Author Archives: Bob Evans

Is The Good Place Nietzscheian?

This post will contain the key reveal/spoiler from Season One of NBC’s unusual sitcom The Good Place, now starting its third season last week.

 

 

The Good Placeis a sitcom concerning Eleanor Shellstrop, a woman who clearly did not lead a good life, she was vain, bitter, and self-serving, and who finds herself in the afterlife in ‘the good place,’ a reward for virtuous people. Most of the first season operates in and around Eleanor as she strives to become a better person and earn her spot in the good place. Along the way she collects a group of friends and they both torture each other with their conflicting personalities and improve each through their friendship. When season one concludes Eleanor realizes that the ‘good place’ has been the ‘bad place’ all along and that their ‘caring’ architect Michael is actually the eternal being that designed this unusual torture for them.

In season two, for reasons of his own, Michael joins with the afterlife humans, working against his former demons, and conspires to help the humans escape to the actual good place. Over the course of the season Michael gradually becomes a better being growing a sense of empathy, compassion, and affection for his friends.

The Good Place, in addition to farcical character driven humor, is deeply concerned with ethical decision-making and entire episodes are built around a single ethical question or dilemma. Many famous philosophers, Kant, Hegel, Plato, etc, are mentioned and their core concepts used as vital elements in understanding the thorny issues of what makes a person good and how do you know what is a good act. Absent from the roster of thinkers is Frederick Nietzsche. On the surface this is not a surprise. Nietzsche is famous for his nihilism and is often attributed with philosophy that emphasizes an individual’s will over any absolute morality. And yet at 5:00 am this morning when I awoke to biological needs it suddenly struck me that from Season Two that there was a very Nietzscheian element in plain sight. Consider one of Nietzsche’s most famous quotes.

 

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

 

Prolonged contact with evil can make you evil and that very nature can stealthily seep into you, but is the inverse also true? It seems to me that one aspect of season two can be the application of the sentiment ‘Whoever fights angles should see to it that he does not become an angel.’ Michael’s closes association with humans, over nearly a thousand reboots of his good place torture village, as they strove to continually improve themselves, profoundly altering his very nature. Late in the second season Michael’s transformation is so complete that self sacrifices in order to save his human friends. Truly he gazed into the heavens until the heavens gaze back into him.

The Good Placeavoids taking any religious stand, it makes no preference for Christian, Jewish, Islamic, or any other of the major religions but rather keeps it focus on the ethics action and the question of what does it mean to be good? It is a show that places ‘Lonely Lady Margarita Mix’ jokes right next to discussion of Utilitarianism and how many major network shows pull that off?

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Nothing is Safe From the Kremlin

Unless you have been hiding behind the woodshed or simply refusing to partake in any of the national discussion you should be aware that the Russian launched a coordinated and sophisticated campaign to influence the 2016 Presidential election.  They did this by amplifying fault lines already present in a politics and our culture; this is standard covert tradecraft but now made more powerful and more destructive through the emerging mass media of the Internet and social media. The Russian’s goals included more than defeating Hillary Clinton at the box office but also fanning the flames of social passions, pitting Americans against Americans weakening us with our own outrage and willingness to spew venom at each other and thereby strengthening their position.

This campaign extended far beyond stoking the emotions surrounding political operative but according to a new study even into our most cherished popular culture; the Russians weaponized Star Wars.

Considering the chaos and pain the fight over Star Wars: The Last Jedigenerated and the heavy political overtones of that fight it should be no surprise that it was yet another front in this Psy-Op war.

This is not to say that the entire ‘SJW destroyed Star Wars‘ bullshirt is a Kremlin creation; that misses the essential nature of how these sort of operations work. They do not create fault lines in a society they exploit existing fault lines, aggravating the divisions, inflating the emotions, turning a disagreement into a battle and a battle into a war.

Personally I think Star Wars: The Last Jediis the best entry in the franchise since Empire, but even then I can recognize that it is not a faultless film, the Cato bright scene, while essential to Finn’s character arc, drags a bit and need a minor rewrite, and some of the elements are heavy handed, look around the world today, the richest people are not arms dealer. Quibbles aside it is wonderful film with strong character, character arcs, and with the most to say about the nature of evil and heroism since the first movie. The very stands it took made it a target for aggrieved people and that made it into tool to be used against us. As I said these fault lines existed before the film and the Russian exploited them brilliantly but we do not have to keep falling for this operation.

It is up to each of us, no matter where we stand on any political spectrum, to resist this attack on our nation, politics, and out culture. This sort of attack cannot defeat us it can only lead us to defeat ourselves.

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My Horror Movie Marathon Experience

This past Saturday The San Diego Film Geeks, a wonderful bunch of people bringing and expanding our city’s cinema experiences, hosted their first 13 hours horror movie marathon Held in the soon to be ComicCon Museum in Balboa Park, the mini-festival boasted six movies from the 70s and 80s, plus a bonus 7th film for those who endurance had not been exhausted. (I am sad to report that my own endurance failed during the sixth film.) The party started about 11:30 am Saturday morning and concluded in the wee early hours of the Sunday. In between features we were treated to snack and lotteries for cool prizes and before each feature a selection of trailers were shown to act as clues to the upcoming movie has the program was a surprise.

The first film was Mother’s Day (1980), an over the top production from Troma Films and directed by a local who now runs the tasty Bread and Cie bakery. It’s the4 story of three women out camping who are abducted by a pair of brothers and brutalized for their mother’s enjoyment, Campy, graphic, and disturbing the movie exists utterly in Troma’s wheelhouse.

Sisters (1972) followed as the next movie. Directed by Brian de Palma and starring Margot Kidder this is a film I had never heard of much less seen. It concerns a young French-Canadian lady and her twin sister with a violent and murderous nature. When Grace a neighbor and also a reporter witnesses a murder that police refuse to believe happened, she investigates uncovering the unnerving secret. Classic 70’s this film concludes with the hero’s pyrrhic victory having revealed the truth but at a price that was far too high.

The third movie of the marathon, Society( 1989) worked the least for me of all the ones I watched. With limited budget, flat cinematography that looks as though it were shot on video, and a disjointed script that is meant to convey paranoia but merely confuses, the movie failed, for me, to convey the sense of a secret society within the rich that consume the rest of America.

The next film Basket Case, though it also suffered from limited production value,worked much better for me. In this movie a young man come to New York city, shot guerilla fashion the film captures the sleaze of early 80s times squares, carrying a wicker basket and an enormous grudge. Bent on revenge the film explores the bonds of brotherhood and who is and isn’t valued by society.

Next came what was perhaps my favorite film of the marathon,Turkey Shoot (1982). Starring Steve Railsback and Olivia Hussey this move hails from the exploitation cycle that came out of Australia. Set in a dystopian near future the story concerns prisoners in a ‘re-education’ camp who are offered their freedom if they participate in a hunt, as the game targeted by elite and insufferable members of the corrupt regime. Though derivative from The Deadliest Game, this movie did a perfectly good job providing excitement with a touch of commentary.

Sadly though I started the sixth, and final official film of the marathon, Night of the Creeps (1986) my energy flagged and that combined with a lack of interest in this presentation conspired to force me to call it an evening and I returned home just after midnight.

For those souls who managed all six movie the bonus movie was Susperia (1977.) I wish I could have seen it but I made the correct call and I’ll catch up with this one on home video.

I had a terrific time and I am very grateful to everyone who made this possible Film Geeks San Diego and their sponsors, Bread and Cie, Lefty’s Pizza, FilmOut San Diego, and the Comicon Museum.

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It’s a Sad Terrible Day

The most depressing truth is that what you believe about Kavanaugh and Ford is principally determined by your political affiliation. I remember when the Monica Lewinski scandal broke during the Clinton administration and hearing liberal friends dismiss her entirely as not attractive enough to warrant Bill Clinton’s attention and later conservative friends commenting that without the infamous blue dress and it’s incriminating stain that the Clinton machine would have savaged and torn Ms. Lewinski apart in the court of public opinion. Of course the process of tearing a woman apart in the court of public opinion is going on right this moment and their concerns have evaporated.

Researching a story that required me to get into the head-space of a sexual assault survivor I have read dozens of survivors stories and I have absolutely no doubt that Dr. Ford is indeed a woman who survived such an assault.

However more important that Dr. Ford’s heartbreaking testimony is Judge Kavanaugh’s evasive response. I scarcely expect any person to confess to sexual crimes committed or attempted but his ‘choir boy’ facade, never drank to excess, had only the deepest respect, focused on study and church is laughably false, contradicted by his own yearbook associates from that time period. It is a lie of Trump-like proportions. It causes serious doubt as to his innocence.

Some have repeated that there is no evidence of the assault, and there is unlikely to be any, not after more than 30 years, but let’s look at the evidence argument.

If Judge Kavanaugh is innocent then he should not only welcome a through investigation of the events by the impartial and professional FBI, he should be demanding it. Hell, from my understanding there is not statute of limitation for that jurisdiction as an officer of the court shouldn’t his position be that the crime must be investigated to its fullest? But that’s is not his position. When directly asked if that was what he wanted he sat silent. Further more he asserted that this was a coordinated political hit, that the entire accusation was revenge for his participation in the Clinton sexual investigations. Hell, if that were the case then even more you would want the FBI poking around, pulling threads, and lifting rocks. If there were such a conspiracy you’d want it exposed. As a partisan you’d want to expose the opposition party with bloody red hands. But there is no evidence of this conspiracy. There is no call to investigate this conspiracy. There is only the accusation, made without support and taken at face value as fact.

So there we are, a woman in tears, recounting her sexual assault and not wavering at all in naming who was responsible and a powerful man insisting, without any evidence at all, that he is the victim of a vast left-wing conspiracy. The simplest explanation tends to be the accurate one and between a drunken assault and a coordinated conspiracy I have no doubt which is simplest.

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Streaming Review: Pitfall

For 2018 the San Diego Film Geeks are holding a yearlong celebration of film noirshowing a different noireach moth at the Digital Gym Cinema and this months movie was Pitfallstarring Dick Powell, Lizabeth Scott, Raymond Burr, and Jane Wyatt. Because I had already had a bad reaction to Dick Powell in Murder my Sweet, I skipped seeing this one with the Film Geeks but instead watched it over two nights at home by way of Amazon Prime Streaming.

Dick Powel plays Johnny an insurance man, bored with his wife, Jane Wyatt, his son, and his life that is stuck in a dull predictable routine. When he has to reclaim items purchased with stolen money from the lovely Mona, Lizabeth Scott, he begins an affair. Mac, Raymond Burr, is a private eye who works on contract for the insurance company and who has developed an unhealthy obsession with Mona. The situation spirals out of control with Mac turning murderous and Johnny realizing the good life he has endangered with his short sighted and selfish drives.

Over all this is the sort of noirI like, an ordinary character drawn into extraordinary circumstances, but my reaction to Dick Powell remained and made me glad I had not seen the film at the theater. Also the final ending where the ‘loose woman’ suffers a terrible outcome but Johnny skates free because that’s the ‘moral’ outcome is a down check on this movie.

Johnny is the sort of wise cracking character that is actually very tricky to play. SF author John Scalzi has a saying, ‘The failure mode of clever is ass.’ It far too easy for someone who thinks they are being clever to come off as an ass and this it would seem turns on performance. Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falconcan wise crack as Sam Spade and it’s endearing, Peter Jurasik in Babylon 5can make you see the humanity within Londo Mollari even as he schemes and makes terrible choices, and Kristen Bell in The Good Placemakes Eleanor Shellstrop a relatable character even when in her own words ‘she’s kind of a monster’ but Dick Powell can’t pull off this trick. When the psychopathic Mac is beating the crap out of Johnny (Dick Powell) in front of his own house I found myself cheering Mac. The things is I’ve seen Powell in other roles and he was just fine, but he cannot walk that fine line between clever and ass. Invariably he falls over into ass.

Next month is Gun Crazyone of my favoritenoirs.

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The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

I want to start this off by saying my blog is not a book review site. While I will occasionally pop on here and yammer about a book I really enjoyed I will not be posting reviews of every book I read and quite unlike with my film reviews I will not come here with a critical take on a novel. The reason is quite simple, I believe that if you are posting honest book reviews then it hampers any working relationship you may have with editors and publishers for your own material. This is a small industry and there are plenty of site and places to get the full spectrum of reviews so for me this will be only about those few books that really hit it off with me.

Certainly one of those is The Calculating Starsby Mary Robinette Kowal. Set in an alternate 1950’s timeline, the novel is about the desperate bid to get humanity into the space and colonizing Mars when Earth’s near term habitability is destroyed by an asteroid strike into the Atlantic Ocean that wipes out the Eastern Seaboard and kick starts a runaway greenhouse effect. The story follows Elma York from her survival of the initial strike, helping establish the accelerated colony program, and her quest to become an astronaut, a daunting challenge for a woman in 1950’s America,

Ms. Kowal has a deft prose style that allows for fast action, large stakes, but without sacrificing deep character and meaningful relationships. Given the setting and the central drive of the character the novel explores the nature of various forms of bias in American culture both in the 1950s and sadly quite still with us today. The exploration of that bias never, for me, crosses the line into peachiness or lecturing and Ms. Kowal gives her protagonists the freedom to have their own biases, which are challenged over the course of the character’s growth.

Ms. Kowal also co-hosts a writing podcast Writing Excusesand it was listening to her theories and practices on the craft of writing that prompted me to give her novel a try.

The Calculating Starsis a prequel to the author’s previous works but it was the first prose fiction I have read by Ms. Kowal. That said the piece stands firmly and quit ably on its own and I feel no one need have read anything else to come into the book. The sequel, The Fated Skyis already out and will soon be joining my library.

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DVD Review: Top Secret!

Saturday I added to my movie library with the DVD of Paramount’s comedy Top Secret!. From the disturbed minds of Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker, this was their follow-up film to the smash hit Airplane!. (Yes, these guys do like their exclamation points.) Top Secret! failed to find an audience at the theaters and the movie, despite launching the career of Val Kilmer, quickly vanished. yet for many us the movie lives on as one of our favorite absurdist comedies. “Weird Al” Yankovic has this movie as a personal favorite.

American pop singer Nick Rivers (Val Kilmer) comes to East Germany to perform in an international cultural festival. However the East Germans, all uniformed and acting like WWII Nazi’s, are using the festival as a diversion while they destroy the NATO submarine fleet. Nick becomes involved with Hillary, daughter of a kidnapped scientist making a super weapon for the East Germans, and soon he and the French Resistance, yes the French Resistance in 1980’s East Germany this is part of the absurdist comedy, make a desperate bid the free the scientist and save the day, but there is a traitor among the resistance threatening everything.

If you have seen the previous film Airplane!Then you know the zany style that the filmmakers utilized in such an over the top plot. Unlike Airplane!, there were no parade of stars playing against type in Top Secret!, one of the elements that I think added to the box office failure. Additionally Airplane!came at the end of a nearly decade long run of disaster movies and satirized them perfectly but Top Secret!is parodying the WWII resistance move, combined with the teen pop musical, and neither style of film had been popular for decades so it was targeting forms that perhaps many in the audience had never seen.

The disc is spare on bonus features, boasting only an audio commentary track and a few deleted or altered scenes.

The movie has become a cult favorite and it still never fails to bring my mood up whenever I watch it.

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A Political Proposal for 2019

In an earlier post I suggested that the odds of the Democratic Party taking bot the Senate and the House were about 1/9, given that the odds for the House was, at that time 1/6 and the Senate 1/3. But on a recent 538 podcast I learn that I was in error, because I had treated the House and Senate as separate events but they are conjoined in the forces that create the outcomes and that the odds of the Democratic sweep is about 1/3. There is practically no scenario where the Democratic Party gains the senate and does not also gain the House.

So 1 in 3 are odds that favor the Republicans but they are from far impossible. Aside from much needed oversight of the Administration, and given that President Trump will be disinclined to sign into law Democratic objectives what should the Democratic Party push for should they control both all of Congress?

The most pressing issue we are currently facing is securing our elections from foreign interference and the most important election to secure is the Presidential one. Given our Federal system and directly managing elections is a responsibility of the various states I think the best measure to secure our presidential contests is to ditch the Electoral College and go to a direct popular vote for President. That of course requires a Constitutional Amendment.

Getting a constitutional amendment out of congress is difficult. It requires a 2/3 vote in both Houses and no matter how steep a hypothetical blue wave may appear in November it will not deliver those sort of the numbers. That I think should not dissuade the Democrats should they take the Senate and House. They should draft the amendment and make the Republicans take a very public stand on the issue of direct popular election of the President. This is not something that the Republicans want to vote for, in recent history they have benefited from the electoral misfires where the Electoral College installed the loser of the popular vote but let them stand before the American people and argue that the winner should not necessarily be the winner of the vote total. An additional benefit to doing this now is that a Constitutional Amendment does not require Presidential assent. The proposal should it pass, proceeds directly to the state for ratification, Trump would be out of the process. Again the climbs to pass this would be steep, there are more red states than blue one but a hard fight is one worth winning. Again let those who stand against the proposal argue why the will of the people must be subservient to the Electoral College.

Yes, there are those who argue that popular vote means the candidates could ignore smaller states, but today we have a situation where the largest states are ignored. No Republican contests in California and no Democratic candidate fights for Texas, winner takes all means it is foolish to waste resources in those states. With direct popular vote the Republican votes in California and the Democratic ones in Texas are valuable not wasted and the 21st century allows candidates to compete nationally in a manner not foreseen by the drafters of the Constitution. The Electoral College system in addition to naturally occurring misfires opens lines of attack for foreign enemies. They do not need to sway an entire nation, or even millions of people, just a handful in a few select states are enough to throw our process into chaos, weakening our nation and damaging out standing in the world. Direct popular vote would also tamp down the extremes of both parties, bringing a bit of sanity back to our government. If the Democratic Party wins in both houses, unlikely but possible, that should move to secure our elections and our future.

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Why Did You Make That Character {X}?

A common question I see people pose authors is often a variant of  “Why Did {Character} have to be [X]? Where the X is gay/ethnic/transgender/sex or some other classification that less often found in fiction and media. What I find fascinating about the inquiry is the assumptions that underline the question, that a character that is not representative of the ‘norm’ has to have their existence justified, that there must a reason, a sufficient reason, for creating a character with the questioned identity. The inverse of that is very rarely asked. Characters with common attributes are simply accepted.

Now sometimes a character is a member of a group because the story requires it in order to explore what the creator what to talk about. These are usually stories about bias, prejudice, and the way we treat the others. In my Nationalized Space novel Seth is an American for that very reason. Being an America, a man from a declined empire, is essential to the story and to the character. But there are lots of stories where the character isn’t there to explore injustice and prejudice. People of all stripes exist in stories beyond the injustices their groups have suffered and they should not be ghettoed to only stories about their pain.

If I make a character that occupies a role other than the expected ones it is usually because that is how the character works for me. I’ll start with just free form thinking about the character, imagining their relationship, their history, getting a sense have how they ‘taste’ in my mind. When an aspect feels right it gets locked in, aspects that scrape against the character, as they exist in my mind are rejected. It’s an intuitive process that doesn’t go for the default but rather questions in what way does this character not fit the default. The truth is that all of us vary from expected defaults and finding those way in fictional persons help make them deeper and more realistic simulations of persons rather than simply a collection of attributes fulfilling plot functions.

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An Unshakable Association

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I find it curious just how easily a powerful association can be forged. Take the song above, every time I hear it, every time I head just the opening bars of that melody, my minds instantly flies back through the decades to a metropolitan transit buss, a cold cloudy grey winter’s day and the song playing though the headphones of my Walkman.

It was the winter of 1987 and I was taking courses at San Diego City College. One of my classes was an introduction to Western Civilization. I enjoyed the course, found the material fascinating, but what sticks with me is the crush I had on a fellow student, Suhara.

I had just come out of a relationship, adrift in the Sargasso of isolation when romance has failed, and found Suhara utterly compelling. She was an Iraqi, and it was from her that I learned the proper pronunciation of Iraq, looked like an Arabic Kirstie Alley, was smart as a whip — she was supplementing her course work at UCSD, and was engaged to be married, so there was never any possibility of a relationship beyond study partners and a passing friendship.

The winter of that semester as finals approached we made a study date at the library on the campus of UCSD and that was the cause of that afore mentioned bus trip. I brought along a couple of cassette tapes of music to pass the time as the bus ride took nearly an hour; isn’t mass transit grand? As I sat there, my head against the window, I can’t read on a moving vehicle and so music was my solace, the cool class against my forehead, the slate grey clouds spanning the sky from horizon to horizon, the song played, and forged an association that is unbroken to this day.

The thing is it isn’t even really about Suhara. I doubt that today I could honestly pull her out of a line up of similar looking women. It was a crush, an infatuation; we didn’t know each other enough for anything more significant to have formed emotionally. But still the song, the bus ride, that winter’s day, is forever locked together in my mind, a tangled knot that can never be unwound. That’s the power of the human mind to form links between experiences and their emotional triggers. It’s one of the defining elements of our existence that the powerful emotional reactions imprint on our selves and follow us for the rest of our years.

Be kind to each other, be good to each other, you never know what impression you are making that will echo through the decades.

Post Script:

And on the short drive from home to work what song played on the radio? California Dreaming.

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