All fiction is fan fiction. All art is imitation. God is dead.

Posted on April 1, 2016 by Kate Skow

This first appeared on Kiva’s blog.
___________

Fan fiction gets a really bad rap. It’s barely even acknowledged (even when everyone knows about it) and when it finally is, it’s dismissed as juvenile. Something teenage girls with terrible writing skills write, but no self-respecting author actually engages with. We are quick to judge fan fiction authors and readers, and we certainly don’t admit that we are these people.

I’m gonna right come out and say it because I would be that hypocrite if I didn’t: I read—and write—fan fiction.

It gives me a chance to flex my creative muscles without having to develop entire worlds, because someone’s already done the hard part. And as for reading it, well, sometimes, okay, most times, writers don’t see their characters entirely the way I do. The internet does. They fill in the blanks the way I want them to be filled. (I’d say “no pun intended” but with me, the pun is always intended.)

As a bisexual, I’m pretty much always tired of the complete lack of representation when it comes to LGBTQ+ characters. We don’t get many, and when we do, their storylines tend to revolve completely around being gay, as if we have no other interests. And good luck ever getting someone who’s into multiple genders to actually identify as bisexual. They’re always someone who “doesn’t like labels” which is so different to my experience. I love labels! Get me a label maker that exclusively churns out the word bisexual! Cause I wanna put that shit everywhere!

So yeah, we don’t get tons of characters to work with. However, we do get tons of characters who seem like they are expressing attraction to multiple genders or their same gender but it’s just…never addressed. In the end, they end up much more developed than their gay counterparts, but inevitably straight and we are disappointed. (By the way writers, that’s called queer baiting. You know you’re doing it and you’re all assholes.)

Sometimes I want to know more about That Thing The Writers Never Talk About. Obviously, the show’s never going to give me all of what I want. (Just enough of what I want to keep me watching forever in hope and denial.) But fan fiction does. That lingering moment that looks like it’s straight out of a regency costume drama in the new Star Wars? Fan fiction goes hard on that, and that’s the kind of content I wish I could get from the movies but know I never will. When Disney lets me down, the internet’s always there for me.

And okay, this kind of stuff may not be your cup of tea. I get it. Not everyone wants to read about two Presumed Straight dudes boning. That’s your prerogative. But you don’t get to shame people who do. Because everything you love is fan fiction too.

Renaissance paintings, often regarded as some of the finest art in the world, use the stories of The Bible and Classical mythology. That’s fan fiction.

The Aeneid, a piece of epic poetry read by every student of the Classics and then some, uses the stories of Homer. That’s fan fiction. (Of fan fiction, because Homer himself was working from oral traditions.)

House, M.D., an award-winning show about a crotchety doctor and his heterosexual life-partner, is a clear allusion to Sherlock Holmes. That’s fan fiction. (And, quite frankly, an “if Sherlock was a medical doctor” AU.)

Every single superhero movie, the trendiest thing in film right now, takes established comic book characters and tells new stories with them. That is, almost literally, the definition of fan fiction.

A ridiculously popular Twitter account builds on the characterization of Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens. THAT’S FUCKING FAN FICTION.

Denouncing fan fiction and avoiding it at all costs is stupid because, as my wise friend Renee once put it, “all fiction is fan fiction.”

“But those examples are different!” I hear you saying already.

Why? Why does something need to be either old or big budget or meme-worthy to not be considered insidiously fan fiction-y?

I’ll tell you why you immediately think your precious Marvel Cinematic Universe movies are somehow exceptions to Renee’s Law: Because when something’s old or big budget, there’s a 99% chance it was created by a man. And if it’s created by a man, it can’t in any way be akin to that stuff on the internet nobody talks about save for criticizing. But that’s classic sexism.

Stop vilifying teenage girls for what you praise men for doing. Internet fan fiction is a community largely comprised of women. That is the reason it is looked down on. That is the reason men will go through some serious cognitive dissonance to say that girls write fan fiction, but they don’t. And I simply do not have the patience for it anymore.

Male creators of the world: you write fan fiction. Admit it.

And furthermore, stop condemning those who read online fan fiction. Studies have shown that some women respond to erotica more than porn. And if you don’t believe the studies, believe the success of Nora Roberts. However, some of us, while responding to erotica, don’t respond to romance novels about boring, snooze-fest heterosexuals we have had no other interactions with. We respond to (yes, that) fan fiction.

Teenage girls have become more comfortable with their sexual identity and are empowered by their sexuality because of writing and reading fan fiction. They shouldn’t be shamed for their desire and they shouldn’t be shamed for how they discovered it. The disparagement of fan fiction, and the girls who engage with it, is ultimately a microcosm of patriarchal society at large.

Noah Berlatsky wrote a piece for the LA Times titled “‘Batman v Superman’ is fan fiction, and that’s OK”. I only amend it to be more inclusive:

Everything is fan fiction, and that’s OK.

Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders

Posted on March 29, 2016 by Jimmy Johnson

This essay first appeared on CiC03.

The popular CBS police procedural Criminal Minds has spawned a second spin-off, Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders. It takes the format of the original franchise with one major exception, the FBI profilers are operating around the globe. The FBI in this framework are an active policing institution with global carceral power, something like what the show Crossing Lines imagines Interpol to be. As such, CM:BB offers the opportunity to explore sovereign imperial violence.

The pilot episode, “The Harmful One”, opens with a voiceover: “Over 68 million Americans leave the safety of our borders every year. If danger strikes, the FBI’s International Response Team is called into action.” Implied is that the U.S. borders are something other than regimes of violence and that to be inside them offers security. This also illustrates a tension in the stories where the U.S. empire’s sovereign violence is carried, if not carried out, by U.S. citizens wherever they go, no matter who else has competing sovereignty.

The episode takes place in Thailand in and around Bangkok. Two white U.S. college students are on a volunteering trip at a cassava farm where they do good by displacing paid local labor. Influenced by a cute boy who is also displacing Thai labor, one girl falsely accuses the farmer of watching her shower and convinces the other girl to abandon their work. They leave the farm and are promptly kidnapped.

We first meet the new Criminal Minds team with the franchise’s lead character FBI profiler David Rossi (fundraiser for the Israeli military Joe Mantegna) in a shooting simulation alongside Jack Garret (noted Hollywood conservative Gary Sinise). Rossi kills the suspect in the simulation and is promptly chastised by Garret who says, “We could’ve talked him down.” Garret moves to review the shooting. Instead they both jokingly dismiss the idea and decide to get coffee. Garret gets a text that sends him to Thailand on the trail of the two girls.

The IRT finds that the boy had previously been convicted of rape but “a Romeo and Juliet” law that knocked his conviction down to a misdemeanor leads the group’s technical analyst ‘Monty’ Montgomery (Tyler James Williams) to say, “I’m not sure how serious it was.”

Upon landing they encounter Clare Seger (Alana de la Garza). She is called the groups “cultural expert” which turns out to be a colonial anthropology position unburdened by expertise. She tells fellow agent Mae Jarvis (Annie Funke), “Listen, this police force is a boy’s club so don’t take it personally.” She thus sets the stage for a recurring theme in the episode where the FBI will upend local patriarchy. Clearly ‘FBI’ stands for ‘Feminist Bureau of Investigation’ though it is never made clear which strand of “leaning in” it is: Clintonian or Thatcherite?

Despite zero evidence in any direction the IRT goes with the theory that the kidnapping is related to a human trafficking ring. Garret and Cultural Expert go to the farm they girls disappeared from to investigate whether the farmer was involved. Cultural Expert’s hot take absolving him: “Well he’s exhausted but willing to talk. He seems embarrassed about the conditions he provides here and he’s not surprised they left. They’re not the first kids to go. And I spotted a Buddha which means he believes in karma.” I’m not sure what followed immediately after this because I rolled my eyes so hard that I momentarily lost the ability to focus.

Taksin tells Jarvis “No!”

The IRT is hindered by local authorities through a combination of incompetence and sexism. The racism of native incompetence is an exposition tool; the show provides condescending explanations to Thair people, since that’s more palatable than admitting that the condescending explanations are for the viewing audience.Jarvis especially is repeatedly thwarted, especially by Taksin (Keong Sim), the local liaison. The local police do not properly preserve a murdered man’s body and thus it is up to Jarvis to get around restrictions put on her actions by Thai people. Taksin has never heard of a serial killer’s “comfort zone” despite being a high ranking Bangkok cop, thus Garret must explain it to him. Taksin stops Jarvis from photographing a dead body because of something to do with sexism.

Anyway, after stoking the fears of human trafficking, the team silently drops the theory because they find a piece of actual evidence after the IRT chases a Thai man through a crowded marketplace. Garret tackles the man, puts him in a choke hold, and demands answers which are immediately provided. Here the FBI can engage in wanton destruction in Thailand without even a frowning glance from local authorities.

Garret chokes the truth out of a suspect while crushing someone’s vegetable crop – See more at: https://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/?p=68591&preview_id=68591&preview_nonce=2a16a793ad&preview=true#sthash.Aj4zsRzB.dpuf

Turns out the killer is a random tribal man (Duoa Moua) who mostly grunts and growls and, for unexplained reasons, has pierced his cheeks and mouth with lengths of metal. The character would comfortably fit in Eli Roth’s racism concentrate The Green Inferno.

The kidnapper of innocent white women as we first meet him

But how will they stop him? Garret hunts for ideas asking, “Are there any cultural traditions for the last remaining member of a family?” Cultural Expert decides that the killer is celebrating Ullambana, which happens in August, and is sacrificing the white labor displacers to appease his ancestors. Wut? In the end the IRT saves the white women from the terrifying brown man, the killer offs himself and Jarvis conquers the patriarchy by getting a validating nod from Taksin.

The second episode, “Harvested”, opens with a bunch of white people at some expensive festival in Mumbai. Two American dude-bros pop some kind of drug while an Indian man watches predatorily from the shadows. One guy wakes up without a kidney in the middle of a slum nicknamed “Kidneyville.”

Upon arrival in India, Cultural Expert drops some knowledge on the team: “Some things to keep in mind: Politeness is politic. Never use someone’s first name without their consent. Never refuse hospitality and never initiate physical contact with someone of the opposite sex. Even something as innocuous as a handshake can be looked upon as a sexual advance.” How is the latter different from the United States where men take everything from a retweet to an axe kick to the forehead as a sexual invitation? Anywho…

The second episode isn’t worth describing at length though it briefly places the kidney and other organ thefts in the context casteism’s brutality and the colorist legacy of British colonialism, which is encouraging. Yet imperial intervention is somehow still heroic and the US police with zero local knowledge aside from Cultural Expert are the competent ones. This story too ends with the killer’s suicide and it too has opportunities for massive eye-rolling. For example Cultural Expert asks if Garret knows that the Mumbai slum they were in that had an open sewer and caste-based organ harvesting program is “completely green” because they recycle all the plastics they have and make them into little toys?

Sovereign Violence Without Borders

Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders is pretty bad television. It has the very same shallow pop psychology premised on ableism as the original series, specifically pathologizing mental illness as a producer of violence, rather than a location upon which violence is enacted. The ensemble cast has little chemistry and the writing is bad both ethically and poetically. But it is interesting in a way.

In this story American sovereign violence follows citizens wherever they go regardless of the sovereign’s borders. The monopoly over legitimate violence that defines the state is deterritorialized in empire. In this read, how do “Over 68 million Americans leave the safety of our borders every year” when for first class imperial citizens those borders are biopolitical and not geopolitical? The answer is that they more or less don’t, except in North Korea perhaps. This is what Garret means when he says of the Thai police, “It’s not their job to worry about missing Americans. It’s ours.” Just as biopolitics govern US citizens, empire governs the episode’s othered populations with necropolitics. The first two episodes both end in death for the villain and in both instances that death is of someone already dispossessed (a Dalit man in Mumbai and a tribal man in Thailand). Necropolitics is already in play in the material world for these populations and Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders reproduces it faithfully. The series will explore these ideas, however unintentionally, as it unjustifiably continues airing episodes.

Lastly, the first two episodes do not question empire’s right to police the world nor its competency to do so. Both exist as unstated facts and only the competency part is defined at all and then, only through positioning it alongside native incompetency. But this is expected. After all if the stories investigated whether or not the FBI should be active all over the globe they will find that it shouldn’t. And the series would have to end. Which it should.

Who Cries When Lesser Rock Gods Die?

Posted on March 22, 2016 by Ben Saunders

Middle-aged white guys like me, I guess.

Several times in the past week I have found myself ruminating on Keith Emerson’s suicide.

It’s easy enough just to shrug and move on when an aging has-been rock star offs himself. The news cycle is so full of tragedy and madness that Emerson’s death could hardly be expected to register as more than a blip for anyone who was not a member of his shrinking fanbase.

Nevertheless, I find the thought of this once quite famous 71 year old shooting himself while alone in his home — apparently plagued by fears about his deteriorating ability to play — terribly sad and haunting. And learning that he had struggled with substance abuse — while no surprise for a 1970s era rock star — made this lonely, despairing death seem all the sadder. It set me pondering the vicissitudes of fame and taste, and the human cost of celebrity culture, and all that stuff …

And while I hadn’t actually sat down and played an ELP record in 20 years, I guess I have to admit — and it is a confession, given the degree to which ELP have been condemned by the critics — I have to admit that I am feeling all this because I was indeed once a fan of ELP.

When I was fifteen, like all my friends I wanted to be a rock star when I grew up. But I didn’t have the nerve to sing, my parents would never tolerate the drums, and everyone already seemed to play guitar.

So I became a nerdy keyboard player.

But keyboards seemed to be the one role you could have in a band that wasn’t automatically cool. I mean, when slapping became a thing, suddenly even bass players were cooler than keyboard players.

And looking back in pop history for a keys player that commanded the kind of admiration that the other rock gods inspired — well, there weren’t many. I now regard Jerry Lee Lewis as pretty damned awesome, but at the time, in the 1980s, it was too much like ancient history. Ray Manzarek of The Doors would get some props. But everyone knew who the sexy one in that band really was. (It didn’t help that Manzarek always struck me as a self-mythologizing bullshitter of epic proportions whenever he gave an interview.) And there were amazing jazz players, of course. But jazz was by comparison a niche interest, commanding none of the attention of rock and pop among my high school cohort.

And then there was Keith Emerson. A crazy showman with bags of talent — the “Jimi Hendrix of the keys”! Most people I knew did not give a crap about ELP in the early 80s, either, of course. But at some point I had caught a TV re-broadcast of a gig from the early 70s and was impressed. Wowed, even.

So this week I went back and had a look at some of that old footage. Here’s one of the moments I vividly remember from that old TV show — two minutes of inspired silliness.

Today, the antics with the daggers and the other forms of Hammond abuse strike me a bit differently. I took it all dead seriously when I was fifteen, in a way I just can’t now. But it still strikes me as a fascinating piece of rock theatre, falling somewhere between Spinal Tap (the scene where Nigel Tuffnell plays his guitar with a violin comes to mind) and Townshend smashing his SG, or Hendrix sacrificing his Strat at Monterey. It’s ridiculous — utterly — watching Emerson drag that massive bit of furniture around. But part of me still finds it awesome. Maybe it’s even slightly camp, in Sontag’s sense of the term — two contradictory things at once, both sublime and ridiculous!

Lost in all the theatrics, though, is the fact that this was a musician of great skill, able to play jazz and classical stylings with real fluidity — admired by such giants such as Oscar Peterson, and with a left hand technique that matches any concert pianist.

Just check out the first few minutes of this clip for an example of how dexterous and delightful his playing could be.

So … talent and showmanship … and yet, is the verdict ever since punk really true? Do ELP deserve their bad rep for rock excess, pretention and pointlessness? Were they really, frankly, just a bit shit?

It seems true that a lot of the material has aged badly.

But, but … at it’s best, I find there is still something in ELP for me. Something about the alchemy involved when those three individuals manage collectively to overcome their musical egotism just long enough to make an extraordinary thing. Something that does not sound quite like anything else. Something capable — if I let it — of inducing in me an experience close to rapture.

Witness: my single favorite ELP track:

The link is to the whole album — but just let the first track play. It’s called “The Barbarian” (I know, I know) and it’s an instrumental mini-epic, in three sections, all of which I find absurdly delightful. There’s the lumbering bass and Hammond of the first sequence, which closes out with a really cool little “call and response” part between the keyboards on one side and drums and bass on the other; then there’s the delicate jazzical Chopin-lite mid-section, with some lovely right hand flourishes from Emerson, and breathlessly rapid brushwork from Palmer; and then a third section that recapitulates the opening before taking off on the mad-as-fuck frenzy of the final 40 seconds.

I’d never heard anything like this when I first encountered it. I still can’t think of any thing else in the pop world that it resembles.

Critics are unkind. Hipsters are dismissive. And the crime of tastelessness was certainly one that ELP committed again and again.

But I think that sometimes they were actually pretty bloody good.

The Utility of Dimension

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Donovan Grant

When aspiring to seek racial harmony through media, a little bit seems to go a long way. Instead of adding one black character to a film’s cast, add two. It does not matter that in Avengers: Age of Ultron, Anthony Mackie’s Falcon never interacts with Don Cheadle’s War Machine, as they’re both appearing in the same scene. Captain America: The Winter Soldier went the extra mile by having Mackie’s Falcon and Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury exchange two scenes of dialogue. The fact that their characters’ personal investment centers on white Steve Rogers should not erase the fact that they are two black men interacting with each other, for however briefly.

But it can, and it does. Most narratives in film or television are willing to show some degree of racial representation, but generally speaking the central focus of said narratives tend to be on other things. This is where stereotypes bleed in, and the marker of authentic representation becomes blurred. Too often the black hero becomes a minstrel. As a result, POC tend to examine media closely for authenticity and veracity, often with a good degree of skepticism.

The quest for authenticity reaches great heights in the FX miniseries American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson. Based on the book “The Run of His Life: the People vs. OJ Simpson” by Jeffery Toobin, the series’ inherent attraction is that it retells one of the most famous murder trials in American history. American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson has thus far enjoyed critical success due in no small part to its near-slavish recreation and theatrical swelling of the facts and events of the case. The actors (headed up by a string of A-list talent including Courtney B. Vance as Johnnie Cochran and Sarah Paulson as Marcia Clark) have arrested viewers with their multidimensional and powerful performances.

The show’s fifth episode “The Race Card” focuses, as the title suggests, on the racial tensions that squeezed the OJ trial so firmly. Written by Joe Robert Cole and directed by John Singleton, much of the focus of racial anxiety centers on Prosecutor Chris Darden (played by Sterling K. Brown) and his nightmarish experiences in going up against the defense team led by Johnnie Cochran. The tone is set by an opening scene in which Cochran is harassed by police while driving his daughters to dinner (he lectures his children not to use the word “nigger” when asked if he was called that by the policeman).

Cole and Singleton’s script sympathizes with Darden, beginning with a press event for Cochran in which he argues that the inclusion of Darden (who is African-American) on the prosecution is a cynical example of tokenism. As the trial begins, Darden makes a case to the court that the use of racial epithets by LAPD officer Mark Furman should be deemed inadmissible so as to not inflame passions of the majorly black jury. Cochran, passionately, responds by accusing Darden of belittling the morality and emotional capacity of African Americans, reminding the court that they “live with offensive looks, offensive words, offensive treatment every day.” “Who are any of us to testify as an expert as to what words black people can or cannot handle?!” It’s a roundhouse blow to the prosecution, particularly to Darden as Cochran turns back to his seat and whispers to him “Nigga please”.

It is here that the episode turns from a recapitulation of a real life court drama into a trial of black identity. The court plans to tour OJ Simpson’s house, so Johnnie Cochran re-styles it as a more recognizably black home, replete with photos of black people and socially conscious artwork such as “The Problem We All Live With”, replacing Simpson’s Patrick Naegel collection and photos of his white golfing friends. Cochran tells OJ that the redecorating will get the mostly black jury on his side, and that it will help to frame the narrative of the trial as a case of police harassment against an innocent black man.

OJ responds “What’re you trying to say about me Johnnie?” before defending his lifestyle, arguing that he earned his wealth himself, and rejecting the idea that he could have done more for the black community. Those who wanted money or aid from him, he says, were just looking for a handout.

Darden’s character is sympathetic. From scenes in which he vents frustration to his parents to his vexation when he tries to explain to Marcia Clark how people downplay their racial bias by being polite, Sterling K. Brown makes the character thoroughly understandable. But Johnnie Cochran, while theatrical and tenacious, also generates inevitable suspicion. The episode presents Cochran telling the other lawyers that their job is to present a better story of what happened on the night of the murders than the prosecution. He also tells Chris Darden that he is in the trial to win – not be professional. Cochran says he believes in Simpson’s innocence, but he comes across as a ruthless individual who is utilizing race to meet his own vindictive ends.

You could perhaps say the same of the show’s producers. The series was developed by writing duo Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who co-produce the show along with Brad Falchuk, Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson and Ryan Murphy. All of these creators are white. Though current national polls show that the majority of both white and black Americans believe Simpson probably killed his ex-wife Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, there was a much sharper divide between the races twenty years ago.

The series does not demonize Simpson; it only presents evidence previously recorded or corroborated during the trial. But real-life overwhelming evidence employed by the show helps shape an argument for his guilt. Suddenly racial diversity becomes a tool for furthering a belief held disproportionately by white people who remember the Simpson trial. Thus, every detail and scene of sympathy and humanization of black people is used to advance a narrative congenial to white opinion.

And so one could argue that the use of people of color, and of real world people and events, becomes a sinister Trojan Horse, or at least it can. But must that be the case? Must white creators inevitably infect a work with prejudice? It’s a popular theory held in several arenas, particularly comic books.

The March 2^nd 2016 issue of Spider-Man, starring half-Black half-Hispanic Miles Morales, was met with controversy when writer Brian Michael Bendis had the character express negative emotions towards his ethnicity. In the issue, amateur footage from a fight involving a tattered clothed Spider-Man with his skin exposed results in an online blogger enthusiastically broadcasting that the new hero is a POC. Miles responds with feelings of discomfort and angst.

“I don’t want that.” Miles says.

“Want what?” his friend Ganke asks.

“The qualification.” Miles responds.

The scene has elicited a number of responses from various groups of people ranging from GamerGaters praising the book for its rejection of “SJW” agendas to reviewers criticizing the issue for its attack on female fans. Black Nerd Problems.com wrote that says that the scene “is classic white liberal rhetoric” which “paints a world in which there are no problems…it serves as a tool to maintain the status quo.”

Brian Michael Bendis took to Tumblr to address the negative reaction with a “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” type of response.

“As I’ve said many times before I used to work at a major metropolitan newspaper and I learned there that anything you say about politics, religion, sex or race… No matter what you say… Half the people reading it will vehemently disagree. that’s just the way it is.

so some writers either decide they want or don’t want the conversation. sometimes it’s a conscious decision and sometimes it’s an unconscious decision.”

When I first read the scene, I immediately felt uneasy in recognizing that the words of a conflicted black kid were coming from the mind of a white writer. Whether or not the scene was written with any sort of liberality couldn’t escape those indicting facts. I took it upon myself to determine, with my own sense of blackness, if I felt this was or not authentic, and it was. It was not believable to me that a thirteen year old would have a fully rounded concept of his own racial identity juxtaposed with the cultural context of the modern world. Not to suggest that he would be completely unaware, but to me Miles Morales would not be as expressive with his blackness as John Stewart was in his first Green Lantern appearance.

The complexity is self-evident. Each POC will see different kinds of representation with each character, as such defines our individuality. It matters not than Bendis’ own children are African American, or that he created Miles Morales. There will always be that double consciousness that pervades every story and creeps into the minds of every POC.

So what is the solution? It would appear to be having more POC producing more of the consumer’s material. That’s not always a surefire way to make a coherent story, but it is a first step. Those are more valuable than failure because each step towards perfecting representation produces a normalizing effect. It also re-contextualizes missteps taken by white people as cautionary examples to learn from. Perhaps they were not so ruinous if evading their failures gets us to where we need to be. After all, Shaft was created by a white author. But not every black person in America likes Shaft.

No one person knows how to totally represent their minority status. Social constructs do not come with a “How-To” kit – the instructions manual only includes a lifetime of misunderstandings and imbalanced power structures, with varying degrees of oppression from person to person. Integration helps us deconstruct the construct. We need the successes and failures of others and our own internal vetting process to get to where we want to be.

My Name is Neo

Posted on March 14, 2016 by Eleanor Lockhart

In the beginning and coda to the highest grossing film to ever endorse terrorism as a virtue, V for Vendetta, narrator Evie Hammond says that ideas have power, but what really matters is the people behind them. Yet this film is strangely agnostic about truly committing to this theme; the titular protagonist, in his final martyrdom, declares that “beneath this mask there is an idea… And ideas are more than flesh. Ideas are bulletproof.”

But, as Evie Hammond asks after her friend (and torturer) V’s death, “what of the man and what he meant to me?” Today, I’m called to ask a similar question about two women who I have known only as ideas – masks, as it were. The Wachowski Sisters, once known by a slightly different name, directed and produced V and a slew of other mass market, big-budget films whose receptions ranged from the vicious – in the case of the recent Jupiter Ascending – to the rapturous, in the case of V and The Matrix. For reasons that are now eminently understandable and justifiable, the sisters have eschewed the press and contact with fandom, choosing to live intensely private lives. But the recent forced outing – the second the siblings have experienced – of Lilly Wachowski,who had chosen to identify herself to the public as Andy until this week, invite a conversation about a simple fact that should blow everyone’s mind like
Neo soaring out of that phone booth: several of the most popular cult action films of all time, including one which once held the title of “highest grossing ‘R’ rated film in history” until it was unceremoniously deposed by Mel Gibson’s sadomasochistic religious fantasy The Passion of the Christ, were directed by two transgender women.

I do not know Lilly and Lana Wachowski. I only know the art they produced and the impact it had in my life. I’m a 28 year old college professor firmly enmeshed in the Matrix of everyday conformity, except for the one fact of transgender identity that unites me and them. Unlike Evie, what I have access to is the symbol, the mask, of the Wachowskis. Yet the glimpses we’ve so reluctantly been given, often at the hands of parasitic tabloid journalists, lead me to feel that, like Valerie in V for Vendetta writing her letter to nobody and everybody, even if I don’t know the Wachowski Sisters, I love them. Another one of my reclusive artistic idols, progressive rock virtuoso Tuomas Holopainen, founder of power metal extravaganza Nightwish, wrote in a song out of frustration with fans who thought they knew him because of his often intimate lyrics, “stop saying ‘I know how you feel. How can anyone understand how another feels?” I suspect the Wachowski Sisters, if they were to read this thinkpiece, might look askance at me for similar reasons – and yet I, and I don’t hesitate to say thousands of transgender fans if not millions, have this inexorable feeling that we know quite a lot about the Wachowskis from their work, and that we share commonalities of experience that are striking.

Like the Wachowski Sisters, my road to living authentically as who I am has been interrupted by numerous socially driven constraints on my freedom to be that person, that woman. I spent a lot of time wearing a mask that wasn’t me, and even long before I and possibly Lana and Lily themselves realized who I was, I saw the consistent theme in their films of a bisected identity, split between a professional and formal role validated by the rules of society and an authentic identity a person has found or created themselves.

The first of the Sisters’ movies to which I was exposed, The Matrix, was a giddy experience for a 14 year old “boy” who had not previously been permitted to watch “R” rated films. My father made an exception because of the film’s metaphoric and philosophical depth (blunt as it may have been). I responded particularly to the way that the Christlike savior figure Neo is split between two existences. As his nemesis, Hugo Weaving’s ingeniously portrayed Agent Smith of the Machine oppressors (more on him later), puts it:
You’ve been living two lives, Mr. Anderson. In one of these lives, you’re Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. You pay your bills… You do your taxes… And you help your landlady carry out her garbage. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias “Neo” and are guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for. One of these lives has a future, Mr. Anderson, and the other… Does not.

Like all of the dialogue in the early portion of The Matrix, Smith’s statement is literally true but not in the way he predicts (in the same way that Neo’s stoner friends think he needs to “unplug” with some mescaline and that he’s their “literal Jesus Christ”). But Smith is wrong about which life has a future. As I’ll discuss subsequently, all of the Wachowskis’ work – yes, even 2008’s family film Speed Racer – deals with a bisection of identity from true to authentic, from assigned by authority, to molded by the scars and traumas left by authority. Neo the hacker has a future of black leather, gunplay, karate, and literally dying – twice – for the sins of the human race. Conversely, Jupiter Jones of the much-maligned box office flop Jupiter Ascending chooses to destroy her offered life as a space empress to live as an undocumented immigrant in modern day Chicago. Admittedly, Jupiter Ascending came from the Sisters’ teenage fantasies, and I can’t help but suspect they made with the full knowledge that it would flop and they would be blamed, and that ultimately it wouldn’t matter because Hollywood wasn’t going to keep giving tr*nnies multimillion dollar budgets to make movies. But even so, what all Wachowski protagonists share is that they have someone telling them who they are, and that tale is a lie.

I don’t know how long Lilly Wachowski has been transitioned – she says it’s been some time, but thanks to her well earned, dutifully preserved, and unjustly shattered reclusiveness, I have no details. For me though it’s been three years—three years, which feel like forever. I, like Neo and like V, felt a pervasive sense of “wrongness” about the world, but still threw on suits, ties, and whatever else I could to try to make the role I was assigned feel right, until one day in 2013 I just couldn’t anymore, and the boy I was died as surely as Neo was executed by a Machine firing squad at the end of The Matrix. About six months into the process, when I, like Lilly and Lana before her, was known as my authentic self to my friends and family but as that old dead boy to the legal and financial systems of society, I felt a moment of acute dysphoria upon calling my bank and being addressed as “Mr. Lockhart,” when I was accustomed to “Ellie.” That distress turned into a sudden recognition of a parallel: Neo, throughout the Matrix trilogy, is constantly subjected to identification as his past identity, Thomas A. Anderson, the name the Machines’ system gave him. Agent Smith is keen on making sure that Neo remembers where he came from, refusing to address him as anything other than “Mr. Anderson” until the climax of to series’ finale – the moment where Smith’s capitulation to Neo’s chosen name leads to the death of both Smith and his enemy. (This ending is significantly more grim than the ones we see in Matrix and Sense8 as well as Jupiter Ascending, in which protagonists reject self-sacrifice in favor of self-validation – a message which is refreshing in the face of a popular culture which all too often seems to validate suicide, as V and the Matrix sequels appear to.)

There’s not a lot about the Wachowskis’ life that I can conclusively claim to know is represented in their work – but if there’s one thing that’s close to certain, it’s the theme of the self-destructive urge and the sense that there is no place in the world for people who are different to live as themselves. In one of her rare public speeches (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crHHycz7T_c), Lana Wachowski discusses her near-suicide attempt as a teenager. Preceding it, she wrote an extended suicide note in which she discussed the feeling that her death by her own hand was inevitable, because there was no place for her in the world. She then went to the Chicago L-train stop near the restaurant where she was writing, and prepared to step in front of the subway – and was only prevented from doing so by a stranger who made eye contact with her, preventing her from acting. That experience echoes the climactic fight between Neo and Smith in the original Matrix. Smith – who has repeatedly expressed his terror of infection with humanity (or, we might say, queerness), and who is identified in the sequels as literally being an aspect of Neo – holds Neo in front of the subway train and whispers in his ears as the train approaches “this is the sound of inevitability – it is the sound of your death.” Neo’s proclamation “my name is Neo,” echoed by the explicitly transgender Nomi Marks in the Wachowski Netflix series Sense8 when her mother refers to her by her former male name (“my name is Nomi!”), reads as a transcendent affirmation of a chosen identity – and bluntly, as a metaphor for transition.

It’s impossible to know until they offer some kind of perspective on their work – something they’ve been notoriously loath to do for, once again, quite understandable reasons – to what extent the Wachowski Sisters intentionally wrote allegories about gender transition into their films and television work, to what extent they subconsciously or semiconsciously inserted these concerns, and to what extent we’re simply reading too much into science fiction, action, and heist stories. But for transgender women the potential that two of us may have been secretly telling stories of their own lives and experiences for the better part of two decades is seductive. Transgender women are so infrequently represented in the popular media at all, and when they are given roles it is as obstacles, confusions, or threats to the normal lives of cisgender people in critically acclaimed films like Dallas Buyer’s Club and The Danish Girl —or as actively malicious monsters in horror films like Psycho, Sleepaway Camp, and Silence of the Lambs. While we do not know Lana and Lilly personally, so many of the experiences their characters – even those who appear to be cisgender males, like Neo and V – have echo with our lives.

I regret and condemn, along with many others (including Chelsea Manning, someone who has truly resisted the system and is paying a price as high as V, Neo, or any Wachowski heroine) the Daily Mail’s outing of Lilly Wachowski, as well as the previous and brutal outing of Lana during the production of the Matrix sequels. Yet I hope that like the protagonists of their films, the lives they’ve now been forced into become more fulfilling and offer them the opportunity to live in a way they have not before. If they wish to offer new perspectives on their work, I’ll be excited to hear it. If they chose to maintain their silence, thousands of trans people will still have the symbols they created and the oh-so-rare stories they gave us.

Not Quite Ready to Die in the Anthropocene

Posted on February 2, 2016 by David James

The recent Paris Climate Conference has been called the last best chance for the leaders of the world, nations and multinational corporations, to agree upon a framework that can somewhat mitigate and limit the compounding effects of climate change. Some have commented that a best-case scenario for such an agreement would still not prevent a future of unbearable heat and widespread famine, drought, war, and mass migrations; a total failure to reach a feasible agreement, like the previous iteration in Copenhagen in 2009, would mean much, much worse: no less than the end of human civilization as we know it and the extinction of huge numbers of plant and animal species, possibly including homo sapiens. Roy Scranton, in his new book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, cleaves to the latter option as the most likely scenario, and this slim volume is dense with big history, scientific nitty-gritty, and philosophical reflections.

Scranton opens the book by invoking his experience as a soldier in the Iraq War, driving and patrolling through Baghdad and pondering the collapse of a once-bustling ancient city into chaos and violence. Back home in the States and safe once again, he witnessed the similar breakdown of order and imposition of martial law in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Scranton connects these localized disaster zones of social breakdown with the future fate of the planet and the human race when climate change accelerates and worsens. He cites a litany of military planners, economists, and scientists to draw his indisputable and alarming conclusion: “Global warming is not the latest version of a hoary fable of annihilation. It is not hysteria. It is a fact. And we have likely already passed the point where we could have done anything about it.” Sobering words.

Over the next four chapters, we are treated to a God’s eye view, in the style of Spinoza’s sub specie aeternitatis, of geological eras, the rise of homo sapiens, the evolution of energy and industry, the seemingly intractable conundrum of the greenhouse gas effect, the near impossibility that the nations and leaders of the world will come to a working solution that will fix things, and the universality of violence in our primate species. Scranton presents well-researched and argued points on an impressive range of topics with a concise and continually compelling sense of conviction.

The fifth and final chapter, entitled “A New Enlightenment”, is the most original, interesting, challenging, and vexing part of the book. Scranton opens with an epigram from the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest pieces of literature on earth which was rediscovered by chance only 150 years ago. The epic tells of the adventures of the powerful king Gilgamesh and his wild companion, Enkidu, as they unite their opposing forces against the gods themselves, forcing the gods to strike down Enkidu. Gilgamesh becomes distraught over the death of his friend and wanders the earth seeking a way to conquer death. Frustrated in the end, Gilgamesh curses the futility of existence. His experience lives on, though, and offers, as Scranton says, “a lesson in the importance of sustaining and recuperating cultural heritage in the wake of climate change.” It also represents “not only the fragility of our deep cultural heritage, but its persistence.” For the author, the specter of climate change is such a monumental problem that we have no hope of solving it; rather, we should focus on maintaining and deepening our humanism and protecting our rich cultural legacy in order that we will both have a softer descent into the envisioned post-apocalyptic future, and that this rich heritage painstakingly accrued over millenia may be rediscovered one day by our survivors in order to rebuild a new civilization. Our study of philosophy, the ancient classics, and Shakespeare, as rewarding as it may be, creates something of a non sequitur when used as a transition to the idea that our unfortunate inheritors will be fighting for resources and survival in a post-apocalyptic world where life will revert to that pre-state existence invoked by Hobbes: “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene is a far-reaching, erudite, and cultured book with a bleak view of humanity and its future. The author draws upon a wide variety of philosophical ideas to make his point, from Heraclitus (“Life, whether for a mosquito, a person, or a civilization, is a constant process of becoming…Life is a flow.”), to Hegel (“The human being is this Night, this empty nothingness which contains everything in its simplicity.”), to Heidegger (“We fall into the world caught between two necessities, compelled to live, born to die, and reconciling them has forever been one of our most challenging puzzles.”). More than any schools of thought, though, it seems like the author subscribes on some level to the Stoicism of Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius when he says “Learning to die means learning to let go of the ego, the idea of the self, the future, certainty, attachment, the pursuit of pleasure, permanence, and stability. Learning to let go of salvation. Learning to let go of hope. Learning to let go of death.” This echoes once again the oft-repeated quote by Montaigne that “to philosophize is to learn how to die.” In both the title of this book and the many references to “learning to die”, I think we could easily substitute the phrase “philosophizing” without losing any significance; for Scranton envisions a dying world in which we will all need to become philosophers if we are to hold onto our humanity.

Fear of death is universal among humans and many of the higher mammals. It likely spawned our myths as well as our art. It is only the philosophers who do not avoid it or fear it, but look it clearly in the face. This is true of Democritus, Socrates, Epicurus, the Zen Masters, the Bodhisattvas, Hume, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, and many others who have spent their lives contemplating death not as a morbid fascination but as a means to improving and perfecting their own lives. If it is difficult for most people to attain such peacefulness of mind even after a lifetime of meditation, it is even more unfathomable to find any comfort in the inconvenient truth that the Earth will be rendered uninhabitable in a few million years, and that the cold death of the universe will follow in its wake a few billion years later. The cycle of life and death does not occur on an individual level, or even that of an entire species; it includes planets, stars, and the universe itself. Numerous other books, films, and stories, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, discuss this tragic reality in one way or another; Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, Asimov’s “The Last Question”, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Lars Trier’s Melancholia, Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, and the Samurai manual Hagakure, which Scranton read in Iraq as a way of dealing with the pervasive and daily dance of death.

Everything in the book springs from the idea that global warming is a problem too big for humans to deal with based on the total lack of realistic and practical alternatives we have to stop it. On this point, I fully understand the enormity of the problem, the almost complete lack of political and corporate will to change our entire world economic system and sacrifice short-term profit, and the bleakness of the future we therefore guarantee for ourselves; but I do not, and cannot, fully endorse the complete resignation of the search and struggle for solutions that the author advocates. On the merits, I have no issue with any of his conclusions except for his certainty of failure in the face of global warming. I am by no means hopeful about the state of the climate and the geopolitical effects that my children will witness, but I think that is exactly why pervading pessimism must give way to de rigueur active optimism for the sake of our survival. The current Paris Climate Conference will be not the last best chance, but the first great step to further increase momentum towards a global solution to the extremely daunting but not impossible crisis we face. If that means a change away from neoliberal capitalism towards a more sustainable future, as Scranton alludes to, so be it.

Overall, the book is exceedingly ambitious and almost too wide-ranging for its own good, and it feels like the solution offered by the author in the face of a crisis he goes to great lengths to explain renders the conclusion relatively feeble and unconvincing. It is not really a work of philosophy as much as a cri de coeur over the indispensability of philosophy and the humanities as a way of securing “the fate of humanity itself.” I do believe, along with the author, that a deep sense of compassion and humanism are necessary to continued civilization, but so are collective action. My grasp of philosophy helps me cope with the thought of my and the world’s eventual annihilation, but my appreciation of human craft, art, technology, and collective potential to solve problems tells me that we will not go gently into that good night.
_____
David James did two tours in Afghanistan with the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and he now teaches English in Italy. He co-edits a website with other veterans at www.wrath-bearingtree.com and maintains a personal blog at www.tigerpapers.net.

Ignorance Isn’t Bliss

Posted on September 4, 2015 by Donovan Grant

A memorable scene from Community season 3’s episode “Regional Holiday Music” involves brainy overachiever Annie Edison (played by Alison Brie) indulging in a baby-doll styled performance of song and sex for Jeff Winger (Joel McHale). Donned in fishnets and high heels, Annie plays up the sex appeal of the childlike vamp, conflating an eagerness to be taught with sexual availability. The joke completes itself three times over when her song ends with the line “Boop be doop be doop doop sex!”, McHale’s visibly uncomfortable Jeff stating “Eventually you hit a point of diminishing returns on the sexiness.”, and Annie responding with a clump of incoherent babbling.

The point, quite clearly, is that the sex appeal traditionally found in female ignorance can evaporate quickly if over-exploited. It’s a scene I keep thinking back to when reading Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti’s current Starfire series. A revamp of the character made infamous in the title Red Hood and the Outlaws at the start of DC’s New 52 company lineup back in 2011, this version of Starfire is a narrative of an alien foreigner growing accustomed to ordinary human culture. As the series establishes its new setting of Key West, FL, it also presents the character of Starfire as ignorant to the point of idiocy. Her her mental state contradicts the level of reasoning and understanding she displaced in the years following the new 52. It’s ostensibly the same character trying to start fresh on Earth, yet concepts like currency, fruit and simple metaphors are completely new to her.

Beginning with the premise of the book, it’s easy to see why Conner and Palmiotti took this approach to the character. The blatant sex-object nature of her first appearance after the new 52 reboot was universally rejected. Starfire has a younger, larger and more female fanbase than many DC characters due to her appearances in the Teen Titans cartoon from 2003-2006. In that series, the character’s reaction to Earth customs (typically teenage Earth customs) was played up to be more wide-eyed and innocent than she ever actually was in the 1980s “New Teen Titans” comic where she first appeared. While the initial version by Marv Wolfman and George Perez had an intrigued and bemused fascination with human and American sensibilities, the cartoon version was decidedly more excitable and energetic. It’s a point made by an online fan comic that portrayed the cognitive dissonance between what new fans of the character enjoyed and what DC was presenting them with when showcasing her in Red Hood and the Outlaws.

The thing is, Starfire’s always been a problematic character. Interplanetary ignorance and alien sex appeal are both aspects of what makes her recognizable to fans of all kinds (the other being the warrior princess trope). Her character has historically championed free love, self-love and a refusal to stigmatize nudity, which is fine in and of itself. The problem is that she’s been depicted this way primarily by male writers, although not exclusively. Sex appeal was always a selling point of the “New Teen Titans” comic despite “teen” being in the title. George Perez flaunted both the male and female bodies in issues where the Titans take a day at a pool, spar and hone their fighting skills in a pool, battle to the point of ripped clothes and are generally sexualized in ways DC Comics character had yet to be seen up to that point in the mid-80s. Starfire was and still is generally remembered as the hot alien babe who took Robin the Boy Wonder’s virginity, and this is often played up in the fan discourse bleeding into the published work.

So in reinterpreting the character for the cartoon series, the producers used her fresh alien perspective and positive sense of self to present a character that eschewed negativity. She was less defined by the men and women around her and more by how she saw the world. In “Red Hood and the Outlaws” she was completely defined by how she was used to her male teammates advantage, at least initially (the public backlash to the first issue prompted a backing off on the sex toy aspect). Now in “Starfire”, the main recurring element is how everything she encounters is treated as a bewildering new experience for her.

It would be extremely easy to write Starfire off as untenable and suggest never featuring her in any type of presentation again, but I have to consider the potential audience for this type of character in a best case scenario. The Teen Titans animated series most certainly dumbed her down to a basic archetype, but it ended up being the least harmful. The original character of the 80s was the best of both the cartoon world and the New 52 world, being sexualized just as much as everyone else featured in the series. The only immediate problem is her relation to the men in her life, from being sold into slavery to being forced into a political marriage. Starfire would be best defined on her own in a solo title, so the solution for the current run is to not make her so unbelievably stupid. Degrees of naivety are aspects of her character, but too much of that clashes with common sense.

The central conflict is figuring out how to present a character who can embody several positive qualities without the objectifying narrative of the male gaze. Perhaps you can’t in the superhero genre, despite her book being written and illustrated by female creators, but a sense of relative intelligence shouldn’t be hard to include. There is nothing cute or appealing about a grown woman wandering around in a fog of ignorance in ways which defy logic. If Amanda Conner got rid of the foreigner aspect of the title, what else could she have to work with? Starfire could preach about acceptance of self, love of self and others and maintaining a positive outlook on life. This would undoubtedly clash with the genre the character exists in, but perhaps that’s the key. She doesn’t work well enough in the macho-fueled world of superheroes, so maybe she could be the first female alien Jesus Christ figure, preaching peace and love in ways which recall the original Wonder Woman. This would put her at odds with almost every single character she came across, but that’s the only reasonable solution to properly writing the type of person she generally is. The DCYOU marketing image for the Starfire title reads “She’s an alien warrior trying to find peace…and will fight anyone or anything to get it!”, which has nothing to do with the tone or direction of the book itself. If she however were to interact and present her views to the people of Earth and be put in a position to defend them, it would place her in the role of the protagonist that lends a sense of enlightenment as opposed to ignorance and removes the theme of the human way being the right way that is implicit whenever someone interacts with Starfire’s alien-sense of love and happiness.

I would very much like to see that character, but it doesn’t look like it will happen. For the forseeable future, as in the past, her creators don’t seem to be thinking very hard, and so Starfire is dumb.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Category Archives: Featured