#Subversive Strategy and “Symbolic Action” | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

and-then-there-were-n0ne · 5 years ago

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On Judith Butler

For a long time, academic feminism in America has been closely allied to the practical struggle to achieve justice and equality for women. Feminist theory has been understood by theorists as not just fancy words on paper; theory is connected to proposals for social change. [...]

In the United States, however, things have been changing. One observes a new, disquieting trend. It is not only that feminist theory pays relatively little attention to the struggles of women outside the United States. (This was always a dispiriting feature even of much of the best work of the earlier period.) Something more insidious than provincialism has come to prominence in the American academy. It is the virtually complete turning from the material side of life, toward a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women.

Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. These symbolic gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance; and so one need not engage with messy things such as legislatures and movements in order to act daringly. The new feminism, moreover, instructs its members that there is little room for large-scale social change, and maybe no room at all. We are all, more or less, prisoners of the structures of power that have defined our identity as women; we can never change those structures in a large-scale way, and we can never escape from them. All that we can hope to do is to find spaces within the structures of power in which to parody them, to poke fun at them, to transgress them in speech. And so symbolic verbal politics, in addition to being offered as a type of real politics, is held to be the only politics that is really possible.

These developments owe much to the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought. Many young feminists, whatever their concrete affiliations with this or that French thinker, have been influenced by the extremely French idea that the intellectual does politics by speaking seditiously, and that this is a significant type of political action. [...]

One American feminist has shaped these developments more than any other. Judith Butler seems to many young scholars to define what feminism is now. Trained as a philosopher, she is frequently seen as a major thinker about gender, power, and the body. As we wonder what has become of old-style feminist politics and the material realities to which it was committed, it seems necessary to reckon with Butler's work and influence, and to scrutinize the arguments that have led so many to adopt a stance that looks very much like quietism and retreat.

It is difficult to come to grips with Butler's ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they are. Butler is a very smart person. In public discussions, she proves that she can speak clearly and has a quick grasp of what is said to her. Her written style, however, is ponderous and obscure. It is dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions. In addition to Foucault, and to a more recent focus on Freud, Butler's work relies heavily on the thought of Louis Althusser, the French lesbian theorist Monique Wittig, the American anthropologist Gayle Rubin, Jacques Lacan, J.L. Austin, and the American philosopher of language Saul Kripke. These figures do not all agree with one another, to say the least; so an initial problem in reading Butler is that one is bewildered to find her arguments buttressed by appeal to so many contradictory concepts and doctrines, usually without any account of how the apparent contradictions will be resolved.

A further problem lies in Butler's casual mode of allusion. The ideas of these thinkers are never described in enough detail to include the uninitiated (if you are not familiar with the Althusserian concept of "interpellation," you are lost for chapters) or to explain to the initiated how, precisely, the difficult ideas are being understood. [...]

Divergent interpretations are simply not considered--even where, as in the cases of Foucault and Freud, she is advancing highly contestable interpretations that would not be accepted by many scholars. Thus one is led to the conclusion that the allusiveness of the writing cannot be explained in the usual way, by positing an audience of specialists eager to debate the details of an esoteric academic position. The writing is simply too thin to satisfy any such audience. It is also obvious that Butler's work is not directed at a non-academic audience eager to grapple with actual injustices. Such an audience would simply be baffled by the thick soup of Butler's prose, by its air of in-group knowingness, by its extremely high ratio of names to explanations.

To whom, then, is Butler speaking? It would seem that she is addressing a group of young feminist theorists in the academy who are neither students of philosophy, caring about what Althusser and Freud and Kripke really said, nor outsiders, needing to be informed about the nature of their projects and persuaded of their worth. This implied audience is imagined as remarkably docile. Subservient to the oracular voice of Butler's text, and dazzled by its patina of high-concept abstractness, the imagined reader poses few questions, requests no arguments and no clear definitions of terms.

Still more strangely, the implied reader is expected not to care greatly about Butler's own final view on many matters. For a large proportion of the sentences in any book by Butler--especially sentences near the end of chapters--are questions. Sometimes the answer that the question expects is evident. But often things are much more indeterminate. Among the non-interrogative sentences, many begin with "Consider..." or "One could suggest..."--in such a way that Butler never quite tells the reader whether she approves of the view described. Mystification as well as hierarchy are the tools of her practice, a mystification that eludes criticism because it makes few definite claims.

Take two representative examples:

What does it mean for the agency of a subject to presuppose its own subordination? Is the act of presupposing the same as the act of reinstating, or is there a discontinuity between the power presupposed and the power reinstated? Consider that in the very act by which the subject reproduces the conditions of its own subordination, the subject exemplifies a temporally based vulnerability that belongs to those conditions, specifically, to the exigencies of their renewal.

And:

Such questions cannot be answered here, but they indicate a direction for thinking that is perhaps prior to the question of conscience, namely, the question that preoccupied Spinoza, Nietzsche, and most recently, Giorgio Agamben: How are we to understand the desire to be as a constitutive desire? Resituating conscience and interpellation within such an account, we might then add to this question another: How is such a desire exploited not only by a law in the singular, but by laws of various kinds such that we yield to subordination in order to maintain some sense of social "being"?

Why does Butler prefer to write in this teasing, exasperating way? The style is certainly not unprecedented. Some precincts of the continental philosophical tradition, though surely not all of them, have an unfortunate tendency to regard the philosopher as a star who fascinates, and frequently by obscurity, rather than as an arguer among equals. When ideas are stated clearly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pursue them on one's own. When they remain mysterious (indeed, when they are not quite asserted), one remains dependent on the originating authority. The thinker is heeded only for his or her turgid charisma. One hangs in suspense, eager for the next move. When Butler does follow that "direction for thinking," what will she say? What does it mean, tell us please, for the agency of a subject to presuppose its own subordination? (No clear answer to this question, so far as I can see, is forthcoming.) One is given the impression of a mind so profoundly cogitative that it will not pronounce on anything lightly: so one waits, in awe of its depth, for it finally to do so.

In this way obscurity creates an aura of importance. It also serves another related purpose. It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding. When the bullied readers of Butler's books muster the daring to think thus, they will see that the ideas in these books are thin. When Butler's notions are stated clearly and succinctly, one sees that, without a lot more distinctions and arguments, they don't go far, and they are not especially new. Thus obscurity fills the void left by an absence of a real complexity of thought and argument.

Last year Butler won the first prize in the annual Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature, for the following sentence:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Now, Butler might have written: "Marxist accounts, focusing on capital as the central force structuring social relations, depicted the operations of that force as everywhere uniform. By contrast, Althusserian accounts, focusing on power, see the operations of that force as variegated and as shifting over time." Instead, she prefers a verbosity that causes the reader to expend so much effort in deciphering her prose that little energy is left for assessing the truth of the claims. Announcing the award, the journal's editor remarked that "it's possibly the anxiety-inducing obscurity of such writing that has led Professor Warren Hedges of Southern Oregon University to praise Judith Butler as `probably one of the ten smartest people on the planet.'" (Such bad writing, incidentally, is by no means ubiquitous in the "queer theory" group of theorists with which Butler is associated. David Halperin, for example, writes about the relationship between Foucault and Kant, and about Greek homosexuality, with philosophical clarity and historical precision.)

Butler gains prestige in the literary world by being a philosopher; many admirers associate her manner of writing with philosophical profundity. But one should ask whether it belongs to the philosophical tradition at all, rather than to the closely related but adversarial traditions of sophistry and rhetoric. Ever since Socrates distinguished philosophy from what the sophists and the rhetoricians were doing, it has been a discourse of equals who trade arguments and counter-arguments without any obscurantist sleight-of-hand. In that way, he claimed, philosophy showed respect for the soul, while the others' manipulative methods showed only disrespect. One afternoon, fatigued by Butler on a long plane trip, I turned to a draft of a student's dissertation on Hume's views of personal identity. I quickly felt my spirits reviving. Doesn't she write clearly, I thought with pleasure, and a tiny bit of pride. And Hume, what a fine, what a gracious spirit: how kindly he respects the reader's intelligence, even at the cost of exposing his own uncertainty.

Butler's main idea, first introduced in Gender Trouble in 1989 and repeated throughout her books, is that gender is a social artifice. Our ideas of what women and men are reflect nothing that exists eternally in nature. Instead they derive from customs that embed social relations of power.

This notion, of course, is nothing new. The denaturalizing of gender was present already in Plato, and it received a great boost from John Stuart Mill, who claimed in The Subjection of Women that "what is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing." Mill saw that claims about "women's nature" derive from, and shore up, hierarchies of power: womanliness is made to be whatever would serve the cause of keeping women in subjection, or, as he put it, "enslav[ing] their minds." With the family as with feudalism, the rhetoric of nature itself serves the cause of slavery. "The subjection of women to men being a universal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural... But was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?"

Mill was hardly the first social-constructionist. [...] In work published in the 1970s and 1980s, Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin argued that the conventional understanding of gender roles is a way of ensuring continued male domination in sexual relations, as well as in the public sphere. [...] Before Butler, the psychologist Nancy Chodorow gave a detailed and compelling account of how gender differences replicate themselves across the generations: she argued that the ubiquity of these mechanisms of replication enables us to understand how what is artificial can nonetheless be nearly ubiquitous. Before Butler, the biologist Anne Fausto Sterling, through her painstaking criticism of experimental work allegedly supporting the naturalness of conventional gender distinctions, showed how deeply social power-relations had compromised the objectivity of scientists: Myths of Gender (1985) was an apt title for what she found in the biology of the time. (Other biologists and primatologists also contributed to this enterprise.) Before Butler, the political theorist Susan Moller Okin explored the role of law and political thought in constructing a gendered destiny for women in the family; and this project, too, was pursued further by a number of feminists in law and political philosophy. Before Butler, Gayle Rubin's important anthropological account of subordination, The Traffic in Women (1975), provided a valuable analysis of the relationship between the social organization of gender and the asymmetries of power.

So what does Butler's work add to this copious body of writing? Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter contain no detailed argument against biological claims of "natural" difference, no account of mechanisms of gender replication, and no account of the legal shaping of the family; nor do they contain any detailed focus on possibilities for legal change. What, then, does Butler offer that we might not find more fully done in earlier feminist writings?

One relatively original claim is that when we recognize the artificiality of gender distinctions, and refrain from thinking of them as expressing an independent natural reality, we will also understand that there is no compelling reason why the gender types should have been two (correlated with the two biological sexes), rather than three or five or indefinitely many. "When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice," she writes.

From this claim it does not follow, for Butler, that we can freely reinvent the genders as we like: she holds, indeed, that there are severe limits to our freedom. She insists that we should not naively imagine that there is a pristine self that stands behind society, ready to emerge all pure and liberated. [...] Butler does claim, though, that we can create categories that are in some sense new ones, by means of the artful parody of the old ones. Thus her best-known idea, her conception of politics as a parodic performance, is born out of the sense of a (strictly limited) freedom that comes from the recognition that one's ideas of gender have been shaped by forces that are social rather than biological. We are doomed to repetition of the power structures into which we are born, but we can at least make fun of them, and some ways of making fun are subversive assaults on the original norms.

The idea of gender as performance is Butler's most famous idea, and so it is worth pausing to scrutinize it more closely. She introduced the notion intuitively, in Gender Trouble, without invoking theoretical precedent. [....] Butler's point is presumably this: when we act and speak in a gendered way, we are not simply reporting on something that is already fixed in the world, we are actively constituting it, replicating it, and reinforcing it. By behaving as if there were male and female "natures," we co-create the social fiction that these natures exist. They are never there apart from our deeds; we are always making them be there [and this is regular feminist theory]. At the same time, by carrying out these performances in a slightly different manner, a parodic manner, we can perhaps unmake them just a little. [this is not] [...]

Just as actors with a bad script can subvert it by delivering the bad lines oddly, so too with gender: the script remains bad, but the actors have a tiny bit of freedom. Thus we have the basis for what, in Excitable Speech, Butler calls "an ironic hopefulness." [...]

What precisely does Butler offer when she counsels subversion? She tells us to engage in parodic performances, but she warns us that the dream of escaping altogether from the oppressive structures is just a dream: it is within the oppressive structures that we must find little spaces for resistance, and this resistance cannot hope to change the overall situation. And here lies a dangerous quietism.

If Butler means only to warn us against the dangers of fantasizing an idyllic world in which sex raises no serious problems, she is wise to do so. Yet frequently she goes much further. She suggests that the institutional structures that ensure the marginalization of lesbians and gay men in our society, and the continued inequality of women, will never be changed in a deep way; and so our best hope is to thumb our noses at them, and to find pockets of personal freedom within them. [...] In Butler, resistance is always imagined as personal, more or less private, involving no unironic, organized public action for legal or institutional change.

It is also a fact that the institutional structures that shape women's lives have changed. The law of rape, still defective, has at least improved; the law of sexual harassment exists, where it did not exist before; marriage is no longer regarded as giving men monarchical control over women's bodies. These things were changed by feminists who would not take parodic performance as their answer, who thought that power, where bad, should, and would, yield before justice. [...] It was changed because people did not rest content with parodic performance: they demanded, and to some extent they got, social upheaval.

Butler not only eschews such a hope, she takes pleasure in its impossibility. She finds it exciting to contemplate the alleged immovability of power, and to envisage the ritual subversions of the slave who is convinced that she must remain such. She tells us--this is the central thesis of The Psychic Life of Power--that we all eroticize the power structures that oppress us, and can thus find sexual pleasure only within their confines. It seems to be for that reason that she prefers the sexy acts of parodic subversion to any lasting material or institutional change. Real change would so uproot our psyches that it would make sexual satisfaction impossible. Our libidos are the creation of the bad enslaving forces, and thus necessarily sadomasochistic in structure.

Well, parodic performance is not so bad when you are a powerful tenured academic in a liberal university. But here is where Butler's focus on the symbolic, her proud neglect of the material side of life, becomes a fatal blindness. For women who are hungry, illiterate, disenfranchised, beaten, raped, it is not sexy or liberating to reenact, however parodically, the conditions of hunger, illiteracy, disenfranchisement, beating, and rape. Such women prefer food, schools, votes, and the integrity of their bodies. I see no reason to believe that they long sadomasochistically for a return to the bad state. If some individuals cannot live without the sexiness of domination, that seems sad, but it is not really our business. But when a major theorist tells women in desperate conditions that life offers them only bondage, she purveys a cruel lie, and a lie that flatters evil by giving it much more power than it actually has.

Excitable Speech, Butler's most recent book, which provides her analysis of legal controversies involving pornography and hate speech, shows us exactly how far her quietism extends. For she is now willing to say that even where legal change is possible, even where it has already happened, we should wish it away, so as to preserve the space within which the oppressed may enact their sadomasochistic rituals of parody.

As a work on the law of free speech, Excitable Speech is an unconscionably bad book. [...] But let us extract from Butler's thin discussion of hate speech and pornography the core of her position. It is this: legal prohibitions of hate speech and pornography are problematic (though in the end she does not clearly oppose them) because they close the space within which the parties injured by that speech can perform their resistance. By this Butler appears to mean that if the offense is dealt with through the legal system, there will be fewer occasions for informal protest; and also, perhaps, that if the offense becomes rarer because of its illegality we will have fewer opportunities to protest its presence.

Well, yes. Law does close those spaces. [...] For Butler, the act of subversion is so riveting, so sexy, that it is a bad dream to think that the world will actually get better. What a bore equality is! No bondage, no delight. In this way, her pessimistic erotic anthropology offers support to an amoral anarchist politics. [...]

The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment. In this sense, Butler's self-involved feminism is extremely American, and it is not surprising that it has caught on here, where successful middle-class people prefer to focus on cultivating the self rather than thinking in a way that helps the material condition of others. Even in America, however, it is possible for theorists to be dedicated to the public good and to achieve something through that effort.

Many feminists in America are still theorizing in a way that supports material change and responds to the situation of the most oppressed. Increasingly, however, the academic and cultural trend is toward the pessimistic flirtatiousness represented by the theorizing of Butler and her followers. Butlerian feminism is in many ways easier than the old feminism. It tells scores of talented young women that they need not work on changing the law, or feeding the hungry, or assailing power through theory harnessed to material politics. They can do politics in safety of their campuses, remaining on the symbolic level, making subversive gestures at power through speech and gesture. This, the theory says, is pretty much all that is available to us anyway, by way of political action, and isn't it exciting and sexy?

In its small way, of course, this is a hopeful politics. It instructs people that they can, right now, without compromising their security, do something bold. But the boldness is entirely gestural, and insofar as Butler's ideal suggests that these symbolic gestures really are political change, it offers only a false hope. Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections through it.

- Martha Nussbaum, The Professor of Parody

#judith butler #postmodernism #martha nussbaum #the professor of parody #feminism #radical feminism #intersectional feminism

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you-can-write-this · 5 years ago

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Character Creation Tip: Archetypes of Interest

If you’re having trouble formulating your cast of personalities, or your characters are feeling nebulous, then try this: begin with an archetype, and then complicate it or subvert it.

Arguably, the most efficient strategy is to begin with your character’s interests, and/or their chosen subculture. (This list is not exhaustive, and it spans a variety of styles and genres. Ignore the concepts which are too exaggerated or too bland for your reality.)

These are just a few ideas to get you inspired! Have fun, and be sure to absolutely ruin the archetypes you select-- don’t play them straight! In other words, these are all stereotypes, and it’s up to you to shift away from these stereotypes!

Rock - A passionate musician who feels more than they think. They list band names just to show off, and they hold extremely strong opinions on obscure controversies (e.g. slap-bass is best thumb-down). They can be talented or terrible. Stereotypically, they are slackers in almost every subject: they refuse to try in school and prefer unemployment to hard work. However, when they are passionate, they don’t recognize that they’re working. With their instrument, they are persistent, and may even become skilled. If they like the idea of pulling up in a flashy car, they’ll learn how to drive, and they’ll do it well enough. But if driving is a chore, they’ll be homebound or hitching rides.

Related interests: Even if they are characterized by their interest in rock, they are likely to have similar feelings about other, lesser interests. Common examples are comic books, D&D, and other nerdy media. They’re likely fond of tv & movies from the 80s and 90s. They may have an appreciation for some other genres, such as hip-hop, but will select genres to hate in order to establish an out-group (commonly classical, country, or radio pop). Stereotypically, they have an aversion to mainstream media and intellectualism; both make them feel inferior.

Dark counterculture - Goth, emo, and all those unlabelled. They are angry about something, but don’t know what to do with those feelings, so they choose society or authority figures as the target of their anger; they might seem very justified, or they might seem completely silly. Some brandish weapons, such as aesthetically pleasing knives, as a symbol of rebellion, but (usually) not as a tool for malice. Similarly, they gravitate towards dark iconography, which to them reads as “truth”-- satanic and violent imagery seem to call attention to the actual darkness they perceive in the world, a darkness often hidden away (although they do not believe in the devil, and do not necessarily advocate violence; if they do, it’s probably all hypotheticals, and never actions). Despite all this, most have personable, friendly, and often cheerfully childlike mannerisms by default, at least when socializing within the in-group.

Related interests: They probably have personal idols who they latch onto. Musicians are most common, but any celebrity is fine, as long as they can classify as a personal symbol of rebellion. A superstitious attitude has taught them to trust tarot, to believe in ghosts, and maybe even to practice casual witchcraft. They cope with internal pain through their vices, primarily drugs, tobacco, and alcohol. Particularly among girls/women (according to stereotype), they also may have a strong liking for childlike or “pretty” media-- Disney movies and children’s shows, for example, although older/nostalgic media for teens & adults may also make the cut. They are averse to mainstream media by virtue of it being mainstream, but older mainstream media, particularly from the 80s and 90s, can appear left behind and forgotten, and regardless of gender, the character may seek to protect this forgotten & broken toy, thereby developing a great fondness.

The idea of America - This trope only applies to Americans, as it describes American nationalists. They love symbols of America, including the flag, the eagle, the army, the police, and sometimes the fire department. In appearance, they have a high level of self-confidence, showing off their toughness and their perceived moral integrity. They are probably politically conservative, if not libertarian or independent. This type is proud to be loyal-- they are proud of how they stand by their family, or their clique, or even how they stand by their own self-- as a result, they resist changing social groups on principle (breakups are especially hard), and they may be willing to make great sacrifices in order to prove their loyalty (e.g. putting themself in danger). Personal sacrifice, to them, demonstrates their heroic nature. They are similarly loyal to America. Country music probably appeals to them, and so does mainstream media, such as pop music and action/superhero movies. In some areas towards the south, these characters are popular jocks, and may have brains as well as brawn; their futures may be promising, and they are well-liked. If younger, they may party, and if older, they are a parent, beloved by other parents in the area, possibly coaching a little league or joined to a PTA. In some areas towards the north, these characters are rebellious and countercultural. In this case, expect spiteful & defensive behaviors, paired with a distrust in authority; they will still have mainstream tastes, but they might be wary of the charming and well-liked. They may find themself stuck, on a loop, talking about leaving town or starting a business, but they mistake their own dreams for goals; it will never happen. In contexts that frame them as rebellious, others may describe them as annoying, childish, or aggressive.

Regarding gender: Not all of them are men. Within this archetype, many pride themselves as “tough ladies,” but be wary that they are not feminists. The men will be loyal to their families, and the women will be loyal to their husbands. Both men and women will place great importance on their gender role as a symbol of tradition, a loyalty to their upbringing and to each other. Women of this type may be proud gun owners, or may be athletic in the realm of “feminine” sports, such as tennis or softball; almost never football or basketball. If these women/girls are countercultural & rebellious in their context, expect them to spite well-liked women for being vapid, superficial, or boring.

Regarding moving: Someone who has grown up in the south well-liked for these qualities will still be confident & sociable in other cultural contexts. In the case of a countercultural rebel, it may depend.

Broader queer community - Not all queer people integrate their queer identity into their lifestyle-- but some do. Without an enormous subversion, this trope is better off written by queer writers. (This admin is queer in many respects.) Social politics engage them, invigorate them, and infuriate them. They’re a leftist if not center-left, and they have probably gained a lot of their knowledge & wisdom from social media, to varying degrees of accuracy; they’ve spent long hours scrolling through socio-political facts and opinions, lighting a fire in their stomach. According to stereotype, legitimate distress has left them spiteful at a young age, and they are quick to anger, quick to correct others. Friendships within the queer community bring them a sense of comfort. When comfortable, they are energetic and indulge in childlike behaviors; speaking too loudly, bursting into song, offering inappropriate emotional responses, etc. They are openly affectionate and may even enjoy cuddling with friends or openly cuddling with a partner(s). After previously feeling limited at a younger age, they are now desperate to express themself through any medium, and therefore gravitate towards wacky/colorful clothing, talk constantly about their queerness, and may decorate their houses/rooms with bizarre, sometimes queer, paraphernalia.

Related interests: If they’re invested in a tv show, podcast, movie series, book series, or other piece of media, they are probably very deeply and passionately invested. This media will usually be current, and will usually be just outside of the social norm-- for example, serious-toned animated shows, but not quite children’s television; if it’s live-action, then it’s science fiction or fantasy with a distinctive lore. Their chosen media falls into three categories: A. media with canonical lesbian relationships, B. media in which two or more men have a warm, positive relationship (which doesn’t always have to be interpreted as romantic by fans), C. it’s a YA story in which a vibrant cast of characters come together as a team or clique. They spend significant time talking about, thinking about, or writing about their favorite media.

Female celebrities - They have a vast knowledge of their favorite female celebrities, and keep closely up to date through social media. They are fiercely loyal to these celebrities, and take any spite towards these celebrities as an ethical offense. Unconsciously, they’ve developed a very strong sense of importance towards the gender binary, and for their own reasons, believe in supporting (certain) women, and distrusting men. Unconsciously, they imitate their favorite celebrities, and learn how to behave from them-- because of this, their world has a high bar for fashion and presentability. Their clothes are a perfect fit, style, and shape, and if they’re a woman/girl, their makeup is a wonder; in this way, they, too feel a little bit more like the women they admire. Stereotypically, if they’re a gay man, they probably imitate their favorite female celebrities consciously more than unconsciously, dancing along to the choreographed dances and attributing these imitations of femininity to their own homosexuality. In any form of imitation, their obsession with celebrities informs their norms, and informs their sense of self. Because they learn to view themself externally, comparing their own behaviors and presentation to that of celebrities, they will become experts in their own presentation, and as a result, become very well-liked, with many friends. Their lingo is very much up-to-date. They’re a fan of male celebrities as well, but they do not make it a hobby; it holds much lesser importance.

Related interests: In general, their tastes sway mainstream. They like watching celebrities because they like people, and so socializing and partying are their primary pastimes. With their heightened empathetic skills, they could relate to those in the out-group, but have trained themself not to, in order to feel most comfortable in their in-group. So they spend time with people similar to themself, and avoid or even act cruelly towards those they don’t immediately understand.

Classical music (for characters below 30 or so) - Their classical tastes span infinite times and locations. However, they take separate interest in European (or Ancient Grecian/Roman) history, and in this regard, they are probably fixated on a particular country during a specific period: for example, the Italian Renaissance, Soviet Russia, or Classical Greece. They’ve read a lot of classic literature from and outside of this setting. They feel disconnected from contemporary society and mainstream media, although their complaints may be diverse. They do extremely well in school, and heel to all authority figures. They relish in their ability to follow the instructions of teachers, bosses, and elders, and when they lack ability to fulfill commands, they become anxious and panicked.

Related interests: When they connect to contemporary culture in their own way, however, their hearts swell with pride-- maybe they make memes about classical art, and tote this as a character trait. Humor is a common way to show off that they don’t take their obsessions “too seriously,” and it often becomes central to their self-expression. Otherwise, they may have any number of interests, but it’s common for contemporary media to be handled with humor and irony.

School - Bookish, quiet, and unhappy. Stereotypically, this archetype is guided first and foremost by authority figures. They feel pressured to do better than anyone, and have either limited or failed to incite their social life. Since success in social relationships remains unquantifiable, friendship always ends up on the back-burner, even long after they’ve realized their mistake, and long after it’s too late. They get straight As most of the time, and feel proud of their ability to do better than anyone else. But they can’t write essays because they struggle to form their own opinions; if they get better at writing through shear hard work and perseverance, they will still struggle when an upper-level English teacher tells them to “cultivate your own unique voice,” because as far as they can see, they don’t have any voice of their own. They don’t know themself and are not sure how to learn about themself. Their actions follow the instructions of others. If they’re a college student, they’re having trouble picking a major, or have picked a major for pragmatic (not emotional) reasons.

Related interests: Poetry is a likely interest, whether it’s Instagram poetry, printed poetry, or the act of writing poetry. Even if they never seem to know who they are, if they write poetry, those poems seem to write themselves. They may also have nerdy interests, such as kpop, children’s tv shows, or anime. They aren’t explicitly averse to mainstream culture, either. Because they study so often, they’ve probably tried, at one point or another, studying with music on, so they have developed music tastes. They probably know their musical niche very well, whatever it may be (and no genre is necessarily off limits).

Academia - Perhaps a professor, or just as likely, a wannabe. They have some knowledge in many fields, and specialized knowledge in one field or a few. However, they will proudly bare their broad, shallow knowledge on the subjects they’re less familiar with. They form strong opinions on hardly familiar subject matter, and become domineering in conversation. They probably think that psychology is a nonsense field made up of unprovable, and therefore irrelevant, theories. Others will constantly be Googling the obscure words they speak. Lateness and disorganization illustrate the disconnect between their deep thought and a pragmatic reality. However, in their private life, they may exhibit extraordinarily silly or childlike mannerisms, in their own adult way. Such mannerisms appear to be a disclaimer to their personalities-- that they are not serious all the time, which makes them feel a little cooler, or at least, a little less cold, insociable, or nerdy. But in fact, they are indignant about any silliness which contaminates art or academia, and thus, they section off maturity (thoughtful, logical, serious, rigorous) and childishness (pointless, for entertainment value only, not strictly beautiful or strictly grotesquely beautiful). They are serious about serious matters and silly among silly matters. Contrast to the young fan of classical music, who approaches the mature, academic, or artistic as a form of entertainment worth joking about. According to stereotype, both the young classical listener and the academia enthusiast use humor to disarm their perilously serious interests, but the academic is much more cautious to distract from beauty or knowledge.

Related interests: They have a strong appreciation for the arts & culture. Classical music is the highest form of music to them, and hip hop is “not real music.” They are deeply moved by literature, sculpture, and painting; the older it is, the more they like it.

Skateboarding - Relaxed and sociable, this character can be seen skating from class to class on an outdoor college campus, or trying tricks with other skaters in back of the public library. They are fascinated by appearances, and are very careful about their presentation in regards to fashion (probably includes a beanie), their language, and the tastes they share with other people (in movies, television, etc.). Therefore, they may slip into superficial behaviors, judging others by first impressions or even just their appearances or their social status. They are aware of how others perceive them, and are both conscientious and self-conscious. The skateboard itself is an aesthetic flare taken very far, reflecting their strong sense of nostalgia. Their nostalgia shows up in their other interests as well: they watch television & movies from the 80s and 90s, they started playing D&D after “Stranger Things” came out, and they genuinely enjoyed reading The Catcher in the Rye. Their tastes and tendencies may be nerdy and subversive, but because they are conscientious about how others perceive them, they are great at forming good relationships with others. They are sociable and know how to be likable. Sometimes they try to simplify themself for the easier consumption of others, and they definitely hide some of their stranger interests & ideas.

Related interests: Music is important to them, but that could take the form of hip hop, rock (likely punk), radio pop, or the generally alternative & obscure. Whether they’re smart or they’re stupid, they probably have at least one significant academic interest, such as literature or history, and they don’t care if other people know.

Musicals - Loud, eccentric, melodramatic. The theater kid is so boisterous that even they can’t deny it, and with full self-awareness, they break from social norms. They usually have trouble taking things seriously. They don’t take rules or laws seriously, and will stand on tables while authority figures demand that they get down. They first and foremost chase their bliss, against odds, threats, and authority. If a loved one passes away, they will become somber and cannot contain their pain, sobbing every waking moment, and they will cry suddenly at birthday parties, (understandably) calling attention to their latest thoughts and feelings for all to hear. However, if an unimportant or disliked acquaintance passes away, they may be stealing away with a friend to the corner of the funeral home, whispering jokes about something else and laughing inappropriately. They will speak sexually explicitly in church and laugh as they catch the glares of a passerby. They are not themself without friends, because they need someone to be in on the fun, on the joke. However, unlike most of the archetypes on this list, they primarily target people within the in-group. Like their friends, they are feeling, and highly sensitive. But like their friends, they are not conscientious of other people’s boundaries, and they don’t like to be told what to do. They make enemies of other theater kids, and can be genuinely aggressive, scheming, and villainous. They feel no shame when they talk behind people’s backs, which is one of their pastimes. But most importantly, you can always expect them to burst into song at the absolutely wrong time. Expect very intensive knowledge about their favorite musicals, but probably not their inner workings-- they can recite scenes from memory, and they know the names of all the original performers, but they are less likely to know names of writers, and they tend to care less for trivia. They may know some music theory and how to play piano, but otherwise, they will remain in their lane, focusing on performance aspects.

Related interests: If they are of high school age or younger, they can party without any drink or drugs; otherwise, they modestly drink alcohol and then trick themself into thinking they’re completely hammered. Assume they first tried alcohol at a young age. Despite how loudly they talk about sex & drugs, they may be inexperienced & naive about drugs. If they do drugs frequently, though, they do party drugs at parties, or try out drugs at other social gatherings to feel hip & cool.

Furries - No, they don’t want to fuck real animals. They want to fuck cartoon animals, but more importantly, they want to be cartoon animals. Like the theater kid archetype, they are bombastic, emotional, and sociable, but unlike the theater kid archetype, they lack any social awareness at all, and they are strictly countercultural. Theater kids read the room and don’t care what they see; furries can’t read the room at all. Amongst the in-group, they are childlike: loud, offering inappropriate emotional reactions, and constantly crossing other people’s boundaries. They can be very inappropriate (sexually & otherwise), regardless of the setting, and regardless of other people’s reactions. But more importantly, they are fiercely affectionate. They hug strangers of the in-group, and otherwise actively pursue physical contact. When a loved one gets attention, they are quick to become jealous, and they pursue their loved one’s attention overtly or covertly; they become angry and demand attention, or they show off their sadness and hope their loved one will notice. Amongst the out-group, they expect others to limit their true self. They are either quiet, or they become overtly rebellious, treating the out-group as the enemy who will stifle them. When rebellious, they try their best to be obscene: they curse & insult haphazardly, they feel proud when authority figures come down on them, and they gravitate towards obscene gestures and lewd implications. They are either proud of their sexual experiences, or shame others for their sexual experiences. Self-expression is extremely important to them, so they wear edgy, suggestive, or brightly colored clothing. However, they only care about bringing the inside to the outside, and they’re not very aware of the gaze of others, so they may not take care of their hair very much, and they don’t wear makeup; these are superficial matters, not matters of the heart. They are attracted to the cute and to the dark, sometimes simultaneously, so it’s common for them to flirt while using childlike language (and perhaps to use childlike language in general). Stereotypically, they have an aversion to "basic” types and to intellectualism; both make them feel inferior. But from the “basic” types-- in other words, people who are well-liked with socially acceptable interests-- they are mostly averse reflexively. They may insult others for being vapid, prudish, and mean (even without cause), but they expect such people to look down on them, and become defensive in preparation for cruelty.

Related interests: They party. They lost their virginity at a young age, have tried every drug, and may cope with their problems through drinking and smoking. They talk a lot about the demons they’ve struggled with (usually mental illness, trauma, or feeling like an outsider), and they blame their bad behavior and these demons. Whether these demons are lesser or greater, they feel unequipped to deal with these problems; their demons haunt them incessantly and, usually with full awareness, run away from their problems through drugs, tobacco, and alcohol. They are also deeply involved with rave culture. Although they get high while they rave, they do not rave in order to cope, but in order to express themself. Being a furry is not the only thing they want to express about themself, though, and they probably have many, many labels they very closely identify with. These labels may include any of the following: leftist, nazi, communist, emo, e-girl/e-boy/e-they, gay, bisexual, pansexual, nonbinary, trans, punk, clinically depressed, clinically anxious, etc. The more controversial the personal attribute they have, the more closely they identify with it, and the more they seek to express it within and outside of furry culture.

Eastern philosophy - Woke, but not really, this archetype is attracted to obscurity. This trope applies to outsiders of the relevant cultures; they are unlikely to be East Asian in ethnicity or nationality. In casual conversation, they make quick and awkward connections, hopping spontaneously from topic to topic. Somehow your political opinions on big business have lead them to go on about chakras. But that lasts only a moment-- now they’re talking about Nietzsche and Kant, and now they’re connecting it back to chakras. You don’t see the connection. They’re well-read and they very much know it; otherwise, they skim books and talk constantly about the couple pages they’ve read. They’re always looking for something deep and meaningful that can bring them realizations about the world around them, but the packaging of information can make or break wisdom. The more distant from their world this wisdom comes, the more likely they are to trust it-- new superstitions from within their country are deceptive, ignorant, and nonsensical playtoys. However, methods of divination from Africa, China, Japan, India, and Indigenous America pique their interest. They find these methods fascinating, beautiful, and artistic. They are either convinced that foreign superstitions are accurate, or they perceive it aesthetically first and foremost, maintaining a respectable distance, and taking pictures for social media. Ancientness, acclaim, and foreignness may all be factors in whether or not they respect a source or a piece of media. They frequently throw out names in European philosophy, but in Eastern philosophy, they have formed a blind trust, and they live their life assuming truth of the third eye, of chi, of chakras, etc. Whatever their preferences and beliefs were in youth, they have moved on. They’re on a constant hunt for novelty, and the familiar is too comfortable, too convenient, to be true. They probably have good ideals-- love, community, globalism-- but they exhibit some egocentric behaviors. To them, the modern is inauthentic (it is plastic, monetary, commodified), and the ancient or foreign is authentic by virtue of it being obscure. In their constant hunt for authenticity, they speak honestly to a fault. They cannot filter their thoughts, and others will become frustrated or disturbed by some of their harsh criticisms. They may also become socially isolated due to their tangents, their rants, their overconfidence, and their delusions of grandeur. For this reason, they socialize with others of their kind, and those with other shared interests.

Related interests: They are guaranteed to have some typical nerdy or mainstream tastes, despite dwelling on extremely unaccessible media. They’ve experimented with various drugs, but they are not the partying type. They listen to experimental music which to most other people sounds only like sound.

Drag - This stereotype primarily refers to drag queens, who dress up in flamboyant exaggerations of women’s clothing. This archetype is very conscious of their appearance-- their sense of self is deeply connected to their physical traits, and as a result, they discuss and amplify the physical traits they closely identify with. This applies out of drag just as much as it applies in drag. If they are visibly non-white, they may very closely identify with their ethnicity, and engage in (probably harmless) self-stereotyping, or otherwise significantly engage with their heritage (e.g. cooking, dressing, speaking the language/wanting to learn the language and never getting around to it). If they are especially skinny, they will dress to emphasize it, and they will carry themself with the confidence of a skinny person who wants to be skinny. If they are especially overweight, they care deeply about body positivity, or in some cases, will purposefully make themself the butt of the joke, and tell fat jokes about themself all the time. A blond/blonde will take extra care to coif their hair, a curvy person will move to emphasize the shape of their body, etc. Other facets of their personality and background may also become the subject of some verbal self-stereotyping (usually of the purposeful, joking kind)-- they may talk about how southern they are, or how “poor” they are, or how communist they are, etc. They may have a (flexible, ever-changing) list of attributes they ascribe to themself, and go out of their way to express these traits, while holding a complex, passive-aggressive relationship with their undesired traits. If they are a drag queen who generally lives as a man, then he wears distinctly male clothing most of the time, but his look is distinctive-- not necessarily fashionable, and unlikely to be flashy, but most certainly distinctive. In this case, he might wear something which represents a surprising, subversive hint of femininity amidst a masculine look: for example, a pair of earrings, or carefully done eyebrows, or a quiet hint of lipstick, or beneath a men’s shirt, a corset. They may not necessarily be extroverted, but they certainly will be sociable and conscious of the feelings of others. If they are rude and obnoxious, then they may be consciously ignoring the needs of others. They have some slight, superficial social justice tendencies, but in being an ally to other groups, they end up with a foot in their mouth. They are not angry for the sake of any minority group; they are merely an advocate, and they are proud to advocate, and when they do put their foot in their mouth, they expose a hidden chink in their advanced social skills. Sooner or later, they will drastically misunderstand the needs of others, because they are quick to project their experiences and ways of thinking and feelings onto others, and in trying to make others happy, they may be seeking out the happiness of an imagined other self; it’s empathy, if a bit misguided.

Related interests: They love pop music, and have had their fair share of drinking and clubbing. Their tastes swing mainstream and they have had strange, adventurous experiences. They are more likely than most people to be superstitious, because they like it when things are simple, stereotypical, and easy to explain; they believe in predictions of the future, and they latch onto astrological stereotypes of other people.

Live laugh love - They have an addiction to inspirational quotes, and it’s beginning to effect their personal relationships. They post inspirational quotes on Facebook. They decorate kitchens with little signs and chalkboards and potholders, inspirational quotes adorning them each. And yes, above all, they worship those three words: live, laugh, love. They are probably a mother in their 40s or above. If not, they have a great and loving relationship with their mother; they openly share interests and hobbies with their mother, and treat their mother the same as a friend. Either way, they live a privileged life. They are financially safe, and they are guaranteed food, housing, and comfort every day, possibly for their entire life. They may live comfortably in suburbia, or they might be filthy rich. If they work, it is not too intensive, and they have a lot of time for their many hobbies and interests. They’re caring and giving with a lot of patience, and they’re quite extroverted, with a lot of friends they meet regularly. However, while they pretend to be adventurous, they are not adventurous; they are aspirational, while remaining comfortable. Their magnetism to inspirational quotes comes from a comfortability with self-love and self-care, which comes from a privilege to take time for oneself, and the privilege of a healthy upbringing.

Related interests: Pets. They’re a cat-lover or a dog-lover. Caring for another creature is an important hobby for them. They love aesthetics, particularly simple interior design, conventional makeup, and plain yet expensive clothing. They probably have an interest in a specific country or region, and cultural inspiration may or may not be respectful. They may be on social media. If they’re young, they’re on Instagram. If they’re on the older side, they’re all about Facebook.

Some primary interests which fit less cleanly into archetypes, or which I otherwise will not be describing on this list: discovering the culture of parents or ancestors, a specific culture unrelated to oneself, being religious (should be specific to religion and sect), true crime/serial killers

Keep an eye out for a second post about secondary interests, and the difference between primary and secondary interests.

#prompts #writeblr #character concept #writing inspiration #inspo

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clarasimone · 5 years ago

Text

A perspective on the forewarning fascist iconography in GoT

Was it yesterday ? I reacted to a mind-provoking aesthetic analysis of GoT reblogged by @felixthemudnescat ... which basically no one reacted to (LOL) but... chatting with @scratchybeardsweetmouth and @ser-jorah-the-andal, I felt like revisiting it to add observations to my initial reaction. Even if it’s too heavy-meta for such a beautiful summer day. @felixthemudnescat pardon me for not using the reblog button cause I want to do this under the dot-dot-dot so as not to weigh down the usual degree of levity in our tumblr group ;-)

Also I only realized today that you actually reblogged without commenting and I assumed, maybe wrongly, that you adhered completely to what you reblogged. And that might not be the case, so I’ll alter my text accordingly...

So here we go... (my input comes at the end)

Anonymous asked:

Girl. Gurl. Who the fuck is Leni Riefenstahl? Y'all Sansa stans pulling the most elaborate nonsense out of your asses to justify shitty writing. Or you twist everything and make D&D sound as if they're the most brilliant minds the world has ever seen LOL

fedonciadale answered:

Hi there!

If you would have taken one moment to look up Leni Riefenstahl - and I assure you that it is not difficult to look her up - you would not have combined your question with a comment about the writing…. Look her up and learn a lesson about how tyrants manipulate.

The visuals of the show are alluding to famous/ notorious shots of Leni Riefenstahl. You would agree that the visuals are something that gives us hints? In addition to the dialogue?

Sansa stans have complained about the writing since season 5…. You all - I’m just assuming you are a Dany fan, correct me if I’m wrong - had no complaints about shitty writing in season 7?

Look I am not saying that the way D&D got to DarkDany this season was well executed, but the foreshadowing and the character development are there. And actually from all the things the show did Daenerys is one of the better from book to screen. The hiding of her path to ruthlessness by filming from her POV is well done in season 1 to 6, and the triumphant visuals are part of that.

Visuals are part of the foreshadowing. It did not come out of nowhere and it was always a major plot point - as has been argued by book readers for ages. That Dany blew up King’s Landing was always to be the culmination of her arc. And it was always meant to hit you in the gut. So, as you do nicely put it : get your head out of your ass as and realise that you have been duped. And ponder about why? Was it because Dany is beautiful? Was it because she had the occasional bouts of benevolence? Was it because you thought she was entitled to an ugly chair because she suffered? Was it because she was set up against people coded as villains, so that you don’t care about how she defeated them? Was it because she is a woman and woman can’t be evil?

Take your pick and learn something about yourself and your own bias, how we can be duped by a tyrant! If you do that you are doing exactly what GRRM intended his readers to do by writing Dany like he did.

une-nuit-pour-se-souvenir

(in fiction, all these logos meant to reference the nazi flag)

fedonciadale

Reblogging for @une-nuit-pour-se-souvenir ’s excellent additions. I could not have done that because that film is actually forbidden in Germany.

justacynicalromantic

Ohhhohohoho the last one - I am😏 at people who half a year ago threw stones at me when I argued that Dany has always had parallels with Hitler.

felixthemudnescat

Found this shared on Quora, had to re-blog!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi @felixthemudnescat long time no see !

I had not seen the original posting of this. My first instinctual reaction to this iconographic/aesthetics research is to object to the simple equation of Daenerys with Hitler. No fiction character will ever match the scope of evil (for lack of a better word) this man and his ideology represented. By ricochet and association, it makes every fan who was moved by Daenerys a potential Nazi sympathizer and that makes no sense. It’s also unnecessarily hurtful and insulting both to these fans and the real World (those who suffered and still suffer from The Holocaust). This said, the iconographic evidence you provided through your reblog has weight and is exactly what I referred to in some of my posts as the visual clues given in the show as to Dany’s *possible* arc, its *possible* finality (more on the *possible* further down); clues which scream at you if you have the cultural baggage to recognize them, and when you binge-watch the series 3 times in one month instead of watching it an ep at the time over 8-9 years. The middle seasons are especially ripe with these visual signs because they’re tagged unto somewhat repetitious narrative (Dany freeing/conquering one city at a time with little intimate character dev scenes). And @fedonciadale is right in wanting fans to look more closely into themselves; we shouldn’t close ours eyes on the shady ideological and moral symbols casting shadows on Daenerys throughout the seasons. But they were shadows. I don’t think they were meant to be the beginning and end to all things explaining the character.

@felixthemudnescat or @fedonciadale don’t you think D&D were building something much more subtle than the end result they opted for and which gives weight to your comparative iconographic essay ? For many seasons, the fascist references or foreboding reminders of Targaryen madness never outweighed the characterizations of Daenerys as a young woman who, regardless (or because ?) of her thwarted and abusive upbringing was trying to conjugate her own suffering and road to affirmation with the conquerer’s path given her. She might not have questioned the necessity/validity for her to conquer her way back to Westeros, as the only way she could get home, but she didn’t do it through simple rampage either. She did care to free the people she needed to build her armies. She did have a heart. This she did spontaneously; it came from a deep source within her, not a calculated one. Even if, of course, it turned out to be an astute strategy. And that sets her apart from the Nazis and its leader. At their best, D&D conjugated the two: giving us a rounded character build-up and evolution with ominous symbolic shadows lurking about her. @scratchybeardsweetmouth also made me realize, I who have not read the novels, that this humane aspect of Daenerys is brought even more to the foreground in the books. I quote @scratchybeardsweetmouth: “In the books (...) she repeatedly communicates firsthand with her freed people. She hears their opinions, is not afraid to mingle with them, always finds a way to protect them, even went out of her way to help heal some when a disease was about...” Without getting as much detailed info on her compassionate stance and actions in the show, it’s certainly the impression she indeed left us with, and it’s what her most faithful and steadfast companion, ser Jorah, sees in her and repeatedly says out loud, lest we forget it ;-) (“You have a gentle heart,” etc.)

So I thought it was IMMENSELY daring of D&D (or the novelist I’ve not read yet) to give us that scene where Daenerys is called Mhysa/Mother by the slaves she freed because the scene was inhabited with so many conflictual signs: I was all at once moved and sooooo worried as to where this could lead. Moved because, bottom line, these slaves are freed, actually freed, it’s the start of something. Dany has always given those she freed a choice to leave if they so wished… Moved because it’s a woman effecting the freeing, not a man… Moved because it’s Dany, the girl who suffered, who was a slave of sorts, that does the freeing, not her mentors…. Moved to see a culture refer to their freer as “Mother” (what a great homage to mothers, to women in general) / buuuuut also worried to see a culture refer to their freer as “Mother” because it seems to infantilize them on screen.

Here we could also open up a whole debate about the malaise one can feel in seeing an Aristocratic White Woman free Third World People but I urge you to go read @khaleesirin‘s meta writings on the subject. She makes a great case for us NOT to see Daenerys in this fashion. Regardless of her looks and lineage, the novels (and GoT, I insist in my chats with @khaleesirin ;-) shows her to be like the people she frees: an Other. She like then is homeless, uprooted, migrant, disenfranchised. If we fail to see it in Essos, the show really drives this home once Daenerys sets foot in Westeros where NO ONE welcomes, understands or appreciates her. (Which suddenly complexifies our rapport to Sansa and the Northerners we grew to love and respect since they seem not to be above xenophobia, and racism.)

But to get back to the Mhysa scene. Once the worrying starts, I can’t seem to stop it, even as I am moved to tears. Literally. Because of the above-mentioned qualities of it, and also possibly because of the Christ-like iconography it uses to celebrate Dany (”Let the little children come unto me” - if I may paraphrase the New Testament -- and thanks to @ser-jorah-the-andal for the reminder). And I’m always partial to feminizations of Christ; I love it, I think it’s sublimely subversive :-) But I’m also kicking myself for liking this because I fundamentally don’t want a Messiah saving the Third World, I want the Third World to save itself... and I’m worried. I’m really worried as I watch Daenerys triumph in this scene because we know she’s lacking important elements in her “psycho-affective and socio-political tool kit” (regardless of the quality and loving care of advisers now on hand, *cough* Jorah -- in the books @scratchybeardsweetmouth tells me she needs no advisor to keep her moral compass straight) and, so, will this get to her head ? Will she get drunk on her Messiah complex (and of course she does at the end of season 8) ? And what will happen if those she freed disappoint her (again flashforward to the end of season 8) ? And how will she rule them exactly (ditto) ? And, finally, yes, worried because, the fascist iconography is there and I’m going: omg where are they going with this ?

Here I want to open another parenthesis, also brought on by something @ser-jorah-the-andal wrote me: “if this is what they meant in the first place, they sure as hell didn’t bother to tell anyone in the cast so they could act accordingly, tho a case could be made that Dany never saw herself as the villain so that’s why they didn’t tell Emilia.” Indeed I’m sure the cast, or at the very least Emilia Clarke, were never told about the endgame, or never cued to the quoting of fascist iconography in some of Daenerys’ triumphant scenes. Clarke’s shocked reaction upon reading the last screenplays is a testament to her profound surprise... and this raises ethical questions, doesn’t it ? I mean in the ethics of creative partnership. It’s a recent debate possibly because there are so many tales of directors manipulating actors into giving them the performance needed to embody and communicate the discourse they want to leave us with. But the professional in me cringes here a bit. You’d hope they would trust actors enough to let them into what it is exactly they’re supposed to be creating...

This said, up to the moment before “the bells” scene in season 8, I had nonetheless seen D+D and EC give us a woman struggling morally with her choices. That’s important to state. And to get back to the above demonstration of fascist parallels, well, please, let’s point out that the Nazis and their leader never did struggle morally with what they were doing (or if they did, History bears no markers -- I’m talking about the Nazis here, not the German people as a whole). And I was prepared to see Daenerys fail because she never healed, she never achieved psycho-affective soundness (shall we get into the chapter of her misconstruing what love is ? Her relationship arc with Jorah speaks volumes) but I was expecting her to feel remorse if she did succumb to true fascism; remorse to the point of self-execution if you will, because that’s the kind of moral person D+D had been building for 7 years. But after D&D sent her over the edge, they erased all the previous nuances they had built into her, and I believe, tried to explained it away with a broken heart, megalomania and madness….

So if their plan was truly to make us see her as a fascist leader of the scope we’re talking about here, the way the above visual essay seems to suggest, they would have fleshed out her character’s arc accordingly throughout the seasons, and they didn’t. There were clues as to the possibilities -- yes, Dany stepping out for her final speech is absolutely shot like Triumph of the Will by Riefenstahl… but it’s also infused with other iconographic references. That image of her merging with Drogon’s wings belongs to the fantastic, and makes her into a formidable and powerful Id, which can be construed as a positive subversive marker. And some of us do celebrate WrathfulDany for this reason....

The reality of GoT is that there were no actual scenes developing her fascist ideology. So let’s not confuse allusions to fascism with actual fascism. With all D+D’s failings towards the end, Daenerys remained a more nuanced and contradictory character than that. She is NOT Hitler, please......

The iconographic research you provided in your reblog @felixthemudnescat show us one important aspect of Dany’s subtextual arc but not the full picture. It’s missing the heart and the suffering behind the soul who fell from grace.

I hope you don’t construe this long winding reaction as a slam. I know you come from a very specific place in regards to Daenerys. I just thought the excellent research you provided deserved to be reblogged, but with an added perspective ;-)

#got meta #got analysis #daenerys targaryen #Ser Jorah Mormont #fascism

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theherocomplex · 6 years ago

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Bruh. What are your thoughts on Tamlen?

Short answer: I’m sympathetic to his trauma, but it doesn’t excuse what he does to Feyre (or Lucien, or (I assume) Alis and the rest of his servants), and he’s still extremely toxic and abusive.

Long answer:

First off: I’m really impressed at how well SJM subverted the expected love-conquers-all ending that ACOTAR seemed to imply. A lot of the heavy lifting was done with foreshadowing (I’ve been looking for you), but it’s the excellent way she explores trauma and victimhood throughout the series that really gives that subversion its weight: we, and Feyre, understand why Tamlin does what he does, but his actions are still monstrous.

On rereading the series, I was struck by how deeply traditional Tamlin is. Granted, SJM is pretty heavy-handed with all the “Rhys and the Inner Circle are so progressive and cool and fun and awesome!” going on in the second book, but the fact is, Tamlin is one of two High Lords we see clinging to the old ways and roles (so to speak). The other, Beron, is an even bigger monster than Tamlin, and totally unrepentant – I find it very interesting that the High Lords who seek to look beyond tradition, toward more egalitarian societies and more compassionate methods of ruling, are also the ones who show remorse and regret for the suffering traditions have caused.

(Your mileage may vary as to how deep and sincere all that remorse and regret is, but I think we can all safely say that Tarquin and probably Kallias truly feeling those things.)

Beron’s cruelty clearly got passed down to his sons; while Tamlin is uncomfortable with his father’s legacy, he doesn’t seek to change it. “The way things are”/”the way things have to be” is enough for him – he never questions his actions beyond that. He’s an utterly reactive character, which we see from the very beginning of the series: instead of directly fighting Amarantha, or seeking allies to help him subvert her rule, he accepts the curse and sends his subordinates out to see if he can fulfill the criteria in time.

(Arguments can be made in support of why he didn’t fight – he had an entire Court to protect, after all – but that’s not something I have room to get into here.)

I’m sure Tamlin is an excellent tactician, and excels at the use of brute force, but there isn’t an ounce of strategy in him – which is probably the biggest initial contrast we get between him and Rhys, who has at last three concurrent long games running when we first meet him (protect Velaris; resist Amarantha by any means necessary; keep Feyre alive – it’s because Rhys is so damn good at what he does that he’s able to make each action do double-duty).

As Feyre’s narration makes clear, over and over, what happened Under the Mountain broke everyone. She and Tamlin are so badly broken they can no longer communicate – they refuse to acknowledge the nightly torment they both go through, and while Feyre longs for freedom, and to assert her new power, Tamlin just wants to go back to the way things were.

He wants – and I don’t think he’s self-aware enough to realize this – to make Feyre what he was to Amarantha: a prize to be won, a treasured possession, a symbol of the status quo. Any attempt on Feyre’s part to regain any agency – an agency that looks very different after her suffering, death, and resurrection – is seen as undermining his authority, which was so badly damaged at Amarantha’s hands. The Tithe isn’t necessary, but still Tamlin performs it, because that’s what they do in the Spring Court. Feyre giving away her jewels to help the water-wraith pay her tithe – giving away symbols of Tamlin’s wealth and prosperity – strikes at the heart of the stability he’s trying to regain. Forget the fact that the wraiths were starving and couldn’t pay; the Tithe must go on, as it always has, or Tamlin is not High Lord.

It’s toxic masculinity, clear as daylight.

(I want to talk more about how Tamlin and Rhys relate their versions of how their respective families died, but this is about Tamlin and if I get into Rhys’ character I will never, ever stop.)

Meanwhile, Feyre is only an acceptable victim so long as her suffering is never mentioned, and so long as she dresses up to play the pretty, empty-headed Lady. She saved the Courts, she defeated Amarantha – but none of that power belongs to her. Tamlin needs it all.

It’s emotional abuse, and Ianthe’s gaslighting only deepens the harm. Feyre, who spends the first few chapters trying to tell Tamlin what she needs – freedom, a purpose, training to harness her powers – is ever more isolated, and Tamlin is so out of touch with what she needs that he gives her paint, thinking all she needs is a hobby.

What follows is one of the most terrifying scenes in the books – Tamlin explodes, nearly destroying his study, and Feyre’s only not injured because she unconsciously protected herself with magic. And then comes the refrain: “I’m so sorry, I don’t want to hurt you, it’ll never happen again…”

And Feyre is numb, Feyre is cold, Feyre is empty – because this moment was always coming. She tread on all the bruises, all the places where his authority was most brittle and proved a show of strength wouldn’t solve the problem – and he reacted with violence and fury.

I would argue that Tamlin’s life in the Spring Court – with a father who murdered Rhys’ mother and sister – gave him no emotional language whatsoever, internal or otherwise. Feyre, at least, knows how damaged she is; Tamlin doesn’t even have the words to describe it. Things will be better later, they just need time, he’ll never hurt her – but they won’t, and there is no time, and he already has.

His worst offense is trapping her in the house, despite knowing her complete terror of being imprisoned. He knows how badly it will trigger her, and how much she’ll suffer because of it, and does it anyways. You’re fragile, you’re weak, your only worth is as a symbol, and I will lock you away so nothing can take you from me.

It’s sickening to read about, and Feyre’s breakdown is absolutely one of the most heartwrenching scenes in the whole series. She gave everything for him, and he locked her up and walked away, just like Amarantha.

Going by how we see Lucien reacting when they finally track Feyre down in ACOMAF, Tamlin’s abuse isn’t restricted to Feyre. Nothing is stated, but Lucien is clearly terrified, and begs Feyre to come home because of how much trouble they’re in – which means emotional and verbal abuse, if not outright physical attacks. Lucien, however valuable he is as a friend and a commander, is expendable when it comes to Tamlin’s authority.

He will do anything get Feyre back, even if that means betraying Prythian, or using Feyre’s sisters as bargaining chips – and because he’s a tactician, not a strategist, he’s unable to see how quickly that choice will turn on him. Nor is he able to see through Feyre and Rhys’ plan to infiltrate the Spring Court – and once that occurs, all that possessive, controlling love turns to hate.

When we see him at the meeting of the High Lords in ACOWAR, he’s cold, vicious, and constantly slut-shaming Feyre. And petty, too – holding his allegiance (and the safety of the realm) hostage because of a bruised ego, and thwarted desire.

Feyre and Rhys certainly have more than their fair share of morally grey (charcoal-grey, in Rhys’ case) actions, but they’re willing to compromise where Tamlin is not. He never has; that’s just the way things are.

He admits his final defeat with some grace, but there’s no indication he feels any remorse for how he treated Feyre, before or after she left the Spring Court. And the fact remains – Feyre shattered herself, traumatized herself, sacrificed everything, for Tamlin, while he sat at Amarantha’s side and watched. Even when he had the chance to free her from Under the Mountain, he didn’t think past physical desire, and even as she died, he didn’t fight for her.

A reactionary nature, a lifetime of toxic masculinity, a bad temper – none of these things, alone or combined, are irredeemable, but Tamlin shows no sign of wanting to change his abusive behavior. Until then, there is no reason to forgive him, and there is no excuse for justifying what he’s done.

#bee replies #acotar #Tamlin #acotar spoilers #bee meta #Anonymous #long post #seriously this is like 1500 words of ACOTAR meta and I could have gone on MUCH longer #thank you for such a thought-provoking question!#I hope this was what you were looking for <3

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ofvernacular · 6 years ago

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Tom McCarthy’s ‘Satin Island’ and the Anthropological Apparatus

What does an anthropologist do? U., a corporate anthropologist and the protagonist of Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island, tells the readers of the novel that “Structures of kinship; systems of exchange, barter and gift; symbolic operations lurking on the flipside of the habitual and the banal: identifying these, prising them out and holding them up, kicking and wriggling, to the light—” is his job (McCarthy 15). U. is the in-house ethnographer for a consultancy evasively called The Company. The Company “advised other companies how to contextualize and nuance their services and products. It advised cities how to brand and re-brand themselves; regions how to elaborate and frame regenerative strategies; governments how to narrate their policy agendas—to the press, the public and, not least, themselves.” Peyman, The Company’s head and another elusive figure through the novel, liked to say that “[They] dealt…in narratives” (McCarthy 16).

A narrative, defined primordially by the Oxford dictionary as a “written account of connected events,” is further defined as a “representation of a particular situation or process in such a way as to reflect or conform to an overarching set of aims or values.” The narrative, taken as a representation of a set of values, can be likened to an ideology. Ideology, as Louis Althusser proposes, is a “representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” Althusser says that what we commonly call ideologies are one of many “world outlooks,” which when examined

As the ethnologist examines the myths of a “primitive society,” are largely imaginary, i.e. do not correspond to reality. However, while admitting that they do not correspond to reality, i.e. that they constitute an illusion, we admit that they do make allusion to reality, and that they need only be “interpreted” to discover the reality of the world behind their imaginary representation of that world.

(Althusser 693)

If we understand The Company’s role as that of dealing in narratives, in investigating the existing ones and articulating new ones as consultations to other companies and governments, then we come to view the company as an agent of ideologization. When Peyman first hired U., he told him that “the Company needed an anthropologist because its entire field of operations lay in analysing groups, picking apart their operations and reporting back on this” (McCarthy 49). U. being the company’s anthropologist, was their specialist in the intellectual discipline of people and society. Therefore, U. determined the narratives that operated in society, that is, uncovered the imaginary relationships between individuals of society and their real conditions, and found ways for companies to modify these imaginary relationships to their own profit. Whenever the Company took upon a project, the brief would be worked at from “several angles, bringing all [their] intellectual disciplines to bear upon [it]…and slapping the pertinent offerings of each of these down on the collective table.” These offerings would be amalgamated into a concept, and Peyman would convert these concepts “into tangible undertakings that had measurable outcomes” (McCarthy 50) via the Company which, U. claimed, had “supplanted [family, or ethnic and religious groupings] as the primary structure of the modern tribe” (McCarthy 48). How specifically did U. aid the Company’s clients in achieving this?

…we unpick the fibre of a culture (ours), its weft and warp—the situations it throws up, the beliefs that underpin and nourish it—and let a client in on how they can best get traction of this fibre so that they can introduce into the weave their own fine, silken thread, strategically embroider or detail it with a mini-narrative (a convoluted way of saying: sell their product).

(McCarthy 25; emphasis mine)

With this construction of narratives for companies, U. helped them gain hegemony, or “social power or domination” (Rivkin 673) in society. These mini-narratives allowed companies to subtly reconfigure the imaginary relationships of people to their real conditions. Antonio Gramsci proposed that “power [could] be maintained without force if the consent of the dominated can be obtained through education and other kinds of cultural labor on the part of such intellectuals as priests and journalists” (Rivkin 673). U. was an intellectual employed by The Company for this very purpose. Gramsci said that society could be fixed into two major “superstructural levels,” one being “civil society” or all private organisations, and the other “political society” or the State.

These two levels correspond on the one hand to the function of “hegemony” which the dominant group exercises throughout society, and on the other to that of “direct domination” or command…

The intellectuals are the dominant group’s “deputies” exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government.

(Gramsci 673)

The dominant group, comprising of the owners of production, that is the corporations, thus control the dominant ideology of the society, meaning that they have hegemony over the society, and U., being an intellectual, stands at the base of this distribution of ideas, or these mini-narratives. The dominated group, or general society, accepts this domination by giving “spontaneous consent…to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group…historically caused by the prestige which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production.”

To further our understanding of how these mini-narratives function in society, we must look at U. as a representative of “the great masses of people” (Gramsci 637) to the corporations, or to “the dominant group” and consider representation through the work of Gayatri Spivak. By representing what the public wants to the corporations, U. is “[speaking] for” them, in a political sense, as opposed to ‘re-presenting’ them in the sense of art or philosophy (Spivak 275). Just as an agent of colonialization would study the natives of their inhabited colony and represent them to the Empire, U., in the capacity of an Ethnographer (historically also recognized as professional agents of colonialization), would do field research which was

…about identifying and probing granular, mechanical behaviours, extrapolating from a sample batch of these a set of blueprints, tailored according to each brief—blueprints which, taken as a whole and cross-mapped onto the findings of more “objective” or empirical studies…lay bare some kind of inner social logic, which can be harnessed, put to use.

(McCarthy 25; emphasis mine)

and present it to the company, or the modern day Empire. An example of this was the way U. had, for a breakfast cereal company, unravelled the symbolic significance behind the first meal of the day, behind fasts and breaking them, and feed all his interpretations and discoveries back to the client, for them to incorporate these cultural insights into their branding and packaging to make their way back into people’s shopping carts. The conception of representation as a tool of indirect oppression and even social control helps us understand the deep hegemony formed by the Company, in which U. played a crucial role. In chapter 4 of the novel, while U. pondered his “official function as a corporate ethnographer, [which] was to garner meaning from all types of situation,” he realised that sometimes he allowed himself to think that “[his] job was to put meaning in the world” and not the other way around (McCarthy 38). Later in the novel, in chapter 12, we see a development in these ponderings.

Around this time, my attitude not only to the Great Project but also towards Koob-Sassen [Project] underwent a sea-change. I started seeing the project as nefarious. Sinister. Dangerous…Worming its way into each corner of the citizenry’s lives, re-setting (“re-configuring”) the systems lying behind and bearing virtually on their every action and experience, and doing this without their even knowing it…

I started to regress my own part in it all…I was quite literally underground: secreted…among the Company’s foundations…This afforded me no power to shape the Project in a formal or official way—but to unshape it, sabotage it even…

(McCarthy 154, 155)

Upon this moment, U. realized his subversive power as an agent of ideologization, as a mediator of the narrative built between the dominant group and the masses. Koob-Sassen was the Company’s latest and till now most consequential project. His “issuing erroneous interpretations and assertions, or even insinuations, could lead to key decisions being made later that were catastrophically bad ones…[He] could do it, if [he] wanted: [he] could torch the fucker…” (McCarthy 154). The Koob-Sassen project, U. claimed, was so important that there wasn’t a “single area of your daily life that it [hadn’t], in some way or other, touched on, penetrated, changed; although you probably don’t know this.” This pervasiveness is reminiscent of ideological manifestation. Ideologies, enabled through narratives constructed by dominant groups, are so deeply worked into the frame of society that they affect the lives of all individuals, however go by unnoticed. A similar demand of overarching theorisation, titled the Great Report, was made by Peyman to U. personally. It was the Company’s ultimate assignment for U. that he had the liberty to create and work on whenever he could.

“The document, [Peyman] said; the Book. The First and Last Word on our age. Over and above all the other work you’ll do here at the Company, that’s what I’m really hiring you to come up with. It’s what you anthropologists are for, right?

…you don your khakis, schlep off to some jungle, hang out with the natives, fish and hunt with them…then, after about a year, they lug your bales and cases down to the small jetty that connects their tiny world to the big one…send you back to your study…you write the book.

Not just a book: the fucking Book. You write the Book on them. Sum their tribe up. Speak its secret name.”

(McCarthy 70)

This directive can be seen as problematic in many ways. Peyman, the head of the Company which not only directly influences the dominant ideology, but also dispenses ideologies to other companies, other centres of narrative distribution, is demanding an almost “codex” on the “modern tribe,” the entire populous of the era. This overreaching, overarching text, U.’s representation of the social order and the intrinsic logic that determines that social order, could be used corporately for the purposes of ultimate hegemony. This need for a fantastic “brand-new navigation manual” (McCarthy 71) betrayed the Company’s intent to be colonizers of the entire era, the supreme capitalist-industrialists. For the course of over half the novel we see U. investigate the “symbolic operations lurking on the flipside of the habitual and the banal,” (McCarthy 15) indulging in identifying patterns and connections between oil spills and parachutist deaths, hoping to find some “universal structure lurking beneath nature’s surface” (McCarthy 18). We can understand why a professional ethnographer was chosen for this corporate project, for ethnographers specialise in investigating practices and social behaviours, it is their job to uncover the symbolic, that is the conceptual, purpose of human acts. Any concept to be expressed, according to Ferdinand de Saussure, must be attached to a signifier. “A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable,” (Saussure 60) and it is called semiology. Culture, like language, is a semiotic affair, claims anthropologist Clifford Geertz (5). Culture, being a collection of such symbols, can be read as a text, interpreted in its own way, and U. does just that. In investigating various cases of parachutist deaths and oil spills, he looks for intertextuality to explain connections that may govern the occurrence of these events. U. being the medium through which the interpretation of what is signified through any social event is passed onto the Company for entwinement into the dominant ideology, becomes a locus of translation. He maintains dossiers, collections of observations and interpretations, on a variety of events, for professional and personal purposes. The intertextuality within cultural practices or social events becomes quite literal in the case of this ethnographer. U. becomes the translator of culture for the companies, an intermediary between these far-removed dominating groups and the masses.

We can understand the nature of far-removedness of those who dominate by the way that they are titled or signified in the novel. The Company always remains the company, and is never signified as anything more specific. “To the anthropologist, it’s generic episodes and phenomena that stand out as significant, not singular ones…the more generic, therefore, the more pure, the closer to an unvariegated or unscrambled archetype.” (McCarthy 74). The Company was a generic consultancy, pure and archetypal. This loose signification also helped bolster its affective value for the reader, helping it encompass more meaning and signify more concepts than a more accurate signifier. The lesser the difference between The Company and other companies, the more overarching, overbearing its presence was made to seem. The Company was further headed by an equally illusory character, Peyman, who for his employees was “everything and nothing.”

Everything because he connected [them] individually and severally…connected [them]…to [their] own age… He connected the age to itself and, in doing so, called it into being. At the same time he was nothing. Because, in playing this role, he underwent a kind of reverse camouflage.

That’s a Peyman thing. You would find yourself saying this several times a week—that is, seeing tendencies Peyman has named or invented, Peymanic paradigms and inclinations, movements, everywhere, till he appeared in everything; which is the same as disappearing.”

(McCarthy 52)

Peyman’s signification as a god-like figure who was “above” and reclusive reinforced the Company’s signification as an overbearing presence in society. It was told that Peyman “took up spectral residence within some sacred recess full of ministers and moguls over whom he held sway” (McCarthy 53). This description solidified the hegemony that was held by him and exercised through the apparatus of the Company. However, as much as Peyman connected everything to everything, it was still U. who mediated much of society to Peyman, becoming one of his most valuable right-hand men. The writer of Peyman’s fantastic Great Report, the translator of cultural texts, and one of Peyman’s personal interpreters of culture.

Towards the end of the novel, in a chapter revealing the story of another character Madison, the woman U. is dating, we are given testimony to the unassailable nature of a hegemony. In a narration of Madison’s activism days, she tells U. about an incident where protesters against capitalism at the G8 summit in Genoa were gathered, beaten and held by the police. Her narration followed into an account of her abduction by a strange old man in a mansion who made her enact various classical poses. At the end of this encounter she was released from the mansion without many of her belongings except her wallet. When U. asked her how she reached home, she narrated

I saw a little airport icon by the [train] stop just before Turin…so that’s where I got off and bought a ticket back to London—again, with my credit card. I remember thinking that it was ironic.

That it was my credit card that saved me after I’d been protesting against capitalism.

(McCarthy 198)

This account helped place the incontestability of a hegemony once put in place. The dominant ideology was the one in the book that took the ultimate position, the final word. There was no final cultural subversion, U., in the last pages of the book when given the opportunity to investigate his much fantasized Satin or Staten Island took up no such opportunity, and the existing fate of society was accepted by all the characters.

This essay, in conclusion, tried to trace the story of U.’s struggle with the nature of his company’s work, and understand his company’s role as that of a hegemony in society, with U. being one of its principle propagators of ideology. The essay made it important to understand the works of Gramsci, Althusser, Spivak, and Saussure to forward the argument made, with select references to Anthropologist Clifford Geertz.

#english literature #literature #anthropology #critical theory #literary theory #hegemony #gramsci #spivak #althusser #geertz

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thunderjust · 2 years ago

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Ted cruz daughters 2018

Since Parkland, Oliver’s advocacy group, Change the Ref, has spearheaded other subversive and disruptive public actions. The school-bus funeral procession - which evokes both the car-caravan protests of the early days of the pandemic and the recent vigils held outside Supreme Court justices’ homes - is a confrontational strategy that transforms a symbol of childhood into a megaphone. The caravan paid a visit to Ted Cruz’s home and his office. “My son knew, at 12 years old, what to do better than Ted Cruz.” “We’ve been keeping it, our little letter to remind us about what we’re fighting for,” she said yesterday. Oliver’s wife, Patricia, found the letter, in which Joaquin calls guns “death machines,” one month after the Parkland mass shooting, she told BuzzFeed News. During the stop at Cruz’s home, Oliver presented the senator (via a staffer) with a special gift: a framed letter by Joaquin arguing for universal background checks, written five years before he was murdered. The bus caravan visited Cruz first not only because he’s the Texas legislator who has received the most money from the NRA - over $749,000 - but also because of his staunch pro-gun commentary after the Uvalde massacre, in which he parroted NRA talking points by suggesting the school might have avoided the shooting by having fewer doors. Kindergarten graduation card - Chase Kowalski, Sandy Hook Jersey - Joaquin Oliver, Parkland Red & gray gloves - Chase Kowalski, Sandy Hook /erESuRDHGX- Change the Ref July 14, 2022 NRA Children’s Museum: School Achievement medal - Chase Kowalski, Sandy Hook Gracie Muehlberger, Santa Clarita One brightly illustrated “Young Author Certificate” issued to Chase Kowalski, who was murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, is strikingly similar to the certificates held by Uvalde, Texas, fourth-graders at an awards ceremony in May just hours before they were murdered. The NRA Children’s Museum is actually a museum: Alternating with the unoccupied seats are school desks filled with books and backpacks owned by young victims of gun violence. But the buses aren’t simply a symbolic memorial. Using a convoy of empty buses to represent the children killed by gun violence over the past two years is particularly notable since, during that period, guns surpassed cars as the No. Oliver’s intention for the project is clear: “We’re going after the money.” The one-mile-long caravan paid its first visit to the home and then the office of Ted Cruz, one of the NRA’s top-funded politicians. The latest work of artist Manuel Oliver, whose son, Joaquin, was one of 18 people killed in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, hit the road yesterday. children killed by gun violence since 2020 - is not subtle. The yellow school buses winding through the streets of Houston just kept coming - empty, draped in purple-and-black bunting, and emblazoned with bold black letters reading, “GUN VIOLENCE IN AMERICA.” The message of the NRA Children’s Museum - 52 school buses with 4,368 vacant seats for all of the U.S. Fifty-two empty school buses make up the NRA Children’s Museum.

#Ted cruz daughters 2018

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orionsangel86 · 7 years ago

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13x07 - Watching Notes - Lucifer, Colonel Sanders, Soap Opera story lines and one very grumpy angel of the lord... it must be a Bucklemming episode!

Since it’s a Bucklemming episode, and I have been seriously behind in getting my episode reviews completed, I thought I would instead just write out my thoughts and reactions to the episode whilst watching for the first time. Usually I don’t do this until I’ve watched an episode a few times but what better way to try to process a Bucklemming Episode than to stop and start and write some stuff down? If anything it may help me understand it a bit better.

My full watching notes and reactions to the episode along with my meta thoughts on it are under the cut. It gets pretty long as it took me over 3 hours to watch the whole thing on Friday evening! It’s taken me until now to actually complete the edit and add some pics to show particularly interesting moments.

The first thing I did on Friday morning was ask a couple of the guys I talk to regularly what to expect from this episode without giving me any spoilers, I always want to check if I should prepare myself for anything problematic or generally horrible. Thankfully I was told that unlike the majority of Bucklemming episodes this one has nothing rapey in it! Yay! Oh how low the bar is already set!

Other than that, @tinkdw and @margarittet told me that it was so bad it was funny, but that there were some stand out scenes.

I felt somewhat prepared. My expectations were buried deep underground as I prepared myself for the worst. I’m glad I did as I didn’t hate it as much as I thought I would. Full notes/review under the cut...

THEN

Asmodeus, Lucifer and Mary, Asmodeus’ plans.

Michael taking Lucifer.

So the set up is that its gonna be all about Lucifer and Asmodeus. No surprises there. Bucklemming love their pantomime villains.

Jack noooooo!

I still don’t understand why he hurt them before he flapped off. It seems so silly that he did that after he used the exact same ability to accidentally kill the security guard. But blaaah that was last episode moving on.

Starting with Lucifer giving a monologue. *grits teeth* It’s really hard to enjoy anything when you actually despise the sound of this guys voice.

*sigh*

All these pretty stock filler shots are quite nice, probably a major contrast between our world and whatever Michael did to the AU.

Ok so it IS Michael reading Lucifer’s thoughts. He wants our world. Because of course he does. Look how pretty those shots were. (Noted Richard is directing this so I expect a very pretty episode regardless of how absurd the script is)

I think @amwritingmeta may be right that Michael is gonna be the real big bad and the scary guy this season. I mean someone needs to be because Asmodeus is a laughable pantomime villain. So I am enjoying this. Give me more of Michael and less of Asmodeus. That is far better.

(we were talking about how I miss the old style villains, the Alistair's and Azazel's and Lilith's were truly scary and awesome to watch in action. Asmodeus in 13x02 just made me cringe so I was praying for a truly terrifying villain this season and Annelie said she hopes Michael takes that role. So I’m rooting for him to be horrifying)

Oh look classic Bucklemming love their torture scenes. Even if it is Lucifer so I don’t care (Can’t he just stay in that hanging Iron Maiden for good?)

Yup Michael is evil. I like it.

Interesting shot of Lucifer hanging behind the statue of Christ on the cross. That is… well its ironic in a way but also potential foreshadowing. If they give Lucifer a redemption arc I swear to god I am gonna be so fucking mad you will never stop hearing about it. Lucifer cannot be compared to Jesus in any way shape or form. Just NO. Look I’m not religious here but I hate this character and after what he did to Sam he deserves nothing but an agonising death. I will not accept a Lucifer redemption arc.

Okay rant over. Moving on.

Dean has a tiny tea cup. I just wanted to point that out… do they always have tiny teacups? I thought that they were manly men who don’t drink out of tiny cups!

(EDIT: In HINDSIGHT THE TINY TEACUPS FORESHADOW KETCH AND HIS POSH TEA DRINKING)

Okay so what is so great about this scene between Sam and Dean is that it is the total opposite to the scenes we are used to when the missing person is Cas. The fact that it is SAM that is super worried and DEAN that is doing the consoling is just so refreshing and it speaks VOLUMES about the way they each feel about Jack and Cas respectively. Sam developed a bond with the kid. It’s really nice. I hope that is developed.

I know that everyone already talked about the promo scene for ages whilst I was out the other night and only caught glimpses, but I love that Dean is finally using singular terms. He is not talking about him AND Sam here and Cas knew that immediately.

“Sorry darling, my family hate you. You can’t come with me”

That is basically what this moment is. They are such husbands.

The fact that he let Cas go though with just a “Don’t do anything stupid” I mean I wasn’t expecting that because I thought Dean would be far more worried and controlling but again it is nice to see him letting go of his control issues. He trusts Cas, and he accepted Cas’s reasons for going alone (which for once made perfect sense) so I am actually okay with this.

So wait, whilst Cas is looking for Jack and we have Michael/Lucifer stuff in AU world, Sam and Dean are gonna go hunt witch killers? That’s…. okay then…. I’m not sure I understand Bucklemming’s reasons for that but maybe it will make sense later. (who am I kidding from what I have been told nothing makes sense this episode and I just have to go with it – fine. The two main characters aren’t even getting in on the main plot. Whatever. *shrug*)

Oh god Asmodeus you are not scary and your weird purring is dumb.

“I have news of the Jack”

The Jack? Ok now I’m laughing. What?!?

Asmodeus that is some serious manspreading you are doing there. Stop that. I can see your bulge and it is not sexy you evil Colonel Sanders.

(Edit - Dean validating this fandom reaction to Asmodeus later is rather therapeutic - at least bucklemming are aware their OC is STUPID but poking fun at him does not make them seem clever)

Tbh this whole conversation comes across as stupid. I can’t take any of these scenes seriously I’m just laughing and trying not to cringe.

A hunter on the pay roll? Well that is definitely gonna come up later. What happened to the Winchester leadership strategy from last season? I thought they got all the hunters rallied up and on side?

Back to apocalypse world and hey Mary got mentioned. Where IS she?

No DON’T wail on Mary for a while. Does this mean that Michael has her locked up too? I hope he’s not torturing her. Urgh that would suck.

I like the light shining through the cross towards Michael. Very nice shot again. It frames Michael as being this holy and righteous character... actually they did that before:

In the first scene they also had light shining from behind him. I like how this is basically a subversion of a classic story telling trick in film making where the good character/ hero is the one bathed in light to symbolically portray him as pure and honest and trustworthy (like an angel) but this time around Michael IS an angel with his holy light, but it is anything but good.

Anyway...

Whenever Lucifer talks I switch off. It’s not very good for meta purposes.

Why is his shirt so sparkling white? How is this possible in a alternate universe? This makes no sense logically in this world. Symbolically though it is a sign of purity, cleanliness, goodness... all things we should totally not be associating with Lucifer so this is interesting. Redemption arc. *oh yay* >.>

So Michael has already been exploring opening alternate universes eh? Well, that once again opens up future storylines I suppose. Nice set up, Bucklemming got all the foundation stuff didn’t they?

Hey Kevin! You look terrible. Score a point for Bucklemming for actually bringing BACK one of the characters they brutally killed off.

Ok so with Kevin comes the Angel tablet and another spell that requires angel grace? Talk about a big call back. I smell another possible story foundation.

Wow so Lucifer gets his grace taken almost the exact same way Cas did, to be used in a spell the same way Cas’s was, in a season where they both act as father to a Nephilim son, and apparently team up this episode too? It’s almost like they want to make the audience see a mirror here or something?

Lucifer being a Cas mirror makes me extremely uncomfortable. Trust bucklemming to try to compare my most beloved character with my most hated character. I hate them a little bit more now.

The call backs to season 8 ARE interesting though. Kevin himself is going to through the audience right back to that season, so is the angel tablet, now this with the grace stealing. We are supposed to connect the two.

Obviously the big themes of season 8 were the toxic codependency, the angel’s fall, Cas’s brainwashing at Naomi’s hands and Destiel. Hmmmm...

Winchesters on their witch hunt. How is this relevant to the story?

KETCH?!?

SAME SAM.

My reaction was the same as the Winchesters. I’m getting whiplash in this episode already and I’m only 10 minutes in. They better have a good excuse for why Ketch is alive.

Hello Witch Daniella. “I know you don’t like witches but I also know you help people who are in trouble”.

This was a good line. Because it’s something that encourages the reading (that some people still refuse to see) that the Winchesters don’t work with absolutes here. There are always shades of grey. Their primary goal is always to help people before they kill things.

Also a call back to last seasons following the Ketch reveal. Ketch who sees in black and white against the Winchesters who try to focus on the “saving people” part of the tagline first.

Again with the whiplash. Lucifer is giving Kevin a lecture like he’s a good parent. All this Lucifer being right and good is making me nauseaus. It’s almost like Bucklemming are hoping to get #dadifer trending on twitter. (I sincerely hope this didn’t happen)

“Michael is a monster, pure evil”

Way to force the exposition down the audiences throats. I get it. Lucifer is the one we are supposed to root for. Sorry you irritating horned hamsters, it ain’t happening. (I should mention that Horned Hamsters is courtesy of @margarittet which I find way too funny so stole from her *love you*)

Kevin called our world “paradise world” which again, I find very interesting especially in terms of what Cas was brainwashed into thinking by Jack. Cas babe, I think you were tricked – unintentionally mind, but still. Never believe in paradise. Ever.

Welp so that explains one worry we had anyway. Lucifer got back to our world so Cas doesn’t get stuck in the AU at least. So where the hell is Mary? Is Mary not in this episode? See I really need to pay attention to the cast names at the start OTHER than Misha Collins.

Why is Lucifer wearing a wedding ring? Who’d he marry? Or has he always wore a ring since Nick? Is this just something I have chosen to not see ever in all of Lucifer’s episodes? If so that is purely a sign of me getting old and looking for rings whenever I see men on instinct now. Jesus Saz...

Lucifer you have no grace. You can’t blow people up anymore. Also that was another call back to Cas in 9x01. WHY are they trying to make Lucifer like CAS? STOP IT!!

“My ex husband is Lucifer” Okay I’ll give them that I liked that.

More torture up close. To be expected.

Oh god I can’t with these Asmodeus scenes. I’m sorry but they are awful. All I do is laugh and cringe.

Back to the random witch case that makes no sense and oh yay, more violence and this time against women! Bucklemmings favourite thing!

(I’m sorry I did warn you that this would be a running commentary on my thoughts so its gonna get wanky)

More whiplash and now a shout out to Rowena! We knew she was coming back at some point so it’s good to finally get a story in place for her.

Tying Rowena to Ketch though is possibly tying the BMOL to the Grand Coven which is what we WANTED FOR SEASON 12 so I hope we get that. Even though I still don’t see how Ketch can possibly be alive and at this point I hope it is hilariously unbelievable and idiotic in classic bucklemming fashion because I am enjoying this so far for its absurdity.

Who the hell is this? Ketch’s evil/less evil twin??!

Holy. Fuck.

(I have had to pause and laugh out loud for about five minutes)

I swear to god that I typed that before it was said in the show. I did not just add it in later. I can’t stop laughing.

So is Supernatural now Day’s of Our Lives?!

Oh god. Bucklemming. When Dabb finally fires you maybe you will be able to get work on an American Soap Opera.

Tell me we aren’t actually getting an evil twin plot? (good twin? Just as bad as the first twin? Who fucking knows. Or cares. Wow.)

I mean, Tink was right when she said it was so bad it was laughable. I didn’t think I’d actually laugh out loud but there we go.

I pressed play and Dean says “Do I look stupid to you?”

Bucklemming this is your entire audience right now.

I did like Dean’s little “Woo” there.

So Ketch has a less evil twin brother who failed Kendricks and went to become a paid for hunter. Okay. Sounds fake but okay. I don’t know whether to keep up my suspicion and go with Dean’s gut or to actually just accept that Bucklemming are legitimately this lazy with their writing. what is real?

“Isn’t that’s what we hunters do? Kill the bad thing”

I like this because it is in opposition to what Daniella said earlier. There is a silent question being asked there: “What is it that Sam and Dean actually do?” Is their primary role to protect? Or to destroy? Again it feels like the set up of a much bigger story arc and theme.

Also it’s the kind of thing that KETCH would say.

“I don’t care how good this story looks, I ain’t buying it” Dean you keep saying my thoughts. I don’t know how to take that. Do Bucklemming just accept that their audience is gonna hate their stuff now? Why are they reading my mind and putting my thoughts in Dean’s mouth! ARGH! It’s giving me a headache.

“There’s Ripley’s Believe it or Not Weird, and then there’s weird that’s just straight up bull” Soooo like every other episode of Supernatural versus episodes written by Bucklemming? Yeah thanks for reading my mind again Dean. Hahahaha!

I kinda feel like there is an undercurrent of self deprecation in the writing here. Like Bucklemming are poking fun at their own absurdity. I’m not sure how comfortable I feel with them being self aware - it’s like they are finally starting to consider how the fandom may react and are playing with that through the characters... are Bucklemming being... smart here? o_O

Dean not buying it though is the classic clue. Dean is always right. So maybe Ketch is just lying. I mean, come on. I really hope we don’t get an evil twin plot because this is so stupid. Dean is always right. That is like rule 1 of SPN. Please don’t screw this up.

I feel like there is a bit of a mirror going on here.

Sam sitting opposite Ketch no.2, mirroring his position, talking about how he admires his brother, wanted to be like him.

“like you I understood my brothers issues and why he did what he did”

This sentence has a dual meaning because of the way he phrases it with the “like you”. We can read it as Ketch no 2 talking purely about his brother and Sam’s understanding of him, but there is also a reading there where he could be talking about BOTH their brothers and their issues. That was in fact what I heard on first watch.

Sam understands his brother’s issues. That’s what I took from that. Whilst that could mean a bazillion and one things about Dean, there is only one theme that has been constant this season so far and Sam always seemed to not quite understand, or at least not voice any real understanding. Here it is textualised that he does. Interesting.

I mean also the fact that this guy is defending Ketch makes me again think that he is just Ketch and this evil twin stuff is bullshit because I don’t even want to believe Bucklemming would be that lazy with their writing.

The fact that Dean was mirrored to Ketch last season as well, to then talk about regret opens up a whole can of worms about Dean’s own regrets and guilt and what he still carries around with him. This whole conversation has honestly been the most interesting so far this episode because it just seems to be laying foundations for more excellent therapy and development for the Winchesters. In a season that is supposed to be exploring the themes of parenthood and of lost fathers, well… that is something that perks me right up.

YAY CAS I WONDERED WHERE YOU GOT TO!

Wait so let me get this straight. The angels are going extinct (makes sense since they keep killing them) and they think that Jack has the power to create more angels? Like God?

My face is pretty much the same as Cas’s right now.

Shout out to Metatron and the fall. Hmmm they are proper trying to remind us of season 8 in this episode. I wonder why…

Can I just say though, I know it’s not ACTUALLY what they are implying, but the idea of Jack being enslaved so he can create new angels has so many icky connotations to it. I mean this is basically what they are saying right? That they want Jack to be their angel breeder? I mean I GET that such a thing doesn’t actually involve any biological acts of reproduction here since angels aren’t BORN but the concept is still icky to me. It’s icky enough to get my ick factor going and I swear guys I’m not TRYING to find faults with this episode but urgh. Bucklemming. Always have to have SOMETHING icky in there. I thought Daniella’s description of what Ketch No. 2 did to her was icky enough.

“He belongs to all of us”. Dude. He is not a possession.

Hey at least Cas was able to hold his own against three angels there. That was pretty good. Seriously though the fighting choreography is amazing this season.

Lucifer saves Cas by majorly pea-cocking and I have several things to comment on:

“What are you doing back in this world?” “What are you doing alive?” “It’s complicated” “Same here”

I already enjoy it. God I love Cas. I like this exchange. I can already tell that he is going to make the rest of Lucifer’s scenes far more bareable for me to watch.

Cas’s angry face is awesome. Look at angry Cas! Stab him already!

And also:

“Woah Cowboy”

BAHAHAHAHA! Yeah Cas is officially a cowboy and this makes me very happy.

Also, I picked up on this earlier but now it is super obvious to me. The super white shirt with a tan coat.

I mean it couldn’t be more obvious if they tried. Jack was dressed practically the same way a few episodes ago. Lucifer is not only another Cas mirror himself, but also therefore a symbol of goodness. I hate that. This redemption arc and framing Lucifer as the good guy thing is really driving me mad.

Lucifer wants to save the world… Oh please.

I just gotta stop for a minute and appreciate how pretty Cas is here. Look at him. Bask in his beauty with me for a moment. He looks SO GOOD compared to the last few seasons. They were proper trying to make him look tired and downtrodden and weak these past few seasons because of his depression arc and it is SO REFRESHING to see him look so hot and badass again. I missed you Cas. You sexy thing you...

Okay moving on...

Cas and Lucifer sitting in a bar with Kingdom beer looming overhead. Kingdom beer is Dean’s heavenly beer, so I find it interesting that it is over Lucifer. I hope someone metas this properly as beer signs have never been my forte.

“The last time we were together you killed me”

“The last time we were together you stabbed me”

“Oh I’m sorry”

I love sassy Cassie here. I’ll give Bucklemming this, I am enjoying their dialogue.

“Instead of the butt of heavens joke”

“I am not the…”

Oh Cas honey, they all think you are in love with a Winchester and regularly boning him against heavens rules so yeah, you are certainly the butt of their jokes!

(This is an edit and not notes from my first watch but look at the way the light shines on Cas. This is very much the same as it was with Sam and Dean in 13x02 where the light has the effect of prison bars. We theorised at the end of 13x02 that the prison bar lighting on the boys was symbolic of their emotional prison, where they were both still repressing their true emotions at the time. This time the prison bar lighting is much more ominous. Cas will be imprisoned by episode end. Interestingly the lighting doesn’t shine on Lucifer which leads me to speculate that Lucifer will escape from Asmodeus’ prison and leave Cas behind - which will piss me off but I can’t see any other reason why the prison bar lighting would only be on Cas and not on Lucifer too. Nevertheless it is another interesting way to use lighting and cinematography to portray foreshadowing.)

“I need to talk to Sam and Dean”

*head bang* lol

“Jack. Your sons name is Jack” Yeah you tell him Cas!

“Oh my dad” oh dear. They keep on using that now. I swear it started in fandom.

Anyway I love Cas being so grumpy and resistant to this, even though I kind of feel like Cas wouldn’t even hear Lucifer out. It feels too much like they are trying to reignite the Cas/Crowley dynamic and I think Cas would really be far more wary of Lucifer - don’t get me wrong Misha does a great job of portraying Cas’s hesitance and suspicion but I don’t see why he would even hear him out really. This all feels like another way that Bucklemming are trying to push for the audience to root for Lucifer - which so far has been one (of many) major gripes about this episode.

The Winchesters are officially the new Bobby. Lots of phones for different places! Its nice to see stuff in canon that we have head canoned for a while.

“evil colonel sanders” DEAN STOP READING MY MIND (I scrolled back up and yep I totally used this exact phrase - wow Bucklemming are so fandom aware now its scary)

“Yes I would like to see you too, sooner the better”

“smooth was never your strong suit”

Lol Dean senses something was wrong because Cas came on too strong for him. What even WAS that Cas? Was he actually trying to hide his real conversation with Lucifer by being all clingy with his husband?! WHAT?

Okay so backing up and considering this for a moment though, of all the things Cas could have said there, let alone maybe just telling Dean that he was with Lucifer and saying “Fuck you Lucifer I do what I want” because WHY would he have hid the phone call from Lucifer in the first place? But then to say something like THAT leading Lucifer to just think he was being a needy husband well. I dunno what to even make of it.

But Dean immediately knew something was wrong because of Cas being over needy. Poor thing thinking Cas coming on too strong is actually a call for help... argh these two are so annoying.

“You did tell him not to do anything stupid”

“Right and when’s the last time that’s worked?”

Oh Dean.

Now I REALLY think something is gonna go wrong. Dean is always right…

Urgh Asmodeus.

Of course Asmodeus wants to keep hell. That wasn’t exactly a shocker.

“this new version seems a little more screwable” Really Bucklemming? REALLY? Stop trying to make Lucifer into the good guy. Stop trying to make him sexy. He is NOT screwable. He is abominable. I will fight this arc with every ounce of my meta being. Urgh. I don’t even care that this was supposed to be a funny joke for the fans. Go AWAY.

Ten bucks says people are now shipping Asmodifer. *shudders*

@elizabethrobertajones is this a contender for #worstshipontheshow? Or does that title still belong to Crowlatron?

The bar was called “Nick’s bar”. Ha. Ha. *slow clap*

Why do these demons have angel blades? When did this become a thing?

I am loving the fight scenes this season. Very epic. Oh look Ketch No. 2 escaped and is helping them.

“If you’d done the prescribed cavity search you’d have found it” haha oh lovely. Lets hope he meant his mouth. Though Ketch always seemed to rather enjoy Dean’s attention... I have no doubt he’d enjoy any ‘cavity searching’ from Dean.

Maybe THAT is the worst ship on the show?

“What’s become of your angel?” I am pretty sure this is actual Ketch if he is already calling Cas ‘your angel’ to Dean. How would the new guy know to pick up on the subtext between them otherwise? He hasn’t even seen the eye sex yet!

BINGO! Actual Ketch it is.

(that explains how he knew about “your angel” then lol)

Heh. I guess the soap opera evil twin story was too terrible for even Bucklemming to use. It was the classic Rowena revive potion instead. That actually makes sense now and I should have been smarter with that one. How else would Ketch have actually survived. Why else would he have wanted Rowena? I guess that’s how Rowena is alive too then. If that spell just needs recharging then Rowena recovered from whatever Lucifer did to her. I’m looking forward to her return that’s for sure.

I wonder if Eileen also had a revive spell...

They better bring her back too. :(

See as I suspected, Dean was right again. We should always trust Dean. When Dean says something feels off he is right about it. He knows. Dean didn’t believe Ketch’s evil twin story for one second. It’s interesting because that story would have almost fooled me if it weren’t for Dean being so insistent that it was bullshit.

Okay that “Hello Dean” was so wrong it’s weird because it’s Misha’s voice but he was able to say it in a way that was so WRONG. Just like Lucifer in 11x14. Impressive.

(Also I love how everyone in all of existence knows about the famous “Hello Dean” It seriously is Castiel’s catchphrase and the fact that angels and demons know this in universe is glorious.)

I had to listen back to Asmodeus playing Cas on the phone again a few times and wow. It’s scarily cold. Dean should totally know that something was up there. I’ll be rather disappointed with him if he doesn’t figure it out like straight away.

So Cas is in a cage and Ketch is back and working with Asmodeus now? Huh. I guess at least Cas being in a cage is a better way of getting rid of him for a few episodes than having him off on some hypocritical mission for heaven or god forbid “riverboat gambling” again.

I also guess this means that Ketch was the “Hunter on the payroll” at the beginning of the episode.

That wasn’t as terrible as I was expecting... huh. I am oddly surprised and pleased at that. What do ya know.

Final thoughts

Watching this whilst writing out my thoughts actually really helped. I was able to process my thoughts instead of getting major whiplash from too much happening too quickly. It ended up being far more palatable for me. (My second watch actually bored me to tears except for Cas’s scenes so there you go - I think I would have been far more negative than I was had I watched it straight through first time around). It was definitely too much crammed in as usual for Bucklemming, and the instance in the plot to make Lucifer a ‘good’ guy is driving me around the bend. The Ketch stuff was completely nonsensical and I am 100% opposed to him being back (the one character I would have been perfectly happy with staying dead completely).

I can’t take evil colonel sanders seriously at all. Now I have watched him in 2 episodes I can’t help but cringe whenever he is on screen. Its worse than pantomime villain, its pantomime villain in an amateur primary school production bad. I’m sorry guys, but just nope. Even the on screen jokes about him from Dean couldn’t lighten a terrible stereotypical villain created by seriously lazy writing.

Michael is actually pretty horrifying though and I am looking forward to what will happen there. I think he is the actual villain to root for and I hope he disintegrates Asmodeus in a puff of smoke. I am extremely annoyed that Mary wasn’t in the episode though. They could have given us something more than we got. I liked Kevin’s return and what he said about choice and paradise, though I feel he is vastly different from our Kevin in how broken he seems to be. No fighting spirit. It just shows Michael’s cruelty in the subtext and makes him even more intriguing for me.

I loved every Cas scene. Of course. Even when Lucifer doesn’t shut up Cas was perfect. He was so handsome in this episode too! In my opinion, Cas made this episode. For once Bucklemming didn’t write him grossly out of character so I’ll give them kudos for that. He did well, and he was interesting and funny and his constant exasperation and suspicion and Lucifer was spot on. He was me. Though if he was truly me I would have just stabbed Lucifer in the face. Pfft.

So Lucifer. This was totally Lucifer’s episode. He held the most screen time and pushed the story forward. I am of course extremely biased because I despise both the character and the actor who plays him so I found it very difficult to maintain focus on anything he said, but one thing that seems certain is that he has been set up for a redemption arc. I am furious about this. I hate that they are dressing him as a Cas mirror (yes I know that Lucifer has been a dark Cas mirror since season 5) and setting him up to “save the world” and I hope that Dabb takes a far more intelligent path here and turns this story on its head. Obviously Lucifer still has selfish ambitions. ‘Fixing’ Jack so he doesn’t “favour the mother” being the one interesting point he made where he didn’t seem like the good guy. The rest of the time he was just trying to convince Cas to help him stop Michael which at a surface level seems like a really honorable heroic thing to do, especially since Michael is being framed as a really bad and villainous character. I guess time will tell what happens with this. Hopefully other writers will have their own take on Lucifer’s story and we’ll see more of his totally evil and abhorrent side in future episodes because honestly, Lucifer playing the hero makes me physically sick.

I’m disappointed the Winchesters had so little to do. Especially Sam, he is such a reactive character right now and its pissing me off that he is so sidelined whilst his abuser and tormentor for years gets to stand in the spotlight. It upsets me that the show writers don’t consider these things. Sam needs a central role in this season and I’ll be pissed if he doesn’t get it. Obviously from an objective meta analysis viewpoint I can see WHY Sam wasn’t so integral to this episode, and I did find his sincerity and hope in Ketch’s lie being the truth interesting. Sam is so desperate to find the GOOD in the world right now and this seems to be clouding his judgement. I will be very interested to see how Sam reacts to Lucifer wanting Cas’s help.

All in all it wasn’t the WORST Bucklemming episode, but it was pretty stupid and cringeworthy throughout. I’m just happy they didn’t totally butcher Cas and made him act in an idiotic way. Though I think they could have made him MORE resistant and not try to portray them as a comedy duo. Hopefully from this we will get some interesting stuff with Asmodeus pretending to be Cas for Dean like a repeat of 11x11 so fingers crossed for that.

I also genuinely hope we get some Cas in the coming episodes and not a massive gap until we see him again. It makes no sense in my opinion to have this story move forward without Cas and Lucifer since the entire mytharc plot right now appears to revolve around them. I guess we will just have to wait and see. Bring on episode 13x08.

#supernatural #episode review #13x07 #season 13 #spn spoilers #spn meta #spn speculation #bucklemming #wank for ts #though its just standard bucklemming wank #like what you would expect from me after a bucklemming ep #my thoughts

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thesunkenblog · 4 years ago

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The Value of Creative and Destructive Horror

It’s a miracle when black characters survive the horror movie, especially in the growing trend of realism in a narrative’s white antagonistic opposition; the black horror renaissance has finally begun to normalize justice in their horror stories, and characters are less and less likely to become trending hashtags within their own universes. Resolution of a black horror climax comes guilt-free and demonstrates a character’s innocence when the black protagonist is not forced to kill or maim the antagonist in the process -- when white opposition (as it so often is) destroys itself without undue action from the black protagonists, they can walk away from the nightmare conservatively, traditionally innocent, all the more palatable to a broad audience for their clean hands and the reassurance that in due time, the corrupt system will destroy itself -- patience, survival, and the time to wait for the sun to rise in the safety of the morning is all the black body must execute in order to see a melioristic world naturally mend corruption with justice.

Right?

Nah. The need for black protagonists -- and by their extension, black audiences -- to passively resist and manage to survive external menace in order to be free from victimization has been largely squashed by more radical horror creators; in retribution horror, characters are given a path to their own agency and self-actualization in justice against the odds, providing catharsis to an audience that does not often see the same in their real lives. Rusty Cundieff's Tales From the Hood (1995) paints its early retribution horror in four episodic titular tales that tell of real-life black horror turned supernatural. The anthology structure allows the plots to cover a wide range of modern issues -- police brutality, child and spousal abuse, gang violence, systemic political discrimination -- but each narrative circles back to agency and retribution in the use of creative art as a form of expression, release, and power in achieving revenge or reclaiming safety for the creator. A corrupt cop is symbolically crucified by heroin needles amongst the neglected homeless of the city and morphed into a street mural painted in sanguine lacquer across from the furious visage of the activist he lynched in cold blood; a young boy manifests the monster of an abusive home on paper and, in giving it creative form, can twist and burn the monster of a father menacing him and his mother into bodily ash; small crafted dolls give shape and action to the displaced souls of untethered lynching victims, embodying their experience one more time just long enough for them to overtake the racist politician who has possessed the bones of the property they died on. The diegetic creation within each of these segments empowers the battered protagonists to give their trauma form and to mitigate the cruelty of its perpetrators in whichever way they please.

Creative forms of retribution mirror the shape of black horror at large, as the genre uses its art form -- movies, television, written stories -- to confront, interpret, and reclaim injury inflicted onto the community, ultimately offering catharsis where there often is none in real-life political strife. A Rusty Cundieff or a Jordan Peele is, invariably, giving their own trauma form through the media they produce, therefore reclaiming control over the fates and narrative therein.

However, phrasing this form of retribution as constructive is still inherently incomplete; the argument for the creative properties of resistance still insists upon a generative and productive outlet for mitigating oppression, and framing it as only creative and artistic neglects the other form of resistance that these examples demonstrate in action taken by black protagonists against their diegetic oppressors. Creation of an additional or alternate system or space in politics, narrative, and the space where they meet is palatable and socially collaborative -- but destruction and embrace of the monstrous is just as, if not more, empowering.

The innocent and sanitized black protagonist presents its resistance in a victim-framed mindset, defanging opposition in a moral bid for the audience’s favor, capturing a photo negative of black stereotypes of brutality and violence as a subversive strategy. However, black horror protagonists can find power in accepting the tropes of the archetypical horror villain into the folds of their protagonists’ practice. Black stories are often riddled with the power of the grisly supernatural in the defensive-- and offensive-- actions of their leads; our glimpse into the reality of the white world’s monster under the bed and behind the veil recalibrates our threat assessment by invoking empathy with black characters and constructing a justification in violence for the downtrodden and abused. An oppositional resistance often asks for a creative alternative match to the dominant group’s power, in civility and cinema alike; subversive resistance often troubles the viewer with the Lordeian question of whether or not you can truly dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. However, an embrace of the monstrous as agency and empowerment -- an abjection praxis -- acknowledges the displaced nature of black communities in supernaturally realistic horrors and sees in them a powerful weaponization of othering instead of the need to neutralize black folks as threat.

The aforementioned retribution resolutions in Tales From the Hood, for instance, could in any other horror subgenre have been the singular villain of each segment’s story; a necromanced, vengeful body and the body horror metamorphosis of a town’s juridical center in the police force, a near-vodou drawing capable of manipulating its flesh and blood image into a broken body, and a hoard of vindictive, possessed dolls bent on revenge all are coded in shapes of horror’s antagonistic camp, but the use in racialized retribution horror on the behalf of the moral protagonists portrayed in Rusty Cundieff’s film instead link black characters to sources of second-sight supernatural power imbued from similarly differentiated realms to those that black bodies have been historically outcast to. Made by black hands, for black eyes, this takes a radical shape in the face of perhaps tired respectability politics -- the narrative move to morally side the audience with an aggressor of traditional generic terror makes the argument that there is justification in violent redress against long-standing oppressors. While not traditional in its cinematic ethics, this is worth percolating on. How often do we get to be monstrous to our monsters?

#afam 188 #ucla

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decuir-international · 7 years ago

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Don’t Believe in Subversion

Subversion is in the content, in the style, in the form. It lies on the surface and the practice of the image, in the visuals and the principles ordering them as a sequence. Subversion is in thinking cinema, it is in sensing cinema.

The first major critical study of subversion in cinema is Film as a Subversive Art. It was 1974 when the first edition of Amos Vogel’s book came out – numerous editions and translations quickly followed (in French in 1977, in German in 1979), making the volume something of a classic in accounts of avant-gardism in cinema, a classic of subversion. This might sound contradictory: how can something subversive in and of itself, something overcoming the constraints of the canon, be a classic? This is one of the fascinating aspects of the relationship between cinema and the idea of subversion, and one of the questions this curatorial project addresses. Vogel’s book is then the anchor of this exhibition, not only because of its iconic status as a critical work but because it connects cinematic subversion in the former Eastern European sphere to international currents through the use of an image from Dušan Makavejev’s subversive masterpiece WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) on the cover.

This exhibition aims at following such a two-fold path, by offering a synthetic survey charting international histories of cinematic subversion. The concept is focused on presenting classical examples from the ex-Yugoslav region and connecting them to their counterparts in other regions, putting them in dialogue with other international practitioners. Inspired by unexpected continuities, by visual, symbolic, and conceptual echoes, the moving image component of the exhibition forwards the idea of subversion by coupling a number of works on the basis of their shared, albeit profoundly multifaceted, radical attitude. Because we believe cinematic subversion overcomes medium-specific constraints the exhibition is cross-disciplinary, including not only films and videos, but also books, new media, and more.

DON’T BELIEVE IN SUBVERSION

(an exhibition curated by Greg de Cuir Jr & Miriam de Rosa)

The title of the exhibition references an early kino club film by Makavejev titled Don’t Believe in Monuments (1958, 5 min., film transferred to video, collection AFC Belgrade). This film was banned for a number of years due to its heavy eroticism and also the erroneous belief that the statue that the woman makes love to in the film depicted a wounded Partisan fighter. It did not – lending credence to Makavejev’s polemical title and also encouraging us to take a skeptical, self-critical stance to the very ideological construction of this exhibition. We have drawn a parallel to Makavejev’s film with fragments from the film Consumer Art (1972, 1974-1975, 16 min., 16mm transferred to video, courtesy of lokal_30, Warsaw) by the uncompromising Polish feminist artist Natalia LL. Her erotic images of various women (including herself) consuming edible items in overtly suggestive ways comments on the nature of consumer culture in Socialist Poland while also subverting the use value of everyday groceries.

The film Scusa Signorina (1963, 7 min., 16mm transferred to video, collection HFS Zagreb) by Mihovil Pansini is the anthemic example of antifilm, which Pansini initiated and theorized as subverting and ultimately negating the very idea of cinema and cinema aesthetics. We have linked Pansini’s work with the video Scanner Pack (2017, 7 min., video, courtesy of the artist) by the Ecuadorian-Spanish artist Karla Tobar Abarca. The artist was kind enough to accept our invitation and to edit a new cut of her video in direct response to Scusa Signorina. The installation of this video therefore serves as its premiere. These two works offer a complementary interpretation of the coordinates characterising the position of the camera in space, and its corporeality and relationship to the filmmaker’s body. Worn pointing backwards, Pansini’s camera explores the city of Zagreb, unveiling overlooked details, showing unfamiliar perspectives employed to frame the urban space. Conversely, Abarca’s Scanner Pack, also meant to be worn pointing backwards, but in fact subverting such an orientation, embodies a hacking system that disrupts the way in which we navigate that same urban space. The back pack employs a scanning technology device to focus on the physical contact, the materiality, and the surfaces of the city.

The film Blue Rider (1964, 12 min., 16mm transferred to video, collection AFC Belgrade) by Tomislav Gotovac is subversive cinema by way of subversive action. The artist’s legendary strategy of entering various cafes in Belgrade unannounced and confronting the clientele and staff with a film camera was a very risky affair. Film cameras did not often make intrusions into everyday life in Socialist Yugoslavia, and therefore the apparatus itself is the carrier of subversive potential, upsetting the status quo and transforming it into unique visible evidence. Gotovac’s film is compared with The Searchers (2016, 2 min., video, courtesy of the artist), a video by Kevin L. Ferguson that uses frame grabs summed in sequence to subvert and transform the visual style of John Ford’s canonical Western. Gotovac’s film features the usage of a readymade soundtrack lifted from the classical television series Bonanza. Sharing this Western background, Blue Rider and Ferguson’s The Searchers exemplify very differently what subversion may well mean: while the former tackles this topic by focusing on the combination of film and life, emphasising the everyday and spontaneity as counter-elements mitigating the pretentions of a scenario, the latter reshapes Ford’s film, offering a visual reinterpretation of filmic time and image which relies instead upon a sophisticated technical process based on a composition of frame grabs taken every 10 seconds. Ferguson’s work looks like a true visual tapestry whose threads are multilayered images thickening the digital grain of the film’s perceptive materiality.

Black Film (1971, 14 min., 16mm transferred to video, courtesy of the artist) by Želimir Žilnik takes an interventionist, socially-engaged stance toward subversion. The artist appears in this film on the street, investigating the homeless situation in Novi Sad, Serbia, eventually bringing a number of vagrants to his apartment so they can sleep for the night and figure out a solution to their condition. Of course, there is no solution. The ultimate message is not dissimilar to Makavejev’s subversive polemics: don’t believe in socio-critical film. Žilnik’s self-critical realism is a subversive act par excellence for artists who display a fervent, idealistic humanism in their work. The link here is with the film Batrachian’s Ballad (2016, 11 min., 16mm transferred to video, courtesy of Portugal Film) by Leonor Teles, which won the Golden Bear for Short Film at the Berlinale. Teles’ work is an anti-racist intervention into the status quo of Portuguese society – into the very places of business that structure Portuguese society. Her action consists of filming herself rushing into stores, stealing the green porcelain frogs that shopkeepers display to symbolize a warding off of the presence of Roma people, and smashing them on the concrete. This is literally a destructive cinema, an unruly and anarchic cinema, moving the act of subversion into ethically-questionable territory – which it should never be afraid to do, if we are to believe in subversion.

This exhibition also presents a literary section comprising the following key publications that chart the various contours of cinematic subversion: Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art (French edition, 1977); the large-format anthology Film and Revolution Today, edited by Dušan Makavejev and Lazar Stojanović in connection with the curated film program Confrontation (Belgrade FEST, 1971); Želimir Žilnik’s manifestos ‘Black Film’ and ‘This Festival is a Graveyard’ (Belgrade Short and Documentary Film Festival/Sineast #13-14, 1971); Richard Porton’s Film and the Anarchist Imagination (1999); the catalog for Sergio Grmek Germani’s curated film program Socialism (Subversive Film Festival Zagreb, 2010); the online journal Now! A Journal of Urgent Praxis, which exemplifies the subversive elements of open access publication projects.

When interviewed by Scott MacDonald, Amos Vogel claimed that the ‘common denominator’ of the films he selected for his Cinema 16 screening space is that ‘they created a disturbance in the status quo […] they would disturb you in some way, would add to your knowledge and make you change’.[1] Inspired by the research that Vogel developed over many years of curating, the works in this exhibition represent that radical spirit. They offer new ways of seeing, unpredictable practices, unexpected actions, and alternative appraisals of the moving image and the discourses that surround it.

Miriam de Rosa & Greg de Cuir Jr

December 2017

The curators would like to acknowledge the support of Alex Johnston, NOW! A Journal of Urgent Praxis, Richard Porton, Miki Stojanović, Wanda Strauven, Verso, the Yugoslav Kinoteka Library, and all of the writers and artists.

Miriam de Rosa is Senior Lecturer in Media & Communications at Coventry University. She most recently organized the screening program Desktop Cinema at Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb.

Greg de Cuir Jr is Selector at Alternative Film/Video. He most recently organized the screening program Avant-Noir, Volume 3 at ICA London.

[1] Amos Vogel in conversation with Scott MacDonald, in Cinema 16: Documents toward a history of the film society, by Scott MacDonald. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002: pp. 44, 51.

#subversion #alternative #film #video #exhibition

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if-you-fan-a-fire · 5 years ago

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Penal Fascism vs. Penal Populism “The government’s security agenda has stirred strong controversy. Some in the opposition have criticized it as “penal populism.” This is of course not the first time that the populist label has been used in a derogatory manner, but in this particular instance the mislabeling obscures the otherwise obvious fascist overtones of the government’s strategy to “pacify” the mobilized citizenry in an attempt to impose an already lost status quo ante.

From its origins in nineteenth-century Russia and the Unites States, to Latin America and Southern Europe, populist movements and leaders have appealed to a class-based conception of the people as a plebeian subject constructed against oligarchy. Attempting to represent the popular sectors, populism strives to satisfy the people’s immediate material demands and visit punishment on corrupt elites. Laws against looting, barricades, blocking traffic, labor strikes, and the use of face masks during protests against neoliberal policies are therefore clearly not “penal populism.” The criminalization of protest is not a demand emanating from the people — the top three are better pensions, wages, and health care— so it would be more accurate to understand these laws that disproportionately punish public disorder as fascistic legal adaptations that build on the doctrine of internal defense of the state to increase the repressive capacity of law enforcement against a mobilized citizenry demanding social change.

While the objective of penal fascism is to impose a legal, moral, and economic order through disproportionately harsh laws against internal enemies, thus undermining the protection of individual rights and due process, the objective of penal populism is to impose disproportionately harsh penalties on corrupt oligarchs through popular forms of justice — such as characterizing political corruption as a crime of treason with life imprisonment or death, and prosecuting cases of political corruption in popular courts to allow for the “venting” of indignation and resentment. According to Machiavelli, political trials in which corrupt oligarchs were tried by the people were the secret to the longevity of the Roman popular republic. While penal populism is today merely symbolic spectacle —a mannequin of the president was recently guillotined in the square— and frauds and collusion are lightly penalized with fines and ethics classes instead of prison time, legal fascism and oligarchic impunity appear to be taking root.

Fascism and the Internal Defense of the State One of the most decisive legal innovations that allowed for the hegemony of fascism during the first half of the twentieth century was the establishment of a set of laws for the internal defense of the State against individuals with ‘“subversive” ideologies — mainly communists but also trade union leaders, socialists, and anarchists. The first law of this kind, promoting an “idealistic doctrine of the authoritarian state,” was passed in Italy in 1926 after an assassination attempt against Mussolini. As his Minister of Justice, fascist jurist Alfredo Rocco wrote, given that tradition embodies truths that must be preserved to prevent the destruction of the state, the penal code must reflect this new defensive doctrine and create strong protections for the “State, family, morality and the economy” against individual actions that could cause social change. The law punished as enemies of the state those who “committed or manifested the deliberate intention of committing subversive acts of the social, economic or national order” with exile, long prison sentences, and even capital punishment. Of the thousands of political prisoners in fascist Italy, perhaps the most famous was the communist Antonio Gramsci.

Chile adopted this fascist legal legacy first in the 1937 “Law for the Defense of the State” establishing severe punishments for disruptions to the social order, and then with the infamous “Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy” passed in 1948, which outlawed the Communist Party, disenfranchised thousands of militants and community organizers, and limited the rights to assemble and strike. While the latter law was repealed in the late 1950s, the former was preserved, then perfected in 1958, and finally broadened during the Pinochet dictatorship when the number of crimes and penalties attached to them increased to target resistance to the regime and its neoliberal model.

Since Chile’s transition to democracy in 1990, the current Law for the Internal Security of the State (LES) has been applied more than a dozen times against Mapuche leaders struggling to reclaim indigenous lands and autonomy in the Araucanía region; a journalist who wrote on corruption in the judicial system; bus drivers and prison guards going on strike; protestors denouncing the increase of natural gas prices in Magallanes; and drivers of shared taxi services mobilizing in Santiago. More recently, the law was invoked to prosecute those involved in the uprising that began on October 18 in subway stations in Santiago. Professor Roberto Campos, accused of destroying a subway turnstile, was held in preventive detention in the High Security Prison while awaiting trial. He risk five years in prison.

The LES penalizes with prison time not only those who “destroy or disable” means of transportation but also those who “incite or induce subversion of public order or revolt,” punishing those who “meet, arrange or facilitate meetings” that conspire against the stability of the government, and those who propagate “in word or in writing” doctrines that “tend to destroy or alter the social order through violence.” Because any idea that promotes social change could be considered an incitement to the subversion of order, such laws in other countries —many of them passed in times of external war— have ceased to be applied or directly repealed. The Sedition Act in the United States, for example, passed in 1918 during World War I, penalized “disloyal language” against the government with up to twenty years in jail. Although the criminalization of political expressions was repealed two years later, the prohibition of any political agitation considered seditious remains in force under the Espionage Act. The jurisprudence emanating from the application of this law demonstrates that the violation of the right to free expression is inevitable when arbitrary power is given to the government to censor internal criticism. Those accused of crimes under the Espionage Act have been mostly union leaders, socialists, communist,s and anarchists — among the most famous are the union leader and candidate of the Socialist Party of America, Eugene Debs, and anarchist Emma Goldman.

The most dangerous article of the LES for protesters in Chile is the one that penalizes people who “incite, promote or encourage or in fact and by any means, destroy, disable or prevent free access to bridges, streets, roads or other similar public use goods.” The law is so broad that it could be applied to students who incite the evasion of the subway fare and to all protesters who mobilize peacefully every day on the streets, blocking traffic. The most disturbing thing is that the government coalition has been pushing to incorporate similar provisions into ordinary criminal law, seeking to further normalize these “exceptional” rules.

As part of the security agenda, the Senate’s Public Security Commission approved in general a bill that incorporates the crime of “public disorder” into the Criminal Code, imposing penalties of up to three years in prison for those who, “using a demonstration or public meeting,” paralyze or interrupt a public service of prime necessity, such as the subway, or throw stones, build barricades, or occupy private or public property. If these modifications are approved, high school students who participate in mass fare-evasion protests at subway stations, “frontline” protesters who make barricades and throw tear-gas bombs back to police to protect those who demonstrate peacefully from being repressed, and those who occupy a shopping mall as a form of protest, would risk prison sentences without the need for the invocation of the LES.

In addition to the criminalization of civil disobedience and mass mobilizations, the new law would also penalize looting in the context of social unrest with five to fifteen years in prison, make disregarding curfews (currently a misdemeanor) a criminal offense punishable by up to three years in prison, and allow for judges to suspend benefits to welfare recipients as soon as they are charged with “public disorder.” These new legal provisions would impose not only disproportionate punishments but also target the poor by giving judges the arbitrary power to suspend social benefits at the beginning of the investigation process. A recent decision by the Prosecutor’s office not to pursue prison sentences for people with clean records who were arrested while looting supermarkets on October 18 seems an indication that, this time, the Public Ministry is not willing to apply the LES, even if the government demands it.” - Camila Vergara, “To Crush Chile’s Popular Uprising, Its Government Is Taking a Page from the Fascist Playbook.” Jacobin. January 2, 2020.

#chile #evade #popular uprising #crackdown #fascism #austerity #popular insurrection #state of emergency #anti-subversive law #public order #police powers #pinochet #Law for the Internal Security of the State #neoliberalism

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vcdtings · 5 years ago

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NOTE: Stop scrolling! This is my Ihi Wehi Blog from now on!!

These posters raise awareness of the lack of funding for vital medication in New Zealand at the hands of Pharmac, a government funded agency. There is currently not a big enough budget to fund everyone that needs help paying for medication. As a result, funding negotiations are long and drawn out, if they are even undertaken at all. The call to action is to visit the Health Quality and Safety Commission website. The Commission studies and measures healthcare standards across New Zealand.

Poster 1 conveys the long wait that sick patients endure to receive funding for life saving drugs. The rhetorical strategy employed is subversion, through manipulating the symbol of an IV bag to instead contain money. The ihi of this poster focuses on the techniques of collage and rhythm to control the direction the viewer follows around the poster. By elongating the tube and making it twist and turn, the viewer feels a sense of time passing. The viewer experiences wehi of compassion and sympathy for the patients who are waiting for help, and frustration directed at the system that prolongs their experience.

Poster 2 uses ihi of contrast between overlapping colours and an effect of visual noise, juxtaposed with negative space, to draw the viewer’s eye to the central image of the skull. Alliteration in “pill poverty” along with the typeface used and the black and white contrast influences the viewer to draw visual similarities between the headline and the barcode in the poster. Through logos there is an implied relationship between the skull representing life and death and pills or medication. Collage is employed where the barcode has been added to convey the connection to increasing prices. The viewer has wehi and fears patients may not receive medication in time.

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dangolding · 7 years ago

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Spec Ops: The Line and the fine art of subversion

Every writer has a piece that they never quite got placed with a publication. I wrote this many years ago now when Spec Ops: The Line was first released and showed it to a few friends and editors, but it was never published. Now that the game is five years old, I thought I’d just put it online.

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And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air

Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there

The first thing you encounter in any videogame is its menu. People generally spend very little time on menus—they are doorways, the thresholds of videogames, ready to set the tone but quick to get out of the way. Despite their importance, they are often relatively disposable for the player, and quickly forgotten. Press Start. Hit A to begin. Now here’s the real game.

But the first thing you notice about Spec Ops: The Line is its menu. It is not here to get out of the way, to be an open door between the player and the ‘real’ game. It is here to make a statement. A dilapidated American flag takes up much of the screen, flying upside-down, either a sign of distress or a deliberate desecration. In the distance sits a Dubai in sandy ruins, the contemporary symbol of capitalist expansion and reach destroyed.

Playing over the top is Jimi Hendrix’s famous 1969 Woodstock performance of “The Star Spangled Banner”. The sonorous, roundly distorted notes signal its arrival half a phrase in; the manic, free-form drumming of Mitch Mitchell barely audible in the background. Already, The Line is in many ways radically different for a standard military-themed videogame. In the place of the usual proud flags and dutiful trumpet calls, The Line populates its menu with complicated and troubling symbols.

Of course, The Line is a deliberate attempt at subversion. Military shooters have long been at the core of the videogames industry (the latest installment in the Call of Duty franchise, for instance, grossed over $400 million in its first 24 hours on sale late last year), and while sometimes technically innovative and exciting, few of these games have very much to say. Some, like the Modern Warfare franchise, will occasionally look to have the appearance of philosophizing on war, but generally, the most generous conclusion to take from these sorts of games is something like this: War is hell. War is also spectacular. The people who choose to go into it and come out alive are amazing.

It’s in this context that The Line presents itself as a sweeping counter to the traditional claims of the military videogame. It isn’t all just upside-down flags and Jimi Hendrix, either. The game’s plot is for the most part, a fairly reasonable appropriation of the general thrust of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. We follow three soldiers—Sergeant Lugo, Lieutenant Adams, and Captain Martin Walker, the last of whom the player controls—as they journey into a Dubai of the near-future, one that has been destroyed by dust storms. A battalion lead by a Colonel John Konrad (in the game’s most guileless reference to Heart of Darkness) has disappeared in the city, and as we find out, has of course gone rogue.

Throughout your journey to look for survivors, Spec Ops continually throws horrifying experiences directly in the face of the player. Needless, limitless bloodshed, civilian massacres, warcrimes.

But The Line’s most unexpected move is its bold indictment of the player in this context. You did this, the game says. Not us, the designers, not the characters, but you. It’s all your fault.

When Jimi Hendrix performed “The Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock in 1969, many, if not most onlookers assumed it was an antiwar statement of sorts. Hendrix’s unorthodox performance was not the first controversial appropriation of America’s national anthem (Jose Feliciano had played a folk-ish version a year earlier at a Baseball match, the fallout of which he claimed stalled his career for a number of years), but it was certainly its most violent. Strewn between the heavily distorted, oppressively bland notes of the anthem were Hendrix’s own embellishments. He threw his plectrum up and down the strings, smashed away at the pitch-bending tremolo arm, and deliberately induced piercing feedback.

The fact that most of these embellishments coincided with the lyric, “and the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,” just reinforced the idea that the performance was about the Vietnam War. The rockets’ red glare was being broadcast on television screens every evening in 1969. It was hard not to take it literally. Hendrix’s slides became missiles, his muted strumming became gunfire (much like his later song, “Machine Gun”), his distortion became bombs, destruction, and cries of the innocent. Played into Jimi Hendrix’s guitar were the nightmares of a generation of disillusioned Americans, his instrument an orchestra of national disaster.

Hendrix’s Woodstock performance is often mythologized as a kind of paradigmatic moment of counter-culture appropriation, of culture jamming fifteen years before anyone had thought of using the term ‘culture jamming’. Here was a noble and patriotic song being roughly hewn back into the militaristic fires from whence it came, Hendrix’s bloody tableau mirroring the war of 1812 that served as inspiration for Francis Scott Key’s original poem.

But it’s not usually remarked on that “The Star Spangled Banner” was actually a British song to begin with. The tune was first known as “To Anacreon in Heaven”, and was written by organist John Stafford Smith as a constitutional song for the Anacreontic Society, a British gentlemen’s club dedicated to “wit, harmony, and the god of wine.” Despite the notorious difficulty in singing the Anacreontic melody (one wonders if the Bacchanalian nature of the society made the task even less viable), the tune was a popular fit for a number adaptations (known as contrafactums) at the time, of which “The Star Spangled Banner” was only one. It also served as a vehicle for Robert Paine’s ode, “Adams and Liberty” in the late 18th century, for example.

The themes of appropriation and reappropriation are perhaps the one constant in the life of “The Star Spangled Banner”. Whoever knows what Hendrix meant when he played it at Woodstock. It does seem likely, after all, that there was some kind of protest meant, but if Hendrix saw what happened to Feliciano a year earlier, he’d have good reason not to push it further.

Curiously, Hendrix himself never said that the performance was meant particularly as a protest. In fact, he never really explained the meaning of the performance at all, except for a brief remark at a press conference a few weeks later.

“We play it the way the air is in America today,” Hendrix said. “The air is slightly static, don’t you think?”

One of Spec Ops’ central villains used to write for Rolling Stone. Robert Darden, a bearded, Hawaiian-shirt wearing reporter taunts the player over a city-wide broadcast system for much of the game, earning him the nickname of the ‘Radioman’. He also has pretty good taste in music, and through several key scenes in the game blasts out Deep Purple, Martha and the Vandellas, and The Black Angels.

Having an antagonist like Radioman allows music to come to the fore in The Line. Rock music is often blasted diegetically through the game’s Dubai, sometimes as a complement to the action and sometimes as a counterpoint, but always as a reminder of the foreignness of the American presence in Dubai. The music writes over the Emirati landscape, reminding players that it is American against American in this game, and that Dubai is only present insofar as it is an immutable reminder of America’s foreign entanglements. This is, by and large, a game about America and American culture: whatever the problems are of sequestering Dubai for thematic ends, The Line is not interested in it as much more than an emblem.

In one early sequence that announces the game’s engagement with popular culture, a lengthy firefight is set to Deep Purple’s 1968 hard rock hit, ‘Hush’. In the context of The Line, ‘Hush’ should act as an ironic counterpoint to the action—“Hush, hush, I need her loving,” sings Rod Evans, “But I'm not to blame now.” When Alfonso Cuarón used the same song in his terrifyingly bleak Children of Men, the Los Angeles Times called it “a sly lullaby for a world without babies.” When Spec Ops makes other similar allusions with its music, as with Martha and the Vandellas’ 1965 Motown classic, ‘Nowhere to Run’, the point is clear enough, even erring on overstating things. “Got nowhere to run to, baby,” runs the Holland-Dozier-Holland lyrics as the bullets fly over our protagonists, “Nowhere to hide.”

But right then, in the heat of the Deep Purple battle, the unsettling point is lost in the haze of cover-to-cover sprinting and pop-and-stop shooter mechanics. The lyrics might say one thing, but the cutting backbeat and the powerful bass line says something else entirely. All this shooting, this strategy, this chaos, this music—this is a little bit cool.

“Hey, you guys hear music?” asks one of The Line’s protagonists.

“Who cares?” answers our character. “Just shut up and keep fighting.”

The tension between critical commentary and surface level enjoyment lingers throughout The Line. When, later in the game, a slow-motion escape from a missile blast is set to Verdi’s ‘Dies Irae’, this unease is amplified. Like the Wagner helicopter attack sequence from Apocalypse Now (which was undoubtedly the scene’s inspiration, as the blast comes from a helicopter here, too), The Line runs a real risk of its intended commentary being literally drowned out by a one hundred person orchestra. The ironic juxtaposition of dead white European classical composers with macho violence is subsumed by the grandiloquent power of Verdi and Wagner, a tension that Coppola played with in Apocalypse Now but that has eventually been defeated by Hollywood iconography. Though Wagner-and-the-helicopters has now entered into the pop culture lexicon, how often is it used to invoke the madness and the masculinity of war, as intended? How often is it instead used to illustrate military elegance and the iconographic power of the Vietnam war?

This is the fundamental problem of The Line, one that is clearly reflected in its use of music. Does it matter that the game offers up a heartbreaking critical commentary on war and videogames, if from moment-to-moment, all I can do is enjoy the mayhem? Does it matter that my enemies are screaming at me that I’m a murderer, that their radio chatter becomes increasingly fearful of me as I move forward through their soldiers like some sort of nightmarish Superman, if the game has also been perfectly calibrated to give me pleasure from discharging my weapon into the faces of oncoming, depersonalized enemies?

“Shut up and keep fighting.” The context of that terse comment is one of maintaining control in the heat of battle, of blocking out pain and trauma until later, when it might be safe to reflect on your horrific deeds. Yet it could equally also apply to the naive player, the kind not interested in The Line’s plot but in its thrilling action; not so much a remark on a lack of time as a lack of care. “Shut up and keep fighting.”

Of course, the simple fact that players are not likely to miss The Line’s critique does not automatically mean anything at all. Earlier this year, the Australian army released the Chief of Army’s Reading List for soldiers. Conspicuous on the traditional list were books like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, while films included the likes of David O. Russell’s Three Kings, Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley and of course, Apocalypse Now.

The presence of these works on such a list appears, at first, to be inexplicable. What use could Catch-22—a book that coined the anti-Vietnam war slogan, “Yossarian Lives!”—have for army bureaucracy? Why would army officials want soldiers to watch a film like Three Kings, a film that tracks three soldiers’ attempts to steal gold in the wake of the first Gulf War, a film that was described by the Los Angeles Times as “one of the defining antiwar films of our time, a scathing and sobering chronicle of U.S. misadventures in the Middle East”?

In commenting on the success of The Hurt Locker at the 2010 Oscars, Slovoj Žižek offers this: “In its very invisibility, ideology is here, more than ever: we are there, with our boys, identifying with their fear and anguish instead of questioning what they are doing there.”

Perhaps it is impossible to make an anti-war film. Perhaps there is always the possibility that despite context and framing, the exhilaration and terror of combat will always translate into romance for some. The strategy for most so-called anti-war films is still one of audience identification: here are innocent characters, thrown into a terrible scenario so beyond the realms of civility that we feel for them even as they commit heinous acts.

Even when characters are allowed some complexity, or are even pushed to become monsters, we can still see glimmers of our own collective guilt, our tortured souls played out within these people. There but for the grace of God, go I. Anti-war films are the best recruitment tool for fascists who still believe in their own soul.

And so it goes with The Line. No matter how hard the game tries in being anti-war, or even just to be a confronting critique of its genre, it never fails to also re-articulate the pleasures of the military videogame. Subversion is frequently too enormous, too clumsy, and too delicate a task to undertake meaningfully. Too much is pulled in too many directions; too many elements left unaltered. For every player who gets The Line’s Joseph Conrad references, another handful will simply find pleasure in the game’s tactical gunfights.

Subversion, especially in a medium as commercial and unwieldy as the videogame, is an imprecise art.

In 2000, the virtuoso guitarist Joe Satriani opened a Baseball match between the Giants and the Mets with his own homage to Hendrix’s performance of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, a moment that was in turn recreated in last year’s Moneyball. His version was nearly identical to Hendrix’s, even down to the guitar tone and layering of effects. What was not recreated, however, was the crushing, distorted sounds of machine guns, bombs, and cries of terror. Why, after all, would you bring that sort of subject matter up at a baseball match, a time where national disgraces are usually tactfully concealed behind layers of professional competition?

What Satriani was left with was just a somewhat stylish, metal-cool version of the American national anthem. He played it, the audience stood, some sang along, and most cheered when it was over. Hendrix was back in the patriotic fold, the ambiguous and potentially subversive elements of his performance smoothed over by a modern rock star. There were no rough edges anymore.

Somehow, between 1969 and 2000, the context of playing the anthem on an electric guitar had shifted from disruption to celebration, from national anthem to rock anthem. There’s something telling about the fact that the only videogame to feature Hendrix’s version of “The Star Spangled Banner” before The Line was Guitar Hero 2.

Look at this page on Answers.com:

The question: “Did Jimi Hendrix mean to dishonor the Star Spangled Banner?”

The answer: “He would never disrespect our country. He played the song that way to honor the troops that were fighting in Vietnam.”

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