#i think the concept of it being a cyclical tragedy makes it so much more heartbreaking

[im-a-freaking-joy]

Okay thoughts--

I just finished a production of hamlet as Hamlet, and during rehearsal one time I flipped open a prop notebook to take notes while the ghost of Hammy Sr. was talking, and saw my same exact notes from last rehearsal, and in my dissociated acting state, it hit me in a weird way and I'm GOING to talk about, though hell itself shall gape and bid me hold my peace.

Seeing the same thing written, and writing it again, made me think of hamlet as a circular story, which it very well can be. The play ends with Horatio promising to tell the story of what happened, and then having to do so to Fortinbras' invading army. You can start the play right back up again there if you desired, and it would fit.

We also know that shakespeare took a sledgehammer to the fourth wall and made it nonexistent, pretty much. Is it not possible, that hamlet is sort of, semi aware of his existence as a character? He references the audience multiple times in lines (which ofc can also mean the people around him but also the audience audience) and delivers monologues straight to the people watching, sort of involving them in the show as well. (See A2 S2, "it would split the ears of the groundlings, who ... are capable of nothing but ... noise)

What if hamlet is slowly going crazy because he is slowly realizing that his story is never ending, it's a cycle and it will be the same no matter what happens. He's so desperate to change the outcome, that we see him begging other characters to do things differently, hoping to have a different ending than the one he sees glimpses of over and over again.

Ophelia might be seeing this too, inspired by the theory that ophelia is seeing everyone's ghosts before they're dead and goes crazy due in part to that (I read that I think on tumblr but I can't find the og post so if somebody can please lmk) she may also be slowly clueing into the nature of their existence.

Isn't that horrifying? Hamlet, over the course of the 400 ish years that the show has been performed may be going crazier and crazier every time because he Can't Get Out. We even see this in one of his lines right before the sword fight with Laertes where he dies, he says to Horatio that "we defy augury." He's still so hopeful that it MIGHT be different this time, and that's what's so heartbreaking about it all, is that after everything he still thinks he can change the ending. And we, as the audience, hope he can! At least I do, and that makes his death and the ending, the inevitable tragedy, all the more bitter.

#am i reading too much into one event that happened at rehearsal? #almost certainly #do i love this concept so much and attempted to incorporste it into my performance? #absolutely #hamlet #shakespeare #an og joy post #i hope you theater kids like this #i think the concept of it being a cyclical tragedy makes it so much more heartbreaking #this is also not a hugely original concept #i was inspired in this theory by various other interpretations online so im not pretending ive struck a revelation here #but i think its neat #and very sad

[veliseraptor]

top 5 the untamed fanfic AUs you'd like to read

t juslides in with meme six months late without starbucks

this is just noting, also, that many of these AUs already exist! I’m just talking here about AUs I want to see more of.  just because they’re on here doesn’t mean I’m discounting the versions people have already written.

1. AU where Xue Yang gets stuck traveling with Xiao Xingchen (and Song Lan, optionally) after the massacre of the Chang Clan, but in CQL verse where they end up as fugitives (oh my god, and then they were fugitives). We know from a brief throwaway line from Wen Qing that apparently Song Lan (and presumably also Xiao Xingchen) are on the Wen shit list, most likely because they’re people who had contact with Xue Yang and Xue Yang is Wen Ruohan’s Most Wanted for a while there until he gets busy with other stuff. And I want to see things that play with that! Either with just Xue Yang and Xiao Xingchen or with the whole trio.

But yeah! On the run together, presumably Xiao Xingchen can’t/won’t ditch Xue Yang to get up to mischief, I don’t think he’s terribly inclined to turn him over to the Wens for a few different reasons, and everyone else is getting all caught up in a war so his options for ‘places to drop Xue Yang off that could handle him’ are pretty narrow.

I’m a sucker for bonding under duress and this seems like it could be a fun opportunity, and also has the bonus of probably keeping Xue Yang from annihilating Baixue Temple, which is good.

2. AU where Xiao Xingchen knows who Xue Yang is from the get-go (or figures it out mid-stream) and for whatever reason keeps him around anyway. I don’t care why it happens or how it happens I just think it’s a fun concept to work with, however it’s played. Whether it happens so that Xue Yang knows Xiao Xingchen knows, or Xiao Xingchen knows but Xue Yang doesn’t know that he does, or it’s ambiguous and they’re kind of going for plausible deniability...it just creates some fun opportunities, ya feel?

I’m particularly fond of this happening midstream rather than right off, because I think it does really interesting and fun things to their dynamic if Xiao Xingchen is already invested at that point (and that’s the version I feel like I see more often), but I’m currently writing a version of from the get-go and enjoying that too.

3. Yi City reincarnation AU. I just want everyone being kinda fucked up by their past lives and continuing to be stuck in each others’ orbit, and I especially like this when Song Lan isn’t reincarnated and is just, you know, still around but undead.

I am aware this is not how reincarnation works at all, that part of the point is that it’s a fresh start, but it’s what I want when it comes to my fanfiction AUs and I think that’s legit of me. 

I just...love a cyclical narrative, too, so I also really enjoy versions of this where it’s more than one reincarnation cycle, and I would read like. 100k of that.

4. AU where Xiao Xingchen’s suicide either fails or Xue Yang brings him back and is desperate to make things work this time. This is another “I will read five million versions of this concept” things, and I will read them in a wide range of dark to more hopeful, and I will still hunger for more because god!!! There’s so many ways you can take it and all of them are delicious. Another reason I specifically love this one is because either way Xiao Xingchen is going to be a mess and I kind of love fucking Xiao Xingchen up emotionally and psychologically but not in a way where he, you know, dies.

...which as I write that out is very Xue Yang of me, isn’t it.

And then also Xue Yang frantically going LOOK I MADE IT BETTER (he did not make it better) and TOTALLY FIXED IT EVERYTHING’S FINE NOW RIGHT (it is not fine now) and he’s not used to having to, you know, “make amends” or whatever, this is not an experience he’s familiar with and he’s not enjoying it.

5. does “time loop AUs” count as a single entry? because like. I would read several different versions of time loop AUs. for an incomplete sampling:

A. Xiao Xingchen stuck in a time loop. I’m writing one of these but I would like many, in which Xiao Xingchen is stuck in a miserable cycle until he figures out a Yi City fix it, and a lot of people die several times in the process, and it’s all very upsetting. Doesn’t this sound good to you guys?

B. Wei Wuxian stuck in a time loop. I have a prompt for this one for myself about Wei Wuxian in a time loop specifically at Nightless City which is really where I want it to be. Again, for misery reasons. I always like trapping characters at their low points. It just makes everything more fun.

C. Jiang Cheng stuck in a time loop. I don’t even care where, it just...okay, not only is it good for all the usual reasons it’s good (forcing someone to recapitulate their trauma and being unable to escape it until they find a way to escape it), is that not a perfect metaphor for Jiang Cheng’s life and problems.

The “being stuck in a moment or moments of time and unable to get out, unable to leave the past behind, continually recapitulating in a more metaphorical way past traumas and therefore often recreating them” and like. Would love to do that to him. I don’t even know where I’d want it to start. After the fall of Lotus Pier? Before that? After Wei Wuxian comes back? After Wei Wuxian goes to the Burial Mounds? I just want to read Jiang Cheng suffering through the mortifying experience of reliving his own mistakes and also making new ones.

D. Xue Yang stuck in a time loop. Someone did already write a very good and frankly iconic version of this but there can never be too many and also that one was very sad and I’d love one where it is less sad. Though sad works too, because the whole theme of Yi City being “we are all trapped in this cycle of destruction no one is escaping alive” is...well, it hurts me but also I like it. but also it hurts me. regardless I would love to read Xue Yang making a go at fixing things (for himself, obviously, all else is incidental) because he’d be terrible at it.

anyway, that’s five, or maybe eight depending on how you count. I’m going with five.

you will notice that pretty much all of these are yi city centric aus and that is because I’m actually less interested in aus that futz with the main plot, in general. I’m not opposed to them or anything but I don’t generally seek them out unless they’re by an author I already know I like.

(hypothetically I would like Wen Qing and Jiang Yanli to not die, but the problem is that I’m so deeply invested in the tragedy of the first life. like, in the Yanli Lives fic I’m writing I killed Jiang Cheng because I wanted to keep that sweet Yunmeng Siblings Misery.)

the exception to this would hypothetically be varieties of Jin Guangyao Lives AUs, but I actually have less of a concrete idea of what I want from that one, just that I, you know. want him to live his best life actually.

#anonymous #conversating #top five meme #i'm not doing this meme now just answering a couple from like six months ago or whatever #the sad queer cultivators show #consider these free prompts to good homes if you want them

[dorian-fey]

In Defense of Citizen Kane...

A much-maligned term of recent memory is hype, or the inflated build-up of a film or product to more praise than it seemingly deserves. One film that has fallen victim to this phenomenon is Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, a film that has never ceased to be controversial and divisive since its original release in 1941. Much debate has been tossed around by audiences, film scholars, and political figures alike as to whether the film deserves the supposed hyperbole and acclaim surrounding it for several decades, often touted as the “greatest film ever made.” What exactly qualifies it for that title, they ask? Is it just the technical elements (acting, cinematography, etc.)? Or is the thematic and cultural relevance? The truth is, Citizen Kane is as notable, influential and acclaim worthy for the elements perhaps not immediately noticed by some, and almost certainly ignored by others.

It’s amazing now to think that even so early in America’s history, someone was able to distance themselves and accurately portray the true nature of this enigmatic nation: the quest for power. Orson Welles was more than just a daring young thespian and professional button/envelope pusher; he was a man who could see the scope of America’s past, present and future as a cyclical construct of pain and self-destruction, a snake eating its own tail. He was active in the days not much different from now: mega-corporations and larger-than-life personalities ruled the landscape like the dinosaurs of prehistory, only unlike the dinosaurs, these ferocious behemoths didn’t go extinct but rather evolved to be more insidiously monstrous. And, in 1942, few of these monsters cast a bigger shadow than William Randolph Hearst, the tyrannical media mogul and an unofficial inspiration for the titular character of Charles Foster Kane. Hearst and others like him were petty, egotistical bullies who didn’t come up against moral quandaries and suffered little consequences for their maniacal need to succeed above all others, and yet were seemingly rewarded for their machinations.

Similarly, Kane undergoes a similar transformation before confronted on his deathbed with the realization that his quest for power has only resulted in his stark displacement from humanity. He dies alone, in a vast palace of his own making, surrounded only by servants and medical staff united only by their status as Kane employees. He realizes too late that the pursuit of his own supremacy grants him a lonesome admission before the abyss: his corpse casts a larger shadow than his living body eventually did.

Of course, the tragedy of his story is that he was not always this way. The film is one the earliest examples of in media res, beginning the story at the logical end and then working backwards to reach this inevitable conclusion. The fascination around Kane by various characters after his death is the pursuit what exactly made Kane the way he was. “Who was he? What is ‘Rosebud?’” a shadowy room of reporters’ muses after the news of his passing – as if a man’s life could be summed up in just one word. Thompson, the journalist investigating Kane throughout the film, says as much at the conclusion, rejecting the notion that a single word, rosebud, could hold that much significance in a man’s life, dying words or not. But the irony is that Kane’s childhood sled of the same name becomes the ultimate symbol of his character’s dilemma, his fight with power over plainness.

Charles Foster Kane starts off as a boy from the wintry Bible Belt, raised by an average working-class family and is perfectly content to live anonymously and without responsibility beyond his own backyard. His innocence is snatched from him purely through luck: his mother’s property stumbles upon a literal gold mine and the family is thrust into wealth and power in an instant. Courted by Mr. Thatcher, a cold and unloving banker, Charles is pulled from the tranquility of his own dream: a simple life of living within one’s means, experiencing love without terms, and the gratification of modesty. Indeed, in this aspect Welles seems to be stating that the pursuit of wealth and power as a concept is antithetical to true happiness: earning the love of others.

As related by an anecdote from Kane’s ludicrously-loyal business manager, Mr. Bernstein, Charles Foster Kane once described his second wife Susan as a “cross-section of the American public.” While perhaps unkindly likening the waifish, lower-class Susan to the subhuman oafs and rubes of society, this statement more accurately describes all the film’s characters. Within the fierce allegory of the narrative they all act of symbols of some aspect of American society. Mr. Bernstein is coded as an immigrant who comes to America with a cheerful and eventually weary desire to succeed, happy to serve some and being an accessory to the oppression of others. Jed Leland, Kane’s best friend and early collaborator, represents the intellectual, with grand idealistic notions, but no drive to make any lasting difference beyond petty attempts to undermine his former friend’s empire. His drunken musings against Kane’s bitter egotism and corruption are not inaccurate, but ring hollow due to Leland’s insecurity and weakness. Political thug and rival Jim Gettys represents the end-result of institutional corruption, and Mr. Thatcher of the aloof devotion to facts and figures over human connection. Kane’s first wife, Emily Norton, is the epitome of blissfully ignorance upper-class mentality, a vain and detached woman who places higher priority on appearances rather than genuine compatibility. Kane’s second wife, modestly-talented singer Susan Alexander, is the opposite: a woman unconcerned with prestige and status, or even artistic admiration, and initially connects with Kane over their shared love of the simple things. But Charles is unhappy with both, as they are emblematic of his own duality and confusion over what it truly means to happy in America.

That Charles Foster Kane’s career is based in the media is no accident. His empire survives on misinformation, pathos-driven commentary, and vain reaffirmation of one’s insecurity. During Kane’s disastrous political campaign, his own newspaper cannot bring itself to clinically analyze reality, opting instead to claim “FRAUD AT POLLS!” to offset embarrassment to Mr. Kane. He, like many other celebrities, seems unable to accept humble defeat or shortcomings. Rather, Kane prefers to be elevated to god-like status, assuming a mythic quality that he regrets far too late.

His name is often framed as the most prominent element in any scene it appears, from the opening titles that punch his name though the blackness, to his massive portrait during his political speech, to his consistently-monogrammed clothing. During a party celebrating his acquisition of another publication’s expert staff, ice sculptures of Kane, Leland and Bernstein are shown. But while those of Leland and Bernstein are of their faces – showing their individual humanity – Kane’s sculpture is simply the letter “K,” as if he wishes to supplant the ubiquitous association of his initial with himself. Indeed, the end of the film he has accomplished this: the entire world undoubtedly knows his name, but almost nothing about the man himself, aside from what was printed in newspapers. Welles is showing us the two-faceted nature of the media: under the guise of the unfaltering “truth,” it manages to truncate human experience and splinter genuine emotions into pandering personas. The tragic irony of the story is that of a man who secretly wished for a private life but ended up with a very public, very unflattering one.

So does Citizen Kane hold up today? Does it deserve this recognition, almost as ubiquitous and indescribable as its titular protagonist? In regards to storytelling and cinematic techniques, it is undeniably influential. From the revolutionary angles and editing; the gothic and shadowy production design; the battle of idealism vs. cynicism; the snappy, overlapping dialogue that make Aaron Sorkin blush…it really is the true American epic. This modern fall-from-grace story has inspired such critically-acclaimed epics as There Will Be Blood, All The King’s Men, Giant, The Godfather trilogy, The Social Network, and countless others.

I would say that it’s almost too easy to decipher its relevance, if you know what to look for. One might say it’s all there in the title. It’s not called Emperor Kane or Lord Kane. The man had exceeding wealth, power and influence, but he was not a god: he was a man. He was a citizen. He was one of us, until he wasn’t.

#movies #review #analysis #citizen kane #film #orson welles

[orpheus-type-beat]

Hadestown

First off Hadestown was phenomenal. I legit almost cried at the end; even though I knew there wouldn’t be a happy ending, the musical did such a good job of creating and then destroying hope for the characters. It was probably the most religious experience I’ve ever had doing laundry, so props to that.

All of the songs were bangers, and the casting of the voices was really well done. Orpheus makes sense as a pretty boy with a gorgeous falsetto, Persephone sounds world-weary but has the capacity to harken back to a time of youth and innocence, and Hades sounds menacing without totally getting lost in the maniacal villain thing (except for the part where he yelled about the electric chorus that was a little much).

I love how this version made explicit the parallels between Hades/Persephone and Orpheus/Eurydice, and also how this version gave both women way more depth. This not only fleshes the story out and makes it feel a lot less misogynistic, it also just makes the story better. In the original story, Orpheus was just a stupid musical fuckboy who couldn’t follow orders for more than two minutes. Whereas in this version, while I was still like “why would you look around?” his doubt makes so much more sense. She left him once before, and so its natural and human for him to doubt her loyalty now. 

At the same time, Orpheus turning around is extra tragic for Eurydice, who left him because of his inability to provide for her. We get the impression that Eurydice, who was doing all of the hard work, felt neglected materially but also emotionally — he was more focused on music than her. By coming to save her, he proves his love, but his inability to do the hard thing and not look back proves that he hasn’t really matured. The same impulse that led him to neglect food and shelter for his music also preventing him from following Hades’ instructions. So really they couldn’t be together, even if Eurydice had escaped — nothing had changed, they were caught in a cycle.

That cyclic feeling to this story is obviously thematically in conversion with Hades and Persephone, which is so cool and deepens the story. It also redeems the musical as a musical. From experience, it’s hard to practice and perform a musical over and over again if there is no sense of redemption at all, and if you don’t fundamentally enjoy the story, the characters, and the themes. The closing song, with Hermes talking about how it’s the same song, and we sing it over and over again, hoping it’ll change even though we know it won’t, is conversation not just with the nature of myth and storytelling, but also the nature of performance. 

Myth and stories are told over and over again, and what Hadestown does it what all good retelling of myth do — they make the same story feel alive and vital again. I knew there wouldn’t be a happy ending, but I felt the tragedy as is if it could have ended another way. That ability to imagine what could have been is, according to Hermes, Orpheus’ true gift. Orpheus is generally just a metaphor for all artists, so it’s kind of also a statement about all art.

What makes this link compelling is the fact that, for the performers in the musical, the have to literally tell this story over and over again, and in order to make each performance good that have to basically trick themselves into thinking it could end differently. That’s just what performing is, being able to replay these emotional beats over and over again and keep them fresh. So Hermes, who addresses the audience and is a really cool meta-textual character (which is stylistically very resonant with the way that ancient Greek poems started with 4th wall breaking invocations to the muses), is also making a commentary about the play itself. The fact that this is a performance is called out, but rather than weakening the story is strengthens it — it calls attention to how this story is an eternal loop of hope and pain, just like the seasons are eternal. So it explains the purpose of the musical in the same way these myths were explained in the past — they both do explanatory work about the world, and the cyclic nature of the seasons, and of love and loss. It’s just more abstract than literal explanatory work (which is probably more accurate to the ancient view of myth, honestly, than an overly literal one).

Hadestown also does what ancient myths did, which is reify abstract concepts in a way that makes reasoning about these concepts easier. Hadestown plays up Hades’ relationship with wealth, and so to me a lot of this reads as an interesting critic of capitalism in the face of environmental destruction. Hades’ constant industrial expansion is destroying his relationship with Persephone, who is emblematic of the natural world. The moments of beauty in this play are all related to nature and the natural — most poignantly, the description of Hades coming to the Persephone in “her mother’s garden,” and sleeping with her (which is an incredible finesse, mixing Christian and Greek spirituality pretty flawless and concisely, wow). A parable about success destroying a marriage that started beautifully is a perfect metaphor for the destruction of the planet by human beings that are uniquely situated to enjoy and appreciate its beauty. That’s the kind of thing that myth is excellent at, casting abstract struggles in personal terms that make those abstract struggles real.

Also, the whole wall thing is even more effective today than in 2016, and like makes the whole Hades=capitalism even more interesting and powerful

[starwarsnonsense]

Darren Aronofsky’s ‘mother!’ as a feminist fable

* Spoilers for Darren Aronofsky’s mother! follow *

I must begin by apologising for what can only be a digression on a Star Wars blog, since mother! (beyond the inclusion of Domhnall Gleeson in a tiny role) has absolutely nothing to do with everyone’s favourite space opera series. However, I can’t feel too bad about it since I really, really need to talk about mother!. Excuse my indulgence, and I hope that those of you who do read these find my thoughts interesting.

I watched mother! for the first time at the weekend and it truly blew me away. I left the theatre with a deranged grin in my face, amazed and overjoyed that Aronofsky had convinced Paramount to fund, promote and distribute something this batshit crazy (amusingly, they actually felt the need to explain themselves in a statement). However insane you expect mother! to be, nothing can surpass the actual experience of watching it in a theatre and hearing the disquieted murmurs of an unprepared and steadily more agitated crowd. 

mother! is any and all of the following, depending on how you choose to approach it - a black comedy, a parable, a pretentious pile of nonsense, an allegory, a muddle of metaphors, a home invasion film, an affront to all reasonable standards of good sense and decency, etc., etc. But what I’m going to focus on here is how mother! is also a rather shattering feminist fable. Just allow me a few paragraphs of scene-setting to get there.

To get right into the thick of it, it has been well established by many others (not least Aronofsky himself) that mother! is a biblical allegory - Jennifer Lawrence’s Mother (upper case mine, out of principle) is Mother Nature, Javier Bardem’s Him (note that all-important, end credits-sanctioned upper case!) is the Judaeo-Christian God, Ed Harris’s ‘man’ is Adam, Michelle Pfeiffer’s ‘woman’ is Eve, and so on and so on. mother! is, in essence, a microcosm of the entire Christian Bible - it is even neatly divided into discrete halves that correspond to the greatest hits of the Old and New Testaments. The characters here are not individuals so much as representations of concepts - they are forces of nature and qualities of man. The film bends time to breaking point, compressing thousands of years of progress, conflict and bloodshed into two hours and reducing the entire Earth to an increasingly dilapidated house.

By borrowing its structure from the Bible, mother! is, by default, a portrait of humanity and its capacity for harm - and it is upsetting people precisely because Aronofsky’s view of man is extremely bleak. Humanity is framed as an ever-swelling deluge of insatiable, greedy and thoughtless brutes, with only the barest glimmers of kindness and compassion visible amidst the chaos. At the film’s end, the only acceptable solution for Mother Nature - her heart black and withered, her love all-but extinguished by her suffering - is to burn them all to ashes. 

mother! is a condemnation of humankind, but it is also a condemnation of the baser qualities of God Himself: His demand for worship, His indifference towards the natural world, and His insistence on the continuation of man even in the face of its violence and destructiveness. Him is portrayed as more akin to the curious, selfish, playful gods of the Ancient Greek pantheon than the bearded, stoic sky-father that the Christian God is now usually framed as - he has a short memory for the horrors wrought by mankind, and demonstrates inexplicable and senseless investment in perpetuating them, even as Mother Earth rages against their existence. The film takes the idea of the six days of creation and, rather brilliantly, makes it look as if God created man out of idle curiosity once he’d become discontented with the tranquil perfection of his creation.

One of the richest and most fascinating interpretations of mother!, as far as I’m concerned, is the one that approaches it as an allegory for the diminishment and sidelining of the divine feminine. This is conveyed through something as basic and obvious as capitalisation - while the exclamation mark in the film’s title has got all of the attention, the lower case ‘m’ means more than you’d first think. It is a very well-established convention that God is always referred to with upper case pronouns (His, Him, He) - this is done to distinguish Him from the petty, fading gods from other religions, and from all those lower creatures with no claim to divinity (or, as it turns out, upper case pronouns). By introducing mother! with lower case in the title of the film, the disadvantage of Mother Earth is being established from the outset. 

To venture briefly into theology, the feminine divine is now usually considered inferior to the masculine one - it has been this way for many centuries, with the ancient goddesses of wisdom, fertility, love and creation being sidelined in favour of warlike, dominating male deities. As Bettany Hughes observes in The Guardian:

At the birth of society and civilisation I find a religious landscape littered with feisty female deities who make wisdom their business. There's Nisaba the Babylonian goddess who looks after the stores of both grain and knowledge in Mesopotamia; the Hindu goddess Saraswati; the Zoroastrian Anahita; the ancient Greek Athena; and the Shinto Omoikane (a fine goddess of holistic thought and multitasking).

But come the end of the bronze age and many of these deities have been demoted. Here we witness a precursor of the Judaeo-Christian scenario. Up until 1400BC, citadel settlements are stable. Goddesses – notably in charge of fertility and learning – have a crucial role to play. But as civilisation gets greedy and society more militaristic, these wise women are edged to the sidelines in favour of a thundering, male warrior god.

It is my feeling that we see this dynamic - with the divine female creative force being forced to the margins by an overbearing figure of male authority - played out in the marital relationship between Him and Mother in the film. Mother is the central creative actor - she is the one who makes the house at the centre of the film (which is analogous to the Earth) beautiful and vibrant following its destruction in a fire. Without her, it is impossible for Him to create. But her efforts are constantly overlooked, scorned and belittled - the guests in her house destroy her belongings, invade her sanctuaries, and show outright disdain for her wishes. Her attempts to resist them are perceived as comical, with her will only being enacted on those rare occasions that Him deigns to support her. Mother is clearly expected to be a passive source of inspiration for Him, an ornament whose attempts to assert herself or share her opinion are swiftly shut down. Just as history has erased goddesses and female deities as patriarchal structures have become more and more entrenched, the characters surrounding Mother in the film seek to trample her down and ignore her role in creation.

A big point is made in the film of the generational divide between Him and Mother - Him is middle-aged, his face lined and weathered, whereas Mother is a beautiful young woman with immaculate skin and an abundance of golden hair. This distinction drives home the imbalance between them - it is a divide designed to unsettle and disquiet from the moment you first see them together, the kind of union that makes your skin crawl from an instinctual sense that something is profoundly wrong with it. 

As the film unwinds, this suspicion becomes fully realised - the film is cyclical in that it begins and ends with a mother setting herself and the house aflame, her heart transforming into a shimmering crystal that Him places on a stand in his study as a new mother forms from the ashes of the marital bed. In this way, He is revealed as the collector of countless women’s hearts - He is essentially a Bluebeard figure (with the study functioning as his forbidden bloody chamber), and the central tragedy of mother! is that the heroine is offered no escape from him. In keeping with Aronofsky’s dim view of existence, the relationship between Mother and Him is destined to repeat itself in an unending cycle of destruction and rebirth. We are all doomed to repeat the same mistakes, being nothing more than the playthings of a capricious God.

There is no sense of lessons learned or mistakes avoided here, and one of the greatest injustices on display is the sheer contempt with which Mother is treated. Aronofsky has been open about the fact that mother! is an environmentalist film, and the vitriol that Lawrence’s character is dealt with is, of course, a statement on how we treat the Earth. But it is also effective precisely because it frames this contempt towards Mother Earth as a very specific kind of contempt - misogyny. The misogyny is most overt in how the avatars of humanity treat Mother, with their subtle disapproval, judgement and objectification building and building until they overflow into a riot of violence and verbal abuse at the film’s climax. The allegory is three-fold - we are witnessing contempt for women generally, contempt for women as a force for creation (in everything from the mundane sense to the divine one), and contempt for nature as a maternal force.

Some commentators have misconstrued the film’s depiction of misogyny as evidence that the film itself is sexist, but I could not disagree more strongly - Aronofsky’s film is a pin-sharp deconstruction of how society treats women, and it is uncomfortable because it is meant to be. Misogyny is real and it is ugly, and by depicting its evolution across a spectrum ranging from a disapproving look to seething violence we are being forced to confront it. The film is entirely told from Mother’s perspective, which makes the brutality and cruelty of her treatment inescapable - she is the only character we can truly feel empathy for, with her suffering registering on an acutely visceral level because it is portrayed so intimately.

While the film offers its characters no escape from a cycle, I like to think that Aronofsky designed mother! to be as shocking as it is in order to confront us with some of the hardest truths - the truth of how we treat the Earth and the truth of how we treat women. Too much cinema is the audiovisual equivalent of junk food, encouraging passive and unthinking consumption. The very fact that mother! has inspired such emotional responses - from passionate hatred to profound admiration - is testament to the fact that it did exactly what it set out to do by jolting people from their complacency.

#mother! #darren aronofsky #not star wars #not sw #film #cinema #film analysis #essay

[irysan]

The Dialectical Monism of Gundam 00

Or, why that one meme about the cool robot and war is bad going over your head is a false dichotomy

Form does not differ from emptiness,

Emptiness does not differ from form.

That which is form is emptiness,

That which is emptiness form.

Extract from The Heart Sutra

I dropped Gundam 00 back shortly after it began airing in late 2007, and have only recently revisited it. I dropped it for reasons very much like why you may have felt inclined to not even bother continuing to read this article after seeing the title and my opening gobbledegook; the unmistakable mark of pretentious posturing.

Indeed, before even 2 minutes of its runtime have elapsed, 00 has already leapt eagerly into the arms of religious symbolism, with all the subtlety of a hand grenade.

This isn't even a bad scene by any means, nor is it guilty of faux-symbolism. In fact, in many ways it's a great opening sequence, the kind of strong hook that longer shows benefit from. But this scene doesn't exist in a vacuum, and what follows begins to paint it in a different, souring light.

Once the opening credits have rolled, viewers are assaulted by a seemingly endless barrage of overwrought and empty theological allusions, punctuated by a soundtrack that so casually reaches for the liturgical that it becomes senseless. Combine this with textbook too-cool-for-school badass protagonists, complete with corny one liner catchphrases and a script where even the narrator never misses the chance to talk ominously about God's Judgement; the clumsy concoction of elements that make up 00's identity come together to create an atmosphere that feels so overly-inflated that it could burst at any second.

Graham's remarks in Episode 01 about the contradictory nature of Celestial Being, an organisation that seeks to use force to bring about the end of war, felt very much in line with my own thoughts about the contradictory nature of the show. How could something that relied on shallow posturing to try to elevate itself beyond stale cliches hope to really convey anything meaningful at all? How could a series that seemed content to merely invoke the sensation of depth instead of demonstrating depth actually have depth? How could a work defined by it's lack of substance produce anything of substance?

10 years and 1.5 rewatches later, a series of lines uttered once again by Graham near the end of the 00 Movie made everything click.

Setsuna : "I didn't come here to fight!"

Graham: "Why does your heart falter? You should be saying that you're fighting for the sake of living!"

Graham: "To continue that existence filled with contradictions!"

Graham: "That's what it means to live!"

***

Graham: "Young lad! I , Graham Aker, shall guarantee that you lead us to the future!"

Graham: "This isn't dying! This is ensuring that humanity will survive!"

In these brief moments, Graham captures the true essence of 00 as a series, a work that wholeheartedly embraces contradictions, two things seemingly opposed, as a ubiquitous, unified feature of existence.

You may be familiar with this concept, perhaps through the Yin and Yang of Taiji, or the teachings of particular forms of Buddhism, as embodied by the quote from the beginning. Contradictions, or opposites, are ultimately complementary, dualistic aspects of a unified whole, the ultimate reality. The unity of the universe can only be experienced through duality, and as such, nature embodies a contradiction, and this contradiction constantly produces complementary opposites that interact with each other, creating new syntheses.

With this in mind, many facets of 00 begin to fall into place. The two Lockons, the two personalities of the two Super Soldiers, every Innovader having a corresponding pairing, Setsuna's contradictory nature as a being who fights in order to stop fighting, the two distinctly different seasons that critique each other, the twin drive system and the infinity sign it leaves behind, the double O...indeed, the list goes on and on. 00's symbolism at large takes on a new dualistic form, where the superficial, Abrahamic facets are merely the other side of the coin of allegories, with the more subdued underpinnings of Eastern philosophy counterbalancing them.

So, what about the robot meme? Well if you haven't figured it out yourself already, to 00, the dichotomy between the cool flashy robots engaging in combat and the anti-war undercurrent is false because it doesn't perceive them as inherently being in opposition. They're just parts of the same whole. 00's ability to pull off insane moments like the Trans Am Raiser Sword, it's ability to turn Graham into Mr.Bushido, and ultimately create fun, engaging and inspiring moments whilst simultaneously addressing serious tragedies is because of its belief that none of these things really undermine each other as long as they’re presented in an earnest dualism. The thrill and spectacle of over exaggerated, slick action sequences should not, can not be rejected just because we know that fighting is undesirable. The tongue in cheek, self deprecating tone of the in-universe movie sequence is an open acknowledgement of this; Saji’s criticism of it is merely that it’s only half the story.

But 00 is not simply retreading ancient Taoist or Buddhist principles. The established, cyclical and repetitive outlook of traditional Eastern views (and for that matter, traditional Gundam views) is rejected, for 00's position is unapologetically optimistic and progressive. Setsuna, and consequently, mankind, changed for the better. They broke the cycle and reached a new level of understanding. This is in itself a dualism, for whilst the roots of the idea of a Universal Dialectic 00 puts forward are Eastern, the idea that this Dialectic is in fact a progressive "spiral" of evolutionary development is a Western invention.

Therefore, 00 is best described as a work that embodies what is commonly known as Dialectical Monism, a unification of Eastern and Western philosophy and quantum mechanics. Particularly fitting, given that the 00 Movie, an animated film made in Japan, ends with a quote from Albert Einstein, who was one of the main sources of inspiration for the enigmatic Aeolia Schenberg, the man who set the entire events of the story in motion.

Dialectical Monism is why I view 00's optimism as truly poignant, as more than mere wishful thinking. For there is no "being" or "non being", merely a process of "becoming". All existence, including our own may be contradictory, but those very contradictions are what cause us all to progress, to innovate, as we move ever onwards, blazing a trail to the future.

#gundam #00 gundam

[insideanairport]

Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” (part I/II)

❍❍❍

This is the best and most profound work of Nietzsche, yet the hardest to grasp. For beginners, I don’t recommend starting with this book. All of Nietzsche’s philosophical universe is condensed and packed in this work. I picked up this book first when I was still in Highschool. I didn’t understand a lot in the first reading of it. I also took some notes and moved on to reading other works by Nietzsche. Soon, I found myself reading all of his major works. Before writing this review, I looked back on my first notes from Thus Spake Zarathustra. I had to delete every single note I took at that time. My view has been changed completely towards Nietzsche’s work since the first time I read this book.

Where did Zarathustra come from?

If you have never heard of Zarathustra (Zoroaster or زرتشت‎) and have only heard it through this book, it means that you have spent too much time reading European writers. Zarathustra was an ancient Persian figure and the founder of Zoroastrianism religion. His most famous book is Avesta (اوستا) and along with it is the communal household prayer book called the Khordeh Avesta (خرده اوستا). Zoroastrianism is still practiced in many countries around the world, especially in Iran, Pakistan, and India. It is one of the world's oldest monotheistic religions that remains active. 

Nietzsche found out that before Manichaean and Abrahamic religions, Zarathustra was the first person who came up with the idea of Good and Evil. A philosophy that states human action fall in these two binary categories. Therefore, Nietzsche considers Zarathustra the first “moralist”. In the book, Nietzsche personifies himself as Zarathustra in order to present a critique of the moralist philosophy of Good and Evil, an idea that he continued in his next book “Beyond Good and Evil”. Nietzsche believed that since Zarathustra created the first notion of morality, he must have also realized his mistake. In his autobiography Ecce Homo, Nietzsche explains: 

“I have not been asked, as I should have been asked, what the name Zarathustra means in precisely my mouth, in the mouth of the first immoralist: for what constitutes the tremendous uniqueness of that Persian in history is precisely the opposite of this. Zarathustra was the first to see in the struggle between good and evil the actual wheel in the working of things: the translation of morality into the realm of metaphysics, as force, cause, end-in-itself, is his work. But this question is itself at bottom its own answer. Zarathustra created this most fateful of errors, morality: consequently he must also be the first to recognize it. Not only has he had longer and greater experience here than any other thinker – the whole of history is indeed the experimental refutation of the proposition of a so-called ‘moral world-order’ –: what is more important is that Zarathustra is more truthful than any other thinker. His teaching, and his alone, upholds truthfulness as the supreme virtue – that is to say, the opposite of the cowardice of the ‘idealist’, who takes flight in the face of reality; Zarathustra has more courage in him than all other thinkers put together. To tell the truth and to shoot well with arrows: that is Persian virtue. Have I been understood? The self-overcoming of morality through truthfulness, the self-overcoming of the moralist into his opposite – into me – that is what the name Zarathustra means in my mouth.” (1)

Walter Kaufmann argued that Nietzsche might have more in common with Zarathustra than we think. “The two figures also share a range of similar properties or powers, such as the ability to annihilate and create in the light of a re-evaluation of past thought, the disposition to be inspired through visions manifested in poetry, dance, and song, and the courage to act in accordance with all of these. Moreover, the ‘Three Stages of History’ that Zoroaster took to be embodied in the individual (as ‘birth’, ‘death’, and ‘beyond’) are mirrored in [Nietzschean] Zarathustra’s ‘Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit’ as Camel, Lion, and Child.” (2)

In this book, Nietzsche is literally preaching but also making fun of preaching and preaching mentality. The book is about a philosopher guy who is trying to “show” humans the right way of living, through Superman (Übermensch). The philosophy is a direct-antagonism to Christianity (not all religions) yet using its lingo. Nietzsche's philosophy starts with the harsh critique of Christian morality. Yet, at times it can be seen as a critique of all morality, or a universal morality (if such a thing exists). We know that not all Abrahamic religions share the same view regarding good and evil. For example, in Bahá'í Faith the concept of evil (devil) does not exist. Evil is interpreted simply as a “lack” of good/goodness. Just as cold is the state of no heat, darkness is the state of no light, forgetfulness the lacking of memory, ignorance the lacking of knowledge.  

Nietzsche’s love of the Greek tragedy, Presocratic Philosophy and art is a reaction to monotheism, rationality, and idealism (especially in Plato). He calls life an “activity”: A continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations. He believes that life is something essentially immoral. In multiple occasions, he joins “God/philosophy” and “dance” to elevate the art and demote God. Quotes such as; “I would only believe in a god who could dance.” or “there is nothing to which the spirit of a philosopher more aspires than to be a good dancer.”    

Nietzsche and the East

The book is speaking of love, affirmation, and also about populism. Nietzsche might have read some Eastern metaphysics, Islamic and Buddhist texts, but definitely has read the bible a dozen times more. While the entire book is preoccupied with references and allusions to the Bible, there is only one reference to the Persians in “One thousand and one goals” where he says: “’To speak truth, and be skillful with bow and arrow’—so seemed it alike pleasing and hard to the people from whom cometh my name—the name which is alike pleasing and hard to me.” 

Dariush Ashuri the translator of Nietzsche’s work into Farsi believes that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra can only be understood in relation to his other works. Zarathustra is not simply a replica of proto-historical Prophet yet a complex iconic figure that bears the voice of Nietzsche and his entire philosophical works, which aims to change the entire vision of humanity about the meaning of being and life through “Transvaluation of all values.” (3)

The book as a whole is written at the end of Nietzsche’s philosophical career and the concept of maturity and prudent is also fitted into the thesis. The reversal of the wisdom is folly, Nietzsche is also interested to play with the two, similar to strategies that Hafez used, although less sophisticated. He is intending to elevate Dionysian philosophy and lower Christianity’s moral dogma. For that reason, I see the influences of Hafez on Nietzsche's work better in this book than others.

The notion of Journey and travel (distance and time) is persistence throughout the whole book next to the idea of repetition and Eternal return. Man is something that needs to be surpassed. Starting from the rosy dawn, following into the noon-tide in the town of Pied Cow, and finally the supper. Similar to the three stages of life: the camel, the lion, and the child. It seems like after reading a lot of Eastern metaphysics Nietzsche is intending to construct a cyclical time perception on top of the very Eurocentric and colonial Kantian perception of time and space. In regard to Europe, Nietzsche is not shy to admit his positionality. His work is from and about European culture, rather than a universal concept. At the end of Joyous Science he mentions that the goal is to emancipate from everything European: 

“If ‘thoughts on moral prejudices’ are not to be merely prejudices about prejudices, they must presuppose a position outside morality, somewhere beyond good and evil, a position to which we must ascend, climb or fly – and in any case, a position beyond our good and evil, an emancipation from everything ‘European’, understood as a sum of the authoritative value judgements which have become transmuted into flesh and blood.” (4)

Sa‘di and Hafez are the only Persian names of the Islamic era mentioned in Nietzsche’s writings. But, going back to the idea of journey and distance, I see Nietzsche’s philosophy closer to Rumi’s poetry than Hafez. Rumi (جلال‌ الدین محمد بلخى) wandered around middle Asia in his life, traveled from modern-day Tajikistan (or as some say Afghanistan) to present-day Turkey where he died. He lived everywhere in between and spoke multiple languages. Hafez on the contrary, similar to Sa‘di, Omar Khayyam and Attar of Nishapur, died in the same city he was born. Hafez’s poetry still has those transcendental elements which influenced Nietzsche yet missing those transformative parts beyond a hegemonic cultural domain. Maybe that’s why both Hafez and Goethe influenced their native speakers yet didn’t manage to connect in a deeper level with the non-natives as much as Rumi did. 

From a Middle Eastern perspective, finding Nietzsche in between the lines of Ali Shariati and Muhammad Iqbal can also be equivalent to reading Rumi and Hafez in between the burning lines of Nietzsche.   

بشنو از نی چون حکایت میکند وز جداییها شکایت میکند

کز نیستان تا مرا ببریدهاند از نفیرم مرد و زن نالیدهاند

سینه خواهم شرحه شرحه از فراق تا بگویم شرح درد اشتیاق

Pay heed to the grievances of the reed  Of what divisive separations breed

From the reedbed cut away just like a weed  My music people curse, warn and heed

Sliced to pieces my bosom and heart bleed  While I tell this tale of desire and need.

(Rumi, Masnavi, Translation by Shahriari, 1998)

"We have left dry land and put out to sea! We have burned the bridge behind us –what is more, we have burned the land behind us! Well, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean. True, it does not always roar, and sometimes it is spread out like silk and gold and a gentle reverie, but there will be hours when you realize that it is infinite, and that there is nothing more terrible than infinity. Oh, poor bird that felt free, and now beats against the bars of this cage! Alas, if homesickness should befall you, as if there had been more freedom there –when there is no longer any ‘land’!”  (The Joyous Science - Book III, 124 In the Horizon of the Infinite)

(Part I/II)

______________________

#read #reading

[aristo-tal]

New Year, New You - 1/3/19

One thing I have always found interesting is our collective obsession with rebirth. Now that may sound a little odd, so I will add some context before diving in. Every year we go through a New Year’s tradition of making resolutions, whether they be related to health, interpersonal relationships, or career goals. Each of these resolutions sum up to create the ideal “us” each individual wants to be for the new year. Oftentimes these resolutions fall flat – looking at you January gym goers - but that doesn’t mean that the process is meaningless. In fact, there is a strange exaltation we share for rebirth which is evident by looking at the high importance placed on this act in a number of disparate religions. Whether it be the reincarnation cycles of Eastern Asia, the Western concept of resurrection in the Judeo-Christian faith, or even the apocalyptic nature of Norse mythology, each of these religions’ respective cultures have placed noticeable emphasis on rebirth as a central tenet to their world views. Though there are clear and numerous differences between my examples above, that reincarnation/renewal/rebirth are valued so highly in these religions and even in today’s society is what I would like to examine now.  

For the Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists, reincarnation is rooted in the concept of Saṃsāra which is roughly the cyclical structure of the world. Furthermore, there is a mobility associated with reincarnation. I am by no means a religious scholar, but I believe the core teaching is that living justly according to the concept of karma is correlated with an improved reincarnation (whereas acting unjustly produces the reverse). While it is far too difficult for me to draw a baseline for what is “just” and “unjust” among all cultures, the main point is that these religions stress action to achieve a better status. In my single semester of Buddhism 101, Saṃsāra was also referred to as the “wheel of suffering”, and this characterization makes sense. We live until we die and, in between these two events, we witness countless others live and die. Extrapolate this experience across numerous individuals and countless generations, and it logically follows that a culture could describe life with the tragedy associated with a cycle of suffering. combining this somewhat nihilistic idea with the mobility of karma, we can see clear emphasis that improving oneself is associated with escaping suffering. In fact, the ultimate goal of Buddhism aims to release oneself from the wheel of suffering entirely.

The Judeo-Christian resurrection is a bit more straight forward. I have written before on the concept of suffering and the inherent value in pushing back against that suffering, so here I will just address the resurrection as it relates to Christianity’s messianic figure, Jesus Christ. On paper, it seems like a simple case: man dies, man is reborn. When understood as a central tenant of Christianity, then the event takes prime importance as a value in the religion. To quote Paul the Apostle, “And if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain and your faith is in vain.” (1 Corinthians 15:14 – as an aside, I never in my life thought I would quote scripture). Put another way, the Christian’s view rebirth as a source of strength, so much so that it becomes the cornerstone of their faith. There’s also heavy emphasis in the everyday actions of the Christianity, especially the Catholics. I have a good friend who is Catholic, and while he is almost constantly wracked with guilt, his faith gives him an out. Through repentance he can be forgiven; Through action he can escape suffering. Orthodox Judaism stresses the concept of resurrection in a similar way.  The Jews too believe in a messiah. One of the central themes of the religion stems from the destruction of the 2nd temple and the promise of its resurrection. The destruction of the Jewish holy site in 70 A.D marks the beginning of Judaism as a religion of the book - without a central location of worship (think Mecca for the Muslims). T’chiyat hameitimt is the Jewish belief that at some point the temple will be rebuilt and all the dead Jews will be brought back to life (think rapture in Christianity). The Jews are quite famous for the story of suffering, beginning before the old testament and following through to the 20th century, but built in to their beliefs is the promise that if they have faith, they will see an end to that suffering.

The common theme between these Eastern and Western religions is the same promise: by aligning our actions in a certain way, we can do better. That may be unhelpfully simple, but the notion is ingrained in vastly different cultures and even today in what Nietzsche would argue is a post-religion society. This commonality may mean that rebirth is a value linked to our very beings. Norse mythology is another wildly different religion which stresses rebirth as a central tenet. Speaking broadly, the world is set to end violently in an event called Ragnarök, during which men and gods would die and various natural disasters will lead to the world being flooded. Afterward, the world would be renewed and the survivors would repopulate. While there’s nothing we can do to stave off the coming apocalypse, the promise that the end of days will not in fact be the end strikes a conciliatory tone – the same promise that though there lies destruction, we have a chance to do better on our next iteration. We may not be able to completely free ourselves from suffering as the Buddha, in fact I have written before that it is a vital aspect of being human. However, just as intertwined in our beings is the concept of a future and with it the chance to do better. To not repeat the mistakes of the past. To carve out and create our ideal worlds.

With that thought in mind I find the practice of New Year’s resolutions quite nice. A chance to connect with the central narrative of what it means to be a person, whether we make it to the gym or not.

Happy 2019.

#2019

[hkynefinarts-blog]

“The Second Coming” Keeps On Coming: Re-examining Yeats, in the Context of the Recent American Election, Through the Works of Joan Didion and Chinua Achebe

“Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe; Didion's book not pictured as I have lent it out. 

There exist at least two books in the world that are titled after lines in “The Second Coming”, a poem written in 1919 by William Butler Yeats; and when I say “the world” I mean “the world”. I know that they exist because I have read them. The first of these is called “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, and it is by California journalist and fiction writer Joan Didion. It is a collection of narrative essays built around the concept of society’s increasing atomization. The second is called “Things Fall Apart”; it is a fictional narrative by Nigerian Igbo writer Chinua Achebe, and its topic is very similar: the fictional story of an Igbo man’s tribal and familial relationships, and his first encounters with white missionaries, are used to illustrate the erosion of group solidarity. And so from opposite corners of the globe we hear the warning that “things fall apart; the center cannot hold”. Our bonds and our social ties are becoming ever more fractionalized as our people and our systems remove relationships from their context and as we bask conveniently in our individualism. We do not stand together for long before we begin to stand against one another or retreat into our own isolations.

I spoke about these books in the order in which I read them, but that is the reverse order in which they were written. Chinua Achebe published “Things Fall Apart” in 1958; Joan Didion published the pieces in her collection during the period between 1961 and 1968, although the particular essay for which the collection was named was published in 1967 - almost ten years after Achebe’s novel. Whether she was aware of Achebe or not during this time is unclear, but there is certainly ample reason for the contemporaries to have been thinking along similar lines. And what is this reason? It is simple: Yeats believed in circular time.

A poem entitled “The Second Coming” already implies a sense of repetition. When Yeats wrote it in 1919, the effects of modernization were already in full swing. Industrial capitalism and globalization were fueling the rise of a consumer society through an emerging middle class. There had been globalization before, and capitalism before, and technological advances and even consumers before, but Yeats lived on the cusp of a change in the scale of all these things that served to make them stand out. The atomization that flourishes alongside an individualist and worldly middle class is not an event or a moment in time so much as it is a tendency. Moreover, it is a tendency that will continually be captured in stop-motion every couple of decades.

That is why, in 1958 and again in 1967, Yeats was resurrected twice at opposite ends of the earth, but for the same reason. Achebe was writing about the past; Joan Didion was writing about the present and future - but they wrote about the same phenomenon. Didion had gone to Haight-Ashbury to live with the hippies, talk to the runaway youths, and to try to understand the social and systemic tides behind the blooming counterculture. She writes of them, “We were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that society’s atomization could be reversed [...] we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing” (p. 122-123). Everybody is on their own “trip” here - symbolically, not just the children, but the adults of America as well. Because of this, the youth have no concept of their relationship to society, or how to find a meaningful place within it. There seems to be no way to gracefully accommodate the needs of both the parents and the children; they’ve lived in such separate worlds for too long, and the world has changed too much, too quickly.

Meanwhile, the children of Achebe’s Igbo clan, presumably a hundred years before the hippie children stormed Haight-Ashbury, are facing a similar problem. There are holes in the fabric of their tribal education that have left them feeling isolated and hungry. Nwoye, son of the wrathful warrior Okonkwo, feels betrayed by his father’s prideful bouts of cruelty. It is these holes that the English missionaries exploit when they come to assemble converts to their church. In Nwoye’s case, “the hymn about the brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul” (p. 147). Thus, it is their own clansmen who establish the English government on tribal land; it is the Igbo people who whip and fine them for pursuing their own customs against the will of the white man; it is their own race acting as interpreter in favor of the British crown, and because their numbers have dwindled or have become divided and filled with doubt, they have no force for resistance.

Fast forward to the “now”. A little bit of research yields some quick results: Yeats has infiltrated book title after book title. Time is cyclical, but like a spiral it trends outward. The atomization is not repeating itself - rather, it is increasing in entropy. It is a trend that is trending ever more towards the extreme of itself. We talk to people, in moments, from all over the world. The ether is constantly abuzz with the voices of billions. There has been another technological revolution, which has left us with the same types of benefits and problems as the ones before, without first having rectified the old problems. The children of Haight-Ashbury were left to their “trips”, the people who read Joan Didion’s essay enjoyed it but completely missed its point, and the isolation brought about by individualist consumerism and technologically driven capitalism continued to grow. It wasn’t painful for everyone, and often the pain wasn’t even immediate when it existed, but still it affected us; and for many of us who believed we were happy, it came in the form of a “vague and persistent question”, like the one that had haunted Nwoye. “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold…”

Now we are turned against ourselves due to that atomization, due to the individualism that we had been taught to think of as “good” because it allowed us to come to our full potential, because it allowed us to manifest progress. We are so specialized and specific that we have found seemingly insurmountable differences even among those of us who are supposed to be our greatest allies. It has been like this, but I write about it now because the recent American election has splattered it with such stark colors. We are seeing something important. We are seeing citizen against citizen, working class against working class, feminist against feminist, racial minority against racial minority, neighbor against neighbor, friend and family against friend and family, and so on. It is the schisms of our own tribe that really bring disintegration. And in a global society, it becomes increasingly clear that these struggles are just variations on the simple, age-old theme of human against human, spurred by the isolation that is a guard to our self-interest. We tried to create community, but there is still a vacuum.

In the preface to the collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, Joan Didion talks about not being heard. “I suppose,” she writes, “almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening” (p. xii). Perhaps that is why our writers feel the need to say the same things over and over again. I’m sure that is why I am writing this now. She’d painted this elaborate picture of life up in Haight-Ashbury; she’d drawn the vivid comparison to the Yeats poem; she’d implicated the structure of American society in the shattering of the mirrors that displayed the youth; but people thought that she was merely covering a fashion trend. The gyre is still widening. But despite entropy, I wonder to myself: might we still prove Didion wrong? Might we yet stop living cyclically Achebe’s tragedy, which we are cursed to enact again and again as we get lost inside our differences? Can we stop referencing “The Second Coming”? Can we, in fact, reverse the atomization of society?

#chinuaachebe #joandidion #yeats #thesecondcoming #thingsfallapart #socialdivision #americanelection #election2017 #capitalism #industrialization #globalism #technology #cyclicaltime #circulartime #repeatinghistory #human relationships #joan didion #chinua achebe #american election #cyclical time #the second coming #poetry #mythology #culture #sacred experience #religion #spirituality #colonialism #racism #africa

[sparrowsabre7]

Ok, strap yourselves in for me reacting to an hour long cutscene. Die-Hardman is president now and finally takes off his mask permanently. I feel we've been robbed because Tommie Earl Jenkins has an incredibly expressive face, much less stoic than Reedus and Mads. Looks like all of the preppers and scientists are at the briefing as DH explains that though extinction is inevitable, it is our duty to savour each moment and the promise of tomorrow. Sam steps out of the briefing and Deadman catches up to tell him they used Bridget's umbilical cord to pull him from her beach, but it was too late as her beach had already gone. Damn he was gone a month, meaning exponentially longer on the inside. They followed the revolver connection instead.

"The stick that became a rope" that's a nice way of tying in with the themes of nonviolence and cyclical storytelling. I like that.

Now Deadman's talking about Cliff. His "common law wife" was Lisa Bridges. And says John/DH killed him, which we already knew. Now DH is apologising for killing Cliff and says it's because he loved Bridget so much. He also says he's called DH because Cliff wouldn't let him die and he says he loved Cliff as much as he loved Bridget and is now torn up that BT Cliff didn't kill him. This is some powerful acting here, probably the single most emotionally raw performance in the game. Reedus and Mads are great at what they do, but they do largely stick to the moody, broody thing.

DH says he thinks Cliff brought him back as penance to make things right and Sam says that's bullshit, "if you aren't scared of death, how can you value life" which, while a little cliche actually resonates in this moment without feeling clunky. "That gun won't help you here" is repeated, again, reinforcing the nonviolent ethos of this new America.

Oh damn. Lou's gone. Decommissioning order came through and she's no longer online, as Deadman's points out BBs are not strictly speaking ever alive. Deadman disconnects Sam from the network temporarily, so he can take off his cufflinks if he wants to allow him to go wherever he needs to without being tracked by the UCA but when he takes Lou to the incinerator to prevent a voidout he will be reconnected if he hasn't done so. Sam embraces him and sets out, but Fragile stops him.

She says Fragile Express has been made the first official courier company in the UCA but also that she didn't kill Higgs, she let him choose: death or eternal solitude on the beach, and he killed himself.

I feel like there's a whole lot of expodumping going on that could have been more naturally peppered throughout the story. That Higgs reveal could easily have happened at the time instead of now. It has no punch now it's been at least 4 hours since then if not more.

Ok. One last delivery. Same as the first one. Another breathtaking piece of music to score the final mission as the camera pulls way back to see the full beauty of the world. It is quite powerful and I do almost get a bit teary. Like I keep saying, Kojima knows how to use music to sell a moment.

Sam arrives at the incinerator and connects to Lou and flashbacks begin again. Bridget and John discussing Sam as a BB candidate or a foundation... to build the Chiral network I presume. Repeat of the scene of Cliff giving Sam an astronaut and John comes in and they shoot the shit. More replaying of scenes, Cliff and Bridget arguing, John scheming with Cliff to escape with Sam. For some reason he has to shoot his wife too, I presume because as an act of euthanasia, but it's not really clear. Mads sells the subtle emotion well entirely through expression, showing how far performance capture has come. He kisses her forehead before killing her and I realise I think this is the only time we've seen her face. Does it count as fridging if the woman was essentially never even onscreen or came out of the fridge in the first place? Once dead her soul leaves her body and we see it from the repatriation camera and fly into Sam. So I guess, like Mama sharing a body with Lockne, maybe Lisa does with Sam.

Replaying of Cliff's death, John tries his best to save him and stop the Bridges staff.

Sam is now there in the flashback too, but imperceptible to other characters, except Cliff it seems at the end. Cliff tells him as his son he's his bridge to the future. A hereditary legacy. Clunkily then immediately over explained as "before you I was like any other Cliff a dead end with no way forward," and underlines that Sam brings people together and bridges them to the future.

Bridget shoots twice and Cliff falls to the floor, but bb Sam is hit too in what is probably the most horrible thing I've had to witness in a video game that isn't even that violent or gory per se. Bridget screams and breaks down, thus explaining her comment about the two shots that started it earlier and why she was so desperate to send Sam back.

We follow bb Sam through the seal to the beach. Ahhh, so the cross on the chest of the dolls and Cliff was a mirror of the scar Bridget left when healing his gunshot wound. I'm now trying to think if we ever saw Sam's belly button before now. Cliff is out in the waters of the beach wading out as Bridget places Sam into the sea to repatriate.

We're back in the tank now looking at John and Bridget. It seems in the shooting, being that it severed the umbilical cord, Sam no longer has his ability to be a BB since that connection is severed. John wonders if they should risk putting a repatriate out into the world, but Bridget says she'll raise him as her own.

Back in reality we see Sam has removed Lou from the tank and placed his cufflinks in the incinerator instead. A nice symbolic visual of burning his shackles which is surprisingly not overplayed, but given they seem to have been designed like handcuffs explicitly for this visual moment and literally any other design would have made more sense in-world, probably shouldn't heap too much praise.

He's desperately trying to revive Lou in a hwartwrenching scene before finally succeeding and leaving the facility. Outside it's raining, but the rain is normal and neither of them age. It's unclear what caused this, whether it was because of the separation with Bridget's beach or because Lou's been released but it's a quiet victory all the same, remarkably restrained as an ending that leaves a sense of satisfaction.

So it's all over, but before I sum up I wanted to share one of the more poignant quotes which is actually in an email from Heartman "About Sam's Return" unlocked upon completion. He talks about how in thousands of years, if intelligent life walks the earth again after the inevitable sixth extinction, they would find fossils and maybe even some of our records. "We cannot hope to guess how much the will understand about who we were. After all their intelligence will not be like ours ... (they will have) different conceptions of what it is to die. But it matters not if they never understand who we were. All that matters, in my opinion at least, is that they know we were here."

I think that's the best summary for the key argument of Death Sranding, that humanity is driven by its connections and quest to leave the world better than we found it. A legacy, something to remember and be remembered by. On these themes, I cannot fault it. It works so well in terms of gameplay and story synergy on that front that Ibthink the story would have been greatly improved if it had been significantly streamlined to focus solely on that. However, I can't deny the cool visual and atmosphere of the BTs, Cliff, all that jazz, but Bramelie was character definitely too overwritten and didn't have the charisma nor connection to back it up. She wasn't the Boss from MGS3 she was a mere plot device. Saying over and over "I an the extinction entity" just underlines that. Cliff absolutely worked for me, his whole story, acting, design; superlative.

Higgs definitely shit the bed as a villain. Quirky charisma only gets you so far and I still don't really get why he wanted to blow up the world. The Englert thing just made it weirder. Oh and some endgame journals reveal he was beaten as a child. Whoop de doo, what lazy writing to try and create empathy for a villain, especially when it's all delivered in an email.

Fragile, Mama and Lockne were... there. Typical Kojima women, supporting the protagonist but never really doing anything of their own accord. Their backstories wrought with uncalled for violence and tragedy.

Deadman was fun, good performance by Jesse Corti on vocals, as was Heartman. Given they both served almost exclusively as expobombs they still felt rounded enough to be interesting. I feel it's not entirely a coincidence that Kojima gave his director friends the most interesting characters.

Sam himself was played with minimalism, but not to the point of seeming wooden or unfeeling. Reedus showed surprising depth with relatively little material when compared with some of the support characters.

Gameplay I've already talked about enough, but it does astound me that on approaching 45-50 hours (forgot to check stats) it still remained fun to deliver parcels and traverse the world.

Overall, do I recommend the game? Yes, if you have the time and willingness to be open to something new. No if you hate weird shit and don't like the sound of the concept. If you don't like the sound of it, you probably won't enjoy playing it.

As to this play along. It was a fun experience articulating my thoughts as I went, particularly with a game as long as complex as this, but I did often find myself torn by relaying events and actually commenting on them. It was a lot of pausing for writing and interrupted play and I think, ultimately, I probably wouldn't do another, or do it in a different way.

#death stranding #sparrowsabre7 plays death stranding