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toomanymessythoughts · 11 months

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Spirit Stallion of the Cimarron is often praised for its breath-taking visuals, great soundtrack and its anti-colonialist and anti-military themes and messages (all things I too absolutely love about this movie). But one aspect that I rarely see discussed is its messages concerning horse riding which is what I’d like to talk about here. During Spirit’s time with the military, the Colonel rides him to the point of exhaustion. Thinking that he had broken Spirit he holds a speech:

“You see gentlemen, any horse can be broken. There are those in Washington who believe the West will never be settled. The Northern Pacific Railroad will never reach Nebraska. A hostile Lakota will never submit to Providence, and it is this manner of small thinking that would say this horse could never be broken. Discipline, time and patience are the three great levellers.”

The purpose of this speech is mainly political and serves as the Colonel’s villain monologue, but I’d like to focus on the last line for a bit. This line shows the dissonance between what the Colonel says versus what he does. He says that time patience and discipline are his founding principles when in reality, he only relies on brute force. His goal is to push a horse to its limits and to a point where it has accepted its fate and listens to him because it knows that resistance is futile. As an equestrian, this method sounds all too familiar to me. Because unfortunately similar methods are still used to train horses today, by popular and successful trainers at that. Some will not like to hear this but trainers who use “dominance theory” go by the same logic as the Colonel. Their methods may be less brutal but their goal is the same. They want the horse to submit to them and abide their every order. They don’t want a partner; they want a puppet. What bothers me most about those methods, is that many people who use them will very rarely listen to their horses. They will expose their horses to high levels of pressure, stress and sometimes pain, but then call them “dominant”, “disrespectful”, “moody” or “mean” when in actuality, they are just tired, uncomfortable and in pain and have no other way of telling their owners to stop and leave them alone.

Later, when Spirit lives with the Lakota, we get to see an alternative to these methods. What I really love about this part of the movie, is that Little Creek’s methods are not perfect from the get-go. He too first tries to overpower Spirit and force him to abide by his rules. But when he realises that it won’t work, instead of stubbornly moving forward, he reflects, he admits failure and decides that he will never ride Spirit and that no one ever should and lets him go. I love this moment so much because it depicts a lesson that I too had to learn and that I think many more people should take to heart: Some horses do not want to or simply cannot be ridden and we, as their guardians and partners, need to listen to them.

Of course, you could say that what I’ve written above kind of falls apart at the end because Spirit does let Little Creek onto his back, but I’d beg the differ. First because they were in a life-or-death situation and second because I think that Spirit allowing Little Creek onto his back only adds to the message, since it shows us that when we listen to our horses and give them the time that they need, they might eventually allow us to ride them.

All in all, this is one of the best depictions of equestrianism that I have seen in film and I will never stop appreciating it.

#spirit stallion of the cimarron #equestrian #about horses

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balanceoflightanddark · 1 year

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The Lost World's Heart of Darkness

In 1899, Joseph Conrad would write the short story Heart of Darkness, a tale about a steamer traveling up the Congo River picking up shipments of ivory all along the way. Needless to say, it's a pretty grim story, a charged anti-colonial message about the depravities of the Congo Free State, which only gets worse the further you go up the river. That as you get further from civilization, you realize just how bad humanity can truly be.

In many ways, you could consider it to be Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 classic The Lost World to be a different take on that. Instead of man's cruelty though, it's more about their place in nature. Both novels could certainly fall in the pro-colonialist adventure novels that were popular during the time. European explorers venturing into an untamed wilderness, discovering lost riches and conquering various hazards along the way. And indeed, The Lost World does fall into that category a bit. It's about a British explorer named Professor Challenger braving the Amazon to find a plateau where dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts still exist. Their adventures are chronicled by Edward Malone who along with describing the various beasts they encounter, also reports of a war between two tribes of people (one more human and one more ape).

Naturally being from 1912, it has a lot of...uncomfortable implications about colonialism. In particular having unflattering portrayals of the natives and characterizing the dinosaurs as being brutish monsters. But at the time the novel was a smash hit that eventually got turned into a feature length film with the same plot in 1925.

While the film does still have a few problematic elements to it though (there is a case of blackface), it also features a much...different take on the story. Here, the focus is solely on the dinosaurs (animated beautifully via stop-motion by Willis O'Brian), with the only native being a single ape-man. The critical plot point of Challenger bringing back a young pterosaur to civilization was changed to him capturing a Brontosaurus for a more thrilling climax when the sauropod inevitably escapes.

It's also here where we get that shift in attitude I was talking about. In the novel, the explorers were able to mostly gun their way through the jungle, including dealing with the dinosaurs by pumping them full of lead, and being able to put down the ape tribe by allying themselves with the natives. Effectively, the conquering hero triumphant against nature.

Here though, it's a bit different. The power dynamic is shifted. Gunning down the dinosaurs isn't an option when you're separated from civilization and need to ration ammo carefully. Man is treated less as conquering, but more surviving, hiding out in caves instead of being the ruler. The only dinosaur they're able to fend off is an Allosaurus, but even only barely. And while they do make preparations for another dinosaur attack, there's no guarantee that it's going to work, and it's powerless in the face of a volcanic eruption that nearly kills them all.

Here in the most primeval part of South America, man isn't ruler. He's prey. Heart of Darkness was all about exploring just how cruel man was. The 1925 Lost World was about exploring just how small man was. A reminder of a time when man wasn't the dominate species.

And ultimately, that's a lesson Challenger (Wallace Beery) learns the hard way in the climax, where the Brontosaurus tears through London while the would-be heroes can only look on hopelessly. They brought it to civilization to prove their theory and return as brave conquerors. Only to bring something they can't control and now have to pay the price for it. The colonials meeting their match essentially.

This is something that is a running subplot with Edward Malone (Lloyd Hughes). The only reason he went on the trip was because his would be fiancé wanted a hero for a husband. Only when he returns, he finds out she just found another man since she thought he wouldn't come back. He does marry another girl he fell in love with on the journey, but his zeal for glory was for nothing in the end.

On another interesting note, the dinosaurs (while not being the brightest) are portrayed with some sympathy. There's a scene of a Triceratops protecting and caring for her young way before the idea of parental care in dinosaurs became mainstream. And the Brontosaurus isn't actually killed like it normally would in these sorts of movies. It just falls through the London Bridge...and is able to swim to safety. The last shot of the film is the Bronto swimming away (presumably back home) peacefully while Challenger looks on. While they can be certainly violent, the fact is that they're still portrayed as animals and ultimately it was humans that brought the Bronto to civilization and put everyone in danger.

While it may have been unintentional, The Lost World (at least the 1925 version) did tap into that sort of anti-colonialism sentiment that was beginning to crop up at the time in a similar vein to Heart of Darkness (though not to the same extent). That ultimately it was the arrogance of Europeans that brought death and destruction in their attempts to conquer the "uncivilized" world. Something that would later be repeated and explored even further in the 1933 classic King Kong (another film where Willis O'Brian did the special effects), which follows a similar premise.

#the lost world #the lost world 1925 #dinosaur #dinosaurs #paleomedia #dinosaur movies #colonialism #the lost world 1912 #willis o'brien

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disappointingyet · 1 year

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2022: The Big Round-up

Decision To Leave

My most anticipated film of the year. And one that could, once I’ve rewatched it, become my favourite movie of 2022. But right now Park Chan-wook’s Vertigo-esque romantic detective drama ranks as a disappointment, sabotaged by the film effectively restarting just as it seems to be ending.

Full review here

(MUBI)

Everything Everywhere All At Once

This is a good film: it’s funny, it’s surprising, it’s moving, it’s got Michelle Yeoh doing martial arts. It has maybe my favourite scene of 2022 (the rocks!). So why isn’t this one of my films of the year?

Essentially, because I’m so done with art in which the future of the world or the universe is at stake. If you’ve seen EEAAO you’ll get the irony: what the film is really concerned with is family relationships, but by the time I grasped that, I had zoned out a bit because of all the multiverse exposition. I’ll confess I enjoyed it most as an indie drama about an immigrant family running a laundromat before the weirdness fully set in.

Rein A Foutre (Zero Fucks Given)

This is two-thirds of a truly excellent movie. It stars Adele Exarchopoulos as an air-cabin crew person for a low-budget airline whose hedonistic lifestyle in assorted resorts is shown through lots of short, impressionistic scenes, reminding (in form) of Moonlight or Exhibition. Alas, then she goes back to her parents’ home in Belgium and it all becomes plodding and cliched. Shame.

(MUBI)

Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood

Maybe the prettiest film of the year? Richard Linklater’s nostalgic look back at the Houston suburbs during the summer of the first moon landing, with animation over film, is just gorgeous. Unfortunately, the visuals are at the service of what is, to all intents and purposes, a long, particularly dull episode of The Wonder Years. Might work better with the film sound off and music on (something like Easter Everywhere by the Texan psych masters the Thirteenth Floor Elevators?)

Full review here

(Netflix)

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Small sample size: I saw this with my sister, niece and nephew. Conclusion: as a popcorn movie, this fails. As an opportunity to ponder politics and the directorial hiring strategies of Marvel Studios, it’s fine.

So theory: the Marvel dudes have accepted the notion that I share that the action is the weakest element of these supposedly action movies. Hence they keep hiring directors with no experience of action and thus the perfunctory fight scenes in Wakanda Forever. Which, instead, is a story about grief and loss on the one hand and revisiting the 1960s idea of the non-aligned movement of post/anti-colonialist countries.

But if you came for entertainment, it’s a bit dull.

For a review of BP:WF star Tenoch Huerta in a Mexican slacker indie movie, go here

The Wonder

The kind of chunky prestige project that goes straight to streaming these days: heavyweight arthouse director (Sebastian Lelio), adapted from a book by a writer with a previous novel that was prime Oscar bait (Room’s Emma Donahue), of-the-moment lead (Florence Pugh) and estimable support (Toby Jones and Ciaran Hinds, working together for at least the third time). Modernity – in the form of Pugh’s Crimean War-veteran nurse – confronts superstition/faith in a1860s rural Ireland still scarred by the Famine. It’s fine, but never gets beyond the obvious. I guess you could say there’s some gender rebalancing going on in that Tom Burke’s role as the bloke is as perfunctory as too many female potential romantic interests have been in the past. The ending is a bit too tidy, too.

(Netflix)

She Said

She Said is a well-made, well-acted, well-intentioned movie about important subjects. But it’s also a film that offers plenty to nitpick about, if you were so inclined. There’s no doubt that the working moms as reporters is a useful corrective to journalism movies of the past. And I wasn’t expecting it to remind me so much of a Michael Mann flick in its look and all the one-on-ones in bars, restaurants and work canteens. But the sheer weight of exposition, especially aimed at senior members of the New York Times staff, was grating. And the two leads lack flaws. Most of all, the story doesn’t quite work in terms of building and resolving tension.

Aftersun

Late 1990s. Scottish father long broken-up with the mother of his daughter takes the 11-year-old on a late summer holiday to a resort in Turkey. That’s your whole premise, and that’s fine by me. In her debut, Frankie Corio is perfect as Sophie. There’s hints of Moonlight in the way that this does feel like fragments of memories, propped up by snatches of home video, and Barry Jenkins is a producer on this film. The recreation of holiday moments is terrific.

So why wasn’t I as moved by this as all the critics? Partly because I saw because I had heard it was that good and worth spending £18 to see even if clearly some of it was going to be grim, so my expectations were way too high. Partly because to me Paul Mescal – who plays the dad – is an uninteresting potatoey bloke with bad hair rather than the cause he seems to be for some folk. But mainly because many admirers talk about how subtle* it is - and I don’t think that’s accurate. It’s true the script does limit the number of times characters discuss their emotional state – but the camerawork and the soundtrack are extremely busy filling in the blanks. Most of the songs – and certainly the one in the climactic scene – could hardly be more obvious. And that rather soured me on it.

*The Canadian critic Adam Nayman – who loves the film – has what I think is a more accurate take on it: that director Charlotte Wells takes some big swings at key moments of the film. For Nayman, they connected and were emotionally devastating. But if they don’t land for you, then they can look clumsy.

(MUBI)

‘Sr’ is Robert Downey, director of underground/alternative movies from the 1960s onwards, whose fame was eclipsed by his film-star son. Jr produced and hogs screen time in this documentary, shot in elegiac b&w. There’s a handful of things the film is trying to do: summarise Sr’s colourful life and career, explore his complicated legacy to Jr (gave him his start as an actor, but also gave him his introduction to illegal substances along with an addict’s genes), allow Sr a partial chance to make a swan song, and chronicle his worsening Parkinson’s. And in the middle of all this, Covid happens.

It’s an excellent piece of filmmaking and Sr seems to have been quite a character (I’ve never seen any of his films – Paul Thomas Anderson is a mega fan, but they look a bit exhausting.) But Jr is hugely annoying and we get far too much of him.

(Netflix)

Amsterdam

This is generally considered one of the turkeys of the year. I saw long after it had been written off, and so certainly had non-existent expectations and none of the pressure that comes with having paid to see something. So I watched and waited to groan with exasperation but never did. It’s not great but also… not terrible? It belongs to a hyper-specific micro-genre: somewhat comedic period-set neo-noirs that draw on (apparently) true conspiracies and in which race is a key story point but the movie is made by a white dude. See also: last year’s No Sudden Move, 2019’s Motherless Brooklyn and season four of Fargo (two of the stars of which have supporting roles here). It’s a mood – Pynchonesque? (add Inherent Vice to that list) that appeals more to movie folk than audiences.

Amsterdam was directed by David O Russell and a stuffed cast: Christian Bale, Margot Robbie and John David Washington are your leads, then there’s Bob De Niro, Rami Malek and Anya Taylor-Joy, Michael Shannon and Mike Myers, Zoe Saldaña, Chris Rock and Timothy Olyphant, and Taylor Swift. It’s too long, obviously, and crams in a lot of stuff, like Robbie’s character single-handedly inventing surrealism. But I laughed in the right places and was rarely bored, so am mildly baffled by the total trashing this got.

(Disney +)

Barbarian

One of those movies that’s absolutely impossible to write about spoiler-free – and (of course) just writing that is a spoiler. Anyway, Barbarian is a horror movie, it’s set in Detroit, it stars Georgina Campbell (yet another Brit in Hollywood) as a woman in town for a job interview, it’s rather good and that’s all I’m going to say.

(Disney +)

Argentina 1985

On the one hand, I’m mostly not in favour of trying to explain complex historical events through the story of one person (usually one dude). And when you are using that one dude for an account of a battle against injustice that was sustained and embodied by a group of very determined mothers, that seems somewhat questionable.

On the other, there’s a lot to like and admire about this film. The always-watchable Ricardo Darín stars as Julio César Strassera, the prosecutor assigned to try the members of the Argentinian junta that had recently stepped down but were still in control of the military. His task is to establish their responsibility for the ‘dirty war’ in which thousands of people disappeared. The film attempts (and I think largely succeeds) on balancing good-humoured scenes of how the somewhat weary and middle-aged Strassera assembles a bright young team to put together the case with the harrowing testimony of survivors and relatives of victims.

(His son is super-annoying though.)

(Prime)

The Souvenir Part II

The conclusion (sort of) to Joanna Hogg’s critically adored autobiographical account of being a very posh film student in the 1980s. I wasn’t hugely taken with Part 1 – Part II was an improvement, not least because there’s more screen time for Richard Ayoade’s awesomely bitchy (but very perceptive) director character.

Full review here

(MUBI - which also has Caprice, Hogg's actual student film starring a young Tilda Swinton)

See How They Run

Entertaining meta-murder mystery that takes place around and about the early days of The Mousetrap’s London run. Relies heavily on the charm of Saoirse Ronan as an earnest young WPC. Very slight, plenty of fun.

(Disney +)

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Did anyone think that Daniel Craig’s Foghorn Leghorn-voiced sleuth Benoit Blanc was the best thing about Knives Out? Seems improbable, but the idea apparently is to build a series of movies around him. On the evidence here, this isn’t a great idea. For a start, the all-star cast is – Janelle Monáe and a handful of very brief cameos apart – deficient in star power. We get Edward Norton as (yawn) an evil tech billionaire, Kate Hudson as a has-been model/actress and Dave Bautista as a YouTuber. The set-up: at peak early pandemic lockdown, Norton invites his chums to a no-restrictions mystery weekend on his Greek island. It’s all pretty meh.

Like the original, the movie improves massively when it gets to the bit where it doubles back on itself. But even so, it never crawls above mediocre.

(Netflix)

#2022 movies

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worstloki · 3 years

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Okay, take it from someone who figured out at seventeen that she had spent fifteen years being the scapegoat child in a very abusive and toxic family. (Long ask warning!)

Ragnarok is hilarious.

Ragnarok is also really, really problematic. The two are not mutually exclusive.

I did not get triggered watching Ragnarok. I did, however, get angry about the casual violence and how it brushed abuse and toxicity under the rug.

In the same way, I did get triggered by the first Thor movie. But I loved its feel, its storyline, its world building, and (mostly) how it handled Loki’s character development.

Ragnarok had Thor be a staggeringly awful brother. Thor’s a very classic golden child, and Ragnarok played that as if he was the noble older brother disciplining the wayward younger brother. Thor’s knee-jerk response to pain and being hurt is to turn around and hurt Loki worse, simply because he’s used to targeting Loki. However, Ragnarok also gave Thor some of, in my opinion, the funniest lines in the MCU. I found myself laughing almost every time Thor was onscreen.

Ragnarok played abuse off as, at best, a joke, and at worst, something deserved depending on characters’ actions. Loki, the scapegoat child and target, who was near-constantly abused and belittled by Odin throughout his childhood, was played as “he was a Bad Child, cartoonishly evil, so he deserves whatever he gets.” On the other hand, Thor, the golden child who was spared from most of the direct abuse as long as he met Odin’s expectations of perfection, was played as “he was a Good Child, and he is our hero, so everything he does to people is deserved.”

Ragnarok, to me, sent the message that people are innately good or bad. If you’re good, then you can do whatever you want to people and it’ll be okay, because that’s what heroes do. If you’re bad, then anyone can do whatever they want to you, and you deserve it because you’re bad. That is a TERRIBLE MESSAGE.

The bottom line here is that good and bad aren’t black and white. That goes double for Ragnarok- its characters aren’t as black and white as it showed them to be, and it isn’t a black and white movie, either. Ragnarok is a terrible movie in a lot of ways, but it does manage to be genuinely funny. You can like one part of something while hating the rest of it. There’s no “this movie is Good” or “this movie is Bad.” It’s always parts- “this part of the movie is good” or “this part of the movie is bad.” Ragnarok is funny- it’s a comedic masterpiece, but only when it isn’t making jokes or poking fun at something it should be taking seriously. But the movie has some deep problems, and if its creators had taken what they were making seriously, we’d all be a lot better off.

I agree! The movie is funny and light and wacky, BUT, it also writes over previous characterisation/development and presents quite a few harmful messages AND not everyone will find the same things funny!

There are quite a few types of humour and depending on what the old characterisation means to someone there is no obligation to like the changes. What people think of things is entirely up to them, and handling issues in one way or another works better for different people.

I think it's incredibly ridiculous that people take saying something is good/bad is a complete summation of every aspect of something, especially when the movie can multitask. It's not like integrity and entertainment are mutually exclusive factors anyway?? Some people prefer one or the other or both and it's literally not a big deal.

#by being found hilarious (good) but also be disrespectful for shoving aside legitimately serious topics.#like...... you can say ragnarok is good because it has non-diegetic rep (valkyrie+heimdall)#but you can also say that the female characters in ragnarok were designed in accordance with the masculine-ideal centric genre #you can say hela was a female villain and go uwu but you can also say you didn't like it because she wasn't very fleshed out+expositioned #if you ignore that the perspective of those colonized by asgard is completely ignored and thor films generally frame things biased #then you could say that the film is anti-colonialist #everyone i've seen who didn't enjoy ragnarok takes issue with the way trauma and the abusive relationships are thrown under the rug or tone #so not liking something and saying it's ''bad'' can refer to many things #and saying that any argument that favours the negative side is subjective is wrong #im not sure what that other anon was on #but they need to maybe sit down and reread the ask they sent

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the-blue-fairie · 3 years

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(One of the reasons) why it’s difficult to talk about issues in F2′s portrayal of the exploitation/decimation of indigenous peoples

Of course, there are many reasons why this is difficult. There are certain people in the fandom who are overtly racist in their rhetoric. BUT they have been largely discussed by many people (myself included.) I’m not going to talk about them right now. I’m going to talk about my experiences trying to discuss elements of F2 that could have been handled better with the far wider array of good, well-meaning people who just want to celebrate and defend F2.

When I’ve pointed out elements of F2 that have unfortunate or unintentionally racist implications, friends have often done their best to provide in-universe rationalizations for these writing choices. Or they’ve pointed out that the writers wanted to do right by Sami people, worked with consultants, and did all they could to approach indigenous cultures with sensitivity.

I think this second avenue of discussion - highlighting the good intentions of the filmmakers - makes clear how people take issues of race/colonization/etc. and often view them through a very individualistic lens.

When someone says, “This plot element has racist implications,” (like when I compared Iduna being gifted for saving the child of her oppressor to racist and Euro-centric takes on the US Thanksgiving story) people can sometimes assume what that person means is, “The creators are racist” or “The film itself is racist” or even “You yourself are racist for enjoying it.” But none of that is true.

Saying, “This plot element has racist implications” only means that the filmmakers have been unwittingly informed by their own biases while doing their very best to write a non-racist narrative.

Many of the things I discuss, I don’t think were maliciously INTENDED by the filmmakers. But they end up in the film nonetheless because the story of Frozen 2 was created by a group of people all living in the US and working for the behemoth that is Disney. Just by growing up in the culture they did, all the story creators absorbed certain biases - as we all do - as I myself have done growing up in that same society.

It’s not a personal attack on the filmmakers or the film itself to try and dissect the complications of the way it tries to unfold its anti-colonialist narrative.

And just because an issue was unintended doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be examined. The fact it was unintended and ends up in a film trying to condemn colonialism and genocide makes it all the more imperative that people discuss it.

(Also, I hope people don’t object to my use of the word “colonialism.” I’ve talked with a few friends who have pointed out that technically Runeard didn’t want to “colonize” the Northuldra, but I stand by my position F2 has anti-colonialist themes.)

#frozen #frozen 2 #the northuldra #anna #Elsa

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painted-starlight · 3 years

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Frozen: Love As Transactional and Contradictory Themes

Warning: LONG POST, Anti-Frozen, Anti-Kristan//na, Anti-Agdu//na, swearing, discussion of colonialism

Tl;dr/Summary: The romantic pairings of Frozen, which are meant to drive the theme of unconditional love appear less romantic and more transactional. Love is something that is owed if you do nice stuff for the person you love.

The romances feel convenient for male characters and give them what they want at the expense of Anna and Iduna’s agency or against their best interests. This convenience isn’t even beneficial in the long run for either party, because it actually hinders the male character’s growth by making them the lesser of two evils rather than good characters with likable personalities of their own.

Both Kristoff and Agnarr are meant to be ideal love interests, but they are very underdeveloped despite the former being Anna’s true love and the latter being the center of Iduna’s character motivation.

Introduction

Frozen’s interesting in the sense that I completely understand what it’s trying to do, but that doesn’t mean it does it well.

The story itself is constantly contradicting itself an it’s own themes. The theme of Frozen is that love should come with no strings. Unconditional love is the right way to love someone, either romantically and platonically. Iduna and Agnarr’s love for Elsa came with strings while Anna’s didn’t. Which is why Anna’s act of love was the cure, while Elsa suffered under them.

Kristoff appeared to have a conditional relationship with Anna but then it turned unconditional, while Hans’s love appeared unconditional but in the end was conditional.

However, upon examining Frozen and it’s sequel, it’s themes become...muddled at best and hypocritical at worst. Especially when it comes to it’s romantic pairings.

Kristoff and Anna, as well as Iduna and Agnarr are one of the biggest issues that threaten to undermine the very themes of Frozen and it’s views on unconditional love. Note that I think it’s views on platonic unconditional love are...OK to an extent (at least in the first film), but it’s romantic pairings are just plain awful.

Kristoff/Anna: The Transactional and the Unconditional

My huge problem with Kristoff and Anna’s relationship is that it feels like the story (through Olaf) pressures her into returning Kristoff’s sudden feelings for her just because he helped her. Their relationship was already very transactional and it really felt like they couldn’t stand each other for a majority of the movie.

Kristoff goes from hating her spontaneity (”You don’t tell Sven what to do!” while throwing her on Sven) to suddenly loving this side of her on the flip of a coin. I could pinpoint the scene too, when she jumps into his arms after failing to scale the mountain by hand. Her incompetency is played for comedy while he watches her. Then, like a switch, he likes her. Seriously, when did he start liking that side of her?

And Anna doesn’t even appear to feel that way towards Krisotff until Olaf basically tells her Kristoff did all that nice stuff for her, so the implication is that she HAS to return his feelings. If she weren’t dying at that very moment, I don’t think that would be an option for her.

They Helped You, You Owe Them!

This theme of “they saved your life, you owe them!” also applies to Iduna and Agnarr, no matter whether or not the latter remembers this because it’s a narrative implication. The person who sacrifices their life for you or does nice stuff for you, should be your true love/or platonically they love you without strings. But only if they have no ill intentions.

As if people in general are somehow mind readers who can tell when people are fooling them. As Hans character proves, this is a very faulty line of thinking. You shouldn’t owe someone love because they do nice stuff for you, and you might never know what someone’s motivations are until it’s too late.

It feels like this notion of romance is very skewed in favor of what the story wants. Iduna can give away the only life she knew for someone she just met, but not Anna. Iduna is portrayed as selfless because she did it for Agnarr, while Anna is selfish because she did it for herself, a child neglect and in a lonely environment.

Convenience for Male Love Interests To Their Detriment and The Preservation of “Good” Royalty

I find it strange that Frozen and Frozen 2 seem to be centered on what’s the most convenient for male love interests, regardless of whether or not they are fully rounded or compelling.

And this doesn’t even mean that it’s to their benefit, but to their convenience because it actually does way more damage to be given things by the story rather than making them fully fleshed out characters.

Kristoff’s Convenience Destroyed His Character

Kristoff likes Anna, so the story is twisted in a way that benefits him so he is the one Anna ends up with.

Consequently, because his story arc is considered done he is reduced to comedic relief to keep him relevant, even when he’s not needed. Both Kristoff and Agnarr are given superficial amounts of “background” through the barest minimum, but only because it is a means to an end to convey a point.

Kristoff and Anna go through the basic boyfriend introducing girlfriend to family, (even though she is already engaged to someone else) bit. They interact with Rock Trolls, have banter with them in a wasteful song. And he talks to his reindeer. These points are necessary within a modern dating context, but they do very little to provide a deeper insight into his character that would him a better option than Hans. Things like who he truly is as a person is stripped to what is needed by the story because we are already supposed to like him by virtue that he isn’t Hans.

In fact, because we know so little about him, his characterization can change on a whim from a gruff loner to perfect boyfriend who’s entire identity is “I’m Anna’s Fiancé, look at me do goofy things!” as demonstrated by Frozen Fever and Frozen 2. Frozen 2 actually tells on itself when they include lines like “Who am I if I’m not your (Anna’s) guy?” And that is a good question. Who is Kristoff without Anna? Who is he really?

And I know that the story uses Krist*nna as a way of perpetuating the idea of not diving into a relationship with someone you literally just met, but it’s obvious that Anna does EXACTLY that, just with someone the story approves of. She and Kristoff are making out within probably a day of the end of the movie.

You can’t tell me they let Hans and the Duke of Weasleton stay for weeks between their attempted assassination of royalty. Kristoff and Anna moved WAY too fast.

Agnarr’s Convenience and Position as “Good Royalty”

Like Kristoff, Agnarr’s position as the good successor to his idiot father Runeard, is considered essential to his characterization. Good, of course, being relative. He was “slightly less of a bastard,” and therefore, better.

But you can’t make a character by saying who they AREN’T. You need to show who they ARE. And saying “well, he could’ve been worse to Elsa” is no excuse. And Runeard in a league on his own, being the stupid dumbass he was.

Agnarr, by the definition of the story, needed to live so he could be the good king. And meant that Iduna had to sacrifice herself for his convenience.

Out of both parents, Agnarr is given the most screen time and dialogue. His convenience and inability to love Elsa correctly motivates him and Iduna to force her to conceal her powers. All the problems that arise in the story are due to him introducing the gloves to Elsa, and he and by extension Iduna are the basis on the conflict.

I say an extension because she almost a complete nonfactor of a character in the original Frozen movie. She is given maybe two lines, tops. She is still accountable, though, for the hot mess that is called Elsa’s upbringing.

But it’s also worth noting that the second movie expands her character and background. She is given more screen time, dialogue, and songs relating to her character. And it’s still very centered on her love for Agnarr, which is portrayed as a positive influence on her despite him being the main source of her leaving her community and keeping her identity as secret. It doesn’t really feel romantic when she basically has to live in fear to keep him on the throne.

Iduna and the Boy She Just Met

Iduna’s character is motivated to leave her people for a boy she just met. This goes against the very themes of Frozen, but not really upon closer inspection. It’s mostly about the convenience of “good” royalty, and he’s Agnarr so he’s special.

Not special enough to give him a fully rounded character, but special in the sense that he is considered a better alternative. As I’ve said before, his characterization is mostly based on the idea of him being the lesser of two evils.

His convenience is placed above Iduna’s safety. The questions of where she lived during her time in Arendelle, who took care of her, how she navigated this life as a child and still felt comfortable being with the person who is the prince of colonialistic nation is considered almost a nonfactor. It is meant to evoke sympathy, but not outrage at her circumstances that left her basically without a support network.

She is praised as sefless for saving Agnarr at the expense of herself. And she is rewarded with his love, which apparently totally worth losing so much.

Final Thoughts

I’m not really sure how Frozen will navigate it’s themes in future installments. However, without significant changes and a reevaluation of what it wants to say, it’s ultimate impact on audiences will leave them questioning if Frozen’s desire to convey unconditional love actually comes with strings attached.

#anti frozen

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msfbgraves · 3 years

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Tainted media

"Hey look. That creator is racist/classist/sexist/terfy/ableist/nazi/homophobic/colonialist/supremacist/what have you and it really shows in their work. Best not engage with it."

Sounds appealing, hm? If you read something that presents something bad as good, you might start believing it. You might become it. We cannot have that. Protect yourself.

What a sad, scared view of our own intelligence.

We're not helpless sponges for other people's evil!

If you find out that the creator of something you encounter has beliefs that you feel are harmful, or has done things that you find despicable, this does not mean that everything they do or say or create is automatically going to make you absorb that evil trait. If Pablo Picasso is a misogynist asshole, appreciating Guernica does not mean you will become an asshole or agree with him. It also doesn't mean that this piece of art is automatically worthless.

Is it, perhaps, preferable to support creators that are not misogynist assholes? Sure! Do your research and look for them. But if you do end up engaging with, even appreciating something by someone you know has done or said harmful things, do you know what that does to you? Absolutely nothing.

Hitler has some interesting things to say about the flaws of the democratic system. Polanski has made a fine film with The Pianist. I promise you, watching that will not turn you into a rapist; it will not make you believe that rape is somehow justified or offset by it. Not if you don't let it.

And - newsflash - it is possible to both be a member of a marginalised group and express harmful views! A queer, disabled Latinx creator may still say something antisemetic. It happens! They're not immune! An intersex Jewish person can be a believer in American exceptionalism. A Roma woman could say something xenophobic or racist. So even if you were to only consume media by oppressed groups you can still encounter things you know, from your lived experience or from listening to other people's lived experience, to be actively harmful.

You are not destined to become what you're exposed to. You can second guess ideas. And even though Socrates was, in my view, sexist toward women, does not mean the whole socratic method is thereby inherently useless. Reading Calvin has not turned me into a Calvinist, it is entirely possible that Mao has had some wise things to say, and that wisdom is not rendered moot by the fact he comitted crimes against humanity. This purity movement in media engagement runs the risk of not letting us develop our own skills of discernment. The fact that Susan B. Anthony was a raging racist does not mean that what she has to say about women's suffrage is no longer worth noting, or that by reading her you can no longer recognise or seek out the perspective of Sojourner Truth. The fact that Martin Luther King was an absent father, an adulterer and a cheating scholar does not render what he has done for the Civil Rights Movement obsolete. Reading Angela Davis will not make you a Honecker apologist (who? Look em up, and also fuck them; but I believe even Margot Honecker may have said a wise thing or two in her time).

You do not need to stop engaging with people and media who have harmful ideas, however you define that. I think that is impossible. What you need to do is learn discernment.

Is what this person says based in fact? Can I check that?

Does this piece of media contradict something I know to be true? But then why do they say that?

Am I even right? How do I know?

If you do that, you will not be tainted by something. You can read Hitler without becoming anti-semite, really you can.

If you artificially limit your information intake based on a desire to remain morally pure, you will

Probably fail. No piece of media is a hundred percent woke, we all have bias

Not hone your thinking skills - you need to be exposed to their techniques to recognise them

Miss out on fun and beauty

Miss out on new ideas. You can even find something good by thinking: this piece of media is so bonkers wrong, I am going to look up the opposite out of spite.

And, you know - if you want to watch Disney, you can. It won't stop you from watching studio Ghibli, or emerging animation. You can even watch the Dumbo cartoon, or Song of the South, and still support Black Lives Matter. Because you can see why those films are racist and reject the racism.

Stop censoring yourself out of some moral obligation to "pureness." Learn to think, and you're not a defenseless victim to misguided ideas. Active exposure to different ideas, even harmful ones, will make you less likely to get brainwashed. It will not make you evil.

And reading Enid Blython will not turn you into a Stepford Wife. Reading Peter Pan will not suddenly blind you to Native concerns.

The best defence against brainwashing is using your brain.

#cancel culture #media literacy #moral purity

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decolonizationxabolition · 3 years

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Neocolonialism and Indigenous Communities in the Americas

Through the lens of neocolonialism, it is important to point out that this form of colonialism is mostly dependent on cultural forces and ideas in order to maintain the power and influence of white settlers (or even non-white settlers that have access to a lot of power, money, and influence; corporate capitalists, basically).

neocolonialism: a variant of colonialism which does not rely on physical force. Rather, it uses cultural and market influences to create resistances against decolonization and enforce integration into a core imperialist economy (globalization); the use of economic, political, cultural, or other pressures to control or influence other countries, especially former dependencies. (The Red Nation, Oxford Languages) [for a more expansive definition of neocolonialism and it's characteristics, please check out my other blog post here]

I would say that some of the largest of neocolonial influences are the systems and/or institutions that embrace capitalism (specifically racial capitalism), resource exploitation, labor exploitation (that happen as a result of racial capitalism), and the persisting influence of the Christian religion via religious institutions (like the Catholic Church and other religious schools). Neocolonialism intersects quite literally with the structure of the prison industrial complex (but I will talk about that a bit at the end of this blog post and write a whole blog post dedicated to those specific intersections). It is also important to note that neocolonialism argues that the systems of the colonial era are internalized in our bodies. In order for these systems to continue to function, these institutions must work to internalize these cultural forces/ideas (like basically low key brain-washing to be honest) that affect our self-concept, the relationship with our bodies, and our access to resources.

Capitalism, labor exploitation, and parallels today from the "Colonial" era

There is a connection between how labor exploitation plays out today and the exploitative history of slavery during the colonial era, a lot of it is apparent in various industries (like the fashion/textile industry, prison labor, etc.) But in this blog post I'm going to mostly talk about the exploitative labor practices of the Hollywood/film industry and how they exploit indigenous communities through labor and the use of their land. I will also be talking about the capitalization of other natural resources such as water, which is a huge problem indigenous communities are facing today.

An example of the exploitative labor practices in the film industry can be found through the analysis of the film Even the Rain. In Fabrizio Cilento's article "Even the Rain: A Confluence of Cinematic and Historical Temporalities, Cilento breaks down how the film "takes a metacinematic approach to the the story of a Mexican film crew in Bolivia shooting an historic drama on Christopher Columbus's conquest. With the water riots as a background, Bollaín uses different cinematic styles to establish disturbing parallels between old European imperialism, the recent waves of corporate exploitation,... and the exploitation of Bolivian actors for the benefit of the global film industry.... Bollaín warns that these productions can fall into a colonialist dynamic by reproducing the imbalances between the 'visible' countries in the global film market, and 'invisible' countries whose native actors and visually appealing locations are exploited...." It is important to note how the persistence of capitalism and the exploitation of resources (whether that be land or labor) continue to work against decolonization and creates similar power imbalances between indigenous communities and corporate capitalists that allude to the colonial era. This is also a prime example of how there is a continued rift between the indigenous people's relationship to the land, especially through the limited access to water.

(Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz)

So, I would like to make the point that capitalism and corporate interests play a huge role in working against decolonization. We do not live in a "Postcolonial" world, but rather, a neocolonial world that continues to exploit indigenous communities for their (quite frankly already limited) resources. Today, many Native Americans/Indigenous people have trouble accessing water like the First Nations in Canada, the indigenous tribes in the United States, and indigenous communities in Latin America and the Caribbean (whom are 10 to 25 percent less likely to have access to piped water than the region’s Non-Indigenous populations according to this page/report).

For more in depth discussion about the water and land crises indigenous communities are currently facing. All My Relations podcast, which is a podcast run by Matika Wilbur (a visual storyteller/photographer from the Swinomish and Tulalip peoples of coastal Washington) and Adrienne Keene (a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and blogger that discusses cultural appropriation and stereotypes of Native peoples in fashion, film, music, and other forms of pop culture, and a faculty member in American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University.), have done an episode about this topic named Healing The Land IS Healing Ourselves in which they discuss with Kim Smith (a Diné woman, community organizer, citizen scientist, activist, water protector, entrepreneur, and writer) about indigenous' communities relationship with the land, how it relates to the current environmental and water crisis, and the relationship it has with healing our bodies, in which Smith discusses that "violence on the land is violence on our bodies".

The Catholic Church, colonialism, sexuality, and it's influence today

When we're talking about colonialism in the Americas and the remnants of the colonial era today, the conquest of indigenous sexuality/eroticism via the Catholic Church and the repression of indigenous sexuality has played a huge part in colonialism and is still an issue today that perpetuates the erasure of indigenous identity.

In Sylvia Marcos's article "Indigenous Eroticism and Colonial Morality in Mexico: The Confession Manuals of New Spain" Marcos explains that "....By condemning indigenous erotic practices and imposing unprecedented restraints on them, the missionaries altered the roots of ancient Mexican perceptions of the body and the cosmos...." Marcos further unpacks this through probes of confession manuals from the colonial era "....The confession manuals of Molina, Baptista, Serra, and others seem to indicate the missionaries' uneasiness over the diversity of sexual pleasures enjoyed by the souls in their charge. The priests had to repeatedly describe their limited idea of sexuality so that the vital Indians could understand that what for them was often a link with the gods was, in their new religion, always a sin, fault, or aberration.... The morality of negation and abstinence propagated by the missionaries became one more weapon used in the violent process of violent acculturation...." It's important to point out that the repression of the sexual pleasures of indigenous peoples has contributed to the erasure of indigenous identity, especially since they considered it as a means of connecting to their gods. This was used as a weapon to conquer indigenous people's bodies through shame and disconnection from their bodies and spiritual practices.

This is still an issue that persists today, this article by the Washington Post, talks about how transgender Native Americans experienced disproportionately higher rates of rejection by immediate family. It also talks about the state-sponsored Christian schools that have affected indigenous for generations in the United States. So, basically the expansion of Christianity/Catholicism culturally and institutionally and the repression of indigenous sexuality has contributed to the erasure of indigenous identity. And indigenous people that fall outside of the gender binary experience stigma still to this day, which perpetuates colonialism.

To further build upon this point and how to begin explaining the intersection of this with prison abolition and the experience of being Black and/or BIPOC in an imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchal society, Estelle Ellison, a Black Trans disabled writer and transformative justice practitioner, in their essay "Gender, Time, and Other Methods of Policing the Body", Ellison unpacks the intersections between exploitative racial capitalism and how it connects to gender, time, and sexuality, and also explains how it is connected to being policed through our bodies by stating that "By design, each of us is expected to participate in gendering other people's bodies...." and that "....of all the possible ways that a person may live their life at any given moment, the infinite combinations of features, experiences, aspirations, and expressions; gender attempts to reduce our possible identities by half. But half of infinity is still infinity..." Ellison also talks about how time has been colonized (via capitalism through wage labor) and is "made possible by overlapping systems of white supremacy, anti-blackness, patriarchy, ableism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, exploitation, and countless other forms of oppression..."

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Ellison's analysis of the intersecting systems of neocolonialism explains how these systems are internalized in our bodies and how it is connected to exploitation (whether that be from our bodies some other form under these systems) and that we are being policed through our bodies due to societal, cultural, or institutional pressures, such as the prison industrial complex and the military industrial complex, or I would argue through religious beliefs.

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#neocolonialism #capitalism #Indigenous Communities #religion #water crisis #education

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frankendykes-monster · 3 years

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On revisiting Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964)

Mothra vs. Godzilla is an interesting film to say the least. On the surface it looks like nothing special, if anything you could call it an example of how Japanese science fiction films were stagnating only a decade after Godzilla (1954), considering this film barely does anything new, just aping material that was already handled by its two predecessors: Mothra (1961) and King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962). But somehow it’s become one of the most beloved entries in the series and something of a gold standard for everything that came after.

Mothra vs. Godzilla opens with a title credit sequence over a hurricane, with Godzilla’s theme from 1962 transitioning into an instrumental version of Mothra’s theme. The hurricane has caused property damage along the Japanese coast, but most notable is the washing ashore of a giant egg. We soon get introduced to Ichiro, a news reporter, Junko, a news photographer, and Dr. Miura, the leader of a scientific team called in to study the egg, who serve as our three main three heroes for this story. The egg is bought by Happy Enterprises, headed by a Mr. Kumayama, who is in turn financially backed by a younger Mr. Torahata, who plan to turn the area surrounding the egg into an amusement park. They and the three leads are both confronted by Mothra’s twin priestess fairies from Infant Island about returning the egg (the current adult Mothra is nearing the end of her life, and the egg secures Mothra’s legacy), and the efforts to retrieve it are also squashed, forcing the fairies and the indigenous people of Infant Island to turn their backs on the outside world. When Godzilla appears, having also been caught up in the hurricane and thrust onto the mainland, he immediately goes onto another rampage, and it seems the best option is to ask Mothra for help (personally I find it humorous that there needs to be some reason for monsters to fight in these early films given they’d eventually go at it on instinct). Some arguing is done but the fairies and Infant Islanders agree in return for the possibility of a better world to be built. Both Kumayama and Torahata are killed in Godzilla’s attacks, and the monster seemingly can’t be stopped, as even the adult Mothra succumbs to battle, before the newly hatched larvae from the egg eventually stop Godzilla, and all seemingly returns to normal, in a cautiously optimistic way, as the protagonists have vowed to make a world better for everyone.

Mothra vs. Godzilla switches from the intense anti-commercialism satire of King Kong vs. Godzilla to some more general anti-capitalist themes. Near the opening when the damage of the hurricane is being documented by Ichiro and Junko, and unnamed capitalist protests about such possible news coverage as it could damage public opinion on an industrial project being built there. Later the same capitalist protests about the protagonists returning to test the area for radiation (as Godzilla is buried in the general vicinity and is contaminating the soil). There’s some inherent ridiculousness that’s openly stated about Kumayama buying the egg in general, but the cost is 1,224,560 yen (i.e. the logic is since a chicken egg costs 8 yen, and the giant egg is approximately 153,820 times larger, it’s a fair price). It’s explained “[the egg is] not private property, the public can watch it incubate for an admission fee.” A musical cue used in the series to hint at some under-the-surface tension and dread is used in this film when we discover that the egg’s incubator has been built and is already operational. Kumayama later stiffs the fishing village who brought the egg to shore out of the money he owes them, only to later on in the film be scalped by his superior Torahata (the two of them turning on each forces Torahata to shoot Kumayama, and in turn Torahata has wasted too much time before Godzilla destroys the hotel they’re in). Torahata is explained to have originally been some trust fund kid to some larger businessman before heading up his own endeavors. When the public discovers that it’s Mothra’s egg and it will not be returned, Kumayama effortlessly throws a PR stunt to counteract.

Functionally it’s a repeat of the plot from the first Mothra film, only here it’s Mothra’s egg and not the twin fairies that have not been kidnapped. I feel as if everything works smoother here as this film definitely has more weight to the proceedings and isn’t nearly as theatrical; the villian in Mothra, Clark Nelson, is often times a bit too exaggerated. (There’s something to be said about how Kumayama and Torahata have zero concern about provoking the wrath of Mothra considering she partly destroyed Tokyo and NYC in the previous film in the effort to get her fairies back; I guess it’s more accurate than capitalists just giving up possible investments.) I’ve seen some fans vouch for Mothra as anti-colonialist story but this film allows concepts such as that much more room to breathe given how the Infant Islanders have actual agency in the story, turning down the possibility of Mothra fighting Godzilla on behalf of Japan, whereas in the previous film they didn’t have much of anything to do given Mothra immediately goes on the attack upon discovery that the fairies were kidnapped.

The rather dense first 30 minutes of the film gives way to the reveal that Godzilla was also thrust ashore by the hurricane, and buried underground in the process, before reawakening. The entire film shifts into a mode of immediate urgency, as everyone now has to confront Godzilla. A lot of Godzilla’s scenes are far more detached than what else the film has to offer, as we’re following mostly nameless crowds fleeing and evacuating and JSDF officials trying to handle the situation. Once again it resembles the previous film, which had all the main characters more closely associated with King Kong. This film spends a much more notable amount of time showcasing military strategies being implemented against Godzilla with tanks and land mines and air strikes and giant electrocuted nets being thrown at him. I think it’s this film that fully established that while Godzilla could take a beating, the character is functionally indestructible, as nothing leaves any lasting damage.

Even though this film isn’t as upfront with the nuclear text as the first Godzilla film (which openly compared the coming of Godzilla to the atomic bomb attacks and brought up Godzilla being born out of hydrogen bomb tests as the most likely origin), it’s still the only other entry in the Showa series aside from that first film which brings it up in any meaningful capacity. Initial news reports call Godzilla “the atomic monster”, and when our protagonists first ask for Mothra’s help because of the attacks, the Infant Island chief shoots back with, “it’s your fault for playing with the devil fire!” Both on a narrative and thematic level, Godzilla and the age of nuclear warfare are one and the same, and everyone from Kumayama/Torahata to any number of offscreen civilians to the people of Infant Island to even Mothra must contend with Godzilla; a deadly force that threatens everyone. Godzilla’s characterization in this matches with the first film more so than the previous two; Godzilla Raids Again doesn’t have much interesting to say given it’s a cash-in sequel, and the explicitly comedic tone of King Kong vs. Godzilla makes him out to be much more jovial than expected, taking delight in dishing out death and destruction. (An added detail in this film is the subtle inquiry that Godzilla is like a natural disaster, you can only move out of the way in the same capacity that you can’t physically fight a tsunami or a hurricane. This was an element of the first film with Godzilla’s first landing being obscured by a hurricane or the electrical towers set up outside Tokyo resembling sand bags defending against a flood.) But this film is the only sequel of the Showa era to maintain Godzilla in a purely threatening, antagonistic role.

The decision to feature both Mothra and Godzilla in a single film does produce more interesting results than having done so with King Kong. King Kong vs. Godzilla only really happened because Kong, in the real world, was the only extremely notable giant monster of the movies prior to Godzilla, and this limitation extends into the film with how the characters remarked over how their individual rampages were like a ratings battle, with constant “who’s going to win?” fights over the stronger of the two. There’s much more thematic depth with this entry, even on immediate visual level; Mothra is quite dainty and gentle compared to how dark and brutal Godzilla is. (Kong was blown up from approximately 20 feet to 45 meters to fight Godzilla for that film, and this film does so in turn. Mothra was absolutely massive in the first film with a wingspan of 250 meters, she’s been shrunk to 135 for this film. Whether it’s succumbing to radiation or just a natural part of Mothra’s life cycle is never openly mentioned.) The first Mothra film made mention of how nuclear testing occurred near Infant Island because no one knew an indigenous population lived there, and upon seeing it, both the characters and the audience discover a lush paradise that has somehow survived the radioactive fallout. This film stands in stark contrast; when the protagonists land on Infant Island, we discover it’s become a desolate graveyard, with only a hidden oasis being what sustains the local population. It’s not just that the egg was stolen, the Infant Islanders are initially non-compliant because their home has been destroyed. (For narrative purposes, Ichiro, Junko, and Miura function as representatives for the outside world, and are confronted about the atomic age despite them, you know, being Japanese. It works in context of the rest of the series wherein nuclear warfare isn’t blamed on any single country and is viewed as something that threatens the human race equally regardless of nationality.) Bringing in Godzilla as the overarching threat thematically completes the mythos surrounding Mothra. Mothra has the upper hand during the entire initial fight, what with her being able to fly and Godzilla being a slow lumbering animal, but one hit of Godzilla’s atomic breath is all it takes to finish her off.

Director Ishiro Honda has mentioned that the driving thesis across all his films (except maybe Matango) is the quest for peace amongst people, considering Honda embraced pacificism following WWII. Mothra vs. Godzilla is possibly the least subtle about this, with the scene where Junko makes a statement to the Infant Islanders might as well being directly aimed at the audience. “I understand why you don’t trust us, but even as we speak many are dying because of Godzilla. Many of them are good people, but even bad people have a right to live. You may call it divine retribution...but all are equal before the gods. They don’t choose sides. Please. We need your help.” Mothra eventually appearing to stop Godzilla comes alongside the fairies stating “we always keep our promises”, a reversal of the unnamed capitalist saying the same line about his industrial project being completed by the target date.

Some have complained that the final act loses steam, as the film has already finished on a thematic level, with the antagonists killed by Godzilla and the vows of a better future already ensured. To which I respond if some people have ever heard of the concept of a final action scene, but I digress; what caught my eye with this viewing is that Godzilla’s final targets are a group of schoolchildren on an island that can’t escape because all the boats have already left. The protagonists are able to have time to rescue them as the Mothra larvae contend with Godzilla, and it stands in contrast to the first Godzilla film where we know that children are amongst the body count, children suffer from radiation exposure by being in Godzilla’s presence alone, and had to see their parents die in front of them. Children in this film being rescued without harm feels like the closest this film gets to putting “a better world” into action, moreso than just a means to artificially increase the runtime.

The ending is what gets me. It essentially combines the endings of the first Godzilla and Mothra films. Godzilla was killed in the first film but forced back into the sea in this one, but regardless, while the immediate danger has been averted, nuclear testing still occurs, the conditions that allowed Godzilla to come into existence haven’t changed. With Mothra, she is able to return to Infant Island with what is hers and the Infant Islanders’ been rightfully returned. They’re sobering and delightful respectfully, but combined we know that forces that created Godzilla have also terribly weakened Mothra and her people, and a better world being made by the protagonists includes rectifying this specific situation. You know the scene in Ratatouille (2008) where Remy shows his brother that while strawberries and bananas taste good on their own, the flavor is far greater when eaten together? Yeah.

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the-desolated-quill · 5 years

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Demons Of The Punjab - Doctor Who blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

Let us now look at our first non-Chibnall episode this series. Demons Of The Punjab, written by Vinay Patel.

Curious about her grandmother’s past, Yasmin persuades the Doctor to take them to India in 1947 only to discover that the man her grandmother is marrying isn’t her grandfather, but a Hindu man named Prem. What follows is quite possibly the most well written and emotionally charged Who historical story I think I’ve ever seen.

Honestly this comes as something of a relief. I confess when the giant alien bats showed up, screeching and teleporting all over the place like something out of a tacky horror film, I was worried. Chris Chibnall and Malorie Blackman showed remarkable restraint with their episode Rosa, focusing solely on Rosa Parks and the oppressive society she was forced to endure without letting the sci-fi elements intrude or distract from the narrative. With this in mind, an amateur production of ‘Attack of the Killer Bat People’ trouncing all over partitioned India doesn’t exactly seem like a good follow up to me. Thankfully they don’t go that route. Turns out that the Thijarians (not the Vaginas, as I first misheard them) are just a massive red herring. They’re not alien invaders. They’re just travelling psychopomps comforting the dead. Presumably they’re the basis for the numerous death deities that have appeared throughout many cultures and civilisations. It’s a nice idea. Granted the episode would have worked just as well without them, but it’s still a good twist on the monster of the week format nonetheless.

Patel quite rightly focuses on the characters and historical setting. Demons Of The Punjab is refreshing in more ways than one. It’s a historical, but it’s not set in Britain or America. Some people (let’s call them idiots) may complain that the show is getting ‘too PC’, but I for one am quite interested in the history of India. It’s about time we delved into the past of another country and another culture. New Who has spent so much time in Victorian London in recent years, I’m surprised the Doctor doesn’t just rent a holiday home there. It’s also nice to have an episode that isn’t afraid to point out that the British Empire was... well... a bit of a bastard, to put it mildly. The Moffat era in particular was very much guilty of romanticising British history (the most notable example being Winston Churchill, presented as a cuddly leader and the Doctor’s bezzie mate when in reality he was a colossal racist and arguably the very epitome of British imperialism in the early twentieth century). Patriots and anglophiles can’t help but think of Britain in positive terms, seeing the British Empire as some kind of noble ideal. The truth of the matter is the British Empire wasn’t some Utopian peace keeping force uniting the world. It was a bunch of white colonialists taking other people’s land and resources and not giving a tally-ho fuck what the ‘alien races’ thought.

The partition of India is quite possibly one of the most petty and irresponsible things we as a country have ever done. Crudely dividing the country into regions before picking up their ball and going home, leaving the native Indians to sort it out for themselves. What angers me is that I was never actually taught this in school. I learned about the partition of India years later through fucking Wikipedia. And you’d think this is something we ought to know. Like the Atlantic slave trade, this isn’t ancient history. This happened relatively recently and the after effects are still being felt today.

So not only am I’m glad we’ve got an episode like this, I’m also glad that Patel chooses to explore the partition of India in a very intelligent and respectful way. Like with previous episodes, Demons Of The Punjab is very intimate and small scale. It’s not about the Doctor combating a massive threat. It’s about how a massive threat affects the lives of this one family.

Demons Of The Punjab has a stellar cast to play Yasmin’s extended family. Amita Suman does an excellent job as the younger version of Yasmin’s grandmother Umbreen. Something this series has been really good at for the most part is finding that humanity at the core of the stories. It’s not about the aliens. It’s about the people. Demons is not about the space bats. It’s about this young woman struggling to compromise between committing to her Hindu fiance and staying faithful to her Muslim faith in the wake of rising political and societal tension, and Suman portrays this perfectly. It’s an incredibly powerful and moving performance and it’s her character you feel for the most.

Then there’s Shane Zaza as Prem, quite possibly the nicest guy in the fucking world and definitely didn’t deserve his final fate. He’s appalled by the rioting and infighting, saying how this wasn’t what he fought for in the war. Despite being confused and scared by the ‘demons’, he still accompanies the Doctor and Ryan and protects them from harm. But most importantly, he clearly loves Umbreen dearly, preparing to share and adapt his beliefs to hers and vice versa. Throughout the episode, Prem and Umbreen’s relationship is presented as the ideal. A love for the ages. How the world should be, transcending belief systems and cultural barriers. This could have become quite sickly in the wrong hands, bu thankfully the episode never over-eggs the pudding. We like this couple and we like Prem, which is what makes his death at the end one of the most heartbreaking in all of New Who and the fact that this comes at the hands of his own brother makes it all the more tragic.

Hamza Jeetoa’s performance as Manish was exceptional. From the start you know there’s something not quite right with him as he seems to buy into the India/Pakistan border quite enthusiastically, but I assumed (perhaps in my naivety) that the Doctor would persuade him to accept his new sister in law Umbreen over the course of the story. Of course that’s not the case. Like I said, the aliens are the red herring. The real villain is Manish. Except... it’s not. While Prem was out fighting for the Brits, a disillusioned and confused Manish was left alone, leaving him a prime target for radicalisation. So as disgusting and horrifying as his actions are, it’s hard to truly hate him because he’s not a bad person. You do see occasional glimpses of brotherly affection between him and Prem, a brief window into their relationship before the partition, and it’s this that humanises him and makes him an effective antagonist. Yes he’s killed people, yes he killed his own brother, yes his views are downright poisonous, but he is in many ways just another victim of this turbulent time. He’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of rigid belief systems and how easy it is to indoctrinate and radicalise the young and disenfranchised. Jeetoa does a great job selling this character without tipping over into panto. He’s not some rabid bigot foaming at the mouth. He’s a confused young man who has willingly bought into this anti-Islamic dogma because of his own frustrations toward the British, He feels like an actual person. It’s this that makes the ending truly shocking.

I don’t think there’s any need to talk about the main cast. They are predictably good. Jodie Whittaker continues to blow me away as the Doctor. Her eulogy at the wedding, her excitement and enthusiasm when celebrating the night before with Yaz and Umbreen, and her sorrow and disgust when Manish shoots Prem are all memorable moments showing Whittaker’s range as an actor. Graham and Ryan don’t have as much to do this episode, although they do still have their moments (the scene where Graham hugged Prem and told him what a good man he was made me cry. God, Bradley Walsh can act!). This really is Yasmin’s episode and it’s about time too. My one complaint I’ve had throughout this series so far has been that Yaz has felt largely superfluous. She’s not a bad character by any means. It’s a problem common with many of the ensemble casts Doctor Who has had over the years. There’s always at least one cast member reduced to being the spare part. So it was great to see Yaz finally get a chance in the spotlight and Mandip Gill rises to the occasion as she portrays her character’s internal conflict. Obviously she doesn’t want Prem to die. He’s a nice guy and her grandmother clearly loves him, but he’s not her grandfather. In order for Yaz to exist in the future, Prem has to die. I love episodes where the Doctor and his companions can’t interfere as they often serve as great moral dilemmas as well as the means of exploring internal strife. Watching Prem die, knowing she can’t change it for risk of damaging her own timeline, is painful and gut-wrenching, and Gill gives her best performance to date.

Demons Of The Punjab I think is my favourite episode so far this series because it shows just how flexible the Doctor Who format is and what kind of stories you can tell. This is a very human story that packs a massive dramatic punch and has great relevance to today. As I said, the effects of the partition of India are still being felt today and the radicalisation of young people is something we’ve sadly become all too familiar with (see ISIS and the alt-right). It’s what makes this episode’s central theme, to love and respect everyone regardless of cultural differences, all the more poignant. If Demons Of The Punjab teaches us anything, it’s that we could use a lot more Prems in the world right now.

#demons of the punjab #vinay patel #doctor who #thirteenth doctor #jodie whittaker #graham o'brien #bradley walsh #yasmin khan #mandip gill #ryan sinclair #tosin cole #chris chibnall #bbc #review #spoilers

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unofferable-fic · 5 years

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Submission from literalapologyblog + some thoughts re: GOT/Marvel/writing

“(too long for askbox, so sending as submission)

Hey, I left a dickish comment on a post you made (via defunct blog, “beewinged”), and I’m sorry. I just literally created a whole new account and painstakingly tracked down your url again to say that, because it was bugging me that much.

I was really into fandom and tumblr for a few years, and pulled out of it completely when one particular fandom went sour with drama and hatefulness. Hate directed at showrunners, between fans– a lot of it using the guise of progressive language.

I removed myself from fandom and social media entirely and pretty successfully, because I hate communicating with people in soundbites and hate how communities like tumblr (for all their upsides) make it easy for users to “curate” a personality and set of opinions with the click of a button.

And it took all of a few days scrolling the Endgame tag for me to go right back to a place of casual, de-personalizing interactions (two comments, the other one being, “this take bums me out”– but still two comments too many).

I saw about fifty posts that compared Endgame to GoT S8; yours wasn’t that unusual. Tags on tumblr, by design, highly concentrate extreme emotion and stimulus. Social media doesn’t care what it’s doing to compassionate discourse. Rationally, I know this! – but seeing post after post talking about writers and creatives, human people with families, as if they had committed war crimes– seeing “fuck the Russos”, “these writers are basically the same people as these writers”, treating “the Russos” like some kind of malicious entity or, worse, seeing anti-colonialist director of color Taika Waititi referred to as “a bag of racid dicks” (in the name of protecting the integrity of a made-up person) made it all too easy for me to perceive individual posts as a part of a vicious hivemind obsessed with its fandom reality-bubble.

I think there are some good criticisms of Endgame. I also felt and still feel that the writing in Endgame (flawed but thematically consistent, focuses on Tony’s arc to the exclusion of others, because his– for better or for worse– is the strongest) doesn’t bear comparison with the hasty and thoughtless writing of GoT’s last few episodes.

That opinion is not what I expressed in my comment on your post. I wasn’t starting a conversation in good faith (something I’ve tried very hard to hold myself to, in real life and when I do make posts online). I essentially expressed, “*you*, a part of a hivemind, are mad because the thing you wanted didn’t happened, and *you* are fronting like that’s ‘bad writing’”.

That’s a very personal accusation, and a really incendiary and unfair thing to say to someone on the basis of one post, ever if it reflects a generalized feeling I have about online fandom. I let my momentary irritation get the better of me, and focused it on you. It wasn’t the most unkind thing I’ve ever said, but that doesn’t rankle any less.

So: I’m sure you do have strong feelings about stories and opinions about storytelling, and I’m sure they are worth listening to, that you have people in your life who enjoy hearing your thoughts, and that the best and most complex of your thoughts can’t be gleaned from just scrolling through your tumblr.

You might have a thicker skin than I do, and maybe didn’t give my comment a second thought– but I’m sorry if, for even a second, it made you feel dismissed or hurt or misunderstood. You could be any number of people who, in “real” life, I’d never speak to so dismissively. I hope you continue to write, enjoy and engage with stories.”

First off, I want to apologise for taking a few days to post this. I saw this in my submission box and wanted to thoroughly think over it before I replied. I’ve since seen that the blog has been deactivated, but I wanted to post this in the hopes you might stumble across my response, because I do appreciate you going to the effort to find me again… It’s a serious effort! And rarely do people apologise for ‘dickish’ comments haha

First off, I understand anyone who wishes to take time away from fandoms, especially when things get toxic and experiences get ruined by it. For me personally, I have a tendency to just avoid those blogs/tags. There was certain things I don’t go near, and certain posts that I might read, internally disagree with, and move on. I’ve spent a lot less time on Twitter and Instagram lately, and I’m feeling better for it too.

In short, do I think that there are rightful comparisons to make between the writers at Marvel and GOT? Yes. Do I think that makes it okay for us to talk excessive smack about the Russos/TW? No. While my criticisms for the Russos and TW run deep, I never condone death threats or unnecessary insults. On one post in particular, I’ve ‘gone off’ on some comment the Russos made regarding fan reactions to Loki’s death. Nothing other than calling them ‘fucking eejits’, but cursing is used more casually here in Ireland, so maybe that’s why I use it as such. But yeah, other than that, I don’t agree with the notion of wishing death or serious harm on these people, and I think most people would agree with that. Criticise them all day, if it’s valid, but anything else is a bit… excessive. I certainly do think that there are far more valid criticisms floating about instead of death threats, but the harsh stuff is always going to jump out the most.

I agree with a lot of what you say - while there are definitely valid criticisms to be made about Endgame, it’s not an awful or bad film, and there are definitely more examples of poor and lazy writing in the last season of GOT. As someone who was in love with that show for a good five seasons, it was sad to see it go the way it did. I did, however, jump ship after some very telling and dramatic writing choices they made in season five. By my logic at the time, “if they will do x now, they’ll most definitely do y and z later”, and it’s never fun when that realisation comes to fruition. That being said, I still strongly believe that Marvel dropped the ball with some of my favourite characters in Endgame (Loki, Steve, Tony, Bucky, Thor). I think they did great by some characters, and terrible by others. But that’s probably a discussion for another post - most of my feelings have been far better explained in posts by other blogs!

“I essentially expressed, “*you*, a part of a hivemind, are mad because the thing you wanted didn’t happened, and *you* are fronting like that’s ‘bad writing’”.” If I’m being honest, this is absolutely nothing new to me haha. As a Loki fan and someone quite critical of the last season of GOT, I’m well used to people telling me “you’re just mad because your fave died!” and “you just don’t like it because it’s not the ending you wanted!” I think any Loki fan can attest to that too. It sucks, but if someone replies to me in that way, I don’t even bother continuing the conversation. You’ve already reached a wall before the conversation can start. I recently had a chat with a friend who I falsely assumed would cut me off in a similar manner, and it was amazingly refreshing to have my opinion heard and not automatically shut off because I’m a “Loki fangirl”. For me, Endgame just proved that my favourite character’s ending in IW was badly written, badly executed, pointless other than being motivation for Thor, and just overall illogical and out of character. Much like most Dany fans don’t mind her character becoming a mad queen, I don’t mind if Loki dies. My issue is how we get there and how badly executed it was in terms of writing. The actors themselves obviously put their hearts into what I would consider a weak story point. It seemed careless, much like Dany’s characterisation... “How do we get there exactly? Ah, who cares, just do it and get it over with. People will watch it and we’ll make money anyway.”. Can you imagine if they had screwed up Iron Man’s arc in the same manner? The backlash would’ve been insane!

I do of course apologise if I’ve ever some across as someone who just shits on Marvel, because that’s not who I am. I grew up being a massive Spider Man fan as a kid, and these heroes and films will always have a place in my heart, but I’m still going to critique something even if I love it. If anything, I think it’s even more important to acknowledge flaws in your favourite things. I’m certainly not right in ever instance, and I don’t think I know everything there is to know about writing!

My main hope from all of this is just that future writers learn from these mistakes and become better writers because of it.

I genuinely appreciate the fact you went to the trouble to find my blog again apologise, because it’s something that I see rarely. I hadn’t paid much attention to your original comment, but your apology is valued and appreciated. It’s honestly something I don’t usually receive amidst a sea of “yOu’rE JUst mAD bEcAUse yOuR faVE DieD!!”

Likewise I hope that you continue to express your own thoughts and opinions on writing in an articulate manner, and hopefully you see less of those posts that proper do your head in! Thank you for explaining your point of view to me, and thick skin or not, apologies and calm conversations always go a long way.

#more of this please #this is the discourse I live for #me answering shit #me saying shit #submission #ask #ask me anything #literalapologyblog #got #game of thrones #marvel #MCU #endgame spoilers #avengers endgame #game of thrones spoilers #loki #writing #apology

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yasbxxgie · 6 years

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New Biography More Fully Defines Playwright Lorraine Hansberry

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

When the playwright Lorraine Hansberry died in 1965, she was only 34, but had already made her mark on American literature. Her play, "A Raisin In The Sun," which tells the story of a black family that tries to move from its South Side Chicago neighborhood into a white neighborhood, that play is an American classic today. Karen Grigsby Bates from our Code Switch team has been reading a new biography of Lorraine Hansberry.

KAREN GRIGSBY BATES, BYLINE: Lorraine Hansberry was 29 years old when "A Raisin In The Sun" opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway in 1959. It earned an armload of awards, including the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for the best play of the year. Hansberry had bested Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill for the prize. Overnight, she was famous, and became even more so a few years later when the movie version of her play was released. Sidney Poitier played Walter Lee Younger, a man all too aware of the cost of racial prejudice.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "A RAISIN IN THE SUN")

SIDNEY POITIER: (As Walter Lee Younger) I'm looking in the mirror this morning. And I'm thinking, I'm 35 years old. I'm married 11 years. And I got a boy who's got to sleep in the living room because I got nothing, nothing to give him but stories, like on how rich, white people live.

GRIGSBY BATES: "Raisin" remains one of the most produced works by a black American playwright. "Looking For Lorraine: The Radiant And Radical Life Of Lorraine Hansberry" shows she was more than this beloved play, though, says biographer Imani Perry.

IMANI PERRY: She was a feminist before the feminist movement. She was - identified as a lesbian and thought about gay rights organizing before the gay rights movement. She was an anti-colonialist before all of the independences had been won in Africa and the Caribbean.

GRIGSBY BATES: In other words, she was intersectional before that became a thing. And, says Perry...

PERRY: She reveled in her identity, even as she railed against injustice.

GRIGSBY BATES: In the early '60s, black impatience with segregation was growing. Black Americans were trying to gain their rights peacefully, and the national pace felt slow. In 1964, after protesters proposed blocking streets to tie up traffic, some New Yorkers were outraged. At a town hall meeting, Hansberry said this.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

LORRAINE HANSBERRY: It isn't as if we got up today and said, you know, what can we do to irritate America, you know?

(LAUGHTER)

HANSBERRY: It's because that since 1619, Negroes have tried every method of communication, of transformation of their situation.

PERRY: She was willing to risk her fame and her recognition for her political convictions. She became more and more outspoken the better she was known.

GRIGSBY BATES: And, says Imani Perry, Hansberry was not afraid of head-on confrontations. In 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy gathered a group of black intellectuals and celebrity activists in a New York living room. Hansberry was there, so were James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne. Kennedy asked the group to spread the word that the Kennedy Administration had done a lot for civil rights. Lorraine Hansberry told him it wasn't nearly enough.

PERRY: What Hansberry said to RFK is, we want a moral commitment from you...

GRIGSBY BATES: To do the right thing on civil rights. Bobby Kennedy was steamed. Hansberry thought the meeting was a failure, but a few weeks later, in a televised address, Americans heard the president say this.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

JOHN F. KENNEDY: We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and it's as clear as the American Constitution.

GRIGSBY BATES: Somebody had been listening. Imani Perry says Hansberry's petite stature and royal carriage lulled some people into dismissing her, but she convincingly conveyed the black anger and depression that came from the constant challenges of segregation. Although she'd grown up part of Chicago's Negro elite early on, Hansberry had lived on a ghetto street like the ones her characters in "Raisin" were trying to escape.

PERRY: It's why, as Baldwin said, she was able to give voice to black America with "A Raisin In The Sun." It was a truthful depiction.

GRIGSBY BATES: Although she wrote about loving women in her private papers, Hansberry was married to theater producer Robert Nemiroff for several years, says Perry. They separated before she became famous.

PERRY: But he remained her best friend, her closest confidant.

GRIGSBY BATES: Nemiroff supported her work financially, and it was to him that she gave her drafts for honest criticism. Perry says Hansberry wasn't out in the sense we're familiar with today.

PERRY: She was a member of one of the first lesbian organizations in the country, the Daughters of Bilitis. It would have been very difficult and even dangerous for her to be out in multiple ways.

GRIGSBY BATES: In early 1960s New York, homosexuality was illegal. Gay gathering spots often were raided and the people in them arrested. Hansberry didn't want to upset her proper family, so she and Nemiroff had an unconventional, but very real relationship. They loved each other. She also loved James Baldwin. They enjoyed mutual adoration. Again, Imani Perry.

PERRY: When they met, he was already famous. She was one of the few people who he could turn to in every way.

GRIGSBY BATES: She was close to singer/activist Nina Simone, too. Both women financially supported Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. A few years after Hansberry's death, Simone co-wrote a song to honor her friend, and it became an anthem for young, black America. The title came from a posthumously published book of Hansberry's work.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK")

NINA SIMONE: (Singing) Young, gifted and black. Oh, what a lovely, precious dream to be young, gifted and black.

GRIGSBY BATES: Hansberry's work was widely but not universally beloved. Some took exception to her criticism of white allies that needed to be prominently featured in the movement and interpreted that as being anti-white. Imani Perry disagrees.

PERRY: She wasn't anti-white, but she was a very strong proponent of black self-determination.

GRIGSBY BATES: Lorraine Vivian Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer on January 12, 1965. Imani Perry says people focus too much on the wrong aspect of her career.

PERRY: You know, there's been this constant theme for the past several decades. Oh, she died so young. What would she have produced had she lived longer? But the reality is she had produced so much.

GRIGSBY BATES: Which is why Perry thought it was time to bring the overlooked contributions - artistic, social and political - of this young, gifted and proudly black artist to the forefront now. Karen Grigsby Bates, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF AHMAD JAMAL'S "SWAHILILAND")

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fireleaptfromhousetohouse · 7 years

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Tintin in the 21st Century

It’s weird that Tintin is only really known in continental Europe, and obscure as hell in the UK, because it was localised extremely well - so much so that it really confused me as a kid when, in The Black Island, Tintin takes a ferry over to Britain. If he tends to be knocking about in Brussels pre-adventure, I certainly didn’t notice.

What tends to get emphasised about Tintin these days is the racism - as in this Robert Brockway column - and yes, Tintin in the Congo comes off like Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden crossed with those episodes of Looney Tunes that they won’t broadcast any more, but Herge himself disavowed that one as being basically early installment weirdness. There is a good deal of fairly iffy content in some of the others, including, in Shooting Star, a scheming Jewish financier serving as antagonist (which to be fair, Herge wrote while living under Nazi occupation, and later edited), but none of this was key to the comic’s appeal.

What I’m criticising specifically here is Brockway’s assertion that “Nobody knows how to deal with the racism. [Modern adaptations] keep trying to whitewash it -- pun so totally intended, friend-o -- and every time they do, they act surprised that the property has lost all its magic”, an assertion he illustrates entirely with excerpts from Tintin in the Congo and Tintin in the Land of Soviets (an even earlier work than Congo and an anti-communist tract in which Tintin is a prick to everyone in Russia). I’m well aware that this all may come off as a white European trying desperately to salvage one of his Boy’s Own mighty-whitey heroes from the dustbin of history, but look at the following excerpts:

(The next panel is Tintin breaking this awful man’s cane. There’s a lot of instances like this throughout the series, where someone’s being a dick to a POC, and Tintin lets them have it. Yes, it’s robbing the POC of agency in favour of Tintin as mightiest of whities, you could call it racist, but it’s not quite a Klan march, is it?)

Certainly they’re depicting racism, but is anyone really looking at those and getting the impression that the author endorses Native Americans being thrown off their land? Or that the author agrees with the stereotypes he’s calling people stupid for believing? (The stereotypical Chinaman picture serves as a bit of a brick joke when, later on, Thomson and Thompson attempt to blend in.) Those last two excerpts are from The Blue Lotus, often held up along with Tintin in Tibet as a rebuttal to the charges of racism laid against Herge (largely because of Chang, based on one of Herge’s life-long friends). Ironically, The Blue Lotus was criticised for racism against the Japanese: the villain, Mitsuhirato (that’s him in the last panel) is a pug-nosed, buck-toothed opium trafficker who commits seppuku after the climax, so it’s a fair cop, although The Blue Lotus depicting Imperial Japan as authoritarian warmongers claiming more and more of Manchuria on flimsy pretexts has perhaps been vindicated by history.

Brockway’s column describes Tintin as ‘a racist Indiana Jones...for kids’, and this is basically accurate, although I think it’s debatable whether Tintin is more Indiana Jones or James Bond. (Last Crusade, apparently, began life as Spielberg’s Tintin fan script.) You could easily go with both - the crucial points are the globe-trotting, the intrigue, and Tintin’s own indomitable capability. To paraphrase another Cracked columnist, the weird thing about Tintin is that he was awesome. He looks like a cherub but will happily get mixed up in, and win, a fistfight or gunfight any day. He’s about 19 and already has a nemesis - a Greek nemesis. Despite being half a boy, and despite being a journalist who never writes anything, he’s self-sufficient in every way, and as physically capable as a man twice his size - which can flow back into the mighty whitey stuff in some fairly unfortunate ways:

but then again, take the racial dynamic out of that page (or, if you prefer, focus more on the white colonialists bossing about the South Asian guys) and it’s pretty standard protagonisty stuff.

The series is ‘for kids’ in that Tintin is your classic boy hero - given his trusty dog companion, it’s a lot like one of The Famous Five aged a few years and got a real job - and a lot of the humour is generally accessible, slapstick stuff - there’s a bit in Tintin in Tibet where Captain Haddock spends about three pages bumping into people and tripping over. Then, out of nowhere, an international arms dealer will plant opium in Tintin’s luggage to get him banged up by the cops. Seriously, most of the villains are gun-runners, opium smugglers, or both - there’s nothing too graphic, no Trainspotting-style illustrations of the full horror of the global opiate trade, but still, heavy stuff for a comic book. Particularly considering the great costumed comic heroes never even touched the subject of drugs until around the ‘80s, and an endless stream of edutainment telling kids to hey, just say no, man.

One crucial difference between Tintin and Indiana Jones/James Bond is the series’s utter sexlessness. Female figures, on the rare occasion they show up at all, are either damsels in distress, desexualised mother-types, or both. This aspect of the series has drawn its share of Freudian analysis over the years, and, due to Tintin’s best friend and roommate being salty seaman Captain Haddock, came in for a bit of ribbing in the bootleg Tintin in Thailand. If you were to put James Bond into that machine from Red Dwarf that splits things into their good and evil selves, you’d end up with Tintin and Sterling Archer.

Really, Tintin’s closer to a modernist-era Hitchcock protagonist, who gets swept up in events and has sufficient pluck to see them through, and while I forget which way round the inspiration came, The Black Island bears a striking resemblance to Hitch’s The 39 Steps. To stick with The Black Island a moment - being half-Scottish, it was always a family favourite - I’d just like to present the first page in full:

Take note, any film or narrative that wants me to spend fifteen minutes with idiots, because that’s how you kick off an adventure. There’s your wholesome protagonist out for a walk with his dog, and there’s your bad dudes up to bad shit. Tintin spends the night in hospital, then proceeds to walk off the bullet going after the guys - who, it turns out, are some conspicuously German forgers operating in Britain, in 1938. Again, there’s nothing too graphic, but perhaps that’s bending the definition of the word for a work that involves the protagonist stepping in a bear trap, nearly being consigned to a Nazi asylum, getting knocked out during a gunfight with a White Russian when his bullets smash some bottles of chloroform, and then getting caught in a house fire (all this, incidentally, happens in one sequence of five pages or so).

To return to The Blue Lotus, one of Tintin’s allies in that, Mr Wang Chen-yee, more-or-less fits the bill for @thathopeyetlives and @raggedjackscarlet‘s idea of a mirror-universe Rocky Horror Picture Show, in which Bizarro Frank-N-Furter comes to represent the good side of traditionalism, the idea that ‘here is something worth believing in, if you dare to’:

Yeah, he’s a stereotype - you know it, I know it - he’s that specific kind of East Asian man they invented the word ‘venerable’ for, and the fact that at no point in The Blue Lotus does he use kung fu to devastating effect just makes you more certain he’s a master of it. But crucially, he seems like - as with Speedy Gonzales - the kind of stereotype the people it depicts could really get behind.

Mr Wang is the leader of The Sons of the Dragon, a secret society - and a robust, active secret society at that, much closer to the mafia than to the Freemasons (or, if you like, closer to the classic Freemasons than the modern Freemasons). Tintin first meets him after having been kidnapped and smuggled back into China, on his orders - and Mr Wang is hoping that Tintin will help them to fight opium smuggling. How perfect is that for a secret society? There’s your completely justified underdog, there’s something you can believe in, or at least you could before world governments introduced some anti-drugs boilerplate and fucked everything up for everyone.

There was a very mild religious grounding to Tintin - it didn’t come up a lot, but to be fair these were still the days when religion and a moral core were thought of as basically one and the same. It wasn’t lessons in theology like Linus in Peanuts, it was a more general use of universally recognisable icons, a lot closer to how Baikinman was elevated to go-to antagonist symbol in Japan - here’s the villains of Tintin and the Broken Ear being literally dragged off to hell:

Here’s Tintin invoking heaven’s name to try and stop the villain from capping himself (luckily, his gun’s been switched for a joke one):

And here’s Snowy grappling with his alcohol problem via his good and evil selves:

(That’s not a joke. Snowy’s taste for hard liquor was a recurring theme, at one point leading to Tintin spanking him as punishment for getting drunk in the Himalayas and nearly going over a waterfall - both content which I suspect simply wouldn’t fly today in the face of the animal rights lobby, at least not in a children’s book.)

Interestingly, this isn’t limited to Christian theology - here’s Snowy again, this time envisioning Tintin’s wrath by having him wield Zeus-style thunderbolts:

And a Buddhist monk levitating while in a prophetic trance:

Similarly, bona fide magic makes some semi-regular appearances in the series. In Cigars of the Pharaoh, Tintin is temporarily hypnotised with one glance from a fakir, but the most audacious depiction of this comes in The Seven Crystal Balls/Prisoners of the Sun, in which ball lightning attacks the gang, causing Professor Calculus to levitate, and it turns out the neo-Incas have been using what are essentially voodoo dolls to torment the explorers who looted their temple - this is particularly jarring in Prisoners of the Sun, contrasted as it is with Tintin’s little yay-science moment of getting out of his own execution by exploiting his knowledge of an upcoming solar eclipse.

In a way, all this magic and the various acts of god were an extension of the deus ex machinas that were a staple of the series from the start. Tintin in America is probably the worst offender in this regard, with the most ridiculous moment being a toss-up between the time the meatpackers go on strike and turn off the machinery seconds before gangsters throw him into it, and the time he gets chained to a barbell and thrown in a lake, only to discover the barbell’s inexplicably been switched with the wooden barbell of a crooked strongman.

Come the later adventures, though, the deus ex machinas would take a slightly different form to the literal intervention of god:

That’s not out of context, that’s not an idle aside - in Flight 714, the second-to-last complete comic, the gang gets out of a tight spot (an erupting volcano-cum-ancient ruin, no less!) when literal fucking aliens turn up to save the day and cart off the baddies. And, unlike most narratives of that ilk, they get out of it with definitive proof of extraterrestrial contact - Professor Calculus brings back a bit of metal composed of an alloy that does not exist on earth, although this is played off as a product of his cloth-eared eccentricity.

Even with the time difference, you’d probably say there’s surely a bit of a leap between the wholesome-but gritty early exploits of Tintin, where he’s running around after forgers and smugglers, and where he’s literally encountering aliens. Fortunately, there was an adventure that bridged that gap very nicely:

And you may well gather from that adorably kitsch rocket that this went down long before the actual moon landings - but despite this, Herge had done his research, he didn’t have the place turn out to be composed of cheddar like Wallace and Gromit’s A Grand Day Out, he depicted space travel and lunar survival reasonably accurately. A lot of people credit the white expanses of Tintin in Tibet as Herge’s masterpiece, but man, the inky blackness of Explorers is surely its underdog brother:

The final adventure, Tintin and Alph-Art, exists only as concept art and various bootleg versions. It features some genuinely radical departures from the established norm - a black Jamaican artist gets to have a heroic moment of his own, rather than just being acted upon by white people, and Tintin plans a date with an actual human woman. So the series obviously had come a long way from the days of publishing a version of Heart of Darkness where Kurtz is the good guy. And to go back to where we started - it’s not like we had to write off Bugs Bunny because of all the times he blacked up, right?

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adambstingus · 5 years

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Death of a Nation: more angry nonsense from Trump’s favorite film-maker

In the embarrassing new film from the far-right provocateur Dinesh DSouza, he compares Donald Trump to Abraham Lincoln, claims Hitler was LGBT-friendly and calls Antifa the real Nazis

Here’s a typical Dinesh D’Souza argument. In Death of a Nation – the far-right commentator, film-maker and recently pardoned ex-con’s fourth political documentary – he tries to make the case that Hitler was a lefty. That’s a tall order, and here’s the best D’Souza can muster: he says Adolf wasn’t a homophobe. Most historians think he was, and will cite as proof the 100,000 arrested for violating Nazi anti-homosexuality laws and the 15,000 murdered in camps. And yet here’s D’Souza claiming there were known gay men peppered about the Nazi top brass. Hitler didn’t have them executed or even demoted. Ergo, Hitler was an SJW snowflake. QED. Right?

Let’s think this through; D’Souza certainly didn’t. Putting aside his typically sloppy historiography, is he really saying that Hitler’s alleged LGBTQ tolerance disqualifies him from conservative circles? Has he accidentally let slip that, in 2018, much of the right remains homophobic? And isn’t he cherry-picking facts then arriving at a dubious conclusion that does nothing but suit his needs? Who would fall for this except someone who would unironically watch a film by Dinesh D’Souza? (Incidentally, D’Souza’s films are reliably lousy with faux-naive rhetorical questions.)

Then again, watching Death of a Nation (a film that tries to compare Donald Trump to Abraham Lincoln), you might not get a chance to think anything through. Throughout D’Souza does what he always does: he drops a bombshell, then before you’ve had a chance to recover, he hits you with another, over and over and over, for nearly two hours. It’s a downright Trumpian move: exhaust your enemies (and your supporters) through the sheer volume of your nonsense. Thing is, D’Souza’s been doing this for decades, well before the world was hijacked by the tweeter-in-chief. Confusing through multiplicity has long been one of his favorite tricks. And he has a heaping bag of them.

D’Souza has never had the fame and notoriety of an Ann Coulter (whom he once dated) or even a Laura Ingraham (ditto), but that’s not for lack of trying. Born in Bombay, he emigrated to the US as a teen and quickly made a name among the conservative intelligentsia for “going there” – saying anything to get a rise. At Dartmouth College, he was the editor-in-chief of the rightwing Dartmouth Review. Under his watch, the paper cruelly outed liberal campus homosexuals for fun, and it published a notorious piece known as the “jive column” – a takedown of affirmative action written in stereotypical black language. (The hed: “Dis Sho’ Ain’t No Jive, Bro.”)

D’Souza didn’t calm down as he got older. He’s relentlessly banged out books, some more appalling than others. In 1995’s The End of Racism, he defended Jim Crow, invented buzz terms like “rational discrimination” and casually dropped the words “the facile equation of racism and slavery”. The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and its Responsibility for 9/11, from 2007, argued just that, and not well.

It wasn’t until D’Souza rebranded himself as the Michael Moore of the right that he approached household name infamy. His cinema debut, 2012’s 2016: Obama’s America, is the fifth highest grossing doc of all time (though it made $80m less than Fahrenheit 9/11). It hit pay dirt because, during an election year, D’Souza told his target audience (read: scared white Republicans) that America’s first black president was a Manchurian Candidate – a plant brainwashed by his anti-colonialist Kenyan father to scale the peak of the US government and destroy it from within. D’Souza unmistakably, enthusiastically preyed on racist fears. His next film in 2014, America: Imagine the World Without Her, claimed slavery wasn’t that bad.

D’Souza could get away with this, sort of, because of another of his moves, and a most un-conservative one: he played the race card. Towards the start of 2016, D’Souza shows a picture of his hand next to Obama’s, pointing out that they’re the same color. He does this, he says, to show that he, too, knows what it’s like not to be white. What he’s really doing, though, is tacitly admitting this: D’Souza thinks, as a conservative minority, he can skip the usual dog whistles and say the repugnant things his white brethren no longer can.

A scene from Death of a Nation. Photograph: Dinesh D’Souza

The problem with D’Souza’s race-baiting? (Apart from, you know, being wrong.) It means his party alienates increasingly needed minority voters. And so his last two movies have attempted damage control. 2016’s Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party revealed the not-so-secret news that the Democratic party was, a century and a half ago, the racist one. Death of a Nation repeats this, but adds another grievance: he’s sick and tired of the left calling the right the party of racists and fascists just because the Republican president called all Mexicans “rapists” and all modern American Nazis are really into Trump. So D’Souza tries to turn the tables, or at the very least play an epic game of “I know you are but what am I?”

Death of a Nation is classic D’Souza, only even angrier than usual. All his tricks are present, particularly his cut-and-paste argumentative style. Back in 1991, on the heels of his debut tome Illiberal Education, a flustered Michael Kinsley asked in his review: “Are you going to use the evidence to think through something, or as a weapon?” D’Souza has always used evidence as a weapon. And so we get a handful of out-of-context FDR quotes to make him sound like he admired Hitler (before going to war with him). We get D’Souza being casually offensive, as when he says the Nazi doctrine sounds like it was written by Bernie Sanders, whose ancestors died in the Holocaust. We get pure nonsense, like when he equates Antifa members shutting down “alt-right” speakers with a recreation of the Nazis launching the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. According to D’Souza, the anti-fascists are really against themselves.

We also get D’Souza interviewing Richard Spencer. The white supremacist is there so D’Souza can ask him leading questions, in a comically unconvincing attempt to make him and his fellow Nazis sound un-conservative. (D’Souza also compares Spencer to Malcolm X for some reason.) Thing is, D’Souza’s not really trying to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with him. He knows how to play his supporters, how to hoodwink the gullible. When his critics call out his falsehoods, all he’ll do is cry about it on social media, make it sound like the media is persecuting him. For D’Souza, the Trump age and its record number of suckers must make him feel like a kid in a candy store. And yet he’s never been more mad, or made less sense.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/death-of-a-nation-more-angry-nonsense-from-trumps-favorite-film-maker/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/184081610487

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laularlau8 · 7 years

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The history of India’s independence and the creation of Pakistan had been unfamiliar to Gillian Anderson when she took the role of Lady Mountbatten for her new film Viceroy’s House. The actor had once hired a private history tutor, a dozen years ago, to fill in some gaps of history she was hazy on – “Stuff that just wasn’t in my brain” – but this had not been one of them.

“No, I’d thought let me start with a couple of things that I don’t actually know that much about, or I can’t remember that much about, which was the first and second world wars.” She starts to laugh. “But it was a disaster. Because I have no memory. I took notes, blah, blah, blah, but couldn’t remember a thing he taught me. Nothing. I’m not even sure, if you’d asked me the next day, I could have told you what I’d learned. You know, even my favourite books, I couldn’t tell you what they were about. It’s always been that way.”

The menopause hasn’t helped, and lately things have become so bad that she’s going to get herself tested to see if she might actually be dyslexic. “Somebody had said to me that dyslexia isn’t just about seeing words backwards, it’s also about the assimilation of information. I’d always been afraid to look into it, because I was afraid that if I found something out, I would think that I couldn’t do anything that I wanted to do. I have this impression that I can do whatever I make up my mind to. But the reality is...” She lets the sentence fall away with a grimace.

By a bit of luck, the one thing the actor has always been able to remember are her lines. “But of course that’s terrifying for me, thinking, well, what if this problem that exists in the rest of my life shows up in that respect, too? Then I’d be buggered.”

If this creates an impression of a ditzy blonde, it would be misleading. We meet at the photographer’s studio, where a rack of stylist’s clothes stands unused; she chooses to be photographed in her own, and the way she chuckles about this makes me think the preference is par for the course for Anderson on shoots. Her fitted black trouser suit and heels are a sort of corporate/fashion hybrid, and her manner is similarly friendly but business-like. Apart from her enormous eyes, everything about Anderson is tiny, and the compactness reinforces the sense of efficient self-possession she conveys. She was just 24 when, as FBI agent Dana Scully in the paranormal TV drama that would make her a global star, she captivated X-Files fans for 10 years with her hyper-rational cool, before moving to London where her career has been equally sure-footed. From period dramas (Bleak House, House Of Mirth, War And Peace) to big-budget TV series (Hannibal, The Fall), to independent movies (The Last King Of Scotland, A Cock And Bull Story), comedy (Boogie Woogie, Johnny English Reborn) and theatre (A Doll’s House, A Streetcar Named Desire), Anderson seems to get busier the older she gets. It’s a tall order for a beautiful blonde to play consistently powerful, intelligent women, but Anderson has pulled it off.

The actor brings her air of serious purpose to the role of Lady Mountbatten, giving us a less flighty version of the aristocrat than the good-time girl caricature we’ve been accustomed to. She evokes her character’s classic colonial glamour, but depicts her dashing about nursing the sick and injured, and being a generally good egg.

“One of the things that I was surprised by in studying Edwina was that there was certainly a turning point in her life when she went from being predominantly a socialite, and wafting around and having affairs, living pretty much from holiday to holiday and leaving her children at home. But when the war happened and she started to participate in nursing et cetera, her escapism completely switched over to being of service, so everything she did from that moment on was about properly digging in and working around the clock.”

Viceroy’s House opens with the arrival in India of Lord Mountbatten and his wife in 1947, to oversee the nation’s transition from colonial rule to independence. Hugh Bonneville plays Edwina’s husband, and their official residence – Viceroy’s House – is not so much the film’s setting as the third star member of the cast. Sumptuously filmed, at moments the movie is a sort of Downton Abbey of the Raj, with all sorts of romantic intrigue going on below stairs among the 500 Hindu, Sikh and Muslim household staff. But there is not so much as a hint of the affair Lady Mountbatten was rumoured to take up with the man about to become India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Their romance was to have been the subject of a 2009 film, Indian Summer, until the Indian government took exception to the salacious storyline and forced the movie to be cancelled. In the hands of British director Gurinder Chadha, whose own family were among the 14 million displaced in the violence and bloodshed of the period, this new version of India’s independence is less racy, if rather more substantial, and concerns itself with the politics of partition.

Anderson says she was always conscious while making the film that some viewers will find the concept of a “good” colonialist inherently problematic – “yes, absolutely, absolutely” – and 70 years after independence, she found herself revisiting colonialism’s dynamics on location. They filmed in Jodhpur, staying at the Umaid Bhawan Palace hotel, where the film was also shot, using the palace to double for the real Viceroy’s House. “And, you know, we’re in a situation where we’re in a developing country and we are filming at the height of luxury and, yes, there’s an uneasiness to it. There was one actor we worked with, who does a lot of work around the world in – I can’t remember whether it’s around poverty or Aids – who would not stay there. He refused to stay in the hotel, and wanted to stay in some place that felt more like India.”

Even by the standards of activist actors, Anderson’s own involvement in social and political causes is prolific. The 48-year-old has campaigned variously for women’s rights in Afghanistan, against sexual violence towards girls in Myanmar, for better access to HIV treatment in South Africa and education in Uganda, against domestic violence in the UK and child trafficking across the globe, for the rights of indigenous tribes in South America and conservation of cheetahs in Namibia, against deforestation in the Amazon and rabbit fur farms in China – and that is nothing like the full list. I was therefore expecting her to be quite forthright about current political affairs, but am completely wrong.

“I generally have a tendency to steer away from outright political discussion in interviews, because I am an actor, and there’s so much that I don’t understand, and I don’t for a second feel like I have a right to that platform. I don’t want to get into a discussion about Trump or about Brexit or any of that – I feel it’s best left to people who really understand the very, very complex issues. Not for a second am I going to pitch in, because I don’t really know what it is that I’m talking about. I have opinions, but I don’t think my opinions are more valid because I’m an actor and have more of a platform than others.”

I wonder if this is her way of saying she shares the view that actors ought to stop turning awards ceremonies into anti-Trump rallies, but she looks faintly alarmed. “No, no, no, I’m not saying that at all. I’m only talking about myself. I don’t have an opinion on whether or not actors should speak out.”

She has, on the other hand, just co-written a book called We: A Manifesto For Women Everywhere. Rather like Anderson, it is less polemical than one might guess from the title, and more a manual for spiritual self-improvement. Co-written with her close friend Jennifer Nadel, a former barrister and BBC documentary maker, Anderson has described it as a work of advice to her younger self. “I have struggled with self-esteem myself,” she said last year, “and in looking at the ways that I have dealt with overcoming those things, I started to think that maybe some of it might be potentially useful for other people of all ages.”

According to the introduction, it is a “manifesto for a female-led revolution”, and Anderson stresses that it is “not a self-help book”, although it reads a lot like one. Chapters are called things like Acceptance: Making Friends With What Is, and Courage: Ending The Victim Trap, and its pages promise to “change your life”. It prescribes a detailed programme of fairly recognisable techniques, which range from meditation, affirmations (“This is who I am and I’m glad to be me”), messages to oneself on Post-it notes stuck to the bathroom mirror (“My name is Decca. I am a good and kind person. I do not need to please everyone. I do enough. I am enough.”) and a nightly gratitude list of reasons to feel grateful to the universe. As is often the case with this sort of book, I find myself torn between cynical giggles and the mesmerising thought: what if it works?

Anderson swears it does, but she has such cut-glass British poise that I struggle to picture her solemnly reciting affirmations. It might have been easier to reconcile her voice with the book’s rather Californian, new-age tone had we met in America, for she is what’s called bidialectal; when in the US, she speaks in an American accent, but here she sounds completely British, and says she has no control over it. “I was in Los Angeles recently with a couple of Brits and I thought, I’m going to see what it’s like to talk among Americans with a British accent, and I felt so uncomfortable. It felt so disingenuous, and I kept thinking they must think I’m a complete twat. But when I’m here, it’s nearly impossible for me to maintain an American accent.”

Anderson was born in Chicago but moved to London aged five, while her father attended film school in the city. When she was 11, the family moved back to the States, to Michigan, but continued to spend summers in London, and by her early teens Anderson was rattling off the rails. Punk rock, drugs, an addict girlfriend and a much older boyfriend all featured heavily in her adolescence, and her classmates weren’t wrong when they voted her “most likely to get arrested”. On the night of graduation, she broke into her school to try to glue the locks shut, and was charged with trespass.

She has been in therapy since the age of 14, and the book is interspersed with personal passages on her own experience of mental-health difficulties. “There were times,” she tells me, “when it was really bad. There have been times in my life where I haven’t wanted to leave the house.” But there’s a bit of a dance between disclosure and discretion, because whenever I ask her to elaborate on the personal vignettes in the book, she shuts down.

I kept hearing myself say, ‘I’ve got to slow down, I’ve got to slow down, I’ve got to slow down’

The book contains enough 12-step-style advice to make me think addiction issues went beyond teenage experimentation for Anderson, and when I say so, she nods. Could she say a little more? “No.” After 24 years in therapy, and writing the book, I’m guessing she has a good idea where her problems stem from, but the question receives a chilly, “Pourquoi?” There are “quite a few”, she says, but “I would have put them in the book if I wanted to talk about them out loud.”

Her first husband was a Canadian art director she met on the set of The X-Filesand married at 25. Their daughter Piper was born a year later, but the marriage was over within three years; her second marriage, in 2004, to a journalist and producer, ended within two. Months later, she announced she was pregnant, and had two sons – Oscar, now 11, and Felix, nine – with a British businessman, before they split up five years ago.

I’m curious about how a single mother who has been working flat out for 25 years (she was back on the X-Files set nine days after giving birth to Piper) can even find the time to practise all the spiritual techniques her book recommends.

“Well,” she smiles, “I’ve definitely deliberately slowed down. Because I kept hearing myself say, ‘I’ve got to slow down, I’ve got to slow down, I’ve got to slow down.’ I must have said that for 10 years, or maybe even 20 years. I was just sick and tired of hearing myself. I just thought, why do I do this to myself, and why have I done it for so long? People would laugh at me because I’d be like, ‘I had an extra 10 minutes, so I stopped in to say hi, you know.’ It became enough of a joke among my friends that I had to start paying attention to it. So one of the things I try really hard now to do is, no matter what, after I drop the kids, I go back home so I can meditate.”

Why has she always pushed herself so hard? “Well, the bigger-picture part is that I’m responsible for quite a lot of people financially, so it’s that. But it’s also a little bit of fear of what happens when one slows down. When I think about an empty period of time, fear comes up. I’m quite good at being on my own, so it’s not necessarily fear of myself, but probably fear of facing those things like: why do I drive myself so hard?”

Does she really compile a list of things to feel grateful for every day? “Yes! I do a gratitude list every night. I mean, it’s in my head now, but I go through stages where I think I’m just complaining all the time again. It’s too floating in my head, it needs to be on paper.” Complaining all the time is “probably one of the things I struggle with most. I suffer from great intolerance. Such intolerance of so much.” Such as? “Oh, intolerance of myself. Intolerance of situations. Intolerance of people on the street. Intolerance of whatever. So I have to constantly settle myself down from the state of being aggravated.”

I try to picture her stropping about, grumbling about roadworks or noisy neighbours, and find this image easier to conjure than the new-age version of her intoning, “My name is Gillian Anderson, I am a good and kind person.” She has a steeliness about her that I really like, but whether it’s proof of the success of her spiritual techniques or indicates the limits of their powers, I can’t decide. She certainly feels like someone in full control of herself and her life, and if this keeps her at a slightly cool distance, it is also rather enviable.

She says she used to be pitilessly intolerant of her own physical self, but won’t elaborate on how that manifested itself, because she refuses to allow herself that line of thinking. “I will not go there. I simply will not allow it any more. Because the things that we might be critical of ourselves about actually don’t matter. The only thing that really matters in terms of our peace of mind is our peace of mind itself, and how we react to things. All I know is that when I meditate, one goes beyond the physical, and it is possible to tap into a sense of absolute contentment and joy in that place. So if that’s where you’re starting, then actually none of this,” and she gestures to her body, “means anything, really.”

How is it possible for a working actor to liberate herself from concerns about physical appearance, when her existence is so entwined in it? After eight seconds of silence, she replies: “I don’t know. I mean, as I get older, I imagine the roles that I’m able to get are going to change. There will be a certain point where I’ll make the decision to go grey, you know. There might be a certain point where I decide that it’s silly for me to continue being blond when I’m in my 60s. I’ve also always wanted to direct, I’ve also always wanted to be an artist. Maybe when the kids are out of college, I can decide to downsize and go grey and get less work.”

The art of acceptance is one of her new book’s biggest themes. As someone who is terrible at it, I’ve never been sure how realistic an ambition true acceptance really is.

“Well, there’s an opportunity for fear around every corner, fear of the future, fear of what if,” Anderson says. “But the acceptance of wherever we are, whoever we are, is freedom. So, you know, I can sit and bemoan the fact that I don’t get the same roles, or bemoan the fact that my skin is starting to look like chicken skin, or bemoan whatever it is. But that’s not reality. That’s fighting reality.”

#gillian anderson #viceroy's house #film #culture #television & radio

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