tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54832511078277185642024-03-12T19:23:38.311-07:00Vulgar Gratitude"I don't feel any sort of vulgar gratitude towards you. In fact, I rather feel as though it is you who ought to be thanking me."
-Harold SkimpoleTMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5483251107827718564.post-51109494318881987052019-04-01T12:35:00.005-07:002019-04-01T12:37:04.890-07:00A Game of Feels: The Radical Empathy of Game of Thrones<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This is a reblog of an article I wrote for Tor.com which can be found <a href="https://www.tor.com/2019/04/01/a-game-of-feels-the-radical-empathy-of-game-of-thrones/">here</a></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">One of the most compelling moments in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels (and the era-defining television show that bears the name of the first book) is not one of the author’s signature shocking deaths, displays of unrelenting cruelty, or visceral battles. Rather, it is a quiet moment of expanding empathy wherein the audience is forced to acknowledge the complexity of a character who had, up until that point, served only as a font of villainy.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The character in question is Jaime Lannister, handsome son of privilege, whose incestuous relationship with his twin sister, casual maiming of a ten-year-old, and general aura of arrogant self-satisfaction when it comes to his martial prowess paints him as something as close to the primary villain of the first two novels as Martin’s capacious and complicated series can muster. And yet, in book three, <em style="border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">A Storm of Swords</em>, Jaime Lannister, a surprise narrator after spending most of the previous book imprisoned, reveals to his traveling companion that the very act that earned him the nickname “Kingslayer” and gave him the reputation of being a man without honor is, in fact, the noblest thing he has done in his life. Martin reveals that Jaime Lannister saved hundreds of thousands of lives by slaying the king he was sworn to protect, murdering the Mad King in order to prevent him from giving the order to burn the capital city to the ground.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">In many ways, that moment changed not only the arc of Jaime Lannister’s character, not only the course of the novel, but the entire thesis of Martin’s series.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Prior to that, Martin’s seeming priorities had been with exploring the lives of the abject, powerless, and underestimated. Jaime’s brother Tyrion, all but parroting the author, explains <span class="content-footnote" data-footnote-index="1" data-footnote="Martin, George. A Game of Thrones. Bantam paperback edition, 1997, p. 244." style="border: 0px; cursor: pointer; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“I have a tender spot in my heart for cripples and bastards and broken things.”</span> Up until <em style="border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">A Storm of Swords</em>, the overwhelming majority of Martin’s narrators are people who were, by turns, loathed, pitied, or ignored by the vast majority of Westerosi society: women, children, bastard children, people with physical and cognitive disabilities, ethnic minorities, people who were too ugly, or fat, or queer, or frightened to be taken seriously by the world. Essentially, <em style="border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">ASoIaF</em> was an exercise in telling a story about power from the perspective of the powerless. By introducing Jaime Lannister as a narrator and forcing us to see not only his bleak future (wherein he reckons with his self-worth after the amputation of his sword hand), but his storied past as worthy of our consideration, Martin embarks on a bold new project: telling a story about political intrigue, bloody dynastic struggle, and personal power plays where no character is irrevocably beyond the reach of his readers’ empathy.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Five books and seven seasons into Martin’s narrative and HBO’s re-envisioning of it, we are given a story where no conflict occurs in which the reader feels truly, wholeheartedly on board with the outcome and the costs involved. We cheer Tyrion’s clever defeat of Stannis Baratheon at the Battle of the Blackwater, for example, while simultaneously being horrified by the deaths of Davos Seaworth’s sons as a direct result of Tyrion’s plan. This raises a number of thorny questions that are worth exploring here: how does Martin manage to make a narrative known for its uncompromising cruelty one in which there are so many characters with whom we can empathize? How can a television series faithfully render that cruelty visually and viscerally without further alienating viewers? What, precisely, are the limits of Martin’s project? Are there places where we as viewers and readers are no longer able to follow beloved characters?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Martin is relentless in his desire to humanize some of his most spectacularly unpleasant characters. A prime example is Theon, the ward of the Stark family and a character who, in the first two novels, exists primarily to underscore the perils of divided loyalty. While Martin is more than willing to explore the many nuances of what it means to be a political captive amidst a very nice family of captors, he also, in making Theon a narrator in <em style="border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">A Clash of Kings</em>, does not give the character much room to gain the sympathies of the reader. He sleeps with women he treats cruelly and gleefully abandons, turns on his beloved adopted brother for the sake of his cruel biological father, murders a number of beloved Stark family retainers when he captures their undefended castle, and seemingly dies having made poor leadership choices and having managed to inspire no loyalty.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Martin leaves Theon to an uncertain fate for the next two novels before bringing him back in <em style="border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">A Dance With Dragons</em> as the mutilated, traumatized manservant/pet of the sadistic Ramsay Bolton. At no point does Martin offer much in the way of an explanation for Theon’s previous behavior. His emotional abuse of his sex partners, betrayal of his family and friends, narcissism, and cowardice are all left intact. And this leaves the viewer with a thorny question: what does it take to redeem a thoroughly terrible person?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The TV series, with its necessary edits and need for visual storytelling, largely paints Theon’s redemption as the result of outsized physical torment. While the Theon of Martin’s novel is far more disfigured than Alfie Allen’s portrayal, the vast majority of Theon’s physical suffering is presented as nightmarish, half-remembered glimpses of captivity, all the more upsetting for their lack of specificity. When the show does attempt to give Theon a redemptive arc, it lays the groundwork somewhat crudely, having him soliloquize, early on in his captivity, <span class="content-footnote" data-footnote-index="2" data-footnote="“And Now His Watch Is Ended.” Game of Thrones, created by David Benioff and DB Weiss, performance by Alfie Allen, season 3, episode 4, Bighead Littlehead Productions and HBO, 2013." style="border: 0px; cursor: pointer; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“My real father lost his head at King’s Landing. I made a choice, and I chose wrong. And now I’ve burned everything down.”</span> From there on out, the Theon of the show is given <em style="border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">carte blanche</em> to redeem himself by rescuing members of the Stark family, supporting his sister and, improbably, by beating up an Ironborn sailor who challenges his authority.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">By contrast, <em style="border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">A Dance With Dragons</em> takes a much more roundabout and, in my opinion, more convincing route to building empathy toward the wayward Greyjoy scion; Martin puts Theon in the exact same position as the reader. Much of Theon’s plot in that novel involves a return to Winterfell, the Stark family castle which has been sitting abandoned and in ruins since the end of the second book. Theon is the only Stark-adjacent character present during these proceedings. As the ruined castle is filled with strange faces and new characters come to celebrate Ramsay’s wedding, Theon is the only character that can compare the Winterfell-that-was with his current surroundings. In Theon’s assessment, <span class="content-footnote" data-footnote-index="3" data-footnote="Martin, George. A Dance With Dragons. Bantam mass market edition, 2013, p. 598." style="border: 0px; cursor: pointer; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“Winterfell was full of ghosts.”</span> That is likely the reader’s assessment as well, and Theon is made into a surrogate for the reader, bearing witness to and unable to alter the troubling misuse of a once-beloved space. Even in cases where Martin makes no apologies or excuse for his characters’ past behavior, he manages to force his readers into feeling empathy. The most vengeful readers of ASoIaF might have been cheering for Theon’s mutilation, but it is much harder to justify once they see him, and see through him, as their surrogate.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">While the TV show has been forced by necessity to take an axe to many parts of Martin’s epic, impossible-to-completely-faithfully-adapt yarn, it has also, by virtue of its ability to explore the private lives of non-narrator characters, demonstrated its dedication to the same ever-widening gyre of empathy—deepening and expanding upon the foundation that Martin laid. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of Cersei Lannister. Martin did eventually give us access to Cersei’s thoughts in his fourth entry in the series, <em style="border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">A Feast for Crows</em>, but the show has been dedicated to making the case for her complexity from the very start. In season one, episode five, Cersei and her husband, Robert Baratheon, two of the show’s more stubborn and intense characters, break into a surprising, vulnerable fit of laughter when the latter asks what holds the realm together and the former replies, <span class="content-footnote" data-footnote-index="4" data-footnote="“The Wolf and the Lion.” Game of Thrones, created by David Benioff and DB Weiss, performance by Lena Heady and Mark Addy, season 1, episode 5, Bighead Littlehead Productions and HBO, 2011." style="border: 0px; cursor: pointer; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“our marriage.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Just after that, Cersei reveals that she had feelings for her husband even after a series of miscarriages drove a political wedge between them and ends by asking, “Was it ever possible for us? Was there ever a time? Ever a moment [to be happy with one another]?” When Robert tells her that there wasn’t, she looks sadly into her wine glass and answers her husband’s query about whether the knowledge makes her feel better or worse by retreating back behind her icy glare and saying, “It doesn’t make me feel anything.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">In addition to being one of the most stunning, devastating scenes of the season, it confirms the truth of Cersei’s miscarriages, which she had previously brought up to Catelyn Stark (after having been complicit in making the rival matriarch’s son a paraplegic). It retroactively lends real complexity to that earlier scene: Cersei, even at her most ruthless, in covering up her brother’s attempted murder of a child is still able to empathize with that same child’s grief-stricken mother.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The Cersei of Martin’s novels is often identified by her motherhood. She is, prior to being made a narrator, often paired and contrasted with Catelyn Stark, a dark reflection of Catelyn’s fierce, relentless love for her children. Where Catelyn (before her death and resurrection, the latter of which, tellingly, does not occur on the TV show) is most often defensively attempting to protect her children, organizing rescue missions for her daughters, trying to safeguard her sons with marriage-based alliances, Cersei is the aggressor, allowing Bran to be silenced lest his witnessing of her incestuous relationship with Jaime call her own children’s legitimacy into question. She also ruthlessly kills off her dead husband’s bastard children in order to grant legitimacy to her own; an act that the show rewrites to be the explicit order of her son, Joffrey—sparing her character any further dabbling in infanticide.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">By contrast, the show expands Cersei’s role from “mother” to “woman.” She ends up speaking, not just for the impossibility of being a laudable mother in a patrilineal world, but for the impossibility of being a woman with any self-determination in a patriarchal rape culture. In another moment invented for the show, Oberyn Martell, one of Westeros’s few male, woke feminists, assures Cersei that <span class="content-footnote" data-footnote-index="5" data-footnote="“First of His Name.” Game of Thrones, created by David Benioff and DB Weiss, performance by Lena Heady and Pedro Pascal, season 4, episode 5, Bighead Littlehead Productions and HBO, 2014." style="border: 0px; cursor: pointer; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“We don’t hurt little girls in [his kingdom of] Dorne.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">She responds with a line that’s produced endless memes and feverish hot takes across the internet: “Everywhere in the world they hurt little girls.” This line may as well serve as a mantra for many of the show’s detractors who, rightly, point out the series’ preoccupation with the objectifying male gaze in its focus and presentation of female nudity as well as its propensity to use graphic rape as a transformational plot point for its male characters. But, from another perspective, it could be argued that this is also the show undercutting the male power fantasy that a viewer might mistake for the central point. And the show gives this line to Cersei—a character who spends much of her narrative arc ordering acts of repellant cruelty and steadily alienating her allies.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The show even goes so far as to make a meta point about the power of expanding empathy in the show’s sixth season, where troubled teen Arya Stark—who nightly whispers a prayer that includes a call for Cersei’s death—is forced to reckon with her own capacity for empathy when she watches a play that dramatizes the death of Cersei’s eldest son. This mirrors a pre-released chapter from Martin’s as-yet-unpublished <em style="border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Winds of Winter</em>. The difference seems to be that, in Martin’s prose, the content of the play is never explicitly stated, and hinted at only as a winking reference to careful readers, whereas the show’s handling of the material clearly marks Arya’s viewing as a powerful moment of identification that triggers her own traumatic memories of watching helplessly as her father was killed.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">It is a stunning achievement, both in terms of the show and in the novels, that so much empathy can be generated alongside events that regularly feature acts of murder, rape, torture, and cruelty. If we are to take the moral philosophy of Richard Rorty to heart, it is the last of these that presents the most difficult hurdle in Martin’s ongoing project. Rorty famously believed that the complexities of moral philosophy could be more or less predicated on the notion that <span class="content-footnote" data-footnote-index="6" data-footnote="Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989." style="border: 0px; cursor: pointer; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">to act morally was to act without intentional cruelty.</span> Clearly, the worlds of ASoIaF and <em style="border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">GoT</em> do not operate on this most basic of principles. So how do we assess Martin’s view of who we can and cannot have empathy for?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">It is worth noting that Martin’s world contains a large number of what we laypeople might diagnose as sociopaths. From the mad kings Aerys II Targaryen and Joffrey Baratheon, who are given unfortunate influence because of their position, to those who have risen high because of their lack of empathy like Ser Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane and Vargo Hoat (called “Locke” in the TV series), to those who have been so systematically poorly educated, abused, or smothered by their upbringing that they never had the chance to develop a sense of empathy like Ramsay Bolton and Robert Arryn (Robin Arryn in the TV series), the list of characters who have tenuous to non-existent relationships with basic empathy abound. It is striking that, in the case of most of these characters, Martin and the showrunners have been clear in their commitment to providing us with reasons for their irredeemability. We may not empathize (or even sympathize) with Ramsay Bolton… but we are told that his overwhelming cruelty is the partial product of his father’s attempts to make him so by dangling the legitimization of his bastardy over his head, forcing us to consider him as a sort of Jon Snow gone horribly wrong. Similarly, if we can’t precisely muster any sorrow for the death of Joffrey, we do grieve for his mourning parents. The show especially offers us a moment of terrible internal conflict when he chokes, crying, in his mother’s arms in an intense close-up, daring viewers to not feel at least some quiet pang of pity. Martin’s sociopaths are almost always portrayed as forces of nature rather than personalities. They are storms of violence that descend upon hapless characters, and we are rarely given moments of moustache-twirling clarity where we both understand that they are monstrous and simultaneously understand that they have free agency and forethought in their actions.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">If Martin has a cardinal rule about where our empathy cannot follow, it does not lie with those capable of cruelty. Rather it lies with those who, in a clear-thinking way, use the cruelty of others to achieve their ends. Roose Bolton, Ramsay’s father, is one of the few truly, uncomplicatedly irredeemable characters in the series, and his villainy stems entirely from his willingness to use his son as a weapon of terror against his enemies. Similarly, while Martin and, especially, the show’s portrayal by Charles Dance, are willing to extend some humanity to ruthless patriarch Tywin Lannister, his primary role as villain is often explicitly tied to his tactical decision to deploy his “mad dogs,” monstrous bannermen and mercenaries, to keep others in line.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Even in cases where the show and books diverge, the moral line remains the same. The show’s version of Littlefinger, played with finger-tenting, melodramatic glee by Aidan Gillen, is far less subtle and somewhat less sympathetic than his book counterpart. The show gives Littlefinger his bravura moment to revel in villainy in a season three episode where he proclaims, <span class="content-footnote" data-footnote-index="7" data-footnote="“The Climb.” Game of Thrones, created by David Benioff and DB Weiss, performance by Alfie Allen, season 3, episode 6, Bighead Littlehead Productions and HBO, 2013." style="border: 0px; cursor: pointer; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. […] Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.”</span> This speech is given over a montage of images that reveal, among other things, how he used Joffrey’s fetish for violence to dispose of sex-worker-turned-spy, Ros, foiling his rival’s attempts to gain influence in the court. The principle remains the same: the most unforgivable sin is the knowing and calculated exploitation of someone else’s cruelty.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The narrative even goes so far as to suggest (at least in the lore of the show) that the ultimate antagonist, the undead Night King, is a press-ganged living weapon created, in desperation, by the environmental stewardship-minded Children of the Forest. The big bad being nothing more than the tragically overclocked remnant of an extinct race’s last-ditch effort to save humanity from itself feels like the most George R.R. Martin-ish of plot points. The Night King must be destroyed, but he truly can’t help himself.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">In looking at the almost comically long list of Martin’s characters, particularly those we are invited to connect with, it is almost more surprising that we do not question our empathy for some of the “heroic” figures more regularly, given the morally gray scenarios, compromises, and behaviors that Martin writes for them. I have gone this far speaking mostly about characters that generally play a more villainous role. We have not even touched on fan favorites like Tyrion Lannister, who murders his former lover in a fit of rage at her betrayal, or Jon Snow, whose loyalty to the Night’s Watch involves his complicity in luring his lover south of the Wall where she is killed by his compatriots, or Arya Stark, who—especially in the show—stares out from an expressionless mask, killing dozens without question, or Daenerys Targaryen, the ostensible, projected winner of the titular game, who regularly tortures her enemies then burns them alive all while deputizing violent strangers and avaricious mercenaries to oversee the cities she has liberated. The world of <em style="border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Game of Thrones</em> offers so many characters, from so many different backgrounds, for readers to feel sympathy for, live vicariously through, and otherwise identify with that the list above is one comprised of characters we mostly don’t even argue over.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">As we anticipate the final season later this month, it is worth understanding that the show is one that has carefully taken inspiration from its source material to create impossible situations where no resolution can feel uncomplicatedly triumphant. Every moment of satisfying revenge or conquest is also potentially a moment of complete devastation for a character we feel a great deal of empathy for. With the cast whittled down to a respectable number, almost none of whom can be written off as irredeemably bad, I find myself watching with a kind of dread for any possible outcome. Any ascension to Martin’s most uncomfortable of chairs necessitates the loss—likely the violent and cruel loss—of characters we have spent nine years (or, in some cases, twenty-three years) coming to love.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><a href="https://www.tor.com/2019/04/01/a-game-of-feels-the-radical-empathy-of-game-of-thrones/#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">Footnotes</span></span><i class="icon-up-dir" style="border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></i></h2>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">1: Martin, George. A Game of Thrones. Bantam paperback edition, 1997, p. 244.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">2: “And Now His Watch Is Ended.” Game of Thrones, created by David Benioff and DB Weiss, performance by Alfie Allen, season 3, episode 4, Bighead Littlehead Productions and HBO, 2013.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">3: Martin, George. A Dance With Dragons. Bantam mass market edition, 2013, p. 598.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">4: “The Wolf and the Lion.” Game of Thrones, created by David Benioff and DB Weiss, performance by Lena Heady and Mark Addy, season 1, episode 5, Bighead Littlehead Productions and HBO, 2011.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">5: “First of His Name.” Game of Thrones, created by David Benioff and DB Weiss, performance by Lena Heady and Pedro Pascal, season 4, episode 5, Bighead Littlehead Productions and HBO, 2014.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">6: Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">7: “The Climb.” Game of Thrones, created by David Benioff and DB Weiss, performance by Alfie Allen, season 3, episode 6, Bighead Littlehead Productions and HBO, 2013.</span></div>
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TMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5483251107827718564.post-72926229520735898512019-03-23T18:46:00.002-07:002019-03-23T18:56:33.783-07:00From the Archives: In the Game of Adaptation, You Win or You Die<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The following is a repost of an article I wrote for Watchers on the Wall that was originally published on September 9, 2017:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Being a fan of both <em style="border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Game of Thrones</em> and the <em style="border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">A Song of Ice and Fire</em> novels it’s based on can be a process of constant equivocation. On the one hand, the books are as close as I have to a sacred text (and the old adage that “the book is better than the movie” doesn’t particularly need more defending). On the other, the process of adaptation is incredibly difficult and no book really gives a road map for how it should translate to screen. I tend to be an apologist for the show—or at least, I want to figure out why a change was made, especially when it rankles me.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">At the end of the penultimate season, it’s clear the show is making a dash for the endgame, tidying up storylines, collapsing its cast, and generally getting ready for a finale. The books have been largely left behind, both because the showrunners have ground through all the currently available plot and because the ripple effect of minor changes now places most characters on completely different tracks than their literary counterparts.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">My main interest here is to look at the ways in which the process of adaptation the books has necessarily altered the story and trying to find places where those deviations both work brilliantly and fall short. Needless to say, my ideal <em style="border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Game of Thrones</em> might have taken some different paths, but I’m every bit as interested in being pleasantly surprised by the showrunners’ choices as I am in being disappointed by their literary calumny.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">What follows below is a look at four different issues that plague the process of going from page to screen, and some unexpected winners and losers of coping with the process. It is by no means a complete assessment of that process, but it includes some of what I consider to be the most illustrative examples, as well as some personal favorite talking points.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-weight: inherit; letter-spacing: -0.01em;">Aging Child Actors</span></div>
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Winner: Sansa Stark / Loser: Arya Stark</span><br /><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">
Winner: The Baratheons / Loser: The Martells</span><br /><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">
Winners: Davos Seaworth and Tormund Giantsbane / Loser: Jaime Lannister</span><br /><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">
Winner: Olenna Tyrell / Loser: Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish</span><br />x</div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The show has benefited a lot from Nina Gold’s spectacular casting abilities and nowhere is that clearer than with her child actors, most of whom have been stand-outs even among the already luminary cast. One problem with casting child actors (aside from the inability to know whether or not they will grow into talented adults) is the constant aging process that runs faster than seasons can keep up.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The timeline of<em style="border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> Game of Thrones</em> is fairly vague and the books they are based on cover about two-and-a-half to three years from the equivalent start of Season 1 to the end of Season 5. The fact that Sophie Turner, originally twelve when the pilot was filmed, turned eighteen on the show by the time her book equivalent was barely thirteen might have presented a problem for the showrunners. Instead, Sansa Stark has become one of the most compelling characters in the series, largely by virtue of her character being allowed to have adult responsibilities, plotlines, and triumphs.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The Sansa of the novels is painted almost identically to the Sansa of the show, but, being thirteen, there is very little chance for her to have agency in a world that largely only allows sexually mature women to have any modicum of power. Having an older Sansa both wed Ramsay Bolton and then take power as the Lady of Winterfell only makes sense for a character who is reasonably within the age of majority (and would have caused even more of a furor among show-watchers, given the already uncomfortable depiction of violent rape in that plotline). Instead, her rise from perpetual political pawn to revenge-taking, justice-minded badass has been one of the show’s great triumphs at a time when book-readers still have only gotten to see Sansa as a character being groomed for political action later.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">By the same token, Arya has suffered quite a bit in that transition. Maisie Williams does an excellent job, but, in aging her up to keep pace with the actor that portrays her, Arya has lost a lot of what makes her character compelling in the novels.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Arya goes from eight to ten in the novels thus far, and George R.R. Martin walks right up to the line of irredeemability with her. Always on the run or in the custody of some of the more terrible monsters in Westeros, Arya is both burgeoning, revenge-minded sociopath, and little girl who brings child logic to her quest. The novels’ version of her infamous hit list highlights her childish sensibilities as it includes both monstrous personages (like the Mountain and Meryn Trant) and trivial ones (like her petty boss at Harrenhal). Her plotline in Season 7 put this mismatch front and center as her arguments with Sansa increasingly relied on the stunted, overly simplistic braggadocio that would have sounded sad and broken coming from a ten-year-old, and incomprehensible in the mouth of a twenty-year-old. Arya seems unbelievably naïve in the world of a show, which is a strange thing to say about an adult, orphaned assassin with Tywin Lannister for a one-time tutor.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-weight: inherit; letter-spacing: -0.01em;">No Strict Point of View</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Martin’s novels are told in tight third-person that rotates between set narrators. Up until the fourth book, these narrators have more-or-less an equal share of chapters dedicated to them and Martin is strict about leaving anything they wouldn’t witness off the page. This occasionally results in major events being rumored rather than on the page (example: the Battle of the Green Fork) and a very limited perspective when it comes to understanding the internal thoughts of the non-POV characters.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">In the first season, the showrunners used their larger scope and ability to see things we couldn’t to great effect. Nearly all the TV critics I’ve read refer to the scene between Cersei and Robert as one of the best in the series, and it works because the writers can explore the previously opaque minds and motivations of those two characters, and lend them some pathos not seen in the novels.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Nowhere does this hit home better than with the exploration of the Baratheons. One need only look to all the “Stannis the Mannis” memes out there to see that a perennially hated character from the novels came to life on the show once we had the ability to see him on his own terms. The one true King of Westeros and his family are rather flat in the novels, coming off as inflexible (Stannis), fanatically religious (Selyse), and tragically sad (Shireen). By giving us many scenes the novels couldn’t, Stannis evolved into a complicated portrait of a tired grammar savant watching his world crumble while clinging to the doomed convictions that validated him.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Likewise, Shireen (who—seriously—is only ever described as sad and ugly in the books) briefly became the heart of the show, almost (but not quite) managing to soften her hard-edged father. Even Selyse (by far the least developed of the trio) was given a more three-dimensional treatment: pining over the corpses of her dead sons, navigating the jealousy she felt for her husband’s lover when it clashed with her faith, and, ultimately, being overwhelmed by her unthinking complicity in the needless death of her daughter.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This ability to go anywhere and see anything also destroyed House Martell in the HBO adaptation. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss severely altered the Martell plotline for the show, in large part because the novels treat it as a labyrinthine maze of misconceptions that would be difficult to play out on screen.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">While we never get Arianne, the central character of the novel’s Dornish storyline on the show, we do get a little bit of her father, Doran. The High Lord of House Martell is presented (identically in the show and books) as a weak-willed, passive, disabled old man who cannot be bothered to exact any semblance of revenge on the family that murdered his brother, sister, niece and nephew. The difference between the two versions is the shocking twist that the novel version of Doran is actually a subtle schemer who has been playing at weakness for decades to fool his enemies into complacency. Nearly all of this plays out through Arianne’s closely-held point of view that prevents the reader from understanding the intricacies of Doran’s plot until it’s been set in motion.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This would read as a kind of cheat on screen. Movie and television audiences typically don’t go in for stunning reversals that play upon the position of the camera and unreliability of the narrator, and the showrunners turned away from it in favor of keeping Doran’s ambitions in line with his outward demeanor (an easy but boring choice) and transmuting Arianne’s quest for justice and recognition into Ellaria’s desire for revenge. Mostly, the Martells became a kind of punching bag for various Lannisters and, with the exception of Indira Varma’s talents (still somewhat wasted), relegated them to the dust heap of the show’s gigantic cast.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-weight: inherit; letter-spacing: -0.01em;">Characters Robbed of Purpose</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The<em style="border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> A Song of Ice and Fire</em> novels are masterfully plotted with a great number of moving parts and a dozen or so narrators being moved into position to witness specific events. As discussed in the above point, the show took great advantage of television’s abhorrence of non-omniscient point-of-view, and several characters whose primary purpose in the novels is to be at a certain place at a certain time found themselves with considerably less to do.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This proved to be an unexpected boon to both Liam Cunningham’s Davos Seaworth and Kristofer Hivju’s Tormund Giantsbane. Davos is a narrator in the novels and plenty interesting, but he primarily exists to give the reader a window into Stannis Baratheon’s court. Freed from the need to bear witness to the false prophet of the Lord of Light, Davos has had very little to do from a mechanical standpoint for the last two seasons, but he remains the warm, plain-spoken heart of the show, all the more useful to the showrunners because he has nothing but free time plot-wise.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">By a similar token, everyone’s favorite Ginger, Tormund Giantsbane, has had very little to do since Season 4 (other than remind people that wildlings exist). Nearly every plot point involving him also involved one or two other main characters and nearly all of his presence since Season 5 has been as comic relief. That said, he is one of the most entertaining characters on the show, especially in his role as unwelcome suitor to Brienne of Tarth. The Tormund of the novels, though similarly characterized, plays a small, specific role as one of the few wildlings who refuses to join Stannis’s army south of the Wall. The showrunners combined the roles several other wildling chieftains in order to keep Hivju front and center.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The butterfly effect of Benioff and Weiss’ slightly laxer plotting has, however, resulted in some characters whose presence feels tacked on as a result of their relative lack of plot. No one is a bigger victim of this than Jaime Lannister who, for the first three seasons of the show (and the whole of the third book) has one of the most fascinating redemption arcs of, frankly, any character on television. The fourth novel in the series gave Jaime a quieter, more introspective plot where he serves as a window onto the devastation in the Riverlands and ruminates about his agency now that he has been robbed of his sword hand. It’s compelling stuff, but that narrative also would have been extremely difficult to film since the vast majority of it either has Jaime acting as a passive cipher, or brooding silently while he reflects.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Without that narrative, Jaime has spent Seasons 4 through 7 bouncing around Westeros, losing and regaining faith in his sister and generally having his storyline reset with each new season. With this penultimate season finale, it is beginning to feel like Jaime is finally done with Cersei (thereby giving him the ability to continue his redemption story with Brienne) but it may be too late. Jaime’s arc could never advance past the point where a return to his narrative start point was more than a scene or two away and he has suffered immensely. He may have had one of the show’s most compelling narratives about wrestling with contradictory vows and attempting to pinpoint what makes a man honorable, but it is doubtful the show can land it, given those four years of equivocating that separate this latest iteration of Jaime from his last purposive moment.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-weight: inherit; letter-spacing: -0.01em;">Casting Amazing Actors</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">As stated above, Nina Gold has an amazing talent for bringing venerated actors into the show. One might think that this can only be an advantage when adapting a series of beloved books, but there are problems with it when it requires a character to be unduly prominent in order to be worthy of the person playing them.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Olenna Tyrell is a memorable but minor character in Martin’s novels. She comes for the wedding, poisons Joffrey and leaves for Highgarden once her granddaughter Margaery’s marriage to Tommen is secure. The show had the great fortune of casting iconic British actor, former Bond Girl, and <em style="border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Great Muppet Caper</em> alumna Diana Rigg in the role.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The show engaged in some of its trademark travel time magic to bring Rigg back to the fore in Seasons 5, 6 and 7, oftentimes for only a few scenes. <em style="border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Game of Thrones</em> was richer for her presence and deviated significantly from the books in order to put Rigg’s acid charms on display as much as possible. Her final speech has been so thoroughly memed and re-memed that it has earned a place as one of the great moments of <em style="border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Game of Thrones</em>, a place that is normally reserved for moments devised by George R. R. Martin.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Another casualty of season 7, Littlefinger was an early fan favorite and the casting of <em style="border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Wire</em> alum, Aiden Gillen, both exalted and, ultimately, defanged the character. Gillen was touted in early seasons as a bravura actor and scenes were written for him to be able to chew the scenery with malicious glee.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This also presented a crisis for the character. In the novels, though his plot arc remains essentially unchanged, Littlefinger is a presented as a character whose chief advantage is his obsequiousness. He is a friendly, glad-handing, bearer of good news who escapes notice by virtue of his avowed lack of ambition.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Compare this to the show’s Littlefinger who, a Season 1 Catelyn Stark is quick to point out, “nobody likes.” Gillen’s iconic Season 1 scene where he lays out his diabolical plot to overturn Westeros’ culture of toxic masculinity (and replace it with a different kind of toxic masculinity) while Ros and Armeca touch one another on his command was the kind of bravura moment that would be tempting to a wide variety of actors. The show doubled-down on this in season three with his oft-quoted “chaos is a ladder” speech. Both are examples of scenes written to highlight the considerable talents of an actor at the cost of a believable character.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Later seasons saw Littlefinger continuing to crow his lack of trustworthiness to anyone who would listen, raising the ever-important question: why does anyone listen to him? His final plot, to drive a wedge between the Stark sisters, mostly baffled viewers who could not fathom that a man so nakedly ambitious and false would ever get the better of either Arya or Sansa. The showrunners continually gave Gillen showcases for his moustache twirling, but it undermined the idea that anyone would take his advice seriously. Ultimately, the Littlefinger of the novels would have to be played by someone who registered as the most minor and banal of recurring characters—a tough sell for a casting director trying to fill a pivotal, if slow-moving role.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">These feel like some of the most pertinent examples of how<em style="border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> Game of Thrones</em> managed to both bungle and elevate its source material. I think there’s a lot to be said for the complexity of the process especially given the hundreds of characters, dozens of locations, and still unplotted nature of the last two novels.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">(Don’t get me started on Lady Stoneheart, though.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The original post can be found <a href="http://watchersonthewall.com/game-adaptation-win-die/">here</a></span></div>
TMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5483251107827718564.post-54369571229105004892019-03-23T18:41:00.002-07:002019-03-23T18:56:33.740-07:00From the Archives: The Trump Within: Mental Illness, Activism, and Self-Care<div class="graf graf--p graf-after--figure" id="7dac" name="7dac" style="letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 38px;">
<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em;">The following is a repost from an article I put out on Medium on August 12, 2017:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">It started sometime during the first presidential debate. I stopped merely being horrified by the content of Trump’s speeches, responses and general bloviating, and started being horrified by their form. I was proctoring an exam that evening, so I could only see the delayed, phonetic transcription of Trump and Clinton’s inability to share the same reality, but the faux-mogul’s debate style, which many news sources accurately described as “unhinged,” still came through.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">In the second debate, far from the uplifting <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: "liga", "salt";">schadenfreude</em> I had come to expect from seeing intelligent, nuanced politicians tear down frothing monsters, I was treated to the stomach churning sight of an ambulatory Trump doing his best impression of an intractable ghoul: lurking just behind the former Secretary of State and threatening, with TV-serial killer glee, to have her investigated and imprisoned.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">In the third debate, I had a moment of empathy with him that was far more distressing than the previous revulsion.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This requires some explanation. I suffer from some moderate mental illnesses. I have been diagnosed with both OCD and Rejection-Sensitive Dysphoria (a disorder that sounds more relatable than it is). This has had a myriad of deleterious effects on my life but the most notable — my psyche’s wretched key to all mythologies — has been a pronounced inability to comfortably inhabit my own opinions and feelings.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I have opinions and feelings, of course. They are numerous and powerful and often feel overwhelming. But, more often than not, I find myself unable to let them exist unmolested. For each moment of thoughtful clarity are three of uneasy doubt.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">If I say to a friend, for example, that I love the<em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: "liga", "salt";"> Lord of the Rings</em> movies more than anything in the world and they reply that they think they’re overrated, a voice that I cannot remember not having clears its throat informs me that, just maybe, my opinion is invalidated by my friend’s. It tells me that this difference between us means that one of us is wrong and, because I am a terrible human being who has never experienced a valid feeling or opinion, the wrong one is probably me.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I then have two options. I can either suppress my own feelings and admit that my friend is correct and that my love for those films is childish and stupid or I can double down on my opinion and argue, mercilessly, that my friend is incorrect and my feelings are the valid ones. I can kowtow to that pernicious voice’s whispers, or I can attack it head on by lambasting its unwitting surrogate.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Thirty four years into this cycle (or however long since the combination of brain chemistry and ill-timed trauma created the inciting incident for this pattern), I have become a person with an elemental fear of conflict. I avoid people whose opinions differ greatly from mine. I rarely contradict people when they voice criticism for statements I have made. I have (mostly) private meltdowns when, say, a Facebook status of mine becomes a flashpoint for controversy among my friends.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">None of this is healthy. I should clarify that, when I am letting a subject go or admitting that someone else may have a point, I am rarely “agreeing to disagree.” I am privately falling apart, getting filled with resentment, and generally trying to justify my anger, whether it’s aimed at the person I’m debating or at myself, for not holding a more valid opinion. When I try to build consensus, it is almost never motivated by a belief in the fundamental value of empathy; rather, it is the result of a gut-churning terror of and bedrock conviction that I will be on the wrong side of everything and therefore be left out in the cold, a pariah who couldn’t figure out how to just think and feel like everyone else.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Needless to say, this has played havoc with my activism. In this age of overt bigotry, vindictive delight in oppression, and a culture war where intolerance becomes a political virtue, I find myself mostly unable to directly engage with self-identified conservatives or right-leaning folk, in general. In place of this, I find that much of my deepest anger is reserved for fellow progressives whose righteous rage, black and white thinking, and ultimatums always end up feeling (mostly unjustly) like a personal attack.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I understand and condemn the fundamentally thin-skinned chauvinism of men who who cry “not all men” or whites who scream that “all lives matter.” But I also understand the inclination to do so. When your sense of self is fragile, it becomes easy to conflate your personal privilege with immorality. You start believing that, so long as you benefit from the color of your skin, the shape of your genitals, or the security of your bank account, you can never truly be a good person and the beleaguered, self-abused, auto-gaslit tatters of your dignity and self-preservation start wanting to scream out that you too are worthy of love, even though no one ever said you weren’t.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">And that brings me back to Trump on the night of the third debate. When Clinton said that Putin “would rather have a puppet as President,” Trump — ever the schoolyard bully, ever the (I suspect) rejection-sensitive dysphoric — replied “no puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet!” It was funny. Almost. It was shocking and petty and vain and inarticulate and unworthy of any serious political discourse. I laughed. My partner laughed. I posted about it on Facebook. Everyone I knew agreed it was the height of ridiculousness.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">And yet, some part of me felt harrowed by that response. Trump engenders disgust and loathing and incredulity in me, but I wanted to offer him kindness in that moment. It was not because he was correct in his assertion but because I saw him recognize just how fragile he was and try, ineptly and painfully, to prove his worth not to Clinton or to Chris Wallace or to America but to himself.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Now, I recognize that my struggles with mental illness have not had the nation-threatening effect that Trump’s have. I did not build a psychic wall around the glass and paper totem of my sense of self, and let my insecurity curdle into poisonous narcissism. But I am also not convinced that I chose not to do these things. I find myself ruminating on my life and wondering: if, by an accident of circumstance, fear hadn’t ruled my childhood would I be one of those MRA trolls demanding sex from women in exchange for basic decency? Had I been raised by affluent white parents in a less diverse community, might I be one of those bastards who today in Charlottesville are chanting “you will not replace us” in a desperate bid to shut up the voices in their heads that claim they are worthy of replacement? Is my mental illness, for all it has done to make my life miserable, the source of my progressivism and empathy?</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">That line of thought gets difficult fast. It simultaneously lacks a clear answer and threatens to become an ontological tautology that gets increasingly abstract, meaningless, and privileged, the longer it turns over in my head. Nevertheless, I find it useful, in short, deliberate bursts, for reminding myself that the miasma of my self-doubt can help me connect with others as well as keep me from them. Empathizing with Trump and his supporters need not be a sign of sympathizing with them. Recognizing fragility in others can help ground the idea that your own is something that exists primarily within yourself.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">On days like today, when the suffering of others is at its most stark and obvious, it is painfully easy to go down the rabbit hole of punishing oneself for practicing self-care. The same voice that demands one do more than buy a bumper sticker or like a friend’s Facebook status can, with alarming facility, be just as sated by hating oneself for inaction as by loving oneself for the inverse.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">On days like today, I can more easily remind myself that the internal monologue that delights in calling attention to my fragility and ineptitude has not metastasized into the credo that says “the only true happiness comes from eliminating disagreement.” I can look at the inner Trump — the broken bully that demands the world accommodate him so he does not have to accommodate himself — and feel the smallest measure of relief in my own discomfort.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The original post can be found <a href="https://medium.com/@tylermaximusdean/the-trump-within-mental-illness-activism-and-self-care-68ca00b2184d">here</a></span></span></div>
TMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5483251107827718564.post-46817195275882077162019-03-23T18:36:00.001-07:002019-03-23T18:55:06.863-07:00Word of the Day #1<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #cccccc;">From a post I made on Facebook on March 19th 2019</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">My word of the day is definitely “glister.” Derived from the Middle English “glistren”—also the probable root for “glitter”—it means more or less the same thing as its cognate: to sparkle or give off light. It’s most famous use is probably in Merchant of Venice where, Smashmouth lyrics notwithstanding, the famous line is “all that glisters is not gold.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I think I like it because it sounds so much like a portmanteau of “glitter” and “blister.” It has always implied a malign so<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">rt of festering to me. Pebbles in a stream may glitter. The overgrown gilded encrustation of Rococo interior design definitely glisters. Perhaps it is also the association with Shakespeare, but I cannot imagine using it for anything other than a warm, yellow-orange sort of luminescence—gold glisters but silver cannot. Those colors feel sordid to me. They are not the clean, sparkling whites of moonlight or bone. They are not deeply mysterious jewel tones of an emerald or a ruby. They are the the sparkle of human folly, of corrupt light, of grimy avarice—the firelight glow that tells you a house may not be as empty as you originally thought. Gold glisters with a sparkling, luminous version of yellowing parchment, or tea-stained teeth, or jaundiced flesh. To glister is to stand out in all the wrong ways.</span></span></div>
TMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5483251107827718564.post-54672914658710334712014-07-11T12:43:00.000-07:002019-03-23T18:55:59.124-07:00The Somnambulist's Diary VIIIn my dream, there is a prologue. In it I am back in high school. I have my PhD, but I am back there all the same, in a classroom full of seniors, being taught by an English instructor I had who I never got along with. I am in his office, asking if the presentation I am supposed to give is powerpoint. I am terrible at powerpoint and afraid that, despite having good information, I will be graded down for being unfamiliar with the tech. He says that I will be fine but yes, powerpoint is necessary. The day of th presentation, I begin to narrate my project: a comparison of Jane Eyre to other Bronte sisters' novels, proving that Charlotte's is not, in fact, Gothic. As the presentation begins I am swept into a Gothic story, ostensibly Jane Eyre, though it bears no resemblance to the novel.<br />
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That was the prologue. My dream takes place within this Gothic world. I am simultaneously viewing it as a novel I am writing about, a film adaptation of the novel, and a lived experience, as I am also inside the world described.<br />
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It is a swampy valley whose high hills border the sea: a rocky coastline covered in shattered bridges and old causeways. I can't tell what time period it is, part of it feels like early Renaissance Italy, another like Victorian England, and yet another seems like something out of a hitchcock film: the late 50's or early 60's.<br />
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I am arriving with a small party of friends for a vacation at the manor of the man who owns the valley. He is perhaps an analogue for Rochester, though the part of me observing this as a film thinks he's been cast far too old and weaselly. The master of the house reminds me of no one so much as Roddy McDowall. As he approaches, I see that he is strapped into something halfway between ornate armor and a palanquin, elaborately enameled wings on his shoulders. The faceplate of his helmet depicts a cherub, though it only covers him down to the lips, so that I can see them move, and the gray whiskers on his chin. It looks as though the cherub is speaking through a hole in his neck.<br />
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As he reaches us, the servant unstrap him from the palanquin, more cage-like than anything, and he greets us. I see him linger on one woman in our party. She is dark haired and shy and I can tell he intends to marry her, perhaps against her will. We enter the manor, he slinking behind us, dressed in the black, ascetic coat and collar of an Anglican priest beneath his armor.<br />
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We spend the next few days exploring the grounds, and find ourselves on a shattered bit of railroad tracks, extending over a rocky gorge, that sunders the coastline. One of our party, a woman who looks as though she stepped out of a Hitchcock movie--frosty and blonde and unreadable--says that she can make the jump to the other side. She attempts and misses and falls onto a spongy patch of sand below. I watch her fall, disinterested. She is splayed out as though dead, a fact we confirm when we reach the shore. A doctor in our party says it is unlikely the fall killed her. We find a bite mark on her neck, something bit her, something poisonous.<br />
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On the return to the manor--now a suburban home where nothing feels quite finished: furniture un-varnished, carpet not yet cut properly--we see our host, leering at the brunette. Clearly we have interrupted him in his seduction. He tells us that what bit our friend was one of the eels that lives near the manor. He says they are quite dangerous and we should stay away from them. We ask if they live in any particular pool and he gestures around. Everywhere is a pool, the whole manor sits in a swamp. The eels are already in charge.<br />
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From there the dream becomes more of a horror show. I drop the levels of distance as an observer and presenter. The eels begin to worm their way in through all the windows, up through the pipes. They are huge, as long as a man, and nearly as wide. They have great, billowing mouths, like basking sharks, and spiked pedipalps on the sides of their mouths, like spiders. We begin to see them, over the net few days, swallowing guests whole, using their pedipalps to ease them down their gullets. People burst into rooms carrying struggling eels as big as they are and tossing them out windows. It would be comical if it weren't so grotesque.<br />
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The last stand is up in the attic of the manor. Those of us left are fending off eels at all turns and tossing them down below, onto a suburban street with a portable basketball hoop. Others beat them with baseball bats once they've hit. It's a scene of utter carnage, but I am too caught up in my fear and hatred of the eels to notice.<br />
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I wake up.TMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5483251107827718564.post-45095609466588954732014-01-21T18:33:00.002-08:002019-03-23T18:55:59.080-07:00The Somnambulist's Diary #7This was my dream a week ago.<br />
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I am with a friend of mine and a girl I went on a couple of dates with a couple of years ago at the latter's family cabin in the pacific Northwest. It is more than a cabin--rather a two story home in the middle of a clearing in the pine forest, strangely dry for this part of the country.<br />
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We are tasked with making it to the coast where they have another cabin and her family is making dinner. So we pack up some supplies in a backpack that I wear and begin hiking into the forest. There is mist here, especially along the highway. We try hitch-hiking a few times but the only cars are dilapidated pick-up trucks. They pass us after leering at the two women.<br />
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Eventually it becomes clear that there is a bear following us. It is a huge grizzle bear which starts by shimmying down a pine tree, moving with such lithe and quiet motions that we do not notice it at first. We try to not betray our fear, moving calmly and quickly forward, trying not to glance behind at the bear stalking us through the mist and the trees.<br />
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We are just about to break into a run, thereby alerting the bear to our presence when we see a school up ahead. We make a break for it, flying into the front doors as we hear the bear's roar. And I am separated from my companions. I am running as fast as I can. There are small children, 6 or 7 in the halls and in my mad scramble I am pushing them out of the way. I can hear the bear just behind me, his claws scratching the the child.<br />
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I smash through some doors into the gym. There is some kind of parent teacher conference going on. One woman at a podium is talking about the need for better security at the school. No one notices me as I climb into the bleachers. The backs of my thighs have been raked by the bears claws. My backpack has been torn open and there is candy inside: our supplies.<br />
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It's a melange of over-sized lollipops, halloween candy, pocky. I realize the horrible truth. The bear was following me. He was following the candy in my backpack and I led him into this school where children will be mauled. I begin to stuff the candy into my mouth, trying to destroy the evidence of my mistake. I am sobbing as I do so, knowing it will be ineffective.<br />
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At that moment a child comes into the gymnasium. He is bloody from head to toe, holding in his organs with one hand at his midsection. Bits of his skull are visible underneath huge raking wounds from the bear's claws. He shouts, almost like a soliloquy that his friend was killed and eaten, that he has seen horrors. That it's his tenth birthday and that none of this should have happened today.<br />
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I wake up.TMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5483251107827718564.post-78129764836552204212013-08-18T21:11:00.001-07:002019-03-23T18:55:59.188-07:00The Somnambulist's Diary #6In my dream I am with a woman I intend to seduce away from her boyfriend. Or else she intends to seduce me in spite of her boyfriend. The intentionality is somewhat blurred. She lives in Glendale, which, in my dream is across some great expanse of sparsely populated outskirts and greenery. It is this peculiar shade of green I associate with the Pacific Northwest rather than with Los Angeles. It is certainly no version of Glendale I have ever been to.<br />
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We are walking back to my place which is actually my apartment in East Hollywood. I can see it in the distance, just across the river, the Los Feliz bridge small but visible as it abuts Griffith Park. As we make our way closer and closer, however, the distance keeps getting father and farther. Soon we are going through the back rooms of restaurants: shiny stainless steel cabinets gleam with menace. We are creeping over low wooden fences, or hugging the backs of abandoned buildings, overgrown by ivy.<br />
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We reach her place, which is not the destination. Her boyfriend could be there after all. And I realize that, no matter whose idea this was, it has soured in my mind. I wait at the bottom of the stairs in their townhouse, the floorplan feeling more familiar than I would like. It's quite a bit like some of the old apartments at UC Irvine graduate housing. I worry that it might in fact be one in particular and I step out onto the patio. I say we should go to my place, but what I really mean is I should leave. I need to leave.<br />
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She follows me, even though I am now walking briskly. We seem to be walking up some sort of highland meadow. A great fissure in the earth runs through it, making for a craggy drop into a deep crevasse. At the top of the headlands, there is a forest--perhaps merely a copse of trees. It is thin, mostly bare pines and aspens. She follows me into them and I can see her boyfriend walking near us. He has been following us since the townhouse and we are both aware that the other knows. She, however, doesn't show her cards, or maybe she is oblivious to the scene that is about to commence. As we walk deeper into the trees, the noonday light becomes oppressive through the dappling.<br />
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We see that there are burnt trees up ahead and she asks me what caused it. I begin to tell her a story. As I tell it I know it to be an old urban legend. There was an old race of people in these woods. Like faerie folk or elves and they made their home in the forest. As I narrate I can see the events unfolding. The fair folk lived in relative safety in the woods. Only these woods were high up in snow-capped mountains. It doesn't look anything like the Glendale/Santa Cruz/Pacific Northwest that I am currently moving through.<br />
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They found some primal power of fire. It is contained in a vaguely bluish chunk of stone and the flames burn dark, nearly black, rimmed with purple and crimson. It helped them light their torches and cook their game. But power fell into the hands of their King, a tyrant who wanted it for himself.<br />
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Back in the real world, she and I have reached a log cabin in the middle of the woods. Where the headlands of the chasm went, I have no idea. But I am sure I am not getting to my place anytime soon. The interior is a single room, devoid of furniture save a sink and a wooden table. Some pots and pans hang by a window.<br />
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As I think back on the story I am telling we get to a dark chapter. The faerie folk rose up against their king and blinded him for good measure. I can see the king, a sallow, broken, portly creature, blind now with no irises or pupils in his eyes, crouching down to the grass while the other elves debate what was to be done with him. The victory came too late, however. I can see beyond the summit where the council is taking place the rest of the forest is on fire, black smoke pouring into the blue skies.<br />
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The fair folk make the decision to leave their world and enter ours. A great purple light envelops the spit of land on which they are debating and it appears in the real world, causing the headland to split, and the burnt grove to appear.<br />
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Suddenly, as I realize that we are in the dwelling of one of these elusive creatures, the door bursts open. Standing in the glare from the noon light is the shade of the tyrant king. He is not the broken creature I saw in my vision. He is a smoking shadow in the shape of one of the creatures. His eyes are pits of purple and crimson fire and his mouth is lined with sharp, shadowy teeth. He rushes at us and we bolt from the house. It bursts into flames behind us. The fire is spreading from the forest. And I lose track of the woman I am with. Maybe she is with her boyfriend. I am running from the shadow, moving in daylight, trying to get back to my apartment but the path keeps extending out before me, elongating no matter how quickly I traverse it.<br />
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I wake up.TMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5483251107827718564.post-73963017120915127662013-05-22T15:58:00.003-07:002019-03-23T18:55:59.167-07:00The Somnambulist's Diary #5In the dream, my sister and I are traveling through a dream version of Italy. It is a very specific place with stable, dream contours and familiar monuments: a cobblestone square next to a small canal. We quickly leave this familiar part of the world for a series of country roads, like the outskirts of Parma. While the streets are unpaved, there are modern-looking houses lining them and small fields full of wheat or grapes can be glimpsed between them. As it begins to get late, my sister and I stop at a hostel, though it looks like a large mansion.<br />
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Inside, it is very strange. It seems to be populated by one family: grandparents, parents, in-laws, cousins though no one under the age of twenty or so. They have a distinctive look, big teeth, small, close-set eyes. They are friendly but there is something off. My sister and I watch TV with them. All the rooms are over-sized and this one is more of a home theater. Old, dilapidated couches sit at odd angles, and my sister and I settle into them, pressed up against the many family members. I am seated next to a very old man with rheumy eyes. He keeps slapping me on the back and pointing at the giant projector screen. There is soccer on it, teams in North Africa.<br />
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The bedroom looks like a hostel at least: lots of rows of bunkbeds in an un-adorned white box. In the middle of the night I need to get up and use the restroom but the one I passed by earlier is filthy. I wander out onto the front porch, which, covered by a tarp, extends some twenty feet in front of the house. There is a door that leads into a wing of the house I did not notice before. I open it and find a very modern, well appointed bathroom. The design is Art decco, the furniture is comfortable. And there is a door from the restroom deeper into the new wing.<br />
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I open the door and find stairs leading down into a basement rec-room--very well kept and pristine. Compared to the somewhat ramshackle nature of the rest of the house this is also a shock but it makes me uneasy. That's when I see them, glowing eyes in the relative darkness of the rec-room. They come closer, attached to children, horribly deformed, their flesh streaked and scarred and, suppurating keloid flesh hanging in tumorous clumps. They are dressed in nice velvet dresses and tuxedos, crawling on their hands and knees towards me. I scream and run.<br />
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The next day, my sister and I are driving around the outskirts still, looking for a place to stay, or our parents, or just trying to avoid going back to the hostel. We are driving by a school and there are a lot of children crossing, It is utter chaos and I am switching gears constantly, cutting a slow path through the crowd. That is when I back up into something. There is a crunch of metal. I get out of the car and see that I have hit a man's bicycle. It is twisted up under my back bunker. The hostel is down the street and I am eager to get away from it, so I approach apologetically. The owner is 7ft tall and sinewy, rail-thin. His face is gaunt and he has gray, stringy hair down to his waist. He is dressed in a clean, red tracksuit. and there is something so threatening in his eyes, so menacing in the clench of his teeth that I start to back away. He raises a wrench in one hand and starts striding towards me. I put my hands over my face and sink to the ground. He walks past me and smashes my rear-windshield with his wrench. Then he bolts, letting out an unearthly howl.<br />
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My dad appears at the end of the street and beckons my sister and I to follow him up onto the highway. As we do so, I wake up.TMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5483251107827718564.post-19208329509237279532013-05-13T16:53:00.000-07:002019-03-23T18:57:30.027-07:00Shadows in the Noonday Glare<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 24px;">Given its mythic importance in my mind (as the birthplace of my grandmother and the cultural center of the part of my heritage with which I most strongly identify) I never had a very clear image in my head of Mexico City. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The closest I ever got were conflicting descriptions of a city high atop a mountain, a city built over a drained lake, a city densely populated and overpolluted. None of these came with a clear mental image. Even now that I've been, with my less than thorough investigation of its various districts and barrios, I have only a perfunctory impression of the place. It was not what I expected. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The center of town feels like it could be Manhattan or Milan, with wide crowded streets and austere edifices, many stories tall. But as one spirals out from the Zócalo, a different portrait begins to emerge. The city is green, greener than any American city I have been to, with palms and cactus and stunted, twisted pines growing up, over a d around the buildings. There is a very clear feeling of shadow beneath all those trees, a palpable darkness in the canopy that feels like the mysteries of dense jungle, or, more accurately of bayou, with crepe myrtle and willow obscuring the views of gated courtyards. Though I did not see any, it reminded me most if the eucalyptus forest I remember from my childhood spent in both Woodland Hills and at the LA zoo. The shadows in the trees are equal parts comforting and dangerous.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The buildings arou d which this foliage grows are pleasantly dilapidated with unfinished, unpainted facades and dark tendrils of water stains reaching down their sides. Everything gives off the sense of decay, of once-grandeur, affably sliding into disrepair, passively allowing itself to be reclaimed by the trees. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">And then there is the pollution. I am used to LA smog--an oily smear at the edge of the horizon which turns to magic and fire as the sun sets. Here, it takes the form of a luminescent haze. I did not see the sun once in my stay, though the skies were often cloudless. The light is too intense to look upon as it drifts down through the occultation of the trees. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This was most true in the neighborhood of Coyoacan, where Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera lived in their Casa Azúl. My sister described it as New Orleans square at Disneyland, but it is more somber than that, despite the crowds, street vendors and blaring calliope music. The city has a peevish dignity, a feeling of suffering you to be there. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">As you leave it, you understand the description of a city in the clouds. You wind down out of large sloping peaks, scores of homes and apartments clinging like lichen to their stones. At the base is unmitigated urban sprawl, an endless field of white drywall, black tangles of wire and gray billboards cryptically displaying only a telephone number. Looking back, the peaks of the mountains, where the city sits, are wreathed in mist and haze, the sky darkening yet still, somehow, glowing like a computer monitor, displaying nothing but quite clearly on. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I was there as a tourist, with all the arrogance of travel--wondering at the lives of people I thought I knew through a moment of eye contact on the street. Looking back, this description is full of that arrogance: wanting to see a thriving ruin instead of a major metropolis whose decrepitude I assume only from the tangle of its foliage and cracks in its paint. In the end, despite my being of Mexican descent, I know nothing about the city or its people and no three day trip could make it so. That was, however, the city I saw, the city whose imagined pristine history, unclear in my mind, was dashed apart by seeing it, alive and real and overgrown by itself. </span></div>
TMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5483251107827718564.post-20323310816137799472013-04-15T18:00:00.002-07:002013-04-15T18:22:06.230-07:00Infinite Possibilities and Narrative EntropyI just finished Bioshock: Infinite to mixed results. This whole thing is full of spoilers for those of you who haven't finished it so I suppose that you should stop reading if you intend to play it.<br />
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One the one hand, it tells a well-crafted story about absolution and the impossibilities and false comforts of redemption. That part is great. That part is worth experiencing. What is not nearly as well done is the resolution of the game's aesthetic promise and how it fits in, thematically with the original Bioshock. For those of you not familiar with the game series, both present dystopian cities whose well-meaning credos are taken to horrific extremes, undermining the values that built them. The first game centers on an underwater city called Rapture wherein Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy of sacrosanct self interest plays out, resulting in a society of powerful narcissists seeking to destroy one another as the city crumbles around them.<br />
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Bioshock's newest entry takes place in 1912 aboard the floating city of Colombia, a monument to late 19th century spiritualism and American Exceptionalism. Led by a mad prophet cast in the mold of Dwight Moody and Mary Baker Eddy, the society presented in the game takes on some of our core beliefs as Americans and does a decent, if ham-fisted job of making American players uncomfortable with the sins of the society they emerged from. That's fair and par for the course. The most revolutionary thing about Bioshock games from a story-telling standpoint is its willingness to make America the badguy. Both Rapture and Colombia are presented as splinter states, but they distinctly American dystopias, not just fueled by our history but by the rhetorical assumptions that we are somehow special.<br />
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The Objectivism of the first game is easy to sell as destructive and problematic. Though Ayn Rand maintains a devoted following in some circles, her theories are generally accepted to be a pitifully simplistic fantasy, attempting to justify greed as a moral imperative. It's harder to justify American exceptionalism as toxic and the game settles on fin-de-siecle racism as the symptoms of its disease. There is no room for people of color or the Irish in Colombia and the game showcases a lot of uncomfortable, racist propaganda to prove just how awful a place the city is. Case in point, the images to the right:<br />
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Bioshock Infinite banks on the twinge of disgust in our gut seeing these images. We are conditioned to disdain blackface, racial slurs, minstrelsy and institutionalized racism and seeing those images placed side by side with the patriotic is jarring enough (though certainly historically justified) to get people to question whether or not the link is necessary. Portions of the game play out (to great effect) like chapters from Howard Zinn's <i>A People's History of the United States</i>. The game uses the Wounded Knee Massacre and the Boxer Rebellion as object lessons in American arrogance and cruelty. Colombia is the America that took those lessons as unabashed triumphs. Again there is something laudable in all this. I doubt most people are aware of either event and bringing them center stage is a pretty cool way to make a point about the still extant dangers of believing your homeland to be the messiah of nations.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QlSaou_Yc8o/UWyYnoI4FqI/AAAAAAAAAHI/35X0GosPJvA/s1600/fitzroy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a>Unforunately, Bioshock Infinite turns away from this plot in order to tell a personal story about the game's protagonist, a former Pinkerton and survivor of Wounded Kneeand the Boxer Rebellion atoning for his sins by trying to save a maiden-in-the-tower heroine who is more than she appears. About a third of the way through, the game essentially becomes a science fiction yarn about multiple dimensions and causal relationships. By the end your hero, Booker DeWitt is revealed to be the race-baiting prophet, Zachary Comstock from a different reality. The heroine is your daughter and solution to the game is to go back to the moment when DeWitt and Comstock diverged (a baptism) and drown yourself. Very complicated, fairly fulfilling but it necesitates a divergence from the coming race war and its shortcuts left me a little bit uneasy.<br />
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Much of the plot of the early game revolves around arming an underground movement called (with sophomoric, winking reference) the Vox Populii. It's led by Daisy Fitzroy, the prophet's former housemaid, wrongly accused of the murder of her mistress. Her rebellion in the works is made up of the city's black, Irish and Chinese populations, working to overthrow the yoke of tyranny and topple Comstock's white-washed hegemony. I was pleased to see a woman of color cast in a major heroic role in a videogame. She also manages to be dressed in an outfit appropriate to a revolutionary and not some cleavage revealing ensemble that belies a well developed character. Say what you will about strong women in video games, no matter how well they are being written they are still, more often than not being dressed in equal parts adolescent fantasy and improbable discomfort.<br />
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In order for the game to make its point about multiple dimensions and the trouble with rewriting history, it needs to shortchange Daisy Fitzroy. The game shifts abruptly from having you help arm the rebellion to having you shift into another dimension where the rebellion is already going on and Daisy is on the ascendant. With a few lines of dialogue, the ever-dour DeWitt says "The only difference between Fitzroy and Comstock is how you spell the name." This holds up, Daisy proves to be obsessed with murdering the WASP-y children of privilege and, as she is about to slit a child's throat, Elizabeth, the game's heroine, stabs her in the back with a pair of scissors.<br />
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From a narrative point of view, it is understandable that we need to see how both sides of a revolution are subject to blind arrogance and cruelty. For DeWitt and Comstock to be equally guilty and problematic, the political situation has to mirror it. Absolute power corrupts absolutely yadda yadda yadda. The only problem is, the Vox Populii and the Colombian Founders are not equally corrupt body populaces. The game is fairly good about discussing the suffering of innocents in times of war, but it makes the mistake of using real historical racism to make the point that anyone can become oppressed. I'm not saying that it is not possible, in some alternate dimension for a woman of color to be a power-mad eugenics advocate, I'm merely suggesting that we are not there yet as a society to look at that critically.<br />
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As I said before, Bioshock Infinite is laudable for its focus on the sins American history: for not blaming racism and injustice on the Confederacy and Jim Crow laws alone--for saying, in fact, that the whole idea of American Exceptionalism is predicated on an exclusionary, white, imperialist vision of the world that trampled numerous cultures and murdered innocents to become an international power. In trying, part way through, to claim that the reactionary revolutionaries are equally to blame as their oppressors, is a simplistic distraction from that story. You and your companion kill Daisy Fitzroy halfway through the game and go on to dismantle Colombia, but her Vox Populii, now leaderless take over from the Colombian Peacekeepers as the game's primary cannon fodder villains. It's as though the game is agreeing with Comstock's assessment of the Vox: anarchists can only ever cause anarchy, if you let oppressed minorities take over, they will run everything into the ground. Racist order is shown to be on equal footing with anarchist chaos.<br />
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Again, this is not the crux of the plot and I do not believe the game developers intended this. It's an unfortunate byproduct of shunting the politics of the game off to the side once the character exploration and science fiction emerge front and center. It's disappointing that the kickass woman of color is reduced to an empty symbol while white male characters get lengthy explorations, but I also think it shows a misunderstanding of the game's central theme. The moment that splinters Comstock/DeWitt in two different dimensions: turning one into an arch-villain and the other into a reluctant hero is a baptism some years after the Massacre at Wounded Knee: DeWitt (the good version of the protagonist) refuses to be baptized and Comstock takes the waters willingly. The implication (though it is delightfully subtle compared to most of the rest of the game) is that Comstock mistakes baptism for death and resurrection. He refuses to explore his guilt about Wounded Knee and instead believes that he has been reborn as righteous and holy (taking on the new name, Zachary Hale Comstock as a way of killing off the godless Booker DeWitt). DeWitt, on the other hand, suffers and suffers terribly, is consumed by guilt over the events of Wounded Knee and refuses to give in to the righteous justifications that Comstock makes for his actions. It is a surprisingly complicated moral, especially for a shooter: you don't get to start over. The atrocities you committed don't get wased away when you do the right thing. There is no redemption, only a slow arc--longer than your lifespan--towards real justice.<br />
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The game fails to give Fitzroy the same treatment because it mistakes DeWitt's original sin. It assumes that faith in absolution is the lapse. The lapse is genocide. Both DeWitt and Comstock participated in it, and just because one man refuses to end his guilt does not make it less real. Daisy Fitzroy does not have the choice to become anything other than a revolutionary. There is no moment in the waters of baptism where she has the option of turning away and, as a result, she cannot be held to the standards of the game's internal morality when it comes to enacting violence.<br />
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And maybe that is the problem with combining multi-dimensionality science fiction with politics. Merely by entering into another world where Daisy Fitzroy won her revolution, the game erases the history of oppression that started the revolution in the first place. This Daisy may not be the same as the one you agreed to arm and that, in and of itself is a letdown. A conceit of Bioshock Infinite's multi-dimensional travel is that you can't actually escape your past or wipe the slate clean. Only DeWitt's death solves the problem of Comstock's tyranny--his death before any of his actions are taken. In that model, we have to assume that Daisy is somewhat stable across multiple dimensions and the game's refusal to acknowledge that is just another way in which she is used poorly. Infinity does not mean infinite narrative possibilities. It only proves that entropy is true in stories as well as physics. When there are millions of subtly different revolutions all happening at the same time, it is hard to really care about the outcome of one.<br />
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Bioshock Infinite has a lot of great things going for it (don't even get me started on the beautifully Gothic subplot about the death of Comstock's wife, now interred in a glass coffin and guarded by an order of coffin-bearing, raven-wielding zealots). It is a game that seeks to challenge our beliefs about America's relationship with race and our ability to atone for past misdeeds. Unfortunately, as it tries to do those things simultaneously, it ends up undermining and over-simplifying the politics that make it so intriguing to begin with.TMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5483251107827718564.post-85110093454886532692013-03-05T17:29:00.001-08:002013-04-15T18:21:54.120-07:00The Somnambulist's Diary IVMy dreams have a false but recognizable geography to them. The street I grew up on figures heavily in many of them and the surrounding neighborhood, skewed by dream logic repeats from dream to dream. Some three blocks down the street from my own block, my dreams consistently feature a dark wood paneled restaurant with hotel rooms above them. No such place existed near my house nor ever did but it is consistently there. So too is a house near the end of the cul-de-sac, always abandoned, always dusty and furnitureless with naked wooden beams, worn and pocked by termites. I mention this because my dream last night featured this stable but non existent neighborhood--a shadow of the Walnut Acres in which I grew up. And the feeling of the unheimlische, not just within the dream, but outside it, is important.<br />
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I'm in a minivan, driving north on Topanga Canyon blvd and I hit Ventura. I park behind a gas station and get out on foot. As I walk east, way from my little piece of dream childhood, there is a street faire going on. It is night and people are dining al fresco, strings of light illuminating their laughing faces. People are waiting in line to get into bars and there are little dyed silk tents set up from which people are hawking their wares. I can hear this man I'm about to meet for blocks before I see him. He's no one specific, a douchey frat boy who reminds me of no one so much as Topher Grace though his features are indistinct. He's talking about some girl he intends to seduce to his friend. I'm his friend sometimes. Sometimes it's a third person standing near us.<br />
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A woman approaches us. She's a short, brunette with a bob--pretty but features are full of anger. She's wearing a tube top and has a deep red scar across her clavicle. The douchebag points at her, "Hey! Look who it is!" He leans in conspiratorially and says "The last time I saw you, you were all tied up." He gives us a sidelong glance and winks. She leaves in a huff. His friend (not me at this point) gives him a fist bump. I go cold. In my head I have a clear vision of that last encounter. She is naked. Bound at her wrists, ankles, throat and waist by heavy iron manacles. They are in some sort of cave and she is seething. This whole experience walks the very edge of consent and I am seething, somehow enraged with an undercurrent of jealousy. Feeling at all desirous in this situation makes me deeply unhappy and fills me with self loathing. The douchebag pulls a butterfly knife from his white slacks and gives a sharp flick of his wrist. He opens up her flesh near the clavicle the source of the scar.<br />
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I come to and am back in my car. I'm filled with a blind rage at this man and his casual leer at the woman he disfigured. I'm driving, white knuckled, my face contorted by anger. I've called the police about this man, I know. He won't hurt anyone else but I have to do something myself. I'm fuming, hyperventilating as I drive around. I start running errands to distract myself. I go to a grocery store to buy a palate of soda. I drop the soda off at the McMansion of a girl I went to high school with. She's having a party and I listlessly shuffle by them. All this time a clinical, detached voice is narrating, as though on a handheld tape recorder "The condition is marked by paranoid delusions. It predicates itself on the desire to take revenge, even when confronted with overwhelming evidence of their folly. In this condition they are doomed to play out their fantasies, disconsolate and immune to all help."<br />
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I am looking down on all this. Hearing the psychologist describe my confusion, seeing myself seethe and plot action, despairing as the police tell me I have no evidence. I saw him cut her, I think to myself. I can't bring myself to admit it might all be imagined. I wake up.TMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5483251107827718564.post-21121682390786020602013-02-18T14:40:00.001-08:002013-04-15T18:21:47.201-07:00The Somnambulist's Diary #3I dreamt, last night, that I was on a snowy promontory, surrounded by men dressed in furs and patchwork armor. We are fending off something horrible that is lurking in the surrounding woods. There are horrid footprints with three toes all around the promontory and I see three of them dragging a sledge on which is the forward half of a bear, frozen intestines dragging behind it. We check its feet but the bear has four toes, not three.<br />
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I'm with a woman I love, a woman who doesn't love me. She's pregnant and it's not mine and she shouldn't be here. Not with the things out in the woods, not the with chaos of these men who are getting ready to run from whatever might emerge. We go to her tent and she tells me that I need to help her deliver the baby. I have no idea what I'm doing but she is urgent about it. As I lift up blood-stained furs she's dressed in she begs me not to look at her genitals. I do the best I can, to look away while delivering the baby. As she struggles, I can see shadows on the walls of the tent. Men are shouting and running outside, the thing or things in the woods have arrived and the promontory is unsafe.<br />
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When the baby does come it's tiny, misshapen, of indeterminate gender. It's covered in my friend's entrails. Soft, bloody tissues that are seeping into the fur lined floor of the tent. My friend grabs me by the throat, she's pale, her hair has gone white and there are deep bags under her eyes. She tells me I have to take care of her child, to get both of them to safety.<br />
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So we leave the tent. There are men torn in half, bleeding out in the snow. I've swaddled her baby in a burlap sack, it disappears among the folds.She's leaning on me, stumbling, leaving a trail of thick, dark blood in the snow behind us as we move forward.<br />
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We make it to the woods. the danger is real but we haven't seen it. There are men running past us with torches mad with terror. We come to a village of rope bridges high in the trees. A man is guiding us forward now, telling us to head north for safety. As we move through the village, we can hear an awful keening sound, something like a child's scream or a peacock's wail but shriller and louder. It's the sound of whatever is out there in woods.<br />
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It feels like days that we're out there. The sun sets and rises again. My friend is not even walking any more: I'm having to drag her through the snow. Her baby is eerily quiet. We come to a mountain summit and a deep cave yawns in its center. A man in a horned helmet tells us that the only safe passage is down into the caves. It's populated by degenerate troglodytes, things that were once-men, but now see us as enemies. It's horrible, a terrifying trip down into the icy darkness, but it's better than the keening thing slaughtering men up in the woods.<br />
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My friend awakens and we stumble down into the dark. One of the once-men finds us sixty paces in. It's face is twisted deformed, blue and black from frostbite. It leads us deeper in, glancing back nervously, chittering and grumbling in its incomprehensible speech. My friend is terrified now, crying, still bleeding, i haven't heard anything from the bundle of burlap in which her newborn child is wrapped. She is wailing and crying and more of the once-men are gathering around us.<br />
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As we pass by icy, still ponds deep in the caves, I can see the once-men's reflections. They reflect who they were before the degeneration or perhaps their ancestors. It's unclear. They are men of noble bearing, dressed in green, etched armor, with long moustachios and kind, sad eyes. They speak in high-minded nasal tones and pleasantries, but the words are only echoes, the chittering and slavering of their degenerate selves is what's real.<br />
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My friend collapses and I drop the silent burlap bundle to catch her. It lands with a wet noise on the hoarfrost crusted stone. She looks at it, screaning, sobbing, reaching out for it. I wake up.TMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5483251107827718564.post-39742787632799379562012-12-25T17:32:00.001-08:002019-03-23T18:58:30.231-07:00So this is Christmas?I should be clear upfront: I hate that John Lennon song. In fact, I hate the vast majority of Christmas Carols written after 1950, and most genre covers of the ones written before (read: an R&B version of Baby it's Cold Outside, cough cough, Vanessa Williams, cough cough). In fact it was my dismay at the idea that my hatred for most Christmas music that inspired this blog.<br />
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I should also be clear: I am not one of those people that hates (or even merely tolerates) Christmas music generally. I love it. During December, my radio station is tuned to KOST, Los Angeles' own easy listening drivel factory which goes all out with Christmas jungles from Thanksgiving to New Years. I will defend the importance of Christmas music to the death. But it is in increasingly narrow band of it that I bother to listen to and it got me thinking about Christmas and it's personal meaning and whether or not I had tapped into something larger or was just recapitulating every meaning of Christmas cliche blah blah blah.</div>
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All Christmases are pastoral: mis-remembered, idealized versions of some distant, indistinct childhood Christmas, now longed for but unrepeatable. My own unachievable Christmas is a conglomeration of the celebrations between four and seven: old enough for me to remember my parents together, young enough to believe in Santa Claus, consistent enough to seem like an immutable tradition. </div>
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It is probably all related to my dad's attachment to Santa Claus. My family is not at all religious (my sister and I were raised as secular humanists by ex-Catholic parents) and Santa was one of the few nods to any kind of spiritual understanding of the world. My father and mother went all out with the tradition of his visits: thethank you note for cookies and milk written in flowery script, jingling sleigh bells on our roof, presents from Santa wrapped exquisitely in rich, velvety paper with pine nettles and holly sprigs. This was supplemented by an obsession with <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Santa_Claus_Book.html?id=GDTaQjt6NmEC">Alden Perkes' <i>The Santa Claus Book</i></a>, a kids primer on Santa that included daily routines, floor plans for his North Pole Compound and (my personal favorite) a slightly terrifying anthropological record of the various sub-species of elves (the ancient Egyptian Cyclops Elf was particularly frightening to me).</div>
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We did not have a specific family mythology of Santa Claus. The Alden Perkes book made for a good foundation, but it did not map directly on to anything I knew from other media sources. Santa Claus was not St. Nicholas, nor was he the Archbishop of Spain, or even the Clement Clark Moore Santa who rode in a red sleigh, finger on his nose etc. He was, if anything, closest the Santa Claus envisioned by L. Frank Baum in his 1902 novella, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. I never read the novella but I was enraptured by Rankin and Bass' 1985 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NsPinx6OXo">claymation version</a>. In it, Santa is raised by fictional pagan gods and faeries and sent into the world with the desire to improve the lot of his fellow mortals. He is rewarded by the gods with the mantle of immortality that transforms him into a woodland spirit who can deliver toys to children through the ages of eternity.<br />
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I haven't really ever settled on what vision of this Santa is. He is vaguely Germanic or Scandanavian, not un-related to Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Present, a feral spirit, living in the deep snowy woods, dressed in green, swaddled in furs, sometimes adorned with antlers or a wreath of candles and holly. He is not a fearful figure, but he is not entirely of this world. The toy-delivery thing often gets lost in the shuffle. He is a manifestation of my fantasy of woodland winters: of the space of light and homely hearths that is nestled in a cabin, snowed in by monstrous drifts. I suppose, in that way, it parallels the christian spirit of Christmas out of dark times comes the brightest light etc etc. It's really an antler based thing for me, however.<br />
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Psychologically, I am sure that this somehow is a need for the safety of my family, unbroken by divorce. I transplant the wholeness of the house to the image of a space of comfort holding out against the cold, snowy darkness without. But it exists, in a very real way, outside of that need. My parents, after all, spend Christmas together now. The need to create a fantasy space is gone. But the fantasy is too powerful not to endure.<br />
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Perhaps that is why I throw a yearly "Victorian Gothic Christmas." It's an attempt to aesthetically reconcile that childhood Christmas with an adult, non-saccharin celebration of the holiday. In bringing out the holiday's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlsJD8RlhbI">intrinsic darkness</a>, perhaps we can summon an evening of light, even light phrased as drunken debauch.<br />
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My dad and I recently, independently heard <a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/482/lights-camera-christmas?act=1">a story on This American Life</a> wherein a family takes this kind of care and concern for perpetuating the Santa myth to a somewhat distressing extreme. My dad apologized to me after listening, fearing he had done the same to me. I listened to it thinking "there is no way I won't turn into that father." </div>
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Christmas isn't a religious conviction. It is not a space to reconnect with family. It is a set of aesthetic imperatives, to stand against the oncoming dark and live.</div>
TMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5483251107827718564.post-23765961698892037532012-10-17T17:54:00.001-07:002019-03-23T18:57:47.713-07:00Oh What a ShameIt's been a while. I've been thinking a lot about Ke$ha lately. Actually for years.<br />
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Anyone who knows me knows that I have a completely unabashed love of pop music. Over the years I have tried to make it into some grandiose statement about engagement with the cultural zeitgeist: oh Pop music is like Kundera's definition of kitsch, oh pop music is the end point of a vast alchemy that transmute incoherent emotion into something tangible--an anthem of consistent, relatable feeling. It's likely that all of it is bullshit and I mostly like listening to easy, un-challenging music.
But with Ke$ha (whose spelling of choice is such an elegant solution to the Prince problem) I feel some kind of uber-connection. I should explain, first of all, that I am kind of a prude. Not in terms of my behavior which has occasionally detoured pretty heavily into vice-alley. But those behaviors are marked with a huge amount of self-loathing and a too-perceptible judgement of others. I am my own worst slut-shamer. I'm not proud of it. Consider this blog an apology.<br />
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But with Ke$ha... there is something in her complete indulgence in trash that transports me. She's not adjectivally trashy, she <i>is</i> trashiness: primally trashy. Ur-trash. And I admit, I get a guilty buzz out of it. But I also think it's more than that. So, without further ado, here is my analysis, for better or for worse of her newest single: "Die Young." Here is the youtube link: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCTfZUEUNxA">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCTfZUEUNxA</a><br />
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We are a culture of binaries and the club party / loser square binary usually associates the former with wild hedonism, abandon, freedom, and meaninglessness. It's a passionate defense of nihilism, usually. We're doing this because we can, because it's fun and because none of it matters. Monogamy is tyranny. Fidelity is a curse. Sobriety is a fiction. As a result, I am surprised to find that "Die Young" is, essentially, a desperate search for connection in a world of uncertain signifiers and painful brevity.<br />
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Let's start with the opening lines (which happen to be the chorus):<br />
"I hear your heart beat to the beat of the drums./<br />
Oh what a shame that you came here with someone./<br />
So while you're hear in my arms,/<br />
Let's make the most of the night like we're gonna die young."<br />
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It's not, on the surface, such a strange message. She is hardly the first artist to make the point that dying young is preferable to growing old. Alphaville did quite a good job of that twenty-five or so years previously. What is worth paying attention to here is the recognition of the club being a liminal space. In previous songs, Ke$ha expresses her hedonism not as a patronage but as a lifestyle. Who can forget that she "brushed her teeth with a bottle of Jack" in her first big hit. Here however there are some spatial and temporal limitations. She recognizes that her would-be lover "came here with someone" and, even more importantly, she characterizes it as "a shame."
The narrative turns on the idea that their time is limited. Those limitations have everything to do with the world outside the club. The "someone" that the object of the narrator's affection came with is never defined. Perhaps it is a girlfriend, or a wife or just a date. She spells doom for the narrator's ambitions. Whatever moment of connection is being posited must, by necessity, end--maybe even at the end of the song.
Rather than being a lament for the things that cannot last, Ke$ha proposes that they exist fully within the limited venue provided them by fate. "So while you're hear in my arms, let' make the most of the night like we're gonna die young," she says. The listener must be most struck by the desperation in the line (the crux of my argument here). Given that the exploration of their attraction must entirely exist within the confines of the dance, Ke$ha imagines that only death waits on the other side of that embrace. To imagine a life where her would-be lover returns to the person he arrived with is to imagine an abyss. Unlike most songs touting the virtues of youth and dying before one ages, this is a plea enjoying that which is limited and unsustainable.
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The cynics among us may want to characterize these lines as a reinforcement of the easy-hedonism that characterizes most of the Ke$ha canon. Reading the "while you're here in my arms" line as something more akin to "Let's grope before your girlfriend gets mad." There is certainly some evidence for this reading. The first verse states, quite clearly:<br />
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"Young hearts, out our minds,/<br />
Runnin' like we outta time./<br />
Wild childs lookin' good./<br />
Livin' hard just like we should./<br />
Don't care who's watching when we tearing it up. (You Know)/<br />
That magic that we got nobody can touch. (For sure!)"<br />
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Essentially, this relationship, because it occurs in a public space, must be shameless and, in it's shamelessness meaningless. The cynic wants to read "don't care who's watching" as a lurid, voyeuristic invitation. They are wild children whose mid-club coupling is only the basest expression of a feral lust.<br />
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As I said, validity in the above-reading and certainly in-line with Ke$ha's previous expressions of a world of endless hedonism. I would like to focus in on the second and final verse, however.<br />
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"Young hunks taking shots,/<br />
Stripping down to dirty socks./<br />
Music up, gettin' hot,/<br />
Kiss me, give me all you've got./<br />
It's pretty obvious that you've got a crush. (you know)/<br />
That magic in your pants is making me blush. (for sure)"<br />
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It's a rather stark denial of expectations. Ke$ha gives us a world of typical club sexuality: free-flowing alcohol, removal of clothing (note the double <i>entendre</i> in the use of the word "dirty"), a crescendo of libidinous music and actual physical contact. When we get to the final couplet, however, we see a hint of something unexpected. Though the couplet primarily treats on her lover's erection, she ends the line with the assertion that his physical arousal is "making [her] blush." Despite the claustrophobic sexuality all around them and her previous assertion of the public nature of their coupling, the most intimate moment of possibility--the recognition of his actual sexual capability, transforming desire into action--is rendered as innocent. The narrator blushes at his arousal. She is caught off guard by the revelation that their desire could be made manifest. Though the entire tableau is Dionysiac and debauched, at its core is a kernel of un-jaded, unexpressed erotic exploration that can still cause the "wild child" to "blush."<br />
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This moment is quickly drowned out by another stanza in which she asserts:<br />
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"Looking for some trouble tonight. (Yeah?)/<br />
Take my hand i'll show you the wild side,/<br />
Like it's the last night of our lives. (Uh huh)/<br />
We'll keep dancing till we die."<br />
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The narrator goes back to playing the role of half-feral seductress, perhaps as an overcompensation for the discomfort experienced in realizing she still had the capacity to experience sexuality in a way that wasn't constructed by the jaundiced eye of the club environs. She describes her lover as a source of "trouble" and her purview as being "the wild side." I see it as Ke$ha's attempt to defend against the critic that is made uncomfortable by her expressed discomfort. Again, death becomes the only viable way out of the situation. Though she employs a simile at first, "Like it's the last night of our lives," she quickly turns it into metaphoric call to action, "we'll keep dancing 'till we die." The line is repeated in ghostly echoes several times "die young, die young." By the end, it is not even a request, it is a command. Dying young is not, like Alphaville professes, the answer to the indignities of ageing, it is the only way make the impermanent eternal.<br />
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We then return to the chorus which is repeated, sometimes even layering over itself in the lines' desire to be spoken. It is a shame. A shame that a world outside the club even exists. The music will stop and the narrator and her lover will have to part ways, he must go back to the "someone" he came with. She must accept that this return to blissful, erotic innocence must end. She will again become one of the jaded, shot-taking dancers, stripped "down to dirty socks" and unable to blush at the "magic" in the pants of her next partner. In a situation like this, clearly death begins to look attractive.<br />
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The genre of trashy club songs relies upon the amorality (but not the immortality) of it's protagonists. They are lost in a world of drink and drug-addled hedonism that removes any culpability for the impulsive actions of a moment. Ke$ha has presented her heroines as mindlessly cruel pleasure seekers who cannot be blamed for their fickle affections because they are unable to be any different than their environs demand. But in this song, there is a profound vulnerability. It is not only the cuckold and his/her partner that suffers. The temptress/cad is shown to exist in a world of impermanent objects and desires that do not change because they are hollow. Rather, these desires change because they must--because they are acted on by outside forces. Ke$ha is the abandoned, even in the center of her own comfortably careless milieu. Those things that cannot last, despite their erotic intensity and exploratory innocence, take their toll. Better to die before the music stops than to continue in such an endlessly ephemeral vein.<br />
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Brava, Ke$ha! You seemlessly blend the ribald with the poignant and yes: it is a shame that you came here with someone.TMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5483251107827718564.post-22160743484966371962012-04-02T15:42:00.001-07:002019-03-23T18:57:13.269-07:00A Clash of KingsI just got finished watching the first episode of Game of Thrones season 2 for the third time. This is nothing new for me; I am the type who likes to watch TV episodes multiple times. I figure that this season I owe it to myself to organize my thoughts better via blogging. I mean, after all, Game of Thrones is my favorite television show and, I think, one of the best on television period. <br /><br />In terms of spoilers, I don’t intend to spoil anything. I make some reference to the existence of later books, and hint at some differences in motivation, but I do not explicitly discuss anything that has not occurred thus far on the TV show.<br /><br />I should preface this by saying that I grew up reading George RR Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” books, upon which the show is based. I started reading when I was seventeen (just after the 3rd book came out) and in the intervening years I have re-read them about five times (though, of course I have only read the 5th one, which came out this summer once). I am something of an odd bird, I take it, among diehard fans of any sort of genre fiction in that I do not have a desperate need for accuracy in adaptations. In fact, I find that a slavish fettishization of detail is one of the most annoying things about most fans. Between Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and, now, the Hunger Games, I have had an earful from irate fans who don’t understand a simple truth about film and television: every act of adaptation is an interpretation. It’s not merely a matter of budgetary concerns and hubris (though the writers, producers and directors of films and shows can certainly be hubristic when it comes to putting their stamp on a property). At it’s core, any story has to be taken on the terms that work best for it. Those will never be the same across media. I remember way back in 2000, fans on theonering.net complaining that the Lord of the Rings films didn’t need to even be written because the dialog was perfectly transportable as is. Obviously they are wrong. Obviously I am delighted by the way that Benioff and Weiss have enhanced, adapted and interpreted Martin’s prose to work on television, but I trust them to tell a parallel story to the one I grew up with and so dearly love.<br /><br />And parallel it is. The second season asserted it’s movement away from slavish interpretation. Events have been jumbled around. The timeline has been altered slightly and characters have been substituted. But all of it seems in service of covering necessary ground while leaving time for character moments. My favorite scenes from the first season of Game of Thrones were those that did not explicitly occur in the novel but could have. Martin’s close 3rd person with its multiple point-of-view characters creates a fantastic sense of occultation in the prose. Major events are often simply rumors. Characters are unable to tell truth from fiction and we get descriptions of the same occurance from four or five different unreliable sources. That doesn’t work for TV of course, and Benioff and Weiss wisely fill in those gaps with small, telling character moments. Those are employed liberally and to great effect here in season 2’s opening.<br /><br />This brings us to the controversial Littlefinger-Cersei scene which many fans have complained about. I will admit that Littlefinger’s brashness in dealing with Cersei, his bold assertions seem a little out of character for the master of subtlety but I didn’t mind that small inconsistency in character for the effect it produced. Martin’s novels are complicated and feature characters with conflicted goals and motivations, but there is an aspect of it that can always be boiled down to the House Maxim’s. Morality is never balck and white and the characters are never simple, but the world he writes seems to believe in the wisdom of simple phrases which litter his page. Littlefinger’s assertion that “Knowledge is Power” is not a stand-in for the whole of his character but it helps distill him, in part, for an audience who is trying to grasp at his methods and motivations. Cersei’s awesome retort that “power is power” is not merely a distillation of her character, it is a stand-in for the show as a whole. GoT’s characters believe in the methodologies and values that comfort them but it is power alone that rules everyone at the end of the day. I may not have liked Littlefinger’s unsubtlety in that moment, but showing us the fragility of his position was excellent. Spies and secrets may help you protect yourself but everyone is fragile in the end and a knife kills a spymaster as easily as a peasant. <br /><br />I also felt like the scene helped to highlight the ways in which the costumers have done an excellent job. Lannister household guards are used as faceless spooks throughout the books. Their loyalty to the lions is rarely questioned and their anonymity makes them scary. It’s a tried and true device—Nazi foot soldiers in gasmasks, hideously uniform orks, killer robot legions—but an effective one. The way in which the Lannister helmet hides the eyes of its wearer makes them much more effective at standing in for that faceless, terrifying horde. It’s the same with the Gold Cloaks and their chainmail veils. Though, as Sean Collins expertly points out in his review over at Rolling Stone, the eyes are left obscured but visible so that we can see the look of disgust on the faces of a couple tasked with murdering children.<br /><br />Compared with the novels, the show seems to be making a good faith attempt at giving us a reason to be sympathetic towards Cersei. Not that Martin utterly discounts any sympathy we as audience members might have for her, but the show gives us moments of vulnerability that the Cersei of the books is determined to ignore. In a lot of ways I feel like Cersei is Ned Stark’s shadow in this incarnation. Both are characters who fanatically believe that the world ought to be a certain way (Ned believes it should be honorable and merciful, Cersei believes it should be free from gender inequality) and the blind spot for both is the idea that others wont accept their world view. Cersei may play more underhandedly and dishonorably than Ned but she seems to have this painful lack of self awareness when it comes to others perceiving her as no different from a male ruler. She may be out for her children’s best interests but when Joffrey accuses her of treason for slapping him, you can see it written across her face that she did not anticipate his discounting her as a mere woman. <br /><br />And that, I think is the key to making Cersei so compelling in this telling. Unlike Catelyn Stark and, to a certain extent, Sansa, she cannot accept her role as second class citizen. She is as smart and capable as her brothers and certainly more invested in ruling than either of them, but she will never be Queen in the way she wants and, as a result, she can only live vicariously through her monstrous son. Tyrion’s crack about her being the disappointing child may have elicited a chuckle from me at first, but it drove home the sad truth of the matter, neither can really ever be Jaime in their father’s eyes. And Jaime, ironically, has no interest in power. <br /><br />I have never felt this way but it has come to my attention that many fans really hate Sansa and Catelyn, preferring Danaerys, Arya and Brienne for their female paragons in the novel. I always suspected that part of it had to do with the lack of a desire to coopt masculine power in the case of the former two. Arya, Danaerys and Brienne all break gender boundaries and succeed where men fail. In the patriarchal rape culture of Martin’s Westeros, that kind of success story makes for some compelling moments of ass-kicking. But for me, Catelyn and Sansa represent a kind of quiet strength that often goes overlooked. They are the 3rd wave feminists of the bunch, getting power and influence without trailblazing or co-opting an identity that the society they live in abhors. Now, of course, you need both to make a decent point about strong women in a world dominated by men and in no way would I argue that Sansa and Cat are the superior characters, but I think for fans of fantasy, who read novels predicated on exceptionalism, it can be hard to see the merits in women who break no boundaries but still stay true to their goals, values and loved ones. <br /><br />Cersei, as she is written in the television show seems to be an interesting commentary on that problem. She is, arguably, the most powerful woman in Westeros and she came by that power through the means traditionally open to women in severe patriarchies: marriage, motherhood, sex appeal. But within that schema, she is seeking to be something more. She is not wielding the sword herself, but in that moment, it’s the blunt force of her martial might that decides whether or not Littlefinger lives and she makes sure that he knows it. I am really excited to see where they take her this season and in the coming years. Cersei has always been reviled, but I think her humanity is really well represented by Heady, Benioff and Weiss. <br /><br />I also am really delighted by Jack Gleeson’s Joffrey. I remember during the 2000 Oscar season, having a long conversation about the difference between Benicio del Toro’s performance in Traffic and Joaquin Phoenix’s in Gladiator. Del Toro took home the Oscar that year but a friend pointed out to me that the role was written for Oscar Gold. He plays a conflicted cop trying to walk the line between a love for small town Mexico that leads him into drug trafficking and a respect for the law that would keep his neighborhood poor. It’s a role that was all about conflict, pained expressions and internal conflict playing out on one’s face. And, credit where credit is due, Del Toro played it well. Joaquin Phoenix on the other hand, had a far more difficult job and produced, what I thought was a far more interesting performance. In the hands of a Christpher Walken or Jeremy Irons, Phoenix’s Commodus might have been transmuted into a snarling, foaming supervillain. As the unrelentingly petty emperor of Rome it was a thankless and bland role as written and yet, we pitied him. In Phoenix’s hands, we never liked Commodus but we understood why he was the way he was. Not a flat villain, he was tortured, sad, relatable, if only for a moment, before throwing away our sympathy by doing something even more cruel.<br /><br />Both the Joffrey of the show and, last year, Harry Lloyd’s Viserys, have had this similarly difficult role. Both are thoroughly monstrous. Gleefully, palpably cruel and insane. Both inspired so much loathing from fans. And yet, both have their moments of, if not relatability then at least sympathy. Viserys’ bathtub sex scene with Doreah and confrontation with Jorah Mormont last season made that clear. For a single moment, he comes across as a human being, remembering his childhood, realizing his own inability to do things the right way, before he threw it all away again in a storm of attempted rape and infanticide. This season we get some of the same with Joffrey. There is just the slightest hint of real teenage angst and rebellion underneath all that insanity. We see it when he confronts his mother about his own parentage the slightest flicker of awareness that he is trapped in his own body, a body born of incest, saddled with a dyspeptic, inbred madness. In the novel, we only ever get the story of the purge of Baratheon bastards second hand from Tyrion. Being so predisposed against his sister and nephew it is described only in broadly condemnatory terms. But here, in this first episode there is a real sense of sadness that precedes even the horrifying slaughter of children. Cersei calls Joffrey’s rule a claim to the throne and he retorts that he is the king, it’s not a claim. I felt the slightest twinge of pity for Joff, lied to all his life, trying to come to terms with the fact that the power he was bred to believe he was born to, might in fact be a complete fabrication. That said, I hate Joffrey all the more this season and that must be handed to Jack Gleeson as well. There aren’t many fourteen year olds who can elicit such rage from so many millions of people and that kid is doing an awesome job of it. Hopefully, he won’t be saddled with Maragret Hamilton syndrome later in life, reviled by people on the street for being confused with a role he nailed.<br /><br />That gap, between Cersei and Joff’s conversation and the slaughter of innocents is an important one. I do not know if Benioff and Weiss plan to let us know whether the idea was Joff’s as a way of protecting himself from the truth of the matter: all his alleged half siblings look nothing like him, or Cersei, in an act of bloody atonement for having led her son astray as to how safe he was on the throne, but both answers work for me. Those last scenes, of gold cloaks storming private homes and whorehouses and murdering teenagers, children and babies all to protect one insane king from further slander and libel, really stuck with me in a way it did not in the novels. The episode ends with a reprise of King Robert’s theme from the first season, which he first heard as the entire court arrives in Winterfell. In that first season its stentorian tones and relentless beat helped us understand the majesty and power the king commanded. It was theater and bluster and bravado, the awe-inspiring sight of the king, the essence of divine right—essentially the core of the show, for without some kind of exceptionality, why follow a bad king in the first place. Here, eleven episodes later, and replayed in a minor key, it is the dark underside of that majesty. The power to command is also the power to destroy. Joffrey (as an inverse of Jon Snow) is still a Baratheon (you may not have my blood, but you have my name) and in the name of Baratheon legitimacy, all the other traces of that awe inspiring house are gutted, drowned and beaten. The sublimity that characterizes kingship is as much fear as it is wonder. <br /><br />The familiar faces and new ones of Season 2 were all great, but, for my money, the episode belonged to Joff and Cersei, two painfully self-deluded characters, hideously cruel but, in the show at least, strangely sympathetic.TMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5483251107827718564.post-64243605880259459542012-03-25T15:07:00.001-07:002012-03-25T15:08:42.052-07:00Mass Effect 3: Stories and the Fans who Ruin ThemSo I’ve just heard about the Bioware decision to alter the ending of their wildly popular Mass Effect series after a sustained outcry by fans. As someone who himself recently finished the game and was haunted, but certainly not outraged, by the ending I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I think revision makes everything better and Bioware gets an opportunity here to build upon the concepts of their initial ending in order to (perhaps) make something that is, in the long run more satisfying. On the other hand, and this is the more dominant hand for what it’s worth, I do not, in any way, believe that the precedent set by this kind of fan pressure speaks well for the future of artistic integrity in games. <br /><br />First and foremost, I think it is worth remarking upon the ending of Mass Effect 3 in order to contextualize and categorize the fan outrage, as near as I can figure it. This will contain lots of spoilers if you haven’t already played the game through the end so be forewarned. Essentially, I think the problem with the ending comes down to its abrupt shift in tone, given the third game in the series. It’s a dark shift. Your character, some iteration of Commander Shepherd (in my case the middle-aged, openly gay, morally ambivalent Hippolyta Shepherd), hero(ine) of the galaxy and uniter of various races jumps from Malkuth (earth) to Yessod (the dues ex machine) quite literally. (S)he sees the inner workings of the god machine that powers the galactic extinction event against which (s)he rails and is forced to make a choice. (S)he can A, destroy the Reapers, those diabolic machines that threaten civilization, but in doing so (s)he will kill off an entire race of sentient machines whose rights (s)he has fought for and kill her/his own AI buddy, the spirit of her/his ship with whom her/his pilot has a relationship (it’s not as hokey in the game). (S)he can B, sacrifice her/his life to control the Reapers and force them to abandon their mindful killing but leaving the fate of organic/synthetic life uncertain. Lastly (s)he can also C, use her/his life energy to power a galactic wide synthesis of organic and synthetic life in the hopes of creating a new order that bypasses the cycle of uncertain chaos and cruel order that has defined the entirety of the galaxy’s history.<br /><br />All three endings are about sacrifice and uncertainty: whether it’s personal sacrifice or the sacrifice of one race to ensure the survival of others, or the sacrifice of all history and all the natural order in an attempt to create something better. None of the choices sit well, especially when most of the game has been spent uniting organic races (and one synthetic race) to fight off their own extinction and put aside old hatreds. Even more, all these revelations come in the last 5 or 6 minutes of the game, the information being delivered by a spectral, artificial intelligence, implied to be a ghostly echo of some unnamed god-like race of individual. So, yeah I suppose I get it. No ending is purely happy. The information is overwhelming and abruptly delivered and, even if it makes sense in the context of the game (all of this is revealed once Shepherd enters the inner sanctum of an alien space station that, for three games, has always been built up as mysterious and full of secrets), seems to be something of a literal dues ex machine. It’s a concern that the player did not know about or understand until seconds before and though thematically congruent with the rest of the series, had virtually no set up. <br /><br />I personally chose the “synthesis” ending; it made sense with the long narrative of Hippolyta Shepherd’s struggle for redemption. She made many questionable snap judgments over her long career, and giving the galaxy a chance to start over, sacrificing herself in the process seemed fitting. This ending also seems to be the one that the developers prefer, seeing as one had to be particularly thorough and attentive throughout the game in order to “unlock” it. I was surprised in trolling youtube that numerous people refer to the “destroy” ending as the “best” one. To my mind it’s the least heroic. It allows Shepherd to live—barely scrape by—but at the cost of many other individuals. Granted, that may be the value system you play with. One of the best parts of the whole franchise is the ability to make decisions that dynamically alter the plot. It’s not by any means user generated, but it’s very involving. Still, even given the difference in play style I was dismayed by the use of the word “best.” There is this niggling thought that I can’t shake that it’s the best ending solely because the main character survives. That somehow, the outrage of fans is, in part, because there is no way to live and also do the right thing for the galaxy.<br /><br />Maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe, at the end of the day, the other complaints (more legitimate to my mind) about the abrupt shift in tone are what really get under the skins of fans, and not just the inability to live with honor. But there is this part of me that suspects that its about not being able to perpetuate and not being able to end the game entirely on their own terms. And that strikes at the heart of the problem for me. The ending of Mass Effect may be good or bad or somewhere in between, but it does not merit the response from fans. I’ve read a few articles from legitimate and less legitimate news sites trying to encapsulate the debate for the non gamer audience. Invariably, the irate gamers are described as “passionate fans” and though it may technically be correct, I think that characterization speaks to part of the problem. Somehow, being dissatisfied enough with the ending of a story to mount a campaign to get the authors to change it and, in one shameful case, attempt to report Bioware to the Federal Trade Commission for “false advertising,” makes you “passionate,” more involved with the game—more invested in its outcome. I say, it makes you whiny, it makes you misunderstand what storytelling is about, and it sets a very, very bad precedent for how creative endeavors are handled.<br /><br />I’m a Victorian literature scholar by trade and, as luck would have it, my field has two examples of this kind of fan outrage having an effect. The first is the ending of Charles Dickens’ 1861 Great Expectations which was altered, at the suggestion of monumental hack, Edward Bulwer Lytton, to be happier. The second, an example more similar to our current, Mass Effect, situation, is Arthur Conan Doyle’s capitulation to fan pressure to resurrect Sherlock Holmes after having killed the character off in the short story “The Final Problem.” In both cases artistic intent was subverted by the will of the reader, forcing the author to compromise their original vision. As a literary scholar, both of these instances produce a lot of fascinating scholarship. In the case of Dickens, the two endings can now be compared for endlessly fascinating permutations of theories of novelhood. In the case of Conan Doyle, it produced many, many more Sherlock Holmes stories to write on and enjoy, even if the artistic integrity went over Reichenbach Falls alongside the great detective. <br /><br />The downside of both of these instances, however, is the laying bare of the power of the fan-base to interfere with the works they purport to love. Much like the 19th century, we are again, living in an age of serialized fictions. They may not come out in monthly papers, but they are broadcast weekly on television and are released yearly in endless sequels to both movies and games. This 20th and 21st century serialized form differs from its 19th century predecessor in one critical way: the stories often do not have endings. We’ve built all kinds of terms into our lexicon for this. “Jumping the shark” for instance, refers to the moment when a story has outlived its usefulness and believability, when we realize that it’s just stalling for time. Furthermore, in the age of outdated Nielson’s ratings, and cruel, artistically bankrupt networks and cable channels pulling the plug on shows before they can even start eyeing their water-skis, fans feel as though they must flex their Jacobin muscles in order to save those stories they think are worth finishing. And lately, they’ve been winning. Arrested Development is set to return. Firefly got its big screen dénouement. Community looks more and more likely to be renewed for a fourth season after a weirdly amorphous hiatus. <br /><br />But as I said before, there is a downside here. Fans feel like they own the properties they fight to save. And it’s true, in this free market, consumer society where women’s rights advocates can vote with their checkbook and get obnoxious right wing radio show hosts to tremble as sponsors drop like dominoes, we do all “own” a bit of the stories we support. I bought Mass Effect 3 (and 1 and 2) and I watch Community (and bought the season 1 and 2 DVDs) and went to see Serenity and will continue my Netflix subscription, in part, so that I can see the new season of Arrested Development. I’ve paid my money and I’ll be entertained for doing so. But leaving behind this depressing capitalist model, I don’t own any of these stories. They are stories that someone else told and that I happen to enjoy. Just because I invested time in Firefly, doesn’t mean I get to have any effect on its narrative outcome, and, honestly I shouldn’t. I’m not Joss Whedon or any of the writers of the show, or any of the cast and crew members who contributed to its ethos. I’m just someone who liked that ethos and even when I didn’t like where they took it, I have no right to be outraged that I didn’t like it.<br /><br />The same holds true for Mass Effect. The situation is confusing. Mass Effect 3 is the third in a series of games where the decisions of the players have dramatically altered the story being told. I chose not to kill the insectoid queen of a forgotten alien race in the first game and, as a result, I am rewarded with her support in the third game. I own the decisions but not the outcomes. Bioware wrote a game where both possibilities existed and I just chose what I wanted most. The vast spread of different stories that are possible in the Mass Effect series is not, as I said before user-generated. I didn’t come up with the situations and Bioware owes me nothing as to what choices are offered. Their decision, to rewrite the ending and release it for their fans, is theirs to make, but I am disappointed that they made it under duress. The ending good or bad, was the ending Bioware originally wanted—the ending the story was supposed to have. That people are unsatisfied with that ending is fine, but it’s not okay to demand it be changed. We aren’t storytellers in our role as gamers. We are involved in enjoying the story, but not in producing it.<br /><br />Gaming is a young industry, much like the novel was when Dickens wrote Great Expectations. It has barely had thirty odd years to establish its story telling conventions and figure out how the bounds of its artistic integrity. What Bioware fans who railed against this ending have done, essentially, is bullied the storytellers into taking back what was intended. I don’t blame fans alone for this. After all, it was Bioware’s decision to change the ending. But it only got to that point because fans demanded that the story be compromised. It will not fix Mass Effect 3 when the new ending is released. A hundred and fifty years from now, we will look back (as we do with Dickens now) and say, look, here are two endings to one game. How do they play off against one another? Mass Effect 3 will never, as a result, have a real ending now. Just a long discussion about why the ending was changed. <br /><br />I’ll play the new ending. I may even like it more. But why it exists will never sit right with me. I don’t believe I know what a better ending is. And that’s not really the point is it. These aren’t angry fans writing fan fiction to satisfy their need for closure. That would be a creative endeavor and a therapeutic one. Instead, these are fans expressing their dislike for the end of a story and demanding that they be given a better one. The end result of that is Glee. Ryan Murphy takes fan input seriously. As a result, his show has gone from being interesting and intricate and important, to a naratological mess: its characters are wildly inconsistent, its plotlines end too quickly, its excessive desire to please is its own undoing. In the end, the public is fickle, and you really can’t always please everyone. I’ve respected the storytellers at Bioware for years. I really hope this move isn’t the beginning of a long descent into fan service at the cost of well told stories.TMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5483251107827718564.post-12141554039229044802010-10-13T14:55:00.001-07:002013-04-15T18:22:33.490-07:00Gaming Gaming EverywhereThis is reposted from a little facebook survey that was going around about fifteen video-games that stuck with me. I normally disdain such things but it got me thinking and I ended up with some nice fodder for my trash blog. <br /><br /> 1. Final Fantasy IV- Perhaps my all time favorite game (or at leas the one I have the nost nostalgic connection to). Final Fantasy IV (or Final Fantasy II as it was called at the time of it's original US Release, was a point of origin for my understanding of fantasy and my involvement with involving narrative. There were many important books I read as a kid, but this ranks up there with any of them for sheer engrossing pleasure of narrative. It's story, now from the perspective of an English PhD candidate with more than a few loose and baggy monsters under his belt, is simple and laughably poorly translated. But I think it was the simplicity that incited my imagination. Later final fantasies were played and enjoyed (VI, VII and IX especially were beloved) but in becoming more graphically advanced they lost a lot of their charm. Something about seeing a vaguely amorphous outline of a little girl with green hair and a daisy tucked behind her ear, excited my imagination so much more than if she had been fully rendered and spectacularly realized. These characters were much more real to me, because they were so crudely drawn and narrated. Their tawdry demises chilled me to the bone. A game full of wanton self-sacrifice.<br /><br /> 2. Actraiser- Very few games can I call my own. I remember that Duck Tales was the first game I ever beat, but Actraiser will always be my game. A charming side-scrolling platformer checkered with a building Sim, Actraiser was, for me, the ultimate antidote to my insatiable lust for mythology. I think what I liked most about it (other than it's truly epic soundtrack-- think: a poorly synthesized Gustav Horst) was it's clear inspiration from readable mythology but divorced from any of its real tropes. Fighting the so-called Arctic Wyvern atop the world tree, was very clearly somehow inspired by Norse Mythology but it was hard to pin down how precisely. Covering a wide variety of world mythological tropes (Greco-Roman, Medieval Catholic, Egyptian, Japanese, Hindu and Norse) and weaving them effortlessly into a pseudo-Christian narrative about bringing light and order back to a world plagued by chaos, was the best thing a bookish 10 year old dreamer could hope for. Incidentally, the game took me precisely one year to beat. I received it for my 10th birthday, and beat it one day shy of my 11th.<br /><br /> 3. Super Castlevania IV- I distinctly remember making up silly names for each of the bosses in this game, with my step-sister, Kristen: Dr. Dominatrix, Mr. Nickels, Sir Reads-a-lot. I was recently informed that I was not alone in this process. The writer of the English game manual presented some obvious silliness (the dancing spectres are referred to as Paula Abghoul and Fed Ascare), along with jokes I only got in the last week: Puwexil, the long tongued skull boss of level four, is merely Lixewup (Licks You Up) backwards. Similarly, Koranot, the stone golem, is a phonetic anagram for Ton o' Rock. A great, operatic metal soundtrack alongside traditional gothic horror tropes and ridiculously charming videogame conventions (whipping repeatedly at a stariwell to receive a roast chicken dinner) made Super Castlevania IV a constant source of amusement.<br /><br /> 4. Dragon Age: Origins- DA:O, Bioware's recent masterpiece, more than any other game of my adulthood, seems to be in sync with my desires as a writer. It is a sweeping historical epic that integrates historical notes (Just post-crusades Christendom and Byzantium) with traditional, Dungeons and Dragons-esque fantasy tropes. In the case of this latter obsession, it seeks to play an interesting twist on well-worn fantasy conventions. It's elves live as second class citizens (fulfilling the role of European Jews), sticking tightly to their lost and fragmentary culture. Dwarves live underground but have built a fascinating proto-Objectivist meritocracy out of a rigid caste system. Dark and evil powers gather beneath the surface of the earth, but are treated as a real race with actual political designs and ambitions. All this is a fantastic spin on the typical fantasy epic, but I especially laud it's treatment of homosexual relationships. It manages to not pull any punches in allowing your avatar to be gay, bisexual or otherwise questioning heteronormative identity. It does so flawlessly, not only offering the complete freedom to make those choices but slotting it in to a world that is not always accepting. In a dialogue with pan-sexual, ethical slu/elven assassin, Zevran Arianai about my avatar's choice to ultimately pursue a heteronormative relationship, he sighs sadly, saying that, when it comes down to it, people usually choose the less difficult path. Hooray for frank and honest assessments of interpersonal relations, even in the most highly wrought and intricate fantasies.<br /><br /> 5. Mass Effect 2- Arguably, Bioware's best game to date. I don't go in for shooters. I don't go in for sci-fi. But I unabashedly love this game. I love it for the reasons that most people cite: it's open-ended plot based off of impossible moral decisions, it's extremely well-written and voice acted characters, it's adherence to a grim plot about Lovecraftian horror. But the standout thing to me was its ability to integrate a very traditional set of quest-based tropes into a plot that made sense. The main thrust of the game revolves around recruiting a team of top operatives, outlaws and oracles to combat impossible odds, outside the strictly legal domain of civilized space. In securing the loyalty of your companions you must perform a variety of mundane tasks to resolve their own psychological issues. Presented to you by a shipboard psychiatric evaluator, who knows that with a team as unstable and self-involved as yours, distraction and unresolved issues could mean the difference between success and failure. This all comes together in a final mission where each and every relationship forged is tested and utilized in the achievement of a greater goal. The game rewards not just your strength and agility, but your interpersonal acumen and understanding as well. As a final note, Jack, the hard-living, batshit crazy, cyberpunk heroine, might be one of the greatest characetrs ever created.<br /><br /> 6. Musya: The Classic Tale of Japanese Horror- I played this game over a weekend when I rented it for the SNES from the now defunct Blockbuster. It's a repetitive, little platformer with a really lousy interface and control system. But it was the first time I had any experience with the Japanese Gothic. The new exposure to giant, badger-like monstrosities in conical, rice padyd hats, tortoises with the face of infants, and living, bronze-age figures, possessed by ectoplasmic organs, oozing from its eyes was so startlingly frightening that I couldn't sleep for weeks afterward. As a Gothic scholar, I think I will always consider Japanese Horror to be several steps beyond me, unfathomably strange and far far more creepy than the western tropes I am used to.<br /><br /> 7. Super Metroid- This was the game I played with my dad and sister. Years earlier we played Super Mario Brothers III (after being literally awe-struck by its pressence in The Wizard, a film we went to see because it starred one of my mom's ex-students). While the trials of the angry sun and the novelty of Hammer Brothers Suits held our attention for many weeks, it was Super Metroid (a gift for my 13th birthday) that really brought us together as a family. I won't easily forget the moment we came home from Junior High to find my dad triumphantly declaring his victory over the Mother Brain then watching eagerly as we beat it for ourselves. More than it being a family experience, we really fell in love with the aesthetics of the game as well as its novel gameplay. I marveled at seeing the suggested, flooded ruins of Meridia, or the Alien-esque gothic terror of a Wrecked Ship, while my dad meticulously used the X-ray Scope to hunt down each and every missile upgrade, increasing our overall completion record to 96% (never could find that last Super Missile pack). A game of shocking moments, and clever tricks, based upon an intriguing system of opening up new places by finding upgrades to physically power yourself there, Super Metroid might be (for my money) the greatest platformer of its time, and one unequaled by modern attempts.<br /><br /> 8. Secret of Evermore- One of the first American games I ever played, Secret of Evermore was a strange, aiming-for-funny mishmash of 50's B-movie sci-fi tropes and classic, sword and sandal epics, wherein a Boy and his Dog explore the temporally replete world of Evermore in an attempt to get back to Podunk, USA. With a dog companion that transforms with your environs (from hulking Cave-Dog to Egyptian Pharaoh Hound to Fluffy Pink Poodle, to Flying, Dog-faced Laser Toaster) and a variety of alchemical formula that require diligent resource management (Three Parts Water to One Part Ash gets you an acid-rain storm), the travails of toe-headed cinema buff Isaac (always named Isaac in my games--not sure why) was a staple of my young life. I predictably loved the Ancient and Medieval portions of the world, alive with gothic castles, temples full of minotaurs, and Stargate-esque alien invaders.<br /><br /> 9. Donkey Kong Country II: Diddy's Kong Quest- Pirate themed with steampunk underpinnings, a surprisingly rocking soundtrack and demeaningly cute animal companions, DKC2 was everything I wanted in a light-hearted platformer. It struck the perfect tone and introduced me to thematic biomes. Sunken, ,muck covered pirate ships crashed in the bayou, oddly zen andscapes of twisted brambles, and intense sequences in which rhinos had to smash their way through the honeycomb labyrinths of malevolent bees. As anarchic and tongue-in-cheek as it was genuinely pretty, DKC2 really changed the way I looked at Apes and Crocodiles, and made me believe, if only for a moment, that Snakes could coil tightly into a spring and bounce to great heights.<br /><br /> 10. Grim Fandango- Scott McCloud in his briefly lived Computer Game Blog Comic described Grim Fandango as the closest game to Art he had ever played. I have to agree. Video Games are moving towards high art, and the debate can rage on as to which have actually achieved that status or if it yet to be conquered, but for my money, Grim Fandango is already there. I grew up playing Tim Schaffer Lucas Arts adventure games (Monkey Island, Sam and Max, The Dig), but Grim Fandango seemed designed for me. A truly organic vision combining Aztec and Mayan mythology with Golden Age of Cinema Film Noir, Grim Fandango followed the exploits of spun-sugar skeleton, Manny Calavera, a hapless travel agent caught up in a twisting labyrinth of insurance fraud, beatnik poetry and blood-sacrifice. It got me in touch with my Mexican roots while reminding me of the greatness of Chandler-Bogart films. You really don't know what you are missing until a tiny, talking skull with Peter Lorre's voice tells you about his trek to the 9th Underworld.<br /><br /> 11. 7th Saga- The Enix adventure game had the highest disparity between integrity of musical composition and quality of synthesizer I have ever seen. I still will get some of the music stuck in my head and any of my grad school friends can tell you that I obsessively play certain tracks on endless repeat while I write my papers. The game had an incredibly difficult learning curve and was plagued by a panoply of random encounters. It also had a fantastic central conceit of being able to play one of seven mercenary types competing for a set of seven ancient runes. Each of the seven played slightly differently (though I always played as Lejes Rimul, the magic-savvy demon prince) and allowed for a large number of strategic combinations by allowing you to team up with another one of the playable options.<br /><br /> 12. Sanitarium- It's hard choosing one serious Adventure game for this list. Stephen Spielberg's sci-fi archeology epic, The Dig certainly was a close runner up. But there is something about Sanitarium's central conceit of a character trapped in his own paranoid fantasies that made me shiver. Very few games have given me literal nightmares but this was one of them. It was also one of the last games my step-dad and I played together, making it especially important. It's hazy dream-logic where nightmare sequences involving Midwestern children slowly rotting away into plant matter, unspeakable Aztec curses, terrifying circus sideshows and insectoid invaders from outer space, contained the seeds of a real life tale of corruption and betrayal. It was a game about horrifying mysteries where the mundane and bureaucratic turned out to be the most horrifying prospect of all.<br /><br /> 13. Shining Force- My friend Casey first introduced me to Shining Force in the form of a pen and paper roleplaying game, meticulously based on the Turn Based Strategy game. There were certainly other games I enjoyed. But Shining Force was the reason I needed a Sega. The game, like Final Fantasy IV, was one of those situations where less was more. Casey and I not only played a few rounds of the pen and paper strategy game, we ended up making intricate back stories for its 30+ playable characters in the hopes of writing a novel. There was just enough personality in the portraits of each character to suggest a real history and a corresponding fondness for each of them. To this day I have a lot of trouble remembering what was fact and what was my own imagination.<br /><br /> 14. Arcanum- My friends have labeled this game a triumph of style over substance. An amazingly story well-told, with pitch perfect Victorian social mores, in a frustratingly (and sometimes hilariously) buggy game engine whose learning curve was butterfly knife sharp. Alongside my step-dad's Victorian roleplaying game and Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Arcanum formed the trifecta that would lead me into Victorian Literature Scholarship. It's a little bit embarassing to admit that my career was inspired by comics, DnD and video games and not, say, by reading Middlemarch for the first time. Coming back years later though, its amazing how much of the 19th century they really capture: Poe, Dickens, Hawthorne, Gaskell-- with a healthy dose of Darwin and Faraday thrown in for good measure. Everything from a misguided faith in electro-magnetism to a supernatural recreation of the Jack the Ripper murders, Arcanum created a world that was essentialized Victorian. Obviously it copped to some Steampunk influences along the way, but unlike Steampunk, it first and foremost loved the society and aesthetic of the era it amulated, not just the technology. I wish the Steampunk movement were more like Arcanum. And whatever its bugs, Arcanum was, and is, my vision of my field and my life, in private, indulgent moments.<br /><br /> 15. Sword of Vermillion- The first real role-playing game I ever played. Its instruction manual (a monstrous 100 page guide) served as a major source of inspiration, and I spent hours trying to illustrate the strangely named weapons and armor (graphite sword? carmine shield?). Monsters grunted with now-comical exuberance. The endless expanse of brightly colored yellow pillars that was apparently supposed to be mountainous terrain is still comforting to me. I still have the muscle memory of the difference in feel between cutting through a giant floating eyeball, and a serpentine Medusa-ling. Probably invented. Definitely affective.TMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5483251107827718564.post-4682016196361624852010-06-13T12:00:00.000-07:002019-03-23T18:55:59.103-07:00The Somnambulists Diary IIA dream:<br /><br />I'm in my apartment and the year is 1977 though that hasnt changed anything save that I am wearing a paisley print silk shirt. I am rearranging my closet, pushing my dresser back into the wall and opening up much more space. I am relieved that I am done with the task and that it has put my room back in order. But as I wander around I start to notice horrible creatures have invaded the house: inch wide centipedes, spiders with death's heads on their backs the size of my fist, roaches... hundreds of roaches. <br /><br />I get a call from my landlady telling me that there has been a breach in the apartment complex. She shows up at my door, suspecting my unit to be the one compromised. Looking into my closet she sees what I notice for the first time: a small strip, no taller than the moulding on the floor, is missing from the side of my closet. The insects are pouring out from that aperture. Beyond it I can see an alleyway... filthy with dappled sunlight filtering down from an old greenhouse style skylight. For some reason it feels like the worst place imaginable. <br /><br />I run to free my roommate. Its impossible to wake her even as centipedes are crawling in and out of her mouth and nostrils. I run back to my room where my landlady, an elderly woman now dressed in plumber gear, complete with utility belt, is working hard to board up the breach.<br /><br />Gargamel, my beloved pug, runs into the room and jumps into my arms. I am cradling him against my chest like a child. He speaks to me, whispering into my ear, with a voice not unlike Linda Hunt's. "I'm scared." he says.<br /><br />"Of what?" I ask.<br /><br />"Death." It is perfectly horrible to me that a dog should contemplate its own mortality. I am chilled by I try to calm myself.<br /><br />"Why are you scared of death?" I ask. Gargamel is ancient by dog standards. <br /><br />"It's the 70's. Every dog I know has died in their seventies." He leans closer conspiratorially, "It wasn't just Boston. It was my mother as well."<br /><br />I want to explain to him that just because its the 1970s doesn't mean he is in his 70s. But this is coupled with the wretched awareness that even so, by dog reckoning, Gargamel is over 100. I settle on a white lie, "You're not 70, you're 50." That seems to pacify him.<br /><br />I leave Martha to her work and stand outside my apartment, insects still flooding out the door, cradling the dog in my arms and suddenly very very sad.TMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5483251107827718564.post-43869164274545646742010-04-23T08:58:00.000-07:002010-04-24T13:41:01.575-07:00Scenes from Another World<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_eAbhZ4b08Yc/S9NXNoqpMzI/AAAAAAAAAC4/wl9H0qdxP7k/s1600/clifton%27s+exterior.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 192px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_eAbhZ4b08Yc/S9NXNoqpMzI/AAAAAAAAAC4/wl9H0qdxP7k/s320/clifton%27s+exterior.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5463806664696738610" /></a><br /><br />I spent the other day walking around Downtown LA with my roommate. She's writing an article on the LA subway and the tourism possibilities therein. I lived in Downtown LA for my lost year between college and grad school, crashing on my dad's couch at the Brewery. I know my way around Downtown pretty well so I came along to navigate. The night before we talked about various ways in which we might tackle the trip; how we might balance well known monuments and attractions with more obscure delights. In mapping out the route, I realized we'd be passing pretty close to 7th and Broadway in the Jewelry district and its singularly bizarre local eatery: <a href="http://www.cliftonscafeteria.com/">Clifton's Cafeteria.</a><br /><br />Founded by a man named <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Clinton">Clifford Clinton</a> whose personal portmanteau lends the restaurant its name, Clifton's is the closest I have gotten to wandering into David Lynch film. <br /><br />Imagine a world built in the same mode as Disneyland: 50's clean cut, white washed optimism with a stern but caring religious undertone, delighted by the endless possibilities of the human imagination. Only, instead of the expensive flagship of an entertainment empire, its a red-headed stepchild of a backwater, underfunded, unable to keep up with changing aesthetics and dilapidated. I'm sure at some point Clifton's was the place of wonder and hope it now mockingly reflects. Those days are long past, however.<br /><br />What remains is a strange kind of shell. It's dilapidation is not so much haunting as pitiable. It I've been to run down amusement parks and off-brand Chuck E Cheese's where the failure of its animatronics and the general decay of its decor made the experience as eerie as a Diane Arbus photo. Clifton's real appeal however, is in the strange pathos it seems to generate. It's hollowed out interior is still remarkably earnest. And its this earnestness that makes it so very upsetting. <br /><br />Supposedly modeled after the <a href="http://www.brookdaleinnandspa.com/">Brookdale Lodge</a>, a family friendly vacation resort nestled deep in the Santa Cruz mountains, the interior seeks to present itself as a <a href="http://www.cliftonscafeteria.com/pages/brookdale_home.html">welcoming sylvan escape</a> from the hectic world of wholesale jewelry just outside its doors. A poorly carved, faux-fur covered moose leers out of an awning just past the main entrance. The walls are covered in dark wood paneling, carved to look like tree trunks. A neon cross crackles atop a tiny "chapel" seemingly built into the impressive mountain rocks.<br /><br />The upstairs is paneled with a series of yellowing, backlit, window-sized photos depicting the African Savannah, the Grand Canyon, Haight-Ashbury. Sitting by those lucigraphed pictures is meant to transport a diner to the faraway land it depicts. One really might be eating in the middle of the Madagascar Jungle or on Pennsylvania Avenue just down the street from the White House.<br /><br />Entering the aforementioned chapel, a claustrophobic <span style="font-style:italic;">camera obscura</span>-- too small to stand up in fully with a diorama of a woodland scene built into a glass tank set in one wall-- one can, with the push of a button hear the voice of a man long dead, with the slightest hint of a Tennessee Ernie Ford twang, read poetry praising both Jesus and the woods while canned birdsong plays, deafened by the whispering of ancient static. There's nothing sinister in the message, just the honest naivete that one could have a profound religious moment, not just by observing the majesty of the woods, but by observing its facsimile in the confines of a theme restaurant, while listening to the cheerful droning of sub par poetry being read aloud. A sign on the door cautions you to close and latch the door so that you can have more privacy in the chapel.<br /><br />So it's not so much that Clifton's perverts and distorts its original intentions. It just falls magnificently short, while failing to appear hollow in the process. My mother, who first introduced me to Clifton's as a teenager, told me that her own mother used to bring her and her twin sister to the place after a day of shopping downtown. I can imagine that, in the mid 50s, as a seven or eight year old, one might be enchanted by it. But now, years past its heyday and nonetheless undaunted in its message it invokes the kind of nostalgia that is thoroughly painful: the return to a childhood favorite and realization that it would never again fulfill that same needful desire. <br /><br />Clifton's was never my childhood joy. It was barely my mother's. It doesn't make me personally nostalgic. Instead it's a kind of nostalgia for the world at large. Here is a place that has fallen through the cracks of modernization. It's a portal into a world that the world has forgotten but still yearns for. It cannot fulfill the promise of its credo, but it makes one keenly aware of the lack.TMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5483251107827718564.post-60527695332645902932010-04-16T11:29:00.001-07:002010-04-16T11:29:39.061-07:00Doubling DownI promised trash culture. I deliver trash culture.<br /><br />The other night, my friend and I went down to the KFC/Taco Bell near the University where I teach in order to participate in a cultural phenomenon: <a href="http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/on-ingesting-kfcs-new-product-the-double-down/">The Double Down</a>.<br /><br />The link I've provided here is a pretty decent explanation of the actual experience of eating it, and I would rather not paraphrase food critics more pithy and accurate than I, but I would like to talk about some of its existential horror and appeal.<br /><br />My old roommate coined the term "intercourse meals" to describe food masquerading as other food. I am deeply entranced by this. Every year for my birthday I make "meatcake" a layered meatloaf glazed with Worcestershire-Ketchup and "frosted" with garlic mashed potatoes. Its surprisingly tasty if never precisely convincing as a desert. Similarly, I love making melba toasts topped with vanilla and orange creme in the shape of a fried egg. In short, I'm a sucker for visual ruses. So fried chicken pretending at bundom would seem to be right in culinary sweet spot.<br /><br />On a bit of a side note, I think I can trace this obsession wit mimicry back to my dad's Time-Life nature books, one of which was devoted to clever ruses in nature. The cover showed a kind of aphid-like beastie masquerading as a thorn on a branch. It was both fascinating and terrifying. Creatures could be lurking in any everyday objects: a knot on a tree might be a spider, the broken capitol of an ionic column might be the shell of a hermit crab. It was a world that, more than deceptive, drew delightfully uneasy comparisons<br /><br />In the culinary world, the gap between fried chicken and bun is not so very great as the gap between meat and cake (or stick and insect), but it nonetheless appeals to that part of me that thrives on indeterminacy. But that is ultimately my problem with the double down. Its not a real sandwich. The chicken is strangely mismatched. One would think that in this modern era of vacuu-formed meats, where McRibs can mimic the non-existent bones in their interior, that you could at least have a piece of fried chicken that resembles a bun, or at the very very rock bottom minimum resembles its sister piece so as to form a grippable, cohesive unit. The interior of this sandwich claims to be a bacon and cheese melt. Sadly it is a single piece of plastic cheese and two meager strips of bacon which would embarrass even a pauper sandwich artist. The chicken is far too thick, the interior is off center. Were it a traditional bread sandwich it would be mocked as an chaotically constructed, abstract joke on sandwichdom. It would be a DaDa sandwich, recognizable only in its obtuse mockery.<br /><br />I guess what I'm driving at is that I don't need the Double Down to be a successful meal, I just need it to be a successful mimic. Content is irrelevant. Form is all. Let's gloss over the fact that the thing tasted terrible. Let us set aside that for all its weight in my hand, it was unsatisfying in my stomach. We shall not stoop to dwell on the fact that its greasy presence in my stomach gave me all manner of unsettling nightmares. It looked nothing like a sandwich. <br /><br />I was promised mimicry, all I got was chicken.TMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5483251107827718564.post-58373434786392378672010-04-15T15:10:00.000-07:002010-04-15T21:26:15.795-07:00The Somnambulists' DiaryDream: 4/14/10, while napping in the early afternoon<br /><br />I am having dinner with Apu and his wife from the Simpsons. I am not animated but they are. While their home is also not animated it is painted in blocks of color making everything look distorted and unreal. I have been eating a yellow curry dish served over rice.<br /><br />Apu’s wife has been stirring the communal bowl with a wooden spoon over and over and buried in the curry I can see a glint of gold, for some reason the glimpses fill me with dread. She rolls up her sleeve and reaches into the pot which has suddenly become much deeper. Glutinous yellow curry oozes over the edges of the pot to join crusty dried refuse from previous meals. <br /><br />Her hand emerges unscathed and she is holding a simple golden band: a wedding ring. She hands it to her husband then turns to me saying “There’s shit in this curry. You’ve been eating shit.”<br /><br />A wave of nausea rushes over me and I bolt down the hall to the bathroom where I start drinking copiously from the sink faucet, trying to wash the excrement from my mouth. That’s when I start noticing grit in my mouth. I spit out what looks like grainy carbon grit and my mouth feels as though its been lined with sand. <br /><br />My mouth feels like its starting to fill up with the stuff and I realize that its actually growing inside it. I begin to chew to try and break it down. I notice that there are small insect like creatures, black and mermecolic. Hundreds of them are falling out of the sink, drowning in the frothy, white water. Whatever they are, they’re in my mouth.<br /><br />I spit the ground up insect into the bathtub next to me. One of them has escaped my teeth intact. I lean in to examine it. It curls up its legs and its scorpion-like stinger tail. Then it pulses, shivers and grows slightly larger. This happens several times and the insect is now the size of a lap dog, I keep having to chew, grind the infant beings into grit, horrified now that my lack of vigilance will result in one of these monsters in mouth.<br /><br />Suddenly I am in my home, watching a tv report. A man who appears to be Jeff Bridges, dressed in faded, weathered khakis, like a great white hunter, is giving a report. His gray hair is drawn into a long ponytail and his face is powdered and he’s wearing big circular spots of rouge on his cheeks. He’s talking about how the city has been overrun by giant insects. The only way to kill them is to stab them through an eye with a flaming spear.<br /><br />I open my door and the outside world is in tatters. Prim suburban neighborhood, SUVs in the driveway, on fire, overturned. Everywhere are giant insectoid creatures. Armored beetles mostly, massive like rhinos. Jeff Bridges voice continues, describing species as I drive around in a jeep. <br /><br />At last I recognize the beast that was pouring out of my mouth from earlier. It looks nothing like it did in the bathtub. Now it’s a towering, elephantine creature with four trunk like legs, an iridescent scarab’s shell and a bony crest worthy of a brontotherium. It glances at me with one of its six eyes, which rolls back in its head with lazy annoyance. It snaps its parrot beak at me, bored.<br /><br />And it dawns on me. I did this.TMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5483251107827718564.post-13855661889656896642010-04-12T02:37:00.000-07:002010-04-12T03:02:24.400-07:00Beginnings are OverratedClearly. I've never really understood the exact role of blogging and I suppose that's because it doesn't have a particularly narrow one. I kept a regular blog through blogspot in college that was basically a space to rant. Before that I had a livejournal which was more or less a private diary that was somehow comfortably open to the public. As to what this is? Who knows.<br /><br />Mostly this is a forum to write casually. Its a luxury I haven't had much in the past four years or so. My graduate program keeps me on my toes for formal writing. I'm limited by my subject matter (English) and my areas of expertise (Victorian and Gothic 19th century literature) and my academic interests (the Gothic valence of children). I suppose this blog is a liberation from that.<br /><br />Don't get me wrong, I love Academia. In many ways, I prefer the formal writing to the casual: I like speaking from a place of authority; I like contributing new ideas to a community rather than rehashing the arguments of others; most of all, I like the things I write formally about. But every once in a while I get the urge to break with formality and research and expertise in order to write thoughtfully and thoroughly from a place of speculation, relative ignorance and on subjects I know little about. I suppose, in that way, this is a pretty standard blog.<br /><br />But I guess its appropriate to write about the title and theme of the blog in a first entry, not that this blog has a particular theme. Harold Skimpole, in my estimation, is the greatest villain in literary history. In Dickens' novel Bleak House, he's a grown man, masquerading as an eternal child and banking off of his wit and feigned innocence to charm his way into the pockets of many innocent philanthropists. The quote that serves as my header refers to his perverse justification of his notions of charity. By being a charity case, he allows those with generous hearts an object on which to lavish their gifts. <br /><br />I'm not into mooching, per se (though the budget of a grad student does make the lifestyle tempting), but I am into the perversity of his inversions. He manages to deftly reverse expectations and remain the beneficiary of his friend's naive charity with nothing more than the suggestion that his poverty isn't a state but a service. <br /><br />I love low culture. Through Skimpole I see a world in which the base becomes exalted and worthy of our attention: a world where trashy TV is the window to our psyche, where fast food becomes a kind of postmodern art and where I can ramble about both with some semblance of insight. This blog is my informal, uninformed and formulaic attempt at perversely reveling in my cultural bottom-feeding. Its a blog of gilded refuse.<br /><br />So please, don't show me any vulgar gratitude. I rather think you ought to be thanking me.TMDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03137031109640087256noreply@blogger.com0