Eruditorum Press

Crash log of the Singularity

Myriad Universes: Blood & Honor

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Returning from an exploratory mission in the Gamma Quadrant, Jadzia Dax informs us through a Science Officer’s Log that her team has discovered something unique: A mysterious blue glowing artefact of unknown origin. Also on her team aboard the runabout USS Orinoco are her erstwhile travelling companion Doctor Julian Bashir, and an operations division ensign called Jamie. Before they can dock, however, Julian gets an urgent call from Commander Sisko that he’s needed in the infirmary to tend to a medical emergency. Before he can even acknowledge, however, he’s beamed there directly from the runabout cockpit.

A Lieutenant Jayakar has been unfortunately killed in some sort horrible malfunction. She was escorting a diplomatic party from the Romulan Star Empire led by an Ambassador Jannek when something seemed to go wrong with one of they airlocks. Jannek himself is on hand to offer his condolences, and urges diligence to Commander Sisko in determining whether it really was an accident, or whether the Lieutenant was murdered. Odo reports that mechanical failure seems like the obvious initial culprit, but he would never accuse Chief O’Brien of negligence, and is far more inclined to point the finger at deliberate sabotage. There’s an obvious tension with the Romulan party present, but before Jannek can excuse himself Dax and Jamie arrive. We get the by-now stock Trill joke (which Jadzia even lampshades), wherein she tries to catch up with an old friend who doesn’t recognise her at first. Jannek, however, seems far more interested in Jamie: He compliments the wisdom in her assignment to Deep Space 9, and expresses a desire to get to know her better, a fact which leaves her and Doctor Bashir somewhat taken aback.

Some time later, Commander Sisko escorts Jannek to the floor of the Bajoran Provisional Government. The Ambassador is interested in opening up formal diplomatic relations with Bajor, but the Bajorans are suspicions. Not of the Romulans themselves, necessarily, but because the Romulans have dealt with the Cardassians in the past. Jannek contends that the Romulan Star Empire seeks to work with anyone who “shares its interests”, but it’s clear he’s going to have some work to do in swaying them. Back on the station, Jadzia, Julian and Jamie are running tests on the artefact in the lab when one of Jannek’s aides comes in suffering from abdominal pain. Turns out he had an allergic reaction to something he ate, namely some Klingon gagh.

After returning from their meeting with the Provisional Government, Jannek and Sisko are talking about Federation history, which is something the Ambassador is deeply interested in. He says Commander Sisko reminds him of the great Starfleet hero James T. Kirk, but Ben can’t see how, feeling that he and Kirk are really almost polar opposites, specifically mentioning how important family is to him, which he contrasts with Kirk’s desire to never be anywhere other than a starship bridge. Sisko does say that both he and Kirk are both “a product of our times”, and Jannek says he is as well.…

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Cultural Marxism 6: Inversions

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I’ve set the Patreon thresholds for reviewing Doctor Who S10 – $300 (currently $9 a week away) for reviews, and $320 for podcasts. So if you’re not backing Eruditorum Press on Patreon, now’s a great time to change that.

Inversions continues the basic trend that began with The State of the Art whereby Banks writes Culture stories whose premises amount to attempts to break the Culture. Having essentially exhausted the two extremes of premises with the form “what if the Culture met X,” however, Banks moves in a different direction by asking, essentially, “what if you took the Culture out?” This is, obviously, quite the feat, and there are aspects of Inversions that clearly don’t quite work outside of the original publication context. When Excession was first published, it very clearly declared itself a Culture novel on the cover. Inversions, on the other hand, was published with no such description. There were significant clues, including a “note on the text” omitted from subsequent editions that contained a conspicuously capitalized reference to one of the characters being “from a different Culture,” but broadly speaking, other than the fact that it was an Iain M. Banks novel instead of an Iain Banks novel, the book was not even overtly science fiction, little yet overtly a Culture novel.

Instead it unfolds with a structure that’s a sort of simplified version of the two-threads approach in Use of Weapons, only without the non-chronological storytelling. Instead the two narratives, titled The Doctor and The Bodyguard, unfold in parallel, switching back and forth between them. Each is set in a different territory on a planet with obvious resemblances to medieval Europe, and focuses on a mysterious outsider who’s a key confidante of the territory’s ruler, and who, it emerges, is clearly in fact a Culture agent. Neither chapter is told from this character’s perspective – the Doctor’s tale is related by her assistant, while the Bodyguard’s is simply told in the third person. And so audiences sit at a remove from the Culture for once, watching its manipulations from the outside, albeit with more understanding of what’s going on than any of the actual characters (including, by dint of the doubled narrative, the Doctor and the Bodyguard themselves).

The way this was intended to work, for a 1998 audience, was for the book to unfold with a shock of slow recognition. It’s not a particularly subtle problem – the reader is clearly supposed to figure it out fairly easily. But the moment of figuring out what’s going on in the book is clearly intended to be part of the book’s impact, and it’s something that’s diminished by calling it “book 6 of 10 in the Culture series” The question that unfolds instead – “in what sense is this a Culture novel” may seem only subtly different from “what sort of novel is this,” but it’s a difference with teeth, moving the book from one about discovering its structure to one about working backwards from a solution.…

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Luke & Order

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(No, not that Luke.  The other one.)

Okay, first of all, I’m aware that Luke Cage has been much written about.  I confess, I haven’t read much of the commentary.  Pure laziness.  I understand a lot of the criticism was about the show subscribing to a rather conservative form of Black ‘respectability politics’.  I can certainly see that issue, but I’m not going to concentrate on it.  Even so, I strongly suspect I’m still going to be reiterating stuff other people have already said.  Also, I’m a white British guy, so inevitably I’m at a disadvantage when it comes to understanding and criticising this particular text. 

Throat-cleared, and ass hopefully covered, here we go.

Oh, and SPOILERS and TRIGGERS.

For various complex, tedious, and irrelevant reasons, I’ve seen a lot of Law & Order in my life, despite not really liking it.  At times, the Marvel/Netflix series Luke Cage strongly reminded me of Law & Order.  Specifically, bits of it strongly reminded me of the Law & Order ‘race episode’.  I say ‘race episode’ singular because Law & Order really only had one race episode, which they made over and over and over again.

Roughly, it went like this:

A crime is committed against a Black person in New York, or by a Black person in New York, or in the ‘Black community’ in New York… or some combination of all three.

The police investigate in good faith.  The police department treats a crime in the Black community exactly the same way they treat every crime they investigate, every week.  However, in the course of their investigation, they have to interview and question Black people… which causes them problems.  Many of the Black people they question respond with mistrust and hostility to the police, who are just trying to do their job.  They are immediately and irrationally touchy, respond with anger to reasonable questions, throw out accusations of harassment when simply being treated as the police would treat any witnesses, etc.  Much anti-police rhetoric is used by Black characters, the substance of which is belied by how we see the actual police behave.

Several key members of the police team, often in senior positions, are themselves Black.  The Lieutenant in charge of the detectives is Black, and is also a woman  – the police precinct upon which Law & Order is centred being run by, for most of the series, a Black woman cop.  Other members of the police hierarchy will be Black too. 

The police will find themselves under immense and unfair pressure from the powers-that-be and the media to solve the case quickly, preferably with the arrest of a non-Black suspect. 

There will probably be a scene where the police are mobbed by the media, who insolently ask them questions about whether they’re covering something up from racist motives, etc.  Media intrusion – which pushes an unfair narrative of racist cops failing to give the Black community justice, deliberately or through incompetence – will severely hamper the police investigation.…

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Silver Millennium Anniversary

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Fuck.

I swore never to speak of such things again. But there’s no way I can get out of talking about this, is there?

This past week, as of this posting, was the 25th Anniversary of the premier of the first animated adaptation of Bishōjo Senshi Sailormoon, or, as it’s better known in the west, Sailor Moon. Like most Japanese pop media, Sailor Moon actually started as a manga first, and thus the *true* 25th Anniversary of the series was last year. But the first anime is considered by the overwhelming majority of fans to be the definitive version of the story, and is certainly the most well known internationally. So this is the date that’s going to be seeing the most widespread attention and acclaim from critic and fan circles. Sailor Moon is one of those huge anime shows that even people who aren’t familiar with Japanese media will instantly recognise. It, along with Dragon Ball Z and Ranma 1/2, defined the anime landscape of the early 1990s and was an integral part of the international anime breakout. It was also far and away the most interesting of the three to my eyes, which is what I thought when I was looking to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of Japanese media a few years back. Quite simply, you can’t claim to fully understand the history of global pop culture without looking at Sailor Moon.

And thus I’m spending Women’s History Month writing about one of the most infuriatingly fraught examples of Mirror Darkly female empowerment in all of pop culture history.

But I get ahead of myself. As if it wasn’t clear, Sailor Moon and I have a history. I have a special relationship with this series, and, in this case, “special” does not entirely mean “good”. I was drawn to Sailor Moon after coming off of a high spent writing about Dirty Pair for Vaka Rangi, and it seemed to me at first glace that Sailor Moon was the natural and fitting, if slightly counterintuitive, successor to Dirty Pair in terms of mass-market young adult Japanese fiction targeted primarily towards girls. It also served as a curious contrast to that series: Whereas Dirty Pair came out of the otaku scene of the early 1980s and was thus heavy on the hard (or hard-ish) science fiction (and failed somewhat spectacularly), Sailor Moon came out of a later generation of Japanese nerd culture, dropped the science fiction altogether and was unique in the sense it was the first large scale manga-to-anime franchise helmed by a woman who wasn’t Rumiko Takahashi to gain universal success and acclaim.

Like I do with all such series, I sat down to read the manga first before I checked out the anime to get a feel for creator Naoko Takeuchi’s original intent. And things promptly went downhill from there.

There is no other franchise I have ever followed or studied that has caused me as much grief, anxiety, confusion, self-doubt, anguish and pain as Sailor Moon.…

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An Increasingly Inaccurately Named Trilogy: Episode VII – The Force Awakens

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It is damning with faint praise to say that “George Lucas done right” is a task perfectly suited to J.J. Abrams’s abilities, which is of course why it’s such a fun thing to assert. It’s not quite true, for reasons we’ll get to, but there’s more truth to it than not, and for the most part the truth is more revealing. Certainly it’s very obviously the logic Disney applied in hiring Abrams for the job of making Star Wars into a viable property again, and their benign cynicism is on the whole easy to understand. The prequels had made Return of the Jedi a better end to the saga in more ways than one, their famous awfulness drying up the bulk of the cultural goodwill the franchise had while muddying the question of what Star Wars should look like post-1983 with a host of unsatisfying answers that nevertheless needed to be considered.

Abrams, in this context, was an eminently safe pair of hands. He’d already rebooted Star Trek with an aesthetic that could uncharitably be summarized as “wishing it was Star Wars,” and with Super 8 had shown himself a skilled practitioner of 1970s nostalgia. More broadly, he was a director who could solve both of Disney’s immediate problems. On the one hand, he was fluent and respected enough in geek culture to keep rabid Star Wars fans on board. Such fans make up a negligible share of the audience for a major tentpole film, but are vocal and engaged enough that losing them creates a significant marketing problem. On the other hand, he was actually capable of making films that people liked and wanted to see.

I noted when I reviewed the film that Abrams was decidedly more interested in making a good Star Wars film than he was in making a good film. This is indisputably true. The Force Awakens works because it is a well-executed Star Wars film. Abrams strikes an intelligent balance between the obligatory wipes and stylistic tics that define the saga and more dynamic, lively moments. Much of this is little stuff – the shuddering, darkly lit shots of Storm Troopers in their shuttles, for instance, or the cut from Finn’s helmet to Rey in her goggles – that hardly merits praise, but there’s still a form of sophistication to it that Lucas simply wasn’t invested in. And these are mixed, in the early sequences, with teasing shots of ruined Star Wars iconography: a crashed Star Destroyer, or a fallen AT-AT. There’s a cheeky, illicit thrill – a child getting to play with the grown-up toys, and yet rising to the occasion so that their exuberance is tempered with real technical nous. Abrams is awed by the material, but not overawed.

This is, in the end, because Abrams is a joyless cynic interested only in appearances and iconography. Abrams is, throughout the film, singularly interested in making sure everything looks good. Over and over again the tone the film reaches for is “here’s a classic Star Wars moment… but it looks good, no?”…

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The Anti-Potter, Part 1: J. K. Rowling and the Effable Mirror

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Happy Friday, all.  Notices first:

There’s a new episode of Wrong With Authority up for you to download, here.  WWA is a podcast about movies about historical events, created and starring myself, Kit Power, Daniel Harper, and James Murphy.  We take it in turns to host.  This time, James is hosting, and we’re talking about Shadow of the Vampire and Gods and Monsters, two movies about the lives of genius directors of classic horror cinema.  So far, the show is getting better with every episode, so check it out.  I believe podcasts in which white guys talk about movies are a real rarity online, so tell all your friends.

I still have a Patreon, as does Eruditorum Press generally.

Sam Keeper is still being really interesting about Rogue One at the moment… and I’m not just saying that because Sam is saying nice things about me and Phil (though that obviously shows excellent taste).

I myself do have more to say about Rogue One and Star Wars generally, but I’m taking a bit of a break for now.  Instead, here’s the first of a new occasional series about another obscure, niche fantasy franchise you probably haven’t heard of.  

 

A little while ago, in the context of a post about John Hurt, I talked a little about the character he plays in the Harry Potter films: Mr Ollivander.  Ollivander is an interesting ‘way in’ to thinking about some aspects of J.K. Rowling’s weltanschauung.

Ollivander is a rarity in Rowling’s work, and also in the films.  Not only is he irresolvably ambiguous, but he’s also a character who has a fundamentally different view of the world to everyone else.  These two things taken together mark him out.  There are other people in the stories who have perspectives that are unorthodox in the Wizarding World, but they are all either evil or foolish.  (In the films there is also Luna, who is neither… but screen-Luna is a very different beast to page-Luna.)

As I noted in the John Hurt essay, Harry – who normally arrives at very decided views on people very quickly, and who usually turns out to be right – is always unsure about Ollivander.  Of course, he turns out to be right about Ollivander anyway, in the sense that he’s right to not be sure about him.  Not because he later turns out to be evil, or a Death Eater (or is it ‘Deatheater’?  I don’t know, I listened to the audiobooks) in disguise, but simply because the books themselves aren’t sure about him.  He turns up again in later books and his character never resolves one way or the other. 

Rowling doesn’t treat Ollivander with her customary spite.  It’s an old saw that good writers have to be sadists towards their characters.  I’m not sure that’s true.  But that isn’t what I’m getting at anyway.  As a writer, Rowling generally has an extremely cruel and judgemental view of people.  She tends to be less judgemental than is warranted towards characters she has decided, a priori, that she likes and we should like too.…

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The_OA Exegesis: Champion

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Thank you for coming back.  My travels have kept me away.  I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting.

You must be hungry!  Aren’t you?  Maybe having a little bite of something something will help to take the edge off.  Yeah, a nice morsel.  A small good thing.  Maybe a chicken sandwich, or a bowl of soup.  Maybe some chocolate, or chips.  Something charred, perhaps?  Or a bit salty?   Maybe something cheesy, or with tomatoes, something with color.

Whatever it is, go get it now.  That tasty thing. 

I’ll wait.  Oh, and save one bite for the end, if you would.

Thank you.  You know who you are. 

 

Champion

Again, the opening image of the episode points to something significant in its middle, something significant that ends up being a point of failure.  In “New Colossus” we first saw the eyes of the Statue of Liberty, and that place marked a huge turning point in Prairie’s life, but it wasn’t exactly a success for her.  This is where her prophecy failed her – but then, maybe she was always going to be found by Hap, and she simply ended up being the cause of her own fate.  In any case, there’s a profound irony between the Statue of Liberty, and how “New Colossus” ends with the revelation of Prairie’s imprisonment.  Here, we get another seeming success: Prairie actually finding Homer’s ring, and a cell phone bill, which allows the prisoners a chance at escape—only for it to completely fall apart when the ring is ultimately lost.  Clever manipulation fails, and the episode ends with images of brute strength and violence. 

That said, we really should attend to the implications of everything to do with Homer’s ring, especially in light of the repeating motifs that have already been established in the first two chapters.  First, we’ve detailed a number of circular motifs—Homer’s ring was actually mentioned in “Homecoming,” and in “New Colossus” we got details like The Healos’ “Full Circle” with its verses pointing towards Ouroboros (combined with various snake references) and hence Eternal Return.  As we established in Chapter 1, the presence of WATER symbolizes a “bridge” in The_OA, a passage between different realities, a way to cross from the Ordinary World to the Other Side.  And as we saw in Chapter 2, the presence of GLASS symbolizes separation and isolation.  All these signifiers come together in the championship ring scenes.

Homer’s ring returns, again and again—in the opening image, which itself is presented as being underwater; then when Prairie finds the ring and drops it in a bathtub that holds a woman long dead (of course); and finally when the ring is passed back and forth between the glass cubicle prisons via an underground river, a river that eventually captures the ring (enveloped in a wireless cell phone bill) and takes it away forever.  So, yeah, there’s plenty here to work with.  The ring symbolizes eternity—the snake eating its own tail, the perpetual cycle of death and rebirth. …

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Pandora’s Hope

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I was watching TV the other night when a commercial caught my eye. It’s the exceptional ad that does this, since I usually have commercials muted so I can focus on constructive things instead. In this case, I immediately recognised, entirely against my will, the iconography of planet Pandora from James Cameron’s Avatar, a movie I never saw. I was wondering if this meant we were getting an imminent Avatar sequel and was just beginning to ponder the ramifications of that before the true purpose of the commercial became clear: Opening in May of this year in the Animal Kingdom park of Walt Disney World Resort will be Pandora: The World of Avatar, an entirely new land attraction that seeks to create the world of the beloved film in physical form.

My first thoughts were, unironically, “well, that’s going to do incredibly well” followed soon after by “this seems like a good fit”. Though the religiously ecstatic paean to CGI that is Avatar at first glance seems like a strange fit for the ostensibly environmentalist tone of Disney’s Animal Kingdom, the connection seems like a much more intuitive one if you look at it deeper for a few reasons, the least of which is the film’s own loose environmentalist message. The movie itself is in many ways the least interesting thing about Avatar: I’m not going to be doing a full review or analysis of the film or anything like that-Frankly, the fact I’m ever writing about Avatar at all, a movie that’s almost a decade old, leaves me feeling pretty dispirited. For our purposes, what I’m going to say the most important thing to note about Avatar is how it used film technology and genre fiction in a way that was uniquely positioned to manipulate a starvation most people don’t even know they have. Writer Jonathan Zap explains this very well in a piece he retooled for Reality Sandwich a few years ago, and while I don’t completely agree with everything Zap says, he does make a point about Avatar and our relationships with our true selves I haven’t seen anyone else make.

Avatar‘s fans are notoriously rabid, but, as Zap points out, you can’t entirely blame them. They yearn for escape and for sublimation so deeply and so powerfully that they explicitly want to live in the fictional world of Pandora to the point some get suicidal when faced with the fact they can’t. In the most severe cases, they believe themselves to actually *be* incarnations of the characters from the film: Avatar‘s motifs of a kind of postmodern technological spiritual ascension resonated very strongly with people who secretly feel they’re living a life of lies and bullshit (because they are) and are unconsciously starving to reunite with their true self, but who don’t want to openly admit it. Avatar plays on postmodern malaise in a materialist and reductive world and was always perfectly suited to be adopted as part of the burgeoning hyper-reality movement.…

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An Increasingly Inaccurately Named Trilogy: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi

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The standard line about the original trilogy is that Return of the Jedi is its weak link. It will surprise nobody to learn that I’m suspicious of this logic, which is at its heart rooted in an aesthetic that says that big reveals like Vader being Luke’s father are good and Ewoks are bad, but it’s nevertheless worth recognizing that Return of the Jedi is the one film in the original trilogy that’s markedly improved by the presence of the prequels. This isn’t a new observation – it’s at the heart of the famous Machete Order, which suggests putting the prequels between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and which basically prompted this entire series with its argument for why you should skip The Phantom Menace while doing this, which was the immediate cause of my remarking that prequel criticism was generally worse than the prequels themselves.

The problem that Return of the Jedi has on its own merits is Luke’s constant assertion that there’s still good in Darth Vader, a claim that not only lacks justification in the films but is actively unjustified by the sheer degree that Darth Vader is an ostentatious force of pure evil badassery. As we’ve discussed at length, it’s not that the claim that there’s some good in him is particularly justified by the prequels either, but at least the line is uttered by Padme in Revenge of the Sith, and more to the point, the prequels put significant effort into making Anakin an actual character. It’s difficult to actually imagine the Darth Vader of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back making an abrupt face turn, but while it’s still a bit out of left field, it’s perfectly possible to imagine the Anakin Skywalker of Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the SIth doing it. (I mean, hell, he’s so fickle in Revenge of the Sith that it’s basically possible to imagine him doing anything.)

More broadly, the relationship between Luke and Vader is, in the original trilogy, a pure abstraction – it matters entirely because of the basic ideological valences of fathers and sons. Indeed, the fact that it literally only matters because of patriarchy goes a long way towards explaining the weirdly outre status of Leia within this relationship, with her involvement a somewhat disposable third movie reveal in which she gets played as the fool, getting a piece of information the audience already knows and that has no actual bearing on the plot. But as a conclusion to the entire Lucas-governed saga it’s a far deeper relationship, and that gives the film new weight, a fact reflected in Lucas’s decision to replace Sebastian Shaw with Hayden Christensen in the final scene. (Honestly not a bad decision, though he probably should have replaced Alec Guinness with Ewan MacGregor in this and The Empire Strikes Back to set it up better.)

But it’s worth interrogating why this should be the case. After all, it’s not obvious that the solution to an undercooked finale is to go back and add more stuff before it while not actually changing anything about the finale itself save for swapping out “Lapti Nek” for “Jedi Rocks.”…

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