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southeastasianists · 3 years

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Making movies about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender can be daunting under Singapore’s restrictive censorship laws, but that didn’t stop one filmmaker from doing so in his directorial debut. Getting his work to the big screen, however, was a whole other obstacle to overcome.

It only took one month for Jet Ho to conceptualize, write, cast and film Aqua Man, a short film about a young Singaporean boy that looks at the hot-button topic of gay conversion therapy. But that was just the beginning of his struggle for anyone to see it. Because it touches the media third rail of homosexuality, his story of student Jun Jie, his distressed mom, and Bible-armed pastor was rejected at least 15 times, by Ho’s count, by streaming platforms and film festivals.

“It [was] quite fast to film, but it took me a very hard time to promote the film,” Ho told Coconuts. “It basically was rejected everywhere from the start until I decided to just launch it on YouTube and give it some justice to itself.”

There’s no Jason Momoa here coming to the rescue, so why Aqua Man? Aqua sounds similar to a derogatory Hokkien term for gay men, Ah Kua, which literally means transvestite. In Ho’s film, actor Josh Lim is the titular character, who comes home one day to find his mother has brought a pastor to pray the gay out of him with a praying ritual form of conversion therapy.

It’s a timely topic as Singaporeans clash over extending or suppressing LGBT rights and recognition in an uneven struggle that has seen one side given a voice over the other.

Because of the subject matter, Aqua Man could never be shown on television, as films featuring characters who are gay – an “alternative sexuality” to government censors – is automatically rated 21 and up.

That restriction, most often applied to movies containing nudity, was not something Ho was OK with. After all, he wanted to reach those who would most identify with his protagonist.

“It is a societal problem that starts out even with kids at a very young age,” Ho said, referring to the younger generation who struggle with their sexual identity. “This has got nothing to do with explicit pornographic material, that perhaps needs a higher age rating.”

So in December he premiered his film on YouTube, where it has struggled to find a large audience.

Unseen …

The commercial photographer for the National Museum and National Geographic channel said he was motivated to make his movie by the lack of a quality queer representation in Singaporean television shows and movies.

Queer characters portrayed as regular people are unheard of on national television, where they are relegated to cross-dressing tropes by the likes of Jack Neo and drag queen Kumar, or are sources of comic relief, such as transgender comedian Abigail Chay.

There is some good – last year’s depiction of a family man turning to drag culture to feed his family was nominated for two Taiwanese film awards – and a whole lot of ugly, such as Mediacorp TV series My Guardian Angels, which portrayed a gay character as an STD-infected pedophile.

“They just include this character and always hint him in a very bad light or bad influence, driving a misrepresentation of the LGBT population in Singapore,” Ho said. “Let’s say Disney has one gay character in a movie and it is premiering in Singapore. I can tell you a lot of people will make a big fuss out of it.”

Indeed Disney’s Beauty and the Beast did kick up some dust in 2017 from church councils, which denounced the film winning a PG-rating despite the inclusion of a gay character.

That said, Singaporeans are more open to discuss gender identity today than two decades ago, Ho said, noting that Aqua Man is set nearly 20 years ago, a time he thinks Singapore’s cultural conservatism was at its peak.

Now, in 2021, arch-conservatives appear to feel they are on the defensive, denouncing “woke cancel mobs” over arguments that seem to have moved on from their point of view as negative LGBT views continue to tick down. Singapore’s strain of evangelical Christianity remains a potent force, and the intersection between faith and family is an area Ho mined for his film.

“Sometimes when the parents face such a problem that is already existing in our very conservative society, they often find a solution with the church or with religious institutions but the answer to whether it is the right or the most moral approach, nobody is there to judge,” Ho said. “I find this dilemma in the film very interesting because there is no right or wrong answer.”

Ho, who is not Christian, had only heard stories of conversion therapy. So, prior to filming, he dove a little deeper into the topic by attending weekly sermons at churches and interviewing pastors in hope of portraying them more accurately. He sounded grateful for the opportunity.

“I don’t want to put any church or any organization in bad light, I want to make the whole film look as authentic as it is. With the church, I was very thankful to come out with this concept,” he said, describing them as “loving” and “very understanding.”

… but not unheard

Aqua Man could have reached a wider audience and been better funded were it not for the strict laws, believes Ho, who forked out S$16,000 (US$12,000) to make it. Even film festivals and competitions turned him down.

“The main problem was when I tried to send out to a few film competitions, I wasn’t notified on whether I lost or anything. Locally, like streaming platforms I actually send out a few emails to their main email and even directly to people who work there but I received zero emails,” he said. “That’s how serious it is, they are so repulsive against LGBT-centric films.”

Ho submitted his film to the Singapore International Film Festival and HBO Asia’s Invisible Stories series, which is marketed as surfacing untold Singapore stories. They were among the more than dozen platforms he says rejected or ignored his inquiries. But he took comfort in one HBO representative’s note.

“Even though we didn’t win anything, it was actually a great relief because she personally wrote an email to us, and that’s the only reply that we got. At first, I really thought the film was so bad and negative to the extent that it doesn’t deserve a place or it doesn’t deserve anything,” he said.

Though direct to YouTube wasn’t his first choice, Ho was gratified by the response he got.

“After the film was produced, it was very astonishing to find that many people actually reach out to say that this happened to them personally so it became a true story that I wrote. Initially, I just dictated the story and something I think will be interesting to show but it became a true story, told by people who watch the film,” he said.

Local LGBT group Oogachaga had also shared the movie on its online platform.

And it’s not the end of the road for Ho, who is still pushing for Aqua Man to reach a wider audience. He’s also writing another script and pledging to continue chasing stories on social issues such as transgenderism, racism, and abuse.

“Singapore has to have its own culture when it comes to filmmaking, our culture is our identity. We should portray more and show more, we shouldn’t hide it we should embrace it and move forward,” he said. “Trying to conceal the whole LGBT-centric material is not going to be helpful for us to progress into a more empathetic society.”

#Southeast Asia #Singapore #LGBTQIA Issues #Movies #Aqua Man

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yellingmetatron · 4 years

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I Just Need to Get This Out (Political Content Warning)

Now more than ever, I am going to be avoiding politics on Tumblr. This is, with any luck, the last political post I will make on my blogs. It is meant to serve as an explanation of why I’m going to be a lot less tolerant of political content on roleplaying blogs. TL;DR, I don’t fit in on the right or left and I’m fucking tired of seeing politics everywhere. I deal with it at work, and I deal with it at home. I don’t want to deal with it here. I’m going to start unfollowing people when I see it. That doesn’t mean our friendship is over, it doesn’t mean we can’t RP. But I’m so tired of it all. If you want the long explanation, keep reading.

From about middleschool to shortly before the election of the current president I considered myself an ardent conservative. Listing out a lot of my positions, this might have seemed not to be the case: I’m not religious (try as I might to be so). I’m pro-LGTBQ+. I’ve always been a proud member of what Rush Limbaugh used to call the Wetland Gestapo. I think anthropogenic climate change is a real thing. I want pot legalized. I think military interventionism is a mistake in all but the rarest situations (granted this is a more recent position). I think the welfare state is necessary and in places ought to be expanded. I am enthusiastic about multiculturalism. On the other hand, I am pro-religion despite not being religious, and feel religious conservatives shouldn’t be compelled to violate their own religious beliefs as long as it’s not hurting anyone (and my definition of ‘not hurting anyone’ seems to be a bit broader than most progressives). While I’m not anti-union, I think that unions can be corrupt as any other institution, particularly at a national level, and that the Left is too inclined to overlook that. I’m solidly pro Second Amendment. I consider illegal immigration a bad thing (mostly because it’s an excuse to exploit the poor and undocumented). I think “states’ rights” is not just a dogwhistle term for racists, but something that really does need to be taken into account given the way the American republic works. I could have expanded the above to paragraphs, but they’re already ungainly and, I’m sure, a pain to read through. Where am I going with all this? Well, first I wanted to establish that I COULD consider myself “an ardent conservative” while holding a lot of varied opinions (like literally everyone on the planet has). Secondly, I want to establish that I hold all of the above views, and have for some time, while bearing a specific label—right winger. I’ve ended up rejecting that label, and rejecting what for want of a better term I’ll call “the conservative movement”, but my positions haven’t changed. And, most importantly, stopping thinking of myself as a conservative DOES NOT mean I’ve come to think of myself as a progressive. Let me try to tell a story. I’m decent at stories. Metamun in middle school and high school was a lonely creature. He was sick a lot, and pretty socially awkward, although he could make up for it by being funny and knowing some trivia. But he mostly kept to himself. Since being on the bus made him sick (it was at a time of life when people experimented with scents that screwed him up at close quarters) usually his dad picked him up after school. That’s where Metamun picked up his politics, those drives home with dad. Dad listened to a lot of Rush Limbaugh, and so Metamun did too. Metamun was already sort of inclined to conservatism—he had a pessimistic view of the world, distrusting the US government and feeling that people ought to be able to protect themselves (i.e. own guns). Rush did not convert Metamun, but he did affirm Metamun. He didn’t usually say anything that seemed greatly outrageous to Metamun. (Mark that “usually”.) Now, as Metamun was living in suburban New England, it happened that conservative politics did not go unchallenged as they might have, say, farther south. To Metamun it seemed as though he was in a tiny minority, especially where authority figures were concerned. Looking back he’d realize this wasn’t the case— particularly not in terms of his actual views. But remember, Metamun didn’t get out much. And furthermore, although he considered himself conservative, he found he usually didn’t like the company of conservatives— they tended to be less interested in the things he was, like books and acting. So most of his friends and acquaintances tended to be, if not self-identified progressives, at least the kind of people who sneered at conservatives and made the obligatory comparisons of Bush II to Hitler. Because that was who Metamun dealt with day-to-day, he was left with the impression that this was the norm for the society he lived in. Most of what was on TV, with the exceptions of Fox News and South Park, seemed to confirm this. And so Metamun became genuinely terrified of people learning that he was not like the majority. Being homebound so often, Metamun spent a lot of time online. That did nothing to lessen his terror. Lonely as he was, Metamun went looking for conservative blogs. Pajamas Media was the big one, but there were plenty of smaller ones. One important thing he learned was that post 9/11, there were a lot of people who sort of fit his description—socially liberal, but mistrustful of leftist politics for various reasons. Ex-leftists. Neo-Cons.

One important factor was patriotism: It seemed like all progressives genuinely hated the United States on principal. Unflattering and quite often spurious comparisons to other countries seemed to abound on the Left. One of Metamun’s new acquaintances explicitly wrote on their blog that they’d always wondered how the Right “co-opted” patriotism before concluding the Left simply threw it away. This acquaintance, a gay Seattleite, would be a touchstone for Metamun’s sense of political self for some time. During the Tea Party era, the Right genuinely felt more fun and open than the Left. Metamun still felt like an underdog, but also like he was part of a ragtag resistance movement with real emotional bonds. And yet, even with all that, his prime political emotion was fear. (Mark the recurrent theme of fear.) Some of you might see the shape of this narrative and guess that Metamun was fed a steady diet of paranoia by nasty wingnuts. Yes and no. The conservative blogosphere was a scary place—it told him that his basic values were under constant assault. That some of the “basic values” in the package were not actually his was beside the point, because Metamun just generally hated the thought of State force being used to coerce people into violating their own principals. Metamun was happy to fight for values that were not his own, on that account. It did bother him, sometimes, the assumptions conservatives made, but by this time he had gotten used to thinking of himself as a minority, so the majority being different wasn't so jarring. Of course there would be a few differences of opinion. But the Right accepted those differences in the way that surely the Left would not. And he knew that this was true, because he’d seen it with his own eyes. The Left was VICIOUS to conservatives, sometimes in a very personal way. In some ways, sick and often absent though he was, Metamun still got the basic high school experience as he watched insults and worse fly fast and thick. Leftists expressed GLEE at any conservative misfortune. They made absolutely insane comparisons between conservative pundits and Nazis. “Republican” was a punchline to very cruel (and sometimes racist and sexist) jokes. Sometimes they seemed to outright lie. Metamun remembered a novelty song about Satan claim he was “in all Rush Limbaugh’s rants”, and Metamun KNEW that was untrue because he’d been listening to Rush for years and couldn’t recall the man even referencing scripture outside of holidays. Metamun heard people casually cite Glenn Beck as routinely opposing gay marriage when Metamun had heard the man himself arguing that the government shouldn’t even be involved with marriage (and thus that it couldn’t compel churches to validate gay marriages, sure, but that seemed a separate issue). But it was watching his conservative friends’ comments sections and twitter feed that solidified the image of progressive-as-persecutor. It was blatantly apparent that these people hadn’t come to engage, they just wanted to take potshots. Ad hominem abounded, total lack of reading comprehension was displayed, and just general delight in cruelty was rampant. He was particularly appalled by the treatment of minority conservatives, who received all sorts of abuse based on race, sex, and orientation. Something that stuck with Metamun for years was watching conservative women get rape threats, death threats, and admonitions to kill themselves. One of his best friends got such an admonition in response to mentioning on twitter it was her birthday. That was it. Nothing political. Just excitement for a special, personal day. And none of his Leftist friends seemed to understand what their own wing was doing. They talked about the Right doing such things, which baffled him—he’d never seen anything like that, or, if he did, it was only once or twice and never anybody HIS friends actually associated with. Every movement has a few bad apples, right? (Mark the irony.) It didn’t help that once, depressed, Metamun DID admit on twitter that he was a conservative, and moreover that he was afraid people would stop being his friends over that. He promptly lost two friends. When he asked a third friend if they could please ask if he’d been unfollowed on purpose, they said they’d do it. And then THEY never talked to him again, even when he reached out. He was convinced the only reason he didn’t lose everybody was that they hadn’t all seen the tweets—he deleted them quickly. So there Metamun was: Lonely, convinced that even if he didn’t line up perfectly with conservatism that at least conservatives accepted him, and very angry at the Other Tribe that was so cruel and callous to him and his friends. But he was starting to grow up, and as he did he began noticing certain discrepancies. Now and then the movement that was supposed to have a Big Tent felt oddly crowded. People sometimes rubbed each other the wrong way. Metamun particularly hated it when the term RINO got thrown around, because he was all too aware that might apply to someone like him. Then there was the lack of nuance. He slowly came to realize people on both sides of the aisle would sometimes use “nuanced” as a snide insult. When the Dalai Lama described himself as anti-capitalist Metamun was disappointed, but understood (and also His Holiness was on record as saying when someone’s shooting at you it’s reasonable to shoot back, which Metamun thought made up for a lot). He did not expect certain conservatives to not only sneer at His Holinesses “nuanced” relationship with capitalism (accepting material support to fight against Mao) but actually accused him of being a PRC puppet. What? Hadn’t they read anything about the man’s life? Or his own writings? Yes, he’d tried to work with Mao, but that fell through because Mao hated religion unequivocally—how could any religious leader work with that? Why were they jumping to such insane conclusions? This wasn’t what conservatives were supposed to do! There were a thousand other cracks in the façade, but two stand out. First, Metamun admitted to a dear friend, full of apprehension, that he voted for Mitt Romney. And not only did she not cut him out of her life, she explained WHY she wouldn’t do that. Metamun was elated but also very confused—this wasn’t how the script in his head went. He was admitting this because the pain of keeping a secret was too much, and he fully expected to pay a price for that. He was (and remains) a drama-addled moron that way. He was also a creature who put a lot of stock in narrative, and this narrative was nothing like he expected. Next, Metamun himself cut two friends out of his life over politics—years apart, but the number is important. The first hurt, but felt very justified. The second haunted him. Metamun was easily haunted, but by this point he’d started really struggling with intrusive thoughts. Around and around they went in his head, and although there was extreme, maddening monotony, now and then he’d see angles he’d missed before. The number was important. Two friends he’d definitely lost (he was never really sure of the third). Two friends he’d rejected. Why did he reject them? Because he figured they’d hate him if they knew he didn’t agree with them. He figured they had made their positions so strident that it was just inevitable that they would cut him out if he didn’t cut them out first. And he realized, stupidly, after years of realizing nothing, that maybe that’s exactly how the people who left him had felt. Oh, perhaps they didn’t. But what if they did? What did that say about what, ultimately, they had in common? We’re getting closer to the present, so I’m going to start talking about myself in first person again. I recognize this version of myself more easily. As time went by I grew more and more jaded with American conservatism, but I still thought of myself as a conservative. A lot of people were like that, children of the Tea Parties who had thought that the Right was the only alternative to all the abhorrent things we saw on the Left. But familiarity breeds contempt, and soon we were well acquainted with abhorrent things on the Right. It seemed as if there was a rot spreading, something that had started as a speck and was now growing. The spirit of fellow feeling was starting to evaporate. There were a few things going on, but by this point I was barely paying attention to any of them. I hadn’t looked at a conservative blog in years. I didn’t listen to Rush. The fracture of American conservatism could probably be better documented by someone who still gives a damn, but we all know what was the final crack in the glass. Donald Trump’s candidacy split the Right seemingly overnight, and not neatly down the middle. The big question is, of course “love him or hate him”, but even people who don’t go to those extremes get caught up in the animosity. This, really, was when I couldn’t call myself a conservative anymore—no, not because his election was an indictment of conservatism, but because as the jagged rift grew, I suddenly realized that literally everything that scared me about the Left was present in the Right, both the MAGAheads and the Never Trumpers. All the bile. All the cruelty. All the callous disregard for our shared humanity. All the absurd stereotyping and reductionism. Everything I’d seen on the Left that made me feel that the Right, imperfect as it was, was my only refuge, was suddenly EVERYWHERE, from quarters I’d thought were safe. A lot of my conservative friends were hit even harder than I was; a few people desperately tried to reconcile people who had once laughed and dined together, but were now swearing never to speak again, or worse, verbally assaulting each other on a daily basis. This wasn’t supposed to happen. This was not the way we were supposed to work.And then, at last, I realized that the only reason I was just seeing all this awfulness NOW was because it hadn’t been directed at me and mine in the past. And here we come to the main point I want to impress on everybody who’s bothered to read this far: My short-sightedness was in no way unique. We always try to show our best face to our friends—and to our Tribe. We are thoughtful and considerate of people on our side. We roll our eyes at the people on our fringe—silly things, aren’t they? Imagine someone taking them seriously. Our enemies do not see our best face. They see our war face. We fight them tooth and nail. We exult in their defeats, which become our triumphs—somehow. And we see this horrible, poisonous crest at the top of their wave that threatens to engulf everything—their fringe. A leftist is not going to be threatened and insulted for being a rightist—at least not consistently outside of “purity” arguments. A leftist will be more cognizant of the threat posed by rightist fringes, because those fringes are not attacking the Right, per se. And you know, this goes for all conflict. You don’t see a problem as clearly if it’s not directly shoved in your face every day. And you will become convinced that the problems that ARE shoved in your face every day are the only ones really getting worked up about, because everything else seems so ephemeral. I read people scoff at their own fringes—“Oh, nobody REALLY believes that stuff, and people who complain about it are just showing their white fragility/race baiting/gay agenda/whatever the key phrase to stop critical thought is in a given situation”. Guess what? Those fringes are constantly needling at the other side. THEY are what is representative of your tribe to the Other Tribe. They are loud, and they are cruel, and ignoring them because the other guys “deserve it” or you hope “now they’ll know how it feels” is fucking insane. And yes, one of the reasons the Other Tribe sees it so often is that they go looking for it, but they go looking for it BECAUSE THEY ARE AFRAID OF IT and they want to make sure they know what it’s up to. The only thing worse than seeing the devil is losing sight of the devil. I’m no longer a conservative because that ideology is poisoned by hate. But I didn’t become a progressive, because that ideology is also poisoned by hate. Or maybe both ideologies have actually been abandoned, and now we just have two flavors of hate in opposition to each other. Please believe me, I do not WANT to be apolitical. Everybody hates the apolitical—we don’t even like ourselves much. And anyway, I’m one of nature’s conformists; I like belonging to a group. But at this point committing to ANY political movement feels like I would be sacrificing my integrity. And I would not want to be part of a movement that accepts people without integrity. I call myself a localist these days. Something risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb came up with. Keep power close to the ground, don’t try to manage everything from the top down, resist interventionism in communities where you don’t have skin in the game. Not aiming for a world without blowups, but keeping them at a smaller scale than we currently experience. Forget fussing over socialism and capitalism; both are bad at large scales. Both can work together at smaller scales. The false dichotomy is a tool of tyrants. I want my country to get better. But that’s not going to happen until people admit there are malicious, corrupting forces even in their own Tribes. It’s not all the Other Tribe’s fault. I still see people I love treating other people I love as subhuman. And when I point this out, tentatively, people nod their heads and tell me I’m correct and then go back to thoughtless hatred. What I want people to understand, please, is that I want nothing to do with political mass movements. It’s all about different flavors of hatred. It’s all about hurting people. It’s all about hypocrisy and cruelty. Fuck it. I am going to try to be a good person without hitching my ego to too many abstractions. I am going to try to make the world around me a more pleasant place, and I am going to do that without giving a fuck about whatever sacred cows the Left Tribe and Right Tribe are busy genuflecting to. So. I’m going to work harder not to deal with it here.

#out of voice #this is really just a personal political essay #it's not funny and it's not thought provoking #i've just been sitting on it for years #i don't fit in any political clique and i no longer have any desire to do so #block this tag if you don't want to see politics #update: maybe i just won't come back to tumblr #but this would be a decent epitaph

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preserving-ferretbrain · 5 years

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Going Bullshit

by Robinson L

Monday, 17 March 2014Robinson L tears into Libba Bray's Going Bovine and makes several unflattering comparisons to the works of Melina Marchetta, Catherine Fisher, and Douglas Adams~

One of the accolades Melina Marchetta's On the Jellicoe Road received on publication was the Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in Young Adult literature. That was for 2009. In 2010, the award went to a book entitled Going Bovine by Libba Bray. After reading Going Bovine, I can only conclude that 2010 was an exceptionally dry year for Young Adult fiction.

The book starts out promisingly, with our protagonist, Cameron Smith, narrating a near-death experience he had at Disneyland when he was five years old. Bray's writing is evocative, and she really nails the fuzzy, almost dreamlike logic with which a five-year-old views the world.

Then we snap to the present, twelve years later, and things go downhill fast. Cameron is now seventeen years old, a jerk, and a loser. Taylor Markham of

On the Jellicoe Road

can be an asshole as well, but she’s always dynamic and interesting—whereas Cameron Smith is the kind of jerk you just want to slap about the face until he gets over himself already.

It takes an irritatingly long time to get there, but things finally pick up when Cameron gets diagnosed with Cruetzfeldt-Jakob (“mad cow”) disease, which will kill him in a matter of weeks. An angel with a punk aesthetic named Dulcie visits Cameron in the hospital and kicks off the novel's plot, which is that a mad scientist named Doctor X has opened a dimensional hole which threatens to destroy the universe, and it's up to Cameron to find him and convince him to close it again. Oh, and Cameron's mad cow disease is actually a byproduct of this dimensional hole, and Doctor X is the only person in the universe who has the cure.

Okay, a quest to save the world/universe/multiverse from complete destruction is cool and all, but in context it jars with everything that's gone before—there's been plenty of supernatural build-up to Dulcie's arrival, but all very magic realist and with a certain amount of ambiguity as to whether Cameron is just suffering from hallucinations due to his Cruetzfeldt-Jakob. Leaping from there straight into a madcap caper to find the one man who can avert the end of the universe as we know it makes the book feel more than anything like a bad 80s Doctor Who story than anything else, except even more incongruous because at least in Doctor Who you kind of expect the fate of the world to be at stake sooner or later.

Anyway, Dulcie gives Cameron a sort of wristwatch which will hold his illness at bay, and sends him off on his grand quest along with his new friend and sidekick Gonzo, a hypochondriac dwarf Chicano whom we eventually learn is also gay. Despite Bray playing Minority Bingo, I didn't detect anything terribly problematic with Gonzo's depiction—which isn't the same as saying that there's nothing problematic there—though I did notice his tendency as a Latino to,

as our friends at Unskippable put it

, slip into Spanish every other word. They later form a trio with the Norse God Balder, who has been trapped in the body of a lawn gnome (it's a surreal book). Balder is easily the best character in the story, so of course he dies toward the end in an event which was transparently foreshadowed early on when he randomly initiates a discussion of Viking Funerals.

Prompted by Dulcie, they set off on a series of bizarre real-world adventures with supernatural overtones which vary in quality from kind of cool to teeth-gratingly bad. My problem here is that for the most part, Cameron has no real plan: he has to find Doctor X, but he has no strategy for doing so, nor does he really develop one over the course of the story. Throughout the novel, Cameron and company just stumble barse-ackwards into one misadventure after another. Now if at some point he decided that he's better off just going with the flow and adopted that as a strategy, it could be kind of cool, and totally in keeping with the unplanned, structureless feel to the plot. Instead, while Cameron can be reasonably proactive when it comes to addressing the problems of a given situation, he's almost entirely reactive when it comes to moving the overall plot forward, as if his player is so profoundly uninterested in the main plot that he has to be constantly railroaded through it by the Author-GM. For the reader, the effect is less of an inexorably and inevitably unfolding series of events than a slightly disjointed bunch of interesting incidents inexpertly welded together.

Even if Cameron were more of a proactive character though, we'd still be a far cry from

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

. In the “Dirk Gently” books, Douglas Adams was able to make bizarre coincidences feel like part of some grand, cosmic pattern which all fits together in an overarching harmony. In

Going Bovine

, Libba Bray's use of bizarre coincidences feels more like a lazy plot device to move the story along. The coincidences get a kind of explanation later on though, as we'll see.

Another problem is that it feels very much as though Bray never actually settled what tone she wanted to strike with the book, the upshot in this case being that much of the stuff that happens in

Going Bovine

is too grounded in reality to write off as parody or farce, yet too silly and over-the-top to take seriously.

One of the biggest offenders in this regard is Bray's occasional dips into social commentary—which might actually have been a good thing if someone had only come along in the revision process and persuaded her to step away from the bloody Themehammer. As it is, Cameron's school, where the teachers tell the students just to concentrate on the test material and not bother trying to learn the subject, represents the book's zenith of subtle and believable discourse. Pretty extreme, but sadly plausible.

Then there's Cameron's encounter with a therapist after his first major fit, and before everybody learns about his Cruetzfeldt-Jakob. School officials suspect drug use, and send him to a counselor—she asks him one question: “are you on drugs?” and when he tells her (truthfully) “no,” she proceeds to take up the rest of the hour reminiscing about bad trips she had when she was younger; at the end of which she tells him she thinks they made a lot of progress in that session, admonishes him not to take drugs, and refers him to a specialist. I find the lack of professionalism at work in this scene appalling—granted, that's sort of the point, but apparently, the only way Bray could think of to depict the problems of the psychiatric profession is by creating a cartoon caricature who is ignorant of the most basic, fundamental rule of counseling (i.e. that you

listen

to your patient). I've no doubt such people are out there, and some of them might just have licenses to practice—but Bray is sadly mistaken if she thinks pointing out the extreme wing-nuts of a profession makes any sort of point about the general practice.

The specialist she refers Cameron to examines him like an actual fecking professional and gives him a prescription for antidepressants, prompting Cameron to narrate ironically that he went to a therapist who didn't listen to him and told him to stay off drugs and then referred him to a health specialist who did listen to him and who put him on drugs. I found that observation quite funny, and there's actually a great point buried in there, but paired with the Nation's Worst Ever Therapist it loses most of its edge.

And then there's the most painful sequence of the book: Cameron's misadventures with the Church of Everlasting Satisfaction and Snack-'N'-Bowl (CESSNAB). Despite its name, CESSNAB gives no signs of being a religious or spiritual organization: it's more of a secular commune for spoiled, self-indulgent, privileged twenty-somethings to indulge a doctrine so goofy, UFO cults probably laugh at it behind its back. The doctrine is basically: “Be happy, and everything will be all right, and you can do anything you put your mind to,” along with the removal from people's lives of anything which is construed as threatening to make them unhappy, per their slogan which makes me cringe whenever I think about it: “Don't hurt your happiness.” (I think just typing that relieved me of two or three braincells.) So basically, a community with utopian aspirations that's actually a tightly-controlled dystopia, but so blatant that even an utter fool could see through it in nothing flat.

It wouldn't be so bad, except that Cameron is not only an utter fool, but a complete idiot on top of that, and falls for CESSNAB's transparent bullshit hook, line, and sinker. This subjects the reader to pages and pages of Bray wringing out a line of discourse which was obvious to anyone with anything approaching what we would call sapience the moment CESSNAB trotted out their philosophy, culminating in this spectacular piece of dialogue spoken to Cameron by a sort-of revolutionary just before she brings the whole organization crashing down:

“What if those so-called 'negative feelings' are useful?”

My tiny mind is fecking blown.

Seriously, Bray? The book is aimed at older teens, and this particular piece of discourse would be patronizing to ten-year-olds. Offhand, I can't think of the last time I've encountered a book which has so completely insulted my intelligence.

This is the most egregious incident, but it isn't the last one. Later on, Cameron encounters a Wishing Tree, which Dulcie explains really works, but it gives you what you want in your heart, rather than what you literally asked for. This strikes me as a stupendously sensible way to have a wishing machine operate; whereas Cameron complains that it ought to grant wishes literally. Dude, have you never read

The Monkey's Paw

? All right, fair enough, neither have I, but have you never encountered the

concept

of “be careful what you wish for”? Just how big of a rock have you been living under your whole life?

As in the previous incident, Bray situates Cameron in the position of Reader Surrogate so that the more knowledgeable character is not only lecturing him about the frickin' obvious, she's lecturing me. If Bray wants her protagonist to be a dumbass, that's totally legit, but treating the reader like a dumbass along with him—uh-uh.

While the sheer idiocy of the CESSNAB sequence and the general condescension are deplorable, it's the ending which ultimately sinks

Going Bovine

. Cameron tracks down Doctor X, who refuses to help him save the universe because of his generically tragic backstory, and so much for that plot thread. Before Cameron can try something else, his time runs out on his disease and he's confronted by the story's villain, the Wizard of Reckoning (which, as villain names go, is pretty friggin' awesome). After the Wizard drops a bombshell which I will come to presently, the two embark upon an esoteric chase sequence which it will take a much smarter or more inebriated head than my own to make sense of. The chase ends with Cameron pulling out the End-Of-The-Book-Emergency-Plot-Device he picked up towards the beginning of his adventures, thus apparently banishing the Wizard of Reckoning and waking Cameron up.

… Yes, you read that right. The epic twist which the Wizard of Reckoning reveals is that Cameron's been in his hospital bed dying of Cruetzfeldt-Jakob this whole time, and all his adventures with Gonzo, Balder, and Dulcie were an elaborate hallucination cooked up by his subconscious. Now Cameron's time is up, though, and the Wizard challenges him to accept his fate and die peacefully.

[1]

The story closes with Cameron reflecting on how the hallucination gave him the chance to really experience life for the first time, and then finding Dulcie in the afterlife and hooking up with her—maybe. I'll let Dan summarize my thoughts on this conclusion: “

The only thing worse than an 'it was all a dream' ending is an 'it was all a dream … OR WAS IT?' ending

.”

Granted, this didn't come completely out of left field. It was technically foreshadowed by a couple of weird flashes Cameron has back to his sister and their parents during his adventures—though since several of these flashes show him events outside of his hospital room, they don't exactly support the interpretation that these are moments of him seeing what's “really” going on. But even if it was foreshadowed, it doesn't change the fact that at the eleventh hour, Bray snatches away the ultimate goal Cameron has been striving for throughout the bulk of the book and replaces it with—nothing, really, or at least, nothing that's at all comprehensible to non-lit majors. As anti-climaxes go, that's pretty epic.

It may be useful to compare the ending of Catherine Fisher's

Corbenic

. As with most of Fisher's work, I took a while to warm to

Corbenic

, but I enjoyed the ending, and didn't feel the least bit cheated by it, even though it could be fairly characterized as “and then I woke up and it was all a dream … OR WAS IT?” I think

Corbenic

works for a couple of reasons, none of which are applicable to

Going Bovine

. First, because the ambiguity in the former does not totally derail either of the textually supported interpretations: if you choose to believe all the magic stuff is real and Cal really has found a mystical grail which will heal the fisher king, there's plenty of interpretive space for you. Second, because the possibility that the magic is a delusion on Cal's part is not treated as an eleventh hour plot twist, but is rather a running theme throughout the book. And third, because the goal Cal has been striving for still has value even if you choose to believe he's hallucinating—you don't go through the whole book with him trying to reach a specific point, only to have that point rendered irrelevant and swept aside at the last minute.

Next to everything else, I don't greatly mind that the book has a tragic ending, but let's not kid ourselves: this isn't

On the Jellicoe Road

, where tragic elements are inextricably bound up with the beauty and power of the story. This is

Going Bovine

, the story of a young jerk who learns something of what it means to be alive, to accept the necessity of death, and then dies—it could just as easily have been the story of a young jerk who learns something of what it means to be alive, and goes on to live a nicer, happier, more meaningful life, without it making a lick of difference to the rest of the book. The tragic ending doesn't actively harm the story, but it certainly doesn't enhance it.

[2]

The book has its good points, but they're massively outweighed by the structural issues and the painful attempts at social commentary, and that's even before we factor in the ghastly ending. It still may have some value as a curiosity—many of the ideas in there strike me as pretty unique and imaginative—but in the final analysis it fails as a narrative, which is perhaps the worst failure a work of literature can commit. I suppose folks who are into surrealist adventures and don't mind “and it turned out it was all a dream … OR WAS IT?” endings may still find it worth a read, despite the condescending and ham-fisted social commentary, but to everyone else, I encourage you to do yourself a favor and don't bother.

[1]

This raises the rather glaring question of why Bray treats Cameron's defeat of the Wizard of Reckoning as such a big deal, as he then goes on to do

exactly

what the Wizard had been telling him to do anyway.

[2]

Actually, the fact that I don't strongly care whether Cameron lives or dies is pretty damning in its own right.Themes:

Books

Sci-fi / Fantasy

Young Adult / Children

Emocakes

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Arthur B

at 18:18 on 2014-03-17Wow, that does sound messy. It feels from your review like there's a whole mess of stuff in there which might have been interesting treated in isolation but doesn't really belong all thrown together in the same pot. (In particular, "let's have wacky adventures with a magic dwarf and a garden gnome - by the way, the punchline is terminal illness" feels like a wonky premise to begin with.)

Out of interest, how long is the book in terms of page count, and how deep in do you get before the whole Doctor X deal kicks off?

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Alice

at 18:43 on 2014-03-17You know, I read this book a couple of years ago, but I'd completely forgotten everything about it except for vague memories of Dulcie and Gonzo. The little that I do remember about the book meshes pretty well with this review, though, and I certainly remember disliking it.

The worst thing about it was that -- despite all the wacky shenanigans -- I just found it really dull. And I can forgive a book many things, but I find it very hard to forgive being bored by a book, especially if I'm not getting anything else out of it.

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http://ronanwills.wordpress.com/

at 00:15 on 2014-03-18Maybe I'm just not intellectual enough, but I tend to be immediately put off by surrealist novels. Basically if the back cover blurb reads like a string of random bullshit (this book has robots! and time travel! and parallel dimensions and talking walruses named Steve who are also stock brokers and Santa Claus fighting a cyclops and) then I stay far, far away.

So this sounds like the sort of thing that would drive me absolutely batshit insane. It's not even that stories like this tend to be confusing, it's that for all their wild and wacky imagery I find them incredibly boring. I'm not entirely sure why- maybe it's just because there's so little to actually latch onto emotionally.

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Robinson L

at 22:36 on 2014-03-18@Arthur: Yep, pretty messy.

According to wikipedia, it's 496-pages long. Unfortunately, I can't tell you offhand where in that Dulcie appears and starts explaining about the Dr. X stuff, because I listened to the book on CD. I would guess it's within the first 100-125 pages, though.

Alice: I can forgive a book many things, but I find it very hard to forgive being bored by a book, especially if I'm not getting anything else out of it.

Oh, I hear you, there.

I don't think I was too bored by

Going Bovine

(it's been a while since I read it, now), though I might have been more so if I'd actually had to read it instead of listening on audio.

@ronan: Interesting perspective. Personally, I don't mind surreal so long as it's mostly coherent; if I can follow along with the characters, then I've got something to latch onto emotionally, and that will usually see me through. A lot of Douglas Adams' work, especially his "Dirk Gently" books could be described as surreal, but they're rarely esoteric, and I like them a lot.

To give Bray her due, she keeps

Going Bovine

mostly on the lefthand side of that ledger. The characters are consistent throughout, and though the events of the novel are often bizarre (again, Norse god turned into talking lawn gnome), the way the characters respond to and interact with the weird elements is plausible enough. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it felt internally consistent to me ... that is, up until final chase and confrontation with the Wizard of Reckoning, where it all fell apart.

From your example, though, I don't think not being an intellectual is the main problem ... it sounds less like "I'm going to do really smart things with metaphor and symbolism and the like" and more like "I'm going to dream up an excuse to throw all these cool ideas into the same story and not bother trying to make it work in terms of plot or character or the like."

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James D

at 19:47 on 2014-03-19Has anyone seen the movie Jacob's Ladder? It uses a similar plot device to a certain part of Going Bovine, namely that Jacob is dying the whole time and the movie is essentially a dream, except I think it works because Jacob still has a character arc, his struggles in the coma dream still matter, as they are psychological struggles, like coming to terms with the death of his son, which it is suggested was his reason for abandoning his life as a professor and becoming a postman.

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Robinson L

at 20:30 on 2014-03-19I haven't, but I'm prepared to believe that it can be done in such a way that it works.

In fact a lot of what happens in

Going Bovine

is still meaningful, because Cameron's wish is to live, and the hallucination let him do just that by giving him a ton of interesting and thrilling experiences - which, come to think of it, still sounds more like cleaving to the letter of the wish, rather than following the spirit as Dulcie explained. But the main goal he's given at the beginning of the quest (find Dr. X and convince him to save the universe) is still rendered moot, which is why I consider the book a narrative failure.

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Arthur B

at 20:52 on 2014-03-19I think part of what makes

Jacob's Ladder

work is that it's all about Jacob discovering and coming to terms with the twist, instead of being aware of what the basic problem is all along.

In particular, it's constructed as an argument that coming to terms with the fact that you're at death's door

significant and important, even if nobody ever knows you were reconciled to it except you, for the few seconds you have left before nonexistence beckons. Here Cameron is fully aware that he's got a terminal illness for most of the book, and it sounds like the purpose of his hallucination was not so much to wake him up to the fact of death so much as distract him and keep him entertained for a while until he no longer had the energy to sustain it.

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http://ronanwills.wordpress.com/

at 21:33 on 2014-03-19Jacob's Ladder was a solid idea, but in practice it left me frustrated because the execution of the twist made it feel as if the preceding story was pointless- the film gives the impression of going somewhere right until it ends very abruptly, at which point it becomes clear that everything up until the twist was basically just killing time. I remember individual scenes from that movie very vividly, but I couldn't honestly summarize the plot beyond "weird shit happens to a guy, then the movie ends".

@Robinon L Yeah, I think you articulated more clearly what my problem usually is. There's a certain kind of writer that seems to delight in emptying their mind straight onto the page and giving form to whatever stray idea happens to come to them. I've just never seen the appeal of that kind of story-telling (even The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy got too much for me in places) but a lot of people seem to find it appealing.

An author who (sometimes) does this well is Haruki Murakami. A *lot* of weird things tend to happen in his stranger books, but he generally keeps the reader confident that the plot is actually going somewhere. The exception is Kafka on The Shore, which devolves into incoherent nonsense fairly quickly.

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James D

at 23:05 on 2014-03-19

Jacob's Ladder was a solid idea, but in practice it left me frustrated because the execution of the twist made it feel as if the preceding story was pointless- the film gives the impression of going somewhere right until it ends very abruptly, at which point it becomes clear that everything up until the twist was basically just killing time. I remember individual scenes from that movie very vividly, but I couldn't honestly summarize the plot beyond "weird shit happens to a guy, then the movie ends".

Well, I've seen the movie a few times now, and I very much disagree. The preceding story is essentially Jacob at first recoiling from the truth - he imagines a future in which he has divorced his wife, left his children, and quit being a professor. He lives with a hot chick he knows from the post office and lives a life of few responsibilities. However, guilt and grief and questioning of that fantasy regularly intrude, in the form of weird events and reminders of the truth - he eventually faces the fact that his son died in a pointless accident and returns to his wife and children, he figures out some sort of explanation for his death in Vietnam (whether or not it's actually true is debatable), and having made his peace he accepts his death. He wouldn't have accepted his death in the end if the previous parts of the movie hadn't established the conflict and the character. It was vehemently not "just killing time."

Now, whether or not you view Jacob's internal psychological struggle to come to terms with tragic events in his life and the uncaringness of the universe in general as relevant is another question entirely.

The movie doesn't really spell any of that out, so a valid criticism might be that it's too subtle, obscures too many important plot points. I don't think so myself, but I'm not trying to imply that anyone who didn't "get it" is stupid. However, it is a film that makes more sense with repeat viewings, and if you didn't enjoy it the first time there's still a good chance you'll enjoy it more the second time.

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Sister Magpie

at 00:50 on 2014-03-24I feel the need to weigh in on Jacob's Ladder since I really liked it and agree with James. Though I do understand feeling like the whole story is basically wiped away with the final twist, I read it more the way James did, that everything about Jacob's life was set up to help him come to terms with death and do what he needed to do.

Btw, the chiropractor played by Danny Aiello in that movie is based on a real guy--a chiropractor who, having been to him, actually is a lot like Danny Aiello.

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Robinson L

at 20:36 on 2015-06-30So, my sister ptolemaeus recently read another Libba Bray book,

Beauty Queens

, because, apparently, it's supposed to be an answer to

Lord of the Flies

She ... did not like it. It sounds like the satire was about on par with that of

Going Bovine

- she said if Bray had just come out and written her points, it probably would have been

less

heavy-handed.

She also described the book as incredibly tokenistic: among the titular Beauty Queens you have the lesbian one, the deaf one, the Indian one, etc., and all clearly written by an author who is not and does not understand how to write any of those things.

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Robinson L

at 15:15 on 2016-03-31

Ronan: An author who (sometimes) does this well is Haruki Murakami. A *lot* of weird things tend to happen in his stranger books, but he generally keeps the reader confident that the plot is actually going somewhere. The exception is Kafka on The Shore, which devolves into incoherent nonsense fairly quickly.

Returning to this discussion because I actually just wrapped up listening to an audio recording of

Kafka on the Shore

a little while ago. And yeah, I got lost and bewildered early in because Murakami frontloads the strange and esoteric stuff pretty heavily. However, I pressed on, and it turns out that later on in the book, most of the really confusing stuff actually does get something approximating an explanation. There's still a strong undercurrent of vagueness and ambiguity surrounding the more supernatural material, but by the end of the book I could understand the basic story just fine. I'm sure there's a lot of rich nuance and subtext which blew right past me because it was too subtle and esoteric for me to apprehend, but I got the basic gist and it made sense, and I'm content with that.

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Robinson L

at 03:02 on 2016-04-30Oops, I forgot to mention that though I found

Kafka on the Shore

satisfactorily comprehensible, and I'm glad I read it, a section later in the book comes with a trigger warning for sexual assault. Granted, it's in a dream sequence and is doubtless part of all the esoteric symbolism which mostly went over my head—and although dreams can seem to effect reality in the universe of the book, the protagonist meets the other character in real life again at the very end, and she shows no signs of having experienced it, which I optimistically take to mean that it was all something which happened just to the protagonist and not really to her—but that doesn't make the scene itself any less problematic and icky, especially with the protagonist's repeated insistence (which in this case appears to be accurate) that he literally cannot stop.

#Ferretbrain #Robinson L #Going Bovine #Young Adult

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