Sean is an aspiring screenwriter, novelist, a trained artist and photographer, an avid reader, film buff, sports fan, working man, bird hobbyist, social liberal, fiscal conservative, and occasional smartass.
He also enjoys craft beers, pizza, and long lonely walks wondering just where the hell his life went wrong.
In the summer of 1998 I was home on break from Longwood College and although I had a part-time job at the Dahlgren Food Lion waiting for me if I wanted it, after three summers I’d had enough and opted not to go back there. I never did go to work that summer, but I discovered the joys of internet discussion boards and was quickly made a moderator at the Jedi Council Forums at TheForce.net, at the time the leading Star Wars fansite.
In my time at TF.N I made several friends, many of whom I am still in touch with today (Joel, Jason, and especially Mahesh, I salute you, my good fellows!). I also met two young ladies, one a girl from Wisconsin (screen name Hathor) of whom I have spoken in the past, and the other, a somewhat cold, officious redhead who went by the handle Octavya. Hathor was a bit young for me but I was interested in Octavya (Traci in real life), and struck up a friendship with her. We talked often and for long hours, and I let her know I was interested. She did not discourage me, and only encouraged me in measured amounts, but my first relationship, the one from college, had ended some months ago and I was ready to try again. Since my college girlfriend had refused to watch Empire Strikes Back if anything bad happened to Harrison Ford (true story), I thought a geeky girl who shared my interests was definitely the way to go. But Traci was very career-minded and I have never found motivation in anything other than creative pursuits, so we were an ill match. That did not, however, discourage me much.
Now, Traci was from Michigan but her sister Penny (Elf) and Penny’s fiance, Joe (Staldar), were living in Houston, Texas, and were to be married there in May of 1999, the weekend “The Phantom Menace” came out. Traci may not have encouraged me a lot, but her sister thought I had a shot and not only encouraged me, but invited me to her wedding, where Traci was to be Maiden of Honor, and she thought if I flew out there, we’d find out if there were any sparks. Spoilers: there weren’t.
I spent a weekend in Houston in 1999 hanging out with people who were a little too upper-class for me, or for whom I was a little too middle-class, and after I came home the only thing I could think of was the Garth Brooks song, “Friends in Low Places.” I should probably add that this was during arguably the darkest period of my life thus far, the period between 1997 and 2006, which is oddly framed by the death of my maternal grandfather Walter Rex at the one end, and the death of my maternal grandmother, Florence Rex, at the other. In between this period I had two failed relationships and one failed attempt, quit two jobs, and discovered I had no idea how to adult or how to life.
I never quite fit in with Traci and her family. I wasn’t in a good mental state — I’d been working at AKA Printing & Mailing for two months or so, and was already gaining weight on top of my college weight, so I was fat, socially awkward, and had little in common with the people I was visiting apart from a love of Stars, both Wars and Trek. Traci and I had a little time to hang out – she took me out to the beach at the Gulf of Mexico, we walked around a little and then drove back. We talked less in person than we ever had online. She was cold and quiet and I was shy and nervous, and it never really came together. I remember even trying to initiate innocuous physical contact freaked her right the hell out. I flew all the way out there only to find out once and for all that she wasn’t interested. I remember feeling like I’d wasted my time, and my money, and it was like I had gatecrashed Penny and Joe’s wedding even though Pen had invited me. Blame it all on my roots.
When I left Houston, I knew I’d never see Traci again and that she likely wouldn’t want to talk to me anymore. Fortunately I didn’t grieve long. My first night home, when I signed onto instant messenger, Hathor from Wisconsin told me she’d missed me while I was gone, and had been worried about me, and thought she was falling in love with me. Nobody had ever said those words to me before. I was twenty-two.
So, that’s why I hate Texas, and especially Houston. My associations with the place are negative ones, of not fitting in, of feeling like I shouldn’t have been there, of learning I’d been strung along for a year. But I wouldn’t wish a hurricane on anyone, nor the kind of damage and catastrophic flooding they have been suffering. Destroying the city could not erase the emotional turmoil of that decade. No, Houston, you hot, damp, rashy crotch of a place, please survive.
And to Elf, Staldar, and Octavya, wherever you are these days — I truly hope you all are safe.
While I was getting ready for bed last night, I was thinking about the Narrative Voice. From this you may surmise that I am single, and also that I think about weird crap when I’m supposed to be winding down for the evening. Both of those surmises would be accurate.
The reason it was on my mind was that a friend of mine is reading my fantasy novel for me, and she’s a teacher, so I get teacherly messages from her, which is cool but also something I really haven’t experienced in nearly twenty years. At any rate, our discussion highlighted for me an issue that has had me on the fence for about a decade now with this book. I have chosen a third-person limited narrator, which is limited to a different character on a chapter-by-chapter basis. I have three or four main characters and most chapters follow one or another of them, but sometimes I break from that I get into others as well, as the story requires. The thing is that I didn’t want to look like I was ripping off George RR Martin’s “A Game of Thrones,” a book that I strongly dislike. Therefore, I chose not to do a thing that he did, which is to signpost each chapter by titling it with the name of the character the chapter will be following, but I’m not sure it works as more than one reader has been flummoxed by this, though usually they figure it out after a while. The trouble is, I obviously can’t afford to have my readers feeling lost and adrift or they won’t keep reading.
Anyway, this got me thinking about why I wrote this book with this particular narrative voice, particularly given that the first draft wasn’t like that at all, favoring instead a third-person omniscient narrator. I think the reasons are several. One is that I felt that the third-person omniscient narrator was too easy. He sees all and hears all, and can give the reader all of the information he or she requires to understand what is going on, but he also is usually objective. It’s useful but I find characters to be the most compelling aspect of story and I want to explore them in more personal ways.
Then I read “A Game of Thrones,” the first book in Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” saga, and hated it, not because it wasn’t well done, it assuredly is; but rather because it was too cynical and perverse, and often left me feeling greasy. However I did appreciate Martin’s ability to craft interesting characters, and his willingness to kill, maim, or otherwise abuse them in service of his narrative. I did thus begin experimenting with a third-person limited narrator in a science-fiction piece I did fourteen or fifteen years ago. I also began seriously making attempts at screenwriting, where showing rather than telling is a necessity of the form, and I think that makes for good writing on the whole. I learned to do less telling even in my narrative prose. To say more while typing less.
There is also the matter of my admitted fondness for pulpy detective novels. These are known for their first-person narration. The fun thing about this style is that it involves a sort of performance on the part of the author: you have to get inside the character’s head, and put him or her on like a costume. Thus the voice you write in is the voice of the character. It can be a useful exercise, a way to stretch your muscles and develop your skill set.
As an exercise, let’s look at a few different ways to approach the same scene, let’s say a scene from a mystery novel that I’m totally manufacturing on the fly here.
Third Person Omnsicient. This will be the least-interesting one, I think, because it will feel the least like a detective story and will eliminate a lot of tension by virtue of the narrator’s omniscience:
The County Courthouse had been built in 1952. It was red brick, squat and low, a faux-colonial neo-classical style, portico and columns, with a confederate monument in front, a stone obelisk on a square base in the freshly-mown grass. It was late July, and the street lights had just come on though it wouldn’t be dusk for another couple of hours. Inside, tucked away in a back corner was the sheriff’s office, a dingy yellow room that hadn’t changed much in the decades since the place was built. There was a thirty-year-old telephone and a twenty-year-old PC with a monochromatic display, but the oscillating fan on top of the filing cabinet was the original appliance.
A banged-up metal desk divided the room. Lawrence Davis, a local PI, sat in one of the guest chairs, one foot propped on his knee, and behind the desk was the Sheriff, who was reading a folder on a twenty-year-old murder case involving a tow-truck driver named Vern Siever. Lawrence hoped to get a look at the folder, as his client was Siever’s nephew and some weird coincidences had occurred. But the more the Sheriff read, he knew he couldn’t share this file. The parallels with recent events were obvious, and he knew he’d have to reopen the case.
“I’m not going to show you this file,” the Sheriff said softly.
“Why not?” Davis asked, some surprise evident in his voice.
“It’d be improper,” the Sheriff told him.
“But the case was closed twenty years ago.”
“S’been reopened.”
Third Person Limited. Here I can pick one of the characters to open to you.
Lawrence Davis sat in the Sheriff’s office, tucked away in the back corner of a county courthouse that was sixty years old. It didn’t look like the interior had changed much in all that time. Tile floors and cinder-block walls, cheap paint starting to peel around the edges. The Sheriff was a muscular man, short and stocky, but athletic. Maybe baseball, Davis thought. The guy was broad, like a catcher. His white hair and moustache were trimmed with military precision, and his brown uniform was neatly pressed, double creases down his chest, the star-shaped badge reflecting the overhead fluorescent lights.
Davis felt a little uncomfortable, if he were being honest. The Sheriff exuded a kind of toughness, not like some country sheriffs who were out of shape small businessmen who had greased the right palms. This guy was a professional. He had the reputation to prove it. He hadn’t spoken in nearly five minutes as he sat carefully reading over a file on a twenty-year-old homicide of a tow-truck driver named Vern Siever. Siever’s nephew was Davis’s client. It hadn’t been apparent at the outset that the nephew’s trouble was related to the uncle’s murder, but the deeper Davis got, the more obvious it was.
He had a feeling that it was obvious to the Sheriff, too, and if it was, his odds of getting a look at the file were basically nonexistent. The Sheriff had not spoken or basically even moved in about five minutes. Finally he closed the folder, squared it up, and placed it carefully on the blotter in front of him.
“I’m not going to show you this file,” he said. His voice was soft and low.
“Why not?”
“It’d be improper.”
“But the case was closed twenty years ago.”
“S’been reopened.”
First Person. This is the one that will feel the most correct for the genre. It’s also the one that will give me the most leeway for humor and observation, while leaving things unstated but still generally implied:
It was a Friday evening in late July and I was sitting in a dingy office in a sixty year-old courthouse. The walls were yellow-painted cinder blocks over a checkerboard floor, and the desk was one of those metal jobs they used to make at the state prison, probably the color of wheat when it left the assembly line, now long-since worn black around the edges by six decades of abuse. There was a window behind the desk, over the sheriff’s right shoulder, too high and too small to afford much of a view, and in any case it was hung with a broken set of colorless Venetian blinds. Beside it was a framed certificate from the Virginia Sheriff’s Association.
The sheriff was a squat, square man with a white flat-top and a matching moustache. Everything about him was square: his head, his shoulders, his jaw. In his square hands was a manila folder and in the folder was, presumably, the file on Vern Siever’s murder. The Sheriff’s hooded eyes moved steadily back and forth over the report. Other than that, he was completely still. I was sitting in a guest chair across the desk from him, black fiberglass on tubular steel frame. I wondered what would happen if I put my feet up on his desk. The Sheriff seemed like the kind of guy who would let you know what to do when he wanted you to do it. I’d been sitting in his office for five-and-a-half minutes. He hadn’t spoken in five. At last he closed the folder, squared up the papers, and put it down on the blotter on front of him. His eyes lifted from the folder and met my own. I tried to take a step back, but I was still sitting down. He shifted his weight, and an ancient spring creaked beneath his probably square ass.
“I’m not going to show you this file,” he said. His voice was low, and soft.
“Why not?”
“It’d be improper,” he said.
“But the case was closed twenty years ago.”
“S’been reopened.”
“What’s the certificate for?”
“Award for the most private dicks thrown out of the courthouse. That was last year. I’m behind on my quota.”
Notice that in the first example, I was able to straight up tell you what the sheriff was thinking. Among other things, it makes him less of a dick because you know his reasoning. I could just say what the conflict is between the two characters and let it play out in front of you.
In the second example, I still had to be fairly objective, but could make you privy to Davis’s concerns and could make some observations about what he saw around the room. When it came to the Sheriff, though, I could only report on how he looked and what he said. It was all I really needed, because you get Davis’s concerns and you can kind of see the Sheriff through his eyes, though not in a personal way. I could have pushed this farther, I think, closer to the first-person version, but for the sake of the exercise I didn’t want to be any more repetitive than necessary.
The third example is the most fun, I think. Here I get to BE Davis, and show you the room through his eyes, and in his words. He doesn’t mention the oscillating fan at all, if he notices it, and he doesn’t talk about baseball, either. Instead he focuses on the Sheriff’s appearance and general demeanor, which ought to give you a sense of Davis’s instincts regarding the man, without me (or Davis) having to be too on-the-nose about it. Interestingly, I feel like this version also best establishes how in control of the situation the Sheriff is, by letting the PI wink at you where his own discomfort is concerned.
I guess if I’m giving advice to any aspiring authors out there – first, why the hell are you listening to me, I’m not even published – but secondly, you grow by finding challenges, so don’t keep doing the same thing every time you write. For me, I think instinct and observation form my first impressions of people and situations, and when I tell stories I tend to base my descriptions on the kinds of things I notice and the impressions I form from them. As a result I tend to let my characters do the same.
The best thing about doing the rotating third-person limited narrator for my fantasy novel was that it let me explore the different perceptions of my various characters – whether they are driven by instinct or intellect, and whether their driving emotion is anger, fear, compassion, or perhaps a sense of honor or duty, colors the way each of them reacts to the others and perceives the people they encounter and the threats they face. It also became an interest challenge when I had to let certain moments that are important for a given character, play out as witnessed entirely by another character, and sell you based on the first character’s observed reaction rather than their feelings… it was a challenge I enjoyed, and I believe it helped me grow as a writer.
Is the book any good, though? Hell, I don’t know. But it was worth it.
I talk a lot about the art of filmmaking. Or I suppose I give critiques of movies the way I learned to do with art pieces during my art training years ago, looking at the positive and the negative and trying to be fair and honest in my assessments. Which for me means I am treating films as an art form, which I think is fair since film is an artistic medium.
However, filmmaking is also a business, and when we talk about the decisionmaking process behind the movies, quite often it’s the business that informs it. For instance, when we look at the recent announcement that Ron Howard is replacing Phil Lord and Chris Miller in the director’s chair for Lucasfilm’s latest Star Wars Anthology film, the currently untitled Han Solo project, it raises questions about the artistic integrity of the film, even as we understand that this was a business decision. Scuttlebutt is that Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan had a difficult relationship with Lord & Miller.
Woody Harrelson’s face makes me wonder what the hell everybody is grabbing.
Lord & Miller are, after all, known primarily as comedic directors. But likewise we have been told that the Anthology films are meant to be different from the Saga films, to really let directors explore new kinds of Star Wars stories. Let us also remember that Kennedy and her team at Lucasfilm hired Lord & Miller to direct this movie. Nobody foisted the directors on them, they didn’t inherit the duo, this was a hiring decision they made, knowing who these guys were. Now, last year’s “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” directed by Gareth Edwards, wound up getting heavily re-shot by someone not named Gareth Edwards. The film was restructured in the 11th hour, apparently to make it more like the saga films, and now Kathy Kennedy has fired Lord & Miller from the Han Solo picture.
Kennedy has a responsibility to protect the legacy of the Star Wars brand, but my read is that she’s somewhat conflicted between wanting to explore what a Star Wars film can be, and making sure that she protects the model of what a Star Wars film already is. The result is almost guaranteed to be another safe and familiar, if entertaining, film. I have not seen a single film that Lord & Miller have made, but these are the guys who cast Alden Ehrenreich to play young Han Solo, and Donald Glover as Lando Calrissian, and damn if I didn’t want to see the movie they were making, good or bad. Now nobody ever will. That feels a little tragic.
On the other hand, there’s also a rumor going around that Lord & Miller, who previously met with Warners and DC about directing “The Flash” before stepping away to do the Han Solo picture, met again with the DC films people during a recent hiatus from filming their Star Wars project, suggesting a possible return to DC. For a DC comics guy like me, that’s an interesting prospect. The mostly unfounded stigma against the DCEU is finally lifting, with the success of Wonder Woman, and a good Flash movie, free of all the soap-opera garbage of the CW show, would be a welcome addition to the lineup.
Actual photograph of Ezra Miller in the vault where Warners is keeping him until they find a director for his movie.
Shakeups like this are still more common than I’d like to think. Look at how many of the Marvel films have lost directors, for example. Before she directed Wonder Woman, Patty Jenkins was up for Thor 2: The Dark World, but departed the project because Marvel Studios had certain requirements that a Thor sequel needed to meet and Jenkins wasn’t going to be able to tell the story she wanted to tell. Before Ryan Coogler came onboard for Black Panther, Ava Duvernay was attached to that project. Peyton Reed replaced Edgar Wright on Ant-Man. Joss Whedon quit Marvel after Avengers: Age of Ultron because hitting a checklist isn’t as fun as telling a story. I think this has a lot to do with the reason Marvel mostly hires TV directors these days to do their movies. It’s about having workman directors who are cheap, controllable, and who can’t afford to let ego get the better of them. It’s like the time George Lucas hired Richard Marquand to direct Return of the Jedi. In the end none of the Marvel movies are bad, but none of them are great, either. They are entertaining and provide a reasonable ROI, and as long as that is true they are going to keep making them the same exact way. Same with the new Star Wars movies. If there’s money in it, Kathy Kennedy will keep pushing for more of the same.
DC has had their share of directorial shakeups too, of course. Patty Jenkins actually replaced Michelle MacLaren on Wonder Woman, and The Flash has had numerous directors attached at various points. Franchises are tricky, they’re not solely about a director’s artistic vision, they are also about building a brand and making money, and studios work hard to find directors they like, who they feel have a vision that suits their needs. In other words, the art takes a backseat to the business. As expensive as these movies are to make, that can’t be a surprise to anyone.
We can reach back even further, to the Salkinds ditching Dick Donner for Superman II, or Warners booting Tim Burton off Batman Forever. What sets the modern age apart is guys like Kevin Feige and Geoff Johns, whose job it is to balance between the studio’s need for bankability, and the legacy of their respective brands. But Geoff Johns, the DC guy, is a fairly recent addition to the staff at DC Films, and what I think a lot of the fans forget, is that while DC Films is pretty new, Warners has been in the business of making DC films for a long time, and while most of those films are not in DCEU continuity, there’s another kind of continuity at work: it is, after all, the same studio that has been making DC films since 1978. The reality is, that’s a continuity of business decisions for them.
Unfortunately, this was one of those decisions.
Essentially, every DC film from Superman: The Movie to Green Lantern, informs the genesis of the DCEU. Take Batman ’89 for example. It was a fight for Michael Uslan to get a serious Batman movie made at Warners at that time, and landing Burton to direct was crucial to making that happen. Warners loaded the film with big-name talent to try and trade on star power, a tactic the entire 90’s Batman franchise would repeat to increasingly comical effect. That’s a practice that Dick Donner and the Salkinds employed with Superman; although Christopher Reeve wasn’t a big name, that film had Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Glenn Ford, Jackie Cooper, and Ned Beatty.
Batman was a huge success, and Warners greenlit a sequel and re-signed Burton and most of his cast. Since dark, serious Batman had worked out for them, they let Burton do what he wanted, and the result was Batman Returns, a film that even a lot of people in my generation don’t like. It didn’t do as well ast the box office, and Burton was booted for Batman Forever. Michael Keaton walked away soon afterward, and we wound up with Joel Schumacher and Val Kilmer.
Batman Forever was fun, and tried to strike a balance between camp and the drama inherent to the character. It was also extremely toyetic, stuffed full of colorful characters with lots of costume changes so that action figures could be sold. The result is a movie that was fun in the summer of 1995, but is often cringeworthy in revisits, and squarely of its time. However, it was a huge success, bigger even than Batman ’89, and that prompted Warners to rehire everybody for its sequel. Val Kilmer dropped out, though, having other commitments, and was replaced by George Clooney. Batman & Robin took all the worst aspects of Batman Forever – the cheesy jokes, the camp, the over-saturated color palette, the gratuitous redesigns and alternate costumes in order to sell toys. The hiring of big name actors had devolved into getting Arnold Schwarzenegger to portray a tragic villain.
What killed da dinosaurs? DIS MOVIE!
It’s worth noting that all of this happened at a time when the internet was just arriving as the seat of all fandom, and Batman & Robin became the first casualty of internet fan rage. It was totally deserved, the movie was awful, and the internet pounced on it like sharks on chum. Warners retired Batman for some eight years. DC Superheroes mostly retreated to television, the realm of animated series and CW melodramas. But Warners, and every other studio, began using the internet as an access point to the fandom, hoping in this way to keep a finger on the pulse.
In the interim, Warners looked at bringing Superman back to cinemas, and hired Tim Burton to do it. That’s a strange pairing, and one that resulted in Nicholas Cage being hired to play Superman. Thank God that never came to pass, but it’s one of the stranger chapters in this history. Brett Ratner and JJ Abrams took a pass at making Superman. The studio also considered doing Batman: Year One, and even began developing a Justice League movie to be directed by Mad Max’s George Miller.
Megan Gale’s costume test for George Miller’s Justice League. This is a thing that almost happened.Unfortunately, so is this. Nicolas Cage costume test for Tim Burton’s “Superman Lives.”
When Batman returned in 2005, or, more specifically, Began, Christopher Nolan made it easy for audiences to believe a man could dress up like a bat and punch bad guys. Nolan cited Superman: The Movie as one of his references, saying Donner’s approach to using big names in key supporting roles was a strategy he appreciated, and that thinking gave us Michael Caine as Alfred, Gary Oldman as Jim Gordon, Liam Neeson as Ra’s al Ghul/Henri Ducard, and Ken Watanabe as Ubu/Decoy Ra’s. Nolan also wasted no opportunity to take moments that were some of the greatest failures of the Burton-Schumacher films, and invert them.
Note, for instance, that in Batman Forever, Riddler and Two-Face ambush Alfred and beat him over the head with a cane before blowing up the Batcave and trashing Wayne Manor; in Batman Begins, when Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows set fire to Wayne Manor, it is Alfred, armed with a golf club, who beats a goon over the head and makes his way through the burning mansion to save Bruce. As a second example, just to prove that I’m not making this up; at the end of Batman ’89, Batman tethers Joker by the ankle to an apotropaic figure using his grapnel, which ultimately results in Joker’s death. In the Dark Knight, Batman tosses Joker out of an incomplete skyscraper, then uses his grapnel to catch him by the ankle and leave him for the police. The DK trilogy is full of these little mulligans.
In 2006, following the success of Batman Begins, Warners heisted Bryan Singer away from Fox’s X-Men franchise (where he was replaced by Brett Ratner) and gave him the keys to Superman. Superman Returns, while a decent Superman movie, was a love letter to the Salkind-era Christopher Reeve movies. It told a story that amounted to a remake of Superman and Superman II, pitting the Man of Steel against Lex Luthor yet again. Fans complained that the film was boring and there was nobody for Superman to throw a punch at. The film underperformed at the box office.
In 2008, “The Dark Knight” crushed it at the box office, and Marvel launched the MCU the same year. By 2009 Warners killed Bryan Singer’s sequel to Superman Returns, and began developing Man of Steel. Then 2011 gave us Green Lantern, which looks for all the world like DC’s attempt to replicate the Marvel Formula. It didn’t replicate it successfully, though, and the result, though entertaining, was a total misfire. The following year saw Nolan’s third and final Dark Knight film, and then Man of Steel in 2013, produced by Christopher Nolan and his wife Emma Thomas, along with Debra Snyder, Zack’s wife. It was a clear reaction against the failure of Green Lantern and Superman Returns. It was also the film that finally launched the DCEU: a Superman movie made in the style of Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy. They even did the thing where they cast a mostly unknown actor in the lead role and surrounded him with veterans like Russell Crowe, Kevin Costner, Diane Lane, and Laurence Fishburne. Yet, audiences were divided. Finally Superman had somebody to punch, and Henry Cavill was perfectly cast, but the film was misunderstood by many. Where Returns had been accused of not having enough action, Man of Steel was castigated for having too much. Where people reacted against Returns being too much of a Donner retread, Man of Steel was reproached for not having the tone of the Salkind films.
Superman bearing the weight of fanboy bitching.
I have to believe that at this point, Warners was feeling like nothing they could do would make a Superman movie successful, which is probably why the sequel to Man of Steel was a Batman movie. Audiences seem to like Batman better, if you’re looking at the numbers. The tone of both MoS and BvS, that so many people reacted negatively towards, I would say was a simple decision for a studio that had just had success with the Dark Knight Trilogy, and failure with Superman Returns and Green Lantern. They just followed the money. BvS underperformed too, but it did much better than MoS.
At this point, David Ayers’ Suicide Squad was reshot to emphasize more humor, and was turned into what amounts to a feature-length music video. And then there’s Wonder Woman. As I wrote in my review last week, Wonder Woman definitely feels like a reaction to the general audience reception to MoS and BvS, and while I think Wonder Woman is a good movie, I also think the balancing act that it has to do is awkward and lets it down a little bit at the end, though not enough to ruin the film. Warners and DC, though, have spoken openly about trying to create an environment where directors are free to work and to put their stamp on their films. When they let Michelle MacLaren go, it was because her vision wasn’t the one they wanted, but once they brought Patty Jenkins onboard, they knew they were all on the same page and they mostly stayed out of her way. That’s probably what puts Wonder Woman above the average Marvel film for me. I hope that approach continues. I’d rather have movies, whether hugely successful like Wonder Woman or underperformers like MoS or the BvS Ultimate Edition, that are good, well-made films the directors stand beside and are proud of, than have a gaggle of garbled messes like Suicide Squad cluttering up the theaters.
In the end, this is why I end up writing so much about movies, and why I have a long history of arguing with people on the internet: I know the studios are listening, and if I like a movie I’m not going to keep it to myself. Arguing with a random stranger probably won’t change that stranger’s mind, of course, but for people reading the comments section, seeing a reasoned argument about why BvS is great, for instance, may be the incentive for some who had avoided it, to check it out. And maybe some of those folks will enjoy it. So when I debate, when I argue, when I converse… it isn’t necessarily for your benefit, or for mine, but for other people. For studios and directors I think have done a good job. For people who might like the movie but haven’t seen it yet due to something their friends said. The internet has given us all a certain amount of power. Let’s use it responsibly.
For the nearly the last decade, we have been in a new era of filmmaking. Superhero films are the new Westerns, they’re everywhere, everybody is making them, and even prime time television is full of superheroes. Whether or not this is a good thing, though, is a subject of some debate, and the reason for that is the concept of the “shared universe.” Since Disney bought Marvel in 2009 and set them up with a filmmaking branch called Marvel Studios, the game has changed. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, with its deep bench of power-hitters and bullpen overflowing with colorful second-tier characters who flesh out the cast of every new MCU picture, superhero movies have become, well, comic books. The model is so lucrative that everybody wants in on the action.
“You will go to him, and you will fight him. To the death. Brown and Green: FIGHT NIGHT! The greatest gladiator match in the history of the world! Lizard versus Ape, Day versus Night. Gojira of Japan versus Kong of Skull Island.”
Projects like “Kong: Skull Island,” and the recent Tom Cruise “The Mummy” relaunch, are examples of how shared universes are the new standard that studios are chasing. Kong belongs to the “MonsterVerse” along with Gareth Edwards’ “Godzilla” from 2014, while “Dracula Untold” and “The Mummy” are meant to launch Universal’s new “Dark Universe,” returning to their roots as the big horror studio. Last year’s all-female “Ghostbusters” remake was Sony’s attempt to kick off a new franchise that would encompass several different Ghostbusters series with different casts, and share continuity with “Men in Black” and “21 Jump Street.” Nobody wanted that, however, and Sony, a studio notorious for making bad decisions, misfired on the whole thing.
This brings us to “Wonder Woman,” the latest from Warner Bros. in their line of DC Comics films, or the DC Extended Universe as it is officially known. Now, I grew up reading comic books, and in the early 1990’s I collected comics, complete with bags, boards, longboxes; the whole apparatus. My friends and I used to dream about what great movies these intellectual properties would make if Hollywood could only see the value of the storytelling in what was, at the time, only just becoming a somewhat respected medium. I wore out my VHS tape of Tim Burton’s 1989 “Batman” film in the early 90’s. I can still quote the entire film in my sleep. I’m an artist, a writer, a reader, and a comic book guy. Naturally the last decade has been particularly exciting for me, as the culmination of a growing interest in comic book movies that began around the turn of the century with the Blade trilogy, the Sam Raimi-directed Spider-Man trilogy, and Bryan Singer’s X-Men films.
But no franchise has done more for comic book movies than Warner’s Christopher Nolan-directed “The Dark Knight Trilogy” from 2005-2012, which showed that comic movies could be serious, mature in tone, and address heavier themes in the storytelling while staying true to what the characters represent. However, despite the DK Trilogy being a Warner’s property and a DC franchise, the DCEU did not begin until 2013’s Man of Steel, which introduced Henry Cavill as Superman in a film that was heavily inspired by Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy. That film was divisive, as for some reason, many people who loved a mature, thoughtful take on Batman, didn’t like Superman receiving the same kind of treatment. I did, though, and this makes me one of the people who loved both Man of Steel and last year’s “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice,” an operatic revenge tragedy starring three of my favorite superheroes, Batman, Superman… and Wonder Woman. That film was also very divisive and did not perform to the studios expectations (although it made an impressive $855 million worldwide) and is regarded by many filmgoers as “dour” and “depressing.” Speaking as someone who knows the inside of depression, I find that film far from depressing. To me it shows that even in the darkest moments, there can be hope. But then I also like “The Empire Strikes Back,” “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,” so maybe I just appreciate the value of a good, dark, middle chapter.
Wonder Woman in last year’s “Batman v Superman,” getting ready to put a hurting on Doomsday.
It is into this climate of strife among fans that Patty Jenkins’ “Wonder Woman” is delivered, and for a guy like me, who has spent the last year arguing the merits of the DCEU films, it was important that the film not sell out the more thoughtful and mature tone of the DCEU, while also finding success not only to cement the future of the DCEU, but to prove to an overwhelmingly sexist Hollywood that women can direct, and lead the casts of, blockbuster movies. It has, after all, been common practice for studios to hedge their bets in this regard. Note, for instance, that the only female superheroes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far are Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow and Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch, neither of whom has headlined her own film, or is in any way scheduled to do so. Fox’s X-Men films have plenty of women characters, but again, as part of an ensemble, the only characters to headline their own films being Wolverine and Deadpool. Last year’s “Ghostbusters” misfire also set the cause back.
Perhaps Wonder Woman’s greatest success is in proving that action movies with ladies, by ladies, can be profitable. Budgeted at $150 million dollars, the film is going to pass $500 million worldwide in its third weekend and looks to finish its theatrical run in the $700 million range. That’s more than Man of Steel and less than BvS, but more profitable than either one, as those were budgeted at $225 and $250 million, respectively. And how is the film?
On my first viewing, I came away somewhat disappointed, but this was owing largely to my love of MoS and BvS, which films are both heavier and I think more complex in their thinking. Subsequent viewings have brought me around, however. Wonder Woman, as a character, has to stand apart from Superman in more ways than just her gender, and what we have here is a representation of the DC Comics “trinity” that should be a powerful ensemble: Superman, a kind-hearted alien in whom people seek a savior, and who thus feels the crushing weight of his inability to save every single person every single time, for he is not a god; Batman, who embraces the darkness because he lost his innocence at a young age, yet who clings to the notion that mankind is basically good, if given the right inspiration to act; and Wonder Woman, a compassionate, optimistic, yet indomitable warrior, a literal demigod who fights for love.
The Lariat of Hestia isn’t just a Lasso of Truth; it’s also a weapon. Imagine the Hulk wielding Indiana Jones’ bullwhip…
Wonder Woman’s first solo film tells her origin, and it does this in a way that intentionally recalls Richard Donner’s “Superman: The Movie,” but is still thematically linked with the DCEU. After three viewings, I still get choked up when Diana drops her cloak and climbs out of the trenches in full armor, charging across no-man’s land to the German line, deflecting artillery with her shield and bullets with her vambraces, leading the British and American troops from a place where they were pinned down, without hope of advancement, to liberating the small village of Veld. That is powerful stuff, and it’s the moment Gal Gadot’s Diana really becomes Wonder Woman.
The place where the film sometimes falters for me is in the juxtaposition between Patty Jenkins’ take on an optimistic, unsinkable hero who acts out of love and compassion, and the film’s attempt to continue the overall moral complexity of the DCEU, which can best be summed up in a quote from William Bradford, the long-standing governor of the Plymouth Colony in Massachussetts: “All great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.” Or, as put simply, and perhaps most eloquently, by Jack Kennedy some three-hundred years later: we choose to do these things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
Wonder Woman enters the world of men as an adult, but one who has been sheltered by her mother, who has lived a lifetime on an island still in the Bronze Age, believing that all war is the fault of Ares, the Greek God of War, and who is thus somewhat overwhelmed by the notion that people have both light in dark in them, and that saving the world isn’t as simple as killing Ares and watching a cloud lift from the hearts and minds of mankind. Her victory in Veld is soon followed by a very dark defeat, and her victory at the end of the film comes with a terrible price. This absolutely fits with the established DCEU material, and Diana’s childlike version of morality takes a beating; yet I never feel like the film draws a clear conclusion from it.
Diana believes that Ares is responsible for World War I, during which the film is set, and she believes that if she kills the God of War, mankind will be free of his influence and they will all stop fighting and be good and honorable and compassionate again. After the climactic battle with Ares, German troops are shown standing up and putting their arms around not only each other, but also Wonder Woman’s friends who have accompanied her on this mission. It’s as if she was right, but of course we know that a second World War occurred, and then Korea, and Vietnam, and the Gulf War, and 9/11, and the War on Terror.
At the end of “Batman v Superman,” Gadot’s Diana told Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne, “a hundred years ago I walked away from the world of men. From a century of horrors. Men have made a world where working together is impossible.” Putting the Wonder Woman solo film into that context, it ought to be the story of how she got there. It just never quite feels like it is. More confusingly, this Wonder Woman believes that people are essentially good when not being compelled by Ares, yet she mows through German troops like a reaper in a wheat field. I don’t have a philosophical problem with killing in battle, and indeed I paid good money to watch Wonder Woman kick every possible butt. I’d have been upset if the film hadn’t delivered. But if she believes Ares has simply corrupted these people, then why kill them? Especially when the movie makes so much hay about her being loving and compassionate.
I feel like there’s a philosophical question to be asked there, but perhaps it’s as simple as, Diana is an Amazon, a warrior raised among warriors, trained by them, destined for one job, and she sees killing in battle as an honorable exercise if it allows her to save more lives overall by reaching Ares and stopping him. I would have liked for the film to take some time to reflect on what Diana has learned by the end, or indeed to demonstrate that she has learned anything at all. In the film’s postlude, Diana has a voiceover where she says, “I used to want to save the world, to end war and bring peace to mankind. But then I glimpsed the darkness that lives within their light. I learned that inside every one of them there will always be both. The choice each must make for themselves – something no hero will ever defeat.” It’s fine that she says it, of course, but I’m not sure that the movie really shows it, which makes the words ring somewhat hollow.
“You’re probably not a terrible person, but I am totally wrecking you anyway.”
We live in a time where our country is extremely polarized, and the way that occurs is by people taking too stark of a worldview, dehumanizing people who don’t agree with them, and insisting that one point of view is the only correct one. That’s what makes people unable to answer defeat with grace, victory with humility, injury with forgiveness, and strength with mercy. It’s also the reason for war, as every side believes they’re right. Because of this, the message of Wonder Woman is a timely one, but one that I wish had been explored in more depth. This film, however, seeks not to deconstruct Diana but simply to put her on a journey and invite us to follow, and to see the conflict through her eyes.
On a nuts-and-bolts storytelling level this means we don’t get much insight into the villains, something I miss since villains can be compelling, and as conflict is the heart of drama, and villains are the source of conflict, the better the villain the better the drama. This isn’t to say we don’t learn about the motivations of the villains in this film, but we never quite get to see them as people, something that supports Diana’s initial, stark worldview but does little to support her eventual declaration that everyone has both light and dark in them. It also unfortunately forces some very talented performers to constrain themselves to one or two notes, hardly representative of the palette available to them.
Somehow, in the end, I don’t mind, and I will give credit to Gal Gadot for that, because this is her first leading role and she absolutely crushes it. She’s engaging, charming, and so earnest that you will follow her on any adventure, and that’s the capital upon which the film trades. Clearly, Zack and Debra Snyder knew what they were doing when they hired her, and Patty Jenkins obviously knows how to get great performances out of her leads – it was Jenkins’ 2003 film, “Monster,” after all, for which Charlize Theron won her Academy Award. Gadot – with a hard T, she’s Israeli, not French – got her start as a model and a beauty queen before breaking into acting. She’s had supporting roles in some of the Fast and Furious movies, and appeared as Wonder Woman in last year’s “Batman v Superman,” but before landing the role, she was ready to quit acting and study law. As an Israeli national, she served her mandatory term in the Israeli Defense Force, where she was a weapons instructor, something that makes her absolutely convincing as a warrior. Patty Jenkins has said that she was upset when she learned that Wonder Woman had been cast before she came on board as director, but was relieved when she met Gal because she understood immediately that they had found the perfect person for the role.
There’s room to challenge the character further in other films, and I hope they do. After all, true drama comes from challenging your characters, really putting the screws to them, and the problem with most superhero films is that there’s no real drama, no stakes, no chance for failure; and it takes the chance of failure in order for victory to mean a damned thing. I grew tired of the Marvel films a few years ago because they have a formula, they adhere to it strenuously, and they don’t challenge either their heroes or their audiences with the choices they make. What sets the DCEU apart from the MCU, in my mind, is that they have the guts to structure a superhero movie like an Elizabethan revenge tragedy, or in the case of Wonder Woman (rather appropriately) a Greek heroic epic, and to trust the audience to be mature enough to understand the grey tones of real-world morality. In a landscape populated almost exclusively by films that want to be comic books, it’s refreshing to see comic book movies that function as classical films.
One of Wonder Woman’s great victories is what the film says about men and women, and what we can accomplish together. Chris Pine, as Wonder Woman’s sidekick and love interest, Steve Trevor, doesn’t have to make a complete ass of himself in order to make his leading lady look good; instead she’s just already inherently amazing, and he gets to be awesome too, and they accomplish great things by working together. He learns of course that he doesn’t always have to protect her, that she can not only take care of herself but can also protect him, and that the two of them have skills and knowledge that compliment each other. It isn’t a competition with them, it’s pure harmony, and it’s a breath of fresh air for an action movie. Indeed, the more Trevor gets out of Diana’s way, the better she shows herself to be, and the better he is, too, because she brings out the best in him. Yes, a healthy relationship in a superhero movie. We need more depictions of healthy relationships in any medium.
My favorite thing about this movie, though, came in my third viewing, when I saw it with my parents. My mom’s reaction to seeing a woman mopping the floor with all these bad guys, and doing it convincingly: my mother leaned over to me and said, “she’s sort of everything I’d like to be.” I imagine a lot of women out there are feeling that, watching this movie. I imagine now there will be an entire generation of girls who grow up with this movie and this character, this version of this character, close to their hearts. And that is, if you’ll forgive the expression, a wonderful thing. In the end, there’s no greater justification for this film’s existence exactly as it is, and none other is needed. It’s a movie I’m proud to support, and will be proud to own when it is released on blu-ray. If you haven’t seen it, get out there and do so. And take at least one of your favorite ladies with you.
Recent events – in name, the death of Chris Cornell and the news about Autumn Snyder, Zack Snyder’s daughter, has made me decide that it’s time to talk about my depression. I don’t talk about it a lot, except with my closest friends. I’m not embarrassed about it or ashamed of it, it’s just that I’ve never been to a shrink, I’ve never been diagnosed. Only recently, within the last few years, have I learned that it runs in my family. I’ve dealt with it in some form for most of my life, and it’s the reason I write, the reason I used to draw non-stop. It’s my voice. The voice of a guy who can’t use his real voice because a lot of the time it doesn’t work; it skips and scratches like a broken record, and it isn’t a pretty voice, nor an exceptionally manly one. A deviated septum, possibly sustained during childhood when I jumped off one of those Masonite slides at a friend’s house and bashed my face onto a brick hearth, gives it a honking, nasal tone that is flatly unattractive.
Anyway, I’ve never been diagnosed with depression, and I don’t see the point in going to a shrink because I wouldn’t accept meds even if they were deemed necessary, and in any case I certainly don’t have it to the extent that others do. I’ve never been suicidal. I can say that for a certainty, though I can admit that there’ve been times where I hated being alive, and couldn’t imagine a day when I wouldn’t. Those were dark times, and I don’t dwell there. That is not my life. That is not what God wants for me. That is not His plan.
Therein is one of the secrets to my dealing with it: faith. It would be a lie to say that I haven’t had my struggles with faith, though, too. I remember one time, back at my parents’ house, having been broken up with by yet another young lady, I collapsed on the floor between my bed and my dresser, in the corner with the subwoofer, my back against the actual wall, tears streaming down my face, wondering what in the hell was wrong with me that nobody wanted me, my mom came in and knelt down in front of me, trying to cheer me up, and she asked me if I had prayed. I remember this because the words that came out of my mouth were like black sludge, like poison, and I bear the shame of them every day. I ever worked it into one of my books, “The Disciple of Cardonn.” I told my mom, “the son of a bitch doesn’t listen.” I regret those words with all my heart. I may apologize to the Lord for those words every day of my life; I know I was forgiven the first time I did so. But I will always be ashamed that I ever said them. What I have learned in the years since, is that it’s pointless to expect things to go my way, and that most of the heartache and the worry and sense of doom and defeat I have encountered in my life, has come from thinking that I could control how things would play out, and being emotionally and intellectually unable to accept the reality when it didn’t meet my expectations.
I watched a few documentaries about castles in Great Britain and Ireland, recently; and one of them, a fortress called Warwick Castle, there’s a dungeon which is really just a dark, claustrophobic stone pit with a mud floor and a chute from the privy, so that the guy who lived in the castle would literally crap on his prisoners. As a metaphor for certain periods of my life, the dungeon of Warwick Castle is imprecise, but it will do. When you try to force things to go your way, and they don’t, you rather have the feeling of being in a dungeon where it is raining crap. You don’t know how you got there, or why. You would give quite a lot to be shut of it.
But of course this is disappointment, not depression. Depression, however, makes it tough to handle disappointment. Because every disappointment becomes cataclysmic in scale. Way back in my college days, dealing with the disappointment of heartbreak for the first real time, I wrote a poem. I don’t remember it; it is probably long gone, and in any case was most likely garbage. But I had a turn of phrase that I thought was very clever at the time, and looking back on it, it was describing depression: I spoke of having some unknown condition of the mind “that makes mountains of molehills, and molehills of mountains.” The point being that you get focused on the wrong things and find yourself disproportionately upset about them. It can be very hard to recognize that, when you’re in the middle of it. Because your brain is affected. You are malfunctioning.
I talk about heartbreak a lot because my loneliness and whatever sort of mild depression I have, make mountains out of a simple thing like the end of a relationship. It takes me forever to get right again after that happens. The older I get, the longer it seems to take. Like skin getting less pliable with age, so does my heart. But my emotional disturbance doesn’t live solely in the realm of heartbreak. I have a kind of sine wave of general happiness; it goes up and down. I hit a peak for a few days where I am downright gregarious, laughing and joking with complete strangers, surprisingly bold with the ladies; then it passes and I start slowing down, drooping, sleepy all the time, lethargic, sullen. I don’t want you to talk to me, but I didn’t tell you to leave. Get back here and leave me the hell alone. During this low point, I can’t even bear to hear people laughing. I hear people laughing and I want to punch the living hell out of all of them. I see my red door, I must have it painted black.
I’m learning to recognize it for what it is. To understand that I need to be less affected by stuff I can’t control. I need to quit giving things power over my life. Ups and downs are natural, but the sine wave, not so much. And what happens, then, is that love, on those rare occasions when I find it, is like a mug of beer and a shot of bourbon in the hands of an alcoholic. Suddenly the sine wave is disrupted; I am up up up and flying. And I don’t want it to ever end. When it inevitably does, I come down like an atom bomb out of the belly of a B-29. And I mean I crater epically. In the end it doesn’t so much level the sine wave, as exaggerate it.
So, I no longer actively search for love. I fear putting myself through that again, for the wrong woman, will destroy me. If I can find stability, by myself, then I will be a better partner when the time comes. Whatever God has in mind, I will follow the steps He lays out for me and not try to force my own will upon it; that way lies only ruin. I am fortunate that I have this ability to introspect and sort through not only my feelings, but the reasons for them. It keeps things from getting away from me. When I understand that my feelings aren’t rational, I can dissect them and find the root causes. The last time heartbreak came to me, I remember sliding down again, and realizing what I was experiencing was an emotional hangover, and knowing that, I was able to put some perspective on it, and prayerfully face it.
Now, it’s been a couple of years. My feelings for her remain, but I know that they are not requited. I exist, with this emotional reality staring at me like a lone wolf from the forest’s edge. Sometimes I can only see the light reflecting off its eyes. It’s there. I am not very sad. But I am not very happy. I am in the field, and the wolf is in the woods, and we regard each other. I could go into the woods. I could dwell there, and snarl at people and howl at the moon, and hunt some kind of satisfaction, some fleeting victory. I could bare my teeth and spring away into the brush. Because that wolf is just the other part of me. The thing I would become if I let the darkness in.
But I remain in the field, where I can see the light of the sun, and the stars, and the moon. From a distance away, I hear people laugh, and I want to punch them, but I don’t. I exist. It is lonely. I am lonely.
Three times in my life, I can remember hitting bottom, and each time has been lower than before. The first, was when I left home to start school at Longwood College 1994. I did not have a direction in life, and I did not want to go to college, at least until I knew what I wanted to do with my life. However this option was not allowed me. I have never done well with change. Four people were my entire world: my parents, and my friends Steven Lowry and Jeremy Bertz. Those four people were my support system, they kept me sane and kept me laughing and kept me from feeling too alone. Leaving all of that behind, going to a place far way with nothing but strangers, filled me with anxiety and dread. I did not realize that I had a kind of anxiety, but I’m sure now that I do, and like the other things, it has only intensified with age. When I got to Longwood, I was placed in a dorm room with Drew, a tall, quiet guy with a strong observational wit, and Chris Blauert, basically a shitty version of Chris Pine.
The three of us shared a suite with Jay, who looks like the love child of David Hasselhoff and Joel Osteen; Justin, who used to spray a cloud of deodorant in the air and walk through it; and Andy Banyasz, a cynical, ballcap-wearing Mac user. I liked all of them except Shitty Chris Pine, but none of them particularly liked me, and in any case, I was panicking, full of the shock of being away from home, having to live with people who listened to The Pixies, and ruined my sleep by spending all evening socializing across campus and then coming home and turning the light on to do homework at 2am when I had an art class at 7. The truth is, I was unprepared in almost every way for being away from home, and I was depressed, and I didn’t understand it, and thus I didn’t know how to face it, and I desperately needed a support system, but instead I mostly got bullied and it only got worse. I’m sure I was insufferable. I was depressed, what the hell else would I be to a bunch of guys just trying to drink beer and get laid, than an insufferable bastard? Of course I was. I hated every minute of my freshman year. At the beginning of the second semester, Drew and Shitty Chris Pine kicked me out of the room, forcing me to find residence elsewhere. I benefitted from this by getting a room to myself, but I had to share a suite with two frat turds whom it would be possible to compare to apes, if one felt like insulting apes. I remember one night, laying on my bed in my half-furnished, cold, cinder-block dorm room, crying, a voice telling me just jump out the window. I wanted to be anyplace other than college. Anyplace other than Farmville, Virginia. The thing that stopped me, was the realization that the only thing worse than staying in college would be disappointing my parents, or worse, hurting them.
The second time was about six years later. I was working at a print shop in Fredericksburg that made junk mail, primarily with a Catholic conservative bent, when my then-girlfriend, Laura (it was a long-distance internet relationship, because I was very stupid) broke up with me. To be clear… I had just finished four and a half years at Longwood, where I did not want to be, studying drawing and printmaking because they did not teach sequential art, and not minoring in English because my advisor was an idiot. I came home and had to find a job, which was made more complicated by the fact that after all that school I still did not know what I wanted to do with my life. In fact I was less certain at this juncture than I had been when I started college. Still directionless, I took the pre-press job because it was sort of art-adjacent, my degree had “printmaking” in the title, which may have fooled the idiots that ran the company, it paid reasonably well, and had a strong benefits package.
I was depressed every day, going to that awful job in that awful place and making awful crap for money. It was art-adjacent in the exact way that farting is sort of like composing music. Laura was my life-preserver. Idiot that I am, it was her, and not my faith, or my family, that I clung to. I broke her. And then she left and I just broke. There were days, driving to work, that the voice urged me to swerve into oncoming traffic. Actually it was all of the days. I hated my life. I kept going there and collecting the paycheck as long as I could, but finally the awfulness of the job just pushed me over the edge. One can only throw so many chairs – and no, that isn’t a metaphor, I used to throw chairs up in that place. Then one day I walked out. I took five months off, wrote the first draft of “Disciple of Cardonn,” and that was therapy as much as anything. I got right. Mom told me it was like I was myself again, like her son was back after being gone for a long time. I knew what she meant. I felt it, too. I got re-hired at Food Lion, where I had worked during my college years, and I’ve been there ever since. It was only supposed to be five years. Whoops.
Well, I did have a plan, once.
The third time was just a couple of years ago. I had worked my way up to being a Produce Manager, and I was proud of the work I was doing. I was making enough money and had finally lined up a couple of friends to rent a place with, and I got out of my parents’ house at last. I was proud of that, but remember what I said about my support system, and change? I began to feel adrift, again. I also had to adhere to a similar sleep schedule to what I’d had at AKA, and I have learned that this is a factor for me. My circadian rhythms dictate that I was not meant for being early to bed nor early to rise. It takes a toll on my physical, mental, and emotional health. I had the job for some fourteen months. I started strong but as the job took its toll on me, I was increasingly unable to perform. Finally the company swapped store managers between the Dahlgren and King George stores, and I found myself working for a man I still maintain is the actual devil. He ground me down the rest of the way, and then forced me to step down from my position and leave the store I’d been at for over a decade. I’m happier at my current store, but I lost a lot of money, most of my dignity, and all of my pride. For the entire first year at my current store, I was basically just taking up space. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be there. I was humiliated, I was wounded, and I felt like I’d just been reduced to a child again.
And then I did a dumb thing. I decided to try to drive to Pennsylvania in a snow storm to pick up a dining room table, and I did not much care if I made it or not. I did not, in fact, make it. God, though? God has a funny way of reaching out, plucking you up and putting you in the palm of his hand. I misjudged my ability to stop in time on approach to the stoplight at Billingsley Road in White Plains, Maryland, and slid through the intersection after the light had turned red, standing on the brake, knowing something bad was about to happen. Somehow, miraculously, what happened was not so very bad. I did total a lady’s car. She happens to be the most beautiful lady I have ever seen in my life. She was not hurt. Nobody was hurt. We hugged each other, she cried, and I thanked the Lord that I had not injured this beautiful, wonderful person. It is absurd that I fell for her in that moment, standing in the snow in southern Maryland, snow in her hair, my insides like jelly. But it is also a kind of miracle. Although we did not end up together – she did seem to consider it, but I lost out to another guy, alas – she and I are friends. And, better still, I came to understand something that day, standing in a pool of warmth by the exhaust of a fire truck. I came to understand that the designs we have for our lives are basically inconsequential, because God’s plan overrides all, and his plans are to benefit us and not ruin us. I was feeling ugly, when I got in the truck that afternoon. I felt like dying. Instead I was reminded of beauty, of the preciousness of life and the wonder of chance. Of snow in a pretty girl’s hair. I was reminded that the world is a pretty good place, when you stay in the field under the light of the universe, rather than hiding in the thorns with the wolf.
That was the day, more than two years ago now, when I finally surrendered my will to God. Now I know that some of you reading this, are not religious. Some of you will think I’m crazy. I’m completely okay with that. But I look at a guy like Chris Cornell, who had more talent than I do, who was good-looking and successful and had three children, and I feel like hell that he’s gone, because I know the wolf got him. I hate that wolf.
I think about Autumn Snyder, and then I think about Zack and Deborah, talented filmmakers, Zack is a great artist, again, more talent than I can imagine. I think about what stopped me from seriously considering the window that night at Longwood so many years ago, and then I think about Autumn, and I know why Zack had to quit the movie. He feels like he failed her. It isn’t your fault, Zack. You, and Deborah, it isn’t your fault. It’s the damn wolf.
That will not be me. The wolf will not eat me. I will eat the wolf. I will eat the wolf raw, with the fur still attached, and I will swallow it whole. I am a warrior. I will live. I will live for the will of God, I will live for the joy of discovery. For snow in a pretty girl’s hair. My God, but it’s a beautiful world.
Okay, you got me. It’s been almost a month. A few things have happened that kept me from blogging, and without making excuses, the main two are the motherboard of my old computer going kaput, and the hard drive of said computer being somewhat mangled in the process. Then the last week has seen me rushing around like a madman at my paying gig due to the Easter holiday, but at last all that is behind me and I’m here with a new computer, ready to talk about whatever it occurs to me to discuss.
In playing catchup, let me put a few things out there. Recently, a customer at work asked me for Romaine lettuce, then rejected my stock on the grounds that it was too green. I’m not sure what her problem was, but I am convinced that mine is my job. So I started thinking about ways to improve my life. To that end, I have determined that I will self-publish a novel in the near future. I am currently revising one of my manuscripts so that I will feel comfortable publishing it, and hopefully it will not be garbage. I’ll let you all know when it’s available in case you’d like to check it out.
I have also taken on a bit of freelance work co-creating cover art for a friend’s novel, and will subsequently co-create cover art for my own. Having projects helps me feel like I’m not wasting my life, since life has little to do with catering to people who don’t know that Romaine lettuce is green. To that end, I have also decided to co-create a screenplay with another friend, who lives in Florida and pitched his idea to me. So there are various irons in various fires, and I find that’s when I am at my happiest.
There have been a few other things going on, too, in the world beyond the scope of my own interests. For one thing, President Trump has become very aggressive in his foreign policy, blasting Syria with 59 missiles and dropping a MOAB in Afghanistan. Tensions are rising with North Korea. It’s a little bit nuts out there.
I have always believed strongly in national defense. I grew up in a small town whose economy is based almost exclusively on a Navy R&D base, and my dad was employed on said base (and its manufacturing-based sister across the river) for more than 40 years. I am keenly aware that everything I had growing up, I have because of the Federal Government. Indeed, national defense is one of about two core functions that the Federal Government was chartered to perform in the first place.
With that said, though, there’s a difference between national defense and international offense, and despite the media seeming to mostly approve of the president’s actions, I’m not as in love with the current state of affairs. I’m not really convinced that Assad gassed anybody, at least not on purpose (it doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense, at least on the surface) and I certainly don’t think we need to be torqueing Kim Jong Un.
Then again, I have also never liked seeing my country cower in fear. If the last few months have proven anything, it’s that nobody knows what President Trump is going to do. But I remain convinced of a few things. I think he goes with his gut a lot, I think he remembers the last thing he heard, regardless of where he heard it, and I think he has a natural talent for creating conflict and finding ways to profit by it. I say none of that in admiration nor condemnation, this is merely my objective reading of observable data.
With that in mind, I think you can count on a few things. The first is that all this cozying up to China is probably part of an attempt to push them into settling the North Korea issue once and for all. It may not work, of course, but it’s likely the intent. Everyone who was freaking out about Steve Bannon can rest easy since he got kicked off the NSC, but that may not be what you wanted; he was all about NOT bombing anybody, but Trump listened to Jared Kushner instead, and here we are today. If you were going to vote for Hillary Clinton, though, bear in mind that she’s a hawk too, and the net result would likely have been little different where Syria and Afghanistan are concerned.
I think it’s likely now that Trump is going to continue to move away from the Libertarian/AnCap stance and ever more towards the standard authoritarian, mainstream Republican platform. He may still attempt to pull off some of his earlier promises, like healthcare, if ObamaCare crashes and burns, but I think we can all agree that he is turning out to be not what most of his supporters were hoping for.
However, he still isn’t Hitler, and thanks to a disastrous turn of phrase by Sean Spicer, we can count on basically nobody trotting out the Hitler comparisons against anybody ever again, so there’s that anyway.
I remain excited for Wonder Woman and Justice League in theaters this year; I am less excited than I used to be about Spider-Man Homecoming (it appears they Marvel’d it, for better AND for worse) and I am completely ambivalent about Star Wars: The Last Jedi. I’ll get into the movie stuff in more detail down the line.
Remember if you see Steve Stephens anywhere, stay away from him and call 911. I am increasingly convinced they’re going to find him dead in his car somewhere, but time will tell.
I don’t remember the date. Not to the day. I don’t remember the date, but it was spring, thirty-one years ago, 1986. I was nine years old, riding on a British Airways 747 with my mom and dad, on final approach to Heathrow. We had crossed the Atlantic overnight. The cabin was roomy, the seats reclined comfortably, and the stewardesses – air hostesses? – had handed out small pillows and blankets. I hadn’t slept much, I was too excited to be out of the country for the first time, but I feel sure I slept some. The in-flight movie was “Young Sherlock Holmes.”
Window shades were going up around the cabin, and I plugged a pair of white plastic airline headphones into the jack in the arm of my chair, futzing with the ridged wheel until the hums and clicks gave way to British voices, giving a weather report. That was the moment it became real. England. The big airliner bellied down out of the golden sunrise, into the cloud cover, and the misty overcast of a London dawn. Parents reminding me to keep swallowing so my ears will pop during the pressure change.
Heathrow is a blur in my memory, people scrambling about, in jackets and ties, flashing yellow lights, locked doors to maintenance areas, being hauled around by the arm through a massive airport in a foreign land. I think we took one of the big red buses from the airport to the hotel where the government had arranged for us to stay. We rode on the upper deck of the bus, open-air, clutching the bare metal handrail in front of us, an old bald man in a tweed coat sitting across the aisle. See, although it was an adventure for the family, for my dad it was also a business trip. As a civilian employee of the United States Navy, my father had been sent to London, if my memory serves me for two weeks to work on a project with some people from the British government.
A couple of years before a man named Ian Melville had been sent from England to work with our people on base, an assignment that lasted maybe two years, and had necessitated the relocation of his wife and three daughters to our small town in Virginia. The middle daughter, Melanie, was in my class. This was a short visit for us, but we were to meet up with the Melvilles for dinner one night when we were in London. It happened somewhere deep into the trip. Dinner turned out to be a large group of us seated around a long, narrow wooden table in the upstairs dining room of a dark, atmospheric pub where old bottles doubled as candlesticks, covered with many years worth of colorful wax drippings. I remember I sat across the table from Ian’s wife, Jane, somewhat disappointed that Melanie and her sisters wouldn’t be joining us. Melanie was a friend, we’d had some good times.
That first morning, though, our bus ride to our hotel ended at what turned out to be a monolithic, glassy modern box called the London Tara Hotel (now the Copthorne Tara Kensington, I believe). I remember the lobby contained the first digital LED scrolling message board I had ever seen, high on the wall behind the check-in counter. It bears repeating that I was nine years old, bucktoothed and mop-headed, tortoise-frame glasses, corduroys, grey sneakers, and a red VMI zip-front hoodie with white stripes around the biceps. Everything I knew about England I’d seen on TV or in movies, Dickens and Conan-Doyle. I didn’t know what had happened to London over the course of its existence. The fires, the Blitz. I had no idea the old city was like a phoenix, rising endlessly from its own ashes.
This is an entirely different bit of iron fence.
It bears mentioning as well that as an American, I’m used to a country where the greatest threat to historical buildings is mere progress; where whole swaths of our past are dutifully registered and preserved and have never been bombed by enemy aircraft in times of war. Founded in 43 AD, London is old, to be sure; the wagon-wheel layout of its streets tells the tale of its Roman origins. But precious little of antiquity remains. So, that first morning as we walked to a small café for breakfast, in spite of the red buses and iconic black cabs running to and fro, my nine year-old brain could not accept that I was really in London, for real, until the sidewalk at long last took us past a cast iron fence like a rack of spears, outlining the garden front of a Victorian townhouse. I’m pretty sure I made a big deal of it to my parents, and they probably wondered what the hell was wrong was me.
And then we were in the café, little round table with a frilly tablecloth, cups of coffee for the adults, and scones all around. I remember being disappointed with scones. I also remember my dad, who takes his coffee black, being instructed that English coffee is made to be taken with cream and would probably be fairly insufferable black. I’m pretty sure he tried it anyway. I would have. Black is the correct way to drink coffee.
This was a long time ago, before The Shard, before the Millennium Wheel. I remember walking across Westminster Bridge one evening, excited to see Big Ben, and picking up off the sidewalk a smiley face button. Somewhere I still have it. We did a lot of sightseeing. The Tower of London. The Tower Bridge. Kensington Gardens, Marble Arch, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abbey, The Houses of Parliament. The Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. There were numerous parks and gardens. In one park, standing on a footbridge over a stream, an old man was feeding sparrows out of hand. He showed us how to do it, though I had trouble holding still long enough for the birds to come. Finally they did. I think my affection for birds may be that old guy’s fault, and I am eternally grateful.
If you’ve ever seen “An American Werewolf in London,” that is exactly London as I remember it. Minus the werewolf, of course, but the proliferation of punk rockers in engineer boots and black leather jackets, all zippers and snaps and buckles, with brightly-colored spiked mohawk haircuts and creatively pierced faces is something I remember seeing everywhere I looked, all of them toting guitar cases and trying to look bad. London in the 80’s.
Silly string was also a fad; I had never encountered it before but the sidewalks and street signs were lousy with the stuff, everywhere you looked some would-be Spiderman had pissed silly string out of a can across the totality of London.
The back half of our trip was mainly spent in Bath, which city we arrived in by train, prehistoric hill figures (perhaps the Uffington White Horse?) visible from the windows on the way by. One of my dad’s colleagues had his luggage stolen off that train. This fellow and his wife were well-dressed and she had brought all her good jewelry. My mom, being somewhat more practical, or perhaps paranoid, had not brought much in the way of jewelry and she and I toured London and Bath wearing hoodies. She wasn’t taking any chances, and I think that day on the train she felt as vindicated as anyone ever has in the history of human civilization.
All I remember from Bath is Bath Abbey, with the Jacob’s Ladder motif up the front of the building, and the actual Roman baths from which the city gets its name. I remember the hotel we stayed in there being a much older, statelier affair, a suite of rooms this time rather than a modern two-bed hotel room. I remember I had my own room there, and a desk at which I remember doing math homework – yes my teachers had sent along a lesson plan for me while I was traveling abroad. At this particular hotel in bath, every morning when housekeeping made up the room they would leave chocolate bars on the pillows. One day I took a bus with mom and some of the other ladies to another nearby city – Bristol, perhaps? – to do some shopping. I remember wet cobblestones and a large record store, the largest I’ve ever seen, possibly an HMV. I remember browing KISS records. Yes, records, 33’s. Thinking how cool it would be to come home with a copy of ALIVE II I’d bought in England. Of course, I didn’t have any money. I was nine.
I remember one day, towards the end of our stay in England, Mom was in a small urban dress shop looking at a kilt, which she did buy, and I was playing with a car or something and stupidly ended up by the front door, when a customer pushed in and scraped two of my fingers somewhat nastily with the bottom of the door. She kept apologizing, and mom rightly pointed out that it was my fault because I was in front of the door. I was mad, but I was also nine, and it was absolutely my fault. Couple of band-aids later I was over it. One of the last days I got, in a card shop, a set of little ceramic figures of the characters from Disney’s The Fox and the Hound – my favorite Disney movie – in fact the only one I have any attachment to. I came home with those, and two other souvenirs: die cast replicas of a London taxi and a red double-decker bus, which were available at pretty much any souvenir shop throughout London. I wanted to get the police car to complete the set, but I never did. The police cars weren’t that great anyway; small white hatchbacks with bright orange stripes down the side and little blue bubble lights.
Why did I choose now to recount all of this? I don’t know, really, it was on my mind Wednesday and I thought maybe, at 40, I should write all of this down while I still remember a good amount of it. Maybe, too, it’s because I keep thinking about how much I miss traveling and how much I’d love to get a lot more of it in, if only I had the money and a lady friend to share the experiences with. A little piece of my heart has been there in London, staring at that one little bit of iron fence for thirty-one years.
Maybe also it’s something more. Maybe it’s because of the jackass who attacked people outside the parliament building on Wednesday. Maybe I just wanted to say, hey, London: I love you.
Kong: Skull Island surprisingly isn’t a bad movie. Big, loud, ridiculous, all of these apply, sure. But it’s got more going on under the hood than I expected walking in, and that made it work for me, overall. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like my beloved Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. There is no Shakespearean drama surrounding this skyscraping monkey, and that’s probably for the better considering the phrase “skyscraping monkey” may be seriously applied to the central figure of this film.
I know Kong’s not a monkey, he’s an ape. Don’t go bananas. That’s the succinct review, for those of you avoiding spoilers. Stick around if you want to be like last month’s milk, because from here on in there’s nothing but spoilage taking place.
The movie opens in 1944, in the air above the South Pacific. We don’t get a clear look at what happened, exactly, but two pilots, an American and a Japanese, both are forced to ditch their fighters and wind up on a deserted island, locked in hand-to-hand combat, when a third set of hands, large, hairy, and black, comes up over the cliff edge beside them, and a large, simian face regards them balefully through the smoke and mist.
The title sequence flashes us forward to 1973, where John Goodman and Corey Hawkins (Straight Outta Compton’s Dr. Dre) are seeking to mount an expedition to the recently discovered Skull Island. The writers have to make up a lot of goofy pseudo-science to justify an unknown island in 1973, but the brush it off just as quickly, making it clear that all respectable scientists and politicians think Goodman’s character is a total crackpot. With groundwork laid, we’re off and running, meeting an air cav battalion at Da Nang, led by Samuel L. Jackson’s Colonel Preston Packard, on the last day of the war in Vietnam. The Colonel feels that the US’s withdrawal from the conflict betrays the sacrifices of so many brave men, and he simply isn’t ready to go home. When his men are tapped to support the mapping expedition to Skull Island, he’s just glad to have a mission.
[Insert cliched reference to Pulp Fiction here indicating an inability on the part of the writer to differentiate between Sam Jackson the actor, and the various memorable roles he has played]Other key players are Tom Hiddleston’s SAS Lieutenant, James Conrad, and Brie Larson’s combat photographer, Mason Weaver. Conrad’s father went off to fight in WWII and never came home; Conrad himself isn’t ready to leave Southeast Asia, though he isn’t a commissioned officer any longer. He’s still searching for something, perhaps the father he lost. Sensing danger all over the mission, he triples his asking price to lead the expedition. Weaver, for her part, got wind of the mapping expedition but smelled BS all over the answers she got back, and having a journalist’s instinct she signed on for the mission.
It’s an interesting setup, rife with thematic riffs and surprisingly layered characters. While the film doesn’t give all of those characters as much development as I might have liked, they do have basic arcs and remain generally believable. Some of the action is rather cartoony, but in a movie about a gigantic ape stomping around a mysterious island in the south pacific, I’m inclined to forgive a lot of that. Skull Island is full of wonderfully designed creatures, from giant bugs and spiders, to gargantuan octopi and water buffalo. Then there are the two-legged lizard things, more Kaiju than dinosaur, which are genuinely terrifying. The costumes, and the set design, are all very satisfying. I’ve read a few complaints about some of the technology being slightly anachronistic (a given monitor was apparently a 1978 model and not a 1973 model or older) but it’s all very satisfyingly 70’s and everything from John Goodman’s neckties, to the Senator’s office, to the airbase at Da Nang, scream 70’s just as hard as a thing possibly can, and it works for me.
For me, the film’s only major misstep is the casting of John C. Reilly as Marlow. When the expedition arrives at Skull Island, they drop “seismic charges” supposedly as part of their science experiment, but it turns out, it’s really to draw out whatever monsters may be lurking on the island, the ones that only John Goodman and Corey Hawkins believe in. Of course, this disturbs the jungles and angers Kong, who swats all of the Hueys out of the sky and rips the Chinook in half. Again the film stretches reality with the number of people who survive violent helicopter crashes in this movie, but whatever, there’s a giant monkey so this isn’t meant to be entirely realistic.
Our heroes get separated, into two main groups with a few other scattered survivors (a large number of them DID die in the attack). Various of the survivors get killed by whatever nasty creatures they encounter along the way. The main group, led by Conrad and Weaver, finds stone walls obviously built by humans, and then meets the Iwi, the natives of Skull Island. With them is John C. Reilly, in a WWII US airman’s flight suit, complete with a leather jacket and a hat like the one worn by my grandfather in some old photos, floppy to fit under a headset.
Remember the downed pilot from the opening of the film? Yep, this is him, 28 years later, bearded, pop-eyed and half-mad. Apparently this role was originally going to Michael Keaton, and I wish to God it had. Although Keaton’s background is in comedy, he is also an accomplished dramatic actor, something that John C. Reilly cannot claim. Keaton has a madness in his eyes and a darkness in his smile that I think would have made Marlow just the right amount of off-putting while still being funny and lovable because Michael Keaton.
Reilly tries it, he really does. And he’s not bad, mostly, but he doesn’t have the range, and the moments that are meant to make you wonder about his sanity just become broad comedy, out of place and unwelcome in the strange jungle of horrors they are navigating. If the names Marlow and Conrad sound familiar, you probably read “Heart of Darkness” in high school, or maybe college, and you know that it was famously adapted for the screen, changing the British in Africa for Americans in Vietnam, and changing the title to “Apocalypse Now.”
I love the smell of napalm in the monkey.
Heart of Darkness was written by a man named Joseph Conrad, and his protagonist was Marlow. But the Marlow in Skull Island is supposed to make you think about Kurtz, to make you wonder if he’s the good guy or the bad guy. With Keaton that would have worked, and it would have made a good red herring keeping you partly distracted from Colonel Packard’s spiral into insanity; because in the end it isn’t Kong who is the villain here, nor is it Marlow; it’s Samuel L. Jackson. The Iwi worship Kong. They know that as long as they leave Kong alone, Kong will fight off the Kaiju that love to eat them for breakfast. Kong is their King. But he is also the last of his kind, and he’s not yet fully grown. As with 2014’s Godzilla, Kong is the hero here, the one who comes to fight off the Kaiju and actually saves human lives. But Colonel Packard wants to kill him.
I mentioned themes, earlier. The film has themes. Basically they can be summed up by a few lines from the movie. One of the Army men, Cole, carries an AK-47 instead of an M-16. He says he took it off a farmer in ‘Nam. The farmer told him that until the Americans came, he’d never seen a gun at all. Cole says the gun is a reminder to him that sometimes you don’t have an enemy unless you make one.
The second one comes from Conrad, talking to Weaver, telling her about his father not coming home from WWII. He says, “He never came home from the war. But I guess nobody does. Not really.”
There are the men who were killed by Kong: an enemy they made, not one they had going in. There’s Conrad, who went to war, and stayed after the war was over rather than going back home, because he never found what he was looking for. There’s Marlow, who was MIA and presumed KIA, trapped on Skull Island for 28 years. Turns out Marlow and his Japanese counterpart became good friends, but Gunpei has since passed away. “Take away the war, and the uniforms,” Marlow says, “and we found out we could be brothers.”
There’s Colonel Packett, who may have physically left Vietnam but in his heart he never did. Packett who could no longer recognize right from wrong. And Weaver, the anti-war combat photographer, does her part to bring down the Kaiju. She knows there’s a time to fight. The experience changes everyone. Yeah, it’s not Shakespeare, it’s not even Apocalypse Now (even though it wants to be). But it’s more than just a giant monkey movie, and I appreciate that. It’s not great, but it’s more fun than I expected, and smarter than I expected, so I give it points for that. I don’t normally give letters grades, or star ratings, so what’s my verdict here? See it, but don’t strain yourself. It’s good fun, it’s not totally devoid of value as a storytelling exercise, and despite John C. Reilly’s best efforts, it isn’t totally stupid.
“…Ashes, ashes, we all man in suit!”
Oh, and stay after the credits. There’s a scene teasing the forthcoming Godzilla vs. King Kong, which is the only reason this particular movie exists to begin with.
I know I’ve been somewhat delinquent in updating. The truth is, it takes many hours to write one of these. Multiple days if I wanted to do it better than I have been so far. But I have a day job and more than once I’ve gotten home from work at 8pm, gotten something to eat, and started one of these articles only to finally post it at 5 or 6am before taking a shower during which I fall asleep multiple times, then crawl into bed and log about four hours of snooze time before I have to get up and start getting ready for work. And then my employer wonders why I don’t seem to have any energy.
So I worked seven days straight last week, and then spent three recovering, and spending a little time with friends and family. Yesterday at work it felt like my only speed was reverse. Anyway this is a long way of saying, this article is a week overdue but I’ve known all week that I wanted to write it. This is the story of how Bill Paxton made me a better writer.
No, I never met him. This story goes back to my years studying Art at Longwood University (or Longwood College as it was then known). After a tumultuous freshman year during which I experienced a bit of culture shock while steadfastly refusing to sell out my personal values, I settled into a kind of rhythm in my sophomore year that carried me all the way through to graduation. I found my people, and surrounded myself with them, and I always knew that no matter how crappy a given day was, it would end with time spent among friends. It is friendship that got me through.
That sophomore year that established this structure, I was sharing a dorm room with a guy named Wayne, whom I had known from my freshman hall. Wayne is absolutely one of my people, and he helped me find the others. Sophomore year we shared a suite in Frasier hall with two guys named Nayan and Mikee. Nayan was a science major, who also happened to be an incredible guitarist with a love of blues and alternative rock, and Mikee was a skater who was studying commercial art. Two of the nicest guys I ever knew, and the four of us, though we had different interests, were united by our love of movies.
Now as a kid, I didn’t get to the theater all that much. My earliest memories of the movie theater are seeing “Stir Crazy” in the movie theater on base in Dahlgren – making the “we bad” scene a part of my personal head canon that none of my friends ever understood – and the Robert Redford baseball movie “The Natural.” I remember seeing “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Back to the Future,” but my parents have never been big on going to the movie theater, and until I was old enough to go to the movies myself or with my friends, I only got to go once in a while.
So in college, I had a lot of catching up to do as far as seeing movies I’d missed out on in my childhood. Wayne and I would rent a few movies on a Friday night and often they were ones he liked and that I had never seen. The ones I liked I’d end up buying for my collection and then we’d watch them often. I’d put a movie on while I worked on a painting, maybe we’d have “Empire” in while we were doing homework. We communicated almost exclusively in movie quotes.
Among the movies Wayne introduced me to, and that I loved and added to my collection, was the Alien Trilogy (for at the time, three is all there were). If I remember correctly, it was Nayan who knew somebody who had the director’s cut of Aliens, a VHS tape dubbed from a laser disc, which not even Wayne had seen. And “Aliens” is one of the movies that most influences me as a storyteller. It’s on the short list with RoboCop and the Star Wars Trilogy in terms of movies that taught me about storytelling, and as quotable as the original “Ghostbusters,” or “Die Hard,” both of which I would easily place alongside “RoboCop,” “The Empire Strikes Back,” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” on the list of 80’s movies that are among the most perfect films ever made.
Everything about “Aliens” functions beautifully as well. You may remember this article that I wrote recently about how the audience can accept almost anything if they have a good surrogate among the main cast who echoes their own feelings and perceptions. “Aliens” is a movie that understands that. It opens more or less where “Alien” left off, with Ripley and her cat Jones, in cryogenic sleep aboard the escape pod after destroying the Nostromo and blowing the Alien drone out of the airlock.
She’s discovered by a deep salvage crew, and wakes up in a med bay to learn that she’s been adrift in space for 57 years, and everyone she knew, including her daughter whose 11th birthday she had hoped to be home in time for, has died. Haunted by the memory of her ordeal aboard Nostromo and buried under two layers of survivor’s guilt, Ripley has taken a job as a dockworker, and sees a therapist regularly. She is miserable, and probably suffering from PTSD, though I would say this last piece is only clearly demonstrated in the third film.
Then, of course, the Weyland-Yutani corporation loses contact with the colony “Hadley’s Hope” on LV-426, and deploys a squad of space marines to investigate. LV-426 is the planet where the wrecked spacecraft was discovered by the Nostromo crew in the original film, with its chamber full of eggs, where John Hurt was attacked by the facehugger that planted the embryo in his body, which so dramatically burst out of his chest in that first film’s most iconic scene.
In the director’s cut of “Aliens,” of course, we’ve already watched as a family in a rover discovers the same wreck, and as the mother frantically drags the father, with facehugger attached, back to the rover in full view of the children, her daughter screaming hysterically as she radios for help.
Paul Reiser, who plays a Weyland-Yutani officer named Burke, recruits Ripley to join to the expedition to LV-426 as she is the closest thing they have to an expert on the aliens, being the only known survivor of an alien attack. This also gives her a chance to face the thing that haunts her nightmares, and to try to reclaim control of her life.
Throughout the beginning of the film, Ripley is the outsider. Nobody believes her about the alien until Hadley’s Hope goes dark. Even then they’re skeptical. And we, as the audience, have seen the first film and know that Ripley’s telling the truth. But moving forward, we’re going into territory that’s going to be familiar yet horribly difficult for Ripley, and James Cameron knew that there would be people who watched his movie who never saw the first one. So, while Ripley is a fine surrogate for those of us who know what happened to her in the first movie, the newcomers will need a new surrogate.
Enter Bill Paxton, as Private William Hudson. PFC Hudson is mouthy, emotional and erratic: in short he’s the guy the rest of the squad probably wishes were not with them, because a guy like that can get you killed in combat. But from a storytelling perspective he’s crucial. The reason is simple. Watch every scene that Hudson is in, particularly when we first meet the marines. By being the wise-ass who torques everybody, he gives the rest of the characters a chance to show us who they are.
Whether it’s Sergeant Apone (above) or PFC Vasquez, Hudson’s antics are the catalyst for them to show their personalities and attitudes. It’s simple and effective.
Hudson is also the conduit by which we find out that Lance Henriksen’s character is a synthetic – which freaks out Ripley given what happened between her and Ian Holm’s character Ash in the original.
Then, as the action ramps up and the film intensifies, Hudson’s attitude creates levity for the viewer, which keeps everything from getting too heavy, something that would probably make a film about phallus-headed cockroach aliens collapse very quickly into the realm of farce. He keeps the audience laughing no matter how horrible things get within the context of the movie itself. He’s a joker, a cynic, a wise-ass. In short, if you want new audience members to buy into this kind of madness, you need Hudson. I learned that lesson, about audience surrogates, from watching this movie until I could just about quote it end-to-end.
It’s telling, I think, that when Hudson finally exits the film, it’s at a time when the number of characters has been scaled back to just a few, where the time for joking has passed, and where if the audience is not now onboard, they never will be. It’s just Ripley, Corporal Dwayne Hicks, Newt, and Lance Henriksen’s synthetic, Bishop. It’s also important to note that Hudson never upstages Ripley as the main character. Hudson’s moments are standouts, but he’s almost entirely unmanned when the drop ship crashes on the way to pull them out, and it’s Ripley who settles him down. It’s Ripley who, having lived through the nightmare aboard the Nostromo, never loses her wits in the horrors of Hadley’s Hope. She’s a mama bear, she takes charge and in the end, it’s Ripley who takes out the Alien queen and gets Newt, Hicks, and what’s left of Bishop to safety.
Ripley is absolutely the hero of the film, but Hudson gets the job of making her show us why. In many ways it’s a thankless task, playing the ass, but Bill Paxton did it so well that he’s remembered for it, probably more than any other role he played. I was always happy to see him in anything I was watching. The fact that he was Hudson made him a favorite of fanboys like me. It was upsetting to hear that he had passed away, but I am truly thankful for the work that he did. My life would not be the same without PFC Hudson and his smart mouth, and I would not be the storyteller that I am. So, Bill Paxton, thank you for the good work, sir. Godspeed.
NOTE: This is Part Two of a two-part series. If you haven’t read the first part, you can find it by clicking this link.
Last time, we took a look at the clues in the Original Trilogy of the Star Wars Saga to determine as much as possible about the economic situation in the First Galactic Empire, and came to the rather obvious conclusion, which I hope we all already were aware of, that the Empire is a military dictatorship. Hopefully we have added to that, the understanding that in a dictatorship the government controls the production and distribution of goods and services.
To be clear, this means there are no private businesses. All business is state business, and therefore Imperial Subjects would all work for the state, and be paid by the state. In this model all money not only originates with the state, but returns to it as well, as there is literally nobody else to trade with. Money in this context is little more than a government voucher. As stated in part one, this is just slavery by another name. That should give you a pretty clear picture of what the Rebel Alliance was fighting to get free of.
Here in Part Two we will examine the Prequel Trilogy to see what new information we can gather from those films. This will be fairly illuminating as the prequels are very political in their focus, and as we will soon see, Palpatine’s rise to power is predicated almost entirely on economic factors. From the opening crawl of “Menace,” we are told that the taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute, and that a group called the Trade Federation has created a blockade to stop all shipping to the planet of Naboo. We are given to understand that this is somewhat unprecedented, and that the Galactic Senate is doing an awful lot of talking about it and not much acting to settle it, so Supreme Chancellor Valorum has dispatched a couple of Jedi Knights, aboard a small diplomatic vessel called Radiant VII, to mediate the conflict.
The Trade Federation would be a massive conglomerate, a number of huge shipping companies and possibly other mercantile operations, joined together for shared security. The Galactic Republic has no standing army, but apparently it is legal for each member civilization within the Republic to have its own military organization and its own unique system of government, and it seems that huge conglomerates like the Trade Federation have similar rights, so they have a fleet and an army in order to protect their interests – hence the blockade, which they make sure to remind the Jedi and their escorts at the beginning of the film, “is perfectly legal.”
We can surmise that the trade routes are being taxed by the Republic, and that the Trade Federation is obviously unhappy about it because it’s cutting into their profit margins. The text of the crawl also paints the Trade Federation as “greedy,” – Lucas’s exact word choice – which is a clear signal to the viewer that the Federation are the bad guys here, bullying this little planet over profits.
Likely this shipping tax has already raised the price of goods and services for the people of Naboo (and other worlds for which trade is affected by the tax) but depending on the needs of the Naboo, they may simply decide to reduce the amount of importing they do. This would not be solved with a blockade, unless some measure of imports are necessary for the survival of their civilization, or if they are a planet whose economy is supported by a healthy export business, which would obviously also be affected by the tax.
George Lucas is the master of visual clues (my main man Zack Snyder is masterful with them as well), so what can we deduce from what we are shown of Naboo? The planet is populated by at least two civilizations who have had limited contact – first, the human inhabitants, who identify themselves as “the Naboo,” and the amphibious Gungans, who are a technologically advanced race living within a tribal system. They Gungans are insular and reclusive, preferring to remain mostly in their submarine home of Gunga City.
The Naboo, however, are spacefarers, whose ships are elegant, shiny and chrome, and they live in classically styled renaissance-type buildings, their cities resplendent with canals and massive statuary. This is an intentional choice by Lucas, and not just because he wanted to film in Italy and Spain. This choice shows us that the Naboo are artists, poets, and philosophers. Remember that in Star Wars, planets are one thing: Desert, Jungle, Blizzard, Swamp, Sky, Redwood forest… Naboo is the Liberal Arts Planet. The Renaissance Planet. This is supported by even the smallest details, like the Queen’s kabuki makeup and the Gungan chief basically calling them a bunch of pointyheads. And damn if the people in the Queen’s court aren’t dressed like they’re in a play about Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella.
Probably they export a lot of art and craftworks, and the blockade would be a serious issue because despite what people think, artists do what they do for more than just the sheer enjoyment of it. Artists like eating and living in houses as much as anyone. It takes time to create anything worthwhile, and it’s much more satisfying, as well as conducive to the overall quality of the product, if you can make enough money from your art to survive on it.
At any rate, it’s fair to say that there is mostly free trade in the Galactic Republic. I say “mostly” because the tax on the trade routes represents a form of regulation. The question, and probably an unanswerable one, is how much regulation there is besides that. The fact that a little old tax has led to a situation described in the opening crawl as, “turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic” probably suggests that regulation has previously been next to none. Apparently, also fairly rare is armed conflict, as Sio Bibble is fond of pointing out that “there hasn’t been a full-scale war since the formation of the Republic!”
Of note is the fact that one man has played both sides of this. The Senator from Naboo, Sheev Palpatine, is also a Dark Lord of the Sith, who goes by the name of Darth Sidious. This isn’t revealed until Episode III, but if you’re a fan (or really good at recognizing chins) you knew it from the beginning. The Trade Federation is shown to be in league with Darth Sidious, even as Senator Palpatine is advising Queen Amidala of the Naboo.
He advises Amidala to accept Federation control of Naboo, knowing full well that she won’t, while he works to spur the senate into action; meanwhile under the guise of Sidious he tells Federation Viceroy Nute Gunray to assassinate the two visiting Jedi and invade Naboo, occupying the capital city of Theed. He even tells Gunray that “Queen Amidala is young and naïve. You will find controlling her will not be difficult.” He’s looking to escalate the conflict in the hope of generating enough sympathy in the senate to challenge Chancellor Valorum’s seat.
I don’t think he necessarily intended for the Jedi to survive the Federation’s assassination attempt, nor for them to break the blockade and escape offworld with Queen Amidala and her entourage, but the delight on his face when she arrived on the Republic Capital of Coruscant and rushed straight to his office to discuss their next move was probably genuine. After all, he gets to play the gentle soul while Amidala, in all her fiery, youthful glory, appears before the senate and demands that they resolve the conflict swiftly. “I was not elected to watch my people suffer and die while you discuss this invasion in a committee!”
Palpatine has stacked the deck, though; Chancellor Valorum has, by Palpatine’s account, “little real power. He has been mired by – baseless – accusations of corruption.” Soon afterward, as Queen Amidala asks for the senate to act, several senators refuse to believe that the invasion is really taking place, or that there have been any deaths at all. The Trade Federation has representation in the senate (which is fairly alarming) and denies any wrongdoing.
Now, as the pressure mounts for the Chancellor to lead the way, the bureaucrats step in and talk him down, and suddenly he shrinks back, buckling under pressure from the special interests to form a committee and investigate the veracity of the Queen’s claims. She can’t wait for a senate committee, of course, it’ll be a year or more while her planet remains occupied by the Federation. Palpatine, ever the master persuader, suggests they could take it to the supreme court, and the Queen is disheartened, knowing that this will likely take even longer than waiting on some useless senate committee. So, with masterfully played reluctance, Palpatine suggests that the queen could call for a vote of No Confidence in the chancellor, and watches with satisfaction as she does exactly that.
The senate votes Valorum out of the chancellery and, in a sympathetic reaction to the conflict on Naboo, the senate elects Palpatine to replace him.
By Episode II, entitled Attack of the Clones, ten years have passed and a separatist movement has sprung up. The opening crawl says that a number of star systems have announced their intentions to leave the Republic, but we’re not told why. However when we meet the separatists, they seem to largely be made up huge conglomerates like the Trade Federation. The others we meet have names like InterGalactic Banking Clan, the Techno Union, the Hyper-Communications Cartel, the Commerce Guild.
The separatists are under the leadership of a former Jedi with political ambitions, who goes by the name of Count Dooku. Dooku is actually Darth Sidious’ new apprentice, Darth Tyranus, and he’s a plant because the Trade Federation knows that Sidious played them. In order to continue to manipulate them, Sidious needs a middle man. Since Palpatine/Sidious is always playing two sides, and since the separatists are all massive conglomerates with interests in the production and distribution of goods and services, we can safely conclude that as chancellor, Palpatine has applied a very liberal helping of trade regulations. This would serve him well as it shows clearly that he is not like the feckless Valorum, and makes perfect sense as a platform for a chancellor whose homeworld was famously victim of a bloody invasion by a militant trade conglomerate. In effect, this is what he was elected to do.
His dual identity has allowed him to continue escalating the conflict, by pitting the people against big business; in effect turning the common people against the rich, driving a narrative of regulation vs. corruption and greed. The Separatist Union, being comprised of mostly giant businesses and their supporters, has the resources to mount an army, and begins doing so, quietly, on the strength of the Trade Federation’s droid army and its manufacturer, Geonosian Industries.
The increasing conflict has overwhelmed the relatively small Jedi Order, and Supreme Chancellor Palpatine has begun pushing for the senate to commission an Army of the Republic in order to back up the Jedi and protect the Republic’s member nations. Senator Padme Naberrie Amidala, the former Queen of Naboo, is nearly assassinated upon her arrival on Coruscant where she would surely have voted against commissioning an army. All of this acts as a distraction that splits up Jedi Knights Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi on separate missions – at the chancellor’s request – while the separatists are developing plans for a very familiar planet-killing superweapon.
Obi-Wan, attempting to track down the would-be-assassin, ends up on the ocean world of Kamino, where he discovers a large cloning operation, creating an army they claim was ordered by a Jedi Master whom Obi-Wan knows to have been dead at the time the order was placed. Still, the army is for the Republic, and the Kaminoan cloners happily show Obi-Wan around the facility. Of course Anakin and Padme’s paths intersect with Obi-Wan’s by the end of the movie, on the termite-mound planet of Geonosis, where they are all to be executed in a gladiator arena, having been captured by the separatists.
By this time, though, Jar Jar Binks, now a Junior Representative for the Gungans in the Senate, was convinced to propose the Emergency Powers Act. When the vote passed, Palpatine, promising to lay down the powers as soon as the crisis was averted, immediately issued an Executive Order commissioning “a Grand Army of the Republic, to counter the increasing threats of the separatists.”
Yoda was sent to Kamino to pick up the first wave of Clone Troopers, while the rest of the available Jedi converged on Geonosis and tried to bail out Obi-Wan, Anakin and Padme. Yoda arrived with the cavalry just in time to back up the depleted Jedi ranks, and the first battle of the Clone Wars raged across the planet. By the end of the film, Bail Organa and the rest of the Loyalist Committee stood by in despair as a legion of Clone Troopers arrived on Coruscant on huge Corellian cruisers.
Now Palpatine’s Machiavellian plan is in full force. The captains of commerce and industry are standing on one side, the leaders of the free galaxy on the other, and he controls both sides. He effectively has two ways to win.
In Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, it’s been some three years since the Battle of Geonosis. The Separatists are kicking some serious ass, and in a metaphorical sense, everything is on fire. They’ve gained so much ground they’re able to kidnap Chancellor Palpatine before the movie starts. Naturally Palpatine wanted this, it’s the natural escalation of the conflict, but it also serves to let him pit his favorite young Jedi, Anakin Skywalker, against his existing apprentice, Darth Tyranus, who is doing his existing in something of a state of decrepitude.
As Palpatine begins to make his persuasive case for Skywalker to join him, he chooses to reveal his true nature. When the Jedi move against Palpatine, this plays directly into a narrative he has created by having the clone army ordered from Kamino in the name of a dead Jedi Master, and by having a former Jedi head the separatist movement. As Anakin defends Palpatine against Mace Windu and his posse, this not only seals Skywalker’s fate, but allows Palpatine to finally cast the Jedi as traitors to the Republic, effectively making Anakin, the newly-minted Darth Vader, his champion and lord defender of the realm, as it were. Using this extra layer of chaos to justify his last push for supreme power, Palpatine activates a secret piece of genetic programming in the Clones, authorizing them to use deadly force to put down their Jedi generals, and sending Lord Vader to slaughter all the children in the Jedi Temple.
With that done, Palpatine reassigns Anakin to go to the secret lair of the Separatist Council and murder them all, thus ending the conflict and bringing all means of production and distribution directly under state control. Palpatine appears before the Galactic Senate, announcing that “the Republic shall be reorganized into the First Galactic Empire, in order to create a safe and secure society.”
There are a few takeaways from this. The first is that this absolutely confirms my reading from Part One of this essay: that the Empire controls all means of production and distribution of goods and services throughout the Star Wars galaxy.
In your face, Randal!
It also fits Lucas’s overall theme for the prequels, which is greed. Greed turned Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader. But it also drove the Republic into corruption, and drove the Trade Federation into working with a Sith Lord. Greed divides us, and love unites us, and that, my friends, is Star Wars in once sentence.
Are there lessons here for us today? Oh, absolutely. I can think of a million of them. Our current president is a persuader, a trait he shares with Palpatine. He also is creating a rather hectic tone in Washington, and is manipulating the media in ways both obvious and subtle (there are layers).
However, I don’t hold anyone blameless. Most of the media is dishonest most of the time. One major party wants to create conflict between the rich and the rest of us. The other party talks about the free market but loves to wield authority just as heavily as the other.
Corruption is everywhere. At least our industries don’t have senators, but they do have lobbyists, which nets the same result in the end. It’s all a bit terrifying and it’s hard to know which way to turn. However, a few things are obvious.
Both president GW Bush and President Obama, gave themselves more power than presidents had before. And now we have this guy, who I still maintain is probably not the second coming of Hitler. However, he is a persuader and that can be terribly effective, either in a good way or a bad one, depending solely on intent. And the fact that trust is not something he inspires in the American people, makes it difficult for most to expect anything good. Especially when his policies go against what half of the country apparently believes in.
So…the guy talks abut Civil Asset Forfeiture? BAD. Guy talks about reducing government regulation? Good.
The most important thing, however, is the free market. As long as we have a free market, we have the means to control our own destiny. As long as the government does not control the flow of money, we are not slaves, but free men and free women.
I talk a lot about balance. You hear me borrow a phrase from some of my anarcho-capitalist friends. I’m not one, but I know a few, and I like them. They talk about how government is literally evil. You hear me basically lean into that when talking about liberty. What nobody ever asks me, is if I think government is necessary. Like I said, I’m not an anarchist. I DO believe government is necessary. I also believe that it is basically the opposite of freedom, since in order for government to exist, you have to give something up. That’s just the way it works. So we give up some freedom in exchange for security. Taxation is theft, but it buys safety in the form of police, firefighters, and armed forces. Yet some of these people are not very popular right now with a lot of taxpayers. Just think about it, is all I’m saying. You get mad when your tax dollars go to pay for stuff you don’t like.
The more power you give government, the more freedom you give up, right? I had a liberal friend-of-a-friend recently tell me that we’re not free, and she said it like it was a good thing. I basically stopped arguing with her after that because in my mind she’d just torpedoed her own ship. Any impartial reader would have walked away from her side of the table after that. Cognitive dissonance is an amazing thing.
Just remember, the First Galactic Empire — like Adolf Hitler’s Nationalist Socialist movement – was all about peace, through the eradication of conflict. Palpatine actually utters the phrase, “safe and secure society.” He literally stole all the freedom so he could have security in power. In his mind he really thought this was better, because there’d be no conflict he couldn’t end, no war he couldn’t win, no wrong he couldn’t right (actually no right he couldn’t wrong, if we’re being honest, but he wouldn’t have called it that way).
So, here’s my point. Greed is bad. Don’t be greedy. But be careful who you give things away to. Don’t give your power to the Sheev Palpatines of the world. Don’t even put your power where it can be used against you. If Trump does turn out to be evil, it won’t merely be the fault of people who voted for him. It will be the fault of every single politician who gave the presidency more power, of every congress that undermined the checks and balances in the constitution, and of every voter who didn’t participate when they had the chance.
Don’t be greedy, but don’t cast your pearls before swine.
Don’t breed division, but don’t fear conflict. Fearing conflict leads to the need to squash differences of opinion, which leads to a lust for power, and that IS greed.
Okay, you got me. It’s been almost a month. A few things have happened that kept me from blogging, and without making excuses, the main two are the motherboard of my old computer going kaput, and the hard drive of said computer being somewhat mangled in the process. Then the last week has seen me rushing around like a madman at my paying gig due to the Easter holiday, but at last all that is behind me and I’m here with a new computer, ready to talk about whatever it occurs to me to discuss.
