#✦ ┊ 「 jo w. 」 call for narratives.

[kyujosha-arc]

lviii. ;; ic ﹚ jo wilson !

✦   ┊   「   jo w.   」   call for transmissions. ✦   ┊   「   jo w.   」   call for interactions. ✦   ┊   「   jo w.   」   call for narratives. ✦   ┊   「   jo w.   」   call for dynamics. ✦   ┊   「   jo w.   」   entering a reality. ✦   ┊   「   jo w.   」   reality in progress. ✦   ┊   「   jo w.   」   mirror image. ✦   ┊   「   jo w.   」   fashion sense. ✦   ┊   「   jo w.   」   musings and isms. ✦   ┊   「   jo w.   」   transmission received. ✦   ┊   「   jo w.   」   dynamic desires ﹚ romantic. ✦   ┊   「   jo w.   」   dynamic desires ﹚ familial. ✦   ┊   「   jo w.   」   dynamic desires ﹚ platonic. ✦   ┊   「   jo w.   」   dynamic desires ﹚ antagonistic.

[19871997]

It’s kind of crazy to me that Connor McDavid x Sam Bennett isn’t a bigger ship? Like, childhood friends to rivals as a whole thing? Sam was Connor’s winger when they were kids. They’ve known each other since they were 7. Connor once gave a quote about how Sam’s game always had bite to it. Sam talked about how Connor playing the same way he does as a kid is why he’s the best player in the world. Sam specifically credited Connor’s dad as one of his most influential and best coaches growing up. They used to have sleepovers. And then they were drafted to rival teams and part of the battle of Alberta. And then Sam’s team beat Connor’s to win the Stanley Cup while Connor won the Conn Smythe.

to me they very clearly have the narrative for a popularish ship but no personality or off-ice anything really liek for two people with lore to be a popular ship they themselves need to be popular/have a personality today like ngl i dont doubt that many rich young boys born between 1996 and 1998 interested in hockey in the greater toronto area played with or against cmd at some point (like i think there's a picture of cmd and mm16 at age 7 playing with or against eachother) the connor/dylstrome lore includes silly snapchats from when they were 17, the natemac/jodrou lore includes silly car interviews where nate calls jo precious cargo from their time in the mooseheads + tna even before jo signing w the avs in 2023, like aaron ekblad/cmd is more of a compelling ship to me than sbennet/cmd lowkey also bc like who even really is sam bennett ykwim like idrk that he's a popular player w fans (also i think he's like actively tried to kill quite a few players lmfao)

these are the top ten most popular hrpf ships on ao3 (left is 1-5, right is 6-10) + its no coincidence of the three that dont contain a hart winner (benn/seguin, tknp, jdtz) they have at least one guy with a very strong personality + they're teammates (friends to lovers fodder)

[skatehepburn]

💗 Fic authors self rec! When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you've written, then pass on to at least five other writers. Spread the self-love! 💗

okay i famously am not a joiner so i don't know that i will reciprocate (but open call to @skyirons my fandom hopping bestie ilu) but thank you for asking!

i think most people on here followed me originally for hacks but i am a bit of a fandom hopper and a rarepair lover so this list will run the gamut:

"Til Sunbeams Find You," Dead to Me. Jen/Judy summer camp counselor AU.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/2526286

I don't love this fic for the writing, but for the fact that someone hopped into the comments and asked me if i was on stan twitter (i was not, but i made a fuckin' account), and thereby introduced me to some of my now very dear friends. Was DTM fandom a hot fucking mess? Yes. Do we ever need to talk about s3 Again? No. Did my DTM standom give me MS? Inconclusive. But this silly show and trying to make these two characters kiss got me through some hard times and i'll always be grateful!

2. "5 Times Mary Jo Shively Almost Kissed Julia Sugarbaker (and One Time She Did)," Designing Women, Mary Jo/Julia (natch)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/21707404

Just what it says on the tin! Someone commented on this fic recently so I reread it (love to never recall anything I've ever written) and it was fun! THE SUBTEXT IS SO STRONG in canon and yet there's not near enough fic imo. Due for a DW rewatch, is what I'm saying. I always enjoy getting to write southern characters as someone who's lived in Appalachia all my life 🫡

(this fic is also one i could show my twin without having to redact the smutty bits lmaooooo)

3. "who's gonna lay in your lonely bed, who's gonna love you like me?" Dragon Age, Bethany/Isabela

https://archiveofourown.org/works/36349606

I'm sure Dreadwolf will get me back into the DA trenches but Bethany/Isabela has gotta be my rarepair otp. I seldom want to read a player character fic for an RPG (with the exception of maybe FemShep); I'm always drawn to pairing off the sidekicks. There's just so much AFFECTION between Isabela and Bethany in the party banter, and Bethany gets such a short end of the stick by the narrative that I really had to let her get her world rocked by the swarthy sailor with a heart of gold.

4. "in the morning i will sing," Baldur's Gate 3, Jaheira/Karlach

https://archiveofourown.org/works/55430185

Most recent fic is always gonna be on the fave fic list, that's just the way it goes. In my first playthrough of bg3 my character pined for Jaheira unrequitedly and in my second I'm romancing Karlach as Shadowheart, so why not combine the two into some smut with a side of party banter! And I clearly have a thing for a bit of an age gap/hero worship dynamic as evidenced by *gestures at ao3 account*

(also tr*cy w*les's chronically online era is not helping my jaheira fixation... love that she ships her with everybody tho we stan an absolute icon)

5. "ring the bells that still can ring," Hacks, Deborah/Ava

https://archiveofourown.org/works/32184166

firstly: i wrote this fic so i could make that shrek/leonard cohen joke. i'm sorry, or you're welcome, as appropriate.

secondly: i wrote this fic before so many things happened! hacks season 2, developing an incurable progressive chronic illness, getting married myself!

my wife rarely reads my fic (they support it fully! including meeting fandom friends on our honeymoon lmaoo luv u [redacted]). but i will occasionally gently ask if they'll take a peek at something, because, well, they're the person that taught me everything i know about love, so it goes into the writing!

it took them a long time to read this fic (or it at least felt like it), but when they did, they sent me a notesapp full of annotated reactions... 6 months later , after a decade together, they proposed in a drivethru.

which is to say: i'm pretty sure this fic is the reason i'm currently married, so it will always be my favorite <3

[teawiththespleen]

okay i get it feminine women find NLOG narratives grating but these video essays about NLOG characters in historical dramas are soooo obtuse. like you really think youve analysed the story critically when your point boils down to jo march/anne shirley/anne lister werent all that for going against everything that was expected of them, or when the character trope youre critiquing are REAL people

there’s nOt LiKe OtHeR giRLs, and then there’s existing in an insular or conservative culture as a woman and being unable to exist in peace in any way other than a way that ACTIVELY makes your life harder. i live in a conservative place by and large and im okay dressing in any way that doesn’t have me be a focal point, so i’ll wear something that i dont feel entirely myself in and be fine. but man it’s tough out here for decidedly masc presenting women, who, if anything, check all the conservative dresscode boxes. and that’s NOW. like present day.

what these critiques fail to take into account is that what youd consider NLOG is often performatively so? like youre not just unlike other girls, you’re unlike other girls in a way that’s appealing to men or other such women or whoever decides things are cool. so much of being NLOG is about declaring that you are not like the other girls. and then listing out the ways that you are then not.like the other girls (but you’re still thin, light skinned, have long hair, have a carefully curated wardrobe dw).

ig it’s distancing yourself from admitting you’re preoccupied with figuring out how to perform femininity or feminine appeal or maybe not wanting to be hyperfeminine but youre still straight, or maybe youre at lvl 1 NLOG and you think hyperfemininity and critical thinking is a real life dichotomy or smth

idk what to tell the ytuber but anne lister was decidedly not like other girls. i dont think she’d even call herself a girl if she were plonked into the present day. anne shirley was either born ND or was put through a traumatising system early and for long enough to never be able to look at the world the same way as the kids brought up safely and with loving, money-having parents. and both of these characters loved women too much for you to conclude that they scorned “feminine” qualities (and therefore, the other girls).

you really cant ignore the context of the time. it took so little to not be like other girls. and so many of her points kind of made my heart sink. is attention to clothing and caring about feminine coded things all that there is to being a woman? if anything a historical setting lets you see there’s more to gender and that people contain multitudes. esp w little women, jo and amy are written as foils and share many core features that make them THEM, more so than their clothing or style or the way they choose to come across and the things they scoff at. they’re two ends of the SAME spectrum

where people get the idea that existing as a masculine woman is easy i do not know. i think people too often conflate being gender non-conforming, with actively rebelling against and/or denouncing gendered expectations, with the NLOG trope/phenomenon as seen in social media/published media

you would really make a “we need to talk about…” video about these women and characters while wearing jeans and having your hair down and wearing bright lipstick..

[ursie]

What are your lantern gender/sexuality/ect hcs?

If I forget a lantern. I apologize

Alan : gay king, I think narratively he actually makes the most sense as cis tbh 🤡😔 cis gay king 😔🤡 , Blind, chronic pain, ptsd, depression, arthritis. No racial hcs outside of canon

Hal : cishet. I’m sorry. Sm mental illnesses going on here I changed my mind his gender is needing therapy . No racial hcs outside of canon

Carol : Bi, TransFemme, ambiguous disorder I do not remember if they clarified ever, should be a wheelchair user. Asian.

Guy : Bi/Trans Male king, Autistic, brain damage, chronic pain and migraines, inconsistent memory, nerve damage, ptsd, depression, inferiority complex, hoh, unspecified disorder (I’ve seen writers and artists call it different things) pls specify rn I’m leaning toward bpd or bipolar disorder. No racial hcs outside of canon

John : Bi/transmasc, Autistic , ptsd, unspecified mental illnesses, chronic pain, nerve damage, should be a chair user. No racial hcs outside of canon

Kyle : gay, twink 💅🏻, adhd, depression, ptsd, unspecified mental illnesses. Indigenous Mexican.

Simon : Bi, TransFemme/Nb/Butch, Autistic, Depression, ptsd, hyper vigilance, ambiguous disorder, chronic pain, migraines, should be an amputee (they just keep on fucking w his arm). Afro-Lebanese/Latinx

Jess : Bi, Butch, adhd, Ptsd, Depression, Anxiety, impostor syndrome. Indigenous Mexican/Native American

Jo : canon Bi? TransFemme/agender, I do not have a good enough read on her yet for any other hcs truthfully 😔

The other ones are babies no thoughts on them only 🥺💕

[stevishabitat]

“These are the perils of working from home,” mutters David Tennant, typing into his phone, filmed by his computer and watched, bemusedly, by me.

The 49-year-old actor has been texting, intermittently and apologetically, throughout our Zoom call. One of his five children (aged 18, nine, seven, four and eight months) has returned to school, and it seems pickup arrangements have been miscommunicated.

Tennant’s correspondent – I assume it is his wife, Georgia – is messaging from inside the house; Tennant is in the garden, his long lockdown locks pushed back into a Beckham-style headband. Over yonder, he gestures off-camera, a homeschooling lesson is under way: “I came outside to avoid the maths.”

Yet Tennant seems to have embraced the realities of home life, with two BBC projects drawing on his experience of raising a family. In the meta, of-the-moment series Staged, he and Georgia play versions of themselves in lockdown in their Chiswick home, while There She Goes (which returns for a second series tomorrow) captures an oft-unspoken truth about parenting, says Tennant: that “it’s sort of a slog”.

Coupled with doing interviews from his garden – Tennant tips his camera to show me Myrtle the cockapoo, flopped at his feet – it offers a surprising glimpse into the family life of an actor who has previously been reluctant to reveal any of it.

“We’re not quite as squeamish as we were,” he agrees, not least because his eldest son, Ty, is now also an actor. “I don’t think we’ll ever be sharing pictures of our children in Hello! magazine, but I think a lot of that comes from an insecurity about being uncovered or invaded. The longer you’re together, the less that feels like a threat.”

Tennant met Georgia (then Moffett) in 2008 on the set of Doctor Who – her father is a former Doctor, Pete Davison. “As our relationship was born out of people trying to stick lenses through windows, it’s taken us a long time to slough off that residual nervousness about sharing anything.”

These days, their guard is low enough for Georgia to post on Instagram a shot of herself breastfeeding – and to rail against Mark Zuckerberg when the image was removed by Facebook for breaching community standards (“I’ll come round there and squirt you in the eye”).

But, Tennant adds: “It’s still important to us that the characters in Staged are not us,” “David” being “more pathetic” than Tennant and “Georgia” more indulgent of him. “We’re not telling the actual story of our private life.”

There She Goes, however, he praises as scrupulously honest. The comedy stars Tennant and Jessica Hynes as parents of a child with a severe learning disability, based on the experience of the writers Shaun Pye and Sarah Crawford with their daughter, who was born with an extremely rare (and still undiagnosed) chromosomal disorder.

Tennant plays Simon, the character Pye based on himself: a loving but somewhat hapless father, always out to foist young Rosie on to his wife so he can head down the pub. Tennant says he tried to catch Pye out on set: “I’d go: ‘This bit we’re doing today – that didn’t really happen, did it?’ And everything is true.”

The first series was widely praised for refusing to sugarcoat the realities of parenting and marriage, while still finding moments of sweetness. Hynes won a Bafta for her turn as Emily, Rosie’s harried but devoted mum who, in a low moment, admits to struggling to love her newborn.

Simon, meanwhile, leans on booze and dark humour. There She Goes can be an undeniably uncomfortable watch. But the dual narratives of each episode – switching between a challenging but joyful time for the family and a more desperate early one – provide relief and perspective.

Tennant considers the series a mainstream comedy. Yet there had been trepidation within the BBC about how it would be received, he says, “because it lacked a certain sentimentality and political correctness – there was a real fear”. He disdainfully recalls a journalist at the press launch playing devil’s advocate, warning of a coming “shitstorm”: “He said: ‘You are going to be destroyed for putting this on television.’ We all hoped he was wrong – but we feared that he might be right.” And this was after the huge critical success of the police drama Broadchurch, which might easily have convinced Tennant he could do no wrong.

The casting of a non-disabled actor as nine-year-old Rosie – who is non-verbal, with the mental age of a toddler – was one sensitivity, says Tennant. The possibility of casting an actor with a learning disability had been explored, he says, “because, of course, that’s a live issue and one that has to be rightly unpicked”. But the demands of the role were found to be too great for a young actor with a disability. “Anyone who appreciates the kind of challenges that a child like Rosie would have doesn’t doubt that it would not really have been possible.”

Miley Locke, who is now 11, was “an incredible find”, says Tennant, praising her as nimble and uninhibited in a challenging role. Locke has met Jo, on whom Rosie is based, and has “an incredible capacity to find the truth of that character”, he says. “She’s also very game – I’m endlessly having to pick her up and fling her about and yank her around …”

Any parent will identify with “that constant sense that you’re falling short”, he says – now, perhaps, more than ever. A scene in which Emily tries desperately to work in the face of Rosie’s demands has taken on new relevance during lockdown. “Well, quite,” says Tennant, while texting in response to the latest news from Georgia. “Erm. Sorry …”

A big part of the challenge of shooting Staged was finding moments when the children were “either asleep or quiet”, but Tennant counts himself as “phenomenally fortunate” to have had the work, given how acting has been affected by the pandemic. This October, he was due to appear in CP Taylor’s play Good; that now seems unlikely.

Even when theatres are able to reopen, Tennant does not foresee audiences flocking back, “to sit there watching three hours of Chekhov as someone coughs all over them”. The impact on British culture could be catastrophic, he fears, even for institutions such as the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It’s a huge bill just to keep those buildings running … We could be left with a cultural scene that’s vastly changed, and that’s a huge part of who we are as a nation.

“Even if the theatre is of no interest to you, even if it feels like an elitist playground, it’s places like that that all the other creative industries feed off,” he says, adding that the arts make a significant contribution to the UK economy – nearly £11bn in 2016, more than agriculture.

Tennant’s career first developed in theatre. As a teenager in Paisley, the son of a Presbyterian minister, he became one of the youngest students at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. Even as his work in television and film has taken off, Tennant continues to be a regular on stage, especially with the RSC.

It faces a “titanic problem” in the pandemic, he says, having furloughed 90% of its staff. Government intervention is needed to support theatres until they can reopen, he says, but he is sceptical of it materialising. “If one felt more inclined to trust this government, one might relax, but they haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory thus far.” In fact, since I spoke to Tennant, the government has promised the arts and heritage sectors a rescue package worth £1.57bn, which the playwright and funding advocate James Graham described as “surprisingly ambitious”.

A longtime Labour supporter, Tennant appeared in an election broadcast in 2015 before becoming disillusioned with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership (to summarise various diplomatic responses to interviewers). Asked if he was a fan of Corbyn in 2017, he said he was a fan of the party – although its ambivalent position on Brexit (which Tennant has called a “shitshow”) was a sticking point.

Before last year’s general election, he said he was not even sure if he would vote for Labour. He did – to return Ruth Cadbury to her Brentford and Isleworth seat: “And, also, what was the actual alternative?”

He admits he found Labour’s defeat and the postmortem “disappointingly predictable”, although he still struggles to fathom how so many red seats turned blue. “How do you go from ever being a Labour supporter to supporting Boris Johnson?” he asks, dumbfounded.

He expresses some limited sympathy for politicians handed a pandemic when they thought they “were only going to have to talk about Brexit”. “But if you choose a cabinet purely to surround yourself with people who won’t disagree with you, you’re not necessarily getting the greatest brains in the country,” he says, although a caveat is quick in coming. “One might postulate, were that to be the case, and I’m not for a minute suggesting it is …”

Last year, Tennant singled out Michael Gove’s call for “enough of experts” as a “political lowpoint”. That attitude has had deadly consequences during the pandemic, I suggest. Now the government is “hiding behind them”, he agrees – “selectively, of course. If the experts then say: ‘We told them not to do that,’ suddenly they’re evil again.”

He shakes his head in despair. “Ugh! It’s a very sad state of affairs. Remember when there used to be clever people? When you look back on David Cameron and George W Bush with some kind of sentimentality, you think: ‘Jesus – how low have we plummeted, when they look like better options than what we’ve got currently?’”

Under Keir Starmer, Tennant says Labour “are looking a lot stronger”: “We’ve got a clever grownup in the room, which makes the other side look as ridiculous as they are. Let’s hope he can fulfil his early promise.”

Tennant has said he was inspired to act by watching Doctor Who at the age of three. When he was cast as the 10th incarnation of the Doctor, in 2005, he quipped that the first line of his obituary was written. Ten years since ceding the role to Matt Smith, Tennant remains as connected as ever to the programme, recording a new Doctor Who audio drama while in lockdown. “It’s a nice show to be associated with, because people feel kindly towards it,” he says. “You may not be a fan, but it sort of sits there in the cultural firmament. As a nation, I think we’re quite proud of it.”

Unlike many vehicles for British nostalgia, the malleability of the format has allowed Doctor Who to move with the times, he thinks. “It absolutely comes with all that nostalgic goodwill, but it also manages to live in the moment.

“It felt like a very different show in 2005 than it did in 1963, but it also has that link to the past – which is a positive, rather than preserving it in aspic in any way.” And the Doctor, defined by his (or her) kindness, a peaceful champion of the underdog, is “a wonderful character to aspire to. It’s about being the cleverest person in the room, not the strongest.”

Tennant, meanwhile, remains in his garden, the school pickup plan no more clear for all the messages sent back and forth over the threshold. “Probably would have been quicker just to go and have a conversation,” he says, cheerily. “But less fun for you, obviously.”

[ansgar-martinsson]

The Best Intentions - Part 2

The Best Intentions

Part 2

Ansgar crossed his legs beneath him and leaned back in the chair, the leather creaking in protest. Considering, he folded his hands in his lap, tented his thumbs and rubbed them slowly together. In spite of his seemingly calm exterior, within his mind was churning… burning, a combination of annoyance and anger and what… fear? Yes, of course, fear.

His reputation was one of perfection. Not a single client unsatisfied. Not a single claim on a single contractor’s bond. If there’s a problem… he fixes it. Yet, here was a woman who, as she put it, was pleading for someone to do something about the condition of the building that he… that his company built.

Resolved, he bent forward, elbows on knees, and stared hard at the girl. With every ounce of sincerity he could muster, he said, “You won’t have to wait any longer, Froken Lindberg. I am…,” he paused, “mortified, to say the least that you had to go to the lengths you did just to get an audience with someone at my company who could remedy the situation.”

“Well,” she countered, her voice wavering, “you should be.”

Ansgar let forth with a bark of laughter. Not condescending laughter, mind you, but true and honest surprise. He smiled, that time the grin reaching his eyes. “Yes, I should be,” he affirmed. And with that, he stood, removed his suit jacket and crossed to the closet. He shrugged into his blue logoed Carhartt coat, flung his tool belt over his shoulder, and fished out an aluminum clipboard case.

“What are you….?”

He whirled. “We’re leaving, Froken Lindberg,” he clipped. “Now.”

“Yes,” she stood, clutching her papers to her chest, “but… where are we going?”

Ansgar brightened. “To the Opera House, where else? I need to see this sprinkler system for myself, I think. I am an engineer, you know. I have some experience with fire protection design. Maybe I can sort this today for you… and,” he shrugged, “you know, perhaps get the Prima Donna off your back.”  

“To avoid the riff-raff,” Ansgar nodded with his eyes glued to the door that led to the lobby, “out there, we’ll go out this way.” A tilt of his head signaled behind him.

That was the moment she saw it, the same moment that he lifted his hand to the wall behind his desk. He palmed with a swipe to reveal an invisible door. The seam blended in so nicely with the built-in bookcase that Joline missed it. A reader lit up in recognition of his touch or fingerprints or body temperature, Jo couldn’t know, and the door popped open with a click.

Jo raised her eyebrows at him and the hidden gadget. “Such technology, such toys.”

Ansgar huffed a deep sound of proud amusement. “Correction. All the technology. All the toys.” And with another dip of his head, he directed her through.

“Mischief managed.”

“Pardon?”

Jo grinned inwardly. “Something my nephews told me. From their favorite book. This—“ She pushed her hands out in front of her into a long marble corridor, gesturing before her. Uniform doors led off to other offices or conference rooms, she guessed, but the hallway seemed part of a typical office building. “This feels very, ‘I solemnly swear I am up to no good.’ Making a secluded break from… well, whatever you got going on back there.”

“Ah, the riff-raff, the circus… The press can be a blessing and a curse,” he took the lead down the bland corridor. “I use them when absolutely necessary and avoid them at all cost at all other times.”

“And you needed them today? Why?”

His shoulders adjusted under his jacket in a wave of… disgust? Stress? “The vultures smell blood. They’re chasing a story, an exclusive.” As soon as the press release published online of his return as acting CEO in an internet blast, the swarm came flocking in.

“And what’s that? The story? The exclusive?”

Ansgar effectively ducked and avoided her question by pointing with two very straight and very long fingers to his right through another door. “To the carpark, and my car. You’ll show me the improvements that need doing at the theatre, and we’ll come back here to schedule the work.”

Where he led with a steady assured gait, Joline followed. Out of necessity, more than anything else. She met him stride for stride, nearly, thanks to the three inch Louboutins. “Your lobby and lounge, so much like the opera house,” she commented to draw attention away from her unintentional pry. “Patrons and tourists parade through to gawk at the structure. Is that your stamp then?”

As they entered the covered garage, Ansgar fished his key fob from his pocket and clicked the button for his car. His brand new red Tesla Roadster chirped in response, and he nearly purred at the familiar sound. “I’ll assume responsibility for that, Froken Lindberg,” he replied proudly.

One of her eyebrow arched skyward. “Well,” she countered, “despite all the technical issues,” she intoned to knock him down a peg or two, “ticket sales are up. Season subscriptions increased six, close to seven, percent over last year. Audiences are responding to the slated new season, the season I put together.”

“I’ve been away. Missed most of the current series, I’m afraid,” Ansgar closed the door with a quiet ‘click’ after ensuring his guest comfortably in her seat. He strode quickly around the back, opened his own door and folded himself within. Continuing, he said, “I didn’t give up my series ticket, though. Seat A10 is still mine.”

“Hm,” the woman huffed. She crossed her legs, and Ansgar wondered if she was purposefully or subconsciously showing him the crimson underside of her shoes. “I hate empty seats.”

Ansgar shrugged. “It’s paid for, what do you care?” He hand-over-handed the wheel, expertly winding the roadster between the cement abutments and into the daylight of the open garage door.

“It’s not all about the money, Herr Martinsson,” she retorted. “You of all people should know – for everyone involved, it’s more about the audience, and their response.”

Ansgar held in a chuckle. He knew perfectly well.

***

Ansgar tipped his head back, following the line of the woman’s pointed finger. “There?” Ansgar, standing atop a folding aluminum scaffold, pointed as well.

“That’s where it went off the first time.” She called up to him.

“Got it.” Ansgar nodded sagely, glancing down at her. He pulled his hard hat off and looked up again as he pushed his hand through his hair. “I actually think I see the problem, Froken Lindberg; and you would not believe how simple it - and the solution - actually is.”

Her eyes went wide. “You do?”

He nodded again, looking down at her. “I do. And when I find out who erred here, heads are going to roll, I assure you. However,” he paused, “I think you, too, may be putting some folks on the chopping block here.”

“What… what’s the problem?”

“Kick off your shoes and come up here.” He reached down. “Take my hand.”

He was somewhat surprised that she did, actually… toe out of the Louboutins, take his hand. Her hand felt warm and smoothly calloused in his. The hands of a woman who, literally, had her fingers in every aspect of an operation. She gripped him tightly, pleasantly, as he heaved her up - moving his hand to her shoulder as he steadied her on the scaffold. “Good, yeah?”

“Yeah,” she replied, quickly, gripping one of the iron supports. “What’s the problem?”

“There,” he shone the beam of his torch at one of the pendent heads. See the colour of that glass bulb in there?”

She nodded. “It’s green.”

“It should be purple or better yet, black,” he explained. “That head you have there is only rated for temperatures of up to about ninety three degrees. A purple bulb is rated for about 182 degrees, black about 227. These heads are the wrong rating for this type of environment, you see?. All these hot stage lights… the ambient air around the heads gets too hot, bursts the bulbs and….”

“Sploosh,” she demonstrated, her fingers flaring out.

“Sploosh. Precisely.”

“Okay, okay,” she said, “but… why would I be upset at my own employees? Where’s our fault if your sprinkler guy put in the wrong heads?”

Ansgar pointed. “There,” he pointed with the beam of his flashlight, that time on the finished underside of the house right loge. “You’ve a set of properly rated heads sticking down there, all right and good for the designed use, but – it also looks as if there have been some modifications of the original design.”

She squinted. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Ask your lighting designer what I’m talking about. She’s bracketed in a brand new lighting pipe there, clamped some eight-inch non-LED fresnels upon it, and did so in a space not originally meant for lighting to be in the first place.” He looked down at her, his lips twisted, a shrug in his shoulders. “First of all, one should never ever hang incandescent lights directly beneath a sprinkler head no matter what the rating – and second of all… isn’t it against fire code to hang lights of a certain temperature so close to a seating area?”

Jo peered up into the face of her inspector, reading between the words he spoke, between the lines of his narrative. “These modifications…,” she pointed over her shoulder to the new problem, “they’re dangerous?”

Ansgar nodded, “Without the proper clearance. There’s code for safety.”

“And if I’m to understand you correctly,” she led, feeling the unease sink into her stomach, “this was deliberate?”

“It appears that way.” He landed the statement as delicately as he could, but it appeared that someone tread the path of sabotage.

The woman popped down off the scaffolding to step downstage where she’d left her file. “The first incident report came after last season.” She shifted through her pages, trying to locate the very report she referred. She’d studied them many times over in the months since the trouble began. Checklist after checklist signed off by a designer and two techs invalidated by one engineer review.

If only someone from Martinsson Construction had come sooner…

Despite the skirt she wore, she plopped down to spread the papers out in front of her. “Work orders, they came through but stated that there was nothing wrong.” She slid the signed sheet along the stage floor towards Ansgar. “’These things happen…’ they said. ‘Accidents’ this one contractor told me. That’s why I came to you… well, Weissing.”

It wasn’t panic she felt. It wasn’t fear or hysteria. It was annoyance. Disbelief. Perhaps a little anger thrown in, but she’d never let anyone see that. Instead she put her head into solving this plague on her tenure as house manager. Fix it. Fix it for good and move forward. “How long to sort all this?”

The engineer still had his head stuck up in the mess of lighting, sorting out just how to fix it, what safety measures he could employ to see this didn’t happen again. He called down, his voice raised for the distance. “Not long. An afternoon, at best.”

“Herr Martinsson, who would have the most to gain for doing this?” She stopped shuffling to look upstage where he stood when hee’d climbed down from the scaffolding some minutes later. The very image of aristocratic bad boy. Starched white shirt beneath a work jacket, topped with a hard hat. The leather and metal work belt slung around his slim waist appealed to her for reasons far beyond her understanding. The contrast between the expensively tailored, highly groomed man and the hands-on worker made for a gorgeous picture.

“I can’t answer that, Froken, not without knowing the key players.” He picked up some of her pages to look at some of the names, to see if he recognized the names of contractors that missed the obvious. The sodding theifs.

She sat in silence rolling the problem over in her head. Could it be a lack of education or knowledge in her trusted employees? Or was it a case of foul intentions? She didn’t want to believe it of her people. When she reigned her thoughts in from solving the problem, she glanced up again.

A furrowed brow knitted over his long nose, he chewed the corner of his lip as he concentrated on the work orders and the checklists. His hand worked at the base of his neck, tracing a v shape below is Adam’s apple. A strangely attractive self-soothing gesture as his focus zeroed in.

“May I—“ she intruded on his reading. She laughed at herself and her predicament of being trapped on the floor. “May I please borrow a hand? I…uh…got myself into a spot of trouble.” She gestured at her seated position on the floor and reached up for him. “I’m in danger of showing my talent for very unladylike positions.” She continued laughing at herself and the challenges she put herself in.

“Oh, yes, of course,” he offered his hand to heave her up off the floor.

“Thank you. I forget… I’m always back here for with the tech guys, building, moving, lifting. This,” she ran her hands along her skirt, “this doesn’t do me any favors.” She tipped her head back looking up into the fly loft. “How long can I impose on you, Herr Martinsson? May I ask you to survey some other problem areas?”

[lysieblu]

When the Camellia Blooms

So I decided to do commentary this time. I usually have a lot to say when wacthing dramas but forget it all quickly.

Mild Spoilers Ahead

I’ve renamed the characters because auto-correct sucks if your first language isn’t Korean.

Oh Dong-Baek - Dongbaek

Hwang Yong-sik - Smiley

Choi Hyang-mi / Choi Go-eun - Clepto Waitress

No Gyu-tae - Tae or Gyu-tae

Hong Ja-young  - Baseball, baseball dude

Jo Jung-sook, Dongbaek’s mom - Mama bear

Deok-soon, Yong-sik’s mom - Ma dukes

Why is it that society can take anything and make it a reason to put others down. Humans ain't shit. Episode 6 “Girls like me are like the Emperor's New Clothes... Good guys cants see me.” Best quote of the whole drama so far. Clepto waitress, I love her. She was weird and I wasn't sure if she was playing old dude, Tae. But she was and kinda genius at it. Men help create the traps they get caught in. Is Dongbaek really going to die in the end because it really sucks as this sad girl narrative goes. Being an orphan and or single mom does not doom you. The society in which she lived did. She was a fighter and would always win. The fact that she made it so far in life despite believing the bs others were telling her and the shit she was telling herself is worthy of praise. Episode 7 Smart girl to keep a tab of bad behavior. I just wish she had a bit more confidence, petty, and bad bitch in her delivery. This self deprecating behavior is getting old now. But this kind of behavior can't be unlearned in a night. It's so frustrating. This is why I can't be a therapist. Get a grip bitch. (kidding I know how healing works) all you can really do is pour in the positive and hope it flushes out the negative. That's why smiley is good for her but God he's annoying. He may be good and all but he had def benefited from her lack of boundaries. The dead girl at the end is the Clepto waitress. She stole the bracelet from Dongbaek and thus why the dead body is wearing it. Go Gye-tae has something to do with the murders. He is too punk to do them himself. But he knows and is close to the murderer. The timing of the alarm at the aesticians office. Tae saved her  I think it's the handy man. Episode 8 Chief is looking really suspect. Clepto waitress has crossed the line to disrespectful. Is she really risking hurting Dongbaek to get baseball dude? I think extortion always been her MO. Mom was referring to her when she said watch who you trust. I don't think she's the killer but bitch is not innocent. Episode 9 I hate bitches. It's true that for some people who never grew the fuck up... Hate is their love language. Cliques need a common enemy to thrive and they are weak as fuck. It doesn’t help that Dongbaek never puts them in their place. Me and Dongbaek are the same age and had our kid about the same time. I don't think the killer is female. Unless that bitch is Ronda Rousey I would like to believe I can fight off a bitch with chicken wire. Chief is looking suspect as hell. Why is he always throwing Smiley off the track or avoiding the case. He knows something. I am by no means taking baseball guys side, however I do feel that both parents should be given the opportunity to be parents to their kid. It's unfair to not tell him about his child when he clearly wants to be a father. The scar can go both ways. You son can resent you for keeping this from his father. Pil clearly knows what's up. Dongbaek is growing up. In a way, this is a death flag. But I still don't believe it's her. Episode 10 There isn't a cloud in the sky. They are walking around without coats. And you expect me to believe that it's cold enough for snow. I still feel like Joker isn't a female but her mom is looking hella suspect. What if the connection between all the victims is Dongbaek. Maybe they somehow did her wrong and crazy momma bear was protecting her. But I really can't see her climbing out of a window. Plus the fire alarm.   Trust no one. A lot of people have said the "don't be a joke" line. I called it. That ending was more of a death red flag. So the dead lady is Clepto waitress. She probably died because she obviously owes debts. Dude in hair salon was creepy. But that is separate from joker. I know this goofy mug. I've seen it somewhere (Googling it) ah.. yes... Mr Smiley was in Midnight Runners, playing a cop there too if I remember correctly. Episode 11 A bunch of elementary school kids fighting over baseball. Me yelling at my TV: GET EM!!! Let me tell y'all. I would have been on that field lighting shit up, whipping everyone's ass. Little boy go get yo momma so she can get your ass beating. 😡 Chief is acting wonky. He knows something. What's with the mom? She seems so protective... Now? What about her dad? What if Dongbaek's parents are some crazy con artists who are protecting their daughter by killing off people who conned her? They are basically trying to tell her to "get a grip bitch!" Or "don't be a joke." And did you see her grab the belt and wrap around her fist? She knows what the fuck she's doing. (I want her on my team in a fight) Why is Dongbaek not questioning her lucidity? 🤔 Clepto waitress is the childhood friend.?!. 🤨 IT WAS THE FUCKING HANDYMAN!!! I CALLED IT!!! 🥳🙌🏾👏🏾 Yass bitches. I'm fucking brilliant. Hold on... let's not get ahead of ourselves. Episode 12 This shit just became an episode of 24 “Why try to live so hard?” Because if I live up to the narrative people create for me based on some societal BS explanation, they win. They can say, "see I told you all _______ are _______." Fuck your prejudices and stereotypes. The last thing I want to do is prove some asshole right. So many people want her dead they are trying to confuse me. Who the fuck is the joker?? Handy man's dad? Is he even alive? And this lack of boundaries is killing me. Dongbaek needs to put both those men in their place. Baseball needs to know he has no legal rights, period, if his name is not on the birth certificate. It would be the kids decision as to what his relationship with his dad is. She also needs to tell Smiley to get a fucking grip and that dealing with Baseball is part of being with her. These situations can coexist and it's frustrating to think otherwise. Mom dukes needs to chill. Her son has to make his own decisions and fuck-ups and she cannot fault Dongbaek for that. Life is hard, regardless. If it ain't this, it would be something else. Who lives an easy life?? Challenges build character. And I get it some things you can avoid. But they are grown in their 30s, who at this point does not come with baggage? And fuck you for trying to make me cry. I'm at work Episode 13 Is momma bear on drugs? Her behavior isn't totally out of the ordinary but maybe she goes away to trip and comes back. Lawd we all gon die together😮 They are teasing this story line so hard.  IDK who the joker is. I'ma stick to the handy man but everyone in this story is guilty of something and really it's like matching the crime to the person or the person to the crime. Who killed Clepto? Was it her enemies or the joker? What momma bear is up to? Who's the joker? Is the joker and cleptos killer the same person? What's handy mans deal? Out of all of clepto's enemies, I believe the only ones capable of killing her are Mr. Pimp, Jessica because she's desperate, or Momma bear because she's protecting Dongbaek. In which case, her death is separate from the Joker's killings. Episode 14 You think Smiley's mom may be jealous because no one took an interest in her with three kids? Hold... The ... Fucking.... Phone... It's handy man's dad??? Behind  every weak man is a mother (parental figure) who never held him accountable. I'm tired of grown people not acting like they are grown, kiss and have sex already... Damn. Oh so now they were meant to be? And did Momma bear really come for a kidney? Episode 15 There is a such thing as too much motherly love. This lady is fucking delusional. Her son has always been the type to run towards trouble. Does she really think his life would be easier without Dongbaek? Really? Go-tae is cleared. He was guilty but his crime is gambling. Jessica hit clepto with her car but someone delivered the final blow. Was it Momma bear? Or joker? I think Chief is cleared too. He was just operating out of fear. So hold up. Momma bear has been watching over Dongbaek her whole life. If Momma bear is lurking in the shadows of course she would run into someone else lurking in the shadows. Bitch. Episode 16 Laugh cry? Jesus Christ Dongbaek is stupid. A abandoned mall. Really? She's like a white chick in a horror movie. No don't go in there. Run bitch. 😔 Always take the fucking stairs. I can't. If she falls, I quit. Episode 17 They look like the fucking Power Rangers and I AM LIVING for this movement. Ordering me a track suit on payday. He gets it. He fucking gets it. "I know I made you be a mother when you wanted to just be a woman" 🥳 "We'll not only feed him, we'll wipe his ass if we have to" My bitch. 😂😂😂 If this shit ends with Pil going with his father, I quit. People and situations can peacefully coexist. What's with this all or nothing attitude? And this discarding of a previous family or kids. I see it a lot in these dramas and it's disturbing. Episode 18 Pil's in for a rude awakening but it's a lesson that his mom can't protect him from. His dad may have nice things, but he ain't shit. He'll be back. Damn even your kid thinks your weak. Or is he being mean? He did it for his mom. Funny.. he's assuming what she wants. Did she ever say that she couldn't marry Smiley because of him? Did Smiley say it? That Ma Dukes said it and it's unfortunate. He's too young to realize which opinions matter  Society sucks for making a kid feel this way. Fuck that shit. It just hit me. One of the underlying themes of this drama is parenthood,  more so motherhood. Dongbaek lacked boundaries, even with her son. Smiley's mom is delusional about her son and life in general. She relied on him too much, babied him too much. I don't think any woman would not have been good enough in the long run. The guilt of his father dying, she blames herself, a burden she should have never had to bare, and never fully healed. She projecting that onto Dongbaek. Dongbaek's mom is seeking redemption. She did what she thought was best for her kid. Jessica's mom put up with an asshole for the sake of everyone else and probably to maintain her life. She's learning that she doesn't want that for Jessica. That her own insecuries have transferred to her. Taeks mom is selfish as fuck and babied her son, never holding him accountable. Mother's think they know what's right for their kid, but a nice life from the outside doesn't guarantee a nice life from the inside. That nice lawyer could have treated your daughter like a slave. But it all looks nice to the neighbors. People have got to let "perceptions" go. Most of the time people with the "worst" past have the best character. The issue with it all is.. most mother's define themselves by their kids or husbands. Korea does it very literally. Then, when it all goes away; your kid grows up, your husband may die or leave, what's left of you? Who are you? Women are incouraged to be everything for everyone else but nothing for themselves. When we do, we are made to feel guilty or less than for it. Dongbaek needs to be away from him for while. How this is happening sucks but both of them have lessons to learn. If they don't live happily ever after I have wasted my 20 hours of my life. This is utter bullshit. I hope they're fucking with me. Episode 19 This would have played out differently if she had a daughter. This is literally why fuck boys are running amuck these days. Moms who use their sons (sometimes daughters) as substitutes for men and adult relationships. Boundaries. To love your dad so much even though he is a killer is unhealthy. Sik needs psyhological help. It sends the wrong message that you need to or have to take you parents (family members) bs just because they are parents (or family.) In hindsight, a red flag. I don't want Dongbaek to be a match. I don't want her to give her kidney. I don't like the idea of someone younger giving someone older an organ. Once you've passed 50 you have lived your life. The donor should be the same age or older and preferably on their death beds. Especially in Dongbaek's case. What if something goes wrong and Pil looses his mother and grandmother? You going to let that man-child raise him? I would never be okay with taking any organ from my kid. Episode 20 So it was the handy man? I was right bitches. And his dad is covering for him. Wow let it be known that Episode 7 I called it! He was framing his dad and playing everybody. Why didn't he kill Ma tho? Loving people and being kind-hearted is so fucking easy. Why do humans make it so hard?? I know these dramas are fiction but someone somewhere has lived a similar life. Where the fuck would I be if I didn't have an awesome mom and a loving family? Ongson feels like Stars Hollow. Them pants are rather high-waisted. That ended well. It had important lessons that I hoped someone learned from. Good story. Why I suspected the handy man? It's usually the character that can easily go unnoticed. He has access to the whole town, knew everyone and smart enough to cover his tracks. Everyone else was too obvious but the story did a great job of making me doubt my initial suspicion. Bravo. Low key miss clepto waitress. When she wasn't being a extortionist, she was a fun character.

[migleefulmoments]

Did I make her mad?

I seem to have ruffled Ajw’s feather. I left her a message- always anon or she won’t read them. I know this because used my username for years and they are ignored. So here we are with a LONG response to her answer.  

It started here: The CCers tried to change the history of Darren and Mia *you can read their entire exchange here* 

But here is the part I was responding to: 

ajw720

Agreed light bearding started April 2011, heavy bearding when they moved her to LA in Fall 2012.  In between I do think they considered other, more famous options but went with her as she is the only person that they could “prove” pre-C. And the CC relationship was their major obstacle and the thing they knew they had to hide to make D straight.

This being said, the article is WRONG if they are following the PR narrative that says they started to date in June 2010 and that is what the “7 ½ crazy and adventurous years came from.”  A narrative that was spun in 2015.

M herself would love to claim college as she is desperate to say Not Alone is about her.

So yes, it is likely they “met” in college, but I doubt it was more than a night out at a bar at most.

So I asked her: 

Come on, you know there are several public pics of M and D together before his "Blaine' audition hair cut. IDK if you have been in a serious relationship but how it works is you start out seeing each there occasionally and then as you get closer and fall more in love you start doing more and more together until you get married. Being in a long distance relationship means that can all take a little longer. Going out more publicly AFTER she moved & over time is how that works.

My responses to her comments are in Italics:

Dearest Michigan,

I really do make an effort to ignore you and your nonsense, but I just could not resist. I know on your blog you have questioned my credentials, well I must say, I question yours and I highly recommend you enroll in a grammar school level reading comprehension program. I have two master’s degrees and undergrad from Michigan, but thanks for the advice.  First, who is disagreeing that they knew each other pre-g/lee?  That is a fact, a fact i state often and frequently and no one that I have encountered here who has any knowledge refutes this fact. Yet you keep repeating this like we are unaware, both in this ask, and in your absolutely comical analysis of the handshake completely based on the the false premise that we think this is when M&D met. Please stop putting words in our mouths and READ critically.

Well let me leave just a couple of receipts as to why I keep saying that: 

This exchange on 11/20 regarding the Trevor Live 2012 video that they have claimed over and over shows Michael introducing Mia and Darren and Darren shakes her hand.  I proved that is not what happened here . 

1.  flowersintheattic254

I’ve never seen this video before and wondered if anyone else new here had? Apologies for putting her on your dash, but it’s useful to have a gentle reminder that this is and always was a business arrangement.  Watch them shake hands under the watchful eye PR at Trevor 2012 and D proceed to ignore her. #because most people shake hands with their SO right 9/ 

2. Anonymous asked:

So glad theTrevor clip exists. That’s my go to when people ask for proof. They had been “together” for 2 yrs. Question on the timing. Does this coincide with the “confirmation” date when D was so upset in Canada?

ajw: Hi anon, this was December, confirmation day in Toronto was the following June.  But no question, they had moved her to LA and the choice to make her full-time beard and to completely oppress CC had been made.  This was right after the BU episode of G/lee, a plot conceived to keep D&C apart.  Not a pleasant time in their lives and when everything really changed.

3. ajw: article is WRONG if they are following the PR narrative that says they started to date in June 2010 and that is what the “7 ½ crazy and adventurous years came from.”  A narrative that was spun in 2015.

4. Hi anon.  That is likely the correct answer.  Her friend dated Jo/e W when they were in college and I believe she maybe visited U of M one weekend.

That being said, to be clear, if they met then, and it is not 100% substantiated, they went to different schools, located in different parts of the country and she graduated before them. They didn’t start dating in college and I would guess they did not keep in touch. The real connection was later when Ch/uck and C/harlene were friendly with her in NYC after they all graduated.  And that is how she was chosen to be the beard, the worst decision D ever made.

Second, I am not disputing that from 2010-2011 it was sort of low key, though by April 2011 she was already being speculated about in JJ with pap pics, so maybe we can say it quickly went from low to mid-key.

Yes, this is how relationships work. You meet, you may not start dating right away. Eventually you start talking...maybe a date or two- they were long distance so likely much more talking. Fly to see one another...a few dates... more talking... more flying until she moved to LA. Nothing inconsistent about the story. They started out long distance so there is no doubt the “start date” is debatable to them. 

However, she was moved to LA in the fall of 2012 and from that moment forward there was nothing low or mid key about this.  That was SIX, count them (unless you need basic math classes as well) SIX years ago. Therefore, a publication CANNOT state that they have been low key dating since 2010. That is a boldface lie. They could say perhaps “they started out under the radar and have since decided to share” but NOT that it has been low key since 2010.

No, no it isn’t a bold face lie. It is literally how REAL LIFE relationships work..you know the unscripted ones. It’s their relationship and THEY get to say when they actually started dating. You could probably win an argument that the fandom didn't KNOW they were dating until 2012, ya know, if you REALLY just need to win.   

Since 2012 she has accompanied him to approximately 75% of all of his events, her picture is taken constantly, her image is videoed, her SM is full of him, and recently his SM contains her face. Their “friends” and family talk about them on their public SM constantly, She has been interviewed about him (remember when she claimed she never wanted to be associated with someone famous), and she is mentioned in D’s press constantly and has been for YEARS.

I will say this slowly.  They. Are. Engaged.  It is normal for her to be with him at events. As many events as they want to attend together. People like love; people like beautiful couples. Photographers and fans are going to take pictures of a beautiful couple in love. Interviewers are going to talk about the engagement and the wedding. It’s we do in America. The problem is you don’t like it. But I’m 100% sure that Darren didn’t ask you for permission. He doesn’t care what you think.. 

Her friends and family post about them constantly? Everyone’s family talks about family constantly. I’m sure YOUR family talk about you. It’s literally what social media is for- bragging about your kids and perfect life, posting naked belly shots in the gym, and connecting with family and friends. I know you talk about your family on Tumblr and you post your cats and your wine on Tumblr.  How does Mia or Darren or their family have less right than you do? I don’t follow the logic and as you say you're a lawyer, I really don’t follow you.  Everyone gets to pick what they want to post on their own social media...that is the rule. 

As for that article...Mia claimed she never wanted-PAST TENSE- to be with someone famous; it wasn’t something she imagined for herself. That isn’t the same as saying she doesn’t currently want to be with Darren who become famous after they fell in love. I will avoid ridiculing you about your lack of basic English grammar skills. 

Yes, she is mentioned in Darren’s press...so what? They are a couple. This is isn’t hard.      

So I am unclear why you are asking me about how a relationship works? I certainly understand how it works.  

Relationships dear michigan are based on love, friendship, and respect, Three fundamental things missing from the mi/arren relationshit.

Couples KNOW when they met and how long ago it was. But not mi/arren. Was it college?  Don Hi/ll’s? In NYC pre-g/lee?  They don’t know, but they will be sure to twist the answer each and every time asked. (D actually looked shocked when she said college). But you know what D knows in precise detail?  His mandate, when he went to see S/utton F/oster, a story he has recounted approximately  5 times, with g/olden g/lobe winning, NY T/imes best selling author C/hris C/olfer (his constant tribute not mine).

I already outlined how long distance relationships work and there is a vague, nebulous start date. But I also suspect that Darren, who does value his privacy, doesn’t really care to share those kind of details with us. So he gives vague, unimportant responses to that question. There is also the fact that journalists and bloggers do research and don’t always ask every question they cover in an interview. Sometimes they use their research to fill in facts- this can lead to perpetuating something that isn’t 100% accurate but Darren doesn’t care to call them out or correct it because it isn't our business. 

As for your mandate. Haven’t you figured out that it is the only Chris Glee story Darren is allowed to share without upsetting Chris? He keeps repeating it because it’s out there already. “Chris hates when you talk about him” so he keeps repeating the same story to feed the Glee nostalgia without getting him upset. Again, this isn’t hard. 

Couples know how long they have been dating.  Not m/iarren and you would THINK after the encage announcement they would stick to the very public timeline created, yet they don’t. She actually wants you to think they started dating in college, years before 2010.

Nobody cares when they started dating. I couldn't tell you when my husband and I started dating- there are times I can’t remember how many years we have been married or what year we got married- It isn’t important to all people. It means NOTHING in the big scope of the day-to-day struggles of being married and raising kids, and struggling with chronic disabling illnesses that we deal with in our kids. Love isn’t a Disney Prince meets Princess sweeps her offer feet and they live Happily Ever After cuz now she’s a Princess.  It isn’t Instagram perfection of big dates, huge romantic gestures and huge diamonds. It’s living with someone and negotiating who does what chores; who cooks and who cleans up dinner; who is taking the kid to PT or the doctor appt that is 3 hours away this week; it’s washing his dirty underwear and getting a puke bucket when the flu hits. It’s missing him because he is gone half the month flying FedEx packages to Dubai, India and China while I am single parenting a lot. In most people’s lives, the date they started dating isn’t that important after you get through a few. Those moments become less important.  

When one proposes to their partner after “7 ½ crazy and adventurous years” I would hope they would know the person well enough to buy them a ring that they would love and cherish. And in turn I would hope the recipient loved the ring, even if not their dream, because it is a symbol of love and devotion. Not mi/arren, D apparently got in wrong FOUR times as she is now wearing ring number FIVE, an indisputable fact.  And no, multimillionaire D did not buy FOUR place holders.

You have very childlike ideas of what relationships and engagements are like.  I haven’t worn a wedding ring in years, nobody cares. Mia wore one engagement ring from January to January- she added other rings to the stack at times which seems to have confused you that it was different rings. I saw your picture proof  and those are all the same diamond ring. She just got a beautiful ring on GG night. My GUESS would be that they designed the new ring together. Couples do that. Some couples get engaged long before there is a ring. None of this is “abnormal”...there is no “normal”. But even if she did have 5 rings...who cares? It means NOTHING to us. They get to do what they want and THAT is an indisputable fact. 

Generally partners don’t run in front of the other constantly when they think they aren’t being filmed. D runs ahead of her constantly as documented many, many times. And notice how he ALWAYS tries to correct it when he sees the camera. They also aren’t afraid to touch their partner (D constantly avoids it, remember Op/eration S/mile when he was caught on film hiding his hand behind his bag to avoid touching her?). 

You pick and choose pictures and videos to prove this trope. You and I both know there are many pictures of them waking together. Again, I ask if you have ever been in a long term relationship because after 8 years, nobody is worried about who is walking in front of who. On the red carpet, it is pretty common for the celeb to walk in front of the spouse because everyone wants to see the celeb and not the spouse. Darren is at work on the red carpet. But if you want to hang your hat on THIS being the BIG proof you have that it is all a lie then go for it. If you want to ignore all of the times Darren has said “I love her” and instead fixate on a photo of him standing in front of her....you are only deluding yourself.  

A partner would NEVER try to steal the spotlight from the SO yet M pulls focus constantly despite the fact that it is D who put in the time and effort to receive the accolades he is currently getting.

I honestly can’t with this one.  She only “steals the limelight” with you guys. Darren’s real fans just enjoy pics of them together as the gift that they are as we enjoy everything Darren does. You guys, on the other hand, stalk the internet looking for pictures of her just so you can rage over them; you guys talk about how she steals the spotlight. Nobody, NOBODY could steal the limelight from Darren Criss.  

A partner would respect that their partner has repeatedly stated that he craves privacy. Neither M nor any of their “friends” give two shits about his wishes as he is all over the internet as posted by this group.

This cracks me up because it assumes that Darren has no idea his pictures are being posted...the ones he posed for and the ones that he watched them post seconds later. Nobody is posting photos that Darren doesn’t want posted.  Mia shut down her public social except for very rare red carpet or special events. When you rage about untrue things you sound exactly like Trump “ there is an EMERGENCY AT THE BORDER...drugs...rapists...coyotes.. DEMS WANT OPEN BORDERS”. “DARREN BEGS FOR PRIVACY AND NOBODY RESPECTS THAT”. Both of those statements are complete bullshit. 

A caring fiancee would concede an award show to allow for him to take his mom (d’s express wishes as he voiced on ET. And no if this is corrected it does not count as he called her out in a very public way).

OMG with this one.  An anon pointed out that the one person who DID take his mom to awards shows after age 30 was Kevin Spacey.  Darren took who Darren wanted to take to his first GG as a nominee. Most adults have closer relationships with their lover than their mommy. His mom came to the parties. I don’t see her upset...she looked pretty damn happy hanging with her hubby. 

Mature, wealthy adults in their 30s don’t have another wealthy adult living with them for, and i quote from D himself “many, many years.”  And no B/en didn’t crash on the couch as you have deluded yourself to believe, he fully lived (or lives) there.

Mature, wealthy adults in their 30′s get to decide who lives in their home with them. If you actually do follow Ben on his social, then you know he is rarely in LA for more than a few days. I never said he is sleeps on the couch because I assume he had his own bedroom. 

If I got to meet a music idol and he wanted to move in with me and we could sit around and immerse ourselves in music, I would  be thrilled. In college my roommate, her boyfriend, and I sleep in the same bedroom. They were a couple, I was just a roommate. It’s even more disingenuous that you keep screaming what is and isn’t normal while you claim to be the biggest gay ally in the world. Gay families form in all sorts of combinations and configurations. You need to educate yourself before you proclaim you guys are the biggest bestest Queer Allies around and stop betting hung up on heteronormative 1940′s norms. . 

A loving partner would not constantly mock and ridicule the other publicly, something she has done often (remember that time she called him douchebag on twitter?).  Nor would s/he mock and ridicule his fans and treat them like the lowest form of vermin. particularly if not kissing said person’s ass.

First of all, I believe she was joking though I haven’t seen that tweet in ages. It is super old. Second, people fight. People say horrible things to their lovers. It’s NORMAL.

You have tried to make the “Mia is mean to Darren’s fans” trope into something with as much effort as “THERE IS AN EMERGENCY AT THE BORDER”.  Neither one is sticking. 

A partner that respects their SO doesn’t force them to perform in a bar nearly every single one of his/her days off, when it was evident the man was on the brink of collapsing from exhaustion, as M did for the duration of the summer.

When you say this I always wonder if you EVER ACTUALLY LISTEN to Darren talk...like USING his words, out of his mouth. Because Darren Criss LOVES making music with people. He played outside restaurants at Michigan, he played inside Sava (MI) and Maggianos (CA), he does concerts and he lives for a small venue event. Marie’s Crisis and other piano bars rock his world so he opened one of his own close to home. Darren LOVES TO CONNECT TO OTHER HUMAN BEINGS THROUGH MUSIC. This is something he has said many times, in many interviews. It is sad that you cannot see that-you cannot hear him- and you continue to disparage his joy. When you finally realize that you are wrong about all of this, the one thing that I hope makes you feel the worst is that you have degraded, disparaged, and denigrated two things he loves- Mia and TSG. 

I could go on and on and on about the issues with this horror show, but i will spare my readers.  But I will repeat something i have said often, the ONLY thing to me that would be sadder than reality, would be if this is real. Because they are the OPPOSITE of relationship goals and incredibly toxic as painfully evident in what they have allowed us to see.

I can go on and on as well. It is real and it doesn’t involve you. Your petty, ill-informed, silly conspiracy theorist investigations have created a reality that lives on in your heads. Darren is clearly happy and everyone around him loves him AND Mia. You spend a lot of time and energy wiping away ALL of Darren’s truths in order to keep your fantasy alive. The only toxic relationship Darren has is with the CC fandom. I don’t know his personal life but what I see from my position in MI is a man and woman who are living their best life and a fandom that is trying so hard to hang on to a fantasy that has FAR outlived its useful life. Chris and Darren have no public relationship and if I had to guess after reading STFF,  I would say no relationship at all. Chris has asked you to stop shipping them more than once. Instead of listening you continue to fabricate fictitious stories to explain away every single word out Darren’s mouth and many out of Chris’s. You aren’t “finding the truth” you are CREATING YOUR TRUTH to keep a fantasy alive. Reading Instagram ��likes’ and looking at song lyrics WHILE IGNORING THE VERY WORDS OUT OF DARREN’S OWN MOUTH is really messed up and very disrespectful. If you really believe that Darren’s public life is a lie than walk away. You have the right to your opinion but you don’t have the right to bully Darren or his family and friends on behalf of that opinion. You don’t have the right to an opinion on the value of his love for Mia. If you don’t like it then you have the right to walk away...not to spread your hate on social media until it gets back to Darren & Mia, and their family and friends. The CC Bullshit that comes directly from YOUR MOUTH was left on Chuck’s baby post for fuck’s sake. That is ALL ON YOU. You claim you don’t post on their social but you have never told your followers to stop and they use your exact words. Chuck and that newborn baby deserved a hell of a lot better than the hate that a CC Family member left. You OWN that. 

Now i beg, please, please, please go back to your own blog where i can blissfully ignore you and leave me alone unless you an actually come back and produce a valid argument.

Nope...as long as you lie, as long as you made ignorant, unsubstantiated and easily disprovable statements, I will be here. Think of me as the New York Times...always giving the folks the well-researched truth. I learned to do research at Michigan. I might not be able to sniff out obscure facts like marriage licenses or who Mia’s mom works for (well mostly because I don’t care) but I can do a damn good job of disproving your tropes because they rely so heavily on misconstrued truths (see my take down of the Fox Studio 7 year contract fact) , outright lies, shortened videos, and photos taken out of context. Also BTW some fact checks: it was CrissColfers who moved into Chris’s neighborhood to terrorize him, NOT Miarrens, in their mission to find proof that Darren was really going to Chris’s home and your anon who mentioned Dot Marie Jone’s wife standing up for Darren and Mia...she is friends with Chris and she was defending Chris and Will NOT Darren and Mia. 

Love,

Me

[asecondinavoid]

Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist - DAN FLORY

Know thyself. Inscription on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi!

In his recent book White, Richard Dyer argues that racial whiteness has operated in Western film and photography as an idealized standard against which other races have been judged. Making his case inductively using instruction manuals, historical theories of race, and tradi- tional lighting and make-up practices, as well as the dominant ideals for human beauty uti- lized in developing film stocks and camera equipment over the last 150 years and more, Dyer maintains that Western visual culture has presented whites as the norm for what it is to be “just human” or “just people,” whereas other human beings have been presented as raced, as different from the norm.? This manner of depicting whiteness has invested the category itself with the power to represent the commonality of humanity. Furthermore, Dyer argues that this historical function of whiteness’s normativity continues to be pro- foundly influential in current practices and instruction.*

Dyer’s argument is in accord with what phi- losophers such as Charles W. Mills and Lewis R. Gordon have advanced in broader theoretical terms regarding the operation of whiteness as a norm against which nonwhites—and particu- larly blacks—have been negatively judged.* Like Dyer, Mills and Gordon argue that pre- sumptions of whiteness institutionalize racial beliefs at the level of background assumptions that most would not even think to examine. Based on this claim, these philosophers reason that whiteness functions not only as a social norm, but also at the epistemological level as a form of learned ignorance that may only with

considerable effort be brought forward for explicit critical inspection?

Similarly, many of Spike Lee’s films place into question presumptions about the normativ- ity of whiteness. A crucial aim in his ongoing cinematic oeuvre has been to make the experi- ence of racism understandable to white audi- ence members who “cross-over” and view his films. Because seeing matters of race from a nonwhite perspective is typically a standpoint unfamiliar to white viewers, Lee has sought to make more accessible such an outlook through the construction and use of specific character types. One way he achieves this goal is by offering depictions of characters who function as what I will call “sympathetic racists”: charac- ters with whom mainstream audiences readily ally themselves but who embrace racist beliefs and commit racist acts. By self-consciously pre- senting white viewers with the fact that they may form positive allegiances with characters whose racist bigotry is revealed as the story unfolds, Lee provokes his viewers to consider a far more complex view of what it means to think of one’s self as “white” and how that may affect one’s overall sense of humanity.

Lee thus probes white audiences’ investment in what might be called their “racial alle- giances,” a dimension of film narrative pertain- ing to the manner in which audiences become morally allied to characters through categories and presumptions about race.° Foregrounding racial allegiances allows him to depict the way in which ideas of race may affect characters’ and audience members’ behavior at much deeper levels cognitively, emotionally, and morally than many of them realize. By offering a critical perspective on their investment in race, Lee issues his viewers a philosophical

astaar] sHOWUIOD aANwaID a[gea![dde ayn Aq poUIBAOE aw sa[IIW YO ‘asn jo sana sop ArT aUIUD AaTIA4, Ho (SUORIPUOS-puR-swLay NOS Kali ATEAGHaUITUO//-sdny) SHORIPUCD pue sUBaL BHR 99g [ZZOZ/OI OE] WO ArEIGNT OULU AaLLAA WILENSMY aUEIYIED [PUONEN OY WHN Aq X°0EZ00 9007 6ZSE-1Z00 SI LTO Mopruos karan Kreaquaurjuo;csdny wox papeojumog ‘| ‘9007 ‘SkZIOFSI 68

challenge, both within the context of their narra- tive understanding and their lives generally. In focusing audience attention on a character toward whom they feel favorably while also revealing that character’s racism, Lee constructs a film that philosophizes by developing a con- ception of what it means to be racist that funda- mentally challenges white viewers to inspect their own presumptions about how they see themselves and others.

Lee depicts sympathetic racist characters so that viewers may initially forge positive alle- giances with them in spite of those characters’ anti-black beliefs and actions, which in earlier stages of the narrative seem trivial, benign, unimportant, or may even go unnoticed. He then alienates viewers from such characters by revealing the harmfulness of these typically white beliefs and actions. Through this tech- nique, Lee contests the presumed human com- monality attached to being white by providing viewers with an opportunity to see their concep- tions of whiteness analytically. By introducing a critical distance between viewers and what it means to be white, Lee makes a Brechtian move with respect to race. As Douglas Kellner points out, he “dramatizes the necessity of making moral and political choices” by forcing his viewer “to come to grips” with certain crucial issues and “adopt a critical approach” to the emotions and cognitions involved.’ The oppot- tunity offered to white viewers who cross-over to see Lee’s films is that of experiencing what they have been culturally trained to take as typi- cal or normative—being white—and see it depicted from a different perspective, namely, that of being black in America, which in turn removes white viewers from their own experi- ence and provides a detailed access to that of others. Exploiting this kind of anti-egoist strat- egy regarding fiction’s capacities to give audi- ences access to the perspectives of others is something that philosophers such as Kendall Walton, Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, Alex Neill, and others have long recognized.® It is just this strategy that Lee takes advantage of in his films.

Given this characterization of Lee’s goals, I would argue that we should recognize the opportunity he offers white viewers as a chance to imagine whiteness “from the outside”—see it acentrally and sympathetically, as opposed to

Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy

imagining it centrally and empathetically. Both kinds of responses are modes of imaginative engagement; sympathy, however, is generally a more distanced attitude in which we imagine that such-and-such were the case, whereas empathy calls for something closer to imagining from one’s own situation.” By encouraging viewer response to be more sympathetic than empathetic, Lee promotes a mode of detached critical reflection that is not merely Brechtian, but philosophical, for it involves reflectively considering presuppositions of the self and humanity that are among the most fundamental in contemporary conceptions of personal iden- tity, namely, those regarding race.'* In this sense, Lee challenges his white viewers to know themselves along the lines of the Delphic inscription made famous by Socrates.

Lee’s crucial insight here regarding his use of sympathetic racist characters is that, analogous to white viewers’ generally favorable “internal” predisposition to white characters, such viewers also have trouble imagining what it is like to be African American “from the inside’”—engag- ing black points of view empathetically— because they often do not understand black experience from a detailed or intimate perspec- tive. It is frequently too far from their own experience of the world, too foreign to what they are able to envision as ways in which human life might proceed. Thomas Hill and Bernard Boxill have argued that this limitation in imagining other life possibilities may inter- fere with whites knowing the moral thing to do because they may be easily deceived by their own social advantages into thinking that such accrue to all, and thus will be unable to perceive many cases of racial injustice. Hill and Boxill note that such a cognitive insensitivity may affect even well-meaning sincere individuals who wish for nothing more than to act morally in situations where questions of racial injustice might arise, a phenomenon that Janine Jones refers to as “the impairment of empathy in goodwill whites.”!!

To counteract such an imaginative limitation in film viewing, Lee offers depictions that invite a deeper imagining with respect to black- ness. Not only does he provide numerous detailed representations of African-American characters in his films, but he also offers sym- pathetic racist character types who provide a

astaar] sHOWUIOD aANwaID a[gea![dde ayn Aq poUIBAOE aw sa[IIW YO ‘asn jo sana sop ArT aUIUD AaTIA4, Ho (SUORIPUOS-puR-swLay NOS Kali ATEAGHaUITUO//-sdny) SHORIPUCD pue sUBaL BHR 99g [ZZOZ/OI OE] WO ArEIGNT OULU AaLLAA WILENSMY aUEIYIED [PUONEN OY WHN Aq X°0EZ00 9007 6ZSE-1Z00 SI LTO Mopruos karan Kreaquaurjuo;csdny wox papeojumog ‘| ‘9007 ‘SkZIOFSI Flory Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist

conception of how it might be possible for a white person to act favorably toward blacks but still be racist toward them. In this sense, Lee constructs the sympathetic racist character type as an “alloy” of morally good and bad charac- teristics, in the terminology developed by film theorist Murray Smith in Engaging Characters and elsewhere.'!? As Smith notes, the moral complexity of such characters can force us “to question certain habits of moral judgment,” which is precisely what Lee achieves in many of his films.'?

What Spike Lee offers, then, is a more acen- tral access (that is, detached access “from the outside”) to white characters so that white view- ers may look at these characters more critically. This type of access might be thought of as the first step in giving whites a sort of “double con- sciousness” regarding their own race. If W. E. B. Du Bois was correct in observing that African Americans possess a sense of “‘twoness” regard- ing themselves racially in American society, then the “single consciousness” of whites would make them particularly susceptible to narrative allegiances based on whiteness and resistant to seeing white characters from other perspec- tives.'* The presupposition of white racial experience in much film narrative, then, contin- gently predisposes viewers, especially white viewers, to understanding characters from a racialized point of view. Thus, counteracting this phenomenon and creating an incipient white double consciousness might be conceived as another way to think of Spike Lee’s overall aim with regard to his white viewers. As Linda Martin Alcoff has explained, such a perspective would involve a critical sense that white iden- tity possessed a clear stake in racialized social structures and inequalities as well as some sense of responsibility for helping rectify these ineq- uities.!° In this sense, the technique of self-con- sciously depicting sympathetic racists throws into question white racial allegiances, for the self-conscious use of this character type pro- vokes in white viewers a philosophical exam- ination of why one might feel favorably toward such characters, in spite of their racist beliefs and actions.

Lee also encourages his viewers to reflect on how whiteness possesses specific characteris- tics that make white experience different from nonwhite experience, and vice versa. African-

69

American experience, for example, is consti- tuted by specificities that involve a history and legacy of racialized slavery, as well as the ongoing “scientific” research project that has time and again ranked blacks at the bottom of what was claimed to be an empirically verified racial hierarchy, and that frequently served as grounds for arguing that blacks possess lesser capacities to be moral, intelligent, and law-abid- ing. African Americans have been subject to the burden of representation established across dec- ades (one could also now say centuries) by ster- eotypes that arose out of blackface minstrelsy as well as a history of having been subject to lynching on the basis of one’s skin color.!® These features need to be kept in focus when thinking about and assessing the actions, beliefs, and emotions of black American char- acters in many films, as it is not unusual for blacks to have the capacity to imagine that whites who are sympathetic toward them might also harbor racist beliefs or act in racist ways. History provides many examples of African Americans having to deal with such individuals, among them Abraham Lincoln.!? Thus it would not be difficult to transfer this cognitive capa- city over to understanding film narratives. On the other hand, neither this history nor its related imaginative capacities are generally shared by whites. Lee’s self-conscious use of sympathetic racist character types, then, aims to assist whites in acquiring the rudiments of these imaginative competencies.

Spike Lee is not the only filmmaker to employ the narrative technique of constructing sympathetic racist characters, but his work seems to be the locus classicus for such figures in the new “black film wave.”!® From Do the Right Thing (1989) to Clockers (1995) and Summer of Sam (1999), Lee’s films have self- consciously foregrounded allegiances with sympathetic racists or similar morally complex “good-bad characters” for the inspection and contemplation of his audiences.'? In this fashion he has sought to make white viewers more criti- cally aware of anti-black racism and fear of dif- ference. I should add here that I do not believe that Lee and other filmmakers necessarily devised these narrative techniques with exactly the theoretical goals I describe or by using the philosophical considerations I outline in this essay. Rather, while I assume that there is some

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overlap between their goals and the ones I describe, filmmakers use these techniques because they work well in depicting certain characters and narrative situations. In contrast, what I provide here is a theoretical explanation and clarification of what these techniques are, how they work cognitively, and why they achieve the effects that they do.

Even as Spike Lee offers his white viewers an opportunity to contemplate their racial alle- giances, it is important to note that one problem associated with the depiction of sympathetic racist characters is that their critical use may not always be evident to viewers. Some audience members may not detect such narrative figures as racist; others will. What I offer next is a detailed analysis that makes clear what Lee seeks to accomplish by presenting this character type as well as an explanation of the fact that some viewers are unable to apprehend it as racist.

I. WHO—AND WHAT—IS SAL?

In an otherwise astute examination of auteur theory, Berys Gaut argues that the character of the Italian-American pizzeria owner, Sal (Danny Aiello), in Do the Right Thing is not a racist figure (p. 166).7° Aiello’s performance, Gaut asserts, overcomes Lee’s explicit directo- rial intention of revealing racist beliefs in a character who is for many viewers the film’s richest, most complex, and sympathetic narra- tive figure.”! Despite Lee’s clearly stated aim to portray this character as a racist, Aiello alleg- edly trumps that aim through his rendition of Sal.?? Gaut sees this conflict between director and actor as an “artistically fruitful disagree- ment” that contributes to “the film’s richness and complexity” (p. 166), in spite of Sal’s “complicity in a racial tragedy culminating in a horrifying murder” (p. 165). Gaut quotes film scholar Thomas Doherty to support his point, noting that, “‘on the screen if not in the screen- play [Aiello’s] portrayal wins the argument’” by depicting Sal’s character as someone who is not racist.”

Other viewers, however, have regarded Sal’s character differently. Film scholar Ed Guerrero argues that despite Sal’s humanity and reasona- bleness through most of the film, when con-

Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy

fronted with Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) and Buggin’ Out’s (Giancarlo Esposito) demands at the end of a long, hot day, “Sal’s good-natured paternal persona quickly cracks and out comes a screed of racist invective about ‘jungle music,’ accompanied by egregious racial profanities, the likes of ‘black cocksucker,’ ‘nigger mother- fucker,’ and so on.”** Guerrero’s point is that by using these terms nonironically and ascrip- tively with respect to black characters in the narrative, Sal reveals himself as a racist. Simi- larly, African-American studies scholar Clyde Taylor notes that it is Sal who explicitly racial- izes this confrontation by insulting his adversar- ies’ choice of melodic accompaniment with the angry exclamation: “Turn that jungle music off! We ain’t in Africa!”” From this point on, racial epithets explode from Sal’s mouth.

Unlike these critics, however, many white viewers tend not to notice or acknowledge this dimension of Sal’s character. Instead, like Gaut and Doherty, these audience members often see him as a good person who does a bad thing, or a rational person defeated by an irrational world, but not as someone who is a racist.” This form of explanation also seems to have been actor Danny Aiello’s own understanding of Sal. In St. Clair Bourne’s documentary Making “Do the Right Thing”, Aiello remarks during an early read through of the script that “I thought [Sal is] not a racist—he’s a nice guy; he sees people as equal.” In a later discussion of his character, Aiello further explains: “The word [‘nigger’] is distasteful to him.” Finally, after acting out Sal’s explosion of rage that sparks Raheem’s attack and brings down the New York City Police Department’s fatal interven- tion, Aiello summarizes: “Is he [Sal] a racist? I don’t think so. But he’s heard those words so fucking often, he reached down... If it was me and I said it—I’m capable of saying those words; I’m capable-——And I have said them, but I’m not a racist.” Aiello thus consistently believed, in developing and acting out his char- acter during the production of the film, that Sal was not a racist, but rather a fair and equal- minded character who in this one case made a mistake and did something that was racist. In his anger and fatigue, he “reached down” into himself and found the most insulting words he could to throw at those who made him angry and thus ended up acting like a racist, even

astaar] sHOWUIOD aANwaID a[gea![dde ayn Aq poUIBAOE aw sa[IIW YO ‘asn jo sana sop ArT aUIUD AaTIA4, Ho (SUORIPUOS-puR-swLay NOS Kali ATEAGHaUITUO//-sdny) SHORIPUCD pue sUBaL BHR 99g [ZZOZ/OI OE] WO ArEIGNT OULU AaLLAA WILENSMY aUEIYIED [PUONEN OY WHN Aq X°0EZ00 9007 6ZSE-1Z00 SI LTO Mopruos karan Kreaquaurjuo;csdny wox papeojumog ‘| ‘9007 ‘SkZIOFSI Flory Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist

though he himself was not one. This under- standing of Sal would thus seem to be a com- mon strategy for white viewers to use in explaining the character.

Such a conflict in viewers’ understanding of Sal presents an interpretational dilemma, which, I argue, the concepts of racial allegiance and the sympathetic racist help to resolve. Accordingly, the explanation for why many white viewers— and Aiello himself—resist seeing Sal as a racist might be formulated in the following way. A white audience member’s understanding of a white character’s actions often accrues from a firm but implicit grasp of white racial experience, which presupposes the many ways in which the long histories of world white supremacy, eco- nomic, social, and cultural advantage, and being at the top of what was supposedly a scientifically proven racial hierarchy, underlay and remain influential in white people’s lives. After all, the circumstances that resulted from hundreds of years of pursuing the goals of presumed Euro- pean superiority—namely, global domination by whites in economic, cultural, social, religious, intellectual, national, governmental, and various other ways—remain structurally in place.?’ Such dimensions of white experience are part of the “co-text,” what Smith refers to as the internal system of “values, beliefs, and so forth that form the backdrop to the events of the narrative,” for individuals raised in white-dominated cultures regardless of their race.78 As dimensions of white experience in particular, they operate as implicit, nonconscious presumptions and expectations that form the background for viewing narrative fiction films. For white viewers, this co-text is part of what Smith calls their “automatized” or ““teferentially transparent belief-schemata, which here I take to form a crucially important and racially inflected ground for understanding and empathizing with white characters.’ This system of beliefs, values, emotional responses, and so on amounts to a set of readily available, albeit largely unconscious, cultural assumptions concerning what it is to be white that have been implicitly built into much Western visual media like film.

Because white viewers are rarely called on to imagine their whiteness from the outside, they tend to have difficulty looking at it critically. This circumstance of rarely having their back- ground beliefs put to the test means that many

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white viewers find it hard to question or give up their racial allegiances, even to characters like Sal. In fact, they resist not empathizing with him and seeing him from a nonwhite perspec- tive. Unlike nonwhite viewers, who, often out of necessity, develop a critical sense of race or double consciousness merely to function and survive in cultures like America’s, most white viewers lack the cognitive tools that would allow them to recognize and question the typi- cally presumed cinematic viewpoint of white- ness. Their life experience as well as their viewing experience are such that they ordinarily have neither opportunity nor need to develop such forms of cognition. Thus, when confronted with narratives that call for them to utilize such cognitive forms or to incorporate new information concerning them, they may react in confused or myopic ways. They resist the possibility of race being an issue and overlook crucial pieces of information that would require them to revise their typical ways of thinking about race because their previous experience has prepared them cognitively neither for the possibility of changing their standard ways of thinking nor for properly incorporating such information.

Clearly, it is not that such audience members are logically incapable of doing so, but rather that given their strongly ingrained and rein- forced “initial schema” for conceptualizing race, there is little or no cognitive space for per- ceiving certain crucial details offered by Lee’s narrative. Were this flaw pointed out and explained to them, no doubt many audience members would modify their viewing stance toward race and seek to properly absorb the crit- ical points advanced. From a cognitive perspec- tive, this epistemological limitation should not be particularly surprising; as E. H. Gombrich noted decades ago, sometimes when our initial belief schemata for art works “have no provi- sions for certain kinds of information... it is just too bad for the information.”?° We simply lack the requisite tools for absorbing it, although with some conceptual assistance we could make the necessary changes.

Because many whites may easily live lives oblivious to how matters of race have had and continue to have an impact on their lives, it is quite possible for them to wholeheartedly embrace the belief that race is no longer a major

astaar] sHOWUIOD aANwaID a[gea![dde ayn Aq poUIBAOE aw sa[IIW YO ‘asn jo sana sop ArT aUIUD AaTIA4, Ho (SUORIPUOS-puR-swLay NOS Kali ATEAGHaUITUO//-sdny) SHORIPUCD pue sUBaL BHR 99g [ZZOZ/OI OE] WO ArEIGNT OULU AaLLAA WILENSMY aUEIYIED [PUONEN OY WHN Aq X°0EZ00 9007 6ZSE-1Z00 SI LTO Mopruos karan Kreaquaurjuo;csdny wox papeojumog ‘| ‘9007 ‘SkZIOFSI 72

factor in anyone’s existence. This de-racialized outlook is one version of the cognitive insensi- tivity stressed in the work of Hill, Boxill, Jones, Mills, Gordon, and others.*! As they point out, absent from such an outlook is a sense that race could be of any major importance in human life experience. Those who believe otherwise, by contrast, appear to be paranoid, morbidly focused on the past, or otherwise psychologi- cally impaired.

When watching films, then, many white viewers may strongly resist the invitation to reconsider their racial allegiances because, from their perspective, such a reconsideration does not make sense. It flouts a system of beliefs, values, and emotional responses presupposed by their everyday lives as well as their typical film viewing and would require a fundamental upheaval in their overall belief-schemata if those elements needed to be substantially revised or abandoned. Such an invitation asks them to consider as a problem something that they believe to have been resolved long ago. To accommodate a character like Sal and make the least disruptive changes in their system of belief—which unconsciously presupposes aspects of white advantage and power—trather than seeing Sal as a sympathetic racist charac- ter, they view him as an empathetic and morally good character. The hateful, bigoted dimensions of his racist beliefs and actions drop out; these aspects of his character are seen as not really racist. Perhaps for some viewers, these matters are explained away as an accurate reflection on “how things are” with respect to nonwhites and are therefore not thought to be racist because they are thought to be true, alluding back to explicit racial hierarchies of times gone by. More frequently, however, such viewers explain away Sal’s racist actions at the end of the film as not truly representative of his char- acter. Instead, his actions are seen as an aberra- tion, an exception to his overall good character. Many white viewers thus empathize with Sal and do not understand him as a “good-bad” moral alloy, but simply as a morally good char- acter who is trying to do the right thing—an “amalgam,” in Smith’s terminology.** He becomes a good person who does a bad thing, or a rational person defeated by an irrational world, as some reviewers described him, a char- acter who is not racist but through a bad moral

Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy

choice toward the end of the narrative is unfortunately complicit in a racial tragedy that culminates in a horrifying murder? Such explanations of the character fit better into their existing schemata for viewing racial matters on film as well as in life than do alternative expla- nations, such as that Sal is a sympathetic racist.

A major task facing viewers of Do the Right Thing is that of constructing Sal such that his actions, beliefs, and characteristics fit together coherently.*+ However, white racial allegiances can distort this process in such a way that Sal’s racism may seem peripheral or temporary rather than central and ongoing. An ignorance of the fundamental role race plays in currently exist- ing versions of human _ identity—especially white identity, as explained by the philosophers noted above—may prevent viewers from seeing racism’s centrality to Sal’s character. Again, the monocular nature of white racial consciousness may well prevent viewers from constructing Sal’s character in a way that coherently assem- bles his actions, beliefs, and primary character- istics.

A careful examination of the film, however, indicates that such an approach would be to misunderstand Sal as the narrative presents him. A variety of cues provide ample support for the idea that the film directly addresses the matter of anti-black racism at the core of Sal’s charac- ter and militates against the interpretation that Sal is merely the victim of a bad moral choice. In closely watching the scene depicting the con- frontation between him, Raheem, and Buggin’ Out, for example, audiences may detect Lee sig- naling to the audience that the issue of racism will be explicitly raised. As Buggin’ Out and his associates stand in the doorway of Sal’s, one hears on the soundtrack Raheem’s boom box playing once again Public Enemy’s song “Fight the Power.” Specifically, the lines sung by Chuck D. blast forth, observing that “Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me... a straight-out racist sucker; it’s simple and plain.” The function of the music in referring to Elvis Presley, who appropriated from black culture the music, clothes, and movements that origi- nally made him famous, is to foreshadow what will be presented as the scene unfolds—namely, that issues of race that normally remain hidden will be brought to the surface and scrutinized. In other words, the music operates as a textual

astaar] sHOWUIOD aANwaID a[gea![dde ayn Aq poUIBAOE aw sa[IIW YO ‘asn jo sana sop ArT aUIUD AaTIA4, Ho (SUORIPUOS-puR-swLay NOS Kali ATEAGHaUITUO//-sdny) SHORIPUCD pue sUBaL BHR 99g [ZZOZ/OI OE] WO ArEIGNT OULU AaLLAA WILENSMY aUEIYIED [PUONEN OY WHN Aq X°0EZ00 9007 6ZSE-1Z00 SI LTO Mopruos karan Kreaquaurjuo;csdny wox papeojumog ‘| ‘9007 ‘SkZIOFSI Flory Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist

as well as a narrative prompt employed by Lee to encourage viewers to imagine that the sequence to follow will address anti-black rac- ism.*° Moreover, during the sequence itself Sal’s insults to blacks are underscored by other characters repeating them indignantly and resentfully. Sal’s initial racializing of the incid- ent through the use of the terms “jungle music” and “Africa” to denigrate Raheem’s choice of acoustic accompaniment is explicitly noted by Buggin’ Out, who argues that such terms are irrelevant regarding what pictures should hang on the wall of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria. “Why it got to be about jungle music? Why it got to be about Africa? It’s about them fucking pictures!” Buggin’ Out doggedly protests, refusing to let Sal get off the subject. Similarly, Sal’s use of the term ‘nigger’ is repeated indignantly and resentfully by the group of teenagers waiting for one last slice before the pizzeria closes. Lastly, after Sal has smashed Raheem’s boom box, he looks its erstwhile owner in the eye and unapologetically declares, “I just killed your fucking radio.” By explicitly stating that he has destroyed the source of the “jungle music,” the origin of the unwanted “African” melodic pres- ence, as well as Raheem’s pride, joy, and sense of identity, Sal underlines his own violently imposed and racially inflected dominance.

Perhaps most damning of all, however, is Sal’s immediate reaction to Raheem’s death. With the eyes of the entire community looking to him for some sort of appropriate response, Sal can think of nothing better to say than the tired old saw, “You do what you gotta do,” as if he had just stepped out of some John Wayne movie, rather than offering any hint of an apol- ogy or regret for his complicity in the events that led to Raheem’s death. Sal’s response self- servingly portrays his violent destruction of Raheem’s boom box as justified, as the best and most appropriate reaction to the situation, given the circumstances. His listeners in front of the pizzeria shout him down in anger and resent- ment at the outrageousness of such a stance. Getting Raheem to turn down his boom box did not require Sal to destroy it, then rub his tri- umph in with a humiliating remark. Plus, in no way does Sal’s alleged justification of his actions speak to the events that ensued, specifi- cally, Raheem’s murder at the hands of the police.

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As much as any other factor, Sal’s breath- taking callousness at this point of the narrative in seeking to exonerate himself and unfairly justify his actions as appropriate brings on the riot that follows. His moral insensitivity is at least threefold. First, Sal lacks an understanding of the racial issues involved in his own response to the confrontation between himself, Raheem, and Buggin’ Out. Second, he does not grasp the racial dimension of Raheem’s death by means of the famous “choke hold” that urban police forces long argued affected African Americans more lethally than whites. Third, his overall lack of compassion over Raheem’s death sparks the neighborhood’s revulsion, which surprises him to such an extent that he has no further response except to exclaim, “What'd I do?” and yell for the crowd not to destroy his business. In this way the narrative shows that Sal values his property over Raheem’s life. All these factors mix and combust to the point that community members lose control and riot, burning and gut- ting the pizzeria in an angry riposte to Sal’s racial and moral callousness.*’

Spike Lee foreshadows Sal’s subtly racist character earlier in the narrative as well. When describing to his openly racist son Pino (John Turturro) why they cannot move their business from the African-American neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant to their own Italian-Ameri- can neighborhood of Bensonhurst, Sal refers to the community’s residents as “these people,” thereby using language that distances himself from them, that “others” them. Earlier still in the narrative, when Buggin’ Out first questions the absence of African Americans on the “Wall of Fame” in Sal’s restaurant (“Hey Sal, how come you got no brothers up on the Wall here?”) and suggests that Sal put up pictures of Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, or even Michael Jordan because African Americans are the mainstay of the business, Sal ridicules the black vernacular use of the term “brother,” scorning it so maliciously that even his mild-mannered, passive son Vito (Richard Edson) tells him, “Take it easy, Pop.” A moment later Sal threat- ens Buggin’ Out with the same baseball bat that he eventually uses to destroy Raheem’s radio. We should note that, particularly during the late 1980s in New York City, baseball bats were symbolic of white on black violence due to their use in a number of racist incidents involving

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whites beating blacks for being in the wrong neighborhood, being there at the wrong time, dating the wrong (that is white) girl, and so on28

After Sal commands the expulsion of Bug- gin’ Out from the pizzeria for suggesting that the Wall of Fame might display famous people of color, Sal’s delivery person Mookie (Spike Lee) defends Buggin’ Out’s freedom of expres- sion by declaring: “People are free to do what- ever the hell they want to do.” To this very typical American declaration of freedom, Sal replies, “What ‘free’? What the hell are you talking about, ‘free’? ‘Free’? There is no ‘free’ here. What—I’m the boss. No freedom. I’m the boss.” For Sal, the application of freedom has limited scope. Although he couches his response in the terms of a businessman setting the rules for frequenting his establishment, because of other factors—primarily, the racial one that Sal and his sons are virtually the only whites consistently in the neighborhood and his customers are almost exclusively nonwhites—it amounts to saying that in his establishment only white Americans like himself may exercise freedom of expression, not his African-Ameri- can patrons. They, in contrast, must abide by his (the white man’s) rules, dictates, and desires. For African Americans then, there is no free- dom inside the confines of Sal’s Famous Pizze- ria. Sal is the boss. No freedom. As Guerrero notes, “Sal is the congenial and sometimes con- tentious, but always paternal, head of what amounts to a pizza plantation, a colonial outpost in native territory.”°?

Given these redundant narrative cues, I would argue that utilizing the concepts of racial allegiance and the sympathetic racist help to make better sense of the character Sal in Do the Right Thing than other possible interpretational strategies because such an analysis coheres more completely with what the film actually presents, even if it does not cohere with typical white presumptions regarding race. Seeing Sal as a good-bad character, an alloy who possesses both positive moral traits as well as negative ones, synthesizes his character much more con- sistently and comprehensively than competing possibilities. This narrative figure coheres better if one attributes to him a racist character, even if he is also sympathetic in other ways, than if one seeks to explain away his actions late in the nar-

Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy

rative as that of a morally good character who makes a bad decision that leads him to do racist and immoral things, even though he himself is not racist.

Many white viewers tend to miss or overlook the details of Sal’s anti-black racism because these particulars do not easily fit into their pre- conceptions of where their moral allegiances should lie. They tend to more readily empathize with white characters like Sal than black char- acters like, say, Mookie or Raheem, who, in spite of his intimidating character and bullying ways, was nevertheless murdered by the police and therefore deserves something more than to be forgotten or valued as less important than the destruction of Sal’s business, which is what many white viewers did.*°

Some empathy for Sal, of course, must be attributed to nonracial factors. To present a nuanced sympathetic racist character for whom viewers might initially establish a solid favorable outlook, Lee makes him narratively central and treats him compassionately much of the time. This strategy carries with it a cer- tain risk—namely, that viewers will find it dif- ficult to judge him negatively as a racist because they know him well and have become firmly attached to his character. White viewers in particular might be inclined to overlook or excuse the depth of Sal’s wrongdoing because their attachment to the character—based on both racial and nonracial elements of the narra- tive—is too powerful. On the other hand, it should be noted that Lee counterbalances this possibility by making the film an ensemble piece. The story focuses not just on Sal, but on the whole neighborhood, including numerous African-American characters who receive significant screen time, such as Mookie, Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), and Mother Sister (Ruby Dee). I would argue that this narrative counter- balancing aims to keep viewers from investing themselves too heavily in Sal by presenting other, nonwhite characters with whom viewers might also ally themselves. Of course, these other character allegiances may be partly or even wholly blocked by racial factors as well, but one can see that from the viewpoint of narrative construction, these figures operate to spread out audience allegiance rather than investing it in just one central character such as Sal.

astaar] sHOWUIOD aANwaID a[gea![dde ayn Aq poUIBAOE aw sa[IIW YO ‘asn jo sana sop ArT aUIUD AaTIA4, Ho (SUORIPUOS-puR-swLay NOS Kali ATEAGHaUITUO//-sdny) SHORIPUCD pue sUBaL BHR 99g [ZZOZ/OI OE] WO ArEIGNT OULU AaLLAA WILENSMY aUEIYIED [PUONEN OY WHN Aq X°0EZ00 9007 6ZSE-1Z00 SI LTO Mopruos karan Kreaquaurjuo;csdny wox papeojumog ‘| ‘9007 ‘SkZIOFSI Flory Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist

From the point of view of epistemology, white viewers may resist developing a critical distance from Sal and instead find ways to explain his actions that downplay or eliminate the matter of racism as constituent of his character. Rather than questioning their own deep-seated habits of judgment and imagining whiteness from the outside, as the narrative encourages them to do, they find fault in the narrative’s inconsistency with their current, racially influenced beliefs and expectations. In this sense, the pull of empathy for Sal, the pull of white racial allegiance, is too strong for many white viewers to overcome and begin reexamining their habits of moral judgment. For these viewers, it seems less disruptive cogni- tively and emotionally to ignore or leave aside certain uncomfortable details in the narrative than to substantially change their belief- schemata—the narrative’s co-text—to accom- modate those details. Rather than working to develop a rudimentary white racial double con- sciousness, many viewers choose to embrace their already existing white single conscious- ness and use it as best they can to understand the film’s narrative, even if that white-privilege- influenced perspective requires them to ignore certain clearly presented details and can only poorly explain others. If Gombrich has accu- rately identified our typical use of “initial sche- mata” in understanding visual artworks, these narrative details would be precisely the ones that white viewers would tend to overlook in any case, given the cognitive background from which they work. Whites typically lack sensitiv- ity to the importance of these features because they tend not to see race as cognitively import- ant in the sorts of situations presented by the film. Thus Do the Right Thing tends to come up short when measured by means of such an inter- pretive stance.

This problem of cognitive insensitivity may be further clarified by means of Janine Jones’s analysis of empathetic impairment in goodwill whites. Jones argues that if whites—even whites of moral goodwill and in possession of the desire not to be racist—are unable to detect the cognitive importance of race in situations where anti-black racism impinges on African Americans in day-to-day interactions with whites (such as those depicted in Do the Right Thing), then they will also be impaired and

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perhaps even unable to analogize from their own circumstances to those of African Ameri- cans. The construction of analogy between white and black experience, which would be critical to any sort of successful empathizing here, breaks down because certain crucial ele- ments of the former experience are seen as strongly disanalogous to the latter. White view- ers may empathize incorrectly or even not at all with black characters, and therefore misunder- stand the situations and outlooks of African- American characters. Empathy, Jones points out, requires being able to produce an accurate system of mapping between another person’s life and some aspect of our own. Empathic understanding thus begins with an appreciation of the other person’s situation.*! If that situation is not well appreciated or understood, then empathy will go awry or fail to occur.

This failure of “mental simulation” also makes clear why many whites fail to see Sal from what is for them the acentral, African- American perspective offered by Spike Lee’s film.” They empathize with Sal because they fail to grasp the importance of certain details that the narrative presents to them—namely, the way his actions and statements build up to a kind of subtle, mostly nonconscious racism that is a part of his character, as opposed to being attributable to a single bad decision or two. They empathize with him, even though Lee indicates time and again through narrative cues that they should ultimately want to distance and qualify their attitude toward Sal. The details of Sal’s character are meant to operate cumula- tively as signals to mitigate ultimate viewer empathy for him, even if the narrative to some extent courted that imaginative stance toward him earlier. Lee urges viewers to distance them- selves from Sal by the film’s end and look at his character critically, instead of embracing him as someone close to their hearts. Again, nonwhite viewers, who typically possess a more finely tuned racial awareness, tend to see this sugges- tion much more clearly, but it is by no means beyond the cognitive capacities of whites to develop this sharper racial awareness. It is just that socially and culturally, such an awareness is not encouraged in white viewers. Rather, as Dyer argues, Western visual media tend to reinforce presumptions of whiteness as the norm, even to the extent that racial whiteness

astaar] sHOWUIOD aANwaID a[gea![dde ayn Aq poUIBAOE aw sa[IIW YO ‘asn jo sana sop ArT aUIUD AaTIA4, Ho (SUORIPUOS-puR-swLay NOS Kali ATEAGHaUITUO//-sdny) SHORIPUCD pue sUBaL BHR 99g [ZZOZ/OI OE] WO ArEIGNT OULU AaLLAA WILENSMY aUEIYIED [PUONEN OY WHN Aq X°0EZ00 9007 6ZSE-1Z00 SI LTO Mopruos karan Kreaquaurjuo;csdny wox papeojumog ‘| ‘9007 ‘SkZIOFSI 76

functions as the assumed standpoint from which to perceive popular film narrative. The typical viewer is presumed to be white or to at least have a full working grasp of what it is to engage films from a white perspective.

A further way to characterize this problem of audience asymmetry with respect to responses involving race is by comparing it to an example analyzed at length by Jones. She builds much of her case around the divergent ways in which many whites viewed the videotapes of the Rod- ney King beating on the one hand, and the attack on Reginald Denny on the other. Infa- mously, King, an African American, was stopped in 1991 for a traffic violation by the LAPD and was severely beaten by several police officers using riot batons. Denny, a white truck driver, was pulled from his rig by several black youths who used bricks and other objects to beat him during the riots that followed more than a year later in the wake of those same police officers being found not guilty of assault- ing King. Both men were hospitalized for extended periods and suffer from permanent disabilities as a result of their injuries. Both incidents were also secretly videotaped. What Jones noted was that in viewing the videotapes of these incidents, whites did not react in the same way toward both individuals, in spite of the similarity of their situations. As one white professor of law who viewed the tapes put it: “‘For King I felt sympathy; for Denny, empathy.’”44

I would argue that the difference in response to the two cases here may be readily explained as one of racial allegiance. White viewers of the videotapes felt closer to the situation, possibil- ity, and overall experience of Denny than to that of King, even though both tapes depicted brutal beatings of helpless individuals by multiple attackers using clubs, bricks, and other blunt instruments. Constructing an appropriate expe- riential analog in the case of Denny came much more easily for most white viewers due to a shared experience of whiteness, an analog not extended in the case of King. White viewers’ racial commonality permitted a much more immediate response—empathy for Denny—as opposed to the more detached attitude of sym- pathy for King.

Like the allegiance that many white viewers felt while watching the videotape of Denny’s

Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy

beating, responses to Sal often seem to be based more on racial allegiance than on close attention to narrative details. Thus these audience mem- bers are more inclined to empathize with Sal than to distance themselves from his character. They ignore, miss, reject, or downplay the Afri- can-American perspective offered by Lee’s film in favor of another racially inflected one already embedded in their typical responses to popular film narratives, in spite of ample evidence that this latter perspective fails to fully explain many details presented in the narrative. At the same time, this aspect of the film allows us to see how it aims to trouble the viewer into making a closer examination of background assumptions concerning film viewing, race, and personal identity.

Tl. CRITICAL REFLECTION AND SYMPATHETIC RACISTS

By self-consciously depicting a character who is both sympathetic and racist—and goading his viewers to think about how it might be possible for such a character to be both at the same time—Spike Lee casts a critical eye on the assumptions that underlie white racial alle- giance. In this manner he hopes to move white audience members toward a more complex per- spective on race. I would further argue that through this provocation to have his viewers confront and reevaluate the racial presupposi- tions of their film viewing, Lee summons his audience members to think philosophically about race. By means of Do the Right Thing’s narrative and the character type of the sympa- thetic racist in particular, Lee encourages many of his white viewers to reflect on and devise a new belief schema for understanding race. In ways perhaps not unlike many students in intro- ductory philosophy courses, however, some white viewers resist this invitation because the prospect of replacing their old way of cognizing would call for them to perform too radical an epistemological revision, require too much of a change in their existing belief structures for them to feel comfortable exploring such a pos- sibility. At some level, perhaps they realize that such a re-examination and replacement of unquestioned background presumptions would not only concern their film viewing, but also an understanding of their own identities and

astaar] sHOWUIOD aANwaID a[gea![dde ayn Aq poUIBAOE aw sa[IIW YO ‘asn jo sana sop ArT aUIUD AaTIA4, Ho (SUORIPUOS-puR-swLay NOS Kali ATEAGHaUITUO//-sdny) SHORIPUCD pue sUBaL BHR 99g [ZZOZ/OI OE] WO ArEIGNT OULU AaLLAA WILENSMY aUEIYIED [PUONEN OY WHN Aq X°0EZ00 9007 6ZSE-1Z00 SI LTO Mopruos karan Kreaquaurjuo;csdny wox papeojumog ‘| ‘9007 ‘SkZIOFSI Flory Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist

humanity itself, thereby touching them at their core, so to speak.

As philosophers from Frantz Fanon to Mills have argued, our senses of personal identity in Western culture are strongly raced. For whites, however, this dimension of self-understanding is largely invisible and unacknowledged. To compel whites to recognize this invisibility, then, is a daunting and difficult task. Still, it is possible, and in fact many whites have done so, in film viewing as well as in their own senses of identity. But many others have not. Facilitating this possibility, which concerns cinematic as well as existential presuppositions, has guided Lee’s efforts, I would argue, to present and depict a sympathetic racist character like Sal. Through narrative characters like him, Lee encourages white viewers to look critically at their racialized sensibilities and assess what they see.

In this sense, Lee presents his viewers with a philosophical challenge: to evaluate the con- tents of their souls, so to speak, and gauge how those contents influence them to perceive mat- ters of race. This critical self-questioning was one of Socrates’s highest aspirations, as evi- denced in the Apology as well as dialogues with Euthyphro, Meno, Laches, and others. It has also inspired philosophers through the ages to the present day, such as Alexander Nehamas.* Socrates aspired to meet, both in his own case and that of others, the old Delphic injunction used as an epigraph for this essay. More recently, Noél Carroll has argued that Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) stages a debate meant to “afford the opportunity for the general audience to interrogate prevailing cultural views of the nature of human life by setting them forth in competition.” The Welles film is “similar in purpose to many philosophical dia- logues” because it seeks “to animate a debate” about human life and personal identity. In the same spirit, we may justifiably recognize Spike Lee as encouraging viewers to take up that sort of philosophical task regarding race through his construction of character and narrative in Do the Right Thing and other films. One could say, then, that Lee not only induces his white view- ers to do something Brechtian—that is, criti- cally distance themselves from certain characters and narrative situations in order to

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consider moral and political choices—but charges them with a properly philosophical task as well. By drawing them into a favorable stance toward Sal only to alienate them from his character by means of the realization that he is also fundamentally a racist, Lee has pro- duced a film that philosophizes, a film that calls on viewers to think philosophically about questions regarding race, identity, and cine- matic viewership. Through this narrative fig- ure, Lee urges viewers to critically reflect on their own senses of self, humanity, and per- sonal identity, which is a hallmark of most if not virtually all persuasive conceptions of phi- losophy.

In addition, Lee’s film offers indications regarding the proper shape that answers to such self-questioning might take. For example, having a fuller sense of the role race has played in the formation of one’s identity as well as one’s overall cognitive perspective is strongly implied as a better epistemological stance to take than one that does not possess these features. For all of Sal’s compassion and patience toward neigh- borhood members like Da Mayor or Smiley (Roger Guenveur Smith), his lack of racial self- awareness condemns him to incomprehension regarding much of what goes on around or even inside his pizzeria, and this incomprehension contributes significantly to his downfall. The film’s narrative thus suggests that having a greater racial awareness—a “double conscious- ness” about race, particularly for whites— would serve one better than lacking such a capacity. This attempt not only to pose but to shape fundamentally the answers to questions, to provide some sort of positive, in-depth con- tribution to the topic being discussed, is a fur- ther hallmark of many stronger senses of what counts as being philosophical, as this positive requirement implies that the film’s call for crit- ical reflection is solidly philosophical rather than merely social, psychological, or political.*° Some viewers may resist this invitation by means of alternative interpretative strategies but, as I have argued, the cost of that choice is failure to achieve full coherence in grasping characters and narratives like those presented in Do the Right Thing, to say nothing of the costs that such choices exact in one’s life or from the lives of one’s fellow human beings.*”

astaar] sHOWUIOD aANwaID a[gea![dde ayn Aq poUIBAOE aw sa[IIW YO ‘asn jo sana sop ArT aUIUD AaTIA4, Ho (SUORIPUOS-puR-swLay NOS Kali ATEAGHaUITUO//-sdny) SHORIPUCD pue sUBaL BHR 99g [ZZOZ/OI OE] WO ArEIGNT OULU AaLLAA WILENSMY aUEIYIED [PUONEN OY WHN Aq X°0EZ00 9007 6ZSE-1Z00 SI LTO Mopruos karan Kreaquaurjuo;csdny wox papeojumog ‘| ‘9007 ‘SkZIOFSI 78

DAN FLORY

Department of History and Philosophy Montana State University

Bozeman, Montana 59717

USA

INTERNET: dflory @montana.edu

1. Plato, Phaedrus 229e-230a, in Plato: the Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 478. See also W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greeks and Their Gods (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), pp. 183-184.

2. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 1-2.

3. See Dyer, White, especially pp. 70-144.

4. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Cornell Uni- versity Press, 1997), especially pp. 53-62, and Lewis R. Gordon, “Critical Reflections on Three Popular Tropes in the Study of Whiteness,” in What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, ed. George Yancy (New York: Routledge, 2004), especially pp. 175-176, 181-182.

5. See, for example, Charles W. Mills, The Racial Con- tract, especially pp. 17-19, 91-109, and Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Phi- losophy and the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 22-26, 38ff. See also Peg O’Connor, Oppression and Responsibility: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Social Practices and Moral Theory (Pemn State University Press, 2002), especially pp. 1-59, 128-131.

6. The idea of a racial allegiance was suggested to me by one of my students, Calvin Selvey.

7. Douglas Kellner, “Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics in the Films of Spike Lee,” in Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” ed. Mark A. Reid (New York: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1997), p. 75, and Bertholt Brecht, Brecht on The- atre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1962), pp. 23, 101.

8. See Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 34; Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1985), especially pp. 64-67; Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), especially pp. 77-79; Alex Neill, “Empathy and (Film) Fiction,” in Post-Theory, ed. David Bordwell and Noél Carroll (University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp. 179-180; Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 235-236.

9. For more on the distinction between central and acentral imagining, see Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), especially pp. 36-38; Richard Wollheim, On Art and the Mind (Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 58ff, and The Thread of Life (Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 73ff; Noél Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 88-96; Smith, Engaging Characters, pp. 76ff.

10. The claim that modern personal identity is intimately linked to race has been argued for by philosophers at least since Frantz Fanon. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White

Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy

Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), pp. 109-140; Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man; O’Connor, Oppression and Responsibility, Mills, The Racial Contract.

11. Thomas E. Hill Jr. and Bernard Boxill, “Kant and Race,” in Race and Racism, ed. Bernard Boxill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 469-470; Janine Jones, “The Impairment of Empathy in Goodwill Whites for Afri- can Americans,” in What White Looks Like, pp. 65-86. Mills also notes this problem of empathic impairment; see The Racial Contract, p. 95.

12. Smith, Engaging Characters, pp. 209ff; “Gangsters, Cannibals, Aesthetes, or Apparently Perverse Allegiances,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Johns Hopkins Univer- sity Press, 1999), especially pp. 223ff.

13. Smith, “Gangsters, Cannibals, Aesthetes,” p. 228.

14. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet, 1969), p. 45.

15. Linda Martin Alcoff, “What Should White People Do?” Hypatia 13 (1998): 24-25.

16. For more on the history and legacy of the racialized existence of blacks, see Mills, The Racial Contract, espe- cially pp. 81-89, 109-120.

17. See Emmanuel C. Eze, Achieving Our Humanity: The Idea of a Postracial Future (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 27, as well as some of the title cards in D. W. Grif- fith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915)! Some in the abolitionist movement might be understood in this way as well; see Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader, ed. Mason Low- ance (New York: Penguin, 2000).

18. Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Temple University Press, 1993), p. 1.

19. For essays that argue implicitly for the use of such characters in Clockers, Summer of Sam, and director Carl Franklin’s One False Move (1992), see my “Black on White: Film Noir and the Epistemology of Race in Recent African American Cinema,” Journal of Social Philosophy 31 (2000): 82-116, especially 92-94, 101-104, and “The Epistemology of Race and Black American Film Noir: Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam as Lynching Parable,” in Film and Knowledge: Essays on the Integration of Images and ideas, ed. Kevin Stoehr (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), pp. 174-190. As Smith notes, the original source for the concept of the “good-bad” character is Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites, The Movies: A Psychological Study (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950), pp. 20ff.

20. Berys Gaut, “Film Authorship and Collaboration,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 149-174. Page numbers in this paragraph refer to this essay.

21. See, for example, Vincent Canby, “Spike Lee Tack- les Racism in Do the Right Thing,” New York Times, June 30, 1989, sec. C16; “Spike Lee Raises the Movies’ Black Voice,” New York Times, May 28, 1989, p. 14; Joe Klein, “Spiked? Dinkins and Do the Right Thing,” New York Magazine, June 26, 1989, 14-15.

22. See, for example, Spike Lee, with Lisa Jones, Do the Right Thing: A Spike Lee Joint (New York: Fireside, 1989), p. 45, and Marlaine Glicksman, “Spike Lee’s Bed-Stuy BBQ,” reprinted in Spike Lee: Interviews, ed. Cynthia Fuchs (University of Mississippi Press, 2002), pp. 18-19. Gaut notes that Lee also makes this point during a read

astaar] sHOWUIOD aANwaID a[gea![dde ayn Aq poUIBAOE aw sa[IIW YO ‘asn jo sana sop ArT aUIUD AaTIA4, Ho (SUORIPUOS-puR-swLay NOS Kali ATEAGHaUITUO//-sdny) SHORIPUCD pue sUBaL BHR 99g [ZZOZ/OI OE] WO ArEIGNT OULU AaLLAA WILENSMY aUEIYIED [PUONEN OY WHN Aq X°0EZ00 9007 6ZSE-1Z00 SI LTO Mopruos karan Kreaquaurjuo;csdny wox papeojumog ‘| ‘9007 ‘SkZIOFSI Flory Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist

through of the script with Aiello in director St. Clair Bourne’s documentary Making “Do the Right Thing” (1989); Gaut, “Film Authorship and Collaboration,” p. 166.

23. Gaut, “Film Authorship and Collaboration,” p. 166; see also Thomas Doherty, review of Do the Right Thing, Film Quarterly 43 (1989): 39.

24. Ed Guerrero, Do the Right Thing (London: BFI Pub- lishing, 2001), p. 75.

25. Clyde Taylor, The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aes- thetic Contract—Film and Literature (Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 269.

26. See, for example, Richard Corliss, “Hot Time in Bed-Stuy Tonight,” Time 134 (1989): 62; Murray Kempton, “The Pizza Is Burning!” New York Review of Books, September 28, 1989, 37; Stanley Kauffmann, “Do the Right Thing,” The New Republic 201 (1989): 25.

27. See Mills, The Racial Contract, especially pp. 140, 91-109; Eze, Achieving Our Humanity.

28. Smith, Engaging Characters, p. 194.

29. Ibid.

30. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Hlusion: A Study in the Psy- chology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 73. This point is also noted in Smith, Engaging Characters, p. 121.

31. See Hill and Boxill, “Kant and Race,” pp. 469-470; Jones, “The Impairment of Empathy in Goodwill Whites for African Americans”; Mills, The Racial Contract, Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man; O’ Connor, Oppres- sion and Responsibility, Amold Farr, “Whiteness Visible: Enlightenment Racism and the Structure of Racialized Con- sciousness,” in What White Looks Like, pp. 143-158.

32. Smith, Engaging Characters, p. 203.

33. See Corliss, “Hot Time in Bed-Stuy Tonight”; Kempton, “The Pizza Is Burning!”

34. For more on the viewer’s need to construct charac- ters in ways that make sense of them as fictional agents, see Smith, Engaging Characters, especially pp. 120ff.

35. See, for example, Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 191-192; Ray Pratt, Rhythm and Resistance: Explorations in the Political Uses of Popular Music (New York: Praeger, 1990), pp. 135-139; Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: the Rise of Elvis Presley (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), especially pp. 3-54.

36. I borrow here the idea of a textual prompt from Smith’s “Imagining from the Inside,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, p. 417.

37. It is worth noting that even after the riot, when Mookie (Spike Lee) returns the next morning to receive his week’s pay, Sal remains unapologetic and defensive about his role in Raheem’s death. Although he acknowledges that Raheem is dead (“I was there, remember?”), he blames Raheem’s death entirely on Buggin’ Out (“He’s dead because of his buddy”), rather than seeing himself as being in any way complicit.

38. Baseball bats are negatively charged symbols of anti- black racism due to incidents in the New York City neigh- borhoods of Bensonhurst and Howard Beach in the late 1980s. Young black men in these incidents were either beaten to death or threatened with bats in ways that led to their death. See Lee and Jones, Do the Right Thing: A Spike Lee Joint, pp. 32-33, 46; S. Craig Watkins, Representing:

79

Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 157, 270, n.43.

39. Guerrero, Do the Right Thing, p. 35.

40. See, for example, David Denby, “He’s Gotta Have It,” New York Magazine, June 26, 1989, 53-54; Klein, “Spiked? Dinkins and Do the Right Thing.”

41. Jones, “The Impairment of Empathy in Goodwill Whites for African Americans,” p. 71.

42. I use the term ‘mental simulation’ here with some reservations because, although I think that work by Robert Gordon, Gregory Currie, and others on this concept has greatly increased our knowledge of the workings of the mind in general and empathy in particular—especially with respect to literary fiction and film—I am not yet ready to embrace the claim that when we imagine, empathize, and so on, we run our belief systems “off-line” and operate as if our brains were just like computers, as in Currie’s Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), especially pp. 141-197. I find these descriptions of how human minds work like computers to be too literal to feel com- fortable endorsing them. For a fuller argument detailing reservations about mental simulation, see Noél Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), especially pp. 342-356.

43. Cited in Jones, “The Impairment of Empathy in Goodwill Whites for African Americans,” p. 75. As she notes, her analysis is based on Joe R. Feagin, Hernan Vera, and Pinar Batur, White Racism, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 117-151, especially pp. 141-142. (It should also be noted that the white professor of law quoted here, David B. Oppenheimer, was sharply critical of his own responses to these images. His position is actually consistent with the one I outline. See his “The Movement from Sympa- thy to Empathy, Through Fear; The Beatings of Rodney King and Reginald Denny Provoke Differing Emotions but Similar Racial Concerns,” The Recorder June 9 (1992): 14.)

44. See Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (University of California Press, 1998), especially pp. 40, 106, 185-188.

45. Noél Carroll, “Interpreting Citizen Kane,” Persist- ence of Vision 7 (1989): 51-61, reprinted in Interpreting the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 163.

46. For discussion of philosophy’s capacities and whether film can mimic them, see Stephen Mulhall, On Film (New York: Routledge, 2002), especially pp. 1-10; Julian Baggini, “Alien Ways of Thinking: Mulhall’s On Film,” Film-Philosophy 7 (2003), available at <http:// www .film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n24baggini>; Mul- hall, “Ways of Thinking: A Response to Andersen and Baggini,” Film-Philosophy 7 (2003), available at <http:// www .film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n25mulhall>.

47. An early version of this work was presented at the “Narration, Imagination, and Emotion in the Moving Image Media” conference sponsored by the Center for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, July 24, 2004. I thank audience members there, especially Lester Hunt, Amy Coplan, and Katherine Thomson-Jones, for comments and encouragement. I also thank Susan Kollin, Murray Smith, and Tom Wartenberg for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this essay.

astaar] sHOWUIOD aANwaID a[gea![dde ayn Aq poUIBAOE aw sa[IIW YO ‘asn jo sana sop ArT aUIUD AaTIA4, Ho (SUORIPUOS-puR-swLay NOS Kali ATEAGHaUITUO//-sdny) SHORIPUCD pue sUBaL BHR 99g [ZZOZ/OI OE] WO ArEIGNT OULU AaLLAA WILENSMY aUEIYIED [PUONEN OY WHN Aq X°0EZ00 9007 6ZSE-1Z00 SI LTO Mopruos karan Kreaquaurjuo;csdny wox papeojumog ‘| ‘9007 ‘SkZIOFSI 15406245, 2006, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ 10.1

/j.0021-8529.2006.00230.x by NHMRC National Cochrane Australia, Wiley Online Library on [30/10/2022]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use: OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License

[jesshughesdesign-blog]

A Close Reading of ‘When I have fears’ by John Keats

19th Century Romantic poet John Keats evokes fear and questioning of death and lost love within his first Shakespearean sonnet ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’. The poem allows Keats to address death from three individual perspectives: as the end of his own existence, as the passing of time running out before he can fulfill himself as a writer; and finally, as a loss of romantic and erotic love due to death. Allowing his reader insight into the poet’s internal struggle with his ideological change as a person as he reflects upon the futile nature of death itself, whilst also allowing the reader to reflect upon their own feelings towards death.

     Keats immediately addresses the question of death directly within his initial quatrain through the narrative voice. Our speaker within the poem, whom we can assume is Keats’ persona due to the use of first person pronoun ‘I’ (l.1), begins to consider a fear of his inevitable death. Keats’ expresses his fear of dying young within the first stanza, reflecting upon the natural cycle of life, and the production of the fields to produce something of value. Similarly, poetry is a fruitful outcome of the poets’ imagination, something which poets from the Romantic era valued highly. Keats uses the natural imagery of harvest to express the overflowing nature of his own imagination within the sonnet in lines 2-4.

Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain /

Before high-pilèd books, in charactery, /

Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain; /

Harvest imagery is introduced within the metonymic description of a pen which ‘has gleen’d my teeming brain’[1](l.2), allowing direct allusion of the harvest process through the abundance of crop ‘teeming’ and subsequently the harvest itself ‘gleen’d’. Keats continues to create a lexical set of abundance within the following lines, using lexis such as the pre-modifying adjectives ‘teeming’ and ‘rich’(l.3) and through the pre-modifying verbs ‘glean’d’ and ‘garners’(l.3). These key lexes are highlighted through the harsh guttural alliteration of ‘glean'd’ and ‘garners’ which serve to intensify the heightened pace of the poem. In itself, the metaphor of the harvest is a paradox, a device often used within Keats’ poetry; as the poet is a representation of the field, with his imagination like the grain being harvested, whereas the writer of poetry himself is also the harvester. Although historical context is not obvious when reading this sonnet, we can understand the period of great transition within 19th Century Britain, as the world was becoming more industrial, ‘a high romance’ may allude to Keats’ escapism back into earlier years and a more natural pre-industrial world. Keats’ use of naturalistic imagery grounds himself as a true poet of the Romantic era, due to his emphasis on the key elements of a Romantic poet; appreciation of the imagination, nature and poetry as an art form.

    The second way that fear presented is the fear of the passing of time running out before he can fulfil himself as a writer, as contextually for Keats we understand his fear of dying young due to a large majority of his personal family, such as his brother dying early due to Tuberculosis. The passing of time was immensely important to Keats himself, as he described himself within Sleep and Poetry[2] which he wrote a year prior to ‘When I have Fears’, in which Keats describes:

             “for ten years, that I may overwhelm/ Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed

                             / That my own soul has to itself decreed” (96–98, John Keats).    

 Keats had given himself 10 years in which he planned to perfect his poetry, however we now know that he suffered from a premature death that didn’t allow him to fulfil his mission. His yearning for life to fulfil himself as a writer is clearly presented within the poem using harvest imagery. Imagery of Harvest and abundance helps to build tension and pace, further reinforced through the elision of the verb ‘glean’d’, of which the missing letter reflects to the reader the quick pace which the poem had to be written, as he felt as though he was running out of time. The sonnets pace is further increased through his use of enjambment within the second stanza through the anaphoric repetition of the frontal conjunction ‘And think’, ‘And well’(l.7-9), the enjambment used throughout the poem clearly reflects the ongoing nature of time and the inevitability of death itself. It’s as though the poem itself was written in haste, as contextually, we understand that the poem itself was never given a title by Keats, instead the first line of the first stanza became the title, this alone reflects the inevitability of death itself and the time constraints Keats felt as a fear of dying young. Pace is also built within the sonnet using very close rhymes within the third quatrain, ‘hour, more, power, shore’(l.9-12) which creates clear emphasis on the ending of lines. Even the form of the third quatrain reflects the frantic need for more time, as it only has three and a half lines opposed to the traditional four-lined Shakespearean sonnet.

Keats expresses his fears of losing his beloved within lines 9-12 of the sonnet. As within the third stanza as ‘fair creature of an hour’ (l.9), using personification of time as he reflects upon the fact that his beloved is short-lasting and so is his love. Love is also called ‘The faery power…of unreflective love’ (l.11-12), his ideal love is ‘unreflecting’ combines a sense of both erotic attraction and innocent romance. This allows Keats to combine young attraction and lack of care for time ‘relish’ (l.11) which was a key thought in Keats mind as he believed that his precious time must be spent upon improving himself as a writer which he speaks about within Sleep and Poetry as he began to become aware of his limited time due to personal illness. Keats gives the reader two opposing attitudes towards love, as love to transform the world for the lovers themselves in ‘faery powers’, which the reader is able to understand that this fairy tale allusion is merely an illusion and that love involves our emotions rather than our thoughts with ‘unreflecting love’, which makes Keats ending statement appear more logical to the reader.

    Keats combines these three fears within his sonnet into ‘nothingness’ which allows him to destroy his own fears in the concluding couplet of his sonnet.

                       ‘Of unreflecting love- then on the shore

                           Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

                           Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.’

 Keats answers his own anxieties surrounding death within this closing three lines of the last stanza, he uses the natural imagery of the ‘shore’ at the end of the 12th line to create a more contemplative and thoughtful environment allowing himself to be lost within the sea. The shore is often used within poetry to indicate death (such as Donne’s ‘Hymn to God the Father’[3]). The sea could also be used as a representation of the whole ‘wide world’ (l.11), Keats’ use of alliteration here amplifies the vast and all-consuming nature of the sea. Imagery of the ocean runs throughout the last stanza is concluded through the final lexis, the verb ‘sink’, which serves to dispel the remaining fears that the sonnet draws up, as ‘love and fame’, his fear of losing his beloved and being able to establish himself as a writer, will become ‘nothingness’ through his death. This leaves the reader in a sense of contemplation upon whether it is worth dwelling upon fear of love and creative fulfilment in death, asserting the true unimportance of these things within his two and a half lines. As in the end, we are all ultimately alone in death.

 Within ‘When I have fears’ Keats compels readers to undergo a period of true self-reflection in regards to two integral factors of every life: fear and death.

[1] John Keats, ‘When I have fears’, in The Norton anthology of poetry, ed. by Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy, 5th edn (New York: Norton, W. W. & Company, 2005). P(906)

 [2] John Keats, ‘Sleep and Poetry’---, The Poetical works of John Keats ([n.p.]: Gloucester Art Press, 1986)

 [3] ‘Hymn to God the Father’ Bloom, Harold, John Donne, ed. by Prof. Harold Bloom (Albany, NY, United States: Chelsea House Publishers, 1998)

[hermanwatts]

Pulp Modern: TechNoir Special

Pulp Modern: TechNoir Special pulls the rug out from under the reader in the best possible way.

Scotch Rutherford serves as guest editor for this themed collection of darkly themed near future science-fiction stories.  None of that should surprise, given the title of the collection.  It’s all right there, just what it says on the tin, and then the authors pull a fast one by delivering stories heavily leavened with hope and optimism and renewal.  All too many authors these days mistake wallowing in the mud with serious chin-stroking intellect, and Scotch throws a middle finger at such pretensions by including stories that, while far from G-Rated family fare, typically turn away from the bleak nihilism so typical of those who seek to emulate the noir stylings.  It’s brave, and refreshing, and surprising.

While largely hopeful, this does remain a noir inspired collection, and the stories are not for those who prefer a light touch when it comes to sex and gore.  Many of the stories allow the camera to linger over the grittier aspects of sexual relations or take a moment to showcase the depths of violence to which men may sink in his depravity.  On the other hand, such moments never come across as cheap or gratuitous, in large measure because the stories do not neglect to also illustrate the price of such actions.  While it doesn’t always happen in a traditional, or legal, or even poetic way, justice exists in the world of Pulp Modern: Tech Noir.  That proves to a nice escape from the normal strictures of the genre.

So let’s look at the stories themselves:

C. W. Blackwell turns out the lights and shoves the reader into the deep end of noir with A Deviant Skein, the tale of an investigator hired by the world’s most tech-savvy billionaire to find a missing android who has been up to no good.  It can be hard to tell who the bad guys are in this one – humanity or his tools?  A fitting homage to Blade Runner, it checks all the technoir boxes, and in doing so frees up the rest of the collection to push the boundaries of the genre a little harder.

The Moderator, by Nils Gilbertson, takes a more digital route.  The investigator at the heart of this tale works as a moderator for the next generation of social media.  Placed on work restriction for a catastrophically bad moderator call, he learns of a guerilla organization piggy-backing on the media giant, and the hopeful result of his investigation provides the first clue that this collection isn’t your typical slurry of fatalism and anti-tech shrieking.

Tom Barlow gives us a different sort of hitman in Love in the Time of Silicone.  Called down to the local robo-whorehouse – yes, it’s that sort of collection – whose owner takes particular exception to the way one customer roughed up a robowhore.  The man wants revenge for the robot’s destruction for reasons that prove to be deeply human.  The hitman guides the man responsible to a just fate as dark as the genre demands, but one that allows just enough light to shine through the darkness.

Things get really strange in Angelique Fawns’ A Time To Forget.  Told from a multitude of points of view, it takes the opposite tack of the two preceding stories.  The end paints a grim future for humanity, but the path to reach that end follows a string of people both good and bad and indifferent.  The bad actors serve as stark contrast that allows the good ones to shine, and to serve as a driver for the indifferent to rise above themselves and become better people.  At its heart, the story highlights how much misery the world inflicts on itself through sheer callousness, and reminds us all of the multiplicative effects of kind acts.

 J.D. Graves takes us away from earth for the first time in the collection with, Three, Two, One Zebra-Stripe Shake-Off. The powers that be have dusted off the old trick of dealing with undesirables by shipping them off to penal colonies.  Our protagonist agrees to board one of the colony ships, in spite of the thorough brain-scrubbing by way of cultish indoctrination such a ticket requires.  His petty selfishness proves to carry a high price when the cult saddles him with a wife with secrets of her own.

We plunge back into the world of social media with Don Stoll’s Fifteen Minutes.  A treatise on the real cost of internet fame and the emptiness of fame earned through deceptive measures, it turns into a deadly game of survival for one girl who chooses the path of drama and hate-clicks.

Jo Perry puts the reader into the skin and thoughts of a robotic janitor in Lights Out.  The strange perspective turns the nature of the world in which the robo-janitor works into a mystery to be solved by the reader.  It is perhaps the crudest of the stories, and culminates with a revelation telegraphed by the full page art included with the story.

Walking Out by Zakariah Johnson again puts the protagonist in prison and on death row.  He moves from prisoner to guard to…well, the story is really one of identity and the lengths to which men go for money and to live variously through the experiences of others.  It’s a kind of tech-driven mistaken identity caper story filled with unsavory characters, and it ends the collection on a bit of a down note.

On the whole, this is a collection that takes risks, thumbs its nose at the prevailing wisdom of the rules of the technoir genre, and provides enough variety to satisfy any appetite.  The writing varies from serviceable to excellent, and the casual disregard for genre rules prevents these tales from falling into the same predictable pigeon holes and narrative cul-de-sacs that so many modern noir works blunder.  Even if not all of the stories appeal, you’re sure to add a new author or two to add to your “to read” pile. 

Pulp Modern: TechNoir Special published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[aion-rsa]

With Far Sector, N.K. Jemisin Gets a Turn in the Green Lantern Sandbox

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We talked to author N.K. Jemisin about diving into the world of Green Lantern, her favorite comic books, and why fanfiction matters.

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A three-time Hugo Award winner for her Broken Earth series, N.K. Jemisin is one of the most exciting and celebrated authors working in speculative fiction today. For the first time ever, Jemisin is working in the comic book medium, collaborating with artist Jamal Campbell on a new Green Lantern story that's part of Gerard Way's revived Young Animal imprint for DC.

The new series is called Far Sector, and it follows Sojourner "Jo" Mullen, a member of the Green Lantern Corps who is the sole protector of the City Enduring, a massive metropolis of 20 billion people countless lightyears from Earth.

read more: N.K. Jemisin's Fifth Season TV Series in Development at TNT

The City Enduring has maintained peace for over 500 years by stripping its citizens of of their ability to feel emotion. Therefore, murder and other forms of violent crime are virtually non-existent... until now.

We had the chance to catch up with Jemisin earlier this month at New York Comic Con. Here's what she had to tell us about diving into the world of Green Lantern...

Den of Geek: What your familiarity with Green Lantern before taking on the project?

Jemisin: Almost none. I watched the Justice League cartoon back in the day that had John Stewart as the main Green Lantern. And I mean I knew that Green Lantern was a popular superhero, but beyond that I really didn't understand very much about it. I knew there had been a movie; I didn't see the movie. I rode the Green Lantern ride at Six Flags. That's about all I knew.

That was the limit of it. So when Gerard Way asked me if I would be willing to write the Green Lantern comic, I said, "Look, I need to do some boning up on the lore and the literature," and so the first thing that they did was send me the big Geoff Johns compilations. I don't know if you've seen them, but it's like this big. All hard cover, and the first few years of the original Green Lantern storylines. Not the original, but of some of the most iconic Green Lantern storylines.

And so I was able to read through those. Of course I was able to jump on the various Wikis that exist out there, and then I began to realize that I was drowning in information, because Green Lantern continuity is like any other comic book continuity: there had been retcons, there are contradictions, and I had to try and find ways to resolve that. So, fortunately, with the the Far Sector comic, because it takes place outside of the normal Lantern system, so far away from Earth and all the other Lanterns. In some ways, I was in an isolated space where I can make things happen.

What kind of freedom did you have? Were there things that you did that they were like, "No, actually this contradicts something that already exists in canon," or did you really have pretty much free range to tell your story?

I mean, yeah, I had free range, but I wanted to fit within canon. I mean, there's no value for me in taking these stories so far away from its fanbase.

So the challenge is to make it fit into the continuity, even if it's not directly related. So,at some point, if this character proves popular, if the book proves popular, at some point, she may want to come back and meet the other Guardians ... the other Lanterns. She may move back to Earth, so I need that to be able to work if I do.

I'm curious if your background and presence as a fanfic author helped you in that process of diving into an already-existing narrative universe?

Yeah, effectively, I was writing fanfic—I love it!—except that I wasn't already a fan of this. So I mean it's professional fanfic, but we've seen that out there before. There's a long history of, effectively, fan works insisting within the literary fiction sphere.

Sherlock Holmes story, for example, or the Cthulhu Mythos, all of that is effectively fanfic. The challenge of it is you read the history, you make sure that you've got the canon down pat, and then once you've got that down pat, then you can riff on it.

So that was the idea.

Tell me about working with Jamal Campbell. What did it look like logistically, in terms of your process?

Well, logistically what it means is I gave him a phone call at the beginning of it and I haven't met him in person. So we're doing everything electronically. I write the scripts, we send the scripts to Jamal, Jamal sends us pages.

That's how it's been working, and then we talk back and forth about ... For example, I wanted to convey in this one particular scene that she feels like she's being disrespected. Can we add a little panel where she looks at a thing and gives it a side eye? Something like that.

Cool, and I don't know how much experience you have collaborating in that way while writing a story.

None. This is my first collaboration.

What's that been like?

I'm loving it, I really am. This is the first time, outside of fan art, this is the first time I've ever seen anyone put my stories or characters or anything that I've created to a visual form. I'm used to being able to see it in my head, but I've never had other people try and see it for me.

And he's got a good eye. He's been able to capture what I've been thinking, for the most part.

This story takes place in a city where people no longer have the ability to feel emotion. There are a lot of mainstream, especially female-centric superhero stories that have been commenting on emotion as power, or trying to do that in ways that I feel haven't been super nuanced or complex. I'm curious about that setting and what, if anything, you wanted to say about the strengths or limitations of emotionality or emotional intelligence.

Well, remember that Jo is a black woman, so there is a different nuance or a different variation on that problem that I feel like black women often have to deal with, which is them being treated as too angry, as if anger is dangerous or problematic in some way.

Even when we aren't angry, we're perceived as angry sometimes, and it gets to be a problem, and so Jo is in some cases going to have to deal with being the only emotional person in the room, and she can't get too emotional in her reactions to what she's seeing and what she's having to deal with.

When she starts working through bureaucracy and she expresses frustration with it, she's not going to be perceived as just an emotional woman. She's going to be perceived as a primitive human being. She's going to be perceived as a poor representation of her species, a poor representation of the Lanterns.

She can't get too emotional, so she's got to be able to solve these problems as the lone person in the room that's allowed to be this way, but also judged for being this way. And there's definitely commentary in it.

You're telling a frontier science fiction story of sorts...

A super high tech space society with near omniscient power. I don't know if that qualifies.

It is a high tech story, but Jo is the only Lantern there. She is the only person, as I said, who has emotions. She has to work with the local cops. She's got to form alliances and relationships with her local community and earn their respect in order to have any real power, cause even one person, no matter how powerful, is not going to be able to solve the problems of 20 billion people unless she gets some buy in from them.

Where there other graphic novels or comics that you looked to during this process?

Well, learning how to write, yes. I read The 2000 A.D. Script Book, which has art rendered pages alongside the script agents so you can see how the writer communicated with the artist or how the writer framed the scene and the artist chose to interpret that scene. So that helped me figure out comic writing format and how to do it.

Of course, I read Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, which was really helpful for helping me understand how storytelling changes in this medium. I've been a comics fan for quite some time, ranging across different media. I did superhero comics a lot when I was back in college, but it got super expensive and I was a poor college student, so I quit around that time.

I read a lot of Japanese manga for awhile. Lately, I have read more indie comics, like Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, Monstress by a Sana Takeda and Marjorie Liu. I'm a big fan of Kelly Sue DeConnick's work, so I've read a lot of comics more recently ... I mean I enjoy the format, I enjoy good storytelling in all of its forms, but lately I've been reading more superhero stuff.

I did already bring up fanfiction, but I have been asking the authors I'm talking to, especially after Archive of Our Own's Hugo win this summer, that fanfic has meant to them, if anything, both professionally and personally.

I mean, I'm not going to say I started out as a fanfic writer, cause I didn't, but fanfic helped me, I think, develop in a lot of ways, my storytelling. I've been writing fanfic basically since grad school, when I started writing it for stress relief, and really when I got access to the internet. That was back in the AOL days. I'm dating myself, and I continue to write it to this day.

It's a place, like a playground, where I can go and sort of write things that I feel like writing without having to worry about my professional fiction readers coming to scrutinize what I do, and I'm not going to tell anybody what fanfic write or what pseudonyms I use or any of that.

Yeah. What else are you working on that you can talk about?

Oh, well I've got a new novel coming out next year. It's called The City We Became. It is based on a short summary of mine in which the city of New York comes to life and develops an avatar, a human being, one single person who represents the spirit of the city.

Well, in the book, all of the boroughs come to life too, and so there's an avatar in Brooklyn, an avatar in Manhattan, and they all have basically magic powers that grant them the ability to protect the city, and they're protecting the city from basically Cthulhu.

It's not really Lovecraftian, and it's not really a Lovecraftian story, although I'd say it's in conversation with Lovecraft, but yes, there is a giant eldritch abomination that is not happy with New York right now and is trying its damndest to destroy the city, and that comes out in March.

Green Lantern: Far Sector comes out on November 13th. Find out more about N.K. Jemisin's work here.

Kayti Burt is a staff editor covering books, TV, movies, and fan culture at Den of Geek. Read more of her work here or follow her on Twitter @kaytiburt.

Read and download the Den of Geek NYCC 2019 Special Edition Magazine right here!

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Oct 21, 2019

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Wearing clothes that were not his own, Edgar Allan Poe was found delirious on the streets of Baltimore, "in great distress, and… in need of immediate assistance".

The death of Edgar Allan Poe on the 7th of October, 1849, has remained mysterious, the circumstances leading up to it are uncertain and the cause of death is disputed

170 years ago, today, 7th October 1849, and aged just 40, Edgar Allan Poe, the American writer, editor, and literary critic, died in Baltimore, Maryland. He is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre and is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. ... Poe's death has remained mysterious, the circumstances leading up to it are uncertain and the cause of death is disputed.

On September 27, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe left Richmond, Virginia, on his way home to New York City. No reliable evidence exists about Poe's whereabouts until a week later on October 3, when he was found delirious in Baltimore at Ryan's Tavern. A printer named Joseph W. Walker sent a letter requesting help from an acquaintance of Poe, Dr. Joseph E. Snodgrass. His letter reads as follows:

   Dear Sir—There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan's 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & he says he is acquainted with you, and I assure you, he is in need of immediate assistance. Yours, in haste, Jos. W. Walker

Snodgrass's first-hand account describes Poe's appearance as "repulsive", with unkempt hair, a haggard, unwashed face and "lusterless and vacant" eyes. His clothing, Snodgrass said, which included a dirty shirt but no vest and unpolished shoes, was worn and did not fit well. Dr. John Joseph Moran, who was Poe's attending physician, gives his own detailed account of Poe's appearance that day: "a stained faded, old bombazine coat, pantaloons of a similar character, a pair of worn-out shoes run down at the heels, and an old straw hat". Poe was never coherent long enough to explain how he came to be in this condition, and it is believed the clothes he was wearing were not his own, not least because wearing shabby clothes was out of character for Poe. Moran cared for Poe at the for-profit Washington College Hospital on Broadway and Fayette Street. He was denied any visitors and was confined in a prison-like room with barred windows in a section of the building reserved for drunk people. Poe is said to have repeatedly called out the name "Reynolds" on the night before his death, though no one has ever been able to identify the person to whom he referred. One possibility is that he was recalling an encounter with Jeremiah N. Reynolds, a newspaper editor and explorer who may have inspired the novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket When Moran told his patient that he would soon be enjoying the company of friends, Poe allegedly replied that, "The best thing his friend could do would be to blow out his brains with a pistol". In Poe's distressed state, he made reference to a wife in Richmond. He may have been delusional, thinking that his wife, Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe, was still alive, or he may have been referring to Sarah Elmira Royster, to whom he had recently proposed. He did not know what had happened to his trunk of belongings which, it transpired, had been left behind at the Swan Tavern in Richmond. Moran reported that Poe's final words were, "Lord, help my poor soul" before dying on October 7th, 1849.

All medical records and documents, including Poe's death certificate, have been lost, if they ever existed. The precise cause of Poe's death is disputed, but many theories exist. Many biographers have addressed the issue and reached different conclusions, ranging from Jeffrey Meyers' assertion that it was hypoglycemia to John Evangelist Walsh's conspiratorial murder plot theory.

Snodgrass was convinced that Poe died from alcoholism and did a great deal to popularize this idea, however his writings on the topic have been proven untrustworthy. Moran contradicted Snodgrass by stating in his own 1885 account that Poe did not die under the effect of any intoxicant. Moran claimed that Poe "had not the slightest odor of liquor upon his breath or person".

Numerous other causes of death have been proposed over the years, including several forms of rare brain disease or a brain tumor, diabetes, various types of enzyme deficiency, syphilis, apoplexy, delirium tremens, epilepsy and meningeal inflammation. Cholera has also been suggested. Poe had passed through Philadelphia in early 1849 during a cholera epidemic. More recently, analysis suggesting that Poe's death resulted from rabies has been presented.

This is my colourised version of the Daguerreotype "Annie", given to Poe's friend Mrs. Annie L. Richmond, and probably taken in June 1849

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[chicagoindiecritics]

New from Kevin Wozniak on Kevflix: What’s Streaming This Month? – September

Here are my picks for the movies coming to Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, Disney+, Criterion Channel, and HBOMax in September.  This month offers up many unique choices, from original films to Hollywood classics.

          NETFLIX

Full list of everything coming to Netflix in September can be found here.

  THE BACK TO THE FUTURE TRILOGY (Robert Zemeckis, 1984/1989/1990)

A trilogy that is full of life, fun, and originality.

  THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME (Antonio Campo, 2020)

An all-star cast of Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Riley Keough, Sebastian Stan, Mia Wasikowska, Bill Skarsgård, and Jason Clarke lead Antonio Campos’ thriller about corruption and brutality in a postwar backwoods town.

  GREASE (Randal Kleiser, 1978)

A musical classic.

  I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS (Charlie Kaufman, 2020)

The latest directorial effort from the great Charlie Kaufman looks like a haunting mind-bender.

  MAGIC MIKE (Steven Soderbergh, 2012)

One of Steven Soderbergh’s best features a scene-stealing performance from Matthew McConaughey.

  NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE (Joel Gallen, 2001)

This comedy satire of teen romcoms is still hilarious and has aged quite well.

  RATCHED (Evan Romansky, Ryan Murphy, 2020)

I don’t usually post about shows on here, but a prequel series looking at One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest villain Nurse Ratched starring Sarah Paulson in the titular role sounds too good to ignore.

  THE SOCIAL DILEMMA (Jeff Orlowski, 2020)

I heard good buzz about this documentary out of Sundance 2020, as it looks at the power of social media and the effect it can have on the world

  WILDLIFE (Paul Dano, 2018)

Paul Dano’s directorial debut is a quiet and powerful look at a crumbling family in the 1950’s.

    PRIME VIDEO

Full list of everything coming to Prime Video in September can be found here.

    THE BIRDCAGE (Mike Nichols, 1996)

Robin Williams and Nathan Lane are marvelous in this Mike Nichols comedy.

  CASINO ROYALE (Martin Campbell, 2006)

The film that introduced Daniel Craig into the Bond franchise is also the best Bond film ever made.

  GEMINI MAN (Ang Lee, 2019)

Will Smith plays an assassin who is being hunted by a clone of his younger self in Ang Lee’s technical marvel.

  THE GRADUATE (Mike Nichols, 1967)

One of the greatest films ever made.

  JUDY (Rupert Goold, 2019)

Renee Zellweger won her second Oscar for pitch-perfect portrayal of Hollywood icon Judy Garland.

  KRAMER VS KRAMER (Robert Benton, 1979)

This Best Picture family drama features stellar work from Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep.

  PATRIOT’S DAY (Peter Berg, 2016)

Peter Berg’s harrowing account of the Boston Marathon bombing.

  HULU

Full list of everything coming to Hulu in September can be found here.

    ANY GIVEN SUNDAY (Oliver Stone, 1999)

Olive Stone’s aggressive, chaotic look at professional football.

  BABYTEETH (Shannon Murphy, 2020)

An emotional relationship drama with Ben Mendolsohn and Essie Davis giving two of my favorite performances of 2020.

  HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE/HAROLD AND KUMAR ESCAPE GUANTANAMO BAY (Danny Leiner, 2004/Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg, 2008)

Two-thirds of a classic stoner trilogy.

  HOOSIERS (David Anspaugh, 1986)

One of the greatest sports movies ever made.

  THE LAST BOY SCOUT (Tony Scott, 1991)

It’s directed by Tony Scott, written by Shane Black, and stars Bruce Willis.  We could call this the “90’s Trifecta”.

  PEE WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE (Tim Burton, 1985)

Tim Burton’s debut film is utterly insane, yet absolutely brilliant

  PRISONERS (Denis Villeneuve, 2013)

Denis Villeneuve’s best film to date is a dark, disturbing crime thriller featuring incredible work from Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, and cinematographer Roger Deakins.

  THE TERMINATOR (James Cameron, 1984)

One of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made.

  THE TWILIGHT SAGA (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008/Chris Weitz, 2009/David Slade, 2010/Bill Condon, 2011/Bill Condon, 2012)

I’ve only seen one of these (I think New Moon?), but want to give them a whirl at some point.  Maybe now is the time?

    DISNEY+

Full list of everything coming to Disney+ in September can be found here.

    BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM (Gurinder Chadha, 2003)

A rousing, inspiring indie sports film.

  CHRISTOPHER ROBIN (Marc Forster, 2018)

A somber, sweet look at Winnie the Pooh and the 100 Acre Woods gang.

  D2: THE MIGHT DUCKS/D3 (Sam Weisman, 1994/Robert Lieberman, 1996)

D2 is the best of the trilogy, but D3 is pretty good and bit underrated.

  MULAN (Niki Caro, 2020)

You have to pay $30 to see this one, but I have a feeling Disney’s latest live-action feature is going to be worth is.

  NEVER BEEN KISSED (Raja Gosnell, 1999)

A classic 90’s rom-com featuring a delightful Drew Barrymore.

  THE WOLVERINE (James Mangold, 2013)

One of the best X-Men films and the BEST Wolverine movie (hot take).

    CRITERION CHANNEL

Full list of everything coming to Criterion Channel in September can be found here.

*The Criterion Channel does things a little differently than every other streaming service.  The Criterion Channel, a wonderful streaming service that focuses on independent, foreign, and under-appreciates movies, doesn’t just throw a bunch of random movies to stream.  They get more creative by having categories like “DOUBLE FEATURES” or “FILMS FROM…”, giving us curated lists of films that somehow blend together or feature a specific artist.*

    BOYHOOD (Richard Linklater, 2014)

Richard Linklater’s ambitious twelve-year project is one of the finest film accomplishments of the last decade.

  THE LOVELESS (Kathryn Bigelow, Monty Montgomery, 1981)

Kathryn Bigelow’s debut is one I have been dying to see and one I am going to check out as soon as it is available.

  THE COMPLETE FILMS OF AGNES VARDA

Agnes Varda was a true artist and Criterion has put all of her work into one comprehensive collection which features all of her feature length films as well as her short films.

  SATURDAY MATINEE

DUCK SOUP (Leo McCarey, 1933)

My favorite Marx Brothers film and one of the greatest comedies ever made.

  SATURDAY MATINEE

CHARLOTTE’S WEB (Charles A. Nichols, Iwao Takamoto, 1973)

A beautiful animated film based on the classic book.

    THREE BY ROBERT GREENE

Three provocative films from a master documentarian.

Actress (2014)

Kate Plays Christine (2016)

Bisbee ’17 (2018)

  DIRECTED BY ALBERT BROOKS

Albert Brooks is one of the greatest comedic minds we’ve ever had.  This block of films looks at his genius behind the camera.

Real Life (1979)

Modern Romance (1981)

Lost in America (1985)

Defending Your Life (1991)

Mother (1996)

  DOUBLE FEATURE: TEARS OF THE CLOWN

LENNY (Bob Fosse, 1974)

JO JO DANCER, YOUR LIFE IS CALLING (Richard Pryor, 1986)

Two unflinching films delve into the self-destructive dark sides of a pair of comedy legends. Lenny features Dustin Hoffman in a jagged portrait of Lenny Bruce.  In Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling, Richard Pryor draws on his own personal demons in the only narrative feature written and directed by the comedy legend.

  BY THE BOOK

A slew of films based on legendary books, from Great Expectations to The Hours and many, many more.

The Count of Monte Cristo (Rowland V. Lee, 1934)

The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)

La bête humaine (Jean Renoir, 1938)

Of Mice and Men (Lewis Milestone, 1939)

Great Expectations (David Lean, 1946)

The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946)

Anna Karenina (Julien Duvivier, 1948)

Oliver Twist (David Lean, 1948)

The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949)

The Passionate Friends (David Lean, 1949)

The Idiot (Akira Kurosawa, 1951)

The Life of Oharu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952)

Robinson Crusoe (Luis Buñuel, 1954)

Senso (Luchino Visconti, 1954)

Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)

Aparajito (Satyajit Ray, 1956)

The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, 1956)

Apur Sansar (Satyajit Ray, 1959)

The Cloud-Capped Star (Ritwik Ghatak, 1960)

Purple Noon (René Clément, 1960)

Zazie dans le métro (Louis Malle, 1960)

Divorce Italian Style (Pietro Germi, 1961)

Lord of the Flies (Peter Brook, 1963)

Tom Jones (Tony Richardson, 1963)

Charulata (Satyajit Ray, 1964)

Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)

Closely Watched Trains (Jirí Menzel, 1966)

War and Peace (Sergei Bondarchuk, 1966)

Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968)

The Angel Levine (Ján Kadár, 1970)

Dodes’ka-den (Akira Kurosawa, 1970)

The Phantom Tollbooth (Chuck Jones, Abe Levitow, and Dave Monahan, 1970)

The Little Prince (Stanley Donen, 1974)

Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)

The American Friend (Wim Wenders, 1977)

The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko, 1977)

The Getting Of Wisdom (Bruce Beresford, 1977)

Empire of Passion (Nagisa Oshima, 1978)

Watership Down (Martin Rosen, 1978)

My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong, 1979)

Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)

The Tin Drum (Volker Schlöndorff, 1979)

Wise Blood (John Huston, 1979)

You Are Not I (Sara Driver, 1981)

Under the Volcano (John Huston, 1984)

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader, 1985)

My Life as a Dog (Lasse Hallström, 1985)

Betty Blue (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986)

An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion, 1990)

The Comfort of Strangers (Paul Schrader, 1990)

Europa Europa (Agnieszka Holland, 1990)

The Handmaid’s Tale (Volker Schlöndorff, 1990)

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (Peter Kosminsky, 1992)

The Castle (Michael Haneke, 1997)

The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan, 1997)

The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999)

The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001)

The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002)

Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, 2008)

Almayer’s Folly (Chantal Akerman, 2011)

45 Years (Andrew Haigh, 2015)

Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016)

Zama (Lucrecia Martel, 2017)

    HBOMAX

Full list of everything coming to HBOMax in August can be found here.

  CLERKS (Kevin Smith, 1994)

Kevin Smith’s indie sensation is a masterclass in microbudget cinema.

  THE CONVERSATION (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

In-between The Godfather and The Godfather II, Francis Ford Coppola made this Palme d’Or winning thriller about a surveillance expert (a brilliant Gene Hackman) who has a crisis of conscience when he suspects that the couple he is spying on will be murdered.

  THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON (David Fincher, 2008)

David Fincher’s gorgeous film about a man who ages backwards.

  DOG DAY AFTERNOON (Sidney Lumet, 1975)

Sidney Lumet’s best film features masterful work from Al Pacino and John Cazzalle.

  THE INVISIBLE MAN (Leigh Whannel, 2020)

Elisabeth Moss gives one of the best performances of 2020 in Leigh Whannel’s chilling remake of the Universal classic.

  JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991)

Oliver Stone’s brilliant account of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the conspiracy behind it.

  JUST MERCY (Destin Daniel Cretton, 2019)

An inspiring film with excellent performances from Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx.

  MIDNIGHT RUN (Martin Brest, 1988)

This crime-buddy-road movie is an absolute blast and features one of Robert De Niro’s most underrated performances.

  POINT BREAK (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991)

Kathryn Bigelow’s surfing-cop thriller is one of the best action movies of the 90’s.

  SNAKES ON A PLANE (David R. Ellis, 2006)

An iconic B-movie featuring a truly great Samuel L. Jackson performance.

              Follow Kevflix on Twitter and Instagram, @kevflix, and on Facebook by searching Kevflix.

          The post What’s Streaming This Month? – September appeared first on Kevflix.

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[womenofcolor15]

EXCLUSIVE DEETS: 'Million Dollar Beach House' Stars Try To Stop Petition That Asks Netflix To CANCEL What Fans Call 'A Racist Show'

Fans are calling on Netflix to CANCEL one of its newest reality series, “Million Dollar Beach House.” The reason? Racist vibes. We’ve got exclusive details about two of the show’s stars reaching out in an effort to have the petition taken down. Get it all inside…

Did Netflix read the room before releasing their new show “Million Dollar Beach House?” It’s a pertinent question to ask being that the streaming service is being called out for allowing racism following the new series' debut.

A little backstory…

”Million Dollar Beach House” is a reality show about a group of young and hungry real estate brokers and agents - part of the Nest Seekers International - selling multi-million dollar homes in The Hamptons. It’s seemingly the successor to Netflix’s “Selling Sunset” reality show where agents at The Oppenheim Group sell the luxe life to affluent buyers in LA.

However, “Million Dollar Beach House” has stirred up some controversy after the release of its first six episodes. There’s only one black cast member on the show and fans are feeling racist vibes. Oh no! Not on Netflix!

The show was the 2nd most-watched series on Netflix last weekend and viewers have had plenty to say about it on social media.

Netflix's new reality offering, Million Dollar Beach House, is a master class in how mediocre racist white dudes fail up

— Emma Gray (@emmaladyrose) August 26, 2020

”Netflix's new reality offering, Million Dollar Beach House, is a master class in how mediocre racist white dudes fail up,” Huffington Post writer Emma Gray tweeted.

Several other viewers felt the same:

Am I the only one getting racist vibes from Million Dollar Beach House on @Netflix? Just a couple episodes in & all the annoying white people are ganging up on the only black male. pic.twitter.com/HZ6DvDb39h

— S K Y L A R (@Sky_Dubz) August 26, 2020

Why did I decide to watch Million Dollar Beach House?? In light of our present day landscape, @netflix should know better than to have shows filled with racist behavior + micro aggressions. Peggy is a straight up racist & Michael is her accomplice, creating fake problems w/ Noel.

— Cheryl Nembhard (@CherylNembhard) August 29, 2020

If you’ve ever had trouble understanding microagressions watch episode 1 of Netflix Million Dollar Beach House

— Gabrielle Howell (@howell_snab) August 26, 2020

I literally turned it off after the first 8 minutes. This shit did it for me...didn’t need to watch anymore #MillionDollarBeachHouse pic.twitter.com/PEHlmtYskl

— Ser Duncan these wenches (@el_chrispo) August 27, 2020

There's a black guy on this show called Million Dollar Beach house and there's a black guy on there and all his colleagues are white and they hate him.

— #EndGBV (@ClixWell) August 26, 2020

Many viewers feel the show feel like Noel – the only black cast member – was given the stereotypical “villain edit.”

Another fun thing is that the only meaningful storyline seems to be the one Black man fighting with the one white woman??? #MillionDollarBeachHouse

— Emma Gray (@emmaladyrose) August 26, 2020

It seems the main drama on the show involves Noel and his co-star Peggy, the only female broker. While Noel and Peggy bicker back and forth, co-stars Michael, J.B., and Jimmy instigate causing the drama to explode.

@netflix cancel million dollar beach house and give noel and joel their own spin-off

— katie jo (@katiejoyofosho) August 26, 2020

Not only that, Noel’s co-stars often seem irritated that he’s so confident and ambitious. Hmph. The microagressions most black folks are used to being on the receiving end of.

Also, considering the climate of society right now with everything going on revolving around racial and social injustice, the show just seems tone deaf. Watching a white woman humiliate a black man on national television isn’t exactly entertaining. And let us not even get into the fact the show totally omits black women agents or any other agents of color (similar to "Selling Sunset," aside from one agent who is Israeli and one who is half African-American and half caucasian). That's another topic for another day.

Well, an Instagram user started a petition to get Netflix to cancel – what they deem – the "racist" show. Here’s what the petition is demanding and why:

Dear NETFLIX,

The blatant racism, disrespect and white supremacy vibes of Netflix's Million Dollar Beach House are reflective of the racism Blacks have endured for centuries. The cast's treatment of the show's only Black character - Noel Roberts - defies your commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion and your support of Black storytelling. It is pointless to allow the characters, specifically Peggy Zabakolas and Mike Fulfree, be so insensitive and cruel.

The evil of racism is on full display in the first season of Million Dollar Beach House. The show demonstrates that racism is still alive all over America. This show glorifies racism and minimizes its impact on marginalized groups. Our country is at a very critical juncture and it is very likely that the show will continue to encourage others to promote racism, hate, discrimination and violence against Blacks. We must face the fact that we still have much to do in the area of race relations. Do your part by cancelling Million Dollar Beach House.

You can sign the petition here.

”Million Dollar Beach House” stars Noel and Michael caught wind of the petition and hopped in an IG user's DMs (@mixthatcreolewiththatnegro) to ask them to take the petition down.

”Hi. Thanks for your support,” Noel wrote. “But I’m going to need you to cancel that petition.”

The user asked, “Why?”

Then, Noel asked for his phone number for a conversation.

Also…

Michael hopped in the user's DMs as well - first attempting to video chat. 

At the time, the IG user couldn't chat and asked what questions he had. Michael responded, "No questions. Just want to connect with you on a human level. We don't want to be that show that doesn't converse with the viewers and their concerns. Seems like you're getting a lot of traction on your post jeeze."

As you can see, the cast members are trying hard to keep the racism narrative from spreading. But, it seems to be too late. People have already formed their opinions about the show and they're running with it. Following the death of George Floyd and the raging protests that have continued since his death, Netflix stood in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. They even launched a "Black Lives Matter" category on the streaming service.

Many would argue that in order for black lives to matter to Netflix they would have to be more conscious about what shows they're streaming because, apparently, "Million Dollar Beach House" isn't it. No word from the streaming giant about the show....yet.

Sigh, now we want to remove this show from "My List" before we even got to watch....

Photo: Chloe Gifkins/Netflix

[Read More ...] source http://theybf.com/2020/09/02/exclusive-deets-million-dollar-beach-house-stars-try-to-stop-petition-that-asks-netflix-t