a ‘point’ on the show besides just existing, because existing is the main thing that people do: Howard doesn’t have to legitimise her existence with drama, she’s just gotta be who she is and how she is and let life take care of the rest. As soon as you start letting dramatic events take precedence, however, it starts seeming weird if everyone isn’t having them, and characters start to appear useless if they aren’t generating any drama (this is how unrealistic soap-opera storytelling happens). Kay Howard is and remains better than that, but I wish they had just let her go out on some cases and basically Do Stuff, it doesn’t have to be dramatic. Just let her do her damn job, on screen.

Speaking of underused characters, if the writer’s wanted to do the whole FBI-investigation-sidelines-a-character-for-half-a-season trick so badly, why didn’t they target someone who barely does anything to start with, someone we won’t miss in the regular rotation? Someone like...Munch. As is, the only ‘Munch episode’ in the bunch is ‘Kaddish’, which isn’t bad, but it does include some terrible flashbacks to Munch’s highschool years that are basically just every single highschool cliche ever, and the episode revolves around Munch’s old crush who has now been brutally raped and murdered, and excuse me if the continued obsession with Munch’s fixation on the fuckability of women is not my idea of a good time (ESPECIALLY when it is focused around the way he shared that desire with a number of other men in connection with this particular (VIOLENTLY! MURDERED!) woman). In context, the aspect of the episode which deals with Munch’s relationship with his Jewish faith feels completely disconnected from the rest of the content. I’m not happy about it. I’m also not happy about Brodie, still being a whiny little creep who can also add ‘spying on Howard and filming her with her boyfriend without either party’s consent’ to his roster of misconduct; as much as I have enjoyed ‘The Documentary’ in the past, under the slightest scrutiny it’s actually a total mess of an episode (and Brodie appears to be a terrible documentarian, even accepting that we don’t see every moment of what he’s made), and the entire concept is actually very plot-holed and a poorly-imagined idea of a fourth wall breaker. And speaking of misconduct, I gotta flag a pattern that’s emerging: in ‘Narcissus’, Gee doesn’t want to investigate local black community activist Burundi Robinson, despite allegations that he’s pimping out the women under his care and that he’s recently sanctioned the murder of one of his own in order to cover it up. While Gee comes around after his initial hesitation and pursues the investigation, the fact that he hesitates in the first place out of a desire to ‘protect the good Robinson is doing in the community’ is frustratingly deaf to the fact that Robinson prostituting the women in his care and ordering men killed if they try to speak out against it is obviously NOT GOOD FOR THE COMMUNITY, GEE. This reminds me directly of the arc in season three (which I flagged at the time) with the gay congressman, whose ‘good work as a politician’ was enough for Pembleton to try and help cover up the fact that he was also A VIOLENT DOMESTIC ABUSER. To a lesser extent, they also played this in season four when Bayliss tried to talk himself out of arresting a doctor for negligent homicide after she failed to provide proper care to a patient because she didn’t feel he deserved it - Bayliss’ insistence that the doctor should be allowed to stay in practice because ‘she saves people’s lives’ is at odds with the fact that she deliberately didn’t save this one, and as with the other examples here, the fact that someone does good work in one form does not entitle them to a free pass to do evil elsewhere. The dissonance bugs me, and I don’t know why the showrunners think that these are worthwhile dilemmas to present. Moral quandaries certainly exist, but these are not them.

ANYWAY I promised to end on praise, so here it is: Beau Felton. I’m not saying I’m glad he’s dead, because that’s a sad tragedy, but the way they handled it was excellent, and the delivery of such a twist at such an unexpected time - when we could easily have assumed, after two seasons’ absence, that Felton would never be seen and scarcely be mentioned again - was so well pitched to feel shocking, heavy, and meaningful, when it could so easily have played like a cheap trick, just one last unnecessarily dramatic turn (it was also the closest we got to a ‘Howard story’, though that’s a stretch really, she’s involved but it’s not about her). It was a tall order, to pull off the death of an old regular character off-screen without feeling contrived, but here we are. I’ve complained quite a lot about this season, but the magic ain’t gone, not yet. Not yet.

#Homicide: Life on the Street #Homicide: Life on the Street season five #HLOTS #Bechdel Test #female representation #full season review

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bluewatsons · 3 years

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Eamonn Carrabine, Imagining Prison: Culture, History and Space1, Prison Serv J 15 (2010)

In this article I explore the diverse ways in which stories of prison and punishment have been told in the literary and visual arts. Stories of crime and punishment are central to every society as they address the universal problem of human identity. Every culture generates founding myths to account for society’s origins, typically situated in some dreadful primordial event. The imaginary origins of Western civilization are to be found in tales of banishment, confinement, exile, torture and suffering. The theme of exclusion is symbolically rich and spaces of confinement — both real and imagined — have provided stark reminders of human cruelty and reveal just how thin the veneer of civilization can be. This article examines how prison space has been represented in the literary and visual arts so as to grasp the complex cultural landscapes of punishment.

Old Prisons

Before the eighteenth century imprisonment was only one, and by no means the most important, form of punishment. The old prisons were very different places from the new penitentiaries replacing them later in the century. Until then hanging was the principal penalty, with transportation abroad the main alternative, while whipping remained a common punishment for petty offences. The defining features of the old prisons are summarized2 as follows:

At mid-century in England, petty offenders were hanged or transported for any simple larceny of more than twelve pence or for any robbery that put a person in fear. The typical residents of eighteenth-century prisons were debtors and people awaiting trial, often joined by their families ... Most prisons were not built purposely for confinement, but all were domestically organized and the few specially constructed ones resembled grand houses in appearance (e.g. York Prison, c. 1705). Prisons were temporary lodgings for all but a few, and the jailer collected fees for prisoners for room, board, and services like a lord of the manor collecting rents from tenants.

A number of points are emphasized here. First, over two hundred crimes (ranging from petty theft to murder) were punishable by death, under the ‘Bloody Code’ of capital statutes, as the political order sought to maintain power through the terror of the gallows. Second, prisons were often makeshift structures and many were no more than a gatehouse, room or cellar and rarely confined prisoners for any great length of time. The largest prisons were in London, where Newgate was the most significant, but others like the Fleet and Marshalsea were reserved almost exclusively for debtors. Third, the prisons were run as private institutions and ran largely for profit: prisoners were required to pay for the cost of their detention. The jailer had almost no staff and so prisoners were chained up in irons to keep control, while those who could afford it could buy relative freedom and even comfort — all at a price.

Whatever the conditions were actually like inside the old prisons, we see them persistently spoken of as places of evil, where profane pleasures, abject misery and infectious diseases all mingled in what seemed like a grotesque distillation of the world outside. In fact, many literary and visual sources drew attention to the failings of the legal system and mocked the rituals of punishment. An excellent example exposing the absurdities of the execution ceremonies is Jonathan Swift’s (1726/7) poem ‘Clever Tom Clinch Going to be Hanged’ that delights in the comic spectacle of the drunken Clinch making his ‘stately’ procession to the gallows and ultimately pointless defiance as ‘he hung like a hero, and never would flinch’. Although Swift was a Tory, he was a radical Anglo-Irish one, ambiguously caught between the colonizer and colonized, his satire mercilessly exposing the gulf separating the noble ideal from grim reality. The most damning example is his A Modest Proposal (1729), a pamphlet calmly advocating that the Irish poor should eat their children in order to solve Ireland’s economic troubles.

Early modern authors were drawing on, and occasionally, transcending already existing literary forms. Daniel Defoe is the archetype. Indeed, he was imprisoned many times, mostly for debt but occasionally over his political writings, including a five- month stretch in Newgate following the 1702 publication of his The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, a pamphlet mocking High Church extremism. Although this punishment was severe, more degrading to Defoe were the three visits to the pillory he endured as part of the sentence. By the 1720s he was successfully writing feigned autobiographies, including Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Roxanna, which have become well known as amongst the first English novels. Moll Flanders takes the form of a gallows confessional and includes a spiritual rebirth in Newgate prison at the depths of Moll’s misfortune. In the book the prison is cast as a macabre gateway, yet in Moll’s case it does not lead to the gallows, but to a new life in the New World. Her crimes make her rich, and her penitence enables her to enjoy a prosperous life in Virginia. It is this heavily ironic structure that enlivens the text, but behind all the adventures lays the looming presence of Newgate, where Moll was born to a woman sentenced to death for shoplifting and to where sh inevitably returns. Like that other great picaresque novel from the eighteenth century, Tom Jones3 who was ‘born to be hanged’, the shadow of the gallows hangs over the central protagonist and the prison occupies a pivotal place in the narrative. The dramatic crisis is reached when the reckless but good natured hero ends up in the Gatehouse, following a series of amorous encounters and comic adventures, as a result of his half-brother Blifil’s treachery (who has Tom framed for robbery and sentenced to death). It is just at the darkest hour, when all seems lost, that Tom’s true parentage is revealed and the natural order is restored, enabling him to marry his childhood sweetheart.

Fielding’s fiction is much more tightly plotted than Defoe’s, and in doing so he exposes the distance between how things really are and how they ought to be. One suggestion is that in the real world Tom would have ended up hanged and the villainous Blifil may well have become prime minister4. An irony Fielding had earlier explored in his Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great (1743), where the notorious thief-taker becomes synonymous with Walpole’s leadership of Parliament — satirically drawing the barbed comparison between Wild’s criminal organization and Walpole’s manipulative control of government. There is a crucial tension between what actually happens in a Fielding novel, suggesting that the world is a bleak place, and the formal structuring of those events, implying pleasant symmetries, poetic justice and harmonic resolution. It is as if his earlier career as a successful comic playwright and later years spent as a harsh London magistrate combine to produce work obsessed with preserving traditional forms of authority, yet fascinated by the disruptive energy of the outcast.

Prisons of Invention

The work that most revels in the many contradictions governing representations of crime, justice and punishment during this era is John Gay’s (1728) hugely successful musical drama, The Beggar’s Opera. Using popular English and Irish folk tunes instead of intricate arias, and set in the criminal underworld rather than royal palaces, the piece gleefully parodies the generic conventions of the then fashionable Italian opera. Although the central characters have become mythical figures they were based on well known criminals from early eighteenth century London. The character Peachum, was modelled on the infamous thief-catcher Jonathan Wild, both of whom impeached (that is they informed on) their criminal associates for the reward offered by the authorities. The dashing highwayman-hero Macheath (later immortalised in Brecht-Weill’s Threepenny Opera and the popular song ‘Mack the Knife’) was based on Jack Sheppard, who had achieved celebrity status through the ingenuity with which he was able to escape different prisons, including Newgate. The original idea for the play is often attributed to Jonathan Swift, who suggested to Gay that he might write a ‘Newgate pastoral, among the whores and thieves there’, but the ploy of associating Newgate society with larger political corruption was already a familiar one. There is no doubt that the play was immediately successful and no one was in any doubt that the Walpole’s government was the target of the satire.

In the book the prison is cast as a macabre gateway, yet in Moll’s case it does not lead to the gallows, but to a new life in the New World.

The play also informed the visual art of William Hogarth. One of his earliest oil paintings depicts the climactic scene of The Beggar’s Opera (1729), where all the main characters are grouped on the stage [Figure 1], which mimics and mocks the compositional dynamics of contemporary paintings of more noble families. The juxtaposition between respectable and criminal, which the play successfully exploits, is developed in two of his famous sequences The Harlot’s Progress (1730/32) and The Rake’s Progress (1734/35). The titles are clearly ironic, as the engravings chart the demise of naïve protagonists caught up in corrupt social institutions. The prison depicted in Hogarth’s (1729) painting of The Beggar’s Opera is also important as it borrows from a Baroque tradition of theatrical stage design largely lost to us now (they have long since crumbled away), but had a major influence on the Gothic imagination emerging much later in the eighteenth century. By innovatively producing a scene per angolo (a way of looking at things at an angle) it appeared to deepen the stage and gave quite extravagant illusions of perspective. It is this lofty prison setting (combining elements of both palace and dungeon), that Hogarth captures in his painting, though others were to produce far more melodramatic images.

The most fantastic imagining of the prison as a space of labyrinthine nightmares is contained in the Carceri d’Invenzione series initially published by Giambattista Piranesi in 1750. These ‘prisons of invention’ draw on the operatic set design tradition, but transform the conventions into megalomaniac structures that have had an immeasurable impact on cultural sensibilities. In his own day Piranesi had achieved acclaim for a series of striking images of the decaying architecture of ancient Rome, the scale of which informed the awesome imagery contained in the Carceri (see Figure 2). Piranesi’s architectural settings bare scant relation to actually existing prison buildings (or even theatrical stage sets), but they do herald a new aesthetic combining both terror and beauty to sublime effect. Many critics have noted how the carceral spaces depicted by Piranesi are fantasy worlds that pervade gothic treatments of imprisonment. Indeed, ancient ruins, dark forests, inaccessible castles, dank dungeons and raging thunderstorms (amongst other elemental forces) were becoming attractive to a new sensibility developing in the eighteenth century.

This fascination with horror would be soon called the Gothic and while it could very easily fall into hammy melodrama (a tone wonderfully sent up in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, written in the 1790s) the creeping unease generated by Franz Kafka’s modernist fiction is hugely indebted to the romans noir. In his novels The Trial (1914) and The Castle (1922) and shorter stories like ‘Before the Law’, ‘In the Penal Colony’ and ‘The Metamorphosis’ they each take up the theme of an innocent victim caught up in relentless machinations well beyond their control. From Josef K’s arrest for a nameless crime in The Trial (with no hope of acquittal) to Gregor Samsa’s grotesque metamorphosis (into a giant insect) the stories explore the question of confinement with immensely unsettling results. In the latter tale the horror derives not so much from the monstrous transformation but in the initially embarrassed and then indifferent way his family react to Gregor’s plight — eventually leaving him to die alone in his room — raising profound questions about our own responses to the suffering of others.

Figure 1.

Aside from fuelling the Gothic imagination, these diverse forms of penal representation have also informed actual carceral spaces. It has been noted5 how:

from France came a number of architectural projects attempting to create prisons from the images of incarceration in the arts. Those produced by Boullée, Ledoux, Houssin and Bellet in the 1780s and 1790s are well known: oppressive, massive, and monumental, with balefully lit cachots surrounded by monolithic masonry. Only the capaciousness of the stage set was lost. They were declarations that architecture was, above all, an art of evocation. The incalculable weight of stone, the encasing exteriors, the immuring courts filled with shadow, the melancholy dungeons pierced with a single ray of light, the entire prison was becoming a cultural reminiscence.

This is a crucial point. All these images looked to the past and appeared anachronistic when compared to the burgeoning prison reform movement then gathering force. As yet it did not possess a distinctive architectural vision, but when it did find one it would be one that looked forward.

Figure 2.

Nevertheless, from the 1760s onwards many prison exteriors consciously drew on these forbidding elements, while the interior practices remained mostly intact. Bender (1984:58) has described how the old system based on gaoler’s fees stubbornly resisted change, while new prison designs ‘outwardly assumed a fearful, awesome, sublimely intimidating aspect — imagery envisioned in the graphic arts by Piranesi and in architecture by George Dance’s 1768 design for London Newgate.’ At the same time the famous prison reformer John Howard denounced the interior design of the New Newgate as ‘hopelessly old-fashioned’. The rebuilt Newgate was the last and grandest prison to be constructed before the full impact of late eighteenth century reform was realised. Between the demolition of old Newgate in 1767, which was still essentially a medieval gatehouse, and the completion of the ‘Model Prison’ at Pentonville in 1842 nearly every gaol and house of correction in England had been demolished and rebuilt according to new principles of confinement.

The Penitentiary Ideal

Throughout the eighteenth century the cultural and ideological importance of the law ensured that it remained at the forefront of public debate. These discussions took many forms, yet always provided commentary — ranging from the burgeoning newspapers, satirical journals, political pamphlets through to literary sources like poems, novels and plays. Such sources could deliver quite damning critiques of the government through stories of crime and punishment. This literature is important as it is closely allied to the rise of the liberal public sphere from the early eighteenth century. The ‘public sphere’ was much more than a purely discursive realm but was grounded in a network of social spaces and institutions that regulated manners and promoted urbane conduct.

Satire was a form of political opposition highlighting the cultural tensions between the civilised and barbaric in metropolitan life, so that accompanying the development of a refined public sphere were numerous attempts at ‘social hygiene’ seeking to regulate the unruly and the vulgar. It is in this context that John Howard’s (1777) The State of the Prisons can be understood, a book popularising prison reform by documenting just how bad conditions were in English prisons, especially when compared to European institutions. Howard was offended by the indiscriminate mixing of men and women, the lack of segregation between the tried and untried, the open sale of alcohol, gambling and generally filthy conditions, where diseases like typhus were rife, rules disregarded and prisoners whiled away their time in ‘sloth, profaneness and debauchery’. Ultimately, the unruly prison was morally degenerate and the squalid antithesis of Christian benevolence. Influenced by religious piety and Enlightenment reason, Howard and his fellow reformers advocated the benefits of classification, isolation and sanitation to create the impression that prison was the natural form of punishment.

But there was no single victory of the penitentiary idea. Reformers were divided over the kind of work prisoners should do and the role of solitary confinement. It was in this climate that Jeremy Bentham pitched his famous Panopticon prison design in 1787. The novel idea was that inspection would be continuous from a central watchtower, but the caged inmates would not know whether they were being watched in their peripheral cells because of a series of blinds shielding the inner tower. Critics not only worried over the tyranny exemplified in the design, but disliked Bentham’s insistence that the panopticon could be ran as a profitable commercial business. This latter objection ultimately led to the rejection of his plans. Nevertheless, significant elements of his design have informed subsequent prisons.

Revisionist historians have demonstrated how the penitentiary offered a vision of social order set to discipline the urban poor, while containing the social disruptions unleashed by rising unemployment and new class divisions in the first half of the nineteenth century. By the middle of the nineteenth century the characteristic features of the modern prison are in place and almost the entire range of Georgian criminal sentences — the pillory, the whipping post, the gallows, and the convict ship — had disappeared from public view by the 1860s. There is no doubt that the new institution was involved in the ideological legitimation of industrial society and the extension of disciplinary techniques through new systems of classification, examination and surveillance.

Realism and Punishment

If satire was the defining form of cultural opposition in the eighteenth century, then it is the language of realism that explored the many contradictions of imprisonment in the nineteenth century. One of the first and greatest exponents of realism was the Spanish artist Francisco Goya. From the 1790s onwards he produced paintings depicting torture, madness and terror that are still profoundly moving. Amongst the earliest are Interior of a Prison and Yard with Lunatics (both 1793-4), which recall Piranesi’s fantasy architectural settings of shadow, misery and chains. Later drawings like his now famous series The Disasters of War (1814-1818) document the true horror of combat in dreadful detail. By the middle of the nineteenth century French painters like Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet strove for ‘Le Réalisme’, heralding a further move away from conventional wealthy subjects to lowly urban themes capturing not just the alienation but also the vitality of contemporary metropolitan life. Contrasting somewhat with realist conventions are the intense pieces produced by Vincent van Gough, including the famous Prisoners Round (1890), depicting prisoners walking in a futile circle in an exercise yard http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Vincent_Willem_van_Gogh_037.jpg Van Gough’s painting though is not overly concerned with providing an accurate representation of prison life, but through the evocative colours and exaggerated forms the haunting image has something more telling to say on the experience.

Ultimately realism reached its fullest expression in the nineteenth century novel. Not all novels are realist, but it has become the dominant style in which they are written and the measure against which they are judged.

Charles Dickens was amongst the first of the great novelists of the city and the prison figures in many of his novels. In his early writing he attacked the influential Philadelphia ‘separate system’ of prison discipline in his American Notes (1842/1906). In this account of his travels he was especially concerned about the damaging effects of the system upon prisoners. A remarkable passage describes6 a hooded prisoner as a ‘man buried alive, to be dug out in the slow round of years; and in the meantime dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair’. This metaphor of living death is one he returns to in A Tale of Two Cities (1859) where the deadening atmosphere of imprisonment pervades the novel, while in David Copperfield (1849/50) he makes a number of criticisms of the separate system that some have claimed led to its demise.

Another theme Dickens pursues is the mystery of human identity — where do we come from, are we really who we think we are, do we author ourown destinies and so forth. In his finest prison novel, Little Dorrit (1855-57), these themes come together in a work where imprisonment structures practically every aspect of the tale. The playwright George Bernard Shaw once claimed the book was more incendiary than Marx’s Das Kapital in itsdevastating critique of greedy capitalism and incompetent officialdom. The vast social landscapes drawn by Dickens dramatize the contradictions of the age by traversing the diverse worlds his characters inhabit. But for all this sweeping panoramic vision a novel like Little Dorrit also announces a further paradox, that of an all pervasive prison and an ‘omniscient narrator’ who is divorced from his ‘fictional world’ (Carnochan, 1998:394)7. This is no problem for an author like Dickens as his realism is always blended with earlier styles of writing, including romance, fable, satire and Gothic, but it is a dilemma for those writers seeking to deliver some realistic psychological complexity to the pain their characters experience.

In response much subsequent writing about prison has looked inward to grasp what it is to be human. The model for this approach is Victor Hugo’s (1829) The Last Days of the Condemned Man, which vividly describes a prisoner’s struggles to come to terms with his fate. Much later Albert Camus’s (1942) The Stranger, John Cheever’s (1977) Falconer and John Banville’s (1989) The Book of Evidence each provide first person narratives where hope and despair are dynamically interweaved in the stories. In The Stranger, for example, those waiting execution worry intensely about the proper functioning of the guillotine — as any fault can mean repeating the same botched operation over and over again. While in Kafka’s ‘Penal Colony’ (1919/1954) the condemned are so resigned to their fate in the grisly execution apparatus known as ‘The Harrow’ that they can be left free to run in the hills, a simple whistle enough to recall them for their execution. Prison systems have also continued to be criticized on a grand scale. Octave Mirbeau’s (1898/1995) Torture Garden is such an account exposing the hypocrisies of European civilization. Readers soon learn that the narrator is a corrupt, if somewhat incompetent, guide who has left France to study foreign prison systems. On route he meets the extraordinary Clara, the daughter of an opium trader living in China, who convinces him to join her on a journey to a prison in a remote corner of Canton. The second half of the book then goes on to detail the flayings, crucifixions and numerous other forms of misery endured in beautifully laid out gardens in the heart of the prison: where torture mingles with horticulture, as the decomposing dead fertilize the immaculate floral landscape.

The book is an unmistakable influence on Kafka’s (1919/1954) ‘In the Penal Colony’, but here the sinister torture machine has fallen into disrepair. Where once ‘The Harrow’ would elaborately carve the sentence of whatever commandment the prisoner had broken on his body, until death provided a merciful release. Now the machine simply stabs the victim quickly to death. Like the Torture Garden the story is seen through the eyes of a visiting European dignitary. Although it is the executing officer who is finally destroyed by the machine, it is the prophecy that the mechanization of torture and it’s associated form of justice — where the accused is always found guilty — will eventually return that menacingly concludes the story. It is this iconography of machine that has shaped the representation of imprisonment in twentieth century media culture, to where we now turn.

Inside the Machine

While modern punishment now largely takes place away from the gaze of public attention, the role of the mass media in making penal practices more visible is especially important. Understandings of incarceration cannot be divorced from how they are represented in television, film and print. Yet how to make sense of the relationships in a media-saturated world is by no means easy or unproblematic. One way of analyzing the social character of mediated representation is through the theory of genre. There are now a number of studies of prison films as a genre and several stock features have been identified: escape, riot, camaraderie, violence, injustice and so on. To give one example The Shawshank Redemption (1994) is one of the most popular films ever made, while actually ‘saying nothing new about prison’ (Mason, 2003:288). It contains all the stock elements of the prison film: sadistic guards, corrupt wardens, masculine solidarity, predatory rapists, eventual escape and a revenge climax. Yet it is the way that the story is told that has shaped the film’s popularity. Film critics8 have compared it to a modern day Gospel parable, as well as a political allegory on recent US history (the corrupt Warden stands for President Nixon) but ultimately it is seen as testimony to the power of Hollywood cinema to move audiences in ways that ‘lesser’ films do not. In a nuanced analysis of the film Michael Fiddler9 has shown how the influence of Piranesi’s depictions of carceral space inspired the dramatic representation of Shawshank.

Others have noted how the iconography of the machine permeates screen representations of prison10. When heroes break inflexible rules or rebel against injustice, this often results in long periods of solitary confinement, as in films like Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Papillon (1973) and it is the metaphor of the machine that is fundamental. It is the organising principle from which all other narratives flow: ‘escape from the machine, riot against the machine, the role of the machine in processing and rehabilitating inmates, and entering the machine from the free world as a new inmate’ (Mason, 2006: 204). In doing so prison films draw on generic conventions that were already established in earlier artistic and literary traditions outlined above. One of the most recurring motifs in all this material is seeing the experience of imprisonment through the eyes of the protagonist entering confinement for the first time, enabling audiences to identify with the character in their struggle with the penal machine.

Of course, prison films are only one way in which the viewing public see punishment — there are many more genres on television. The prison setting has appeared in popular situation comedies (Porridge), light entertainment drama (Bad Girls), ‘serious’ drama (Buried), documentary (Strangeways) and reality TV (Banged Up), while newspaper reporting provides an essential counterweight to fictional representations in the broadcast media and the literary tradition I have been describing. It is important to recognise though that stories of crime and punishment, when they appear in press reports and documentary programmes, are themselves increasingly told in melodramatic form. This generic blurring does not mean that media audiences are incapable of discriminating between fact and fiction, rather that both are influential in shaping how crime and punishment are understood. Genres do not produce themselves and I now briefly turn to stories told by prisoners, which offer further understandings of prison space.

Prison Writing

Any account of prison writing soon acknowledges that most of the literature is written by privileged prisoners. Not only are they literate, but often they have been imprisoned for political, religious or other ideological reasons which further distinguishes them from other inmates. Three different kind of writing have been identified. One is produced by imprisoned intellectuals and includes Socrates, Bunyan, Boethius, Dostoyevsky, and Gramsci. Ranging from spiritual salvation to political martyrdom it demonstrates the extraordinary breadth of writing produced under captivity. A second group contains writers who speak from within a prison culture and whose messages have more often than not disappeared: either lost or destroyed by officials. Jean Genet and the Marquis de Sade are two of the most well known writers in this tradition. Aside from these infamous accounts of dissident sexuality this writing covers a diverse range of genres — including autobiography, memoir, fiction, drama, poetry and journalism — from Oscar Wilde in the late 1800s to Razor Smith in the early twenty-first century11. A third group stretches back to the beginnings of history and include parts of the ‘Old Testament, stories of the shtetl, the songs and stories of the American and Caribbean slaves, the accounts from the Gulag and Van Diemen’s Land’ which have become part of collective memory through the folk tradition of storytelling12. These very different narratives speak to ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ pain in significant ways and are unified in the fundamentally moral question they ask: how are we to live? The importance of the cultural representations I have been discussing is that they can enlarge our powers of imagination, so that we can better understand each other and the kind of world we live in. As Aristotle13 pointed out in his Poetics, written in the fourth century BC, literature shows us ‘not something that has happened, but the kind of thing that might happen’. This understanding of possibilities is a vital resource enriching comprehension of the human condition and one that reminds us of just how much of our cultural tradition has been produced under captivity.

Footnotes

Much of the material in this paper is taken from Carrabine, E (forthcoming) ‘Telling Prison Stories: The Spectacle of Punishment and the Criminological Imagination’ in Cheliotis, L. (ed.) The Arts of Imprisonment, Aldershot: Ashgate, where the argument appears in a more extended form.

Bender, J. (1984) J. (1984), ‘The Novel and the Rise of the Penitentiary: Narrative and Ideology in Defoe, Gay, Hogarth, and Fielding’, Stanford Literature Review, Spring, 55-84, p.57.

Fielding, H. (1749/1975), Tom Jones p.118.

Eagleton, T. (2005), The English Novel: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell, p.59.

Evans, R. (1982), The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture, 1750-1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p.80.

Cited in Johnston, H. (2006) ‘“Buried Alive”: Representations of the Separate System in Victorian England’, in Mason, P. (ed.) Captured by the Media: Prison Discourse in Popular Culture, Devon: Willan, p.108.

Charnochan, W. B. (1998), ‘The Literature of Confinement’ in Morris and Rothman (eds.) The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Kermode, M. (2003), Shawshank Redemption (London: BFI publishing.

Fiddler, M. (2007) ‘Projecting the Prison: The Depiction of the Uncanny in The Shawshank Redemption’, in Crime, Media, Culture, 3(2):192-206.

Mason, P. (2006), ‘Relocating Hollywood’s Prison Film Discourse’, in Mason, P. (ed.).

Broadhead, J. (2006), Unlocking the Prison Muse: The Inspiration and Effects of Prisoners’ Writing in Britain Cambridge: Cambridge Academic.

Davies, I. (1990), Writers in Prison, Oxford: Blackwell, p.4.

Cited in Nussbaum, M. (1997), Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defence of Reform in Liberal Education, Harvard University Press.

#prison #criminology #crime and punishment #media #representation #storytelling #culture #cross-cultural themes #exclusion #civilization #prison films

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Black Panther (17/20): There is SO Much To Talk About Here...

Oh boy, there’s a lot to say about Black Panther. We’ll begin spoiler-free of course, but we might have to stray a bit. I’ll let you know before we drift into dangerous territory. Seriously though, we have a lot to get through. So let’s figure this out.

(Actually, before we get into it, I just want to note something that struck me. There’s a lot of hype surrounding this film. Much of it is because it’s a pretty damn good movie. But a significant amount is due to the fact that it’s a black super hero movie with a mostly black cast, written and directed by a black filmmaker. And yes, I agree, not only is this awesome, but these levels of excitement are exactly the correct response. What struck me however, (and what impressed the absolute hell out of me) is, though representation and race are vital elements in the meta-narrative of the film’s release, they actually play extremely small roles in the in the story itself. No, the MCU’s first black super hero movie isn’t about racism. It’s about toxic nationalism. About tribalistic selfism. Not unrelated, I know, but as a theme it allows for a more nuanced, more interesting moral discussion. And it’s at least as topical as race. There is no doubt in my mind that Black Panther was written partially in response to the modern political landscape. I love the front it chose to fight on. It didn’t just go for the low-hanging fruit, and that’s rare.)

(Okay, back to the review.)

Black Panther easily stands out as one of the best films in the MCU franchise. Partly, this is due to the fact that it sets aside a lot of the baggage and detritus that’s built up over the many, many … many installments. Partly (of course), because it’s the well-conceived, well-executed passion project of a group of very talented people. Partly (and I may be alone in thinking that this is the smallest part of it, but even so it’s fairly significant), it’s because the film offers a fresh aesthetic that we (or at the very least, I) have never really seen in this kind of movie before.

DEFINITELY A MARVEL MOVIE

To begin, while in many ways it offers refreshing film-going experience, I wouldn’t dream of saying Black Panther is a game-changer for the MCU. Here’s why:

- The cinematography is very much in line with the rest of the franchise. We’re given dozens of hero-shots, rotating cameras, and sweeping arcs over grand structures and landscapes. Colours are bright; costumes are busy and elaborate. Action is smooth, fluid and easy to follow. All of this is what we usually expect to actually see in a MCU film.

- So too does Black Panther’s tone match other in-franchise films. Action-heavy, quippy (we’re going come back to ‘quippy’ later), never too dark, never to serious, with character tragedy that exists for the sake of plot rather than emotion (using pain to motivate characters to act, rather than to draw any strong feeling from the audience).

- Additionally, the tropes surrounding character motivations are vary-much in line with what we have seen before: Proving yourself worthy. Daddy issues. Old enemies returned. Secret histories discovered. Etc.

Now to be clear, I’m not saying any of these things are bad. Or that they automatically make for a good movie. Not at all. Hero shots are awesome. Marvel has carefully cultivated an extremely watchable balance in the tone of their films. And the motivations I mentioned are used so often because they are both relatable to the audience and chocked full of drama. But these are merely the composite parts with which the MCU likes to construct its films. Black Panther is no different in this regard. It is, however, a variation in the construction.

DIFFERENT THAN OTHER MARVEL MOVIES

This can be seen in a distinct lack of incestuous MCU Mythology. There are no major heroes or villains from other movies here. No carried over plot-lines or setting up future, bigger plots. But then, that’s hardly unique in 3rd Generation MCU, Hero-Introduction Films. (Though I would argue Black Panther is 4th Gen.) While Spiderman is balls-deep in mythology, both Ant-Man and Doctor Strange stand fairly isolated. But common to all three is the creation of a pre-packaged hero ready to ‘be the person they were meant to be’. Ready to join the fight. To become a piece of the larger mythology. Such intentions are unmistakable in these films, a character-shaping trope not present in Black Panther. Black Panther stands on its own four paws. It barely hints that it might be a part of a larger universe, a reality it almost seems to want to hide. This self-containment comes out in levels of creative freedom rarely found in present-day Marvel films.

I mentioned above how quippy dialogue gives the film a measure of MCU-ness. This however, was only a partial truth. I mean, it does, but less than we’ve come to expect. The watchable tone I mentioned above has caused MCU films to drift together. With a few exceptions, every character sounds the same. Most the major heroes are all arrogant smartasses. Everyone’s quippy. All the time. And as the franchise has advanced, this glibness has become more central to character and dialogue. To the point where character and honesty to the moment is regularly sacrificed for the sake of a cheap laugh (what I like to call, ‘crank calling the Hux’. At its best we get a legitimately fun and funny moments like the banter between Thor and Hulk/Banner in Thor: Ragnarok. But more often than not we get Doctor Strange’s cape acting like a Disney animal sidekick. Black Panther’s quippiness on the other hand doesn’t feel like painted-on humour. Jokes suit the characters telling them. Also, rarely are they told in a vacuum. Most often they fall into beats that actually advance the plot. They’re fewer and further between so the film feels less jokey. But ‘jokey’ is a crutch and this film doesn’t need.

But more than anything, Black Panther benefits from its MCU divergence in the formulaic plot structure / character type formula it avoids. We see it again and again and again and again in these movies, and when people say, I’m sick of these Marvel movies, there’s little doubt in my mind, this is why. Black Panther breaks away from this structure. It offers narrative scape I’m not actually sure I’ve ever seen before. It’s as fluid as the most formulaic MCU film but with the energy and excitement of one willing to break away and follow its own unique path.

So let’s stop comparing it to other films and talk about Black Panther by itself.

THE GOOD

I walked out of Black Panther with no real gripes about the film. I mean, I thought of one or two small ones later, but in the moment, none. Loyal readers will know just how rare an occurrence this is for me. I ALWAYS have something to complain about. Because so much of the film was done right.

The Characters: This film is its characters. There are more interesting, distinct, watchable characters than I really knew what to do with. Six characters that could easily have carried their own movie—including T’Challa (the Black Panther) himself, of course. They’re interactions were strong and felt extremely honest, giving life and substance to the film.

The Visuals: I mentioned above, both that the film closely follows Marvel visual tropes and offers a fresh and appealing aesthetic. This aesthetic is a beautifully crafted vision of what we might see in terms of art, architecture, design, fashion and just … in the appearance of society if an technologically advanced African civilization came into existence without any outside influences. It is gorgeously imagined and fashioned and it permeates the film, adding a level of beauty from which it’s hard to look away. Not than a layer of paint really, but much more mural than roll-on.

The Action: Again, Black Panther’s action can best be expressed in a comparison to other MCU films. (Sorry, but that’s just how it is.) Something about its many fights chases and battle sequences feels cleaner than most the action in Marvel films. It took me a while to figure out why. But it’s this: virtually all the action onscreen moves the narrative forward. Each beat of each fight is a turn in the story. This is to say there is very, very few shots of people doing cool fight moves just for the sake of showing cool fight choreography. As a result, the action sequences all have very well controlled pacing and never slow down the film’s narrative.

The Structure: Okay, here’s one of the things that I found really interesting (and unfortunately this is where things are going to get spoiler-y. So if you haven’t seen it yet, and you don’t want it spoiled for you, I’m afraid this is where we must say ‘goodbye’. Thank you for making it this far though my oh-so-long, and ever-so-dry review of the film! I’m sure you’ll enjoy it!).

(SPOILERS)

Okay, here’s the thing about the film, and it could very well be considered a flaw, even a plot hole, but I don’t actually see it like that. Anyway, I certainly found it interesting. So you know how Killmonger shoots Klaue and dumps his body to the border to gain access to the city and make his challenge? Well, why didn’t he just do this to begin with? The whole second act of the film has little to nothing to do with the rest. It could be cut away altogether and nothing would change.

Or would it…

Let’s look at Act One:

1) T’Chaka confronts his brother

2) T’Challa pulls Nakia from her mission

3) Klau and Killmonger steal the axe

4) The Challenge and ascension ceremony

5) T’Chall goes to the Plane of Ancestors and returns to the throne as king.

An apt title for this part of the story would be T’Challa takes his place as king. Act One. But after this—immediately after this—we get two little throwaway scenes that absolutely define the rest of the film. First, T’Challa and Nakia walking the streets and Nakia urging him to open the border and offer help to the rest of the world. He resists. The next scene is T’Challa and W’Kabi, the leader of his War Dogs. Here we get W’Kabi urging him to open the borders and enforce justice on the rest of the world. And yes! THIS! These two scenes encompass the entire conflict of the film—just moments before they get distracted with chasing Klaue. And of course, these are what come through in spades when Killmonger makes his challenge.

You see? All through this unnecessary second act, we have a shadow act in the background, hidden in plane view. It is there. Right up until the second challenge fight, it’s the film’s actual second act. The Klaue scenes are more or less an short film overlaid over top of it.

So why Klaue at all then? Well it gives T’Challa a chance to see Killmonger’s father’s ring so he can learn the truth about what happened. But that’s just exposition. They could have done that any number of ways, including showing the same explained flashback after Killmonger enters Wakanda. No, that whole thirty or forty minutes is there because if he just showed up at the border with a body and demanded to challenge T’Challa, we the audience wouldn’t have given two shits. It’s expository alright; it’s not informational exposition though. It’s dramatic exposition. Those thirty or forty minutes where they’re chasing Klaue, attach dramatic significance to him. And the rather intense scene where Killmonger (who at that point has done very little in the film) shoots him, transposes that significance onto him. So when we learn Killmonger’s heritage, when he appears to make his challenge, none of it feels out of nowhere. It feels like he’s the rightful villain of the film. It’s great.

Now, of course, there are other ways this might have been accomplished. I can think of one or two. I think most of these however would likely have veered dangerously close to the formulaic MCU plot structures I mentioned above. This does not. I’m not saying it’s an intrinsically good structure. But it’s interesting. And, in this context at least, it’s new. And best of all, it’s elegantly executed.

GRIPES

As I mentioned, I left the film with noting to complain about. Of course, I have since been able to find some things. But these are very minor.

First, when Killmonger throws T’Challa off the waterfall and his not-quite-dead royal body shows up in exactly the place his loved ones flee to. That’s some pretty damn strong plot armour. Ultimately, I found this fairly forgivable. Of course we knew he was going to turn up. And the act of ‘killing him’ led to some pretty strong moments in the story. Like when Nakita assumes Okoye will flee with her and Okoye is shocked at the idea. That was a beautiful scene.

Also when the M’Baku tribe shows up like the riders of Rohan, just when things in the battle are starting to look grim. That was both clichéd and overly projected.

Also, some tiny gripe about when they choose to speak English and when they don’t, pulling me out of the movie. But this review is already way too long. This didn’t actually bother me at all, I just kind of noticed it because I was looking for it. So fuck it.

#Black Panther #Marvel #MCU #Movie #Film #Review

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