Category Archives: Culture

Why Was Andor So Good

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It’s been a year since the Star Wars franchise spin-off of a spin-off Andor completed its second and final season with the last episode flowing seamlessly into Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and for many people Andor represented the best material since the original trilogy.

But why is that? What makes this limited series of just two dozen episodes so compelling and so vibrant compared to the rest of the vast and sprawling additions to that ‘galaxy far, far away’?

I think the answer lies in part in the cultural environment that the series was released into. Star Wars hit the box office in the late seventies, a period when the old Hollywood studio system was effectively dead before the mega-corporations took control, when the ‘young Turks’ and their Producer Unit system dictated the industry. These young, rebellious filmmakers explored themes of loss and cynicism with films that dominated the public’s attention. Even when the protagonists of these films claimed victories at the end of their struggles they proved to be Pyrrhic ones. Michael becomes everything he did not want to be at the conclusion of The Godfather, or their victories came at terrible prices such as the death of Father Karras in The Exorcist. These examples don’t even touch the cases where there was no victory, only soul-crushing defeat for the characters, such as at the end of The Stepford Wives.

Star Wars, a straightforward tale of good vs evil where it is unquestioned that evil will fall, exploded into the setting with an undeniable dynamism and optimism. In a nation that still reeled from political turmoil, senseless violence in its cities, and the unfathomable loss in a distant Asian country, this film, which at first blush appeared to have no cynical subtext, was received like a miracle cure for the ailment dogging the American spirit. In combination with Jaws two years earlier, it created the summer blockbuster and reshaped not only film production and distribution but the course of the culture for the next few decades. Studio after studio and production company after production company chased the enormous dollars that seemingly lay in simple adventures, clearly defined good and evil characters, and hopeful narratives leaving the darker, moodier, and more challenging stories from Blade Runner to The Thing to fail at the box office and only be recognized for their artistic merits many years later.

So how does Andor, a story where our protagonists commit murder as the easiest path out of their troubles, kill allies that they perceive to be a threat, willfully allow others to fly to their doom in order to protect their secret, and whose ‘villains’ gain our sympathies as they struggle against the same impersonal bureaucracy that enslaves the galaxy even as they viciously and ruthlessly hunt our ‘heroes,’ compel such admiration and love from its audience?

By the time Andor came to production, the American culture had changed quite dramatically, coming full circle from the 1970s back into a wary and tired cynicism, but after decades of hopeful, optimistic media the public taste for something that reflected the world they knew had grown quite intense, setting the table for something as ethically questionable as Andor to satisfy that hunger. Where audiences in the 70s needed escape from the bleak times, audiences of the 2020s wanted to see their times reflected back at them, but with the promise that victory, even if costly, remained a possible outcome. The enemy’s competence, once a source of derision such as with the marksmanship of the Imperial Stormtroopers, could be recognized even as their villainy remained patently obvious.

And that brings us to the second element that I think contributes greatly to Andor’s success in these times: the depth of the characters.

It is wrong and an injustice to both Andor and Star Wars to label their characters as either ‘complex’ or ‘simple.’ The truth of the matter is that these are very different genres of storytelling, and I do not mean science-fiction or fantasy, but something much more basic than that. Star Wars is a fairy tale, even opening with a revised version of ‘Once upon a time …’ with ‘A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away …’. Andor is a drama, not a fairy tale.

In a fairy tale characters are presented with far less depth, often representing archetypes instead of fully realized humans. The Princess, the Knight, the Thief with a heart of gold, The Mentor, the Dark Knight, and the villainous, corrupt King: all these are stock representations of character and not characters in and of themselves. These archetypes often lack depth but that does not make them bad characters, it makes them the right characters for the story that is being told.

Dramatic characters tell different stories: they do not tell fairy tales but stories of relatable characters facing relatable issues, even if the environment where they face those issues is fantastic. Andor’s Dedra Meero is a villain. She tortures prisoners, and is willing to murder entire populations, but she also is conflicted by some of her actions, she mourns the cost of her dedication, and weeps at the loss of a love she thought she had won. These elements of her life do not make her ‘superior’ to Star Wars’ Grand Moff Tarkin, who displays not a moment of doubt and slaughters entire planets as a mere display of power. Both characters serve their respective genres. Cassian Andor, when faced with the accidental death of a corporate police officer, does not hesitate to kill a survivor, an action that Luke Skywalker would never even consider, much less commit.

Andor is not better than Star Wars; to compare the two is like comparing a painting to a sculpture. The reason so many people took Andor to heart is because like Star Wars in the 70s it is what they hungered for, even if they did not know it.

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Thinking About The Batman

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Bruce Wayne, AKA The Batman, is an enduring character that first emerged in 1939 from the pages of Detective Comics and has been with us in some form ever since. Recently, I have been noticing a number of posts that seem to place the version of the character presented in the Zack Snyder films as the ‘best’ version. Now, Snyder’s fans are vocal and intense just as fans, which is a perfectly fine expression of devotion, but I cannot find myself in agreement with them on this. One of the clips that they post and re-post is the fight between Batman and a number of thugs in a warehouse where Batman has come to rescue a woman held under a threat of being murdered.( I am being vague for those who have not seen Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.) This to me, and that film in general, do a disservice to the essential nature of the character.

Batman, despite predating the term’s general use in fiction or film, is for all purposes a noirdetective and that is what resides at the heart of the character. He investigates and exposes crimes and criminals with his brilliance, but like another fictional character, Sherlock Holmes, is adept at combat in all its forms because his opponents are never shy about employing violence. It is perhaps a strange quirk of fictional evolution that over time the two characters, Holmes and Wayne, who shared so much in skill and ability, diverged until what is glorified in each comes at the cost of their full skill set. Holmes, despite in the text as being proficient in so many forms of combat, becomes primarily an intellectual and Wayne, despite being brilliant, is noted for an impressive array of martial arts, his devotion to deduction mostly forgotten.

This reaches its apotheosis in the clip posted and re-posted by the Snyder fans. It is from a film in which Batman’s intelligence and detective skills are utterly forgotten as the character is manipulated and led to plainly false conclusions by the film’s principal villain.

Perhaps this is why my favorite cinematic Batman is Matt Reeves The Batman which, while showing elaborate hand-to-hand skill, is much more of a film noir than a martial arts experience. Even when Bruce Wayne fails to grasp the true nature of a clue he remains at heart a detective, untangling a complex web of cause and effect and ultimately not only uncovering the villain but his true self at the same time.

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Wakanda and Westeros

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Two of the great cultural fictional kingdoms of recent times, kingdoms that have been taken to heart and have occupied the minds of millions, are Westeros and Wakanda.

Westeros, from the mind of author George R.R. Martin, and thrust into the vast public consciousness by the impressive HBO show Game of Thrones, is the fantasy kingdom where treachery, murder, incest, dragons, and ancient magical powers vie for the throne that ruled over the island continent.

Wakanda, from the pages of Marvel Comics and the hit feature films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is home to the secretive tribes that discovered the rare and fantastical abilities of the fictional metal Vibranium and the super-science that it allowed.

Each fictional setting presented its kingdom in crisis and civil war: Westeros plunged into a long and bloody affair when the succession line became tangled and powerful lords arrayed against one another, while in Wakanda, unpleasant secrets surfaced, bringing a murderous thug to victory in the trial by combat that defined their succession. (Yes, I am aware that by some definitions the trial never finished and as such Killmonger’s ascension was never official, that is not the point here.)

In each case we, the audience, are supposed to believe that the matter has been resolved in a manner where we can rest easy and that the troubles lie in these lands’ pasts. In Westeros, Brandon Stark, gifted with sight beyond time and space and wisdom born of his magical gifts, sits upon the throne with benevolence and good will, to rule justly. While in Wakanda, with the would-be dictator and global threat dead, T’Challa, the Black Panther, sits on the throne undoing the centuries of isolation and bringing his nation and his people into the global community, ruling, presumably, as justly as the fictional king Brandon Stark.

But neither kingdom corrected the actual root cause of their terrible troubles.

In both cases the kingdoms are presided over by absolute monarchs whose powers are unconstrained, with their every whim and proclamation passing instantly into law and action. Brandon may be a good and supernaturally wise man. T’Challa is a good man with a good heart, but they are mere mortal men, doomed to die and pass on these unchecked powers to another. The warning is not that bad men should be kept from the thrones of kingdoms but that the powers of any ruler, king or president, must be checked or eventually they pass to those unworthy, untrustworthy, and whose appetites can never be satisfied.

It is a lesson that extends far beyond the borders of fantasies and comic books.

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Should Firearm Owners be Held Responsible for the Misuse of Their Weapons?

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San Diego this week suffered yet another mass murder tragedy when two young men, one apparently still legally a boy and the other legally an adult, murdered three people at a local Islamic center and mosque before taking their own lives. It is a terrible history that this city has at least three times has been thrust into the national spotlight for this sort of violence; Brenda Spencer in 1979 when she opened fire on an elementary school, killing two adults, injuring eight children, and a police officer, James Huberty in July 1984 when he killed 22 and injured another 19 at a McDonald’s, and now this act of brutality.

Early reports, and it should always be kept in mind that early reports are often erroneous and littered with mistakes, indicate that the firearms were taken from the parents of one of the cowardly killers. This week’s attack is not the first in which the perpetrators obtained their weaponry from others who legally possessed the firearms. The unsecured nature of the firearms is in these particular cases a crucial element in the chain that led to murderous disaster.

Gun safety advocates often attempt to pass laws that would require firearms in the home to be secured in a gun safe to prevent theft and misuse while gun rights enthusiasts dispute such proposals usually upon the lines that rapid access to firearms is necessary for self-defense in the home and that the expense of gun safes is in effect a tax with the purpose to depress ownership rather than any actual and practical safety concern.

Should firearm owners who do not secure their firearms in a manner that precludes easy theft or use by an unauthorized person face either criminal or civil accountability?

In criminal law there is the doctrine of felony murder which stipulates that anyone who participates in a felony crime can be held legally responsible for murders that are committed in the commission of that offense even if the person did not actively participate in the killing directly. A getaway driver outside of the bank being robbed is equally guilty of murder as the man who gunned-down the security guard inside the bank.

It is clear that felony murder doesn’t apply to people who have had their firearms taken without their consent or with no knowledge of the crime that is about to be committed with them. Any criminal liability would have to come from new legislation passed with that clear intent. Is such a course wise?

Perhaps.

It is clear from the sheer number of unsecured firearms in homes across the nation that to rely on the inherent responsibility of their owners is a fool’s errand. It is also clear that such proposals would face fierce opposition from the gun rights community. There was a township in the state of Georgia that passed a local ordinance making it a crime to leave a firearm in an unlocked motor vehicle. That’s it, if you left a gun in your car you had to lock the car. The conservative state government in the next session amended their supremacy laws to make such a local ordinance void. It is hard to imagine a more benign restriction of firearms possession but even that proved to be a bridge too far. I doubt any such legislation as required firearms be secured and that the owners would share in some criminal liability for unsecured guns used in crimes could ever see the light of day.

Civil liability has a better shot at viability but that requires private civil actions that incur expensive legal actions and to be honest, civil penalties carry not the weight and fear that criminal ones do.

In the short term there is no solution to this nation’s gun death troubles, of which about half are suicides but being self-inflicted doesn’t make those deaths any less tragic or any less worthy of prevention. The truth of the matter is that this is. deep cultural infection and one that has hounded our nation for generations and will likely carry on for generations more.

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A Lethal Literary Trope

Tropes, in prose and in cinema, are commonly used ideas or conventions that are at once familiar and if overused trite and cliche. Enemies-to-Lovers, The Real Enemy is the Best Friend, The Chosen One, The Hidden Society or World, are but a tiny sampling of well-worn tropes. The Harry Potterfranchise makes extensive use of two, Harry is the Chosen One, destined by prophecy to end the villain’s reign and life, and the entire ‘Wizarding World’ is hidden from the rest of humanity, existing in a secret space just outside of the public’s knowledge.

Used correctly tropes can make the world building of a piece of fiction faster and more easily grasped by the reader or audience; subverted they generate surprise and a fresh perspective that can illuminate actual reality; and badly deployed or overused they become cliches that tarnish and degrade a work. But something that is less considered is the danger a trope can present to the world that the reader or audience lives in, when a trope ceases to be a device for fiction and is taken on as a representation of reality.

The hidden but vast conspiracy, such as vampires, aliens, or a cabal of ultra-wealthy Satanists, who manipulate the world’s events, is, in my opinion, a terribly dangerous trope because it aligns so closely with actual paranoid delusions held by far too many.

In 1988’s John Carpenter’s They Live, adapted from the short story Eight O’clock in the Morningby Ray Nelson, a down on his luck itinerant worker, Nada, stumbles onto the fact that human society is being managed by extraterrestrial aliens who keep humanity in a perpetual state of perceptional blindness in order to craft the global capitalist culture by which they extract the world’s resources with the assistance of a small cabal of quislings that have betrayed the rest of the world for personal wealth and power. Nada, after a brief spree of killing the aliens as he encounters them, joins a band of resistance fighters and, in clear trope fashion, succeeds in revealing the vast conspiracy to the wider population.

Carpenter, whose political leanings are clearly on the left side of the accepted spectrum, intended his film to be a critique of capitalism and specifically the culture around the American Republican Party and the head of that party at the time President Ronald Reagan. However, not everyone interpreted his satire in the manner that Carpenter intended.

American neo-Nazis saw a very clear metaphor in the film, one that reflected and validated their own twisted conspiratorial delusions. To them the movie was very boldly speaking about the international influence and control exerted by ‘the Jews.’  Carpenter augmented this interpretation by not only having the aliens occupying the very top of American society, including the presidency itself, but they also lived and worked in the most common of professions, putting in their hours as beat cops and random businessmen on the streets — a bit of clumsy worldbuilding that validated the delusional and evil beliefs of the neo-Nazis and their ilk.

I do wonder just how much of the conspiratorial culture we suffer today was fertilized by the paranoid political thrillers of the 1970s. The movies that espoused the idea that the CIA manipulated events, that every assassination is evidence of secret plots operating behind the scene. Hell, how much of the moon landing hoax was supercharged by Capricorn One and its faked Mars mission plot? What looks ‘popcorn movies’ that only existing to pass a few hours are really ideas. Ideas that in the true sense of the word ‘meme’ take hold in people’s minds and spread like a virus.

This goes beyond the poorly thought out worldbuilding of They Live and into the heart of the story conceit, that, in the face of all reason and evidence, it is possible for a vast and all-powerful conspiracy to exist in the world. It doesn’t matter that in the end this is a silly and overly simple adventure story, the foundations of that story validates the very concept of that vast conspiracy. People may come away knowing that aliens aren’t real, but they ‘know’ that conspiracies are and the subtle effect of such tales is to reinforce and nurture such fantasies that are mistaken for reality.

Antisemitism is a live and terrible thing in our world. It is not a thing born of fantasies but one that is driven by dark and twisted ones, clumsy and ill-considered employment of conspiratorial tropes feeds into and reinforces it. There is not a direct line between stories like They Live and events such as The Tree of Life mass murder, but because the line is not straight or easily seen doesn’t mean that no connections exist. Stories shape how we see the world, what we believe to be true and what is false and they also instruct us how to fight the evil that they present. Because of this I think that vast and all powerful conspiracies need to be used in fiction with extreme caution and perhaps best of all, never.

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People Should Not be Idolized

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My sweetie-wife has the day off today from her job with the county as it is a holiday recognized by the state of California, Farmworkers Day. If that seems like a clumsy and unwieldy name for a holiday it is because until very recently it was Cesar Chavez Day in recognition of the labor organizer and leader. However, recent and apparently credible allegations have emerged that in addition to his work for farmworkers’ rights, the man also sexually abused people under his control and influence. I have not read deeply, or at all, into the allegations and as such I have no opinion on their validity, but this is yet another example in my book as to why people should not place anyone on any sort of moral pedestal.

The sad and self-evident truth is that people are complex and nearly everyone is a volatile mixture of things both morally good and morally reprehensible. Washington owned slaves, and no amount of noble and impressive action as part of the clique that founded the United States of America can erase that he held other people in bondage. Jefferson held people in bondage and raped some, and yet he also spoke eloquently about the inherent right to freedom. He was both a visionary and a monster. Erasing Chavez’s name from the holiday is the right move and you know what, I’d be perfectly happy erasing every holiday that celebrates a particular named person.

One of the central, enduring, and often missed themes of Frank Herbert’s Dune was that charismatic leaders are bad for your health. To save himself and his family Paul plunged that universe into a religious war that slaughtered billions. In that fictional setting he was revered and honored and he remained a monster.

Perhaps the most important thing we can recognize in our reality is that there are very, very few ‘heroes’ and we should not be surprised or shocked when a leader, an artist, or anyone who has clawed their way to an achievement turns out to be as flawed as the billions that share their genetic heritage.

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Minneapolis Proclaims: Don’t Tread on Us

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It has been heartbreaking and inspiring to watch and hear the events unfolding in the city of Minneapolis. Heartbreaking that our government flooded the streets with masked, unidentified thugs in unmarked vehicles acting with at best reckless abandon and quite arguably murderous intent against that community. Inspiring that the people of Minneapolis came together in profound unity, organizing networks to protect, assist, and safeguard their fellow community members with everything from people who stood watch in the freezing winter temperatures to those standing outside the center where the thuggish government released people into the snow and ice without cold weather gear, without their possessions, making sure each and every one was safe. That, to me, is the spirit of America, the Spirit of 1776, not the arrogant parading about with long guns trying to intimidate your fellow citizens.

It would seem that the architects of this pogrom failed to see that this sort of reaction might occur. They had no real plan to deal with a community that not only refused to assist them but actively and with deep and wide coordination opposed them. Why? Why were they so blind to this possibility?

I think it is because the people behind this heinous operation, the attempted occupation of an American city are at heart, racists.

Most people have a very difficult time getting out of their heads to see the world from another’s point of view.  People tend to think that everyone thinks and feels the way that they do, that they see the world through the same lens. In fact, they are ignorant of their own lens and assume that they objectively see reality and not an interpretation that has been filtered by their own history and biases. One of the more challenging aspects of fiction writing, and one not every author published or not achieves, is successfully climbing into that point of view that is alien to your own. It is a difficult task at the best of times, requires not only effort but sustained practice, and with a charged subject such as religion or politics it can be nearly impossible. Overlaid with the disease of racism, it becomes unthinkable.

The thought that people, particularly white people, might come together for their neighbors when their neighbors had darker skin and spoke accented English or foreign languages, risking their own liberties and lives is utterly alien to the racist. They wouldn’t get in the way; They wouldn’t risk anything of theirs for someone who wasn’t like them. As such they were blind to people who see community as something that transcends color and language.

It is not over. Not in Minneapolis, not for America, but Minneapolis shows us the way, Minneapolis gives us hope and now we must find our courage as they found theirs.

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Art Is Choices Not Prompts

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With generative A.I. getting more and more capable in nearly all areas but particularly in creating video imagery there have been a number of voices, not industry voices mind you, proclaiming the death of Hollywood with some short video piece that they crafted.

The videos are impressive for what they are, a machine mimicking the data that has been fed into it, but there is so much more to a film, a novel, a painting or any other art than how it appears in its final form. Art is about the choices the artist made along the path of creation and not just the final product that was created.

Some artists are very intellectual, plotting out every detail of their art, knowing with deliberate decision why everything is the way it is, why that color was employed and not some other hue, why the character has that particular name. Other artists work more from hunches and intuition, making decisions on the fly, exploring the piece as they create it. Why that color? It just seemed right. Both types, and every type in between, are making choices, and those choices in aggregate create what is the style and voice of the artist. It is the sum of the choices that let us look at a movie and tell the difference from one directed by James Cameron and one directed by Steven Spielberg, why a song by Taylor Swift doesn’t sound like one from Danny Elfman, why a novel from Kazuo Ishiguro hits different than one from Gail Carriger.

That voice that is generated by the thousands and thousands of choices made by the artist is a product of the artist, the events of their lives, and the way they see and interpret the world around them. It is why only they could have produced that one piece of art, because it is a reflection of everything that they are, had been, and how they are interacting with the world at that exact moment of creation.

Generative A.I. does not make choices, it uses probability on what the next word, or pixel is going to be, probability that is derived from the blending of all the similar data that it has been fed. Mind you, that is still a vast powerful tool. An A.I. powered grammar review will nearly all the time catch when you have typed “tub” when you meant “tube” making it a powerful assist in catching those nasty little errors, but it has no voice. Generative A.I. has no opinions on the world, it has never suffered heartbreak of love not returned nor the heights of joyous love that is returned. It’s an impressive parrot regurgitating with stunning ability what it has been fed, but by that very nature what it creates is bland, without the strong point of view that makes art last.

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Life, Uninterrupted

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Not a lot going on at the moment in my life, just the usual day to day action, reactions, and observations that is the slow steady passing of time from today to tomorrow. Certainly, there is a tremendous amount going on in the world but I am far from inclined to write even short posts about the terrible state of the United States. Those inclined to see it my way already do and those who are not so inclined are for all effective purposes immune to any arguments I might make. This is the reason why I am so terrible at Twitter. I see a stupid post from some random person I scroll right on by.  There’s nothing to gain from arguing with strangers on the internet. When I do respond to a post it is nearly always because I personally know that person. Even then I merely note and move on from most of their posts without interaction.

I have started a new novel but it’s very vague at this time and I am just sort of feeling my way through the opening chapters to see if I can uncover the voice for this book before committing myself to its creation.

My Sweetie-Wife and I watched Predators: Badlands a film I suspect will slip quietly and quickly from my memory. It is not bad; it is very competently crafted but I never crossed the gulf of empathy between myself and the characters. Taking us into the Yautja culture robbed them of most of their power as a force and the character came off as pretty one-note.

In anticipation of the next season, I have begun a  rewatch of Dune: Prophecy  the HBO series about the founding of the Bene Gesserit, and it’s just as wonderful on the second watch as it was on the first and like The Godfather, a rewatching actually helps me with the tangled and dense plotting.

Last night I watched the trailer for the Netflix series How to get to Heaven from Belfast and had the most enjoyable reaction to a trailer that I have experienced in a very long time. This quickly shot up the list for something for us to watch in our household.

You know when the manufacturer suggests a part should be replaced annually, that’s something to listen to, I was shaving Monday morning and felt a strange sensation against my cheek and something pinged off the countertop. A part of the electric shaver head had abandoned its post and one of the two metal foils that cover the cutting surface had sprung up. I wasn’t cut in any way and a replaced head showed up quickly via Amazon. My order history showed that it had been two years to the month since I had replaced the head that should be replaced annually.

And that, my friends is my life, mostly dull, somewhat creative, and at least a little entertaining.

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Helen of Troy Wasn’t Real

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Later this year we’ll get Christopher Nolan’s next epic and chronologically scrambled film, his adaptation of The Odyssey. I’m a fan of Nolan’s work, in general, Interstellar mistakes cynicism for wisdom — a fault that often appears when he works with his brother Jonathan — so I expect to put my butt in the theater when this is released.

Rumors have slipped out and I do not believe that they have been verified that Nolan has cast actor Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the mythical reason for the war and destruction of Troy. As Ms. Nyong’o is far from the Aryan ideal of feminine beauty, the usual quarters of the internet have released their hateful monkeys, pretending to be aghast at this ‘historical inaccuracy.’

Daniel Benavides – Creative Commons License

First off, Helen of Troy is a fictional character.  There is no ‘historical accuracy’ in any casting of her. She probably doesn’t look like how Homer or anyone of his time would have pictured the subject of the epics, but that hardly matters. Beauty and what is considered beautiful is such a slippery concept, shifting so quickly from culture to culture and, hell, from year to year within the same culture. No, the intense ‘debate’ has little to do with history and much more to do with weak and scared people needing something, particularly culture, to reassure them that they are the best in the universe and that their pale skin is evidence of that fact. ( I am pretty damned pale myself, but all that really means is that I consider the sun an evil force.)

This is not the first time we have been subjected to this vile nastiness cosplaying as ‘accuracy.’

When Marvel released Thor in 2011, there were the same cries and thumping of sunken chests over the casting of Idris Elba as Heimdall. Again, we were assaulted with the argument it wasn’t ‘accurate’ as though Heimdall existed in reality and not simply the product of mead-induced story-telling.

1989’s Batman saw the same thing erupt, though with far less notoriety due to that being the pre-internet age, with the casting of Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent. Again, a fictional character though this time one with a history of being depicted visually.

Lupita Nyong’o is not only a fantastically attractive person, she is a highly skilled and proficient actor, someone who has mastered her craft. If she is playing Helen of Troy, I will be perfectly fine with that and will find it far, far easier to suspend my disbelief than when I was assailed with Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist.

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