tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-47987446263727118582024-03-13T01:52:30.588-07:00Brilsby's WhimsWhere I post reviews every Sunday Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.comBlogger68125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-78757872445848940142018-11-16T05:30:00.003-08:002018-11-16T05:30:46.036-08:00"Lodg'd in me Useless": An Analysis of John Milton's "On His Blindness"<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Many poems have the
unfortunate virtue of using their final lines to beautify a platitude. It does
not matter that the preceding lines do their best to undermine the platitude; those
who read a poem only once, and never closely, remember the diamond at the end,
never realising it’s a zircon. The most infamous example is Robert Frost’s “The
Road Less Travelled”, which is, bluntly, about a road equally travelled. A less
famous example is the closing lines of John Milton’s “On His Blindness”:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">‘… Thousands at His
bidding speed<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">And post o’er Land and
Ocean without rest:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">They also serve who
only stand and waite.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">This pretty sentiment
is comforting, but, to wise people like Milton, comfort is always uncomfortably held. That
despite his disability he does all that he is able, that he gives God all that
God asks, that God will bless his stillness, the narrator does not know.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/johnmiltonscompl01milt/page/44">The poem in full:</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">When I consider how my
light is spent,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Ere half my days, in this
dark world and wide,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">And that one Talent
which is death to hide,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Lodg’d with me
useless, though my Soul more bent<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">To serve therewith my
Maker, and present<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">My true account, least
he returning chide,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Doth God exact day
labour, light deny’d,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">I fondly ask; but
patience to prevent<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">That murmur, soon
replies, God doth not need<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Either man’s work or
his own gifts, who best <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Bear his milde yoak,
they serve him best, his state<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Is Kingly. Thousands
at his bidding speed<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">And post o’er Land and
Ocean without rest:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">They also serve who
only stand and waite.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">On a surface reading,
the narrator of “On His Blindness” comes to accept his limits. He is rueful that
he lost a ‘Talent’, but realises that all talents are equally superfluous to a
self-sufficient God. God judges each of his children according to their own
abilities, however impaired.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">This is not what the
poem is about. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Read closer and consolation
falters. The reader notices that the platitude is not spoken by God, nor by the
author, but by ‘patience’. Patience is not a virtue of truth; it is a virtue of
endurance. Patience only aims ‘to prevent / That murmur’, not to prove the
murmur groundless.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><o:p> </o:p></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">God demands no more
than you are able. That, however, is the narrator’s worry: Is he doing all he
is able? When he had sight, he wasted his powers. ‘That one Talent which is
death to hide’ references the Parable of the Talents:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="text"><span lang="EN-US" style="background: white; color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="text"><span lang="EN-US" style="background: white; color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">‘… a man travelling into a far
country … delivered unto [his servants] his goods. </span><span id="en-AKJV-24024" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to
another one … and straightway took his journey. </span><span id="en-AKJV-24025" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">Then he that had received the five talents went and
traded with the same, and made <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">them</i> other
five talents. </span><span id="en-AKJV-24026" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">And likewise
he that <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">had received</i> two, he
also gained other two. </span><span id="en-AKJV-24027" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">But he that had received one went and digged in the
earth, and hid his lord’s money. </span><span id="en-AKJV-24028" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">After a long time the lord of those servants cometh, and
reckoneth with them. </span><span id="en-AKJV-24029" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">And so he that had received five talents came and brought
other five talents … His lord said unto him, Well done, <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">thou</i> good and faithful servant … He
also that had received two talents came and said, Lord, thou deliveredst unto
me two talents: behold, I have gained two other talents beside them. </span><span id="en-AKJV-24032" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">His lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful
servant … Then he which had received the one talent came … </span></span><span class="text"><b><sup><span lang="EN-US" style="background: white; color: black; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></sup></b></span><span class="text"><span lang="EN-US" style="background: white; color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">His lord answered and said unto him, <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Thou</i> wicked and slothful servant … cast
ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness …’</span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> (</span></span><a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25%3A14%E2%80%9330&version=AKJV">Matthew 25:14-30 AKJV</a>)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This is not a parable of a man who is excused for
making nothing with nothing. This is a parable of a man who had something and
did nothing with it. In the context of the poem, the narrator realises that
when he had his sight, he ‘spent’ it wastefully, yielding no return. Now that
he is blind, he fears he wastes his remaining talents.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">‘They also serve who only stand and waite’ is obvious
hyperbole. Being blind does not reduce you to standing and waiting. (Milton,
for instance, wrote <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Paradise Lost </i>while
blind.) The hyperbole is, on first reading, rhetorical, not meant to be taken
literally, and yet when taken literally, the hyperbole reveals the narrator’s
dissatisfaction with his own efforts. He <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">can</i>
do more than stand and wait. Why isn’t he speeding over ‘Land and Ocean without
rest’? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The narrators fears his ‘milde yoak’ has broken him,
not from its weight, but from his own weakness. When he could see, he wasted
his sight. Now that he is blind, he fears – he knows – his remaining powers are
lodg’d in him useless.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-70368601815490998032018-09-04T05:06:00.001-07:002018-09-04T05:06:39.134-07:00"How Long You Dilly-Dallied Before Reaching Maturity": Looking at Franz Kafka's "The Judgement" (1912)<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Georg Bendemann, the
protagonist of Kafka’s “The Judgement”, thinks he’s a grown up. He runs the
family firm, he is engaged to a woman with both looks and money, he has a place
in his community. Georg has all the apparel of maturity, quite unlike his
‘overgrown schoolboy’ of a friend, who moved to Russia to start a business, who
aimed high and crashed low. Georg, however, is not mature. Kafka smears his
protagonist’s face in this fact. Georg is still under the thumb of his aging
father: Georg is still a child.</span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"></span></o:p></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If you’ve heard of,
but have not read, “The Judgement”, then you likely only know about the climax,
where Georg’s father ‘sentences’ Georg to death by drowning, a sentence Georg obeys.
Taking this climax out of context makes Georg seem like a daddy’s boy. He is a
daddy’s boy, but this is a twist, not the set up. The set up of the story is
Georg implicitly comparing himself to his friend in Russia (never named). This
friend is ‘the manager of his own business in Petersburg, which had begun very
promisingly, but for a long time now had been in the doldrums’. This business
is ‘frankly unimpressive compared to the scale of Georg’s business’. This
friend has no companions in Russia, and will likely suffer ‘life as a
bachelor’, while Georg is engaged to ‘Miss Frieda Brandenfeld, a young lady
from a well-off family’. Georg has his life on track, while his friend has
derailed. Or so Georg thinks. He thinks this because he puts too much weight on
qualities which are accidental to maturity. But of course, you could have no
money, you could have no friends, you could have no spouse, and yet you would
still be more mature than a child, regardless of how many decades that child
has lived.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">What is more childish
than being dependent on a parent? Georg might protest that he is not dependent
on his father; his father is dependent on him. Georg lives under his father’s
roof because his father’s mental and physical frailty have put him under
Georg’s care. Being a caretaker is a position of power, even though the power
expresses itself through service: being a caretaker implies your charge needs
help. Consider how the parent serves the infant’s needs, feeding it, clothing
it, washing it. The infant is served, but the infant does not rule. The parents
have total power over the infant’s wellbeing. Now that his father seems to have
entered his second childishness, Georg takes, or thinks he takes, control of
his father’s wellbeing, even down to supervising ‘the changing of his father’s
underwear’.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘Do you really have this friend in
Petersburg?’ Georg’s father asks. It seems an absurd question, springing from a
slackening brain. But Georg’s father is not so ignorant. He has been in secret
correspondence with Georg’s friend. Georg must sense something untoward in the
absurd question, something which suggests his father is not as frail-minded as
he thought, something which suggests Georg himself is ignorant of something. ‘Don’t
let’s talk about my friends,’ Georg says:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘I think you don’t
look after yourself properly. Old age demands to be treated with consideration
… You peck at your breakfast, instead of taking proper nourishment. You sit
here with the window closed, when fresh air would do you the world of good. No,
Father! I’m going to send for the doctor, and we will follow his instructions.
We will change rooms – you can move into the front room, and I’ll move in here
… for now you should just lie down in your bed a little, you need rest. Come
on, I’ll help you get undressed, you’ll see, I can manage that’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Georg pivots the
conversation to all the ways he can help his father, that is, all the ways in
which his father is too weak to help himself. But his father is not weak,
neither physically nor mentally. Kafka executes this twist when the father,
just after being tucked in by Georg, leaps to his feet, looming so large he
‘supported himself lightly on the ceiling’ and proceeding to harangue his son,
revealing that Georg barely runs the family business, that Georg’s friend
doesn’t even read his letters, that Georg has ‘dilly-dallied before reaching
maturity’. Georg’s father, returned to the role of parent, talks down to Georg,
returned to the role of child. Georg’s power was an illusion, his independence
was an illusion, his maturity was an illusion. Now disillusioned, he submits
entirely to his father’s authority, even unto becoming his own executioner.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“The Judgement” is the
story of a man who realises he has wandered into all the signs of maturity.
Maturity, which is made of independence of mind if not body, Georg has walked
past. Georg is a full-grown child, who cannot grow up, even when his life
depends on it. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Quotes taken from Michael Hofmann's translation in </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #111111;">Metamorphosis and Other Stories: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)</span></i></span></div>
<br />
<br />Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-16689493502389764612018-07-09T19:36:00.000-07:002018-07-09T19:36:51.255-07:00A Victim of Short-Lived Ambition: A Review of "The Knight of the Swords: The First Book of Corum" by Michael Moorcock<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I will not be judging <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Knight of the Swords</i> as an adventure story. ‘But why?’ you ask.
‘It’s a cheap fantasy paperback. What did you expect? Depth!?’ To which the
answer is: Yes. I expected depth not just because of the fawning pull-quotes on
my edition*, not just because Moorcock is called a genius of fantasy fiction
and 20<sup>th</sup> Century literature. I expected depth because the novel’s
first act starts to interrogate racism and the nature of mass murder. It starts
to say something, and, before the first act ends, it shuts up. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Prince
Corum’s elven race, the Vadhagh, have holed up in their castles to spend their
centuries of life studying abstract scholarship and art. Bid by his worried
father to check on their relatives, Corum is the first to leave his family’s
castle in centuries. During those centuries, the race of Mabden (homo sapiens)
have risen, a race that the Vadhagh thought were mere animals. Rushing from
Vadhagh castle to Vadhagh castle, Corum finds that each has been sacked and
massacred by the Mabden warlord Gladyth-a-Krae, who vows to slaughter every
member of the Vadhagh race. After Corum has a hand amputated, and an eye gouged
out, he vows vengeance on the whole Mabden race. And then Corum finds some nice
Mabden, falls in love with a Mabden aristocratic at first sight, fights a
battle, and then sets out to fight a demon lord. (I have abridged the last
two-thirds of the novel.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">When
I say the novel shows signs it will explore racism and genocide, those signs
are not the Mabden genocide of the Vadhagh. If that was it, I would no more
expect <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Knight of the Swords</i> to
explore genocide than I would expect Star Wars to explore Eastern philosophy.
The novel creates false hopes for the novel’s depth by depicting the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vadhagh themselves</i> as having a racist
worldview conducive to mass murder. This irony intrigues the reader. This
intrigue disappoints the reader.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Moorcock
knows how to use dark topics as mere set-dressing, making sure the reader does
not expect profound investigations of these topics. In his post-apocalyptic <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hawkmoon</i> series, the hero resists the expansion
of the evil empire of Granbretan (Read: Great Britain). The reader never
expects <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hawkmoon</i> to comment on
imperialism because the enemy in the book is literally called an ‘evil empire’.
The lords of Granbretan are evil, and their capital is a decadent and depraved
Pandemonium on Earth. They want a universal empire because that is what evil
lords think they are owed. They spread it through massacres because that is
what evil imperialists do. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hawkmoon</i>
does not begin to interrogate the real life motivations and rationalisations of
imperialists, it does not begin to seriously examine life under colonial rule,
and because it does not begin, I feel no irritation that it does not continue. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Knight of the Swords </i>does begin.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Before
you can kill a people, you must convince yourself that they are not really
people. Hatred is not sufficient. When the leader of the Mabden marauders,
Gladyth, is asked why he kills Vadhagh, he says: ‘We hate your sorcery. We
loathe your superior airs.’ This hatred is a rationalisation. More importantly,
however, there is dehumanisation. Earlier, an unallied Mabden villager explains
that Gladyth’s clan believes the Vadhagh are ‘evil’, and they call Vadhagh by a
word which means ‘fiend’. These Mabden dehumanise the Vadhagh by calling them
as demons. The Vadhagh also dehumanise the Mabden. Supposedly a scientific and
rational race, the Vadhagh view the Mabden as less than human, indeed, they
think Mabden literally are animals. To the Vadhagh, the Mabden do not travel in
armies, but ‘herds’. They do not invade: they ‘infest’. When rumours arrive
that Mabden have captured and slaughtered a Vadhagh castle, it is described as
if insects had swarmed through. Before their murders, the only Mabden Corum’s
family has seen is a woman they had ‘placed in the menageries where it was cared
for well, but it lived little more than fifty years and when it died was never
replaced.’ This is the best line in the novel because it captures that hatred
is not necessary to completely dehumanise others. They make this woman a zoo
animal, which they ‘care for well’. Even if the Vadhagh would not resort to
killing Mabden, you can see how their dehumanising view of them could
rationalise ‘controlling’ the Mabden population.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">When
Corum sees his whole race massacred, he adjoins hatred to his dehumanising
outlook. ‘Corum had learned, as an animal learns, that the Mabden were his
enemies.’ This is not a vengeance that limits itself to a band of marauders,
but by identifying a race with a band of marauders, Corum’s targets a whole
race. Even when his life is saved by a Mabden, Corum says:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘… but Mabden you are. There are so many of
you. And now, I find, there are even varieties. I suspect you share common
traits …’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">He says ‘varieties’ as if he were
discussing different breeds of rat. He suggests that he cannot be convinced
that there exist good Mabden.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But
he is convinced. He realises that you shouldn’t make hasty generalisations
about a race based on the actions of a few members, no matter how abhorrent
those actions are. This would be a potentially compelling character arc, if it
had occurred over the course of the novel, rather than wrapping itself up
before the first act is done, rather than resolving the character’s internal conflict
a dozen or so pages after the conflict is introduced. (Corum does have a
character arc over the rest of the novel, but it’s something about learning his
place in the battle between the Lords of Chaos and the Lords of Law, or maybe
it’s about fighting fate. It’s not very interesting.) <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I
do believe Moorcock intended that the Vadhagh have a racist worldview. If his
essay “Starship Stormtroopers”, published only six years after this novel, is
anything to go by, Moorcock could certainly spot signifiers of far-right
ideology in s-and-f adventure novels. If he did not intend the Vadhagh to be
racist, I believe he would have spotted how racist he accidently made them, and
then would have edited those bits out. Why he started down this thematic path
only to ignore it, I will only briefly speculate on. The first and second halves
of this seem to be two different storylines. The first half is what I have
elaborated; the second half is Corum being sent on a quest by an immortal
science-wizard to steal the disembodied heart of a Lord of Chaos. That second
half does seem a lot more like a conventional fantasy adventure story. I
imagine he didn’t want to weigh down his escapism with philosophising. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The
lesson is: if you start, finish, and if you don’t finish, clear up all evidence
that you ever started. I would be less harsh on this novel if I didn’t see that
initial thematic ambition. I probably would have said very little about the
novel, but I would have been less harsh. Corum is an escapist fantasy story
that promised to be more.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">*A pull-quote from Angus Wilson that sets a
bar the novel never passes: <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘No one at the moment in England is doing
more to break down the artificial divisions that have grown up in novel writing
– realism, surrealism, science fiction, historical fiction, social satire, the
poetic novel – than Michael Moorcock’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Only later did I notice that neither this
nor any of my edition’s hagiographic pull-quotes mentions the book they’re
appearing on.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-39644679741453780472018-02-13T06:33:00.000-08:002018-02-13T06:33:01.990-08:00Even Shakespeare's Not Perfect: A Review of 'Timon of Athens' by William Shakespeare <div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-GB">Even
geniuses need to redraft. Shakespeare was a jobbing writing, so I imagine he
had to pick his creative battles, and <i>Timon
of Athens</i> was not one of them. Narrative rules of thumb exist for a reason.
Rules such as: ‘If you have a character arc, don’t give the first half to one
character and the second half to another.’ If you start a play with a character
learning to hate all humanity because a few people have wronged him, and you
end the play with a character learning to put his hate away when he realises
that those few people don’t equal all humanity, then you should ensure they are
the same character. And if you are going to have a character realise that not
all people are despicable, you should obey the parroting of creative writing
manuals, and <i>show </i>us these
non-despicable people, rather than just <i>telling</i>
us<i> </i>they exist.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-GB">There
is a rich Athenian called Timon, who gives much charity, gifts, and feasts. He
is popular. It has slipped Timon’s mind that he’s paying for these charities,
gifts, and feasts with debt. Because Athens has no credit rating authority,
Timon’s creditor’s come calling long after he’s lost all ability to repay them.
Believing his past beneficiaries will become his present benefactors, Timon
asks his friends to bail him out. They refuse, given it is a very large debt,
which is primarily his fault. After throwing rocks at his ‘mouth-friends’, he
moves to a forest, where he moans about how terrible people are to every
passer-by. Meanwhile, an Athenian general called Alcibiades tries to appeal the
death sentence of a friend who killed a man in a pub fight. Alcibiades is
refused, banished, and so decides to bring an army to destroy Athens.
Meanwhile, Timon dies off-stage. In the end, two senators surrender to
Alcibiades, and convince him not to kill everyone.</span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"></span></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">My
summary is only slightly facetious. While Timon still dominates the stage-time,
he loses all effect on the plot after he moves to the forest. Narrative
momentum shifts to Alcibiades, who has spoken, before this, less than ten
lines. But a character does not need to wreak changes on the plot, so long as
they wreak changes in themselves. Yet Timon stops developing in the play’s
second half. In the whole play, Timon develops from faith in humanity to
misanthropy, and then he stays there, before dying. Alcibiades also changes: he
starts as a good Athenian, before growing to hate Athens, before realising it’s
rash to hate <i>everyone</i> in Athens. Alcibiades’
end complements Timon’s beginning. Had Shakespeare redrafted this a few times,
I imagine Timon and Alcibiades’ roles would merge.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Perhaps
Shakespeare thought Timon had become such a grump that redemption would stretch
belief. Timon’s reason for hating everyone is stronger than Alcibiades’.
Although Timon’s bankruptcy is his own fault, that his ‘friends’ refuse to help
pay his debts, debts he incurred while giving them gifts, feasts, and even
bailing one out of prison, is excessively mean. We sympathise with Timon’s
sense of betrayal. We understand how this resentment towards a few ingrates
bloats into a hatred for all mankind. Even if we don’t agree with this hatred,
we feel its stubborn rationale. Washing this hatred away would require Timon
experiencing humanity’s innocence as intensely as he experienced his friends’
betrayal.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Washing away
Alcibiades hatred needs far less force, because the cause of his hatred was far
pettier. He is not wronged by his ungrateful friends; he is wronged by the
single senator who upheld his comrade’s death sentence and banished Alcibiades.
Alcibiades perhaps extends his hatred to all Athens because its legal system
killed a fellow veteran, thus showing Athens’ ingratitude towards those who
fight for it. But the audience have far less sympathy for this extrapolation,
because Alcibiades cannot rationally justify it. His comrade earned his death
sentence by killing a man in a drunken brawl. Alcibiades rationalises this by
arguing, with escalating speciousness: My friend has his ‘reputation touched to
death’, possessing him with ‘noble-fury’ (III.v.19, 18); he killed in
self-defence; and doesn’t everyone get angry sometimes. The obvious responses are:
it is not nobility to kill a man for insulting you; it is not self-defence if
you started a fight because someone insulted you; and, yes, everyone does get
angry, but not to the point of manslaughter. For lack of any convincing
appeals, the senator is right to uphold the death sentence. The senator only
oversteps his bounds when he exiles Alcibiades for trying to commute the death
sentence. Exile is little better than bankruptcy, so we can understand why Alcibiades
would become so enraged as to martial an army against Athens. And because his
hatred was planted in a shallower wound than Timon’s, we can also understand
how a single dialogue with the surrendering Athenian senators is enough to
uproot this hatred. But the shallowness of the wound makes the uprooting less
dramatic. It would have taken more work, more psychological development, more
ideological confrontation to uproot Timon’s hatred, but – because of this extra
work – it would have affected the audience more.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Maybe, and more
respectably, Shakespeare thought a misanthrope renouncing hatred would have
been a tad trite, and so had Timon remain hateful. A daring sentiment, botched
in the execution. The dramatic force of Timon’s decision, regardless of it
being to keep or stop hating, is undermined by Shakespeare only telling us
about instead of showing us the humanity Timon hates. Let’s first consider the ending
as is.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Although originally
intending to lay ‘proud Athens on a heap’ (IV.iii.102), Alcibiades is dissuaded
from massacre by the Athenian senators. They argue:</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white; line-height: 200%;">All have not offended</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white; line-height: 200%;">.</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 200%;"><br />
<span style="background: white;">For those that were, it is not square to
take</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">On those that are, revenges: crimes like
lands</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">Are not inherited. Then, dear countryman,</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">Bring in thy ranks, but leave without thy
rage</span><span style="background: white;">.</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">Spare thy Athenian cradle and those kin</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">Which, in the bluster of thy wrath, must
fall</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">With those that have offended. Like a
shepherd,</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">Approach the fold and cull th’infected
forth,</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">But kill not all together.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">(V.iv.35-44)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In short: one guy screwing
you over doesn’t mean everyone deserves to die. A well-argued point, but note
that it is <i>only</i> argued. The ‘Athenian
cradle’ and ‘kin’ never appear on stage. We do not feel the danger they are in,
nor do we feel relief for them when Alcibiades restrains his wrath.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">While it is bad form
for a critic to rewrite the work they’re reviewing, and vainglorious if that
work is by Shakespeare, I have some changes for the final act. Alcibiades is
ready to ravage the city, to take revenge, but then he, and the audience, sees the
people his sword will cut: the children and citizens who have harmed no one.
More than just an argument that not every Athenian deserves death, we would see
evidence.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I shall rewrite the
play some more, returning Timon to the centre, and still following the rule of ‘show,
don’t tell’. Where in the play as it is Timon remains in misanthropic mopes
until he dies off-stage, in the rewritten play Timon would have his misanthropy
challenged by innocent humanity. While Timon is wrong to hate everyone, you can’t
blame him for thinking everyone’s scum, based on the people he meets in the
play. After being betrayed, he meets: a genocidal general; prostitutes willing
to veneeally plague Athens for gold; a philosopher more pessimistic than Timon;
three bandits; two artists looking for a commission; and two senators who’ve
heard Timon’s found gold in the forest. A good belief (or dogma) can withstand
counterargument, and Timon has met no argument countering his misanthropy, with
the sole exception of his former servant Flavius. Timon must meet some people
who, to the audience at least, do not deserve hate. This would either: dissolve
Timon’s misanthropy; or, confirm the strength of his misanthropy, though not
the truth of it.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Hearing Alcibiades
means to massacre Athens, Timon would witness the massacre. For it is one thing
to say, ‘If Alcibiades kill my countrymen … Timon cares not’ (V.i.169), but quite
another to see the killed and say, ‘I don’t care’. Two developments can result
from witnessing slaughter: one, Timon realises these innocents don’t deserve to
die, so renounces his misanthropy; two, Timon remains convinced that humans are
scum, and so even ‘innocents’ shouldn’t be wept over. In both cases, </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">showing</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> the audience the innocent
citizens enhances the dramatic force. Either we would see Timon recant his
misanthropy, and we would believe his recantation because we have seen the
atrocity he has seen; or, we would see him retain his misanthropy, a steadfastness
made more chilling because we see an atrocity that makes us feel pity, but which
stirs nothing in Timon. </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Again, </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Timon of Athens </i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">is not a bad play. Alluring
moments and monologues almost make up for the flawed whole. A side character
spontaneously becomes a main character who steals the title character’s arc, the
title character has one burst of character growth and then remains in surly stasis,
and the innocent human beings that the thematic climax depends on never appear in
the play. </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Timon of Athens</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> is not a
bad play, but we can see everything stopping it from being a good one. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><i>Quotes taken from the black Penguin edition of</i> Timon of Athens. </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Timon-Athens-Penguin-Shakespeare-William-ebook/dp/B003AYZBGG">https://www.amazon.com/Timon-Athens-Penguin-Shakespeare-William-ebook/dp/B003AYZBGG</a></span></div>
Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-1508937975933336212017-12-17T06:06:00.000-08:002017-12-17T06:13:41.361-08:00Creative Destruction: An Exegesis of Friedrich Nietzsche's 'David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer' (1873 essay)<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Friedrich Nietzsche’s <i>David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer</i> is not really about
David Strauss. The polemic’s target is first mentioned ten pages in, and
nowhere in the introduction. Nietzsche’s focus is the difference between
productive thinking and lazy thinking, or in his terms, the difference between ‘culture’
and ‘cultural philistinism’. The cultural mind seeks to improve itself, to seek
that which is good outside of itself, and weed out that which is bad within
itself. The cultural philistine’s mind, however, believes it does not need to improve
itself, for everything within itself is good, and thus needs no weeding, while
everything outside itself is misguided, and thus deserves no seeking.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<a name='more'></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">At the outset, I will comment that while
Nietzsche uses the word ‘culture’ he ends up talking about individuals. His
definition of culture, as a society-wide phenomenon, is a ‘unity of artistic
style in all the expressions of the life of a people’ (5). Nietzsche says ‘of a
people’, but throughout the essay he identifies culture with genius. And
cultural genius is defined by one thing: ‘productivity’. Productivity is a
philosophical attitude, a constant weeding, replanting, and remodelling of your
intellectual garden, an attitude the philistine lacks. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Thus, a cultured nation would be a nation
of such geniuses, a nation of people never settling for their preconceived
values. This becomes nonsense when Nietzsche gives examples of cultured nations:
ancient Athens, and France. No offence to any Athenians or French people, but
at least a few of you are not geniuses. Nietzsche may mean these nations have
more geniuses, i.e. they are conducive to the creation of geniuses.
Nevertheless, geniuses will always be a minority, hardly identifiable with ‘a people’.
Nietzsche says his concern is culture, but in effect his concern is
individuals. A ‘cultured’ individual is one who challenges values, follows
ideas through to their potentially destructive ends. An uncultured individual,
a philistine, is one who thinks only so far as to rationalise their own
values. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">You should not accept ‘reality’ as you
initially understand it, because all this ‘reality’ tends to be is a collection
of beliefs and values you received unconsciously from your society. Cultural
philistinism is the half-awake acceptance of current values, a ‘grovelling
before the realities of [the] present-day’ (27). Most readers of this, I
assume, live in liberal democracies. We believe in the values of liberal
democracy, i.e. that every able-minded person should be able to do as they
please, and have a say in the government which serves them. We believe this as
strongly as the peasant believed the King ruled by God’s grace. This is not to
argue all political and moral values are relative. But to most people, all
political and moral values may as well be relative. Most accept the value
system they received as the right one. Perhaps it needs a little tweaking, but it
is fundamentally sound. They would believe this regardless of which value
system they were born into. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Or say a peasant is dissatisfied with the
values of his feudal society, and so he moves to the land of liberalism. This
migrated-peasant has questioned his old set of values, he has taken on liberal
values, but will he go on questioning values? Or will he settle with receiving
these new liberal values? The difference between culture and cultural
philistinism lays in the answer to these questions. True culture involves
always ‘seeking’ truth (9), while never believing you, or anyone before, or
around you, has ‘found’ a truth which you may settle on forever more. A
cultural philistine believes the discovery of truth has been accomplished, and
all that they are required to do is ingest the fruit of dead men’s gardens. Actually,
cultural minds must ‘go on seeking … and not to grow weary of doing so’ (9). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Complacent people want the fig-leaf of
knowingness, the pseudo-justified belief that inquiring further than their
current beliefs would be fruitless. It is a misconception that people love texts
which agree with them; rather, people seek texts which make them feel
intelligent for agreeing, which intelligently justify their preconceived
conclusions, without challenging them. Writers of such texts gain followers not
because they have anything improving to say, but because they can make intellectual
complacency seem correct. To Nietzsche, David Strauss writes these
un-subversive texts, texts whose conventionality Strauss conceals behind a
façade of modern science and philosophy. (Were Nietzsche writing today he may
have chosen Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Malcolm Gladwell, etc.) Strauss
uses a <i>façade</i> of science and
philosophy for if he followed the breadcrumbs of science and philosophy to
their end, he’d wander off a cliff, or, at the least, far from the garden in
which he began. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Strauss’ attempt to justify old, Christian
values with new, atheistic reasons is a botched sleight of hand. The magician
swipes away the table-cloth and expects the tableware to remain in place –
except Strauss doesn’t swipe away the table-cloth, he swipes away the entire
table. The bible is not a true document, but <i>if</i> the bible is a true document, you can draw conclusions. If you
believe the bible, then it is sensible to believe its statements about the
value of humans and about the content of morality. Strauss does not believe the
bible is absolutely true. He is a man of science, a believer in Darwinism – but
see how little this change of doctrine affects his morality. From Darwinism –
which states humans are animals, which states humans, by differences in their
abilities, triumph or flounder to each other in the survival of the fittest –
Strauss somehow concludes that humans are above the beasts of nature, and that,
despite all our differences, we have the same needs and wants, and, as such,
should be treated equally. See how the tableware hovers. These are Christian
conclusions grafted onto Darwinism. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Nietzsche argues this is why the cultural
philistine loves this reasoning. The philistine finds new rationalisations for
their values, and so can avoid the hard work of constructing new values in the
face of new facts. Nietzsche suggests that from Darwinism Strauss should have
‘derived a moral code for life out of the <i>bellum
omnium contra omnes [War of all against all] </i>and the privileges of the
strong’ (30). As a morality drawn from Darwinism, Nietzsche’s suggestion falters.
Darwin’s theory privileges not the strong, but those fittest for their
environment. And if cooperation (i.e. the opposite of the war of all against
all) allows an individual/species to fit their environment, then a Darwinian
morality could praise cooperation. Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s suggestion has
value not in content, but in intention. Nietzsche makes sure his understanding
of nature informs his morality. Strauss has his morality, the past’s morality,
and selects and distorts facts of nature to support said morality.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">To Nietzsche, Strauss’ sophistries always
shy away from their implications. Strauss approaches the truth, by grasping a
post-Christian fact, but never approaches close enough to shake his Christian
values. Strauss’ attempt to justify philosophical Optimism with materialistic
determinism, Nietzsche attacks with especial contempt. Strauss’ argument runs:
given fixed laws of nature which ensure a cause can have only one predetermined
effect, the universe-wide chain of cause and effect follows a single,
unchangeable path; to object to any single effect (e.g. a branch falling on a
child, or a tsunami wiping out a village) is to object to the laws of nature,
thus to repudiate nature itself; a rational person must thus take no issue with
undesirable effects, for to object to this one undesirable effect is to object
to the whole universe. This is sophistry. As Nietzsche notes, Strauss gives
moral and intellectual weight to nature’s laws merely because they are real and
inevitable. To say ‘X is the case’ says nothing other than ‘X is the case’. It
says nothing regarding the goodness or badness of X. If a car hits me, then my
getting hit by a car is not automatically made good merely because it was an
unavoidable effect of our deterministic universe. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Nietzsche chastises Strauss not just because
this Optimism is illogical, but because Strauss castrates a potentially productive
idea. A deterministic universe guided inextricably by itself alone, lacking a
good God’s guidance – this is a productive idea, <i>if</i> you comprehends it. The values you can draw from this idea of
the universe are uncertain, but they will not resemble those values drawn from
the idea of the universe as one lovingly crafted and shepherded by God. As
Nietzsche says, Strauss has not the courage to upset cultural philistines, or
his own cultural philistinism. That is, Strauss has not the courage to
challenge current values. ‘[Strauss] does not dare to tell them honestly: I
have liberated you from a helpful and merciful God, the universe is only a
rigid machine, take care you are not mangled in its wheels!’ (33). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">This Optimism is a symptom of cultural
philistinism to Nietzsche, for it swells and bloats the philistine’s
contentment with society <i>as it is</i> into
a contentment with the universe <i>as it is</i>.
The heart of philistinism is settling for what you have, for believing you have
achiev<i>ed</i> culture. To settle, you must
be too lazy to go on achiev<i>ing</i>
culture, too lazy to challenge current values. To be lazy and retain peace of
mind, you must believe that spending any extra effort would be a waste. We have
culture, we have values, we know good taste and good morality. Why question,
question, question when, at best, you will end up at the start, merely showing
there was nothing other than our good taste and morality; at worst, you will question
yourseld out of good taste and good morality. But extra effort in this
endeavour is never a waste. To look at your taste, morality, and values and ask,
‘Do these stand up?’, and to change your taste, morality, and values when they
do not stand up, that is the heart of culture. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><i>Quotes taken from:<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><i>Nietzsche, Friedrich. “David Strauss, the
Confessor and the Writer.” Untimely
Meditations. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Ed. Daniel Breazeale. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2016, 1-57. Print.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-814975019269465862017-11-26T05:01:00.000-08:002017-11-26T05:02:53.541-08:00The Rhetoric of Mass Murder: An Analysis of 'Fantastic Planet / La Planate Sauvage' (1973 animation) <div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><i>Content Warning: Discussion of genocide; full plot details</i></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-GB">Some works of art aim only to leave the audience
with a feeling. Characters, story, aesthetic, all elements become secondary and
instrumental to producing a state of mind. <i>Fantastic</i>
<i>Planet</i> is about genocide, and, more
strikingly, the mindset needed to commit genocide. The film guides the audience
to, for even one small moment, adopt this mindset, and then realise with horror
how easily they adopted it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">On the planet Ygam, the gigantic Draags
treat Oms (humans) as animals. The Draags either keep Oms as pets or exterminate
them as vermin. One pet, named Terr, flees into the alien wilds, dragging behind
him a Draag education headset. Finding a ‘wild’ Om tribe, he gives them the
Draag headset, allowing Oms the knowledge to escape Draag oppression.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">If you’ve only seen stills of <i>Fantastic Planet</i>, that summary will come
as a disappointment. The film’s aesthetic feels as if a renaissance painter,
trained in depicting Hell, was abducted by aliens and lived to illustrate it.
The plot of the film, however, can be found in any young adult dystopia, although
young adult dystopias tends to have rounder characters. There is an overclass
and an underclass. A very special underclasser rallies the underclass to
resist, or at least escape, the overclass. Happy ending optional. In terms of
scene outline, the film does not introduce thematic complication or complexity
to this trite plot. Yet this is not a trite film. The film does not merely
waste its creativity on the visuals, sparing none for the plot. The visuals make
the audience feel the film’s themes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span lang="EN-GB">Fantastic
Planet </span></i><span lang="EN-GB">is film about genocide, and the genocidal
mindset. Before you can slaughter a people, you must convince yourself they are
not persons. A person has reason as I do, suffers as I do, ambitions as I do. But
<i>these</i> people do not reason as me, and
their suffering means less than mine, and their ambitions can only be to my
detriment. Besides they’re barely individuals, they’re a swarm, whose every
causality is one less pest.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: right;">
</div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjriwNYteLiizVYEwsyC0g_TimOvzSp8fqzG6U2Rz2PrD_99wuHAduW7b5IeHioa8iS5lz1WUymIOsHeR0Bt2d7bO6A-60MJJzCWyfrmv00L7dF_gjZRjOOBFL3d5FOD7QhhTGEy5zjDTw/s1600/04+table.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjriwNYteLiizVYEwsyC0g_TimOvzSp8fqzG6U2Rz2PrD_99wuHAduW7b5IeHioa8iS5lz1WUymIOsHeR0Bt2d7bO6A-60MJJzCWyfrmv00L7dF_gjZRjOOBFL3d5FOD7QhhTGEy5zjDTw/s320/04+table.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A table, without even a computer</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">The film’s visuals and plot elements manipulate
the audience into adopting this view, on a pre-rational, amoral level. For one,
the audience identifies earlier and more closely with the genocidal Draag than
with the victimised Oms. Until half-way through the film, the only Om voice we
hear is Terr’s narration. Oms are little more than voiceless animals. The
Draag, however, seem more human than the Oms. It is no failure of imagination
that these alien beings live like middle-class inhabitants of the industrialised
world. The director could have alienated us from the Draag easily. The director
could have given the Draag a hive-like family structure, instead they live in
nuclear families. The Draag could have conducted their government in a
telepathic convergence of minds, but, no, their leaders gather around a literal
table. Most importantly, they speak intelligibly. If the aim was to alienate
the viewer from the Draag, there would be no quicker means than having the
Draag speak gibberish. Yet the first dialogue we hear is from Draag children,
saying the kinds of things children do. Sparing the architecture of Draag-ish
homes and how Draags breed via astro-projection, the Draag-ish society mirrors
the presumptive industrial-world viewer’s own. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj83g-Am226Dsk-8KQN7x9s6YbblYatLya8jrToVk5q5r_xWQmwXGlJHTSssyUM3OG179733VCF0Xpluv_VQTKBM_D7NC8NzPGwvNLUruPcs0yd5IfVbn7G7CC36QS0mMUvAZ8aOCc0BRc/s1600/11+kiss.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj83g-Am226Dsk-8KQN7x9s6YbblYatLya8jrToVk5q5r_xWQmwXGlJHTSssyUM3OG179733VCF0Xpluv_VQTKBM_D7NC8NzPGwvNLUruPcs0yd5IfVbn7G7CC36QS0mMUvAZ8aOCc0BRc/s320/11+kiss.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Terr and his love-interest, in an unromantic kiss</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">As the film forces us to identify with the
Draag, viewing them as at least a little like us, the film also dehumanises the
Oms by depersonalising them. None of the Oms are three-dimensional characters. Terr
wants to help his fellow Oms, and he possesses Draag knowledge; beyond this he
has no character. The leader of the Om tribe also wants the best for his
people. The wizard of the Om tribe doesn’t like Terr. Terr’s love interest is…
his love interest. This lack of character is not necessarily a failing. We
identify with the Oms because we know they must have internal lives, but we
cannot identify with these characters because we cannot see their internal
lives. We know they are sentient beings, but we cannot empathise. We can neither
empathise with the Draag, as they are at most two-dimensional characters, but
the two-dimensional Draags inhabit a society and social roles closer to the audience’s
than the one the Oms inhabit.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiHPjJjLoK5RdHZ3EaG_HF7mx1RGB0T2prn-6uYtKlEnwyyRsB_C-be9FZjnm2XoLgyPwBGVkBg2pWAU1aTzQd9bQ6hK2a3p-hU2PCN4pjYnKIvJYRx7JlVaWk870vvMj_hDkykgO34PI/s1600/30+black.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiHPjJjLoK5RdHZ3EaG_HF7mx1RGB0T2prn-6uYtKlEnwyyRsB_C-be9FZjnm2XoLgyPwBGVkBg2pWAU1aTzQd9bQ6hK2a3p-hU2PCN4pjYnKIvJYRx7JlVaWk870vvMj_hDkykgO34PI/s320/30+black.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Evoking insecticide</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Starting from this emotional distance the
film accomplishes its most affecting sequences: the Draag genociding the Oms.
These sequences are not affecting because of the visceral impact each death has
on the viewer, but from the viewer reflecting on how little of an impact all
these deaths make on them. Only for moments at a time is the genocide shot from
the Oms’ point of view, i.e. from the victims’ point of view. The camera looms
back, so dozens of unknown Oms occupy the screen, dying on mass. Sometimes the
camera hangs so far back that the Oms become black blots, looking and feeling
like insects falling. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIZz_sYDbyERi-ttgogoM97DrQKdiPBnCr4BSiViQhMineEpC7wLh7bTecA75g3E5uw1xmHqgyX5RGjN4k5Vv4gTRcWZKbcB_kO1Yeeuw-WbcvzFI631BHsNmoKvkicy8R6V6I5u-jXaY/s1600/25+nest+kill.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIZz_sYDbyERi-ttgogoM97DrQKdiPBnCr4BSiViQhMineEpC7wLh7bTecA75g3E5uw1xmHqgyX5RGjN4k5Vv4gTRcWZKbcB_kO1Yeeuw-WbcvzFI631BHsNmoKvkicy8R6V6I5u-jXaY/s320/25+nest+kill.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Two pedestrians</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span lang="EN-GB">This </span></i><span lang="EN-GB">is the film’s most affecting element: the audience feel the genocide
as the Draags rationalise it, even if, intellectually, the audience knows it is
unconscionable. The Draags do not believe they are committing genocide. They
murder Oms like we would murder insects, throwing gas canisters and spraying
death. Even as the Draags find evidence that the Om are rational beings like
themselves, the Draags never talk of Oms as a military threat, but as an insect
infestation. Oms live in ‘nests’, they are ‘dirty’, they ‘reproduce at an
alarming rate’. The Draags are not ‘killing’ anybody, they are ‘de-Omming’,
just as you would delouse. This is the rhetoric of mass murder. It is a crime
to kill innocent people, but <i>these </i>are
not people. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">We do not view the victims as people. Their
deaths do not affect us because they are as emotionally and physically distant
from us as insects. And then we realise we are seeing Oms like the Draags see Oms.
We realise each of those depersonalised deaths is the death of a person. The horror
of these murders is heightened by the fact that we the audience so easily took
on the mindset of the murderers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-27124061412097580062017-09-24T08:22:00.000-07:002017-11-26T05:02:06.461-08:00When Conscience Slept: An Analysis of 'Purple Noon/Plein Soleil' (1960 Film)<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Spoiler Warning: This will reveal the entire plot of the film, and by extension the plot of the source material, </i>The Talented Mr Ripley</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Purple Noon </i>is a work
of amoral art. A rare film that playfully imposes judgement on its characters
and events, not even on its central murderer and identity thief, Tom Ripley.
Any praise or blame you may direct at Tom is very much your own morality, your
own judgement, cast like a pebble to skim on an uncaring sea. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Tom Ripley wants what Phillipe Greenleaf’s got: money, luck,
a life of leisure in Italy, and a beautiful, if too forgiving, fiancé, Marge. Of
all the men in the world to be so blessed, why did it have to be the self-centered,
cruel Phillipe. Tom seems fine, basking in the spillover of Phillipe’s decadence.
But then, on a boat trip with Phillipe and Marge, things take a turn. After
Phillipe and Marge get into a fight, she disembarks at the docks. Tom and
Phillipe sail off alone. Phillipe’s luck runs out. Tom doesn’t just want
Phillipe’s money, he wants it all. Tom stabs him in the chest, and throws him
to the sea. Tom steps into Phillipe’s emptied life. He forges signatures, passports,
and romances Marge. Living with Phillipe’s name and money, Tom gets by
swimmingly, until one of Phillipe’s friends, Freddie Miles, realizes the man
living at ‘Phillipe’s’ apartment is not Phillipe. Tom bludgeons Freddie with a
stone buddha. Even this second murder doesn’t sink Tom. To ensure his good
life, Tom steps back into his old identity, but not before sending Phillipe’s ‘suicide
note’ and all of Phillipe’s money to Marge, and trying to marry Marge. Tom lays
in a deck chair, safe in the knowledge the law has no lead on him. And Tom
would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for Phillipe’s corpse getting
stuck to the hull of the boat Tom was trying to sell. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<a name='more'></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Rather than immoral, Tom’s murder of Phillipe feels amoral. By
making Phillipe so unpleasant, Tom’s crime ascends from ‘sin’ to ‘public
service’. Unlike in Patricia Highsmith’s novel, where we meet Tom impersonating
an IRS inspector to swindle people, the film’s first immoral act is by Phillipe.
After refusing to pay 800 <i>lira </i>for a
meal, Phillipe offers a blind man 20,000 <i>lira
</i>for his cane. Phillipe offers so much, not because he wants the tacky cane,
but for the satisfaction of forcing someone to make a sadistic choice: forego
20,000 <i>lira</i>, or stumble home without
a cane. In either case, Phillipe has abused a disabled man. Throughout this
event, Tom’s only evil is that he permits and aids Phillipe’s cruelty. On
meeting such a person as Phillipe in real life, you might not think, ‘This man
should be killed,’ but you would think, ‘It’d be no shame if he died.’ <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Within the broader plot, of Tom stealing Phillipe’s
identity, it seems Tom started emulating Phillipe before killing him. Tom plays
along with Phillipe’s hedonistic amorality, and then goes further than Phillipe.
While ‘monkey see, monkey do’ does not defend murder, you wonder if events
would have turned out cleaner had Tom met a philanthropist, rather than a rake.
By being such an arsehole, Phillipe not only makes his murder more forgivable,
but also goes some way to making his own murderer.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The film exploits our schadenfreude for life’s winners. On
top of being an arsehole, Phillipe’s a lucky bastard, someone you want to see
tumble off his yacht. In the scene with the blind man, successive acts of
Phillipe’s self-serving dickery domino in Phillipe’s favour. Phillipe takes a
blind man’s cane, so the blind man must take a cab, so that said cab cannot be
taken by a young lady, so that the young lady will run into Phillipe, who, with
his cane, pretends to be blind, so that he can win the young lady’s sympathy
and companionship, so that he can flirt with her throughout the evening, so
that she does not even care when she realizes he’s not blind. And, keep in
mind, Phillipe has a fiancé, who, even after she reasonably suspects he cheated
on her, wants to stay with Phillipe. And he’s rich. You want the cosmos to balance
the scales, and kick Phillipe once for every boon it’s given him. Maybe you don’t
think he <i>should</i> be stabbed, but, deep
down, you really want him to be.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
While the film makes the murder seem forgivable, the events
after the murder show a world where forgiveness is superfluous, for forgiveness
implies morality. Conscience has no grip on Tom, and morality no grip on the
world. After both the murder of Phillipe and of Freddie, two separate pairs of
priests walk past Tom. Symbols of omniscient morality stroll right past a
murderer, twice, as though the avenging angel took a vacation. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
More powerful than symbols of an amoral universe, is an
amoral point of view. Tom doesn’t care that he’s killed a man. In other stories
with a murderer protagonist, you expect, at some point, a flash of guilt or
panic or a post-traumatic memory. After Tom’s second murder, he calmly looks
over Freddie’s body in the morgue, along with acquaintances and police officers,
all of whom he’s trying to fool. Tom is so unaffected by the sight that he can
straight afterwards eat a big lunch with his acquaintances, even knowing a
police woman is spying on their conversation. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Food becomes a leitmotif of Tom’s amorality. When a normal person
does something wrong, they lose their appetite, they may even vomit. After
killing Phillipe, Tom devours a peach. When he kills Freddie, Tom roasts a
chicken and eats it, all while the corpse lays nearby. In one of the film’s
most memorable sequences, Tom browses a fish market. The scene is notable for
what doesn’t happen. Up until now, Tom has been occupied with the various tasks
necessary for impersonating Phillipe. Now, he’s ambling, with no project to
blinker his mind from remembering his crime. Had Tom a glimmer of conscience,
he would see flashes of the victim he threw into the sea in these dead fish.
But he does not. He eats free samples, and curiously eyes Italian sea life. The
camera close-ups on the fish’s faces, but instead of evoking humanity, instead
of evoking Phillipe’s face, the audience only feels how inhuman these faces are,
how unworthy they are of pity.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The world and protagonist of the film don’t care about the
murder, and neither does the narrative structure. Up until the last few
minutes, none of the obstacles facing Tom have to do with the murder of
Phillipe. Tom faces obstacles, but they concern his stealing Phillipe’s
identity, and later his killing Freddie. The film’s second act would remain the
same even if, instead of murder, what preceded Tom’s identity theft was
Phillipe having a fatal accident, or even Phillipe choosing to flee to a life
of anonymity, leaving his identity for Tom to step into. The murder itself has
no narrative fallout, as though this most immoral of actions were of no note.
Within the last minutes, when Tom’s victory seems assured, the murder does
return to smite Tom. It turns out Phillipe’s corpse, rather than falling to the
ocean floor, got caught on the boat Tom’s been trying to sell, making Tom’s
crime known when the boat gets hoisted out of the sea. This moral comeuppance,
however, seems so accidental, so out of Tom’s control, that it feels disingenuous.
It feels like an American Hays Code film, where regulation demanded that law
and morality reassert themselves by the end, no matter how discordant such an
ending would be with the rest of the film. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
In making a murderer amoral rather than merely immoral, the
film starts with the easier of two tricks: making the murder victim killable.
The audience wants Phillipe to die, and Tom obliges. The harder trick is
avoiding the murder’s morality from then after. The film must divest Tom of all
flashes of conscience, and the narrative of all moral sentimentality, of all
censures and excuses. Until the last few minutes, <i>Purple Noon </i>succeeds. <o:p></o:p></div>
Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-12811409892395764152017-09-01T21:23:00.004-07:002017-09-01T21:23:50.265-07:00‘I’m Sure You Don’t Like Hurting All These Nice People’: An Analysis of Katie Skelly’s 'My Pretty Vampire' (2017 Comic)<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[CW: References to sexual assault, murder,
abusive relationships.]<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Spoilers: The entire plot will be revealed.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘Coming-of-age’
doesn’t generally mean killing spree. But adolescence means breaking free,
expressing who your truest self is, and Clover is a vampire. In the process of
finding herself and overcoming trauma a lot of people will die.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-GB">Clover
wants to leave home, live her own life. Unfortunately for her, her brother
Marcel is an incestuous bastard who keeps her locked in their castle.
Unfortunately for the world, she’s a vampire hungry for human blood. She
escapes her brother’s clutches, and hightails it to the city, killing this
person and that, stopping only for sunrise. But there are people following her,
a P.I. Marcel hired, and an Order of animal-headed figures.</span> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Skelly
costumes a <i>bildungsroman </i>in the cape
and fangs of a vampire film (actually the sex and fangs of a 70s vampire film).
The tropes of vampirism intensify the conflict of the coming-of-age story. Our
protagonist, Clover, must break from the womb of childhood, and through a debauched
adolescence come to a compromise between the needs of her Self, and the needs
of society. In <i>My Pretty Vampire</i>,
Clover’s individual needs are to drink and kill: self-actualisation through
hedonistic murder. Society would prefer she not kill people. But like any decent
<i>bildungsroman</i>, the poles of Self and
Society are not synonymous with Good and Evil. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">We readers,
as human beings with an interest in living, can understand Marcel and the
P.I.’s concern about Clover’s violence. A free society finishes when my fist
reaches your face, or her fangs meet your neck. In a realistic setting, where the
selfish excesses of self-actualisation rarely spout (much) blood, a reader can
be lulled into the protagonist’s self-justifications. Clover is a predator, only
a metaphor away from a murder-rapist. Skelly doesn’t contrive justification for
Clover, like more squeamish vampire writers do. Clover could drink animal
blood; human blood is merely a matter of taste. Nor does Clover prey on the
worst of society. Her first kill is a truck driver. She does kill two skeevy
guys, a drunk who acts boorishly to his prostitute, and a guy who creeps on
schoolgirls, but Clover doesn’t justify this as a cull of undesirables. She
kills them because they remind her of her brother.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But while
her brother keeps her from spree-ing, his dominion is not altruistic. Marcel
does not love his sister, though he thinks he does. He loves an image of his
sister. After she’s fled, Marcel stares at a photograph of a smiling,
brown-eyed Clover – not the hungry, red-eyed predator we know. Towards the
comic’s middle, we learn Marcel delivered Clover to an Order of vampires so that
she could live forever. The bunny-headed cultist says, ‘The one you love will
never die. (How selfish.)’ Marcel does not want an immortal sister, he wants a
forever young sister. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Marcel tries
to arrest Clover’s development by force. He wants his innocent schoolgirl
sister to live eternally. Like any decent guardian he gives his charge rules,
but his rules reveal what a selfish guardian he is. With context clues, we know
Marcel orders Clover to study, to wear her school uniform, and to avoid
smoking. Sensible rules for a teenager, but Clover is a vampire, four years past
high school. Why study? Her brother refuses to let her leave their castle, what
good will a high school diploma do? Why wear a school uniform when she cannot
go to school without bursting into flames? Why avoid smoking? If age cannot
whither her, tobacco won’t. Marcel does not love his sister: he loves a girl who
will forever fulfil his fetish for innocence.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The reader
becomes complicit in this reality-denying innocence worship. People don’t like
rooting for unredeemed murderers. As Clover slays her way through the city, the
reader conjures justifications for actions. ‘Did these people deserve it… In
the context of the metaphor… Well, when you consider where she came from…’
Skelly never validates these justifications. The P.I., Marcel’s agent, wants to
bring Clover back into her restraints. With the incomprehension of far-removed
authority figure, he says, ‘I’m sure you don’t like hurting all these innocent
people…’ <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">She does.
That’s who she is. What the P.I., or Marcel, or we readers would like her to be
does not change who she is.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But Clover
does not start as who she will become. Although always evil, although always
predatory, something within her, even deep as her subconscious, restrains her.
The comic opens in her dreams, on a red rose bleeding black blood. Roses
symbolise sadistic lust, having thorns and associations with romance – but
notice how the sadism and lust are tempered. The roses have no thorns, like a
vampire defanged. The roses bleed, but they bleed black blood. For the first
half of the book, all the blood is black. Black is not the colour of blood,
black is the colour of censored blood. In Clover’s dreams and her first
murders, which hypothetically happen outside her brother’s control, her
savagery is sanitised. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Blood turns
red in chapter four. She has just hit her lowest. The daylight burnt her
unconscious, and she enters a lucid nightmare. The animal-headed Order grabs in
images suggesting gang-rape, and the leader of the group is her brother. He
holds a throbbing dagger to her face and tells her to ‘kiss it’. When Clover
awakes, she kills a prostitute’s john.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The john is
a boorish drunk, publicly molesting the weary prostitute. His is the first red
blood in the comic. Clover does not kill him for the prostitute’s sake. Clover
does nothing for anyone’s sake. In this creep, whose every affection is
assisted masturbation, who snaps at the slightest withholding of the affection
he believes he’s owed, Clover sees her brother. The john’s blood runs red
because killing him was more than feeding, it was sacrifice. She killed her
brother in effigy. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The
compromise she makes with society makes sense in this light. The bat-headed
leader of the vampire says he will not stop her, for her ‘evil is too beautiful
to destroy’. He says she can live, so
long as she lays low. In the end, Clover has found a place in the world,
forever tormenting her frantic-eyed brother. She must cause suffering, but of
all humans her brother most deserves her hate. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-35271513810617696452017-08-06T08:44:00.003-07:002017-08-06T08:44:59.888-07:00Nature, Lacking Tooth and Claw: A Review of Algernon Blackwood's "The Dance of Death" (1928 Short-Story) <div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In <i>The Dance of Death</i>, Algernon Blackwood
uses the supernatural to express platitudes. A modern man, a modern-deskbound-man,
yearns for rugged nature. Mr Browne’s nine-to-five deadens him, you see.
Blackwood does not redeem this trite setup with nuance, character depth, and/or
Weirdness. From respect to Blackwood, an acknowledged master storyteller, I was
tempted to uncover layers of irony, to find, beneath the naïve protagonist’s
thoughts, a subtext criticising the protagonist’s naiveté. But no, <i>The Dance of Death</i> depicts a love of
nature held only by those who have never met nature. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Mr Browne
loves nature. He saves up, from his stultifying desk-job, so he may retire to a
life among nature. His doctor’s diagnosis, then, comes as quite a shock; and a
shock is the last thing he needs, what with his weak heart. Living among nature
would be far too strenuous for him. Even dancing must be undertaken with care.
He attends that night’s dance hesitantly and sadly. Then he sees a woman, Miss
Issidy, a woman none else seem to see, a woman more like a forest sprite than an
urban dancer. He dances with her, and she reveals she knows him, and was waiting
for him. We zoom out: Browne died on the dancefloor from overexertion. His boss
is glad to be rid of him.</span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The
Everyman is not a relatable character. Call me arrogant, but I cannot identify
with people who have no personality. Blackwood avoids all characteristics that
would distinguish his protagonist from his audience of middle-class
desk-jobbers, who divert their free-time by reading trite fantasies like this*.
Browne has a precarious post at his job, and daydreams about living ruggedly in
rugged nature. (You know, the type of guy who reads <i>Walden </i>and <i>Fight Club </i>for
escapism.) He has nothing else characterising him. He has a dream-destroying
heart problem – conflict! – but it is a conflict which afflicts a character
with no character, a character I am meant to care about merely because he,
hypothetically, resembles me.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Browne’s
driving passion in the story, the thwarted passion, is his naïve love of nature.
A love of nature that only we most tamed and civilised people have. A man who,
unironically, believes being a ‘shepherd’, a ‘dweller in the woods’, will stoke
his ‘savage yearnings’. Blackwood means me to feel sympathy for Browne, because
his weak heart ‘at one fell swoop … destroy[ed] a thousand dreams’. Yet all
these thousand dreams are insubstantial, mere daydreams about rustic idylls,
too Romantic to ever become reality.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">But H P
Lovecraft praised Algernon Blackwood, so I shouldn’t dismiss him lightly.
Perhaps, on close-reading, this story will become a satire.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Looking for
irony, I can find it, in the first half. Blackwood’s page-long description of
Browne’s sensitivity to nature approaches self-awareness. A snippet:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">‘[Browne] was an idealist at heart, hating the sordid
routine of the life he led as a business underling. His dreams were of the open
air, of mountains, forests, and great plains, of the sea, and of the lonely places
of the world. Wind and rain spoke intimately to his soul, and the storms of heaven,
as he heard them raging at night round his high room in Bloomsbury, stirred
savage yearnings that haunted him for days afterwards with the voices of the
desert.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">That first sentence is one-sentence description of so many
Everymen – good, good, that’s self-awareness to build on. Storms ‘spoke
intimately to his soul’ – something so earnest-sounding cannot be genuine;
Browne feels it, but Blackwood mocks it. Blackwood then contrasts Bloomsbury, an
upmarket area, with Browne’s ‘savage yearnings’ – so evocative of the bougie
kid who wants to travel Africa to ‘find himself’. Oh, and rainy storms filling Browne
with ‘voices of the desert’ implies he doesn’t know how deserts work. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">This close-reading thing seems to work. I’m building respect
for Blackwood. Let’s turn the page.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Browne fears his weak-heart will force him to spend his
holidays and retirement ‘in some farmhouse “<i>quietly</i>,”
instead of gloriously in the untrodden wilds’. How different that ‘quiet’ life
would be from his dreams, his dreams of becoming ‘a shepherd on a hundred
hills, a dweller in the woods, within sound of his beloved trees and waters,
where the smell of the earth and campfire would be ever in his nostrils, and the
running stream always ready to bear his boat swiftly to happiness.’ If Browne
cringes at ‘quiet’ living, I’m surprised his daydreams don’t make him retch. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The ending neuters the text’s satiric potential. Brown meets
Miss Issidy, the spirit of Nature, or some such saccharinity. Issidy does not
belong to ‘ordinary humanity’, being invisible to all but Browne, and evoking a
‘young tree waving in the wind’, ‘ivy leaves’, and a ‘life of the woods.’ They
have an instant and soul-deep connection, as of a forest goddess and her
unwitting worshipper. They dance ‘with music … within, rather than without;
indeed they seemed to make their own music out of their swift whirling
movements’. Their dance lifts them from the hall, takes Browne over ‘the
dark-lying hills’, with the ‘cool air of the open sky on his cheeks’. The girl,
the spirit of Nature ‘melted away into himself and they had become one being’.
Browne dies in sublimity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The moral of the story, children, is: <i>Nature was in you all along</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The denouement, where Browne’s boss callously plans to replace
him with a more efficient worker, does not salvage the story. Rather than
pulling back from Browne’s daydream, showing perspective, the last paragraphs
validate Browne’s daydreams. The sordid world of business deserves to be
deserted, for nature is so much more fulfilling. The sentiment is valid, even
agreeable. But, as expressed by Blackwood, it is hardly interesting.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">*<span lang="EN-GB">This is
unfairly reductive towards middle-class desk-jobbers, but that’s the point:
such reductive characters don’t exist in real life.</span></span><o:p></o:p></div>
Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-88604786481290957122017-07-09T06:59:00.001-07:002017-07-09T07:10:18.903-07:00An Ape is an Ape is an Ape: An Analysis of Kafka's 'A Report to an Academy' (1917)<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Trying to adopt another culture is difficult. Trying to adopt a
different species is damn-near impossible. Kafka talks about the former through
a fable about the latter. An ape assimilating into humanity allegorises a
person of one ethnic background assimilating into a different culture. This
person may mimic every behaviour and internalise every value, but at some level
his audience will only see this person’s origin. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Red Peter – Peter to those who respect him – is an ape. An academy has
invited him to talk about life as an ape. As Peter’s has no memory of his
ape-like days, he hijacks the engagement to talk about how he became human.
Captured in the Gold Coast by a hunting party, and imprisoned in a cage on a
boat, Peter needed an escape. Ape-strength could not break his cage, and even
if it could, a bullet would be his reward. The only way out, he realised, was
to become human. Through a vigorous apprenticeship under his shipmates he
learnt how to smoke, spit, and drink. He continued his education on dry land,
employing five teachers at the same time to help him reach the level of the ‘average
European’. With humanity under his belt, he took a job as a variety performer,
the only job available to him outside the zoo. But as he says to the academy,
he does not seek their approval. Through his narrative, he only hopes they understand
him. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">A Report to an Academy</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"> is two stories: one, how Peter assimilated from
apedom to humanity; two, Peter recounting how he assimilated from apedom to humanity
to an audience more interested in his apedom. For the first story, his goal is
to mimic humanity; in the second, his aim is to ‘spread understanding’ about where
his mimicry has left him, and what assimilation entails. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Peter did not assimilate into the human world by choice. He assimilated
to survive. This survival does not require strength, speed, or any ability a
jungle-dwelling ape requires; it requires a mastery of etiquette. Peter changes
his behaviour to blend in with humans, so much that now he cannot even remember
his ape days. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Prima facie, Peter shows assimilation done well. Through active and
close attention to his adopted culture’s ways and manners, he has internalised
them; he has ascended to the level of ‘average European.’ Yet the story Peter
tells of how he got here, of the human ways and manners he studied, undermines
not just Peter’s achievements, but the endeavour of assimilation. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Although Peter speaks like an educated bourgeois, his introduction to humanity
came from a lower kind of person. Caged in a boat, he learnt human-ness from
sailors. Far from the refinement he himself has achieved, Peter focuses on
these sailors’ bestial ticks: their laughter, which ‘always tipped over into a
nasty-sounding but finally insignificant cough’; their habit of ‘always’ spitting,
and not caring where it splatted; their ‘grunting’ which replaced speaking.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">To an audience which expected Peter to talk about his apedom, which
still views him as an ape, Peter talks about these less than refined examples
of humanity, whom none of the audience would see as less than human. This is
the double-standard of assimilation. The dominant culture imagines an ideal
member, and expects aliens to measure up just to be considered average, but
rarely subjects natives to this standard. In his subtlest and calmest manner,
Peter reveals the hypocrisy, describing the natives’ vulgarity with his
ape-tongue’s refinement. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">To pass as human Peter mimics human behaviour, but few of these
behaviours seem essentially civilised. The bulk of Peter’s narrations tell of
his first steps into humanity, on the boat, learning from the sailors. How he
got his erudition and eloquence, he relegates to the denouement. Rather than
tell his audience, in depth, how he gobbled and digested the highest flowers of
European culture, Peter tells a grubby story of learning to smoke and spit. His
story climaxes with him sculling whiskey without gagging. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The irony is that in learning these vulgar behaviours from humans, Peter
shows a human virtue. One virtue that separates humans from beasts is being
able to defer present pleasure for greater future pleasure. From the sailors,
Peter learns smoking and drinking. To the sailors, these are hedonistic acts.
To Peter, these are nauseating acts, and yet he does them, because he knows
they will help him get out of his cage. By persevering with these personally
revolting human hedonisms, Peter shows he was already, in some sense, more
civilised than these humans. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The defence given of rigorous assimilation is that outsiders must learn
to live by values of the culture they live in. Perhaps there’s something in
that, but often this talk of deeper values veils a prejudice for superficial
behaviour. Peter’s story of the boat shows him, not internalising human values,
but mimicking their behaviour. He copies how they ‘spit’, how they ‘smoke’, how
they ‘drink’. This does not reflect a deep revolution of character; he acts,
but does not understand why. Even after he mastered holding a pipe it took him ‘a
long time to grasp the difference between a filled an empty pipe’. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">But ultimately, one’s character hardly matters. Peter must <i>appear</i> human, which is impossible. His
ape-ness, his unconcealable otherness, stops him from getting the complement of
assimilation, acceptance. Peter says he has ‘reached the level of cultivation of
the average European.’ His underestimation of himself only strengthens his
implicit point: Are average Europeans viewed as he has been. By the end of the
story, Peter has the superficial luxuries of class: drinking wine in leisure
time, accepting visitors, frequenting banquets with learned people, etc. Yet
Peter is still a show-ape on the variety stage, the ape who apes humanity. If he
did not have this dubious claim to fame, one wonders if he could mingle with
good-society; his foot-hold in human society comes from his not being human.
The entire framing device of this story comes from his not being human: the
academy asked him to speak about life as an ape. Peter has the character,
diction, and manner of an above-average human, yet the average human will
always see him as an ape. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Quotes taken from </span></span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Penguin Classics
Deluxe Edition)</span><i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">, by Franz Kafka,
translated by Michael Hoffmann, 2008</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-16411969483991496862017-06-04T06:57:00.000-07:002017-07-09T05:54:40.094-07:00You Will Never Be One of Us: An Analysis of 'The New Advocate' by Franz Kafka<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">A new advocate has come to the bar, Bucephalus,
Alexander the Great’s horse. The narrator acknowledges that, as a horse,
Bucephalus will have an awkward time. No sooner does the narrator introduce
Bucephalus than his mind drifts towards the horse’s past, to Alexander the
Great. Where have the great men gone. But, being gone, perhaps it is better to
be like Bucephalus. Abandon the battlefield, and devote oneself to quiet study.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">That is the plot, but this story is not a
plot. Progressive sentences do not unfold events, but unpeel the narrator’s
mind, his prejudice, nostalgia, tone-deafness. The narrator, by telling us
about Bucephalus, shows himself. Bucephalus is an Othered individual – it
doesn’t matter exactly what marginalised group he stands for. What matters is
how the narrator, a member of the dominant class, views this Other.</span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Statements of escalating prejudice make up
the first paragraph, all of them disguised as benign commentary. Depending on
whether the narrator is ‘well-intentioned’ or not, each sentence is either
tone-deaf or back-handed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">‘We have a new advocate, Dr Bucephalus. His
exterior offers few clues to the time he used to be the battle charger of
Alexander the Great. However, anyone familiar with his background will not fail
to notice certain things. On the stairs recently, I saw a very simple court
servant watching our advocate with the appraising eye of a regular race-goer,
as, raising his thighs mightily, he mounted the marble steps with ringing
strides.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">By saying Bucephalus’ ‘exterior offers few
clues’ about his past, the narrator reveals Bucphalus’ past. Even a reader who
knew the name of Alexander’s horse would not think ‘Dr Bucephalus’ refers to
that Bucephalus, yet the narrator forces this information on the reader. It has
the tone of saying, ‘You’d never know he was a Jew.’ The narrator then points
out anyone ‘familiar with his background’ will notice Bucephalus’ tells. One of
those people ‘familiar with his background’, the narrator adds, is a court
servant – not just a court servant, but a ‘very simple’ court servant. In
short, everyone knows. But their knowledge does not become awed respect. The
servant watches Bucephalus like a ‘regular race-goer’. Even Alexander’s horse
is just a horse. A regular class hierarchy would put the lawyer Bucephalus
above the servant, but even servants see the Othered Bucephalus as inferior.
The paragraph ends with what might have been a compliment in some other
context: ‘raising his thighs mightily, he mounted the marble steps with ringing
strides.’ A compliment, but one akin to telling an African-American kid, ‘You
want to be a lawyer? But you’re so good at track-and-field.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">The narrator ‘sympathises’ with Bucephalus’
position. He reports his groups’ orthodoxy, what they ‘tell one another’, that
‘with society ordered as it is today, Bucephalus is in a difficult situation.’
This acknowledgement of racism has the fatalism and vagueness one expects from
members of the dominant class, who are aware of racism, but experience none of
it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Despite his mock concern, the narrator
cares little about Bucephalus’ pain. ‘Bucephalus is in a difficult situation,
and for that reason, and for his historical role, he deserves compassion.’
Notice ‘his historical role’ tucked away there, as if Bucephalus’ service under
Alexander only <i>added</i> to the bar’s
compassion. At least for the narrator, it is the only reason for compassion. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">The story goes for around a page, and yet
one-third devotes itself to Alexander. Not Bucephalus <i>and</i> Alexander, but Alexander solely. Bucephalus fades from the
story, as the narrator drifts into nationalistic nostalgia. ‘Even then the
gates of India proved unattainable, though the king’s sword was certainly
pointed in the right direction.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Bucephalus has joined the bar, but he will
never belong. Only twice in the piece is the first-person plural used, in the
first and last sentence. ‘We have a new advocate, Dr Bucephalus’ and
‘[Bucephalus] reads by quiet lamplight, and turns the pages of our folios.’
Both pronouns <i>could</i> include
Bucephalus, but in the context of the piece, I doubt it. It is we, the lawyers,
as opposed to him, the equine lawyer. The final ‘our’ has no need to be there.
The narrator need only have said the horse pages through ‘old folios’, but no,
these are ‘our’ old folios, not his. We allow him to page through, from our
compassion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">This is the bigotry of the narrator: even
in his compassion, he excludes. Bucephalus may be a lawyer, but the narrator will
always view him with pitying condescension. He cannot even think about
Bucephalus himself. He thinks of Bucephalus’ past with Alexander, he thinks of
how the court servant views him, how the bar views him, or he thinks of
Alexander solely. Only in the final paragraph does the narrator even attempt to
enter Bucephalus’ mind. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">As an examination of a particular kind of
racism, Kafka importantly did not have the narrator express hate. The narrator
does not openly mock or despise the horse. No, the narrator’s sin – equal but
distinct from hate – is an absolute lack of respect. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-GB"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Quotes taken from </span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Penguin Classics
Deluxe Edition)<i>, by Franz Kafka,
translated by Michael Hoffmann, 2008<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
</div>
Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-4442745784687377302017-05-28T07:32:00.000-07:002017-05-28T07:32:32.456-07:00The Comedy in Horror: A Review of 'The Bride of Frankenstein' (1935 film)<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Camp ages better than seriousness. Subjected
to the ironising current of time, straight-faced gothic horror becomes ridiculous.
James Whale prevented <i>The Bride of
Frankenstein </i>suffering this fate. He makes his film ridiculous to begin
with.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">One night, Mary Shelley reveals to Lord
Byron and Percy Shelley that her tale, <i>Frankenstein</i>,
had a second part, that of the bride of Frankenstein’s monster. Henry
Frankenstein has put mad science behind him. He’s settled down in his massive
castle, and all’s right with the world. That is, until an even madder scientist,
Dr Pretorius, drags him back into the game. They will make a female monster.
And it turns out the original monster is alive and well.</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"></span></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The Byron and Shelleys framing device cleverly
flips-off <i>Frankenstein </i>purists. The
previous <i>Frankenstein</i> film<i> </i>did not faithfully adapt the source
material. This sequel is even less faithful, and yet here Whale forces Mary Shelley
to say, ‘This is my story.’ Whale even puts in Mary Shelley’s mouth that most
platitudinous reading of <i>Frankenstein</i>:
Frankenstein should never have tampered in God’s domain. Whale is saying, ‘I
know this is nothing like the book, and I don’t care.’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In that spirit, I will not compare this to
Mary Shelley’s work, spare for one area. I feel the film has filled in one of
Shelley’s plot holes. In the book, Frankenstein fears building the monster a
bride, because he thinks they’ll breed a race of monsters. The prospect is as
horrible as its solution is obvious: don’t build the bride with a womb. When
you’re building a human from the organs up, wouldn’t you have to <i>intend</i> to make it fertile.. Whale’s film
corrects this. Frankenstein fears the monsters breeding, but Dr Pretorius
intends it. He wants the bride to bear children. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Whale has forgone straight horror, and has
instead made a horror comedy. The archness of the acting and tone teeter
between gothic and hilarious. Dr Pretorius’ old-queen mad-scientist shtick
nails the archetype far better than Frankenstein. And the Bride, when she darts
her head around in stupefaction, can either unnerve or tickle. But <i>The Bride</i>’s comedy does not limit itself
to exaggerating the gothic. It has comedy elements which are plainly and solely
comedy elements. The scene where Pretorius shows Frankenstein his ‘experiments’
cannot be taken seriously. He has miniature, Tudor-era homunculi living in
jars. None of them seem particularly miffed about their imprisonment. They do
not bang against the glass while silently screaming, in some darkly comedic
way. No, this is just a weird, light-hearted comedy beat. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Not to say that all the comedy’s surreal brilliance.
Una O’Conner fills a far more conventional comedy role, the shrieking servant
woman. She was neither funny nor necessary to the plot. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The
Bride of Frankenstein</span></span></i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> is a decent comedy, even if
it pretends to be a horror film. It may have flaws, but it does plaster over
some of the Mary Shelley’s flaws. Give it a watch.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-60499392271157659952017-05-14T08:27:00.001-07:002017-05-14T08:27:03.149-07:00The White Powder's Not That Either: Review and Analysis of Arthur Machen's 'The Novel of the White Powder' (1895)<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This
review will spoil the plot in full<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Machen could only have disappointed.
Praised by Lovecraft and Stephen King, Arthur Machen’s story will be known by
horror fans, though rarely read. And if read, better left unread, if <i>The Novel of the White Powder</i> indicates
his oeuvre. Machen writes competently, but he cannot justify the label ‘horror’.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Helen Leicester’s brother does nothing but
study law. His idea of recreation involves sitting idly in a chair between case
law binges. But even lawyers grow sick, and he requires a special medicine. Too
special it turns out. The prescription he gets from Dr Haberden changes him –
Francis wants a holiday! More than that he wants to give up the law altogether.
He starts slumming around London. Helen doesn’t know what’s happened, or what
she can do. Her brother rots in front of her, and the very weather seems to
degenerate alongside him. Eventually, he shuts himself in his room, saying he’s
studying law again. When Helen and Haberden knock down the door, they find a
oozing mass. Haberden leaves England, never to return, but sends Helen his
colleague’s analysis of the medicine. This white powder, left on the shelf so
long, with the temperature rising and lowering, had become something… other.
And it has something to do with medieval pagan devil-worshiping cults. </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"></span></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This is less a horror story than a story
with horrified characters. We must take their word for how scary this all is.
Dr Haberden flees Francis’ room, saying, ‘I, who have dealt with death all my
life, and have dabbled with the melting ruins of the earthly tabernacle. But
not this, oh! Not this.’ Machen does attempt showing the horrific, but his
descriptions can fall into diabolic platitudes which evoke no image. Some time
into his transformation, Helen describes Francis as ‘the symbol and presence of
all evil and all hideous corruption’. What is that? What does evil or corruption
look like? Even at the climax, when Machen’s description of Francis reads like
the special-effects brief for a 1980s creature-feature, Machen slips into
vaguery. Francis ‘seeth[es] with corruption and hideous rottenness’. Rottenness
is at least material. I can imagine it. But corruption? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Machen’s descriptions, at times, get
specific, but these images do not terrify. The most powerful image goes:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘[A]s I lifted my face the blind was being
drawn back, and I had had an instant's glance of the thing that was moving it,
and in my recollection I knew that a hideous image was engraved forever on my
brain. It was not a hand; there were no fingers that held the blind, but a
black stump pushed it aside, the mouldering outline and the clumsy movement as
of a beast's paw had glowed into my senses before the darkling waves of terror
had overwhelmed me as I went down quick into the pit.’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘Black stump’, ‘beast’s paw’, Helen sees in
her own house, in her own brother, the human act of pushing back the blinds done
by inhuman limbs. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In comparison, Machen’s other attempts at horrific
images seem so much duller. Helen thinks something’s up with her brother when
she sees on his hand – Horror of horrors! – a spot. Machen’s melodramatic style
makes this even more ridiculous. ‘Oh! If human flesh could burn with flame, and
if flame could be black as pitch, such was that before me.’ (There’s no ‘if’
about flame burning, and burns can be black.) Great horror writing can make the
unthreatening terrifying. A child’s ball can be terrifying. But if you just
show me a child’s ball, I’m not scared. Even if you blare a load of scary music
around it, I won’t scream. I’ll laugh. This ‘small patch about the size of a
sixpence’ could be terrifying, but from another writer’s pen. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The climax fares better:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘I looked, and a pang of horror seized my
heart as with a white-hot iron. There upon the floor was a dark and putrid
mass, seething with corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor
solid, but melting and changing before our eyes, and bubbling with unctuous
oily bubbles like boiling pitch. And out of the midst of it shone two burning
points like eyes, and I saw a writhing and stirring as of limbs, and something
moved and lifted up what might have been an arm. The doctor took a step
forward, raised the iron bar and struck at the burning points; he drove in the
weapon, and struck again and again in the fury of loathing.’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But it’s not scary, is it? Earlier I said
it was like a 1980s creature-feature, with their moistly grotesque practical
effects. They were rarely scary; they were merely repellent. As an image, this
climax doesn’t achieve what Machen wants it to. As the climax of the story, it
doesn’t either. This last shot of gruesomeness, after a long time of relatively
subdued stuff, feels like the twist from a pre-Comics’ Code horror comic. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Unlike one of those horror comics, Machen
can’t just leave us with this image. He must <i>explain </i>it. The denouement gives us a pseudo-scientific,
pseudo-pagan mythology explanation for all that happened. We read a letter
verbatim from one of Dr Haberden’s associates, a man who only exists for
exposition. He waffles on about how science doesn’t know everything, and how
the universe is more than material, and that evil rituals were carried out in
medieval Europe. I’m not expecting philosophical, scientific, or historical
rigour from a story ending in an oozing demon corpse. I would be fine if Machen
glossed over this explanation in three sentences. He takes three pages. My
tolerance for bad arguments does not last three pages. And does this fluff add
anything to the story? Not much, only a snippet towards the end, which I shall
get to later.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As a literary horror writer, it would be
wrong to judge Machen on his scares-per-word count. Let’s see if the story’s subtext
can make it interesting. I’ll first dismiss an obvious, but boring, interpretation
of the story. <i>The Novel of the White
Powder</i> is a drug addiction allegory.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">We have Francis, a man so establishment he
does nothing but study law. One day, without his knowledge, he ingests a drug,
which is dangerous. And pleasurable. He seems happier than ever, and at first
only his closest family can see what’s wrong. But Francis’ ‘recreation’ soon
becomes hedonism. His break from the study of law becomes a full rejection of
it, a fall from the establishment to bohemianism. His personality changes,
until he becomes a stranger. His body degenerates, until even his own sister
can only look at his ruin in horror. He is undone by his addiction.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A valid interpretation, but accepting it
would do a disservice to Machen. Although I don’t much like this story, it is
more than a didactic moral allegory. Judging this as a drug story, lowers it.
The supernatural exaggerations do not enhance, but blunt the story of a drug
addict. Were it drug story, it would have done better as a realist one.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And now for the more interesting
interpretation, the one which Machen spells out in expositional letter at the
end. The powder makes Original Sin flesh:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘[A] few grains of white powder thrown into
a glass of water, the house of life was riven asunder and the human trinity
dissolved, and the worm which never dies, that which lies sleeping within us
all, was made tangible and an external thing, and clothed with a garment of
flesh. And then, in the hour of midnight, the primal fall was repeated and
re-presented, and the awful thing veiled in the mythos of the Tree in the
Garden was done anew.’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Adam and Eve fell from the perfect order of
paradise. Francis fell from absolute law. He sins, but his sins do not merely
tear his soul, they tear reality: <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘the sky began to flush and shine … in the
gap between two dark masses that were houses an awful pageantry of flame
appeared – lurid whorls of writhed cloud, and utter depths burning, grey masses
like the fume blown from a smoking city, and an evil glory blazing far above
shot with tongues of more ardent fire, and below as if there was a deep pool of
blood.’ <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Machen makes this more complex than a black
and white fall from paradise to sin. Francis rots in an extreme of sin, but his
extreme of law was never virtue. What is the law when not applied to humanity?
Francis studies the law like a hermit. All well and good, if he were in any
other field, whose education did not decide the fate of others. As a student of
the law, his education will never be complete if he only studies the law, and
not the society which the law governs. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Although the pagan ritual of the white
powder has the ‘primal fall … repeated and re-presented’, it is not the primal
fall. The primal fall has happened; we have the Original Sin to show for it.
Francis’ lawful beginnings parody Eden. He cannot live in pure law, because
Original Sin already debases him.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Although this interpretation grabs me more,
it also leaves me less scared. Lovecraft’s critique of Machen holds: he
believes in sin. For Machen, sin is not merely socially undesirable acts. Sin
is an affront to the foundation of the universe. Immorality takes on a
supernatural fascination. A fascination I, and other atheists, cannot share.
This story about reality tearing around this sinner interests me only as much
any curious belief system does.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Aesthetically and thematically, <i>The Novel of the White Powder</i> does not
scare. Its images either lack definition, or, where they have definition, lack
impact. As I’ve heard of Machen’s greatness, and of the mark he left on
Lovecraft, I hope this story is one of his weaker efforts. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-66691591758078318502017-04-23T10:03:00.001-07:002017-04-23T10:03:05.469-07:00The Dark Before Dawn: An Analysis of Oscar Wilde's 'Salomé' (1891)<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Without knowing its disease, the body still
succumbs to disease. A civilisation’s flame dwindles to flicker, before
snuffing. In <i>The Hollow Men</i>, T. S.
Eliot wrote the world ends ‘not with a bang but a whimper’.<i> </i>Eliot wrote of a tired death, a whimper at the end of weariness.
Wilde culls a world with decadence. Only when the rotting flesh of Herod,
Herodias, Salomé ferments do they whimper. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Reading <i>Salomé</i>,
another of Eliot’s poems echoed: <i>Journey of
the Magi</i>. One of the three wise men recounts meeting the baby Jesus. But
through his opaque narration, we learn he witnessed not just Christ, but his world’s
death. With Christianity came a revolution in values, a revolution in culture,
a revolution in the world, but the old world, culture, values must die. The magi
cannot become a Christian.</span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span lang="EN-GB">Salomé
</span></i><span lang="EN-GB">is concurrent with Christ. We hear Christ has, or
has not, performed this, or that, many miracles. Importantly, Christ never
appears. Wilde shows the birth of Christianity, but chose a source narrative absent
of Christ. Wilde’s readers, presumably Christians or descendants of a Christian
culture, are not given the chance to smile at Christianity’s birth. They are
denied the presence of Christ. They are alone with the dying pagans. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Like Eliot’s magi, Wilde’s pagans sense the
future, but cannot articulate it. They are like the New World native, who
cannot tell the black mass on the horizon is a galleon. The moon augers ill,
looking like a ‘dead woman’ and turning ‘blood-red’. Herod has imprisoned a
prophet, Iokanaan (John the Baptist). Although more articulate than the moon,
Iokanaan’s words require hindsight, available to Wilde’s audience, but denied
to his characters. (And even Wilde’s audience will only comprehend broad
strokes.) ‘Rejoice not,’ he says, ‘oh land of Palestine, because the rod that
scourged thee hath been broken. From the seed of the serpent will come forth a
basilisk, and the off-spring of the basilisk will devour the birds.’ Herod
hears the prophet’s words, but cannot help bending them to his preconceptions. ‘The
Angel of the Lord will smite him. And he will be devoured by worms.’ Well, this
surely means Herod’s rival, the King of Cappadocia. ‘The wanton! The strumpet! …
Let the captains pierce her with their swords. Let them crush her beneath their
shields.’ He means Herodias, Herod and Herodias think. He actually means
Salomé, who Herod himself will command pierced with swords. Herod hears, but cannot
comprehend. Can we expect inhabitants of the old world to comprehend the shape
of the new?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">When Iokanaan talks of the ‘Saviour of the
world’, the pagans of course do not know who this is. Perhaps the prophet means
Caesar, emperor of the old world. No sooner is Caesar mentioned than his
infirmity becomes apparent. ‘He suffers from gout … [H]is feet are like those
of an elephant.’ How feeble does this sick man seem next to a healer of the
sick. How insignificant does this King of Earth seem next to the King of
Heaven. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Caesar ruled the world through might. Herod
ruled by slaughtering his brother. Christ’s reign is of pacifism and resurrection.
Power is not moving from one dynasty to the next. Power is transforming into
something unrecognisable. Power moves from the body to the spirit.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Wilde’s honey-tongued descriptions are not
merely sordid or decadent. Wilde focuses on them, because the characters obsess
on sensuality. Theirs is a world where all value is bodily. The play revolves
around one of the most famous strip-teases in history. (<i>The Dance of the Seven Veils </i>is never described, but something at
least as lascivious seems necessary.) An act of sensuality ending in a
beheading. Herod tries to divert Salomé’s bloodlust into a more acceptable
hedonism. He offers treasures of parodic luxury. When she demands Iokanaan’s
head, Herod offers fifty white peacocks whose ‘beaks are gilded, and the very
corn they eat is gilded.’ She again demands Iokanaan’s head, so Herod offers a
pearl necklace ‘like moons chained together on silver moonbeams’, a fan of
parrot feathers and a robe of ostrich, a crystal ball, three turquoises which
allow one to ‘imagine things that do not exist’ and ‘make women barren.’ All
these treasures are the most the physical world has to offer. All are
ridiculous. In demanding the head of Iokanaan, Salomé senses this, but not
entirely.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">At base, Salomé does <i>not</i> lust after Iokanaan. Rather, lust is the only way she can
comprehend her fascination with this herald of the new era. ‘All other men
filled [her] with disgust.’ She goes on to praise his physical body as an ‘ivory
column set on a silver pedestal’. This is contradicted by common sense (he is
an emaciated beggar) and her own words. After he denies her approaches, she
says his body is like ‘the body of a leper’, his hair is ‘covered with mud.’
Only his lips does she continue praising, the most sensual part of the body still
legal to show on stage. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">She sees something different in this man,
but cannot comprehend its nature. His force is spiritual, but she sees only the
physical. The plot centres on her desire to kiss him. When he will not do so
willingly, she will kiss his dead lips. Kissing a severed head is not merely
forcing oneself on an unwilling party. Salomé reduces Iokanaan to a body, sans
life, sans spirit. She wanted to kiss Iokanaan, and when she has, she has not.
She does not kiss Iokanaan’s lips, but the lips he once spoke through.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Salomé, like all the pagans, missed the point.
They could only miss the point. The revolution progresses, and the world abandons
them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><i>Quotes taken from Vyvyan Holland's 1957 translation, from the The Folio Society edition.</i></span></div>
Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-59623148297625060992017-04-16T07:44:00.001-07:002017-04-16T07:44:37.015-07:00Style Substitutes Substance: A Review of Waid and Samnee's 'Black Widow' (2016-7 comic)<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I don’t mean style over substance as an
insult. In Waid and Samnee’s twelve-issue, single-arc run on <i>Black Widow</i>,<i> </i>plot threads only just hold together, characters have rote motivations,
and the themes extend to characters saying ‘secret’ a lot. On their own, these
elements are merely competent. Here, they are redeemed, because they fuel the
book’s style. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Black Widow runs from SHIELD. A masked terrorist
named Weeping Lion blackmails her into digging up her own past. He wants
information on the Red Room, a school for child assassins. The Red Room has resurrected,
ready to educate a new generation of assassins.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Style over substance is not a bad thing. Raymond
Chandler’s novels testify to this. At its best, <i>Black Widow</i>’s style substitutes for substance. This redemptive
style owes more to Samnee’s art than Waid’s writing. Or it owes to Waid only so
far as his writing gives a reason for Samnee’s art. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The first issue is an implied manifesto,
one professing illustrative flash over narrative depth. Twenty decompressed, mostly
wordless pages show a chase through the SHIELD helicarrier. Samnee choreographs
these pages as well as <i>John Wick </i>or <i>The Raid</i>. (When a SHIELD agent complains
that Black Widow ‘turns a 40,000 foot fall into a ballet’, the reader is
willing to forgive Waid and Samnee for patting themselves on the back.) At the
end of these exhilarating twenty pages, what have we learnt? Black Widow has
burnt bridges with SHIELD, and is after a MacGuffin. A different series might
have gotten this out of the way in the first ten, no, three pages. A different
series might also establish some character depth or themes in its first issue.
While I can say what this issue, what this series, lacks, I cannot call it bad.
Why keep a chase scene to three pages when twenty are more exhilarating? Why
bother with more than the barest character beats, when more would stall the
action? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Someone flicking through <i>Black Widow</i>’s cover gallery may question
my claim that it has no thematic depth. The cover of issue seven proclaims, ‘No
More Secrets.’ Surely, <i>Black Widow</i> at
least tries to say something about secrets or truth. Beyond characters saying ‘secret’,
and a reference to Snowden, no, no, this work has nothing to say. Secrets
amount to, at most, plot points. I call this is a good thing. I wouldn’t want
this series bogged down by pseudo-philosophizing. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I compared <i>Black Widow</i> to Chandler’s novels, and that’s true in less positive
ways. Chandler had little care for narrative lucidity. If the plot gets boring,
have a man bang on the door with a gun – it’ll be fine, so long as we finish the
case we started in the first act. Readers comprehend the plot <i>as a whole</i>, but when asked to recount
the scene-by-scene cause-and-effect, comprehension evaporates. Issue to issue,
month to month, reading this series irritated me more than it pleased me. The
fog of memory thickened a foggy narrative. Read in one sitting, this loose plot
is not so much a problem. Narrative momentum and a general sense of what’s
going on prevent the reader falling into impassable confusion.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Only in two places does this loose plotting
grow into a blemish. Two times, late in the series, Waid introduces hitherto unheard
of characters (no spoilers). I know the benefit of a shared universe is you don’t
have to waste time with introductions. If Spider-Man pops in to help Thor, the
reader doesn’t need a dossier. It becomes a problem when Spider-Man pops in during
the story’s third-quarter to perform a vital plot function. What’s worse, in <i>Black Widow</i>, the worst offending
character is unnecessary. Oh, yes, they perform a vital function, but that
function could easily have been given to an established character. Or a
computer. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The overall narrative concerns Black Widow’s
<i>alma mater</i>, an all-girls boarding-school
for child assassins. Decades later, the school reopens with a different name,
but the same M.O.: brainwash and train young girls to become the most effective
and the least suspected killers. To keep <i>Black
Widow </i>a breezy action book, Waid does not examine child soldiers or
brainwashing. Here, it’s a bit of spy-fi camp that adds to Black Widow’s pathos,
but adds no pathos to <i>Black Widow</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Our main antagonist has a rote but
effective motivation. Black Widow’s always inferior classmate vows to exceed
and destroy Black Widow. Which is fine.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Black
Widow</span></span></i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> is an exercise in style. It’s a spy-fi action
romp with a few ideas that could have been themes, but which, thankfully, it
leaves as plot points. <i>Black Widow</i> is
best read all at once, without looking for depth.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-70639781457362349572017-04-02T04:41:00.000-07:002017-04-02T04:41:06.017-07:00A Gay Old Time: A Review of 'Moll Cutpurse: Her True History' by Ellen Galford (1985)<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It’s amazing what you can find, trawling through
second-hand bookstores. I found a swashbuckling, historical yarn, starring a
tomboyish lesbian, in a loving relationship, written in the 1980s – which doesn’t
end in misery. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">During the reigns of Elizabeth and James I,
when women weren’t at their most emancipated, a dashing thief-tress stole her
way through England: Moll Cutpurse. We follow her from her start as her parent’s
problem child, to her managing a pick-pocket academy, to her bambooziling a
shanghai-ing ship captain, and beyond. Throughout her life, Moll has one
constant, her apothecary girlfriend Bridget.</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"></span></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The cover calls this a ‘Novel by Ellen
Galford,’ but I don’t think ‘novel’ is the right term. A novel implies an overarching
narrative. The blurb reads: ‘[Moll] pits her wits against Puritans and
tricksters, travels with the gypsies, rescues a near-victim of anti-witchcraft
hysteria, and cheats the wealthy out of their ill-gotten gains’. You’d think
these were adventures she has <i>on her way </i>to<i> </i>a larger goal. But, no, in <i>Moll Cutpurse</i> these adventures are
distinct episodes, building to no grand narrative. Some episodes are no more
than incidents, like when Moll argues with Thomas Middleton and then battles a
misogynistic swordsman. This is not a mark against the book. Even if the
episodic structure leads to a looser overall product than I’d like, the
episodes themselves entertain well enough.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The book’s breezy style prevents these
episodes getting stale. We see Moll evolve from problem child to serving girl
to cross-dressing actor in a mere sixteen pages. The prose refuses to bog down
in details of environment or character.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Your liking of this novel will depend on
your liking of Moll. Like Holmes or Jeeves, Moll stands above average humanity.
We want to see how this singular individual swash-buckles her way through it. There
are certainly less interesting characters than a butch lesbian in the Elizabethan
Era, always up for a fight, and ready to defend her sex against a man’s chauvinist
word. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If the novel has any arc, it is Moll’s
growing past her internalised misogyny, and into a defender of women. We first
meet Moll barging into Bridget’s apothecary’s. She demands a potion to ‘turn
[her] into a man’. But this book is not a pioneering work of transgender
adventure fiction. Her desire to become a man comes not from believing herself a
man, but from believing what men say about women. Around her, she sees women
denied opportunity, treated as their husband’s chattel. She wants more for
herself than that, and becoming a man seems her only way out. With some words
from Bridget, though, she realises female suffering does not originate in womanhood,
but in societal oppression. Unfortunately (or fortunately, from the perspective
of the characters), Moll realises this only fifty pages into the novel,
completing her arc. From then on, Moll versus misogyny is just sort of a
running theme, which gets centre-stage in the climax. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Moll
Cutpurse</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> is not a character study. ‘Her True
History’ does not cover Moll’s growth as a person (beyond the first fifty
pages). It does not even track a grand desire she has. She is a static
character, like Holmes or Jeeves. And like Holmes and Jeeves, we get Moll’s
tale toldthrough a third-party.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Moll’s Watson is Bridget, her lover. On
paper the book is told through Bridget’s eyes, but I question how necessary her
perspective is. I know the common wisdom: Sherlock Holmes stands so far above
us mere mortals that we need an everyman’s POV from Watson to relate to. But in
<i>Moll Cutpurse</i>, Moll <i>does</i> tell most of her story. We’ll be in
Bridget’s head, only for Moll to turn up and say, ‘Well, here’s what I’ve been
up to.’ From there, we get Moll’s first-person recollections, showing we don’t
need Bridget’s narration. What’s more If we stuck to Moll’s POV, there might be
added tension. Given Moll recounts her dangerous exploits to another person, we
know she gets out alright. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I suppose, interspersing Moll’s narration into
Bridget’s varies up the book. If we didn’t take a break from Moll, her
swashbuckling would become a dull baseline. But even without Bridget, we have
characters other than Moll give their tales, which would be spice enough for
the book. These tales range from unintentional treason to escaping an abusive
husband. Bridget’s life story is nowhere near as interesting. Yes, she is a lesbian
small-business owner in the Elizabethan Era, but she has no beginning, middle
and end. Spare an episode in the second quarter of the book, all sections told
from Bridget’s perspective just feel like dull digressions. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But though I can’t stir much affection for
Moll’s lover, I appreciate that in this novel from the 80s, the worst I can say
about a lesbian lover is that she’s boring. There’s no ‘bury your gays’ here.
The novel has a sense of innocence. Not love, nor sex, nor same-sex love, nor
same-sex sex is shameful. The work glances at society’s bigotry, but only as
caricatures for Moll to bat away with the back of her sword.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Moll
Cutpurse </span></span></i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">is a loose novel, a series of entertaining episodes amounting to no grand
product. It follows a main character who may not have depth or much growth, but
she is entertaining to watch (even when she is watched through her less entertaining
lover’s eyes). If you’re in the market for a historical romp, give <i>Moll Cutpurse</i> a try. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Quotes taken from </i>Firebrand Books' <i>1985 printing.</i></span></div>
Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-20511327498992512792017-03-26T04:08:00.002-07:002017-03-26T04:08:18.596-07:00Approaching Mediocrity: A Review of 'Kindred Spirits on the Roof' (2015 manga)<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Perhaps this collection appeals to fans of
the original game, but <i>Kindred Spirits on
the Roof</i> underwhelms as a standalone manga. Cameos pop up, as though we
should care about them, and maybe players of the game do. But none of the
characters in this work are compelling or distinct. What we have here are
graphic novellas that feel slight and unsatisfying.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Both stories share Shirojo high-school as a
setting, but otherwise do not overlap. The first story focuses on Shiori. She
still pangs with guilt over fleeing her best friend, Mako, when Mako confessed
her love for Shiori. With the help of her new friends, Hina and Seina, Shiori
must learn to stop running from her problems, and her feelings. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The second story concerns a girl, Hase, who
<i>adores </i>seeing female friendships. She
loves her voyeurism so much, she joins the quiz club just to pour over the
friendship of the club’s two leaders, Tomoe and Sasaki. Together they aim to
win the national quiz tournament. And will Tomoe and Sasaki’s friendship become
something more? (Not even a spoiler: it will.)</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"></span></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Anyone uninitiated into <i>KSotR </i>should hold their wallets back. As
for how the initiated should act, I can’t say, because I have never played the
VN. Maybe the players will find this spin-off just as mediocre. I hear the game
is very good. Apparently, it presents lesbian coming-of-ages with tenderness
and depth. The manga does not display such skill. Perhaps players who’ve spent
hours with these characters (I assume the game contains these characters), will
bring character depth over with them. Maybe the characters have quirks and
nuances that did not have the necessary knowledge to notice. Perhaps the cameos
will seem more welcome and less distracting to the players. Perhaps I’d
understand why, for no reason, two ghosts appear.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The first story did not strike me as terrible,
merely cliched. The difference between cliché and universal is in the execution.
The story explores coming to terms with your past actions and your current
feelings. Those times when one must swallow their hesitance, their fear for
societal consequence, and act for the sake of others’ and themselves. The
writer undermines these perennial themes with platitudinous execution. Shiori
‘ran’ from Mako when she confessed her love. Shiori has never stopped
‘running’, but if she wants to grow, she must stop ‘running’. (Because she’s
literally <i>running </i>from her problems –
get it?) <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Shiori stops running when her friends give
her words of wisdom, and aid her reunion with Mako. The writer introduces these
friends, Seina and Hina, with two twenty-five words text boxes. These boxes
contain such unique traits as: ‘[Hina-san] doesn’t talk much, but when she
does, she makes it count.’ And: ‘[Seina-san’s] a hard worker at the centre of
the class.’ Over the rest of the story, they get little more characterisation
than this. They barely get as much characterisation as this. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As for our main character, she is a little
bland, but her turmoil is compelling. We do feel her shame and self-doubt (even
if said emotions are expressed in cliché). What’s more, the story does not bog
down in self-doubt. Outside of her uneasiness with Mako, Shiori smiles, she has
friends, she has goals, talents. Albeit, those friends, goals, and talents are shallowly
painted. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Unfortunately, for a love story, the love
is not convincing. Shiori and Mako fall in love because… this is a love story.
That seems to be the main reason they get together: the genre requires it. Key
to the story is Mako’s confession to Shiori, but I felt no chemistry on
Shiori’s side towards Mako. This story could have limited itself to themes of
reconciliation. Or it could have put more effort into the love story. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But although rote and not romantically
convincing, I prefer the first story to the second. The first story may express
its theme platitudinously, but at least it has a theme. The first story has no
compelling characters, but at least it has a somewhat compelling protagonist.
The second story slogs along, sans theme, sans character, with only a
superficial sweetness.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the second story, you’re not sure who
the protagonist is, and you suspect the writer didn’t know either. As the story
begins with Hase’s narration, we assume she’s the protagonist. But no, the
story arc focusses on the two girls Hase voyeurs on, Tomoe and Sasaki. It
focusses on their love, and their goal to become quiz champions (or something,
it’s too dull to remember). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Framing narrators have a respectable
legacy. Holmes has Watson, and Gatsby has Caraway, but in these cases, Holmes
and Gatsby – the characters being framed – are interesting. And there are
insights to be had by looking at them through another’s eyes. But none of
Tomoe, Sasaki, nor Hase have depth. We have an uninteresting couple seen through
the eyes of an uninteresting narrator.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The second story’s illustrations worsen the
shallowness of the characters. By itself, the art is decent, full of fresh-faced,
dewy-eyed characters. Unfortunately, all the girls have the same fresh faces
and dewy eyes. Only length and shade of hair differentiates them, but in
close-up even these differences vanish. It’s already difficult to care about
what’s being said, but too often I don’t even know who’s talking.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But maybe there is <i>something </i>in the second story, something self-aware and subversive.
(Warning: I’m about to give this manga too much credit.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">KSotR
</span></i><span lang="EN-GB">is not a good manga. Its first story only reaches
competency. Why does it exist? Well, because it spun-off from a semi-popular VN.
But why else does it exist? Because it serves a niche. A lot of readers (I will
swallow my pride and count myself among them) will read it because it is <i>yuri</i>. Like an action film buff will watch
any old action trash for its generic bombast (and I mean generic in both
senses), a <i>yuri </i>fan will read any old
<i>yuri </i>manga because of the central
love-story between two women. They could be the dullest women in the world, but
as long as they’re in love. <i>Yuri </i>fans
are quite like Hase, the voyeuristic narrator of the second story. She calls
herself a ‘girl who loves <i>friendly girls</i>’
(emphasis theirs). She joins the quiz club not from any interest in quizzes,
but because two ‘friendly’ girls head it. She would have joined any old club,
so long as two ‘friendly’ girls headed it. And what ensues is a quiz tournament
that she has no real stake in, just as we the readers have no real connection
to the story.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The writer probably did not intend this.
Perhaps they did intend Hase as an audience stand-in, but in a less subversive,
more ‘Hey, she likes thing you also like’ kind of way. I guess I’m just trying
to find something redeeming in the second story. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But while I can’t recommend the second
story, I’d say maybe try the first. Only if you’re a fan of <i>yuri</i>, of course. If you’re not, there
are far better examples of the genre out there (just take a look at my previous
reviews). But as I said, fans of a genre are generally willing to put up with
mediocrity for the sake of beloved tropes. That said, buy this on the cheap, it’s
not worth $20.99US.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-62402719379833687912017-03-19T05:43:00.001-07:002017-03-19T05:43:34.492-07:00All Sweetness and Light: A Review of 'Hana and Hina After School' Vol. 1 (2015 manga)<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Calling <i>Hana
and Hina After School </i>‘sweet’ seems like damning with faint praise. It’s like
I’m saying, ‘This piece of fluff has nothing to say.’ And indeed, this series does
have little to say (at least in this volume). But while this series has no
grand moral messages, nor very deep characters, nor even grand conflict, the series
is a sweet story of budding love. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Quite against school rules, Hana has a
part-time job. She works in a toy store, but she keeps a low profile. If her
school finds out, they’ll expel her. One day, one of her regular customers, the
dashing Hina, asks if the store still has a vacancy open. It turns out, despite
her cool demeanour, Hina goes gaga over everything cute: plush-toys, dolls,
Hana – Not that she’d ever reveal that last one. But until both Hana and Hina
figure out their feelings, their biggest worry is that their school will
discover their jobs, and expel them.</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Much of Morinaga’s work feels like a
director getting back together with her regular actors. Outside of the
relatively weighty <i>Girl Friends </i>and <i>Kisses, Sighs, and Cherry Blossom Pink</i>,
Morinaga’s work settles on a comfortable repetition. Long-time readers will
recognise the main characters of <i>Hana and
Hina</i>, or their character models at least They are Morinaga’s standard
short-haired, reserved tiny girl, and her long-haired, cool tall girl.
Long-time readers will also remember the tone of her work. <i>Hana and Hina </i>is – and I mean this with no negativity – fluffy.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Sweetness pervades the book. Our heroines
work at a store which sells cute things, and Hina adores all things cute. The
series’ tone fits the setting – you won’t find a workplace or school drama
here. You won’t find much conflict at all. The threat of expulsion I mentioned
up the top is ever-present, but never feels urgent. Hana will <i>say</i> they need to keep a low profile, but
the reader never senses discovery looms around the corner. Episodic conflicts
in the series (e.g. Hina wanting a photograph of Hana, or Hana wondering why
Hina seems surly) do not so much resolve, as vanish. As the chapter reaches its
end, it will turn out the conflict owed to a misunderstanding, or that the
stakes were not as big as we thought. Now, this lack of conflict may seem
boring, and, coupled with sweetness, the story may seem cloying. But <i>Hana and Hina</i> is neither boring nor
cloying. The low-conflict sweetness suits this escapist love-story, one where all
is right with the world.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The series foreshadows real conflict, but
in a cliff-hanger for the next volume. In an impacting sequence, Hina realises
her feelings may be more than friendly. She asks her friends whether its normal
to take pictures with your cute friends. They say that’s normal. She asks if wanting
to kiss your friend is normal. Well, kissing a girl’s cheek is normal, they
suppose. What if ‘you can’t get them out of your head’ and ‘want to be together
forever’? The girls think Hina’s talking about another girl saying this to her.
They respond: ‘If she really meant it, that’d be <i>freaky</i>, right?’ Within the last pages, Hina’s conflict materialises.
Hina wants to be with Hana, but she fears revealing her love lest she pushes
Hana away. A rather conventional conflict. Worse, it is based on a lack of
communication, rather than any actual mismatch between our two lovers. This
might have become conflict for conflict’s sake. But Morinaga frames this not
merely as misunderstanding, but self-doubt, self-disgust, shame, rooted in
casual homophobia. The conflict for conflict’s sake breeds a legitimate
character conflict within Hina. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">While I consider myself a fan of Morinaga, I’ve
never felt crazy about her art. Her illustrations are not bad, but they do not
exceed mere competency. It is fine that she repeats character models across
series. I am not so thrilled by her repeating facial expressions within a
series. One imagines an illustrative reference book, with such entries as ‘happy’,
‘embarrassed happy’, ‘surprised’. Add to that many of the characters having
roughly the same face shape, and all their expressions become cookie-cutter.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Her page layouts also underwhelm. Their
stylistic excesses are just prosaic. Most of the panels bleed off the page.
Many panels abandon rectangularity for diagonal borders. Rarely is there any dramatic
or thematic motivation for this. These excesses add a superficial dynamism to
the page, a dynamism not based on the content of the page. Worse, when bleeding
and/or slanting panels could enhance a plot point, they cannot. These techniques
are used so often they become a dull baseline.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But as I said, Morinaga’s artwork is
competent. It does not detract from <i>Hana
and Hina</i>, it just does not enhance the series. Her style gets across the
sweetness of the story. If you’re looking for a light love story, with few
bumps in its progress, give <i>Hana and Hina
</i>a try. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[Translation taken from Seven Seas' edition: </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hana-Hina-After-School-Vol/dp/1626924627">https://www.amazon.com/Hana-Hina-After-School-Vol/dp/1626924627</a>]</span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-35186516337365497752017-03-12T05:25:00.000-07:002017-03-12T05:25:04.436-07:00Break Your Shell: A Review of Princess Jellyfish Omnibus One (2009 manga)<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Princess
Jellyfish </span></i><span lang="EN-GB">has a passive protagonist shocked into
life by a manic pixie dream girl – and yet it’s not a bad book. Going on
omnibus one, this seems to be a belated-coming-of-age story. Our heroine’s must
learn to overcome her passivity. And the manic pixie dream girl is not the male
wish fulfilment it so often is, because 1) this book is about a woman’s
coming-of-age, and 2) our dream girl is a male transvestite. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Tsukimi is a <i>fujoshi</i>, who shares an apartment building with other <i>fujoshi</i>, self-proclaimed ‘rotten women’.
They have no time for social lives, or, really, lives at all, outside their obsessions.
Tsukimi seems resigned to a life of social stagnation. Until, she runs into
Koibuchi, a girl with all the style and affability Tsukimi lacks. But it turns
out Koibuchi is a cross-dressing guy. And though Tsukimi gave up on her social
life, Koibuchi has far more ambition for her.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Good writers tend to avoid reactive
protagonists. Characters who have no goals, and do not fight for what they
want, make for dull stories. Such aimlessness, however, fits Tsukimi. She is a
socially maladjusted woman who lives with other social maladjusted women, none
of whom have gainful employment. Tsukimi needs to become an independent agent
in the world. She needs to move beyond her passivity. When a love interest
comes into her life, she must <i>do
something</i> to get what she wants. Or, at least, that what this first omnibus
suggests.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Tsukimi’s fecklessness extends to her
flatmates. All of them forgo the wider world (especially the world of men), in
favour of their pet obsessions. One obsesses over <i>The Romance of the Three Kingdoms</i>, another over kimonos, and
Tsukimi herself over jellyfish. All the women, sparing Tsukimi, pride
themselves on their being <i>fujoshi</i>,
women who cannot fit into traditional femininity. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the hands of a male writer, or perhaps
just a writer from the 1980s, this could all become very regressive. Lots of
women who don’t act lady-like. One of starts acting lady-like, and so achieves
happiness. While Tsukimi does get the makeover you expect from such narratives,
<i>Princess Jellyfish</i> does not portray
her failings as her lack of femininity. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Her and her flatmates’ problem is not that
they fail as women. Their failings are gender neutral. They are not students.
They do not have they gainful employment (spare a bit of assistant work to a <i>mangaka</i>). They live off their parents’
money. They only have a place to live because it belongs to one of their parents.
Not everyone needs to work in an office, but you have to do <i>something</i> with your life. Living in such
a sinkhole, Tsukimi has no impetus to grow as a person. She lives with people
who do not challenge her to grow up. Only when Koibuchi comes from in from the
outside world, does her life kick into gear.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But even though Tsukimi’s lack of
motivation is a theme of the story, a story without motivation would still be
dull. If the protagonist doesn’t move the plot forward, something else must. Koibuchi
fights for Tsukimi’s goals, even if he doesn’t quite know what he’s doing. This
does make him a more compelling character than our protagonist. He’s a
transvestite who kicks the plot into gear. All our protagonist has is inner
turmoil and a love of jellyfish. It’s the Jack Sparrow effect: a secondary
character grabs the audience’s interest, but to a fault.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I imagine over the next fifteen volumes <i>Princess Jellyfish </i>will become a small-scale
epic. A work that gives us an exhaustive chronicle of Tsukimi’s coming-of-age
and other character’s struggles. But even in omnibus one we feel the start of
her growth. Although Koibuchi does steal the show a bit too much, <i>Princess Jellyfish</i> is a promising read. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-29834885345158332802017-03-05T05:40:00.002-08:002017-03-05T05:40:20.942-08:00Isn't This All Just a Bit Ridiculous: A Review of Daphne du Maurier's 'The Birds' (1952 short-story)<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">When applied to modern fiction, the word
‘fable’ sounds like an excuse. The word suggests the work harkens back to a
simpler, more primal style – and thus the lack complex characters and plot is entirely
justified. At times, the word ‘fable’ is justified (see Shirley Jackson’s <i>The Lottery</i>). Some have called Daphne du
Maurier’s <i>The Birds</i> fable-like,
though I am not so sure. The story’s simplicity is not a feature, but a fault.
The story’s self-seriousness, and lack of compelling characters, undermines its
genuinely terrifying aspects. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In an isolated English village, birds
attack Nat Hocken’s family. These little birds break through his windows to
peck out his eyes. By the next day, he has fifty avian carcases to clean up,
and no villager will believe him. People soon have no choice but to believe, as
the birds blacken the sky in London. A state of emergency is declared. The BBC
warns the populace to stay indoors. Against nature so unnatural, can Nat Hocken
and his family survive?</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">The
Birds </span></i><span lang="EN-GB">has one of those high concepts which is at
once shocking and silly. Which side the work lands on is all in the execution.
Ironically, works feel silliest when they do not relent in how seriously they
take themselves. The silliness comes from the contrast of the audience’s idea
of seriousness and the story’s. While du Maurier’s skill prevents <i>The Birds </i>tangling in silly string, her
execution falters in too many places to call this story perfect. I understand
du Maurier intends a foreboding sense of escalation by starting with benign
birds, like jackdaws, and only then moving up to birds of prey – and, yes, I
understand some of the best horror comes from inverting the natural order, so
the most harmless become the most harmful. I understand this. But I can’t help
but smirk at the unintended campness of depicting little birds as the <i>worst thing ever</i>. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re5LoYKyGT4">It’s like that execution device from Barbarella.</a><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If du Maurier would relent with the story’s
solemnity, perhaps I could take its pivotal moments more seriously. While it may
sound vulgar, and Hollywood, and perhaps even Hitchcockian of me to demand
comic relief, I feel some levity would have made the serious parts impact more.
For one, the contrast of comedic and dark emphasises both the comedy and the
darkness. If some elements of the story were <i>explicitly</i> silly, perhaps the central concept would feel less
unintentionally silly. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I must state that the story only <i>errs</i> into silliness. The bird attack scenes
are tense. The calm between storms, where birds wait docilely, are eerie. The
self-seriousness merely undermines this tenseness and eeriness, but it does not
quash them completely. As the story goes on, the self-seriousness almost
evaporates, for du Maurier turns to more believable terrors. While the birds
are a fantasy, the government’s feckless response seems a grim certainty. As
Nat Hocken and his wife huddle around a radio, waiting for an emergency
broadcast, which never comes, you feel their abandonment. I bang on about this
fault because I can’t find other reviews criticising this element. Perhaps
other reviewers had a very different experience from mine. Perhaps for them the
story did not err into self-seriousness, but rather achieved Poe’s ‘unique or
single effect’. I cannot agree with them.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And I cannot deny the quasi-Lovecraftian
terror of the birds, the terror of the unexplainable, the terror of the
pointless to explain. Events are at once natural and perversions of nature. The
first line sets up this split: ‘On December the third the wind changed
overnight and it was winter.’ Winter comes quickly, but it does not come
unseasonally. As it always has, it follows autumn. Watching the currently
benign birds, Nat sees nothing more than ordinary, seasonal restlessness in
them. ‘The restless urge of autumn, unsatisfying, sad, had put a spell upon
them, and they must spill themselves of motion before winter came.’ While du
Maurier never definitively explains the birds’ motivations, she near
definitively dismisses <i>an</i> explanation.
This is not a man-made phenomenon. Around town, gossip spreads that the
Russians have ‘poisoned’ the birds. But it’s just that, gossip. This is not man
perverting nature, this is nature perverting itself. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Characters grope at explanations. Some
blame ‘the Russians’, some blame an artic wind, but no definite answer
materialises. On the simplest level, having no answer is scarier. (Identifying
the cause of your suffering is an act of therapy.) But more than that, to
someone in such a situation, explanations don’t much matter. Who dropped the
bomb? Well, we’re all going to die anyway. Who emitted more carbon dioxide?
Well, climate change will ravage us all anyway. What’s the deal with these birds?
It doesn’t matter. They’re at the window. By refusing to identify a cause, du
Maurier focusses us on the effect: the suffering of Nat and his family.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Unfortunately, such terror hits the reader stronger
when they actually care about the characters. For page economy, a short-story
writer cannot flesh out too many characters. For most of the characters, the
only question is: How flat are they? The Triggs are good-natured, but simple,
folk, whose disbelief and optimism contrast Nat’s justified fear. Nat’s wife
and children have no more characterisation than that they are his family, a set
of people he has an interest in protecting. (His wife does not even get a name.)
This is fine. We do not need every character to be a fully-rounded human being.
These characters fulfil a function, which is to illuminate our protagonist’s
struggle. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Pity the protagonist is so dull. Nat Hocken
is a manly protagonist, a veteran-cum-famer, more clear-minded than his
neighbours. He is solitary, spare his duty to his family. Nat teeters between
archetypal and stereotypical. Which you think he is will depend on how many
stories you’ve read where a grizzled father figure guards his weaker charges.
Granted, du Maurier wrote when such conventions were not entrenched in the apocalyptic
genres. We, however, are reading her work now, in our current pop-cultural context.
Nat is an example of a now overdone type. But though I’ve no taste for that
type, the story does not spend enough time with him for Nat to become a
wearying cliché. He is merely an unremarkable protagonist, rather than an
actively boring one.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">The
Birds</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> is almost a brilliant short-story. Du Maurier
does her best to ground her fanciful concept, but goes too far. Her relentless
po-facedness just highlight how silly the central idea is. I could forgive this
if I’d any character to fear for in this work. But the only character with any
depth is just dull. But given how other critics rave about this work, I’d say
give it a read. The problems I have with <i>The
Birds</i> are subjective. I can entirely understand how another reader could
say, ‘No, I don’t think this is self-serious.’ So while I cannot champion this
work, I urge you to make up your own mind.</span></span></div>
Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-6363275976440857132017-02-26T04:14:00.000-08:002017-02-26T04:14:37.452-08:00Good is Enough: A Review of 'Secret of the Princess' (2012-5 manga)<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Sometimes, a well-done love story is enough.
In Milk Morinaga <i>yuri</i> oeuvre, there’s
manga with more depth and scope. While such qualities can elevate a work to
greatness, a merely decent story is nothing to scoff at. <i>Secret of the Princess</i> somewhat explores the shackles of
heteronormativity, but this seems thematic gravy to what is a well-done <i>yuri </i>love story. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Miu’s mother raised her to snag a prince.
Miu lives by her mother’s advice, making herself cute and girly so she can
marry a handsome guy. Trouble is, she goes to an all-girls’ school. For all her
girliness, Miu’s had no practise dating. What if she finds <i>the one</i> only to mess up their first date? When Fujiwara, Miu’s
tomboyish upperclassman, smashes a vase, she begs Miu to keep quiet. She’ll do
anything in return. Anything. Miu demands she and Fujiwara start dating – just so
Miu can practise for her future prince, of course. But is Miu’s prince closer
than she thinks.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"></span></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">So, yeah, this is a high school, lesbian
awakening story. Not exactly a drought of that in the </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">yuri</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> genre. When Miu utters the inevitable ‘But we’re both girls’,
you hear cacophonous echoes from the entire genre. In Morinaga’s own body of
work, we find further variations on this theme. But Morinaga recites this theme
well. Although she developed it with more emotional depth in her five volume </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Girlfriends</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">, and with more variety in
her short-story collection </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Kisses, Sighs
and Cherry Blossom Pink</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">, this new work does not feel clichéd in comparison.
Even if </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Secret </i><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">uses familiar pieces,
you can’t deny they fit together.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Secret
</span></i><span lang="EN-GB">focuses on Miu’s awakening and struggle. She has
internalised her mother’s well-meant, but wrong-headed, advice to be a cute
girl waiting to ‘snag a great guy’. (That is, after all, ‘what every girl
dreams of’.) From time to time, Miu will put her mother’s sage wisdom into
action. Thus we get the irony of Miu applying such heteronormative gems as ‘Men
sometimes put others on the spot … A good woman … can subtly guide the
conversation in the direction she wants’ to a homosexual relationship. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Thankfully, Miu is not too snared by
heteronormativity. She does not hem-and-haw for the entire book over whether
she is a lesbian. Not that uncertainty over one’s sexuality is an unworthy
topic for a story. Morinaga explored it to great effect in <i>Girlfriends</i>. I merely feel that in this work, any hemming-and-hawing
beyond what is present would have merely served to create conflict, rather than
explore character. By the midpoint, her conflict switches from ‘How can I
prepare myself for my future husband’ to ‘How can I avoid scaring away my
crush.’ <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And, yes, this does descend into the cliché
of both characters loving each other, but refusing to admit it, for fear their
love is unrequited and would scare off the other. The dramatic irony is so
thick you almost gag on it. Almost. As this is a short work, this old chestnut
can’t grow too old.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Our other lover, Fujiwara, has less of an
arc than Miu. This is for the best, as she works better as a love interest than
a focal character. She is athletic, pretty, rich, and what failings she has are
endearing. She exists to show Miu that a girl can be her Prince. To Morinaga’s
credit, Fujiwara’s Princeliness never slips into unbelievability. Fujiwara is
not a check-list of desirable traits in a romantic partner. She’s that kid at
school who’s more skilled and popular than you.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Although Fujiwara doesn’t have a deep
character arc, the one she has improves the story. Your friends and lovers
change you. Morinaga could have written this as a one-way track, where only Miu
is changed by Fujiwara. Morinaga fleshes out the relationship by having Miu
further Fujiwara’s arc. Fujiwara wants friends, but has none, because her
seeming perfection intimidates her peers. Miu facilitates a meeting between
Fujiwara and girls with similar interests. Just as Fujiwara improves Miu’s
life, Miu improves Fujiwara’s.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> <i>Secret of the Princess </i>is just a well
done <i>yuri</i> story. Our heroines are
believable, their love develops at a decent pace, and they don’t get <i>too</i> bogged-down in the melodramatic ‘but
what if she doesn’t feel the way I feel’. If you’re a fan of Morinaga, pick up
this book. If you’re new to her, however, her previous works, <i>Girlfriends </i>and <i>Kisses, Sighs and Cherry Blossom Pink</i>, better exhibit her artistry. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[Quotations taken from <i>Seven Seas'</i> 2017 translation <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Princess-Milk-Morinaga/dp/1626924694">https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Princess-Milk-Morinaga/dp/1626924694</a>]</span></div>
Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-79189804035763801252017-02-19T01:05:00.001-08:002017-04-02T04:43:48.321-07:00Someone Else's Nostalgia: A Review of 'Mai Mai Miracle' (2009 anime film)<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Full
Disclosure: I backed this film’s Kickstarter. I have buyer’s remorse. </span></i><i><span lang="EN-GB">Also,
spoilers.</span></i></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Mai
Mai Miracle</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> wants you to <i>feel things,</i> other than boredom.<i>
</i>Great animation veils undercooked characters and an unfocussed plot. Unfortunately, the film is otherwise so competent, that no dunderheaded artistic choice will distract you from how much of a slog the film
is. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In 1950s Japan, there forms an unlikely
friendship between an outgoing, rural tomboy and a shy, city girl. Our tomboy, Shinko,
has a vivid imagination. She transforms the countryside into the ancient Land
of Suo’s capital. She dreams of a lonely princess, who wants only to meet a
girl her age. Our shy girl, Kiiko, can’t quite grasp Shinko’s fantasies, but
reaches out to them regardless. Our heroines, alongside four boys, adventure
through the countryside, until one of the boys has his life changed forever.</span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Friendship. Friendship between rich and
poor, urban and country, refined and unrestrained, friendship across a gulf of
circumstance and personality, a gulf which narrows as friendship grows – a fine
sentiment. But a movie cannot live on only a sentiment. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Films require conflict. (Some avant-garde films
forgo conflict, but <i>Mai Mai Miracle</i>
is not avant-garde.) If there is no difference between how the world is and how
characters wish it would be, why should the audience care about what characters
do? What are their doings for? Lacking a conflict, their actions only add to
runtime, not plot. A long, continuous portion of this film amounts to a montage
of children playing. Cute, for the first thirty seconds, but soon we beg the
film to go somewhere. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Mai
Mai Miracle</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> could do with a lot more conflict
spread throughout, rather than front- and back-loading it. The first twenty
minutes have a bit of conflict: transfer student Kiiko is treated as an
outsider, and wants to stop feeling isolated. A conventional conflict, but the
film goes through the motions convincingly. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Problem is, the conflict resolves too
quickly. The gregarious Shinko follows Kiiko home. Soon Kiiko warms to her. And
then there are no new challenges, no new gulfs between reality and desire,
until a good thirty minutes later. Oh, yes, stuff happens within that thirty
minutes. They make new friends and go adventuring, but no obstacle stands in
the way of getting friends, nor did the adventures throw up any obstacle. (It
does throw up one bit of conflict, when a child goes missing, but it resolves
without our heroes’ input.) Lulls in action are fine, but one-third of a movie
is a hiatus. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">This lulling period-piece of children
playing in untamed nature feels like watching someone else’s nostalgia. For the
first ten minutes, it is merely mawkish. By minute forty, it is interminable. It
may mean a lot to the author of the original book, but their childhood arcadia
bores me to tears. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Some conflict still runs through this
section’s still waters, but of such a kind that it doesn’t matter. Shinko
imagines an ancient princess, in desperate want of a friend. The viewer infers
this potential friend is the peasant girl on the other side of the castle wall.
The princess wants a friend, does not have a friend, and a way presents itself
of getting a friend – thus conflict. But even putting aside the easy resolution
this conflict has, it is unsatisfying. Within the narrative, it is a fantasy,
i.e. not real. Why should I care if this imaginary girl doesn’t get a friend?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I suppose, the purpose of this fantasy’s
conflict is subtext. After a dream where the princess is lonely, the normally
unflappable Shinko wakes up crying. At the end of the film (spoilers), Kiiko
continues Shinko’s fantasy in her mind. The princess only befriends the peasant
girl in Kiiko’s fantasy. It symbolises the solidification of Shinko and Kiiko’s
relationship. Despite her boundless imagination, Shinko cannot imagine the
princess with a friend. Only when Shinko’s friend Kiiko opens her mind to
Shinko’s fantasies can Kiiko give the princess a friend.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">But while I’m all for subtext, it should
relate to the actual text. The princess and the peasant girl become friends.
That would be a fitting metaphor for the film’s first act, when rich girl Kiiko
and poor girl Shinko become friends. This fantasy, however, culminates at the
end of the film. After the princess and peasant become friends, Shinko and
Kiiko affirm their friendship. The fantasy’s climax may reflect Shinko and
Kiiko growing closer, or that a rift between them healed. If that’s the case, the
film should have laced some doubt about their closeness, so that this capstone
could be a culmination, and not merely a confirmation of what the audience knew
from the start.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Apart from the fantasy narrative, our film’s
latter half has a baffling choice of focus. Of our sextet of childhood friends,
only Shinko and Kiiko approach roundness. That is fine. You can depict a friend
group where only the main characters have depth, and the others are just there
for background. What’s not fine is the film’s climatic conflict focusses on neither
of our heroines. The plot swivels to one of the undercooked characters in their
friend group, and his family, and his coming-of-age. This swivel is not merely
underwhelming, but infuriating. The film assumes you’re invested in this
character. You want to yell at the screen, ‘I don’t care!’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">As one can expect from a nostalgic tale of
childhood, by the end, childhood dies. But the film botches this
tried-and-tested theme. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">There’s a cliché that if a children’s book
has a dog on the cover, that dog will die. This symbolises the death of
innocence, or something. For such a symbol to work, however, the audience needs
to actually care about the dog. In <i>Mai
Mai Miracle</i>, the dog is a fish and a teacher with the same name. The
audience could not care less about them.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The children’s teacher is moving to Tokyo, because
her fiancé needs to move there. Shinko and Kiiko are ecstatic about their
teacher’s coming marriage, but she tells them to keep it a secret. Our
heroines, therefore, shower their celebrations on a pet fish named after their
teacher. In the fish’s pond, all six children leave little gifts. Kiiko’s gift,
her late mother’s perfume, leaks into the water, killing the fish. And thus
happiness turns to melancholy. Change, even positive, is bittersweet.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">But it’s not bittersweet to the audience. We
don’t care about this fish, or this teacher. We know they exist, we know the
children like them, but we have no connection to these underexposed characters.
So what we have is a fish, which the audience doesn’t care about, symbolising a
teacher, who the audience doesn’t care about, to communicate the pangs of
change, which the audience doesn’t feel.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The death of innocence is also repeated in
the brooding boy, who is the focus of the third act. As I have said, the
audience builds no relationship with him, and thus feel nothing for him. His
coming-of-age affects the audience as minimally as the teacher-fish.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I cannot chalk up the film’s mediocrity to
the creators’ laziness. If the film was just lazy, perhaps I’d not be so harsh;
there would have been no <i>promise</i> of
something good. Just looking at the animation, flowing with the youthful
exuberance, coloured like a nostalgic daydream, we see the effort, care, and
money put into this film. The creators pooled all their talent into creating a
Ghibli-esque masterpiece. They only achieved the pretty pictures, not the
emotional depth. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Apparently <i>Mai Mai Miracle</i>’s getting good reviews. I would say judge it for
yourself, but the film costs around $30 American. Don’t make that gamble. Wait
for it to come on streaming. The ninety-five minutes this film steals is cost
enough. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-89201941932487852692017-02-12T04:48:00.000-08:002017-02-12T04:48:01.626-08:00You Can't Teach an Old Dog New Tricks: An Analysis of Jason's 'Lost Cat' (2013 comic)<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Contains
Spoilers for the Entirety of Jason’s </span></i><span lang="EN-GB">Lost Cat<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">You wouldn’t think a detective tale of a
dead-eyed, anthropomorphised dog suffering mid-life crisis could be a tender
examination of resignation. Jason tells a Chandler-esque crime story, which isn’t
really a crime story. He tells a love story which isn’t really a love story. He
tells an alien invasion story, that only becomes so by the end. Jason tells the
story of Dan Dellon, a man who can’t change, but almost knows he should.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">PI Dan Dellon finds a lost cat on leaving
his office. When he returns it, he strikes up a conversation with its owner,
Charlotte. He asks her on a date, which she accepts. Charlotte doesn’t show. Two
men claiming to be Charlotte’s brothers come snooping. Dan smells a fish. But
that’s a red herring. An old man, Dumont, hires Dan to find a nude painting of
his former sweetheart. But that’s a red herring. When Dan closes Dumont’s case,
and surrenders to the dead ends of Charlotte’s case, Dan lets years pass. He
lives alone, accompanied only by a fantasy of him and Charlotte growing old
together. During an alien invasion, Charlotte returns to Dan. She was a scout,
and is just now coming to say goodbye. After Dan waves a gun at her, calling
her a liar, Dan embraces his fantasy of Charlotte, the real Charlotte having
left him.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"></span></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Lost
Cat </span></i><span lang="EN-GB">is about unnecessary resignation, where you know
you don’t have to resign yourself to anything. Dan Dellon clings to his present
circumstances, and past obsessions, not because he finds it comfortable, but
because change seems so very uncomfortable. Dan, at least, has no delusions. In
Dan’s conversation with Charlotte, she asks Dan, ‘Why don’t you change jobs if
you don’t like it [being a PI]?’ Dan replies, ‘… Finding a new one … It means
change, and change is tough. Who knows what’s around the corner? Better to
stick with what you know.’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The narrative reveals this rationale as ironic.
Continuing as a PI might lead to something ‘around the corner’, he says. But
meeting Charlotte, whose image lives with him for years, happens outside his
detective work. He finds her cat when he is literally walking away from his
detective office. His detective skills don’t even help him find her after she
goes missing. The only real lead he finds is her cat, which just showed up in
his home – no detective work needed. After a few dead ends, he can search no
more. He been a banker, an artist, or an athlete and still have met Charlotte,
still have lost Charlotte, still have obsessed over her for years. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The only narrative thread which requires
him to be a PI, fittingly, has nothing to do with Charlotte. At first, Dumont’s
case seems to intersect with the Charlotte’s missing person’s case. By the
conventions of detective narratives, the weirdness in both cases, the
abductions, faked deaths, mental scarring, should tie together into a single
case. They do not. When Dumont’s case closes, Dan returns to his routine, a
routine augmented only by entrenched fantasies of growing old with
Charlotte. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Jason’s mixing of genres highlights how
un-nourishing Dan’s PI work is, and would always have been. Dan is not merely a
PI, he is a man playing a PI. Dan, Charlotte, and a girl he meets in a bar
comment on his resemblance to Humphrey Bogart, the archetypal image of a PI. This
is an image he puts on. One day a case will come, befitting Humphrey Bogart. A
case does come, but it doesn’t fulfil him. No, the irony is: Dan plays a PI in
an alien invasion story. The role he plays does not fit the genre, the world, he
inhabits. Nothing would ever have come ‘around the corner’. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Although narratively Dumont’s case has
nothing to do with Charlotte’s, thematically, it has everything to do with it. Dumont
tells Dan his parents forbade him from marrying Ingrid, the woman in the nude
painting he wants. Ingrid married the artist who painted her. Dumont wants to be
buried with the painting. This is a lie. The artist, Pierre, who married Ingrid
reveals Dumont was a jealous lover, whose covetousness of Ingrid pushed her to
run away from him. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">For decades, Dumont nursed a delusion,
salivating for a love he never really had. Just like Dan. Dan had only one conversation
with Charlotte. From that, he fantasised an entire life together. Dumont would
rather have this nude image of Ingrid, rather than recall his actual
relationship with Ingrid. Dan prefers his fantasy of Charlotte, rather than the
literal alien who returns to him. When the real Charlotte returns, Dan wants to
kill her, calling her a liar. By being something other than his fantasy, she
threatens to destroy his fantasy of her. As the world falls to aliens, he
embraces his delusional Charlotte, even though he cannot ignore it is a
delusion.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Dan’s choice to remain in fantasy was not
inevitable. Although the most impactful moment in his life happens outside his
detective work, his detective work pushes him to a cross-road. Pierre, Ingrid’s
painter and widow, faked his death after Ingrid died. For years, he lived alone
with his paintings of Ingrid. When Dan tells him Dumont wants the paintings,
Pierre burns his house down, with the paintings inside. Dan finds him sat on a
pier, staring into the distance, away from his burning house. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Did Pierre see a bit of himself in Dumont?
Dumont may obsess over his far from perfect relationship with Ingrid, but Pierre
literally lives among idealised images of Ingrid, his paintings. By burning
down his house, he burns away his stultifying obsession. With no way back into his
comfortable stasis, he forces himself to change.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Pierre came to his cross-road off-panel,
the moment he considered whether or not to burn his down. Dan stands at his
cross-road when he meets Pierre on the pier. Dan sits down beside him and
shares a cigarette. Perhaps Dan will follow Pierre’s example.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But Dan looks back. Anyone with a passing
interest in mythology knows nothing good comes of looking back. He looks back
at the burning house, and the thinks of the burning paintings, of the job
Dumont hired him for. He falls back into the role of PI. Unlike Pierre, who
forces himself to change, Dan resumes his old life. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Although Dan found little
fulfilment in the life he chose, he would do it all again. Even at the end of
the world, he refuses to change. He literally embraces his fantasy. He would do
it all again, not because his chosen life made the melancholy and regret all
worth it. He would do it again because ‘change is tough’. Faced with a raging
flame, a man must move, as Pierre did. Faced with the day by day dripping away of
life, a man feels no spur to action. Dan’s fantasy of the Charlotte who never
existed, or the Humphrey Bogart he never was, comforted him enough that he felt
no spur to change.</span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Cat-Jason/dp/1606996428">Edition used was the 2013 Fantagraphics publication, translated by Kim Thompson</a> </i></span>Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-49627992352703965452017-02-05T04:04:00.000-08:002017-02-05T04:05:42.560-08:00'Stars have Fallen in a Stagnant Pool': A Review of Akira Kurosawa's 'Scandal' (1950 film) <div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">[Warning: Spoilers for the entirety of Akira
Kurosawa’s <i>Scandal</i>]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Akira Kurosawa’s <i>Scandal </i>is a masterfully directed first draft. It is a potentially
great film where one can see every mistake dragging it down. When writing,
Kurosawa and Kikushima seemingly started with, ‘What if two innocent people got
libelled in a sex scandal?’ As they continued, however, their interest shifted
from the libel victims to their lawyer, Hiruta (Takashi Shimura), and his
redemption story. In early drafts, such shifts of focus are fine, but the
writers neglected to make the whole script fit this new focus. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-GB">The painter Ichirou Aoye (Toshiro Mifune)
and the singer Miyako Saijo (Shirley Yamaguchi) vacation in the mountains,
separately. A chance encounter leads Ichiro to chauffeur Miyako to their inn,
where they have a platonic conversation in her room. Two tabloid photographers
trailed them. They take a photo of this famous singer and her ‘paramour’. The
tabloid has plastered their libel all over Tokyo’s streets when our heroes
return. Help arrives in the attorney Hiruta, a poor, weasly-looking man, with a
consumptive daughter. Can Hiruta save them?</span> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The film suffers from misplaced focus. From
my outline of the first act, you’d think Ichirou and Miyako are the heroes,
that the plot centred on their reactions to, and sufferings from, the scandal.
But no. Our hero is Hiruta; he is the only character with a complete arc.
Hiruta starts as wanting to do good, to put his slimy past behind him. The
tabloid bribes him to throw the trial, thus betraying Ichirou and Miyako. His
accepting the bribe is an obstacle to his redemption. By the end, he comes to a
cross-roads were he either must conceal the bribe, and lose the case and his
self-respect, or reveal the bribe, and win the case, but lose what little
respect from others he had (and possibly his career).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">And yet this film about Hiruta’s redemption
begins by establishing Ichirou’s individualism and love of freedom. The opening
scene shows him painting a mountain, in a style entirely his own, for he ‘never
imitates’. He tells Miyako he drives a motorbike because he loves the sense of
freedom. A character having such values, and the film showing the character has
such values, is no mark against a film, by itself. (Indeed, it suggests a round
character.) But by foregrounding Ichirou’s values, the film signals it will be
about these values. It isn’t. The plot never challenges his values. His
individualism does not turn the court against him in the libel lawsuit. (‘Well,
if he’s willing to do that, then, of course, he had sex with that woman.’)
Media attention does not curtail his freedom. It does not chase him wherever he
goes, thus forcing him to remain in hiding. I am not saying the film should
have challenged Ichirou’s values. But if it was never going to challenge them,
it should not have given them such undue prominence. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">And talk about undue focus, the film is
called scandal, but it doesn’t explore scandal, or the human costs of libel.
Ichirou and Miyako suffer little from their sex scandal. The scandal bolsters
their careers, if anything. Her concerts and his gallery showings sell-out.
They do complain their new audiences don’t care about their art, only their sex
lives. But this is not sufficiently explored to be a theme – in fact, the film
only explores it enough to diffuse the scandal’s stakes. What have they to lose
in this libel case? Their reputations? The truth? The film only gestures in any
such direction. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The film realises its misplaced focus, and
relegates our side characters to the side-line, to focus on Hiruta. This is only until a misjudged monologue in
the climatic court scene. In this scene, Hiruta must decide whether he’s man or
scum, yet the scene begins with a monologue from Ichirou. He gives an
impassioned defence of himself and Miyako, saying they have done nothing wrong.
This protestation of their innocence would have been a tremendous capstone to
the film, had the film been about them and their innocence. The audience does
not care whether they lose this libel suit (ergo, the court rules they did do
the scandalous act), because the film did not build up the stakes of their
losing the case. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Even given the low stakes facing both our
libel victims, the film focuses on the one with the lower stakes. Ichirou may
not be the protagonist, but he should not even be the foremost side-character –
Miyako should. The film touches on gendered double-standards concerning sex
scandals. Accused of sleeping with a famous singer, Ichirou gets crushing
teenage girls gawking at him. Accused of sleeping with a famous artist, Miyako
gets a post-box full of slut-shaming. Although the film rarely extrapolates on
what exactly these two have to lose, the film knows Miyako has more to lose
than Ichirou – yet it devotes more screen time to Ichirou. This is a failure of
plot focus and structure. Most of Ichirou’s dramatic functions (his hiring
Hiruta, consoling Hiruta’s daughter, helping Hiruta believe in himself), the
writers could have shifted to Miyako.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-GB">But, as I said, Hiruta is the true
protagonist of the film. He is the germ of brilliance at the film’s centre. He
is a self-pitying, self-loathing, weak man wanting to become better. It’s no
coincidence his name, </span><span lang="JA" style="font-family: "ms mincho"; mso-ascii-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">蛭田</span><span lang="EN-GB">, contains the kanji for ‘leech’.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Kurosawa gives him that best kind of
character introduction, where the audience gets the character’s essence in
miniature. The audience does not see Hiruta, at first. They see Ichirou’s life model
screaming at Hiruta, who was staring in through the window. In the narrative,
this isn’t as creepy as it sounds: Hiruta was checking if anyone was home.
Nevertheless, Kurosawa didn’t have to have Hiruta mistaken for a peeping tom.
Kurosawa wants the audience to associate Hiruta with that level of villainy.
Peeping is not an outright threatening crime like assault or stalking. Peeping
is a pathetic, skeevy crime, a crime reeking of impotence. Even as Hiruta
advertises his legal services to Ichirou, with genuinely good intentions, the
audience suspects him of pathetic-ness, skeeviness, and impotence. The audience
senses he will do wrong, not from malice, but weakness. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">With directorial flourishes, Kurosawa codes
Hiruta as pathetic. (For one he cast Takashi Shimura, a man who resembles an
abused rat.) But let’s look in detail at a specific scene, when Hiruta
confronts the libellous tabloid editor. To outline: the scene starts with
Hiruta threatening the editor with a lawsuit, bluffing and bigging up his case;
the editor pokes holes in Hiruta’s case; the editor says (dishonestly) he has
hired one of Japan’s finest attorney’s. In outline, the editor beats Hiruta
down from Hiruta’s early dominance. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">But the Kurosawa’s direction prevents this
from being a battle for dominance. Although Hiruta starts the scene literally
higher and more prominent in the frame, standing while the editor sits, the
audience never feels he’s in control. His clothes are baggy and scruffy, made
more so by contrast with the editor’s crisp, tailored suit. In the middle of
his threats, Hiruta has to scurry off screen to cough his lungs out, before
scurrying back as though nothing happened. When the editor convinces Hiruta he
has the upper-hand, the audience does not view it as a reversal of positions,
but a realisation of the inevitable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">As the audience needs to see some good in
Hiruta for his redemption to seem believable, he has a consumptive daughter. She
makes his willingness to accept a bribe, his willingness to betray his clients,
less damnable. His ill-gotten gains do not merely serve himself, but his dying
daughter. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">But while I understand the daughter’s
narrative purpose, she is an artistic misstep. She’s straight from a Victorian
novel, the consumptive girl who is too good for this world. She serves only as
a spur to other characters’ consciences. She is not a character; she is a
narrative device.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">If <i>Scandal</i>
is a great movie held down by mistakes, the Christmas party scene in the middle
shows the greatness it could have achieved. Narratively and atmospherically, it
symbolises the cross-roads Hiruta stands at, where he can either rise up, or
remain low. Ichirou and Hiruta drink in a bar. Hiruta drinks to forget what a
horrible man and father he is. Ichirou wants to keep this pitiable leech from
hurting himself. Their dourness seems out of place among the Christmas cheer. Another
drunk starts yammering about he’ll change his life. Next year will be his year,
he yells to the bar. He’ll become a new man. Hiruta jumps into frame – Yes!
Next year will be his year, too. This year, he was scum, but in the next, he
will become a man! He calls for the patrons to join him singing <i>Auld Lang Syne</i>, at first futilely, but
eventually the patrons join in, growing to a choir. The scene does not end on
this solidarity. It ends by montaging the singers’ sad, sobbing faces.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The scene superposes aspiration and
resignation. We have the saplings of redemption, a man who vows to be better,
but the scene’s details complicate this. For starters, Hiruta is drunk. Alcohol
bolsters hope and courage, before sobriety murders them. Secondly, while New
Year’s Resolutions in general go infamously unfulfilled, he makes his
resolution on Christmas. Still six more days to remain scum. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Auld
Lang Syne</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> could easily have unbalanced this
ambiguity of hope and despair. If no one else joined Hiruta singing, he would
have been a pathetic old man, nursing delusions no one believes. If everyone
joined (a lá that cliché of a few claps growing to applause), the crowd would
validate his optimism. By having them all sing, but cutting to their sorrowful
faces, Kurosawa captures the ambiguity of all big resolutions. Everyone in the
bar thinks, ‘I will become a better person; I am too worthless to become
better.’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The outdoor sequence at the end acts as
synecdoche for the scene, concisely capturing the ambiguity. Wandering
drunkenly with Hiruta, Ichirou bellows at a pond, ‘It’s a miracle. Look! Stars
have fallen in a stagnant pool.’ The hope of this exclamation is tempered, but
not extinguished, by the image’s triteness, and that the image comes from a drunkard.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Such prolonged spurts of brilliance make
the film worth seeing, but do not expect a brilliant movie. It takes the film
too long to realise who its hero is, so it never recovers from its out of the
gate stumble. But when it does focus on Hiruta, you’ll find a masterfully done
redemption story.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">[Version Watched: Madman/Eastern Eye's DVD release.]</span></div>
Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4798744626372711858.post-67292276607018070132017-01-29T04:06:00.000-08:002017-01-29T04:06:31.291-08:00Anime Recommendation: Revolutionary Girl Utena<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Sorry, something came up, so I can’t post a
full-length review this week. Instead, I’ll just recommend one of my favourite anime: <i>Revolutionary Girl Utena</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span lang="EN-GB">Utena
</span></i><span lang="EN-GB">is a parody, a tragedy, a <i>bildungsroman</i>, a queer love story, a feminist text, a magical
realist tale, a critique of ideals and seeming perfection, a fairy-tale that
has outgrown fairy-tales, and most of all a thoroughly entertaining anime. <i>Utena </i>is a coming-of age-story, but not
sentimental. It does not see the death of childhood as a sad, if necessary,
fact of life. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">To <i>Utena</i>,
childhood means ignorance, self-righteousness, and received ideas. A true adult
abandons false ideals, and cultivates their truest self. The show first
presents our hero, Utena, as a ‘gender rebel’, a girl who dresses as a boy and
aspires to be a prince. But her rebellion is not revolution, as she still
operates under false ideals. As a girl, she refuses to play the role she was
cast, the princess – yet she still plays a role, the prince. Even ‘rebelling’
against the gender binary, she plays into it. Her journey through the series
requires her to move beyond ‘prince’ and ‘princess’, to fight not for these ideals,
but for tangible things. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Here, I have shallowly dug into a single
theme in this sprawling series. I could go on about the show’s exploration of
self-pity, incest, the Problem of Evil, patriarchy, teenage pretension,
self-delusion, etc.,etc.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">When the Blu-Ray set of Utena comes out, I
plan to do an analysis of it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
Simon Brilsbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12922819494593801127noreply@blogger.com0