#Corey Robin

[flock-of-cassowaries]

I’m having a deep think right now about the overlaps and the differences between the appeal of fascism, and that of libertarianism.

On one level, this is because I am writing a Sucession fanfic, and trying to get into Roman’s head.

But on another level only reason I’m even writing Succession fanfiction is that I identify with Roman, and that is in large part because he is a queer person who is philosophically in the thrall of his terrifying conservative father, whose love he desperately craves.

And once upon a time, that used to be me. And I feel deep and abiding shame about that.

(Not the sexy kind of shame. The devastating kind.)

But as I delve into philosophical discussions of fascism and conservatism (and honestly, I have not yet delved the deeply), I’m starting to realize that maybe I have less in common with Roman, and more with Connor (if we leave out his weird S3 white-nationalism dog whistles about the evils of onanism).

I’m basing a lot of this on the first chapter – which is all I have read so far - of “The Reactionary Mind” by Corey Robin; which I came upon via the source list for the linked YouTube video.

[link to “Endnote 2: White Fascism” by Innuendo Studios, on YouTube.]

Robin (if I’m understanding him correctly) posits that the end goal of conservatism is fundamentally Fishstick fascistic, and that the real animus driving political conservative movements is always the desire of the privileged to remain above those the existing social order oppresses.

I have certainly voted for, and carried water for, conservatives (a fact of which I am, again, deeply ashamed), but I don’t think that was ever the real appeal for me.

I’m not saying I didn’t internalize beliefs that were (I now realize) racist, classist, ableist, and elitist; but I don’t think that was ever the main draw, so much as a side effect of reading the goddamn National Post every fucking day

But for me, I think the main appeal of conservatism was the illusory promise of total self-sufficiency, and of being impossible to further hurt. It was the libertarian lie, bound up in the same nihilistic appeal as the Nine Inch Nails song whose hook is “Nothing can stop me now, cause I don’t care anymore.” (‘Piggy’ is the song.)

In this respect, I think I had more in common with Connor; I was also the discarded child who grew up to think of themself as “a flower that grows on rocks and feeds on the insect that land inside of it.”

Honestly, that soliloquy (from S4E2) could’ve been me at thirteen.

I felt rejected and shunned by the world, but I was also rapidly becoming aware that I could use my looks and intelligence as currency (just a Connor uses his literal currency as currency).

It was only when I was 21, and ended a long relationship, and found myself with no one to turn to, and no idea who I was, that my father swooped in to be my new best friend; and that’s when I became more Roman-like in my fawning attempts to appeal to him.

But I think Roman truly believes that his father is better than him, whereas a much more significant part of me always knew my own dad was a false prophet.

I think the world reaffirmed this belief in Roman, because his father has been so successful, and I think his father, concerned with legacy, has been much more active in fostering this mythology than my own father was.

(My dad would tend to just willfully ignore that l existed for several years at a stretch, if I was acting too cringe [i.e. not stereotypically conservative-lady feminine enough] for his conservative sensibilities; something I am assuming that Shiv could probably relate to.

The scene where Logan tells her he wants her back in the fold was very similar to what my father did with me when I was 21, and I glowed just the same way she did.)

But yeah, I think an internalized belief on Roman’s part that his father truly is better than him, and a desire to “be as good” as his father in order to redeem himself and overcome this inadequacy in his person, really feeds into Roman’s affinity for fascism / conservatism.

And I think that belief structure is with him in that bathroom with Mencken, unacknowledged and subconscious, and even more insidious than his conscious priorities of wanting to win points with Logan, and maaaaaybe wanting to be pushed to his knees and have a fascist phallus (a fascllus? I’m going to hell) thrust upon him.

Anyway, if anyone ever reads this, feel free to suggest some books / essays / videos to my reading list.

So far, in addition to the above-mentioned Cory Robbins tome, I am planning to actually finish “The Ur-Fascist” by Umberto Ecco, and to at least dip into “The Dialectic of Enlightenment” by Horkheimer and Adorno, and “The Authoritarian Personality” by Adorno.

[grandhotelabyss]

Thoughts on Corey Robin's THE REACTIONARY MIND? And, if a book by an author with opposite ideologies were to exist, what might be the thesis of, let's say, Robin Corey's THE PROGRESSIVE MIND?

(I actually think you discussed Robin previously, but with your daily word count rivaled only by Crichton or PKD, of course I have no idea where to find it. When's that indexed THE COLLECTED POSTS OF JOHN PISTELLI, Volume 1 coming out? Because, honest to God, you should self-publish, at minimum, a "best of" collection.)

YA intellectual history. Good guys and bad guys, everything on each side is everything else on that side, Edmund Burke is Friedrich Nietzsche is Sarah Palin. The only thing that rescues it is his obvious and helpless admiration for the reactionaries: those would-be saviors of a system to which they are mostly outsider-aspirants, their sometimes gratuitous resistance to the tide of history giving them a richer and more disillusioned appreciation for power than that enjoyed by those who, in Robin's first sentence, "marched against their superiors in the state, church, workplace, and other hierarchical institutions."

(Also, and I know this is petty, but I'm not sure about the ethics of passing off a collection of occasional magazine writing as a scholarly treatise.)

I think that with The Rebel, Camus has already written The Progressive Mind, though it takes a grander and more abstract approach to the subject. Camus knows what goes through the heads of those marchers, those troupers. He knows, because he was one, because he is not a reactionary, of the progressives' deep, unspoken desire:

To kill God and to build a Church are the constant and contradictory purpose of rebellion.

Because Robin never acknowledges the second part of that formula, he also never acknowledges that Burke and Nietzsche might have been alert to a genuine existential (and not merely circumstantial) danger that Paine and Marx missed. (Though Camus, reasonably enough, groups the God-killer Nietzsche with the progressives.)

On my word count, it's like Updike said of himself: I write faster than I read. On The Collected Posts, someone will have to pay me to do that. Unless and until I see a check, I am content to let everything I've written online vanish into the ether whenever the internet inevitably does; as far as I'm concerned, only my fiction is real.

[xtruss]

Illustration of Painting Over the Words ‘We and The’ Leaving Only the Word ‘People’ Legible. By Nicholas Konrad/The New Yorker

How Do We Survive The Constitution?

In “Tyranny of the Minority,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that the document has doomed our politics. But it can also save them.

— By Corey Robin | October 4, 2023

Donald Trump caught academics off guard. Historians and social scientists had long studied the American right, amassing a vast library on its relationship to race, gender, sex, the media, the Cold War, religion, and big and small business. Less explored was the role of the Constitution, which has always been more friend than foe to the American way of repression. This gap in the literature left the field wide open for experts in authoritarianism abroad and scholars of authoritarianism past.

The most important contribution to this genre was “How Democracies Die,” by the Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Studying how democracy was undermined elsewhere, Levitsky and Ziblatt defined the threat of Trumpism as an attack on the Constitution, the rule of law, and institutions. They also claimed that these pillars were less sturdy than people supposed. The Constitution was riddled with holes. Restrictions on Presidential prerogatives were not written down. Institutions designed to check extremists, whether specified in the text (a bicameral legislature) or not (political parties), were vulnerable to extremists.

Most worrisome of all, the ligaments joining these parts, what Levitsky and Ziblatt called “norms,” were frayed. Two norms in particular—tolerance of one’s opponents and forbearance in the exercise of power—were foundational to constitutional democracy. But since 1965, 1994, or 2010 (Levitsky and Ziblatt never settled on a date), those norms had been eroding. Traditionally, élite “gatekeepers” had been the custodians of norms, exercising “peer review” over norm eroders such as Charles Lindbergh and George Wallace. But, in the wake of reforms initiated by the Democrats after 1968 (another date), and later copied by the Republicans, ordinary voters, rather than insider élites, were empowered to choose the Presidential ticket of each party. For a while, the establishment held the line against outsiders. Then came 2016, when Republican leaders failed to stop Trump and rallied behind him.

Within a month of its publication, in January, 2018, “How Democracies Die” hit the Times best-seller list. It’s easy to see why. The book gave voice to liberals who felt betrayed not by their country but by its voters, the gate-crashers who put Trump into power. Levitsky and Ziblatt’s readers believed in norms, trusted élites, and valued institutions, particularly the Supreme Court. They revered the Constitution. The problem was the half of the country that didn’t.

But spring came, as it does, and a new wind began to blow on the left. After the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett, progressives started seeing the Court less as a counter to Trumpism than as its conduit. “Defend institutions” may have made sense at the beginning of Trump’s reign. By the end, it sounded like a call to protect the Electoral College and other struts of the right. In 2018, Levitsky and Ziblatt had recommended building coalitions with “red-state Republicans,” abandoning abortion as a litmus test for candidates, and making unnamed but “tough” concessions to moderate voters. Now liberals were ready to play hardball: abolish the filibuster, pack the Court, admit new states to increase Democratic votes in the Senate, and stop all coöperation with the G.O.P.

None of this agenda has been enacted, but its pressures are felt throughout “Tyranny of the Minority,” Levitsky and Ziblatt’s follow-up to “How Democracies Die.” There’s little talk of norms in the new volume. Instead, Levitsky and Ziblatt reaffirm the call to end the filibuster and remake the Court, norm-eroding measures they previously cautioned against. More surprising is their revised view of democracy itself. The primary threat to the system is no longer demagogues; it’s the very institutions that Levitsky and Ziblatt once rallied readers to protect. If the United States is to remain—really, become—a democracy, Americans must stop treating its founding text “as if it were a sacred document.” The Constitution, the deepest norm in American politics, must be eroded.

In 1857, the British historian and statesman Thomas Macaulay set out a grim forecast for the United States. In Britain, political power was safely tucked away in the pockets of élites, who were “deeply interested in the security of property.” America had foolishly handed power to the “discontented” masses. For now, there was land for them to settle in the West. But, when that safety valve failed, the working classes, “none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to have more than half a dinner,” would vote to strip the minority of their wealth. The Constitution wouldn’t stop them. It was “all sail and no anchor.”

For much of American history, it’s been the reverse: all anchor, no sail. The most influential authors of the Constitution were terrified of democratic majorities. They devised a government with a sluice of filters—at least six, which Levitsky and Ziblatt note is “an unusually large number”—to push majorities to the side. More than two centuries later, we still have this “uniquely counter-majoritarian democracy,” which is hardly a democracy at all.

Congress has two of the filters. A bicameral legislature is one; the Senate is the other. Many countries have learned that, in a real democracy, upper chambers either don’t exist or have highly limited powers. The U.S. Senate doesn’t just have power equal to (and, in some cases, greater than) the House; it also represents states rather than individuals. Wyoming, with a population of about five hundred and eighty thousand, has as many votes as California, which has nearly forty million people. There’s a reason that most democracies don’t operate in this way: it’s undemocratic. This has been apparent for centuries. All of the antislavery bills that passed the House between 1800 and 1860 were killed by the minoritarian Senate.

If the House and the Senate agree on a bill, they still need the approval of the President, who’s elected not by the voters but by the Electoral College. That’s the third filter. With a bias toward smaller states and a winner-take-all structure, the Electoral College can send the loser of the popular vote to the White House. In this century alone, that’s happened twice.

Even if the elected branches agree on a bill, the Supreme Court can strike it down. Justices are put on the bench by the Senate and the President, so we can have a Supreme Court majority, like the one we have now, created by a combination of Presidents who lost the popular vote and senators who represent a minority of the voters. That’s the fourth filter, a creature of the preceding three.

Meanwhile, another course runs parallel to the national one. Our federal system, the fifth filter, grants states tremendous power, including the right to design electoral rules—how district lines are drawn, who can access the ballot, how elections are conducted, and so on—that privilege minorities over majorities. Between 1968 and 2016, the party with fewer votes has won a state house a hundred and twenty-one times and a state senate a hundred and forty-six times. Those legislatures, in turn, can gerrymander federal election districts, turning the putatively majoritarian House into another counter-majoritarian chamber. They also can pass laws, such as bans on abortion, that abridge the most basic freedoms of the people.

Many nations entered the twentieth century saddled with the yoke of counter-majoritarianism. They got rid of it. We haven’t, thanks to our mega-counter-majoritarian requirement for constitutional change, which is the sixth and most important filter. Two-thirds of both houses in Congress propose an amendment, and three-fourths of the states must then ratify it. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, a political scientist has devised something called the Index of Difficulty to measure how hard it is to change a country’s constitution. Ours tops the list, by a wide margin.

This news comes at a bad time. Today’s Republicans—many of them white and living in rural areas—hold fast to the Constitution for protection against Democratic majorities. Those majorities increasingly live in large cities, where the jobs are, and many of those cities are in highly populated, Democratic states. The combination of these factors leaves blue voters vulnerable to malapportionment in the states, where they needlessly pile up their votes in cities, and in the Senate and Electoral College. A minority of voters can now inflict a legislative wallop of racism, sexism, nativism, homophobia, transphobia, and economic misery on the rest of us—and never have to pay for it at the polls.

This is the “tyranny of the minority” that Levitsky and Ziblatt rightly fear. No lawless strongman or populist autocracy, it’s a product of the very Constitution that we have been taught to admire.

Once we set aside the compass of the Constitution, where should we look for our North Star? Levitsky and Ziblatt point to “multiracial democracy.” Either we become a multiracial democracy or we cease to “be a democracy at all.” The battle, in other words, is existential.

Yet Levitsky and Ziblatt aren’t equipped for war. Like many analysts, they believe that today’s right is driven by a primitive fear. Conservative voters fear the simple fact of demographic change. As immigrants, people of color, women, and sexual and gender minorities assume greater visibility, dominant groups—straight, white, cis, native-born men—fear a loss of status. That fear of erasure fuels the G.O.P.’s “turn to authoritarianism.” Holding on to government power is an “existential” imperative for the Party and the groups it represents.

This argument, now ubiquitous on the left, has come to seem like a natural law of the political universe, describing our most elemental drives of identity and anxiety. It makes sense that conservatives would believe it, as they’ve been pushing it since the French Revolution. But it poses a problem for the left, and for Levitsky and Ziblatt, in particular.

If dominant groups can get members of subordinate groups to identify with them, they may not need minoritarian tyranny to stay in power. That scenario is not as far-fetched as it may sound. Until recently, that was the story of the American right, whose foot soldiers created large voting majorities and cultivated explicit support for big business from the ranks of its victims. Whiteness is insidiously capacious, forever incorporating new arrivals into its enveloping fold. Small shifts of nonwhite voters away from Democrats and the rise in the number of Republican candidates of color suggest that this phenomenon remains salient, even in the age of Trump. In today’s environment, where elections are won at the margin, the effects can be lethal.

More important, if the laws of identity and anxiety are as primal and potent as many progressives believe, resisting those laws risks turning the left’s project into a purely moral crusade, an exhortatory ought against the right’s is. Levitsky and Ziblatt call themselves political realists, yet they often resort to an earnest moralism to explain the world. What makes politicians capitulate to authoritarians in their midst? The absence of courage. How will multiracial democracy be advanced? By “loving America with a broken heart.” “History is calling again,” and “future generations will hold us to account.” More than a lapse in style, platitudes like these, stacked one on top of the other, reveal how difficult it has been for progressives, of all stripes, to mount a political argument for democracy.

Levitsky and Ziblatt are refreshingly clear that only a popular movement can create the constitutional reforms that democracy needs. But they define democracy narrowly, as “a political system with regular, free, and fair elections in which adult citizens of all ethnic groups possess the right to vote” and “enjoy equal protection of democratic and civil rights.” Quoting the political scientist Adam Przeworski, they add that it is “a system in which parties lose elections.” Given this straitened sense of what a democracy can do, it’s not clear why any contemporary movement would take on the task of creating it. It’s probably no accident that, thus far, none really has.

It wasn’t always so. The United States has seen many movements for democracy. The successful ones have treated the Constitution not simply as a document of constraint, weaponized by the courts and politicians, but as a charter of expanding freedom, wielded by and for the people. As Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath detail in their wonderfully counterintuitive book, “The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution,” the very document that Levitsky and Ziblatt are so dissatisfied with is annotated with statements of astonishing democratic vision, penned by the great social movements of the past.

From the earliest days of the Republic, those movements insisted that the greatest threat to democracy is not the tyranny of one man but the oligarchic rule of wealth. Poor citizens, at the mercy of richer ones, could not be full citizens. More than a moral or political argument, this is a foundational claim about the Constitution and the economy, or what we might call the political constitution of the economy. When we think of the Constitution today, our minds drift to civil rights or to the obstacle course described by Levitsky and Ziblatt. Historically, Fishkin and Forbath remind us, Americans have thought of the Constitution as a weapon in the struggle for economic equality, as a real presence in their material lives.

Among the most successful movements against oligarchy were the Populists and Progressives, who used the document to treat the disabling economy of the Gilded Age. At the end of the nineteenth century, land promised to farmers in the West was gobbled up by banks, railroads, speculators, and cattle companies. Suddenly jobless, a new proletariat scuttled back East, praying for work in factories and cities. “Unemployment” appeared as a census category for the first time. Vagrants shattered store windows to get a bed for the night in jail. Meanwhile, the top one per cent owned half of the wealth.

When the United States was an agricultural society, distribution of property seemed like the fount of equality. But, as Macaulay anticipated, industrial capitalism—with its wrenching shift to wage labor, complex production lines, and corporate behemoths—had rendered that vision moot. The Populists and Progressives realized that they needed a new conception of democracy, one tied less to physical notions of land and labor than to the social facts of economic combination and coöperation. Mass parties, labor unions, public schools, strikes and boycotts, social insurance, minimum-wage laws, state banks and currency reform, antitrust regulation, income taxes, even economic planning: these were the new priorities, the material resources of freedom. They deserved all the constitutional fervor and protection that once attached to yeoman land.

In their quest to enact these changes, the Populists and Progressives hit a familiar wall—the Senate and the courts. The Senate was “a paradise of millionaires,” one critic cried. Edgar Lee Masters, the author of “Spoon River Anthology,” wrote that “plutocracy appoints the federal judges.” After Grover Cleveland sent in the troops to crush the Pullman Strike, which was organized by thousands of railroad workers, Illinois’s governor declared that “never before were the United States government and the corporations of the country so blended.”

Instead of accepting oligarchy as the inevitable consequence of the Constitution, the Populists and Progressives looked for alternatives in the text. Through a close reading of James Madison’s notes and papers, they uncovered an argument for the national government’s design and regulation of the economy. In the commerce clause, they found a tool for Congress to “secure the Blessings of Liberty,” which later proved critical to the passage of the Wagner Act—the cornerstone of workers’ right to organize unions—and the Civil Rights Act. The Gold Standard, which enriched bankers and burdened farmers, was deemed a violation of the equal-protection clause. And, in a brilliant marriage of substance and strategy, the Progressives joined forces with the feminist movement, arguing that women voters would help strengthen child-labor laws, health and safety protections, and so on.

By insisting that “the people are the masters of their Constitution,” these armies plowed through Levitsky and Ziblatt’s sixth filter. In rapid succession, the country adopted the Sixteenth Amendment (1913), which gave the government the power to enact an income tax; the Seventeenth Amendment (1913), which established direct election of senators; and the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), which secured for white women the right to vote. The amendments were linked. A democratically elected Senate would lead to income taxes that, by the middle of the twentieth century, were the envy of social democracies across the globe. The right to vote would empower women in the household economy, overturning what Susan B. Anthony had called the most “hateful oligarchy” of all, the “oligarchy of sex.”

Fishkin and Forbath also push against the reductive identitarianism of today’s defenders of democracy. Any movement of constitutional reform requires racial and gender equality, and vice versa. But the laws and norms of race and sex are part of the economy, from the distribution and rewards of labor, in the household and the workplace, to the operations of finance and the regulation of marriage and inheritance. To overcome oligarchy—and Levitsky and Ziblatt’s tyranny of the minority—that political economy must be remade.

Reconstruction and the New Deal offer instructive examples. “By building up a ruling and dominant class,” the congressional Joint Committee on Reconstruction declared, slavery “produced a spirit of oligarchy averse to republican institutions.” Slaveholders had accumulated vast wealth and power, not just through enslavement but by forcing wage workers, Black and white, in the North and South, to accept harsh conditions on the ground that they weren’t as bad as slavery. The slaveholders also thwarted a much-needed land-grant bill for public colleges and universities, fearing that any exercise of federal power might be turned against them.

Because the slaveholders’ power derived from a racial caste system, labor exploitation, and a privileged position in government, the leaders of Reconstruction vowed to destroy all three. Like the amendments of the Gilded Age, the Reconstruction amendments linked profound changes in political economy (the end of enslaved labor and an extensive expropriation of private property, in the case of the Thirteenth Amendment) to a democratization of the political process (the right to vote for Black men, in the case of the Fifteenth Amendment). The Fourteenth Amendment—which included the citizenship clause, the equal-protection clause, and the due-process clause—transformed the standing of many Americans, and each amendment gave Congress the unprecedented power to take “appropriate” action to insure its enforcement.

Leaders of the New Deal followed a similar course. “A small group,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced in 1936, had “concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives.” Now the enemy was a coalition of pro-business Republicans and white-supremacist Democrats, whose power depended on stifling a multiracial social democracy. Advocates of the New Deal saw it as the continuation of Reconstruction. The Thirteenth Amendment became the rallying cry of organized labor, inspiring half a million Black workers to join the ranks of the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations. New Deal officials, the N.A.A.C.P., labor organizers, and Communist Party activists fanned out across the South to rally Black workers and tenant farmers. Summarizing the movement’s credo in 1945, the Black legal theorist Pauli Murray wrote that the only way to end racial discrimination in the workplace was to create a full-employment economy for all. Civil rights meant social democracy.

We’ve come to think that Reconstruction and the New Deal were defeated by racism and violence in the factories, fields, and streets. But the higher reaches of reaction took a different form: severing race from class and class from race. If overthrowing oligarchy required racial equality in the economy, the oligarchs could best maintain their position by hiving off civil rights from economic issues. Beginning in the eighteen-seventies, reactionary courts and liberal politicians narrowed the meaning of the Reconstruction amendments, applying them to Black Americans only, rather than to workers as a whole. Freedom from economic domination had no friend in the Constitution; with time, neither did Black America.

In the wake of multiple defeats in the late nineteen-forties and early fifties, the New Dealers reached a different settlement. Hoping to end decades of judicial activism on behalf of big business, they agreed that economic questions would be left to Congress and the President. Meanwhile, the Court, assuming sole custody of the Constitution, would tackle racial (and, later, gender and queer) equality. That settlement came to haunt the left, as Republican Presidents appointed more and more conservative Justices.

This is the real story of the Constitution. A document of and for the people has become, for one half of the country, a structural support, and, for the other, an imperilled instrument of the marginalized. The choice seems clear. Return it to the people or scrap the whole damn thing. ♦

[milolovesbmc]

Oh wow these playground injuries really are gruesome!!!!!

[fallinginaforrest]

Can't find it now but there was that confessions post where anon was like "Why are curt and corey (Lubowich) even interacting with the fandom on tumblr, it makes me uncomfortable, especially on a confession account like aren't they supposed to be free of judgement- idk i just don't think this space is for them" and I think that is possibly the most chronically online, go-and-touch-grass take that I've seen in a hot second, and I need to rant about it.

Anon be so fucking for real are you telling me that the people who's media you consume have to limit their internet experience because you don't want them to see what you are saying about their work on the internet? Is that a Joke? If you post an opinion anonymously, that does not make your take free from judgement. People can see it and judge it all they want- it just means it cannot be traced back to you. In fact, confessions pages are DESIGNED to inspire discussion and judgement based on the confession! How entitled do you have to be to see Curt Mega giving his opinion on a character HE PLAYS in response to some anonymous comment and go "Waaa Why is he even here anyway??" He's here Because this is a space for EVERYONE. If you do not want a creative mind behind a project to see your opinion, don't fucking post it on the internet?? Artists can handle being criticised for their work, so why do you feel the need to try and police how they interact with a fandom space. They're users on this hellsite, just like you. They have the same right to the content on this site that you do, and they have a right to see opinions about their work, just like you do. Grow up.

[dapper-kingpin-cobblepot]

Oswald is a bottom with top energy.

Edward is a top with bottom energy.

[www-pinkhearse]

Birthday girlboy

[silveragelovechild]

by Corey Smith

[itsmetord]

What If Corey Riffin And TTG Robin Became Enemies

Credit To @rhyliethecaterfly

[celluloidchronicles]

Return to Never Land

🇺🇸 | Feb 14, 2002

directed by Robin Budd

screenplay by Temple Mathews

characters by J.M. Barrie

produced by Walt Disney Pictures, Disney Television Animation

starring Harriet Owen, Blayne Weaver, Jeff Bennett, Kath Soucie, Corey Burton

1h12 | Adventure, Animation, Fantasy, Family

out of plan

Browse through collections

American Movies | director Robin Budd | writer Temple Mathews | writer J.M. Barrie | studio Walt Disney Pictures | studio Disney Television Animation | actress Harriet Owen | actor Blayne Weaver | actor Jeff Bennett | actress Kath Soucie | actor Corey Burton | Peter Pan Collection

Browse through genres

Adventure | Animation | Fantasy | Family 

Links

trakt.tv | letterboxd

[shojoboy]

nooooot a fan of historic fiction/period piece tv usually but excited for Transatlantic. oh, Corey Michael Smith is gonna be in it? As the main guy? Wearing glasses? oh that’s nice i hadnt heard. thats definitely not why im interested. whats Gotham hah ha ha

[violentdick]

-source: Detective Comics #47-

Weapon of Choice: "I'm Going to....to....to kick you in the head!"

[milolovesbmc]

trick or treat.... is it later enough to get more gpi.... 😁

It's never too early........ Always a delight to have you in my asks.... 😁😁

I'm working on more stuff I promise... but for now have this one.... They invented being t4t

[rcdiostcrs]

i kinda wanna make eleven an actual character...

[camyfilms]

ALADDIN 1992

Do not be fooled by its commonplace appearance. Like so many things, it is not what is outside, but what is inside that counts. This is no ordinary lamp! It once changed the course of a young man's life; a young man who, like this lamp, was more than what he seemed: a diamond in the rough. Perhaps you would like to hear the tale? 

[wowbright]

((In all seriousness, I just thought I'd contribute to the Goncharov mystique by making up a Soviet remake. BTW, Sergei Bodrov is an actual Russian director, and he did make at least one crime film (Katala) to my knowledge.))

Are you sure you made up the Soviet remake? I started high school in 1989, and one of the few American school districts that taught a full four years of Russian. I didn't take it myself, but my friends who did were obsessed with a Russian gangster movie that had recently come out that they said was based on "the Scorsese classic." Not having been born in 1973 and also living in a house that didn't own a VCR until 1992, I thought they were talking about The Godfather (because I also kept confusing Scorcese with Coppola).

It wasn't until late in my junior year, or maybe my senior year?, that they finally got a hold of a copy that we could watch--European DVDs and videotapes weren't compatible with American players, so it required somebody going on an exchange trip to Russia (a feat in itself), getting the DVD, bringing it back to the US, finding somebody who had a DVD player that could read European DVDs (IDK may be Russian DVDs were different from even European ones), and having that person transfer the Russian version to videotape.

Anyway, I remember going over to my friend Jason's house to watch it. I didn't speak Russian beyond "hello," "very," and "glasnost" (later I would also learn how to say "it [is a] factory"), but I had watched The Godfather movies every Thanksgiving for several years so I figured I'd be able to follow along fine. Also, I had taught myself this Cyrillic alphabet, which wouldn't be relevant if it weren't for the moment that the title screen came up.

"Goncharov?" I asked. "Does that mean 'godfather'?"

Everybody looked at me like I was crazy. "You're joking, right?" my friend Beth (okay actually we weren't friends at all but we were in the same friend group so you know) said.

I didn't know what there was to joke about.

"Wait. You've seriously never heard of Goncharov? The greatest mafia movie ever made?" Jason asked. He was a real cinema snob.

"I thought that was The Godfather," I said.

So many pairs of eyes rolled.

Anyway, we watched the movie. There were no subtitles. Robin, who I knew from church but didn't really hang out with otherwise, took pity on me. She sat next to me and translated the dialogue. Sometimes this annoyed the other viewers, sometimes they jumped in and offered their own translations.

Of course, I didn't need any translation to see the chemistry between Katya and Sofia. Of course, it still remained subtext mostly, and even when they kissed it was open to interpretation about whether it was a kiss of friendship or something more. We were 20 years on from the initial filming of Goncharov, but same sex romances still weren't being portrayed on the silver screen in the U.S. except in the context of Serious Art Films that You Had to Really Hunt Down at the Video Store, and I would imagine it was even more restrictive in Russia.

Still, as a young closeted queer, the story meant everything to me.

I later got my hands on the actual Scorcese Goncharov and would watch it alone in the basement, rewinding and rewatching the scenes between Katya and Sofia so many times that the tape wore out.

Later, in college, we ended up doing our freshman class play (it was a women's college, we had a lot of weird traditions) as a parody of Goncharov. Only in our version, Katya and Sofia's kisses were unmistakably romantic, and at the end of the play they left for Hawaii and got married (it wasn't legal there, but the Hawaiian Supreme Court had ruled that not letting same-sex couples get married or register in civil partnerships was discriminatory, so we were full of hope); Goncharov and Andrey fled Italy for Denmark, where they registered as domestic partners (it was the first country in Europe to recognize relationships between same-sex couples) and transferred their business skills to start a successful floral and produce enterprise.

I realize I have now gotten way way off the topic. But wow, your question just brought back a flood of memories and I'm loving it.

Anyway, I suppose it's possible that my high school friends were misleading me about this Russian gangster movie. I mean, I *thought* the women were called Katya and Sofia, but not speaking russian, I could have been mishearing the whole thing. Maybe my wholesome church friend Robin was making up her translations just to screw with me, and that's why the others joined in so adamantly at times.

And Goncharov's a pretty common Russian name, right? So it's totally possible that there's a Russian movie with that name that has only an accidental relationship to the American one.

Honestly, at this point, I don't care if my snooty high school friends in the Russian Honor Society were fucking with me or not. They introduced me to a wonderfully homoerotic Russian movie, and also to the original Goncharov (1973). And those things warmed my closeted queer heart, and kept me going until I found real queer representation in books and made-up college plays and later in films and TV.

But I sort of hope the Russian version is real. Now that we have the internet, it shouldn't be so hard to find it. If only I still remembered how to read Cyrillic ...