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April 1, 2024

Post-poverty SF: Some Reflections on the Vast Inequality in the Star Wars Universe

Posted by faustusnotes under game reports, Gaming material, Metashit, Movies, RPG cosmology, RPG Systems, Science Fiction, Space Opera | Tags: books, movies, return of the jedi, sci-fi, star wars, stars in my pocket like grains of sand |
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I have been playing Star Wars recently with my regular group, first using the Genesys rules and (since yesterday) using a port of the Coriolis rules, because we’re all sick of Genesys. The Star Wars universe is fun and, like D&D or Lord of the Rings, has that particular positive quality that you can settle into it without knowing anything about it – it just feels familiar. Plus, running around on missions for the Hutts is fun, what could go wrong? However, it is beginning to feel like the Star Wars universe suffers the same problem I have identified with the Harry Potter universe – it is fine so long as it is kept within a very specific and narrow narrative framework but once you try exploring it freely as an adult outside its original confines it falls apart fast. I want to try examining how in particular the Star Wars universe is weird, first from the perspective of the weird inconsistencies in the amount of energy available to its denizens, then through a discussion of how we should interpret the inequality of the rim relative to the core in light of these calculations and what we know of its history, and then through some specific examples of how this affects e.g. energy weapons and the existence and behavior of Hutt space.

How Many Dyson Spheres do You Need?

First let’s do some energy and energy density calculations, and introduce some reference values, by way of setting the context[1]. First, from this Forbes article (?) we can establish that the amount of energy required to destroy a planet like Alderaan is about 2e32 Joules[2]. That is, 2×10^32 Joules. Some quick online searches tell me that the sun outputs 4×10^26 Joules. So the Death Star is, to all intents and purposes, a Dyson Sphere wrapped around an artificially-created star, and because we know from the three original movies what the time frames are, it takes the Empire about 3 years to build one.

From a random and quite wild blog post we can estimate the death star to have a mass of about 2e18 kg, meaning that it has an energy density of an astounding 10^14 Joules per kg, if the whole thing was a giant battery. We will return to this information a little later. Here are some other random bits of information about energy:

The population of the earth consumes about 2×10^20 Joules of energy per year, meaning that if we assume most of that energy is consumed by 100 million rich people, the average energy consumption of the richest societies on earth is about 10^12 Joules in one year
If we assume an X-wing fighter weighs about 20tons, the energy required to accelerate this thing to 10000 x the speed of light (10k C) in one second would be about 10^4x3x10^8x2x10^4 (using energy required as mass times the final speed obtained, i.e. the change in momentum) which is, essentially 6×10^16, let’s say 10^17 Joules
Apparently a star destroyer weighs 40 million tons, which means it would take 10^20 Joules to get to the same speed[3]
A typical nuclear reactor produces a GW of power, which is 10^9 Joules
The original steam engine, the Watt engine, invented 250 years ago, generates 6 horsepower or about 4200 Joules, 4×10^3 Joules. So over 250 years we have improved our energy generation capacity by a factor of a million. But note that nobody in the modern world uses a Watt Engine to do anything!
A modern LIthium-ion battery has an energy density of about 750000 Joules, that is 7.5×10^5 Joules.
A lead-acid car battery has an energy density of about 150000 Joules, which is 1.5×10^5 Joules. I think this means that energy technology has developed much more slowly than energy generation – let’s say at the ln() of the rate of energy generation[4]
The Star Wars galaxy has a population of one hundred quadrillion sentient beings (10^17 people) over 1 billion (10^9) planets. I call bullshit on the latter number, since I’ve seen the map, but let’s go with it
A typical nuclear reactor has a 30-70% energy efficiency, with the rest of the power escaping as waste heat. If this profile applied to the Death Star it would be as hot as the sun, so we have to assume that it has almost perfect efficiency in power generation

So let’s look at how some of those numbers work out. Dividing the energy in the Death Star by the population of the galaxy, we find that every time the Death Star is fired it generates enough energy to enable everyone in the galaxy to have a standard of living 1000 times better than the richest people on earth. During the battle of Yavin the Death Star was fired multiple times. Just to be clear I’m going to put this in quotes:

Every time the Death Star is fired it uses enough energy to maintain the entire sentient population of the galaxy at the standard of living of the richest people on earth for a millenium

So over the 3 years of the original 3 movies the Empire generated and wasted enough energy to maintain the entire population of the galaxy for about five aeons. By way of contrast, the Republic presided over an era of peace for a thousand years.

That’s a lot of energy! Another way to think of this is to imagine that the Death Star has an energy system that is 99.9999999% efficient, that is only 0.0000001% of the energy generated is lost during the firing process. This is obviously necessary, to ensure that the waste heat generated is orders of magnitude less than the temperature of the sun. That number is 10^-8%, or as a decimal, 10^-10. If an enterprising engineer on the Death Star noted this waste, they might be able to tap it, and would thus be able to drain off 10^22 Joules of energy – enough energy to maintain their home planet’s population for 100 years if their planet was as populous as earth. This is very similar to the situation in Harry Potter, where the magical world’s rubbish is valuable enough to muggles that they can use that rubbish to change their entire lives.

Another way to think about the energy differentials involved here is to contemplate the scale of energy required from an X-wing to a star destroyer to the Death Star: we go from 10^16 J for the X-Wing through 10^20 J for the Star Destroyer to 10^32 J for the Death Star, a factor of 10^16. Compare with the ratio of energy generation from the nuclear reactor to the Watt Engine, of 10^6. We are seeing people living in and working with devices with energy density that is so far below that of the peak technology that it is as if people living on earth were using windmills to power every aspect of their lives, as if every day we saw Watt Engines alongside nuclear reactors – but three orders of magnitude greater in difference. More like if there were people living in urban Tokyo who could barely produce fire, while the rest of us cruise by in nuclear-powered cars.

Post-poverty Science Fiction

The implication of this is first and foremost that the Star Wars galaxy has levels of inequality that are staggering by even the worst standards of earth. Every three years the society of Star Wars is able to build a Dyson Sphere wrapped around an artificial sun, and fly it almost instantly to anywhere in the galaxy, where they can casually blow off enough energy to maintain the entire population of the galaxy at elite standards of living for a millenium, but Luke’s Uncle Owen is struggling to get by on Tatooine as a moisture farmer, pawning broken-down droids off of passing Jawa who live in conditions little better than those of a 19th-century gypsy. Tatooine isn’t the only planet where we see this poverty: the forest-moon of Endor, the planet where we first meet Rei, Jah-Jah Binks’s planet, and pretty much every planet we see in Star Wars is living in conditions little better than or a lot worse than a typical rural area in 1970s earth. In a sense this is similar to how there are people in rural Nigeria who have modern smartphones and a TV but no access to modern health care and unreliable electricity. But the difference is that those of us in the Imperial core on earth do not have access to energy sources 10^16 times better than those people living in Nigeria. In fact the World Population Review suggests a maximum of eight-fold difference in energy use between poorest and richest regions (though it has limited data on Africa). The inequality in the Star Wars universe is staggering, so great that is essentially unmeasurable with any meaningful metric.

And it’s not like this is the fault of the Empire, either. We don’t see any evidence anywhere in the first movie that Tatooine is a once-great, super-rich society reduced to poverty by Imperial neglect or mistreatment – in fact in that movie the Empire has only been around a couple of years (a decade?) and the Republic “presided over a thousand years of peace.” All that inequality and ruin on the edge of the empire is the fault of the Republic, and nothing is presented anywhere to suggest otherwise. Now it could be argued that the Empire has been wastefully using resources on building mobile Dyson Spheres for war, which fair enough, but why wasn’t the Republic investing in these backwaters?

They deserved to be overthrown, didn’t they?

How small can a blaster be?

This also has consequences for in-game mechanics, which could be interesting or alarming depending on how you approach the fantastic scale of energy generation in the galaxy. While converting our system to Coriolis rules we have been discussing the damage blasters do, and trying to distinguish between blaster pistols and blaster rifles – Coriolis and Genesys both have low damage settings, which makes it difficult to easily distinguish weapons from one another since a sword might do 2 damage and a dagger 1. But I noticed, based on the scale of these energy values, that the ridiculous energy densities of the machines in the universe suggest that any blaster of any size would contain so much energy that it could effectively disintegrate a human being with a single shot, and the form and function of any blaster pistol or rifle in the universe is essentially aesthetic. Consider the X-wing, which weighs 20,000 kg and can generate 10^16J of energy. That’s 10^12J per kg, and much higher if you look at just the engines. Or a light saber, which can run forever on a battery the size of the palm of your hand with enough energy to cut through steel or humans. There’s no reason to suppose that a blaster pistol and a blaster rifle would have any noticeable difference in damage from each other. The battery required to provide essentially infinite shots of plasma capable of eviscerating a human would probably weigh a gram in the Star Wars galaxy. It’s entirely possible that a blaster rifle that actually had the Cumbersome-3 quality would have enough energy to collapse skyscrapers. I suggested we price blaster pistols and blaster rifles only by damage done, and that the difference between them was that the greater stability of a rifle configuration allows it to fire at longer range and to use the aim action. If we don’t do that then we are essentially working in a setting where our weapons are the equivalent of police in our own world carrying nothing more effective than pebbles, to fight gangsters driving tanks. If you look even superficially at the energies involved in the Star Wars universe you start to notice a lot of things are wrong!

How much effort is too little?

This stupendous inequality also has implications for the entire concept of Hutt space. In the original movies we don’t see any background information about the Hutts, except to know that Jabba is a notorious gangster lording it over at least one section of a backwater desert planet. But in the games (and I assume the broader canon) Hutt space is a sprawling zone of the galaxy that covers a pretty big wedge of the galaxy and spills over onto at least one major trade route (the Corellan route). This is an area that is supposedly only nominally under Imperial control, a situation that existed before the Empire, and is controlled by competing clans of Hutts who are essentially gangsters, who the Empire attempts to cooperate with but has been “unable” or “unwilling” to completely dominate.

But why? Why would an empire that can build two Dyson spheres in three years give a flying fuck what the Hutts think? Why would an empire that can mobilize soldiers from a population of a hundred quadrillion people, deliver them anywhere in the blink of an eye with spaceships that can generate more energy than most planetary economies, let this happen? One of my fellow players suggested that this is because controlling the Hutts is “too much effort”. But what is “too much effort” to a society that can fire off a millenium of luxury energy in a second, an economy so powerful that the waste energy from one of its flagships could fuel the industrial revolutions of a thousand planets? What, they get tired? It would take them a week to invest every planetary HQ of every Hutt clan, and when the leaders had all fled to Nal Shaddaa it would be the work of a couple of minutes to rock up and vapourize all of them. Or, if your Death Star is out of commission, you blockade that planet and wait 3 years to build another one, then rock up and vapourize them.

The mere thought or conception of rebellion is not even possible in a galaxy where your leaders can rock up with a Death Star on a moment’s notice. It’s not like ancient Rome where you get warning that the bastards are coming months ahead, as they cross rivers and ride over mountains. They just turn up, a couple of minutes or hours or days after they left their last system, riding on a Dyson Sphere wrapped around a star that they built, and you have precisely five seconds to pledge your allegiance, hand over the traitors or get turned to cosmic dust. And all you have in reply is the galactic equivalent of a pen knife.

Another argument for the Hutts is that the resources they ship to the empire in exchange for their nominal independence are a reward in and of themselves, but this makes no sense in a galaxy where you can build a Dyson Sphere wrapped around an artificial star, that is a weapon. Who is going to deny you anything? And what could you possibly need? The answer of course is Kyber crystals (which are apparently needed for your artificial stars) but what is an easier way to get them? Collaborating with a large criminal network, or rolling out so much energy and luxury goods that the entire galaxy is 100 million times better off than it was just 3 years ago, and everyone is happy to go along with your plans? If they stopped building star destroyers and Death Stars for just one year they would have so much energy that everyone in the galaxy could live in luxury like the Hutts. Who would be a gangster then? It’s inconceivable that the Hutts have anything the Empire would want that they cannot buy or take.

SF’s imaginary failures

It’s very easy when you are developing visions for new worlds to have them be incoherent and inconsistent on closer inspection. Almost all of them are. But it’s very interesting to me when they are incoherent in a way that suggests either that the fundamental social structure of the world is evil, as in Harry Potter, or the game designers really didn’t know much about how the real world works, as in Feng Shui. In this case the broader Star Wars universe seems to reflect both of these properties – I feel like people who understood how the real world works might have noticed the massive inequalities in their imagined world, and I also think they should have noticed that almost all of the social problems we see in the Star Wars galaxy are the Republic’s fault. Apparently George Lucas envisioned the rebellion as the Vietnamese and the Empire as the USA, but I think that’s a flawed vision since the rebellion is happening within the Empire, while the Vietnam war happened outside it (say what you want about the USA’s many bad geo-political practices, but Vietnam was not part of US territory before they started the war). And the inequality between the USA and Vietnam in the 1960s was not in the same order as the inequality between, say, Tatooine (not part of the rebellion!) and Coruscant in the Star Wars galaxy. In fact I would guess that the inequality between the life of a Roman Patrician and the poorest heathen resident of Britannia just by Hadrian’s Wall would have been smaller than the gap between Admiral Ozzel and Luke Skywalker. George Lucas didn’t have to think about this much, just as he didn’t have to waste much time on the structure of Hutt space, because we just got glimpses of all this stuff, fragmentary visions of a world of good and evil laid out before us as we romped through it. Was Jabba the Hutt even a planetary-level gang boss? Who knows! But once you develop the extended universe you have to figure this out, you have to systematize these ideas. I personally think it would have been much better to have the Hutts not be gangsters overall, not have a concept of Hutt space, and have Jabba the Hutt be a unique gangster in command of a single planet’s underworld, as others of other races are in other isolated parts of the edge of the empire. But no amount of careful world-building can overcome the enormous, staggering inequality at the heart of the galaxy, because it’s there in the original canon.

Better examples of how to handle these problems are shown by Iain M. Banks’s Culture series, or in Firefly. In the Culture series we see a society that might be capable of building a Dyson Sphere (they probably would consider it too trashy a thing to bother with), but they don’t hoard the tech – they distribute all energy and wealth freely to whoever wants it, and nobody lacks for anything except by choice. This is the only logical endpoint for a society that has so much spare energy floating around that it can build its own stars and wrap a Dyson Sphere around them every 3 years[5]. There’s no rebellion from within the Culture because nobody needs anything from anyone, there is no inequality or even money. It’s luxury space communism!

In contrast, Firefly also takes place on the edge of the empire, in outlying colonies living in grinding poverty, lawless planets and systems where gangsters control the lives of poor and desperate people while the elites in the centre look the other way or send punitive expeditions to meddle in the lives of these people on the edge who they see as trouble-makers and scoundrels. But the society of Firefly doesn’t have infinite resources, can’t build Dyson Spheres, doesn’t have the power to blow up planets, in fact can’t even properly run a randomized clinical trial of a happiness drug. There is still inequality but it is believable in its magnitude, exists for explicitly social reasons and is the central friction driving the plot. In contrast, in Star Wars we never really find out why there is a rebellion. They don’t like the Empire, something about freedom etc, but we don’t see anything about the material or political structures underlying this rebellion. All we know is that the location of the secret rebel base is in the hands of a Princess. It kind of stands to reason that there would be staggering inequality in a Republic run by Princesses, doesn’t it? But we don’t get to ask any of those questions.

To be clear, it’s fine to me that this happens in the original three movies, I’m down with the Rebellion as soon as the show starts and I don’t need any motivation to be on Luke’s side, I know how to watch a movie. Blowing up Alderaan confirms for me that the Empire are the bad guys, even though I don’t know what the Republic did to people. That’s okay in the movies, but now my character Dita Voss is doing these jobs for the Hutts and I’m having to figure out why in this galaxy we even have Hutts and gangsters and human trafficking and poverty and contract workers in the shadow of a Dyson Sphere. Once I start exploring the broader galaxy of the expanded universe, and thinking about things like how smuggling works, why the Hutts run this system, why these planets are so poor, who I should really be trying to kill, I begin to run into big inconsistencies in the way it’s all laid out. And given the recency of the Empire, and the obvious persistence of these problems, I am starting to think I need to look further back in time to find someone to blame. And Dita Voss is starting to wonder if there is a Quelchrist Falconer she can turn to, who might have a better plan for the future, in which the Death Stars get turned on all the ruling houses, then melted down into ploughshares.

We will need something, after all, to plough all that blood and bone into the soil of our new utopia, once those distant star lords have been dragged out of their towers of infinite energy and down into the dust beside us.

fn1: A word of warning, it has been 30 years since I studied thermodynamics and electromagnetism so I may confuse some measures of total energy and flow of energy. Be patient with me!

fn2: I think that article suggests we can lower the amount if we assume it uses the planets gravitational dynamics against it, but this is inconsistent with the use of the Death Star’s main weapon in Return of the Jedi to blow up spaceships, which have no meaningful gravitational effects.

fn3: Here I’m assuming no special amount of energy required to break the light barrier or do the weird physics of hyperspeed, and assuming that the punch to light speed takes about a second. I chose 10,000 so that an X-wing can travel about 10 light years in half a day, which is consistent with the amount of time it took the pilots in Episode IV to get to the Death Star from their rebel base. An alternative method is to imagine that the hyperdrive converts their mass to energy and then transfers it, in which case the formula would be mass x 10^16 (E=mc^2, a formula originally identified by Chewbacca); in that case an X-wing requires 10^20 J and a star destroyer 10^24. But note if this is the case that the Death Star would require ~10^34 Joules to enter hyperspeed, which is more than is required to blow up Alderaan and is the energy of 100 million suns. I can’t abide those numbers! But feel free to update the wildness of this post with higher figures for hyperspeed if you want.

fn4: You could argue that this is unreasonable since batteries didn’t exist when the Watt Engine was invented, and that in a galaxy a long way away and a long time ago they just have different battery tech. The light saber certainly seems to suggest so

fn5: And remember, once you’ve built one of these bastards the next one is easier. You now have the energy of a million suns at your disposal in one mobile platform that moves faster than the speed of light, you can do anything, build anything. Need resources? Rock up to an inhabitable planet and turn it to rocks, then send in the mining drones …

September 21, 2022

Why Is Durin a Man?

Posted by faustusnotes under Fantasy, Metashit, Movies, Nerd Culture | Tags: Lord of the Rings, Rings of Power, Tolkien |
[13] Comments

By strange coincidence, everyone in charge was white …

There has been a lot of racist backlash against the decision to cast some non-white characters in the new Lord of the Rings tv series. Tolkien fanboys and fascists (a not very distorted circle on a Venn diagram, it would appear) are very angry that a few new characters – some Harfoots, Durin’s wife, a random elf – have been cast as black or brown-skinned rather than the “fair” skinned characters that Tolkien originally envisaged them as. I’ve already written on here that I think this is a good thing, and a direct confrontation with the worst part of Tolkien’s legacy, his racist theories. But now, as the show starts to get, well, boring, I’ve had more time to think about the composition of the cast, and I think that the people making this show have taken an easy road to diversity and inclusion, which is going to have the unlikely consequence of reproducing the race and sex-based power relations of modern America. I think my disappointment in their decisions and their consequences is best summarized in a simple question: why isn’t Durin IV a woman?

Durin and Disa and the shackles of domestic life

First, let’s consider all the material that has been written about Durin IV (the particular King in the show), from Appendix A of the Lord of the Rings:

There [Durin 1] lived so long that he was known far and wide as Durin the Deathless. Yet in the end he died before the Elder Days had passed, and his tomb was in Khazad-dûm; but his line never failed, and five times an heir was born in his House so like to his Forefather that he received the name of Durin. He was indeed held by the Dwarves to be the Deathless that returned; for they have many strange tales and beliefs concerning themselves and their fate in the world.

This does not specify the sex of Durin, it only uses the generic “he” to refer to all the Durins, of whom there were six. Given that Tolkien refers to all humans as “men”, and it is quite common to refer to mixed collections of men and women by the male pronoun, there’s no particularly strong reason to believe that every Durin “so like to his forefather that he received the name of Durin” had to be a man – there could have been one or two Durins who were female, and Tolkien would probably have referred to them as “he” anyway. This is what Tolkien’s fan-boys and assorted fascist hangers-on would want, they would strongly object to to the use of the “woke” “their” to refer to a mixed group of male and female characters from (for example) the race of “men”. If you think I am being facetious with this, consider the responses by D&D players to this EN World thread about choice of pronouns in D&D, which makes clear (and I remember this!) that AD&D used the masculine pronoun generically, and people responding to the question at the top of the thread include some loser saying anything else is “woke nonsense”. What do you think Tolkien would have done?

Sometimes even elves have to negotiate with the help

Anyway, we are dealing with poetic license here. There is no reason, given how little is written about Durin IV, that he should have been made either male or white skinned in this show: the show-makers chose to go with this decision based on a disputable fragment of a sentence in an appendix, and on the general assumption that no women could be rulers anywhere in Middle Earth (except among the elves). So, Durin IV is a white man, and his wife is a black woman. And what is his wife’s job? She cooks and cleans for him. We know this because there is a quite elegant conversation in episode 4, where Elrond is sitting in Durin’s home while Disa does stuff, and he tries to fool her into revealing where her husband has gone, and it is made very clear that she is waiting at home, minding the kids and cooking his dinner.

So there we have it: white husband black wife, black wife is a housewife. Sure, we see her do some stone-singing later, but it’s clear that she doesn’t have an actual job otherwise – she’s a housewife (she also prepared Durin’s dinner in episode 1, in case it wasn’t clear) who can sing a little when everyone’s desperate. What’s the implication here? Probably it was her job before they got married and she settled down into her domestic role.

This isn’t the only time that we see the gender roles at work in Middle Earth (or Numenor for that matter). Women are cooks, housewives, mothers and cleaners, while men are leaders and fighters. In Numenor in Episode 4 when Elendil calls for warriors to go to Middle Earth we get a general scene of the crowd and only men raise their hands to join the battle. Perhaps we don’t see this division of labour amongst the Harfoots but the Harfoots are essentially comic relief at the moment, and it’s telling to me when the only time gender roles can be reversed is among the comic relief.

What are the consequences of these decisions going to be, in terms of representation? Let’s consider the case of Galadriel.

The consequences of Galadriel’s Whiteness

Galadriel is white in this show, so painfully white she has no lips and limited facial expression. Why is she white? Because in the books we know a lot about Galadriel, and she is definitely described as fair. So the show-makers have decided to stick to the text in this case, and make her a fair-skinned maiden with no lips[1]. Why didn’t they make her black? Is there any reason that any of these characters need to stick to the descriptions in the book, other than fidelity and making them easy to identify? Now that we have established through the presence of Disa and Arondir that canon can be broken as regards skin colour, why not extend this to established characters within the canon?

There’s no reason to do this of course – we could have all the established characters keep their descriptions from the book, and then only make the new characters black or female. That’s a completely defensible choice, really, isn’t it? But what does it mean? It means that Galadriel, Elrond, Gil-Galad, Celebrimbor, Durin, Elendil and Gandalf are going to be white and only subordinate characters are going to be black. All the leaders are going to be white men and their inferiors, servants, wives, maids and sub-alterns will be black.

What an amazing coincidence! In a magical world far away with no rules to bind it, except the long ago text written by a dead English Professor, all the people in charge are male and white, and all the black people are subordinates[2]. Who could have guessed such a circumstance would arise?

This could be solved by making at least one of the major characters black. Why not Gil-Galad or Celebrimbor? Nobody gives a fuck about them! Elrond had a human mother, we could easily run with that. But no, we can’t, we have to be at least that true to the text, but instead of being fully true to the text so that all the housewives and maids and foot soldiers and subordinates are white, now some of them are black. Even Middle-Earth has red-lining, glass ceilings and a black-white pay gap!

So, at this point we are beginning to see how race and sex relations will play out in this supposedly too progressive, overly “woke” show: the leadership will be white men, women will be in the kitchen, and somehow black people will remain servants and followers of white people. If this is how the show plays out it will be, if anything, worse than the books.

Why is it that so many modern American cultural works can conceive of playing around with racial roles but can’t upend the gender conventions underlying so much of US society? And why do all their decisions reproduce current class-, race- and sex-based power relations? Why couldn’t they just have made Durin a woman?

fn1: and apparently no magic and no radiance and not really any ears, since she can disguise herself as a human simply by pulling her hair over her ears…

fn2: Except one! Miriel, who is the queen regent of Numenor, who is an actual character in Tolkien’s world (the Silmarillion I think) and who should be Queen but <em>in the books</em> has her title usurped by a man. This man is not on the scene in the show, and Elendil is about to set sail to Middle Earth (where her usurper husband does it in the books) so it’s entirely possible it will be Miriel, not her usurper husband, who is deceived by Sauron and brings about the ruin of Numenor – so the only black leadership figure in this story is going to be one who is not officially a ruler, but has taken the place in someone’s stead, and who brings about the downfall of a great race. Good choice of character from the books to make black …

September 20, 2022

Everything Everywhere All at Once is Trash pro-Family Propaganda

Posted by faustusnotes under Movies, Reviews, Science Fiction
[37] Comments

Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAO) is a weird “absurdist” science-fiction in which a multiverse-hopping Michelle Yeoh attempts to deal with her family issues while saving the universe from destruction. It was released in 2022, gained plaudits at some random US film festival, and has been making a killing in its public release. It has received generally very good reviews: it got 95% at rotten tomatoes and 81% at metacritic, as well as winning a bunch of awards. It seems to have stirred a lot of passion, with most critics seeing its science fiction as clever and original, its acting as great, and the emotional component of its story as deep and genuine. Of 339 critics on Rotten Tomatoes, for example, only 18 rated it as rotten and many said it was “profound and moving” or “made you think and cry” (see below).

To me it was ordinary SF and trash pro-family propaganda. My review has a few light spoilers, but here instead of dwelling on its failed science fiction I want to talk a little about how much I hate pro-family propaganda in art, and how socially destructive it is.

The premise and the ordinary science fiction

The movie is about an Asian-American family, headed by migrants Evelyn Wang and Waymond Wang, who run a failing laundromat and have a college-age daughter, Joy, who is a lesbian. They have also recently had to bring Evelyn’s father over from their home country (it’s not clear if it’s Malaysia, or one of the provinces of China, but since Evelyn and Waymond speak a mixture of Cantonese and Mandarin it is probably either Guangdong/HK or Malaysia). Granddad is old and sick, and Evelyn is an incredibly stressed, hyper-active, and extremely unpleasant mother, who refuses to engage properly with either her daughter or her husband and is basically an abusive bully. She refuses to respect her daughter’s relationship, calls her girlfriend “he” and then blames this lapse on her bad English (Chinese speakers of English often mix up genders because in Chinese it’s all ta), refuses to tell her father the truth about Joy’s relationship, refuses to listen to any of either her daughter’s or her husband’s concerns, opinions or emotions, and when she appears to be about to be kind to her simply tells her “You’re fat”. She also reacts very badly to any attempts to change or improve the working of the shop, has an incredibly poor management style (for e.g. receipts) and gets angry whenever anyone tries to improve it, but is always stressed about it. She’s a classic manipulative and abusive parent.

When the show starts she is being audited by the tax office, and trying to organize a party for her father. We learn later that she was basically kicked out of home by her father for choosing to marry Waymond, and he has come back to her because his wife (her mother) died and she needs to look after him. Most reviews don’t mention that Waymond is spending the first half of the movie trying to get Evelyn to agree to divorce, but she is so dismissive of her husband that she refuses to make time to talk to him or look at the papers, and only finds out by accident. What a nice mother and wife!

So anyway it turns out that there are infinite multi-verses, and someone who looks exactly like Evelyn’s husband is racing through all of them, at the behest of a parallel-universe version of her father, looking for the specific Evelyn who is best able to fight off an evil being that is attempting to destroy all the multi-verses. This evil being, of course, is a parallel universe version of her daughter, Joy, who is building a singularity thing that will destroy all the universes. Joy’s reason for doing this is that nothing matters, a nihilistic destructive urge that ultimately looks a lot like suicidality, when we get to find out what makes her tick. Eventually the parallel-universe team realize that the Evelyn in our universe is the correct Evelyn to take on Joy, because she’s so hopelessly shit that she must be perfect for the task (this is logic). Because this is “absurdist” SF these alternative universes are full of dumb things like people with sausages for fingers (through which they have sex), a universe where Evelyn is a rock, a universe where she can fight with a pizza sign, etc. By imagining such a universe and pressing a button a special magic headset, Evelyn can go to that universe, grab the skills of the person in that universe, and then use them in this universe. Sometimes this leads to personality swapping and sometimes it doesn’t, because the movie has no rules, and the only useful person Evelyn gets is an alternative universe Evelyn who is basically actual Michelle Yeoh. So she can do some martial arts. Also to jump between universes you need to do something improbable or weird in this one, so chewing discarded gum, sticking a butt-plug up your arse, telling your enemy you love them (and meaning it).

It’s not absurdist, it’s shit. For about 30 minutes it’s funny and then it’s just boring and dumb, with escalating levels of weird as the directors try to milk this for all it’s worth (and it’s a very long movie!) Finally there’s a big, overly long showdown between Evelyn and Joy, during which we somehow learn that useless Waymond (who was trying to divorce his wife) is the hero of the movie, and if we all just be “kind” we can save the world, so Evelyn (who is a horrible person) starts trying to be kind like Waymond, who she now suddenly looks up to and admires, and fighting enemies with (martial arts based) kindness. Then there are long and supposedly moving interchanges between Evelyn and Joy about how Evelyn is a bad mother but Joy should just accept it, because Joy is Evelyn’s daughter. At this point reviewers will tell you that the movie is about how family are the people we really love, and they may not be perfect but we should stick by them and respect them because they’re there when everyone else isn’t, and this is very moving and the way Evelyn tries to draw Joy back is very deep and powerful. Actually Joy is suicidal, and this is because she was raised in a loveless and cruel family, and her belief that everything is pointless and empty is their fault, but the movie wants us to think she should accept them and forgive them anyway.

There is a brief period where Joy returns to her family and they live happily, with Joy and her girlfriend’s relationship being accepted, but Evelyn still telling Joy she is fat and lazy. Which is meant to validate all the battles or something. And Joy and her girl are overjoyed that her mother has accepted them, because this is all the validation they wanted all along.

Fuck that. This is pro-family propaganda, it’s dangerous, it’s wrong, and we should be ditching it from our culture. We can start by not over-hyping shoddy, ordinary SF movies that fail at a multiverse story in order to get us to believe that forgiving and going back to your family is the right thing to do, because it’s not, and anyone who tells you it is is a liar who means you ill.

The dangerous illusion of the “Asian Family” stereotype

Before we go on to discuss pro-family propaganda, let’s just briefly digress to discuss the stereotype of the unforgiving Asian family, the mother and father who never have any flattery or kindness for their kids but only unrelenting demands. American Born Chinese (ABC) commentators and comedians are full of stories about this idea, and would like you to believe that this is some unique trait of Asian families. But here’s the thing: it’s not. My father never had any flattery or kindness for his kids, but he also didn’t ever encourage or demand anything from us. Homer Simpson is based on a real type of Western father, who can’t stand his own kids, doesn’t care to understand them, and always encourages them not to bother being special or seeking to make themselves better. Isn’t that worse? I think some ABC wear the meanness of their family like a badge of honour (look how I suffered) and have turned normal abusive family dynamics into some kind of cultural iconography. It’s not! And to try and make it so at this time is a dangerous tactic. As anti-Asian hate has grown, a lot of ABC journalists and comedians have tried to use these narratives to get onside with white society, to try and weather the backlash. Don’t do it! And don’t laud the depiction of Evelyn in this movie as somehow an especially perfect depiction of a Chinese immigrant family or intergenerational trauma. Her behavior is just bog-standard Arsehole Parent.

For example, the story of Evelyn’s father not being able to accept his granddaughter’s lesbianism is presented by some reviewers and, I think, by Evelyn herself within the movie, as being reflective of his conservative Chinese upbringing. This serves a nice role for the audience, mostly white, to imagine that their own community hasn’t produced this kind of bullshit, but it’s misleading propaganda intended to allay white concerns about white problems. Western men the same age as the grandfather in this movie are just as fucked, don’t pretend it’s because this old dude is Chinese. This is like the classic “if you think it’s racist here, you should see how Japanese treat foreigners!” Actually, I live here, I know how they do, and the west is far worse. White people love telling themselves these little comfortable lies to enable them to pretend their own society isn’t a cesspit. Don’t do it! If there is anything in this world that is Everywhere All at Once, it’s the universal form of arseholery on display in Evelyn and her dad’s personality in this show.

What is pro-family propaganda and why is it bad?

Western movies play many propaganda roles, but two of their deepest and most powerful roles, which are related to each other, are:

To show that sub-standard white men can be heroes and winners, that what goes wrong is never their fault, and that even if you are an ugly, boring, useless whining loser who is propped up by the women and foreigners around you, you are still the hero of your story. Jackson Oz in Zoo, Brandon Stark and John Snow in Game of Thrones, pretty much every male character in a Disney cartoon, and to a certain extent James Holden in The Expanse all play this role.
to remind you that you have an obligation to uphold family loyalty and ties even when your family are cruel, negligent, neglectful and/or openly abusive. The absolute classic canonical example of this is Rick & Morty, in which there is an obvious, openly abusive relationship between the grandfather and the grandchild, the parents don’t care or interfere in the abuse, and the viewer is sucked in as an accomplice to an incredibly abusive relationship. Incidentally a lot of people compare R&M to EEAO, which should tell you all you need to know…

One day I will devote an entire blog post to 1), the “It’s not your fault white man” genre of social reinforcement for boring losers, but a more common theme and a much more destructive one is 2), the idea that you need to stick by your family and get their approval no matter what. Some movies cover both themes (e.g the first Guardian of the Galaxy movie with its obssessive focus on helping a callow dude find his lost mummy) and in American movies the pro-family propaganda saturates almost every production in the form of their ubiquitous daddy issues, but it’s more widespread than just this.

And let’s make no bones about it, this story is destructive. I’ve written before about how we have an obligation to hold our family to account for their misdeeds, but I’ll summarize it again here: The only reason that parents feel that they can treat their children like shit for years is that they know, without any doubt, that their children will stick around and won’t abandon them when they become adults. Most shit parents even have a pretty strong inkling that they can keep treating their adult children like shit, and their adult children will keep coming back and licking that shit up. In contrast, the reason we don’t get away with the same levels of abuse towards our friends (in general) is that we know our friends will cut us loose if we keep that shit up. Similarly, for a lot of us, with partners: people are much more likely to divorce than to cut off their parents.

And how do parents know this? Because they read books, read magazines, and watch TV shows and movies that constantly, over and over, tell us that sticking with our parents is an absolutely essential role for us as adults, that we should tolerate their crap, that it’s the kids who need to bend and adapt not the adults, and that we need to be understanding of our parents’ “shortcomings” (which are actually, generally, just abuse) and accept that they won’t change or adapt for us. Movies about kids shaking off their parents and fucking them off are much, much rarer than movies about the kids struggling to find common ground with their parents and eventually learning to deal with, tolerate, or adapt to their parents’ bullshit. Often in these movies the parents throw out a fig-leaf to the kid – accepting their choice of partner or job or moving to Paris or whatever – but they never, ever admit they were wrong and they don’t usually do anything to change the other suite of awful behaviors they have inflicted for decades on their kids.

This movie is just another example of that propaganda. Joy just has to accept, forgive, and stand by her stupid mother, she gives a wild speech about how her mother has ruined her life and then just … gives up. Evelyn changes nothing about herself and just wins.

If these movies weren’t made, or if they were properly balanced with stories about kids getting their vengeance, kids refusing to seek approval, or even – imagine this – parents seeking out and earning their children’s forgiveness through real changes and growth, then we might see people who become parents understanding that their children’s love for them is conditional on their behavior, rather than unconditional acceptance of their faults, cruelty and violence. Then they might modify their behavior accordingly. But they don’t see any reason to do this because all of society keeps telling them they don’t have to, and keeps telling their children that it’s their responsibility to do all the giving in the relationship.

This movie is just another cog in that machine, and not a very interesting one.

Conclusion

As someone who actually made the decision to cut off my parents and abandon them to wallow in their own bullshit, I get angry when I am forced to watch a movie about 親孝行, about having to respect your parents no matter what. This movie started off looking like an interesting insight into a difficult family, with Michelle Yeoh playing a very convincing unpleasant mother figure who I was waiting to be forced to adapt to her family and the outside world by the SF circumstances. Instead I was betrayed – again – by a movie that recited all the same old pro-family propaganda and gave me the same old nonsense about how parents are good no matter what, and we’ll never find anyone like them.

This propaganda is nonsense, and it’s dangerous. People need to stop making it, and reviewers need to stop pretending it’s “deep” or “profound” or “thoughtful”, and start recognizing it as valorization of abuse, cruelty and arrogance. Please stop making these movies! And if this thing bothers you, don’t waste your time on this movie.

I swear every movie should come with a sticker that tells you if it has daddy issues, pro-family propaganda, copaganda, or military-industrial complex war-porn. Fuck Tipper-stickers, I don’t care about “adult themes” and swearing, I want movies that don’t tell me cops are cool, the US is a force for good, and you should stick by your parents no matter what. We can’t build a better world if everyone believes that their wife-beating ex-marine dad is just a misunderstood guy who is traumatized by murdering foreign babies, and will get better if we just stand by him no matter what he did or what he does.

Don’t stand by that man, and don’t stand by this movie!

September 7, 2022

Initial Reactions to the Rings of Power

Posted by faustusnotes under Fantasy, Movies, Nerd Culture | Tags: Rings of Power, Tolkien |
[12] Comments

Having spent a lot of time writing about Tolkien and racism on here, and having watched fanboys consistently misread Tolkien’s novels in various ways to justify their racist and anti-semitic imagery, I was looking forward to the inevitable backlash at the new Amazon Prime show, the Rings of Power. Being a big Tolkien fan, I was also very interested in seeing the Second Age of Middle-Earth given a big budget cinematic treatment. I have watched the first two episodes, and here are my opinions so far.

The setting is confusing

I know it’s meant to be set in the Second Age, but I don’t think it tells us that, and I don’t think it has done a lot of work establishing a timeline or a sense of the sheer scale of the time over which these events happen. There is no indication (that I recall) that the Trees of Valinor were destroyed in a different Age, or how long it was between the destruction of the Trees and Galadriel’s efforts in Middle-Earth (it also breezes over the kinslaying and exactly what Gally was doing there, but that’s probably for the best). They don’t really even give any clear indication that elves live forever, or of how old Galadriel is. That’s cool, we don’t need tons of exposition, but I think overall it makes the whole setting a little confusing to the uninitiated. This isn’t helped by having three seemingly unconnected stories take place at once in three very different places. I don’t mind, and it’s nice to have a story told without an infodump at the beginning, but I wonder if this is going to come back to bite them later on.

There is pointless conflict

The bit where Galadriel goes almost back to Valinor and then jumps off the boat is dumb and pointless. Yes yes we need to know she is confused and uncertain about whether to stay in Middle-Earth and fight, but sending her all the way across the ocean – especially after we have panned over the map and now how vast that ocean is – is just pointless. Now she has to swim all the way back, which you and I (being among the elite of fandom) know it is possible for an elf to do, but which lots of viewers will just think is dumb. Anyway she is just going to end up on a floating shipwreck where she learns about an orc raid on a community. All of this could have been done on the road to the Grey Havens: she could have changed her mind halfway through, run away into the forest, met the dodgy dude, learnt about his orc issue. Why put it right over near Valinor? This kind of pointless conflict doesn’t advance anything, it just serves to distract us and present a main character with a set of circumstances (looking dumb, swimming across a whole ocean, panicking under worm-attack, having to be rescued) that undermine the character traits so far assembled for her (smart, resolute, brave). I hate it when writers put this kind of pointless conflict into stories. I think we’re going to see more of it too – the rock smashing contest between Durin and Elrond was another example of five minutes of my life I’ll never get back, and it just serves to undermine Durin as a resolute leader. Durin! Also it makes him seem petty and emotional. This kind of pointless conflict almost always makes the characters involved look shallow, petty, indecisive or stupid and usually undermines them to no great end. Drop it!

It’s slow but sumptuous

I like the settings and the scenery, I thought Khazad Dum (and especially Durin’s house) was a really nice vision of dwarven life, and there are lots of grand shots and sweeping beauty. I’m hoping for a grand, expansive view of Middle Earth that takes us to places we’ve never seen before, and I’m hoping for it to do so with some sensitivity to the peoples and lives we may not have seen at all or only peripherally in Tolkien’s story. We’re already seeing things in Rhovanion, which gets largely overlooked in the Lord of the Rings, and “the Southlands” (the bordern of Harad) which is just a nest of bad guys in the stories we all know and love. Seeing things from the perspective of Harfoots or the descendants of Sauron’s servants in Harad adds a bit of richness and depth to Tolkien’s world – a post-colonial interpretation, if you will – and takes us to places we haven’t seen before. I’m looking forward to seeing the creation of Mordor, and I expect that the Rohirrim are going to be really cool if we go there. I hope we see a bit of Harad! So I don’t mind if it’s a little slow, if it shows us some of those things.

But showing us these other sides of Middle Earth – the poor descendants of the humans who fought for Sauron, the survivors of Orc raids, the Harfoots – and attempting to reimagine Tolkien’s world a little has unfortunately opened up an opportunity for the Tolkien Fanboys to align with anti-“woke” culture and outright fascists, to start a seething wall of outrage over the use of non-white actors. So let’s look a little at the central issue that has come up so far – the decisions about race in the show.

The Tolkien and Race Debate Goes Mainstream

The producers have decided to cast non-white actors in all possible races in the show, so we have black actors playing elves, dwarves, and hobbits and the only Orc we have seen so far was white. There’s also apparently some scandal over the decision to show female orcs and dwarves.

First of all I want to say that it is absolutely true that having non-white elves, dwarves or humans is completely throwing out Tolkien’s idea. He wrote these books with a strong racial essentialist ideology, and it was an iron clad rule of his world that darker=more evil. The humans who fought for Sauron were called “dark men” and were created without a sense of good, orcs were dark-skinned and created evil, and Sauron’s primary allies in the human world were black-skinned humans from Harad, or yellow-skinned Easterlings. The Dunlendings were also dark skinned and their colour was even in their name. This isn’t something that’s up for debate as far as I’m concerned: Tolkien wrote this way intentionally, and having a black-skinned elf is a complete rejection of the aesthetic of his races, and the ideology underlying it.

I also think it’s a good thing. This part of Tolkien’s work is explicitly, clearly racist and he says so himself. By having non-white “good” races the producers have rejected the racist ideology underlying the world, and that’s good. For anyone who isn’t familiar with Tolkien’s work and watches it for the first time, it’s not even noticeable – having non-white characters in lead roles or as good guys is becoming increasingly common and in a modern cinematic context dominated by superheroes it’s completely normal. The only people it could possibly annoy are people who are deeply invested in Tolkien’s specific aesthetic linkage between skin colour and morality. These people have ganged together with the fascists and online nazis who see LoTR as a text book for their bullshit racist opinions and are review-bombing it on all the major sites, but they’re wrong and we should proudly tell them they’re wrong. They aren’t wrong about what a change this decision is, but they are wrong about why it matters.

The only problems I can see with this decision to cast non-white actors is that it weakens the distinction between races, in the sense that we can’t tell what makes elves different to humans visually. They don’t even appear to be a different height and they certainly aren’t more beautiful. This is going to mean that unless the writers <em>show</em> us somehow that elves are different to humans – through their super human feats, resistance to cold, etc – the viewer will find it hard to believe that they’re actually not just a weird type of human. This is already a problem with the Harfoots, who until the Stranger appears are not easily conceived of as super short. I don’t think this is going to be a big challenge, but other than this minor detail I think the decision to cast non-white actors in non-human/non-orc racial roles is good. Yes, it’s a break with Tolkien’s original intent and yes, that is a good thing, and we should say so. Middle-earth cleansed of its stupid racial essentialist ideology is better than Middle-earth with it.

Conclusion

I’m not convinced this show is going to be good, I think it could be a little slow and perhaps a bit weak, but it has a lot of potential and I’ll be watching with interest to see how they change the original world building. The decisions they have made so far have been positive interpretations of, or outright changes to, the original work. Let’s give them some time and see what kind of magic they can build up in this world – and ignore the racist losers who want us to slavishly worship a racist 1930s ideal.

April 21, 2020

Understanding Trump’s Popularity Through the Lens of Tiger King

Posted by faustusnotes under Crime Fiction, Movies, Reviews | Tags: politics, Tiger King, USA!USA!USA! |
[21] Comments

I have just had a knee reconstruction and have spent the last 6 days wallowing in self-pity in a hospital bed in Tokyo, completing the last (I hope) uglinesses of three months of body horror (report to come). With little else to do I have resorted to Netflix, and of course I have watched Tiger King. So far I have just finished episode 5 (I was distracted by The Innocence Files, which I strongly recommend), but by the end of Episode 5 I was convinced that the main character of Tiger King, Joe Exotic, is very similar to Trump, and his public and political reception in America is an example of why Trump was not an isolated phenomenon. Americans, I think, have a problem with people with narcissistic personality disorders – too many Americans admire them – and are way too easily fooled by conmen. Here, I will explain why I think Joe Exotic is similar to Trump and what his public reception says about Trump’s rise.

First some basic background. Tiger King is a documentary about these super weird Americans who keep big cats as pets and money-machines, in these weird and horribly shitty rural zoos that should be closed down with extreme prejudice. The story is that it was meant to be a doco about one particularly weird and flamboyant member of this strange society, Joe Exotic, but during the making of the doco Joe tried to get a rival killed and so the whole thing spiraled out of control. I haven’t got to that bit yet, but everything leading up to is pretty disturbing. The main character is Joe Exotic, a gay gun-toting zoo owner from Oklahoma who has two husbands (not legally I guess?), both of whom are straight, and has a menagerie of something like 220 lions and tigers that he shows off to the public in flamboyant performances. He makes a lot of his money from cub petting, in which he takes newborn cubs (before the mother can lick them!) and allows customers to snuggle and play with them, until they reach about 12 weeks old, after which he dumps them in the zoo with the rest of the adults, where they become mostly just a financial burden (so he killed them or trafficked them). His opponent is a woman called Carole Baskin who runs a (rather dubious looking!) animal sanctuary for abused big cats, and has spent years trying to shut down Joe’s operation, including using a sneaky (according to the doco!) copyright trick to force him massively into debt. Rumour has it that Baskin killed her first husband and fed him to a tiger, information the doco does very little to dispute even though it seems pretty obvious that her husband was up to something shonky in Costa Rica and probably got himself killed down there. There are a few other tiger owners – one called Antle who has a sex cult and another who is a dodgy former criminal – and there is a ragtag crew of people who work for Joe Exotic and go to enormous lengths for him (one of these, who apparently was misgendered in the doco, lost an arm to a tiger and kept working for Joe). In his little menagerie-kingdom Joe keeps a lot of guns and explosives (he is clearly not one of those super-rare “responsible gun owners” that his libertarian political campaign manager would have us believe is the norm), meth and pot, and a lot of boys toys. In general Joe treats the tigers badly, and his relationship with his cats is emotionally very hot and cold and is basically transactional. They make him money, and he plays with them, but he doesn’t trust them and he doesn’t particularly seem to respect them.

It should be added that this documentary is really not very objective and although it’s great viewing, as a documentary it’s shit. It obviously has taken Joe Exotic’s side (at least in the first 5 episodes) and doesn’t show much objectivity about its subject at all.

So how is Joe like Trump? Let us count the ways:

He has the same personality disorders: He obviously has narcissistic, antisocial and borderline personality disorders, just like Trump, or as some might put it he has the Dark Triad. His relationships are entirely transactional (he basically buys his straight boyfriend with meth) and everything is all about him. This is most clearly seen at the funeral for his second husband, which he makes all about himself, and the subsequent marriage to his new boyfriend within two months, which he uses to humiliate and break his dead husband’s mother. It’s visible in the way he treats his animals, his insatiable need for fame, the way he treats his staff, and the way every emotion he ever shows is clearly and obviously a performance. He can never be wrong, nothing is ever his fault, and the whole world is out to get him.
He is deeply misogynist: The videos he makes of Carole Baskin are really shocking, and he cannot control himself when he is talking about her. Even when he is running a political campaign he is making campaign videos calling her a bitch and a whore, and on his youtube channel he put videos of her as a sex doll being face-fucked with dildos, and being fed to his cats. He has the same reaction to a woman challenging him as Trump does to female journalists.
He is messy and disorganized and terrible with money: Just like Trump, he is incapable of running or organizing anything, and only gets anything done because a group of strangely loyal misfits jump at his every order and do everything he wants, even when everything he wants is constantly contradictory and changing. He also obviously can barely keep the farm afloat, where a better manager would turn it into a cash-making machine. Whatever money he does get he squanders on bullshit, like meth and trucks for his straight husbands or guns and ammo. This is no clearer than in the stupid brace he wears on his knee for much of the series – he obviously has not got health insurance and hasn’t paid for it for his staff (likely the real reason Saffer chose to have his damaged arm amputated – with no health insurance he could not pay for the reconstruction surgery). He would rather flamboyantly suffer than buy one less truck a year for one of his husbands and pay for health insurance for himself, let alone his crew.
He has dodgy mob connections: He obviously has access to a regular supply of meth, and is able to traffick lions and tigers however he wants, and in the first (?) episode we see him cozying up to a drug dealer who is so shady it’s hard to believe. Not only does he have these dodgy criminal connections, but he also obviously admires them – and they obviously see him as an easy mark.
He is an easy mark: Like most of the senior figures in the GOP, while he is running a long con on his friends, associates and supporters, Joe Exotic is also easily being conned by others. He got done like a dinner by the Kirkham guy, and when Jeff Lowe gets to him he is so easily tricked into giving up control of everything. Trump is the same – this is why he is owned by Russia. The biggest con-artists are also the biggest marks.
He has no interest in truth: He is a classic bullshitter, just like Trump. Whatever he says is true, and if he contradicts himself two days in a row it doesn’t matter because he does not recognize the difference between truth and lies. Words don’t work for him as they do for us.

So of course, just like Trump he runs for political office. First of all he tries the presidential campaign but then failing that he runs for Governor of Oklahoma, with a libertarian (idiot) for a campaign manager and a platform of low regulation. His platform and campaign imagery are so Trumpian – there’s even a scene where he tells some shlubb that if he is elected there will be “someone as broke as you” in charge, trying to market himself as a man of the people. Unlike Trump he doesn’t win, but he does get 18% of the vote. And when people are interviewed about why they will vote for him they give exactly the same reasons as people give for Trump: he’s just like us, he tells it as it is, he’s not politically correct and that’s good, etc. The interviews with his supporters could have just as easily have been at a Trump rally.

Furthermore, his chief enemy (in business, not politics) is so obviously identifiable as a Hillary Clinton-like figure: an older white woman with a real set of goals, who is methodical and prepared and speaks clearly and with intent, who every single media outlet seems to have described with the same adjectives as Clinton – desperate to be liked, unlikable, untrustworthy, etc.

This is the enduring puzzle of American politics. How could an obvious fraud, grifter, gangster, womanizing rapist psychopath like Trump be popular in America? We see the same thing with Joe Exotic: in a Morning Consult poll of 400 viewers of the show he had the second-highest favorability ratings and Carole Baskin had the lowest, and her husband the second lowest – below a libertard gun nut, a tiger-killing narcissist, his meth-head husband, another tiger trader with five “wives” in a sex cult, a rich fraud from Vegas who uses tigers to fuck models (or at least put their pictures on instagram), and another tiger trader who wishes he could learn how to “control women” the way the sex cult dude does. How do Americans judge older white women on a mission to be at the bottom of this pile?

I previously described the Trump campaign as similar to WWF, a giant fraud that all its fans know is a fraud but love anyway. Tiger King is another insight into this strange cultural phenomenon that seems to be unique to America, where people fall easily for frauds and gangsters and love them even after their obvious shonkiness is revealed. There is nothing authentic or real about Joe Exotic – he is a narcissistic, manipulative and vicious bastard who uses people for his own ends, and has never shown a true part of himself in his life – but despite the rest of the world watching this doco and recognizing this immediately, somehow to Americans he is authentic and serious in a way that a softly-spoken older white woman can never be.

America has a problem with grifters, psychopaths and narcissistic frauds. Too many Americans cannot understand when they’re being taken for a ride, and too many Americans enjoy being fleeced. This is the essence of Republican politics – it’s a giant con job played on people who are eager to be fleeced by men the rest of the world would not consider fit to lick our boots. It’s terrifying, and if Americans can’t break out of this strange fugue state and start understanding the way they’re being conned, their country is done for.

December 30, 2019

The Rise of Skywalker: Time to Bury this Travesty of a Once-Great Saga

Posted by faustusnotes under Movies, Nerd Culture, Reviews, Science Fiction, Space Opera | Tags: star wars |
[18] Comments

It’s that time of year again, where I hate -watch the latest Star Wars dump so that you, my dear reader(s), don’t have to. I’m a little late to the party because I was on holiday and had much better things to do with my time than watch a shit movie for this blog[1], so sorry for those of you who already wasted your money on this stinker. This review isn’t going to be quite as expletive-laden as my review of the pile of shit that was The Last Jedi, but that’s because this movie was mostly just disappointing, overblown rubbish, not earth-shatteringly bad.

This review will contain extensive spoilers, so if you really do want to subject yourself to this masochistic annual ritual, don’t read past this paragraph. In this paragraph I present a spoiler-free assessment of the movie, to encourage you to wait until it’s on free-to-air TV. Basically, this movie was boring, insipid and lacking in any real sense of direction. The whole thing was weighed down by all the woeful decisions made in the previous one, and by the ruinous changes to the Star Wars universe that one introduced. It was also weighed down by bad casting decisions made years ago, and by the fact that JJ Abrams is an utterly shit director. It has some nice set pieces but they can’t hold your attention as they should because it’s impossible to bring yourself to care about these people or this story. It’s a washout, and I’m glad the whole sorry travesty has finally come to its ridiculous end.

So now to the part of the review with spoilers.

Why do I care about these people?

The first and biggest problem with this movie – and with so much of modern American cinema, actually – is that I just can’t bring myself to care about any of these people (okay, maybe Chewie and BB8, but no one else). They are just the worst, most boring, most anodyne characters I have seen in an action movie in so long. Sure, Rey is significantly improved from the useless whining loser she was in The Last Jedi, but that just means she has ascended to the level of boring. All the spice in her character in The Force Awakens has been leached out and replaced with, well, with nothing. Finn is a complete waste of space, Rose seems to exist only to worry about Finn (why would she?), there is some old lady who is in a few scenes who kisses another girl who I guess I’m supposed to care about (was she Dorn in the previous one? I can’t tell because these people are so boring that they all look the same). Even the supposedly quirky aliens – like Babadook or whatever the stupid little rat thing was called – are just quirky aliens out of central casting, stereotypes done boringly. Compared to every alien in this movie Ja Ja Binks is a miracle of acting and character development. The cast also acted very poorly – the actors playing Poe Dameron and Rose were super wooden, but everyone was pretty bad – which is really bad when they’re also delivering a bad script in a plot that doesn’t work. Within seconds of coming onscreen for their first introduction every character is reduced to empty nothingness, by a lethal combination of poor script, poor acting and poor character vision. Look at Hux as an example: an Aryan icon giving vaguely meaningful fascist speeches in The Force Awakens gets shot for the most pathetically-acted attempt to lie I have ever seen on screen, an effort that would have made Weasley in the first Harry Potter movie look like the Arch Deceiver himself. And Hux was played by a decent actor! I guess it’s just impossible for them to even give a shit by now, and so why should I?

Poe Dameron needs to die

Poe Dameron was a central problem in The Last Jedi, and he’s absolutely awful in this. I can’t understand why I’m supposed to care about Poe Dameron, or indeed how I can support the Rebel Alliance at all when he’s hanging around it. I would absolutely unleash the Final Order ships on every planet in the universe if it would scrub the universe clean of that man. He’s awful, the worst stereotype of the American jock-hero, with the added crapitude of being absolutely shit at everything he does. In The Last Jedi he single-handedly brought the Rebellion to the edge of ruin, through refusing to behave like a soldier, but somehow in this movie instead of being spaced or fed to the Sarlak in the first scene he is a fucking general, and now everyone has to follow his stupid plans that invariably fail. He – and I guess the director – thinks he’s funny and rogueishly charming but he never does or says a single funny or charming thing, even with the masked chick he just comes across as a sleazy failure (of course we learn that he betrayed and failed his previous gang too). What a piece of shit that character is – and what a piece of shit the director is for assuming we are going to find any fellow-feeling with this worthless scumbag.

The sputtering plot turns

This movie was stupidly long, and a big part of the reason it was stupidly long was that the heroes would be halfway through executing a plan when a fundamental plank of the plan fell apart, so then they have to quickly make another plan to achieve the same objective, and then again, and so on. This meant that a bunch of things happened that just didn’t need to happen, for no apparent reason connected to the overall plot. Or, the heroes would do a thing to achieve a thing, and then something would turn up that meant the goal they achieved was no longer needed. A prime example is the wayfinder, which the heroes spent half the movie looking for just to have Emo Ren smash it, so then Rey just stole his ship. Seems to me like a big chunk of the movie could have been dropped and I could have gotten out of that shitshow about an hour earlier if they hadn’t done that useless quest. Sure I’d have missed the cool scenes on the ruins of the Death Star (just about the only good setting in this movie) and the Big-Haired Black Chick (who I think gave her name only at the end of the movie but I missed it because I was being utterly floored by the sleazy way Lando Calrissian basically made a move on her right there), who was the only cool character in this whole movie. But I’m willing to make the sacrifice if a) this movie can have a bearable length and b) this movie can have a functional plot.

This thing of wasted sacrifices is pretty common in American movies, and it really shits me. The characters spend an hour chasing down an important goal and then it is rendered useless, and I’m meant to somehow maintain a healthy attitude towards the director? The best example of this in history of course is Titanic, where the whole story turns out to have been a complete fucking waste of time. Why would any director think it’s cool to do this to the audience? Ask JJ Abrams I guess because it happened regularly in this movie.

The incredibly stupid plans

I don’t want to sound like a hero or anything, but if I am ever taken captive by a pack of shitstains and held in an impregnable fortress, and you my dear reader(s) are on a mission to save the galaxy, could you maybe consider not putting the entire mission on hold to save my worthless arse? Even if I have somehow managed to graduate to being as charming as Chewie? Just leave me to die and go save the galaxy. Yeah I’ll blame you later, but whatever, you’ll be up to your necks in whatever gender of eager supplicants you want after you become galaxy-saving heroes, and you’ll soon find a way to fuck away the guilt. Don’t do what the idiots in this movie did, and go running to rescue your friend for no reason! And if you do, try to come up with a plan better than “we’ll land in the space ship and start shooting.” That’s not a plan. Oh! Of course Poe Dameron thought of it, so I guess we have to pretend it was a stroke of genius. Just like his plan to take on the largest battle fleet the galaxy has ever seen: take a handful of ships into the middle of the fleet and hope some more will join you later.

Now, it’s perfectly possible to have a movie centred around stupid plans – when you think about it Aliens was a series of increasingly dumb and desperate plans – but it needs to have some other redeeming feature. The original Star Wars movies had fresh ideas and good characters with a tight script, and weren’t exhaustingly long. Here we have boring characters led by an utter shitstain[2], repeatedly fucking up the simplest tasks and taking reckless and irresponsible risks in the middle of a galaxy-threatening event. This is not the recipe to an enjoyable movie!

The power creep

It’s a kind of joke that in each movie the Death Star is bigger than the previous one, and still stupidly easy to blow up, but there is a bigger problem in these movies, that each iteration of the saga we find the ships are bigger, the powers more extensive, and the stakes exponentially higher. We see this power creep in many ways in this movie: the vast Final Order fleet, that just appeared out of nowhere; the sudden revelation that there is a whole planet of Sith; the way that force ghosts can now raise spaceships from the ocean; the use of the Force to, amongst other things, stop spaceships flying or use lightning bolts to wipe out a whole fleet; the deployment of a gun that can kill planets, as ubiquitous now as artillery; the ability of force users now not only to project their image across the galaxy but to interact physically with the location they send their ghost to. It all just keeps escalating, and we the audience get decreasingly emotionally invested in every victory and every defeat. It also seems that with every step in power things also become noticably more fragile: the star destroyers can be blown apart simply by shooting the big planet-killer guns; the bridge of the flagship can be completely destroyed with light artillery; the entire fleet is rendered useless if a single transmitter is knocked out; and so on. There’s no coherence to the power steps, and with each revelation of a new level of power there is a decreasing sense of threat for us the viewers, since we’re so used to everything becoming bigger and nastier, and simultaneously more vulnerable. It’s just puff, useless decoration to hide the fact that there’s nothing underneath the story, nothing to carry the movie.

The problem of hyperspace skipping

So the Final Order have somehow procured a fleet so vast it has enough spaceships to bring every planet in the galaxy to heel, every ship so big and nasty it can kill a planet if the planet doesn’t surrender completely. Very Genghis Khan, much fearsome! Except … there is a super simple way to end this entire strategy. You simply place an old and decrepit ship in orbit of each planet, and when the Final Order ship arrives you just point your ship at it and go into hyperspace. We saw in the Last Jedi that this previously unheard-of strategy enables a small ship to completely destroy a star destroyer. Worse still, these Final Order ships are vulnerable to having their planet-killer guns hit[3], so even a tiny ship capable of hyperspace travel will be sufficient to get the job done – it doesn’t have to be even the size of a Rebel cruiser. We also know that this power move hasn’t been retconned out of the movie, because Poe Dameron uses it in the Millenium Falcon in the first 10 minutes of the movie, to break through an ice wall[4].

So why do I give a fuck about the Final Order fleet, the entire dramatic tension at the centre of this movie? I just don’t care, because in the previous movie these chuckleheads came up with a 100% plot-killing idea that has retroactively fucked the story of every fucking movie in the entire series. What a pack of amateurs.

The stupid rewrites of past decisions

Although JJ Abrams was too stupid to retcon the Hyperspace skip out of his movie, he did make a few efforts to get rid of or explain some of the other dumb-arsed decisions Rian Johnson made, though it didn’t help. We have a training scene where Leia’s Jedi past is explained (spoiler: it isn’t explained, because nothing can explain the awful decision to ruin her character by making her a Jedi); Emo Ren remakes his stupid helmet so he looks even dumber than he did before, like he spilled redbull on his helmet or something; Palpatine is back, because the final confrontation of every trilogy needs a Sith Lord and Rian Johnson stupidly killed Snooky boy back in the last movie; and a few other minor concessions to fandom or to criticisms of some of Rian Johnson’s more bizarre decisions. These just make it seem like the whole trilogy was a dumb dick-swinging contest between directors, and serve to break us out through the fourth wall (though none as badly and awkwardly as the stupid fucking festival of ancestors – see below). They remind us that more than anything else, this is no longer a Saga but a franchise (how I fucking hate that word when it is applied to cultural products), a business whose managing directors have been at odds over the past few years, but which we are now assured has been settled down and is back to sensible business practice. Yuck.

The awful idea of Rey’s parents

I’ve been waiting for the bullshit reveal about who Rey’s parents were and why they matter. It turns out that she is the granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine, because everything in this stupid series has to be some kind of petty family drama, and only rich people matter. So she wasn’t a nobody as told by Emo Ren in the second movie (shock!), so another decision had to be retconned, but whatever. The return of Palpatine was such a dumb idea, and a sign that these writers have no original ideas at all, though I guess it’s better than having a Sith Lord called Snooky Boy, which is the kind of name you give to your dog when it’s being cute, not to a giant force-wielding pscyhopath with very poor recruitment practices. It was also revealed very poorly, and a confusing story revealed quickly with no real sense of meaning or gravity to it. Who cares anyway? It’s been five hours of cinema since we last saw any spark in Rey’s character, so by the time we find out she’s descended from the last good character to die in any of these movies we don’t really care anyway. I think soon after we find this out she dies and gets resurrected by more magic force powers that never used to exist, so it doesn’t really matter. And then at the end of the movie she calls herself Skywalker, probably because the original idea was that she was Luke’s daughter but Rian Johnson fucked all that up. So now this movie also has a completely misleading name – Skywalker died in the last movie and there is no Skywalker to rise, just as the entire second movie was about two Jedi, not the last Jedi. Maybe these guys can’t count, as well as being unable to write.

If Rey’s parents had genuinely been nobodies at least she would have had at least one redeeming feature, but no.

The unseemly arrogance of the Festival of the Ancestors

The first Star Wars movie was released in 1977, and so the entire shabby saga comes to a close here with this shambling boring wreck of a movie in 2019, 42 years later. At one point in this movie our heroes arrive on a planet that is having a festival of ancestors, which only happens every 42 years and is super special and we are told by C3P0[5] is a very rare and important event that we are privileged to see. This is obviously a meta-reference to how this final movie in the trilogy is super important and special and is a festival of the original movie and carries on in its tradition.

Fuck off already, you fuckheads. What an awful, arrogant, stupid and shallow little reference. Everyone involved in making this movie – and the previous one – should hang their heads in shame. You are reprehensible, and you should never be allowed to make another movie.

Conclusion

There are lots of other things wrong with this movie – minor things like how did Lando Calrissian manage to muster up a fleet of thousands of ships from hundreds of star systems in just a couple of hours – but I can’t go exhaustively through all the myriad failings in this and the other recent movies. I think though that it’s enough to say that there are really very few redeeming features in this movie, nothing really to make it worth watching and certainly nothing to salvage the flaming wreckage of this series. The original three movies were fun, charming and exciting, with fresh ideas and a lot of really good acting and writing, but they have been well and truly betrayed by everything that came after them. It’s a shame: the Star Wars universe is rich and diverse and holds a lot of opportunities for good stories, as we saw in Rogue One; but the main story has been wrecked beyond recognition, and all the charm of the original vision has been buried under a mound of bullshit. There is nothing left in this series, and every additional movie is just going to further poison the already much-corrupted legacy of its original stories. Disney need to take this franchise (oh how I hate using that word to refer to cultural product) out the back of the studios and put a bullet in its head. The best option for this decrepit old series now is a quick and painless death, before any other creepy Hollywood Directors further abuse its corpus.

I won’t be watching any more of the main series, and I recommend you do the same. These directors have ruined a once great thing, and they will probably continue to do so. But we don’t have to help them do it.

fn1: For example, reading shitty economic “mathematics” on the plane, in preparation for a post on the disaster that is “analysis” in mathematical economics, oh I do have such a fun life!

fn2: How did Poe get to be leader, btw? Leia was in charge in the second movie, and now suddenly this idiot is running the show. If ever there was a model for a shitty white man failing up, Poe is it.

fn3: Somewhat tragically, these guns hang under the ship like a massive cock, so it’s exactly like kicking the ship in the balls.

fn4: Apparently this strategy destroys Rebel cruisers but barely scratches the Falcon, who knew?

fn5: Who, fair play, is mildly enjoyable in this movie, especially after he loses his memory

November 4, 2019

“Tasukete!”: The Japanese Warnings in The Exorcist

Posted by faustusnotes under Horror, Japan, Movies
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On the weekend I watched the Director’s cut of the Exorcist for the second time in my life. I think I previously watched this version back in the 2000s when it was first released, and it remains impressive on a second viewing, though the special effects let it down a little. It is creepy, nasty, disturbing and ultimately also a beautiful story about one man losing his faith and purpose and finding it again at the last. Fundamentally I think it’s a very christian movie, which revels in the rituals and imagery of the Catholic church and ultimately redeems that church in the face of a deep evil that only the Catholic church is able to understand. Reading William Peter Blatty’s wikipedia, it appears he was a devout Catholic who remained committed to his religion until his death, so it seems likely that he wrote this book with the intention that it was a paean to Catholic tradition, and I think it does this job very well.

There is a lot of careful attention to detail in this movie, which I think is intended both to ground it in the ordinary life experience of people at the time, and also to enhance its creepiness, and a lot of that detail was added into the director’s cut. For example, the coffee conversation between the detective and Chris MacNeil (Regan’s mother) was added in the director’s cut, and in this conversation we see that Regan made the clay statuette that the detective found at the base of the steps. The sets are also very rich, so that for example Father Karras’s little room or his mother’s shabby apartment are full of tiny details about his life that serve to make him seem very normal and to place his class background, his history and educational achievements. This movie is very richly and carefully prepared.

This time when I watched the movie I noticed this detail at its scary best in the language lab scene. This scene was apparently added in the 2000 DVD release along with the coffee scene and the upside-down crabwalk down the stairs. In the language lab scene Karras is listening to the recording he took of Regan when he threw “holy” water on her. He sits in a booth in the language lab, and behind him at the back of the room is a doorway to an office of some kind. The only sources of light in the room are Karras’s listening booth, and the light from that office. Above the door of that office the word “Tasukete!” is written in red on white butcher paper. There are other similar banners in other parts of the room but this is the most obvious and the only one easily read during the brief moment of the scene.

“Tasukete” means “Help me!” in Japanese. It’s an imperative, a demand for help. If you look around the room in the picture above you will see that the other banners in the room are written in whatever the native script of the language is, so presumably are not readable for the vast majority of the movie’s intended audience. Only this one piece of script is transliterated into roman characters that the audience can read, and this is in the place where the reader’s eye is drawn. It seems quite clear that this writing is intended to be read by the viewer.

In the very next scene, Karras is called by Sharon, Chris MacNeil’s live-in assistant, and rushed to the house to see a new phenomenon in Regan’s degeneration. Sharon pulls back Regan’s pyjamas and we see the words “Help me” emerge from the skin on Regan’s belly. The very next scene! These are obviously linked. The director put a Japanese cry for help in a form the viewer could read, before seguing immediately to an English plea for help from Regan herself. He did this in the era before google, when no one could look it up – likely 99.9% of people who saw the movie on its release would never have understood that moment, but he put it in anyway.

But there is another Japanese banner in that language lab. I haven’t been able to find anything about it online, but on the top left of the screen there is a banner written in Swedish, which seems completely normal (the last word is the Swedish for Swedish, so I guess it’s not a special phrase). Beneath it is a short imprecation in Japanese, with two kanji and some hiragana. It’s very hard to see, and the first kanji in particular is impossible to read, but the second one appears to be 惧, a kanji for terror. Writing the first unreadable kanji as a hyphen, it appears to say -u yori osoreyo!, which could be loosely translated as “rather than doing (something), be afraid!” or, more bluntly, “terror over (something)!” I think the first kanji is either osou (襲う, to attack) or 救う (sukuu, to save). So it is either “Terror over salvation!” or “Don’t fight, be afraid!” That’s a very apt warning for Damian Karras given how this movie ends, but it is too subtle for him to understand – no one in this story can read Japanese. So why is it there?

I cannot find anything in the history of any of the people who made this movie which suggests that they had any connection to Japan, and at the time that this movie was made I don’t think Japan was very much in the conscious of Americans – fear about Japanese influence in the west started in the early 1980s, and is best reflected in later movies like Die Hard or Big Trouble in Little Tokyo, and most obviously heralded by Bladerunner (1982). This Japanese is in this movie 10 years before Japan became a common aesthetic influence on Hollywood. So why is it there? And what is the writing on the right hand side wall? It might be radicals for kanji, or perhaps it’s some other writing system I know nothing about.

If only Father Karras had heeded that warning on that banner, this movie might have ended very differently …

October 7, 2019

The Sad Decline of the American Action Movie

Posted by faustusnotes under Art, Metashit, Movies, Nerd Culture, Reviews
[7] Comments

Fucking muppets!

I have spent the last 4 weeks on a series of fairly demanding business trips to two continents, and since I am bound by the tyranny of miles to a single airline I have been forced to watch movies on only one channel during the flights. This has been really challenging because aside from the enjoyable John Wick 3 the only action movies on offer have been super hero movies, and derivative schlock from other series (like Godzilla). Here I give my brief thoughts on the movies I watched, and ask some questions about the terrible decline of the modern action movie.

X-Men: Apocalypse

I can’t believe how ordinary this movie is. Does it even have a plot or a purpose? The acting is terrible and the entire cast of mutants is boring and shallow, with no possible reason for me to care about them. As a movie it only holds you because there are some other movies in the same series and you need to see what they do – but since I haven’t seen any other movies in the series I really can’t feel anything for these characters and can’t be led to even understand why they bother turning up. There are some good actors in this movie but you wouldn’t know it. This movie also has one of the most execrable scenes in modern cinematic history which is also one of the most execrable plot hooks in human history, and which is performed so poorly by Michael Fassbender that the depth of its depravity almost slips by you through the power of its banality. I am, of course, talking about the scene where a dude called Apocalypse tries to convince a Jewish concentration camp survivor to join in with his plan for genocide by having him destroy Auschwitz. There’s something really wrong about watching a fictitious character destroy the Auschwitz memorial – it’s just so horribly wrong – but to do so as part of a scheme to enlist a genocide survivor as a genocide perpetrator is really … well, it’s a chef’s kiss moment in modern cinema, isn’t it? But it’s all done so badly that you almost don’t realize how terrible it is until you wake up from the stupor this movie has sunk you into and realize what you’re being tricked into nodding along to. I gave the movie perhaps 20 minutes after that pearler but it didn’t offer anything remotely interesting, so I gave up and decided that staring at the ceiling of the plane was a better use of my time.

Deadpool 2

Deadpool 2 isn’t bad – at least I managed to finish it – but it’s a really lame and weak follow up to the freshness of the original. Standing on its own as a piss-take of super hero movies, Deadpool is entertaining and creative, but as a series in its own right it has nothing to hold it together. Deadpool’s smut and the particular conceit of his humour gets old fast, and watching Deadpool 2 I realized that the original movie was good primarily for its freshness in what is otherwise a stale, juvenile and worn out genre. Since Deadpool was made this genre has gone from needing a healthy dose of satire to needing a bullet, and is such a weak and overworked formula that satire no longer works. Indeed, when you look at the poor mixture of humour and pathos in Avengers: Infinity War you realize that the genre has been satirizing itself accidentally for quite some time now, and satire doesn’t work any more.

Avengers: Endgame

I hate-watched this after reviewing the awful sack of shit that was Infinity War, and had such low expectations after that wretched abomination that I was pleasantly surprised by the movie’s failure to be abysmally awful. It was, however, too long and way too boring, and it ended exactly as I expected: with the universe being saved by a rich white guy (what are the chances!) Plot spoiler folks: our world is not going to be saved by a rich white guy, and the fantasy of the rich white dude who does good has got old fast. The movie still had so many bad points that it was almost unwatchable, but I struggled through so I could see how this horrible shitshow ends (or, rather, restarts). I still didn’t know (or care) who most of these boring, caricatured white people were. Hulk was, if anything, worse than he was in Infinity War, transformed from a metaphor for erectile dysfunction into a sad mocking image of middle-aged ennui. Iron Man had lost his last redeeming feature (his sense of humour, which had already grown old and tired) and was now just annoying. Black Widow at least had a speaking part, though the rush between her and the other dude to kill themselves was just pathetic – neither of them are of any use to anyone, so why didn’t they just toss a coin? And why did they undo the extinction of half the universe anyway? Wiping out half of all life in the universe seems like a bargain if it will get rid of spiderman and space douche in the process. Why bring them back? I mean I know you love your mother and you’re sad she’s dead but five minutes in a room with either spiderman or space douche and you’d kill your own mother to escape. So why on earth would anyone bring them back, and are we meant to really believe that this cast of nobodies is sad about the deaths of their colleagues, who were the most forgettable characters in cinematic history? I’m surprised they could even remember who they used to work with, let alone want them back (I still don’t know the names of most of these incompetents, let alone work myself up into any kind of sweat as to whether they might die or not). This movie also went on a walk through about 8 other Marvel movies, as a reminder that by now these movies are so self-referential and self-involved that you have to do 20 hours of homework through the back catalogue just to understand what’s going on in multiple scenes. What was that shit between Thor and the blonde chicks? I get the impression one was his mother, who he used to live with and see daily, who didn’t notice that apparently overnight he had turned into a fat stoner. How’s that for a maternal bond! (Also Thor was one of the few redeeming features of Infinity War so of course they ruined him in this movie). I guess I should be happy that this entire tired story got a resolution but given that the final scene is just all these people getting back to more adventures it seems like more of a sigh of exhaustion than of relief.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Apparently this is a thing now, with multiple Godzilla movies, which are also somehow linked to King Kong because why not? Also it has this novel plot idea that the beasts are dangerous but some people think they’re part of the natural order and we should try to co-exist with them which is definitely not at all an idea that was old when Jaws was made, and we definitely need to sit through those debates again, especially when they’re done by people who could only be loosely described as “actors”. In this one there are bad guys who are actually environmentalists who want to wake up all these giant monsters to restore the balance of the earth (read: wipe out humans). Because absolutely, definitely, as the world slides into climate crisis and multiple environmental disasters that the environmental movement has been trying to warn us about for 60 years what we absolutely, definitely need are more movies where the end of the world is the environmentalists’ fault and the good people in the government have to fight them to stop them wiping out humanity. Definitely that’s a message we need right now! I would tell you what the moral of the story was but I stopped halfway through because the movie was so pathetic, the action scenes so contrived, and the plot so silly that I just gave up. This movie included Charles Dance and the chick who was Eleven in Stranger Things but even they couldn’t rescue this junk.

Men In Black: International

Boring daddy issues that can’t figure out if they’re serious or a joke, no appreciable plot and the worst acting since Liam Neeson apologized for his racism.

What’s going on with American action movies?

Looking at the menu of the plane’s entertainment system was depressing: just a long chain of superhero movies, with a couple of remakes and a few sequels. There was almost nothing original on the screen at all, and if you wanted to watch something original you would have to look outside the action movie genre. I’m now writing this in the same week that Martin Scorsese derided superhero movies as “theme park junk” and I have to agree with him[1]: action movies were once a great part of Hollywood, but in recent years they have degenerated to the point where they are reliably the worst. They’re just an endless series of rehashed super hero movies, which can be best characterized as second rate pro wrestling, with a scattering of other “franchises”[2] like Men In Black, Star Wars, Batman, or – god forbid – Rambo. There’s nothing original in this at all, it’s just microwaved kara age for the soul. There are even remakes of great movies (like Death Wish, the remake of which was abominable). I think the last original action movie I saw was Atomic Blonde, which was genuinely brilliant but what three years ago now? Since then it’s been spandex as far as the eye can see.

I don’t know why this is happening – why people pay to watch this junk, or what kind of business model the production companies are running that requires them to return to this artistically and culturally desolate fare rather than doing anything original. The best I can think is that it’s the cinematic equivalent of outsourcing risk. They’re guaranteed to be able to make these movies easily and on time, since the plots don’t matter and there are so many characters in your average super hero movie that plot is almost superfluous, and you pay for the movie before you see it so by the time you realize it’s shit it’s too late. I can’t think of any other reason for why people would make super hero movies at all: the original material by Stan Lee is just obviously low-rent, juvenile crap for teenage boys in the 1960s and it is laughably bad, so why would anyone think to draw on it for a movie? Recall that Stan Lee’s material – all the American comic legends – for years followed the Comic Code Alliance, which is a recipe for transparently nationalist and vapid material, and although Stan Lee is said to have broken with this[3] in 1971, this is just post hoc valorization. American comic books were drek for decades, and building a successful movie series on them is going to necessarily require dipping into some of the most juvenile trash that has ever been written down on paper.

Which is fine if these are occasional movies, but the cinematic landscape has been dominated by what is essentially adolescent drivel for the past 10 years. There are now something like 20 Marvel movies, almost all of them shit, and a similar number of DC Comics movies in probably just the past 10 years (apparently there are 71 in total). This is not including the awful TV shows that have now almost all been cancelled because they are so bad. Why has American cinema been overwhelmed by this flood of movies from the same universe about the same characters? And why this universe and these characters, which are specifically and particularly so stunningly low quality?

I don’t have an answer for this, although I suspect it lies somewhere in the toxic witch’s brew of American pop culture’s growing venality, the terrible education system in the US, concentration of American media in the hands of a very small number of companies, and the complete intellectual and artistic emptiness of the money men in those companies. But it’s a depressing turn for American culture to take, because for a long time America was a reliable producer of good quality, exciting and enjoyable action movies. But that industry – the industry that brought us movies like The Last of the Mohicans, Jaws, the original three Star Wars movies, Aliens, Blackhawk Down and Bladerunner – appears to have shriveled and died, and come back as a zombie monstrosity that just lurches from movie to movie, slowly eating our brains.

Someone needs to chop its head off, before the entirety of western cinema culture becomes an empty wasteland.

fn1: Overall Scorsese seems like a man of vulgar tastes, since he seems to think that the only real movies are movies where a young woman falls in love with an older man (or as he puts it, “human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being”), and he seems to think anything where things blow up or people die isn’t real film, so he’s obviously basically wrong. (I mean, if you want to experience “human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being” you could hang out with your family, or read a book – cinema is definitely not the best place to experience that!) But in this case he is just by pure good fortune correct: this is theme park junk.

fn2: I fucking hate this word when it’s applied to movies or games but when you’re talking about super hero movies or these other long-running bullshit series like Star Wars you’re basically using the right word. They’re the McDonalds of cinema.

fn3: Incidentally, check out the quote of Stan Lee in the linked article. My god, what a prat he must have been.

May 21, 2019

Game of Thrones Comes to its Catastrophic and Pathetic End

Posted by faustusnotes under Fantasy, Movies, Nerd Culture, Reviews | Tags: game of thrones |
[7] Comments

[Spoilers below obviously]

In 2016 a journalist reported that voting machines of a county in Florida had been hacked by the Russians, in support of electing to the highest office in the land an unqualified and useless white man who has never achieved anything. Other media outlets, right-wing agitators and partisans jumped on this and dismissed it, burying the story completely. In 2019 we discovered it was actually two counties, and the Florida governor has signed an NDA while the FBI investigate. In 2016 Barack Obama tried to organize a coordinated statement from political leaders on Russian interference in the election, but Mitch McConnell refused to support it and threatened to oppose it, in service of electing to the highest office in the land an unqualified and useless white man who has never achieved anything.

In 2018 the producers and writers of Game of Thrones had their Mary Sue, Tyrion Lannister, give a speech about the power of stories, and about how evil men cannot kill a story, in support of electing to the highest office in the land an unqualified and useless white man who has never achieved anything.

Do they think we’re fucking stupid? Or are they, in fact, fucking stupid?

Jon Snow Completes the show’s murderous and misogynist arc

Until this season, to the best of my recollection, Jon Snow had not murdered any women in cold blood, and hadn’t killed his own lover in a passionate embrace. I guess the show-runners wanted to make sure that he got to share in the fundamental misogynist spirit of the thing, so gave him the chance to murder his own lover in cold blood and made sure it was the crowning moment in the entire 8 seasons of this shitshow. Remember Jon Snow has been turned into this show’s liberal conscience over the past 8 seasons, so in doing this they made their modern, liberal audience complicit in this final act of spite.

They also had Tyrion complicit in it, because the misogyny of this show has always been a conscious conspiracy by the male characters (with people like Littlefinger and Varys explaining this with bored exasperation to the female characters who hadn’t figured it out). Tyrion egged Jon Snow on to do it, and what were his reasons? Listen to him lay them out: he reels off a long list of all the bad men Danaerys has killed and all the good people she has liberated, and suggests Jon and Tyrion and the bad men of Westeros might be next. Yes, Danaerys killed slavers and murderers and rich exploitative bastards and every man who harboured resentment towards her in his heart. Clearly she was going to have a field day in Westeros! So better that the show’s liberal conscience kill her off before she gets to work. #notallmen amirite?

The show betrays its own grimdark history

I have watched over 8 seasons as the people of this show go through a vicious and cruel exploration of the grimdark genre which, I have argued before, has nothing in common with the reality of mediaeval history and is really just the show-runners’ fantasy of how they would act if they had no legal restraints on the murderous power of their cocks. One element of this grimdark fantasy’s over-the-top bloodthirstiness is its heroes love of murdering prisoners, and the gleeful abandon with which they wander through the battlefield putting their vanquished foes to the sword. This has been standard practice of all the armies of Westeros since the beginning, including the good guys. Jon Snow certainly had no problem with it when he defeated the wildlings north of the wall, or after the battle of the bastards. He didn’t complain when Sansa had the captured leader of his enemies eaten alive by his own dogs.

But when Danaerys and her foreign horde do it, the men who have been running people through with impunity for 8 years develop a sudden case of the Geneva Conventions. Suddenly the show would have us believe that its gentlemen are really gentlemen, and if any one of these other leaders got astride a dragon in a time of war they wouldn’t burn a city to the ground. They’ve been more than happy to have their soldiers run rampage through vanquished cities for the last 8 years and suddenly they get the willies. It does seem like the show has softened this season, as they have attempted to make some of the characters more relatable to the liberal US audience watching it, but this is a problem. For 8 seasons we have understood that the spoils go to the victor. We accepted Danaerys’s Dothraki horde raping and looting their way through every town they conquered and we understood that powerful men get to choose who and what and how they fuck. There was nothing in all the abuse Sansa experienced that was incongruous in its time or place, and only its brutality was unusual. We appreciated that when the Hound killed those dudes talking about Arya as a chicken it wasn’t because their conversation was in any way wrong in the context of this world; it’s just that the Hound didn’t want them to do it to his friend. But if we carry this to its logical conclusion then whoever ascends the Iron Throne is going to murder their way there, and treat the city – and all the seven kingdoms – like their property. Given that the only people left standing are the liberal crowd pleasers, this is going to be a little on the nose for many of the fans. So the show had to take a liberal turn to not end up with one of the most repellent endings in cinematic history. But to me this is a massive disappointment. Don’t throw this gory shit at me for 7 seasons and genuinely revel in it then suddenly get squeamish at the last. Show the courage of your convictions and have the eventual ruler burn, stab, rape and murder their way to the top. Dispense the summary justice and vengeance we should expect! Even Cersei’s death was a cop out here: we all know that if this show were sticking true to its roots she and Jaime would have been captured and she would have been handed around to the people of King’s Landing to be used before her eventual bitter end.

I didn’t sit through the red wedding to see this piss-weak cop out of an ending. If you’re going to commit to this level of grimdark, see it through.

Does everyone in Westeros have their own weather?

I tried to focus on the stupid scene where Tyrione is allowed to choose the next king by a suddenly piss-weak Grey Worm, but I kept looking at the costumes and thinking what is wrong with these people? All the northerners were dressed like they were on a mission beyond the wall, while the southern dandies were in the mediaeval version of shorts and a t-shirt – on a sunny day in the south! What’s going on here? Does every noble in Westeros have the power to set up their own personal environmental zone? Shouldn’t the northerners be sweating like Brits? This whole scene was some of the worst story-telling I have seen in modern tv but still, couldn’t they at least have got the costumes right?

(Incidentally and relatedly – as time goes on in this show I have become more and more convinced that the Northerners are a bunch of insufferable prigs. Turning up to a meeting in the sunny south wearing your best arctic weather gear and sitting like you have a stick up your arse Sansa is the epitome of the kind of inflexible prudery that makes them Westeros’s eternal losers).

Pulling the teeth of all the most dangerous people

I think I’m not alone in wondering what the actual fuck was up Grey Worm’s arse in the second half of this episode. Or Drogon’s, for that matter. Or Arya’s. Or Sansa’s two episodes earlier. Over the past 3 episodes we have seen Sansa retreat to the basement at the first sign of trouble, we have seen Arya go from monster-slayer to pissy girl who forgot how to change her face, and finally in this episode we see Drogon just give up on the whole thing and piss off once his mother dies. WTF? Since when do dragons just chuck a bit of side-eye and run away after someone kills their mother? Worse still, Drogon shows enough intelligence to know that Danaerys’s quest for the throne was her undoing, but not enough to figure out that the dude holding her body killed her, even though the knife that smells like him is sticking out of her chest. Why didn’t Drogon burn Jon Snow, the tower, the city, and all the rest of humanity? Oh because he’s a dragon and they’re renowned pacifists? This is just pathetic.

Similarly with Grey Worm, who goes from being willing to kill all his allies in order to get vengeance on a couple of captives, to handing Tyrion over to what are effectively his enemies, making some weak mewling pleas for justice, then allowing his prisoner to speak, choose a king of all the 7 kingdoms, and then get himself pardoned. The Unsullied have gone from an unstoppable force with iron commitment to their queen, to a bunch of pussies who give up as soon as some white people ask them nicely. Similarly the Dothraki, who in the last scenes are depicted walking along the docks past Jon Snow – the man who murdered their queen – and ignoring him affably.

Basically every opponent of the entitled white men in this story – and in particular every rival to Jon Snow’s attentions as the Most Important Character – has been completely disempowered in this season, their motivations, powers and murderous ethics all melting in the southern sun so that Jon can come out as the reluctant hero. This is weak.

Tyrion fails up

Tyrion has been a failure for multiple seasons. Basically every piece of advice he has given Danaerys has been wrong. She could have captured King’s Landing first with three dragons, burnt Cersei alive, raised a huge army, waited for the army of the dead to come to the south, burnt them all to a crisp with her three dragons, presented herself to all of humanity as their savior, and then replaced all the kings of all seven kingdoms with her handpicked allies. But because of Tyrion’s advice she lost a dragon on a stupid mission to the north that just led to her fooling herself into thinking she had an ally she didn’t; she gave that treacherous ally time to build dragon-killing machines that took out her second dragon; and she lost her best friend in the process. Then Tyrion helped her enemy escape which ensured that she didn’t get to flamegrill Cersei, the woman in all of human history who most deserves a flame grilling, and almost allowed a claimant to the throne to escape alive and foment insurrection. And finally Tyrion managed to convince her lover to kill her (not a hard job since Jon Snow is such a piss-weak loser of a human, and in this show the boys will always prioritize their misogynist conspiracy over a worthy woman). Anyone looking at Tyrion’s history of bad advice would probably think that he’s not a good person to listen to.

So of course when he proposed Bran as king they all agreed. Bran, the most useless person in all the useless people in this show. Bran, who has no experience of leadership, no experience of battle, no significant education, no identifiable character traits, and no evidence of any ability to think or plan. Bran, whose sole contribution to the progress of the story – in fact the only way in which he has materially affected any human being in 8 seasons – was to break Hodor’s mind in a desperate defense that was revealed to have been completely futile within a couple of minutes of it happening. This man is the person who was recommended to the council of Entitled Fuckwits as the next leader. And what new system has Tyrion introduced them all to with his shitty speech? An elected monarchy? I’m sure that will last the test of time!

And after that, with all his evidence of dangerous and useless advice, Tyrion was appointed hand to this useless man. Has anyone ever failed their way to a loftier position than this pair of idiots? This show is like an object lesson in the value of being a rich white failson. Even Jon Snow, whose repeated failings led ultimately to the destruction of much of the northern population and the sacking of King’s Landing, manages to escape justice for murder and then once assigned to the Nights Watch is seen, at the end, just skipping out on those obligations to go and fuck wildlings beyond the wall without a care in the world.

This show should be renamed Rich White Kids Can’t Fail.

Winter’s waning as the final insult

At the end of the show, as we see Jon Snow skipping out on his punishment that Grey Worm meekly agreed to and heading north of the wall to find, fuck and fail another Ygrit (who had the clearest judgment of his character, though for some reason she still fucked him) we see the first budding shoots of spring. This really pissed me off. For 8 seasons we have watched this show on the fundamental understanding that winter in Westeros is unpredictable, long, and horrible. It has been made clear to us that winter doesn’t just come because the Night King brings it, but that it comes randomly for its own reasons, and the Night King has not had anything to do with its coming for so long that nobody believes in him anymore – Cersei had to see a wight with her own eyes to believe he was even real, remember. We were told repeatedly that this coming winter would be longer and harsher than those recorded in long memory, and led to believe that this is why the Night King has been raised up and why he is using it to his advantage. Yet here, barely a couple of months after the Night King dies and so only perhaps an actual earth season since winter reached Winterfell, we see it is already receding.

This is utter bullshit and it is the perfect, final example of how the writers of this show betrayed all its fundamental principles in order to tie it together into a nice, trite package that reassures us that the system must stay the same, nothing must ever change, and white men must win. It’s pathetic, weak writing and the end of this show was a catastrophe.

March 26, 2019

The Expanse’s Belters: Marxist Post-colonial World-building at its Best

Posted by faustusnotes under Movies, Science Fiction | Tags: colonialism, The Expanse |
[13] Comments

I have just finished season 3 of The Expanse, the near-future science fiction series based on the books by James S.A. Corey, and although some aspects of the ending of season 3 were disappointing I have been really enjoying this show. There’s a lot to like about it – the setting itself, the aesthetic, the fundamentals of the inter-system conflict, the main characters, the ideologies at the centre of the conflicts, and the plot are all excellent aspects of this show – but for me the thing that really stands out, the thing that has kept me really strongly engaged with this show is the Belters and their culture. I think it is the best example of how to build a synthetic culture that I have seen in science fiction or fantasy for a long, long time, and the Belters present a rich and detailed culture that serves to reflect ideas and ideologies from our real world, while also standing alone as a fascinating, rich and deep vision of a culture all of its own. The Belters feel simultaneously very alien, like a society raised in space 500 years in our future and yet also viscerally close to us, as if they had sprung straight from the present to taunt us with visions of our own failings. Even their invented language is simultaneously alien and yet so close you feel that you can understand it without subtitles.

The Belters are a culture defined by both the harsh environment of their upbringing, and their political struggle for rights and freedom. The broad parameters of their political struggle are very much like something we would have seen in the colonial era on earth: a people born and raised on a land they don’t own, who yearn to liberate that land from its distant owners but who have to work for those owners in harsh and unrelenting conditions. They are dependent on those distant overlords for much of their technology and supplies, just as surely as the Indians or Irish were forced into dependency on their colonial masters by a deliberate program of economic and industrial destruction. Their liberation struggle aims to free them from this yoke, but cannot act decisively out of fear of losing that essential lifeline, which in space is a much more punitive and restrictive relationship of dependency than we ever saw in the colonial era. This a really well defined model of how a colonial relationship would look in a capitalist and highly militaristic near-earth future, a brilliant depiction of the property relations that would arise in space 500 years after the Cyberpunk era.

This deeply exploitative pseudo-colonial relationship is perfectly tied to the general character traits of the Belters we meet in the series. They are fatalistic, cynical and prone to despair, but they are also full of energy, indomitable and apparently immune to fear. They are resourceful, capable of making something out of almost nothing, independent and smart, but also cramped by their physical space, the constant imposing emptiness beyond the walls of their tiny communities, and the poverty they are forced to grow up and live within. Belter society is obviously rife with crime and people trying to get one over on one another – and who could blame them? – but their society is also rich from solidarity and a shared sense of struggle, and many of the characters we meet are ferociously committed to the long-term goal of national liberation.

This Belter personality, and the political complexity of Belter life, is perfectly summarized in the character Anderson Dawes, the OPA leader on Ceres Station. Anderson Dawes is simultaneously a union leader, a gangster and a revolutionary, making sure that he is personally enriched and empowered by his central role as a union organizer on the station, while also being intensely (and often violently) committed to his people’s struggle. His public persona alternates between lazy, corrupt gangster and committed unionist, but occasionally we also see his ruthless devotion to the cause of freeing the Belters and making a Belter nation. We also see this later in season 3 in the form of Ashford, captain of the Behemoth and former pirate, but Anderson Dawes is the quintessential Belter revolutionary, simultaneously venal and ideological, selfish and selfless. These people are a really good science fiction depiction of the kind of colourful characters who arose from the national liberation movements of the 20th century, activists who were ferociously and single-mindedly committed to the liberation of their people but who were also often personally very corrupt. Anderson Dawes and the OPA are also excellent representations of the way in which national liberation movements of the 20th century overlapped with worker’s movements, and show the ease with which Marxism was able to infiltrate nationalism in developing (but not developed) nations. It makes perfect sense to viewers of the Expanse that Anderson Dawes should be simultaneously a criminal, a union leader and a revolutionary nationalist – wouldn’t you be? – and this perfect logic is exactly why so many national liberation movements in the 20th century adopted Marxism. Europe’s colonial subjects were also largely exploited workers, and their political activists saw very quickly where those two oppressions overlapped. In The Expanse we see a very believable model for how such oppression would be exported into space, and how its victims would respond in a similar vein to the Arafats and Sukarnos of the 20th Century.

Belter culture differs from 20th century colonial cultures by its existence as a colonized diaspora, rather than a simple single landmass under the control of a foreign power, and the Expanse handles this especially well in showing their relationship with the Martians. The Martians in the Expanse serve as a kind of model of New Zealand, white South Africa or Australia, the colonies that made good by dint of being built on “empty” land (which, of course, was stolen in the real world but was genuinely empty on Mars). Farmers, land owners and rich workers, they view the “skinnies” of the belt with disdain, just as Americans sneered at the Irish diaspora, and Australians looked down on the Chinese workers who provided them with essential services during the gold rush. The Martians think they’re better because they have their own land, although of course really they’re just lucky. The relationship between dusters and skinnies is thus driven by a dynamic of scorn and envy, with both depending on each other and unable to separate, and both looked down on by Earth natives, but unwilling to admit their shared interests. We see in season 3 what it takes to make them put those interests aside and fight for a shared humanity, but I think we will also see in future seasons that the new threats they face will wash away the dynamic of their struggle, and with it the most interesting parts of this excellent television series.

With all of these details, The Expanse offers a masterclass in how to make a new culture: drawing on existing social history for its key ingredients, it adds in new threats and environmental constraints, and builds the character, society and motivations of the new culture carefully on this basis. The result is a rich, believable and highly appealing society that quickly draws you into its struggle, and keeps you deeply engaged in it until the bittersweet ending. This is world building at its finest!

Compromise and Conceit

Movies

Post-poverty SF: Some Reflections on the Vast Inequality in the Star Wars Universe

How Many Dyson Spheres do You Need?

Post-poverty Science Fiction

How small can a blaster be?

How much effort is too little?

SF’s imaginary failures

Why Is Durin a Man?

Durin and Disa and the shackles of domestic life

The consequences of Galadriel’s Whiteness

Everything Everywhere All at Once is Trash pro-Family Propaganda

The premise and the ordinary science fiction

The dangerous illusion of the “Asian Family” stereotype

What is pro-family propaganda and why is it bad?

Conclusion

Initial Reactions to the Rings of Power

The setting is confusing

There is pointless conflict

It’s slow but sumptuous

The Tolkien and Race Debate Goes Mainstream

Conclusion

Understanding Trump’s Popularity Through the Lens of Tiger King

The Rise of Skywalker: Time to Bury this Travesty of a Once-Great Saga

“Tasukete!”: The Japanese Warnings in The Exorcist

The Sad Decline of the American Action Movie

Game of Thrones Comes to its Catastrophic and Pathetic End

The Expanse’s Belters: Marxist Post-colonial World-building at its Best

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