The Serpent's Wisdom

Entertainment is factory-made these days, and the best we can hope for out of it is the occasional glimmer of meaning. This week cowgrrl and I went to see "X-Men: First Class" and agreed it may well be the best superhero movie yet made. That praise may be fainter than it sounds, considering that the genre exists primarily as an excuse to give us elaborate CGI action scenes featuring muscular men and svelte women wearing skintight costumes. This movie, at least, makes a coherent statement about oppression and the mistreatment of minorities (and even at that level, its treatment of this issue is problematic).

The movie, though, is a retelling of a story that's already been told, and as such the story could not have deviated on any of the major details. And so we're left with nonsense such as Angel Salvatore deciding on a lark to join with the scary bad guys who just broke into a CIA compound and killed every last non-mutant in the building. Why? Well, because she was a bad guy in the comic books, of course.

This isn't storytelling; it's ritual re-enactment of an established myth. By the end of the movie, things have to be in their proper place, the world must have its established and familiar shape.

There's more I could say about the movie, but it would take me off the topic I originally set out to write about. Consider, also, that 2013 will be the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. There, too, we have a franchise straining under the weight of its continuity - an especially tricky continuity in this case centered on one single character, and which spreads out across time and space and even into multiple universes. (Multiple universes/timelines is a trick that has been used in numerous long-term continuities to enable writers to keep telling stories - DC and Marvel comics, Doctor Who, Star Trek, you name it.) Lately attention has turned to "reboots" as a way of keeping alive just a while longer the viability of an established intellectual property.

We can cast this net even wider and include video games, which no one even really pretends is an artistic medium, but which is also stuck in an established-franchise rut. As David Wong writes,

Everybody complains about sequels and reboots in Hollywood, but holy shit, it's nothing compared to what we have in gaming right now. For instance, each of the Big Three game console makers took the stage at E3 to show off their biggest games of the upcoming year. Microsoft led off with the aforementioned Modern Warfare 3, which is really Call of Duty 8 (game makers like to switch up the sequel titles so the digits don't get ridiculous). Next was Tomb Raider 10 (rebooted as Tomb Raider). Then we had Mass Effect 3, and Ghost Recon 11 (titled Ghost Recon: Future Soldier). This was followed by Gears of War 3, Forza 4 and Fable 4 (called Fable: The Journey).

So, just how much blood can you squeeze from a stone? The "why" is obvious. Creating a new genre franchise is extremely difficult and risky (when development of a movie or video game costs hundreds of millions of dollars, how much of a risk would *you* take on an unproven concept?), whereas the established stories are a safe bet -- the established fans will turn out, will keep watching, will keep buying, even if they complain bitterly about the most recent content. But as a continuity continues, the more iconic it becomes, and from there, and the less likely it becomes that you'll be able to wring a meaningful, original message out of it.

I just finished reading China Miéville's The Scar. It is excellently written, I enjoyed it quite a lot (as much as one "enjoys" something so gothy).

But, what the heck did I just read?

( questions that will only make sense to people who've read the book )

cowgrrl and I went to see "Inception" on Sunday. It's fun in a sort of video-game-y way but on the whole we were underwhelmed.

( cut for spoilers )

I learned a lot, about myself and the nature of fandom, from the great WoW RealIDFail controversy of last week.

Being a fan of just about anything will generally get you a lot of grief, and so people learn in public not to mention that they are a fan. Unless you're talking about sports fans -- which makes me think that scorning fans is yet another secret form of misogyny, peppered with our society's general scorn for intelligence. I think this is part of why, whenever the producers or writers of an entertainment franchise do something that ignites fan controversy, discussion within the fan base isn't so much between opponents & supporters, as it is between opponents and people making fun of opponents.

But I got to thinking about the notion of being "emotionally invested" in something. A fan is someone who has made a significant emotional investment, not to mention a significant financial investment as well, in an entertainment franchise. That's not to mention the contribution they make to the community -- fan art, fan fic, etc., the glue which binds fans together and keeps them spending money -- and their enthusiastic free publicity for the franchise: word-of-mouth and viral marketing which advertisers dream of (because it means customers doing their job for them).

However, fans are not usually seen by the producers and creators as being co-investors at all. From the other perspective, the "investors" are the creative talent and the ones who sign the checkbooks at production time. This leaves fans in an incredibly vulnerable position: they are investors who have no real say in the decisions that are made.

This may be a large part of why so many people's relationship with a fandom, a very personal and intense experience, often quite literally a formative part of their lives, more often than not ends with sadness or disappointment. Fans make what is for them a huge investment in something in which they have no real say; the only vote they get is to stop consuming.

As a writer I can see how the flip-side might become somewhat harrowing; if you listen to fans *too* much, if you deliver only what they want, you might feel too constrained and feel as though you've had to sell your artistic integrity.

Before RealIDFail I would likely have sided with the writer 100%. But as I've said before, the meaning of a creative work is essentially the response intended to be provoked in the reader/listener/viewer. The writer or musician or developer does not develop subsequent works in a vacuum, especially at the point when there is a large, vibrant, active fan community. (So was Stephen King saying in Misery that he felt hobbled by his fan base?)

I'm not sure what I'm saying here in terms of how much an artist or developer owes to the fan community, I'm just... thinking about this and seeing if there's a dialog to be had about it. How much of a say do fans have? How much say should they have? Will artistic quality or meaningfulness suffer or improve if fans are allowed greater access and influence? There's a perception that an artist who caters too openly to fans will create inferior content -- is there any truth to this?

Rush lead singer Geddy Lee is the son of Holocaust survivors. The song "Red Sector A" reflects his mother's accounts of her time at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, making it one of few rock songs describing the Holocaust.

Though "Red Sector A," like much of the album from which it comes, is set in a bleak, apocalyptic future, what Lee calls "the psychology" of the song comes directly from a story his mother told him about the day she was liberated.

"I once asked my mother her first thoughts upon being liberated," Lee says during a phone conversation. "She didn't believe [liberation] was possible. She didn't believe that if there was a society outside the camp how they could allow this to exist, so she believed society was done in."

from How the Holocaust rocked Rush front man Geddy Lee

So, I finally got around to watching Torchwood 03x04.

( my eyes, they are a-rollin' )

I'm still a bit mildly stunned by the moment yesterday of fully grokking, as if all at once, that the real essence of the writings of the Marquis de Sade was not sexual deviation, but the rich doing whatever they want to poor people without any sort of consequence or accountability. (Well, okay, I was helped along to this epiphany by Grant Morrison.)

It is fascinating that the class aspect of these seminal writings rarely ever comes up at all in modern discourse about sadomasochism. Not surprising, but fascinating.

So lately my interest has been piqued in the Cthulhu mythos. With its emphasis on bizarre geometry, nameless unspeakable horrors lurking just outside the edges of one's line of sight, and the concept of cosmic secrets known to ancient civilizations and since forgotten, it seems almost tailor-made for a nerd like me.

But as I re-read the seminal story "The Call of Cthulhu" over the past few days, I began to perceive a rather different set of unspeakable horrors lurking just outside of sight.

I've reached a point where everything I listen to, everything I read, everything I watch, gets filtered through a certain perceptual bias. It's impossible for me to not notice references to social power or imbalance. By the time I was done reading the story I was forced to conclude that it was about the "evil danger" of people of color.

"About" is a funny thing. I've written previously that I believe that the meaning of an utterance or artistic work is "primarily that reaction which is intended to be provoked by the work's creator". But I think that I have to include in that any agenda of which the author is only subconsciously aware. IOW, whether it was Lovecraft's intention or not to produce a work intended to provoke fear of people of color, this is what he produced, and it is not accidental, it is not something one "reads into the text now 91 years later."

As an aside to illustrate the point of "about", and just because it's on my mind today, and just to prove that I wasn't kidding when I said I am always viewing the world through this lens, consider the 1985 video to "Some Like it Hot" by the Power Station. The model featured prominently in the video is Caroline Cossey, also known as Tula; the video contains so many Terrible Tranny Tropes that it's practically "about" the fact that she is transsexual, though the 'obviousness' of this is only obvious to me in hindsight.

Anyway, back to Lovecraft and his story. It's not enough to say that the story draws a contrast between civilized, rational, yet unsuspecting white people, vs. violent and savage, yet knowing of the hideous horrors lying at the ocean floor, people of color. It's not enough that several times he refers to people of color as "mongrels," or suggests that the cultists are barely human, or avers at one point that to kill them would be an act of mercy. The story hangs its entire bid for effectiveness on the notion that voodoo and other "primitive" religions are evil and dark. Lovecraft presumes the reader is white and expects him or her to be complicit in his view that wherever we find people of color we might find the violent members of an ancient, savage, global cult. The cult and its secrets live "out of sight" in dark jungle type places until the beacon of white anthropology shines on it and reveals the terrible secret.

Furthermore, what of the "unspeakable horrors" this cult may usher in? What of the bizarre, otherworldly geometry in which they dwell? The popular interpretation is that Lovecraft was an anti-modernist concerned about what terrors might be ushered in by Twentieth Century science. In the post-atomic age this does not seem an unreasonable interpretation; indeed it almost seems to cast Lovecraft as a prophet. I'm inclined to suspect, though, that what Lovecraft feared was the thought of a populist uprising in the non-white or even the Eastern European nations. Perhaps the "otherworldly geometry" he feared was the upheaval of the Newtonian clockwork universe and the safe hegemony of the European colonial world order that proclaimed it.

Blizzard Entertainment is holding a creative writing contest, and the deadline for entries was tonight at midnight.

At 11:54 PM i submitted an edited version of an old story i wrote originally almost two years ago. I've put it behind the cut, in case anyone wants to read it.

Title: Sabraea Nightstar and the Tauren
Fandom: World of Warcraft
Characters: various of Bloodhoof Village; cameo of Thrall and Cairne
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 7,986
Warnings: violence, combat; memories of extreme hardship and forced servitude. No spoilers, since it was written just after the release of "The Burning Crusade."

( Read more... )

I saw The Watchmen last night. lady_babalon asked me afterwards if i liked it, to which the best answer i could give was, "I have a complex set of reactions and strains of thought inspired by the movie which i could summarize with 'No.'"

Set aside the rather imbalanced production - for all that it is visually stunning, there are minor problems that jump out, like a CGI character whose mouth sometimes moves out of time with his voice. Seriously, having a complaint like that makes me feel like a fussy quibler, but isn't lip synching what you learn on day one of Animation 101?

Set aside that every major female character (all two of them) and several of the minor female characters are portrayed for a significant portion of their screen time in sexual situations. I say "set this aside" not to minimize it, because for many this alone will be sufficient reason to despise the movie; i say it because this is not my biggest beef with it.

After seeing the movie i found myself asking, "What is it that we look for in art, in literature, in film?" I can't say i was enriched by seeing this film. In fact i feel like the filmmakers were trying to tear something out of me.

I know there are those who might imply that i sound like a doe-eyed innocent clinging to lofty illusions and idealistic daydreams. It wouldn't be the first time.

But it's not the grittiness, the overblown choreographed fights and questionable characters that cause me to react to the movie as i did. In fact, i like very much the main character, Rorschach. He stood out to me as the best part of the graphic novel and he stands out in the film, too. Yep, he's a twisted mess, a reactionary car crash of a human being, someone i would stay as far away from as possible in real life. As a fictional character, he's fantastic. I can handle my heroes conflicted and morally ambiguous, can even say i prefer them that way.

So, yes, i "get it;" even in an alternate universe where there are people who put on costumes and fight crime there are no real heroes. In fact i think we can live with more fiction that doesn't break people down into categories like "hero" or "villain."

Do i think there's a place in the world for nihilistic masterpieces which leave us thinking that maybe brain is just another kind of brawn, and the end justifies the means? I suppose so, if we must.