#ever think about how she went from being imprisoned for centuries to being brutally killed within the span of like a year or two?

[amazingdeadfish]

Day Twenty: Oblivion

I like to think that Lady Bone Demon has found her peace in the nothingness.

[minervacasterly]

~Henry, Seventh of his name by the grace of God, to rule over England, Ireland and Wales~ Henry VII, first monarch of the Tudor Dynasty, deserves to be more than just a footnote in history. His family changed the face of not just history, but none of that would have taken place without their forefather, Henry and his loved ones. Henry VII was a master propagandist who heightened the perception of the king's power and his dynasty as divinely blessed in addition to being linked to Cadwalladr and King Arthur. He was the first King of England to be fully featured in a golden coin. The Golden Sovereign as it became known has Henry enthroned, holding the scepter in his right hand and a ball on his left hand with the words King of England around. This was done to emphasize Henry's position as rightful sovereign. Henry was a quarter Welsh -something that like his granddaughter, Mary I’s Spanish ancestry, has been used against him. But if we look at the royal bloodlines of other kings and queens, we find that all of them had different nationalities. There was no such thing as pure-English. Even Elizabeth of York and her siblings whose parents were both English were not pure-English. Elizabeth Woodville’s mother, Jacquetta of Luxembourg was French. Most of the English premier noblemen owed their fortunes to their Norman ancestors. They came to England with the Conqueror, William, Duke of Normandy, who (like Henry Tudor) challenged the English King for his crown and defeated him at battle. And even the Anglo-Saxons were not native to England. Before them, there were the Celts and other tribes who they themselves Yet, the concept is one that remains very popular and as centuries passed, and the geo-political situation of the British Isles continue to change, the pendulum swung in the other direction. Henry was an usurper, a foreigner and a rogue whereas Richard, an angelic King, was a just man who had been unfairly robbed of his divine right. Jane Austen is a perfect example of this new geo-political landscape. Before she became a published author, Jane wrote during her teenage years that Henry was “as great a villain as ever lived” who “made a great fuss about getting the crown and having killed the king at the battle of Bosworth.” Jane went on to add that the only good thing that came out of Henry VII (and his dynasty for that matter) was his eldest daughter whose descendants united both crowns, and Henry VIII whose reign saw the creation of the Anglican Church. Jane had plenty of bad things to say about Henry VIII too but thought he wasn’t “quite so bad as his daughter Elizabeth.” Fast forward to a few decades later to the Victorian era and you see an increase in popularity for Richard III. This is not surprising. England’s national identity was more important than ever. Xenophobia was in the air and with the English queen being half-German married to her cousin who was German, it became more important than build on that national identity. As a result, countless writers began to rely on secondary sources that distorted most first-hand accounts, painting a picture about the Tudors -namely Henry VII and his mother, Margaret Beaufort- that was far removed from reality. At the time that Henry VII became King of England, the country was in chaos. Everyone was holding their breath, eager to see their new king walking down the streets of London, hoping -begging the almighty- that his reign would last and usher in an era of peace and economic prosperity. Henry VII achieved the former during the last years of his reign, though the chronicles would have everyone believed that he put an end to the wars of the roses the minute he defeated Richard’s forces. The latter was also achieved but it came at a high price. By the time of Henry VII’s death, the crown’s coffers were full but his subjects’ adoration for him had become almost non-existent. Henry levied excessive taxes on the rich and poor alike, and while he survived every rebellion against him, people’s animosity for him continued. Henry’s attitude is largely owed to his reasonable paranoia. Living fourteen years of exile had taught him that he would never be safe unless he rooted out all his enemies. Few people comprehended this; those that did had died except for his mother whom he continued to rely on for emotional support. Margaret Beaufort was an indomitable woman, someone who had more experience at court than Henry did. But he quickly learned how to navigate that world thanks to his stay at the Breton and French courts during his exile. In the five hundred and eighteen years after his death, he remains a controversial figure. People associate him with the image that came in the last years of his reign -that of the miser and the Winter King, and of course the one that’s the product of secondary sources and latest novels: the true culprit behind the princes in the tower’s disappearance or an enabler who used his mother and her husband to dispose of them. This has a lot to do with how we think of Henry, a man who spend hours sitting behind his desk, overseeing every state affair and paying more attention to what was going on his kingdom than squandering his time and money on women and other vices that destroyed the reputations of previous kings. Henry’s life story however is just as interesting as all of these other monarchs. And the fact of the matter is that regarding the princes’ disappearance, is something we will never know. But just as Richard’s defenders say that you cannot condemn him based on little evidence, you can use the same argument for Henry and his mother. There are ‘perhaps’ ‘could haves’ but never any certainties. Just as kings were known to be pious, they were also known to be cruel and Richard was no different. The facts don’t lie, to secure his power, he executed Lord Rivers (Elizabeth Woodville’s brother), Richard Woodville (hers on), and Hastings and imprisoned others that he considered were also a threat. His brother and father had been brutally killed when he was very young, and being exposed to violence at a very young era, no doubt, had an effect on him. The same can be said for Henry Tudor who saw from an early age the destruction of his mother’s house, the Beauforts, and his uncle’s, the Lancastrian. And when he became a target of Edward IV (who feared he would be perceived as the new hope for the lase Lancastrians) he and his uncle Jasper fled the country. This alone makes him one of the most fascinating figures in European medieval history. For more info on Henry VII's reign and legacy, check out these articles on my blog: https://tudorsandotherhistories.wordpress.com/2017/08/22/henry-vii-the-man-behind-the-legend/ https://tudorsandotherhistories.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/birth-death-two-henrys-and-their-legacies/ https://tudorsandotherhistories.wordpress.com/2018/03/14/henry-vii-and-king-arthur-unifying-and-divisive-figures/ I also recommend the following biographies: Tudor by Leanda de Lisle, Henry VII by SB Chrimes, Henry VII Cunningham, Bosworth by Chris Skidmore (an in depth study about the battle of Bosworth and the series of events leading up to it), Wars of the Roses: Fall of the Plantagenet and Rise of the Tudors by Dan Jones, and Winter King by Thomas Penn. I also recommend this The Anne Boleyn Files video on Henry VII and Elizabeth of York's marriage: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Anne+Boleyn+Files+Henry+VII

[erdariel]

Ok so this is mainly a pointless rant, me yelling into the void, and at places based more on gut feeling than me knowing things for certain, so feel free to ignore but I just wanna express my frustration somewhere and tumblr seemed like the right place for it.

Anyway, I watched a movie with my folks today. A fairly well-known historical action thing, called Braveheart. The "They can take our lives, but they will never take our freedom!!" thing. And it just... ended up being vaguely disappointing. And I thought a few moments to think about why.

And one thing I must say, it really left me with a similar feeling as another historical action movie I watched earlier this year, Rob Roy. Just this vague disappointment and this sort of feeling of "this could have been so much better".

And I feel like, in the end, the reason is largely the same. The reason is that what ends up being the protagonist's main motivation is that his wife was raped or killed by the bad guys (which I think in both was also framed as something they did to get to the protagonist, too, but that's somewhat irrelevant).

Which just, even ignoring the problems always present in writing female suffering as motivation for male protagonists without ever truly paying attention to the women themselves, ends up not really working if you ask me. I just noticed it while I was thinking about the more basic "why did it have to be a woman's suffering?" bit. Now, don't get me wrong, I do realize that in Braveheart William's father and brother were killed and so were a great many other people before them. I know that in Rob Roy too, there'd been trouble even before his wife was raped. The suffering of the protagonist's wife, in both of those cases, was merely the last straw upon a whole big-ass pile of straws of suffering, it just happened to be the one that broke the camel's back.

Except it wasn't. I just realized that, while I was thinking about it. While I wondered why couldn't it have instead been that, say, Rob Roy's brother being, dunno, imprisoned and tortured, or just brutally slaughtered. Or that, Hamish, William's childhood best friend, being, say, unfairly accused of stealing and condemned to death in an unfair trial. And that's when I realized one key difference.

If the catalyst had been the suffering of a man, the motivation would have been the systematic oppression of the Scottish by the English, the decades or centuries of slights and harm caused by them. And that would have been addressed. William Wallace's big famous speech about freedom, about rather choosing death than continued oppression, would have had some true narrative weight to it. All the political games, choosing sides, switching them, loyalty and betrayal, someone buying someone else and deceiving yet another... they would have mattered, then.

But when the person who suffered was a woman, they can conveniently make all of that a backdrop, instead. Oh yes, there's big talk about everything else, too, but ultimately, it didn't to me feel like it ever truly was about the oppression. It was written so that the motivation was avenging that one single woman. Which would not necessarily be a bad story in itself (provided you could write one and not make it sexist), but I feel like Braveheart especially, but honestly Rob Roy too, should not be about it. I think I realized it in the scene where William is arguing with Hamish about whether to go negotiate with Robert the Bruce and the Scottish nobles. Hamish says something to the effect that he's really doing it for Murron, because he thinks that she's somehow watching. Wallace says that yes she's watching and Hamish' dead father is, too. And even though I think it may have been meant to be taken as this sort of that it's not bad to be fighting for dead loved ones, especially dead loved ones who ended up dead as a result of such wrongs as they did (and it wouldn't be!), I realized that Hamish was right. Narratively, it was never about the oppression, about the historical context. It was about a woman. That in this movie, William Wallace went to war because of a woman.

Now, in the end, even though Female Suffering As Male Motivation is Bad, I don't think I'd have minded it (after all, I am rather used to it, it's not like you can grow up without being exposed to that in media to the point where you need to think about it to notice it) if only they'd made her suffering a symbol for Scotland's suffering. If they'd made her narratively truly embody Scotland, made it really feel like it, rather than like a woman made to hurt and bleed and die for a male hero. If they'd made it really feel like her death was merely one of many wrongs suffered, and it just happened to be the one to push the protagonist over a breaking point. Which... to me, it always felt like all the other wrongs William had seen and suffered were a separate thing, almost irrelevant, that without Murron's death he wouldn't have done the things he did no matter what else happened, and with her death he'd have acted as he did even if he'd never been wronged by the English before. And that... that made his words about Freedom and shit, all his big talk about needing to stand united, about the nobles being out of touch with people... it made them lose meaning, to a degree. Made them feel like he was saying those words, not because they came from his heart, but because that was what he needed to say to get others to help him.

I don't know why they did it that way, in the movie. I don't know if it was being reluctant to fully engage with those more political and potentially more controversial themes of oppression, fight for freedom, and so on. Or that whoever wrote it tried to write those in, but just failed at balancing that vs the tragic romantic part of the plot. Or something else. But I do feel like that romance and the way it ended overshadowed the freedom fight -part of the movie, and in the process ended up making the movie, at least in my opinion, less meaningful.

And I do know that it would have been possible to do better. Even keeping the romance and Murron's death (as I said, it could have been written to make her more fully a symbol of her country). I think, if you gave me some more time to watch the movie a couple times more and really think on it, I could come up with suggestions on how to do it, too. In fact I have a couple half-formed ideas even now, though I'd need time to refine them and I don't think I'll bother, I have other things to do.

Disclaimer: I am aware that some of what I've said here is in conflict with the text of the movie, and the dialogue at least largely tries to make it seem as if it's about Scotland and not just a girl. I am aware that the things I said may not have been intended by the people who made the movie. However, what I have said here genuinely is how things in the movie came across to me while I watched it, and the dialogue often felt to me like it was slightly in conflict with the story. I'm also not saying other people can't enjoy the movie for what it is in reality. I'm not even saying the movie is objectively bad. But I didn't like the movie much and this is why and I wanted to rant about it somewhere.

[littlemisssquiggles]

Pinehead Headcanons: Oscar’s Grimm Buddy.

Okay, but hear me out with this one, alright Pineheads? How many of you remember the Studio Ghilbi film called ‘Spirited Away’? I’d like to think that most of you know about it right? 

Anyways, remember the character called No Face---the faceless spirit that befriended the main heroine of the movie.

Well this squiggle meister has been thinking. Back during V5’s runtime, when I first proposed the theory of a potential Dark Domain Arc where Ruby and Oscar become prisoners of Salem and are forced to work together to escape her dark world on their own, I also shared a theory about Oscar possibly befriending a Grimm or gaining a pet Grimm while in the Dark Domain.

This headcanon began with the idea of what if…Oscar befriended a lone Beowolf Grimm and this creature basically becomes his Toto, acting as a means of transport and protection for him and Ruby during their trek across the Land of Darkness.

This concept later evolved into my musing on Oscar becoming the RWBY equivalent of the Golden Cap from the Wizard of Oz and gaining the power to gain control of the Winged Beringels we saw in V6.

Now I have another ‘Oscar Befriends A Grimm’ idea that plays into my alternate Dark Domain headcanon where Oscar is the only one taken to Salem and she imprisons him a lonely tower much like the one she was confined to centuries ago.

The idea I have in my head is that, should Salem take Oscar, she wouldn’t imprison him just to torture him physically with violence and manipulation or any kind of dark spells. Oh no! By my headcanons, I feel Salem would torture Oscar with something far worse than any kind of physical pain---loneliness.

I have a feeling that Salem would force Oscar to endure what she went through while locked away in her tower. Complete isolation. Separating him far away from the people he knew and love in an abandoned part of the Dark Domain that not even Salem would go by herself. She wouldn’t keep Oscar in her castle. She’d keep him away. Far away from anything remotely resembling human interaction and contact. Salem would desire for the young farm boy and Ozma incarnate to feel every bit of desperation and longing for freedom that she suffered through while wasting away in that tower of hers for who knows how long.

One thing I noted from the Lost Fable is that when Salem was introduced in her backstory, she seemed well-taken care of despite being locked away by her father. This led me to believe that Salem’s father---the man who trapped her in the first place---must have possibly enchanted the tower in such a way that not only does it prevent intruders from entering but additionally cater to Salem’s every need. I figured Salem had everything she needed to survive up in her tower apart from the one thing she desired most---companionship and the freedom to see the outside world once more.

Where I’m going with this is that, should Oscar be taken to Salem, her objective wouldn’t be to hurt the boy. On the contrary, despite being her clear prisoner, not one day in his tower was Oscar left to starve and slowly wither away in his lonely tower. Instead, he was fed regularly with actual human food that wasn’t a farce. He wasn’t left to grovel in his own filth nor did he sleep on the cold dirt. Instead his chamber was lavished with everything Oscar would need to make himself perfectly comfortable---a warm bed and a wardrobe of fine robes; much like the one Ozma wore during in his lifetime as Diggs.

You might ask yourself

However, there were quite a few twists to all of this proclaimed comfort. For starters, as mentioned Oscar was left alone, void of any human interaction. His only companions were the Grimm that Salem left in his care to ensure his captivity inclusive of one particular humanoid Grimm that looked after Oscar; like a caretaker. This Grimm’s job was to ensure that Oscar was well taken care of. Not only did this creature feed Oscar, whether he was willing to eat or not, but it also clothed him, bathed him but it even watched him carefully like he was sleeping. This creature never left Oscar’s side. Oscar wasn’t even allowed to do his business in peace without this creature standing within a few feet of him; watching his every move with his hovering red eyes. To think, this creature was Oscar’s main source of company during his imprisonment and the routine on constantly being watched over by this hideous faceless monster ultimately began to wear on him after sometime.

And should Oscar dare try and escape, this creature would hunt him down and forcibly drag him back to his tower; kicking and screaming. During his earlier days of his imprisonment, it became almost like a game of some kind between Oscar and this creature. A game of cat and mouse where Oscar would come up with clever ways to outsmart the creature. Let’s say, for the first week of his imprisonment, Oscar spent it trying to escape and with each failed attempt he made it a little closer to the door. A little closer to freedom.

Until one day, he managed to trap the creature and make it out the door, sprinting outside. But what Oscar found outside drained every bit of hope he had left.

Let’s say, from within his tower, Oscar has no clue of what his surroundings were. He never saw where he was prisoned because after he was taken from Atlas, he was knocked unconscious and when he finally came to, he was already inside the tower within the room he would be confined to.

The idea I have is that Oscar’s tower is positioned on a lonely hunk of rock in the middle of giant Grimm Pool.

So even if Oscar tried to escape on foot, he wouldn’t get very far.

I also had this idea of Salem giving Oscar an incentive to be a ‘good boy’ and stay in his castle. A part of me wants to play with the concept of…what if…during the Fall of Atlas; Salem and her forces managed to successfully abduct a portion of the kingdom’s populace, holding them all hostages within the Dark Domain.

Unbeknownst to him, Oscar was crowned the ‘King’ of these said innocent prisoners. Therefore, their overall care and happiness was mainly dependent on his. So let’s say, there was a time during his captivity when Oscar refused to eat out of frustration of what Salem had done. So because of this, all those imprisoned Atlesians---adults as well as children were starved for that particular day he chose not to eat.

After all, if the king doesn’t get to eat then neither should his people, right? And all those times Oscar tried to escape and somehow went unpunished for his endeavors, well…someone else had to pay for his actions. I remember browsing through screenshots of an episode of the Walking Dead where there was some hilltop where someone had murdered characters important to the main cast and left their decapitated heads on display for them to see. I haven’t watched TWD since S3 admittedly but I did take a look at some of the events of some of its later seasons and this is one that I remembered.

 So picture, something like that with Oscar’s situation where upon his escape attempt from the castle, he stumbles upon a graveyard littered with bodies of captured Atlesians, adults as well as children, who all paid the price for Oscar’s treason in his place.

Imagine Oscar learning of this from a malicious Salem who sent one of her Seers to reveal this little tidbit to him. People; innocent people, were being killed because of him. While he had selfishly been secure his own freedom, others were subjected to brutal punishment for his own actions and thus, would continue to pay for him unless he learned to behave.

So…Oscar has no choice but to behave. Oscar submits to his fate as Salem’s eternal prisoner and never dared try and escape again. He became to compliant King of Prisoners so that his fellow captive ‘subjects’ were never forced to suffer further on his behalf. And by accepting his captivity, Oscar additionally submitted to the feelings of depression, loneliness and hopelessness that came with it.

I know this concept is tad dark but…I like it since it plays into the manipulative side of Salem. So let’s roll with it for now for the sake of this headcanon of mine.

Anyways, going off of that, remember that Grimm I spoke of before? Imagine if…while imprisoned, Salem crafts and assigns a special kind of Grimm to be Oscar’s caretaker. This Grimm was christened the Kaonashi Grimm---a faceless Grimm with the power of mimicry enabling it to change its form at will by stealing the form and abilities of anything it consumes.

Remember how in Spirited Away, No Face would inherit the personality and voice of the Bathhouse spirits in consumed? That’s how I envision the Kaonashi Grimm to be. It can take the form of anything if consumes and this is inclusive of other types of Grimm. After it was created, I picture Salem feeding it different kinds of Grimm to test its abilities to change into these other Grimm and mimic their abilities.

So the Kaonashi can take the form of a Nevermore, Beowulf, Ursa, Geist, among other Grimm and can even mimic the special abilities known to said Grimm. I picture the Kaonashi being a very powerful and profoundly intelligent Grimm---the rarest Salem has ever made. Thus it is the only one of its kind. And it is this particular Grimm that Salem puts to live and stand guard over her special prisoner.

How does the Kaonashi know how to cook food…well…it mimics the abilities of the things it eats, right? So feel sorry for the poor experienced human chef that became this thing’s lunch so it can know how to prepare human food.

Like I mentioned earlier, as his caretaker, the Kaonashi cares for Oscar. Oscar is barely allowed to do much of anything on his own. The Kaonashi feeds him (and makes sure he eats), bathes him and for any other activity that Oscar must do on his own, it watches him with keen eyes.

This creature is completely at Oscar’s beck and call. After all, its sole purpose to ensure that he’s a happy little prisoner. And should the Kaonashi fail in its duties, Salem is quick to punish it for its failure. Since the Seer Grimm acts like Salem’s eyes and ears and has been seen to report back to her from time to time, I have this idea of Salem sending a Seer to check in on the Kaonashi watching over Oscar and should the creature be shown to be failing, Salem would chastise it through the Seer Grimm.

Like I’m picturing Oscar being asleep on night in his prison room only to be awakened by the painful screenching wails of the Kaonashi being brutally beaten; horrified by the sound. The next morning, when the Kaonashi comes up to bring Oscar his breakfast, the farm boy would be horrified to discover it limping with scratches embedded in the Kaonashi’s skin and mask.

Not only were the abducted Atlesians being punished for Oscar but so was the Kaonashi. Salem wasn’t even merciful to her own Grimm creations. After seeing the abuse the creature endured for his sake, this causes Oscar to warm up lightly to it.

At first he only tolerated the Kaonashi, silently hating its company. But after some time, Oscar started to chum up to it. Perhaps at this point in time, Oscar is fully merged with Ozpin so he no longer has the old wizard in his mind to guide him.

So when captured by Salem, it’s just Oscar alone mostly. Well him and the Kaonashi Grimm who Oscar tries to befriend. Even talk to it sometimes when loneliness got the better of him.

Of course it never talked back since it was a Grimm and Grimm lack the ability to speak. At least, that was the impression Oscar had until, one night after who knows how long, when he was preparing to rest and the Kaonashi was putting him to bed.

Out of his newfound courtesy toward the Kaonashi, Oscar tells it goodnight and to his surprise, it answers him; mimicking the words ‘goodnight’ in a raspy voice.

Oscar: You…you can talk?

Kaonashi: …Talk? Talk… no.

Oscar: Wait…you understand me?

Kaonashi: …Understand, yes.

Oscar: How come you’ve never spoken to me before?

Kaonashi: …Understand, yes. Talk, no….Speak…little?

Oscar: I see. I guess you don’t know a lot of words, don’t you?

Kaonashi: …A lot of words, no.

Oscar: *chuckles* Well I guess we’re going to have to change that. I’m not much of talker myself but I’ve become increasingly chatty these days. *laughs lightly* Do you have a name?

Kaonashi: …Name?

Oscar: Yeah, what do I call you?

Kaonashi: …Name, no.

Oscar: No…name?

Kaonashi: …No.

Oscar: Well, I guess that’s what I’ll call you from now on. No-Name. I think it suits you.

 Imagine an exchange like that. I know the possibility of No-Name---a Kaonashi or ‘No Face’ inspired Grimm in RWBY is slim. 

Nonetheless, I like it a lot. Unlike most folks who probably saw Spirited Away when they were young, I didn’t see it for the first time until a couple years back and even now, I can recall No-Face being my favourite most memorable characters from the film. He was a character that said very little but I absolutely adored him every time I saw him on screen.

If we ever got a Grimm in RWBY that pays homage to that character, I’d be floored. And should Oscar have a special connection to said Grimm, I’d be even happier. I am fully onboard with the headcanon of Oscar sharing an unlikely friendship with a Grimm especially if it’s a No-Facef from Spirted Away inspired Grimm. 

While I feel like the likelihood of Oscar befriending the Alpha of the Winged Beringels is a better possibility given the call back to the Wizard of Oz; nonetheless, I’m gonna cherish my No-Face inspired Grimm who become Oscar’s Grimm buddy.

Ain’t gonna happen but…let me have this headcanon, okay.

 More Pinehead Headcanons

~LittleMissSquiggles (2019)

[apenitentialprayer]

In light of what happened on Saturday, I’m going to be telling you two stories. Both center around brave women who were inhabitants of Alexandria. They lived about a hundred years apart from each other. Both were brutally killed because they didn’t conform to the majority opinions of the societies that they lived in.

The first of these women would have been known by her friends and family as Ekaterini. She was a bright girl and a member of a noble family, possibly the daughter of the governor of the Roman province of Egypt. Early in her life, she revealed an interest in schooling and education, a passion that her parents happily indulged. By the age of fourteen, she was among the most learned individuals in the city. That was also the age that she decided to convert to Christianity.

The year 301, which would have been around the time that Ekaterini was baptized, marked the beginning of one of the darkest periods of Christian persecution in pagan Rome. Before this point Christians had been persecuted, but such persecutions had always been on a local level at the command of a regional official. This was not the case of the great Diocletian Persecution. This would be an empire-wide persecution, marked by a ferocity and intensity that had not been seen since the persecution headed by Nero over two centuries before.

This was not a sudden process; the seeds had been sown since the year 284, when Emperor Diocletian rose to power. For a long time already, Christians had come to be seen as an “anti-national” minority. Though they may have prayed for the Roman Emperor, as per Saint Paul’s orders (1 Timothy 2:1-2), but they refused to pray to the gods of the Roman elite. As such, they risked angering the gods, and thus were a threat to the metaphysical stability of the empire. Diocletian took this a step further; he identified himself more closely than any other emperor with the Divine, referring to himself as “Iovius” (Jove/Zeus) and demanding that he be worshiped as Lord.

But for Christians, Christ is Lord. He is the only Lord. And so many Christians felt that they could not venerate Diocletian in the way that he wished to be venerated. This made him very upset. First he had decided to purge Christians from the official bureaucracy and the army, but this was not enough; in the year 303, a general persecution calling for the extermination of all Christians who would not worship him was launched. This would be the political landscape that Ekaterini would have to face.

In the year 305, as the story goes, Ekaterini’s conversion to Christianity was made public, and she was confronted with this revelation. Given her young age –she would have been around 18– and the fact that she had a reputation for being well educated, she was questioned by fifty of the most influential philosophers living in Alexandria. The hope was that she would be humiliated by their skill in argument, but that did not happen; in the public debate that followed, several of the philosophers converted to Christianity, as did several hundred members of the crowd.

It was then that the governing officials switched from humiliation to violent cruelty. She was publicly scourged, and then starved while imprisoned for twelve days. During this time, she prayed, gave comfort to fellow Christians who had come to visit her, and received comforting visions of Christ Himself. The order for her execution was ultimately given, and she was beheaded. Those who had converted due to her example were killed afterwards. Today, Ekaterini is one of the most famous of all Catholic saints, Catherine of Alexandria.

The Alexandria that existed a century after Ekaterini’s death was a very different city. In the year 318, Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity and forbade further persecution. In the year 380, the Edict of Thessalonica declared that the official religion of the empire was Christianity, and that all should convert to this official religion. The roles had been reversed; Christianity was ascendant, and paganism, already dying a slow death within the Roman Empire, would never recover. By the time of our second story, which occurred in the year 415, Alexandria had become largely Christian.

Among those dissenters was a woman between the ages of 45 and 65, a remarkable philosopher and scientist known as Hypatia. Hypatia ran her own school for mathematics, philosophy, and astrology. Several major Christian thinkers are numbered among her students, and she was regarded with warmth by pagan and Christian thinkers alike. As it has been mentioned, she took on Christian students; Hypatia did not think that the gap that existed between their community and hers could not be bridged, and she worked hard to make peace between the two groups.

Unfortunately, Hypatia became embroiled in a political struggle between two Christian factions fighting over the position of Bishop of Alexandria. The dominant claimant, a man named Cyril, ultimately earned the ire of the secular ruler of Alexandria, a friend of Hypatia and a recent convert to Christianity named Orestes. As tensions between these two men got worse, rumors began to spread that Hypatia’s influence was the reason that the two groups were not reconciling.

In March of 415, a group of Christians led by a lector named Peter took matters into their own hands. Waiting in ambush, the group seized Hypatia when she was traveling to her home. They dragged her into a church and butchered her. Her eyes were ripped out, her flesh was torn open, and she was ripped limb from limb. They took her parts outside the city and burned them to ashes. So ended the career of Hypatia the brilliant, Hypatia the teacher, Hypatia the bridge-builder. And so it was decided; there would be no peace between Christians and pagans.

It’s amazing how quick the Alexandrian Church had forgotten their roots. In the course of one hundred years, Christians went from being a violently oppressed minority to a violently oppressive majority. According to the records following the immediate aftermath of this tragedy, Christians expressed their disgust and horror at what the party of Peter had done. But that didn’t change the fact that the ever-shrinking pagan community became increasingly seen as outsiders, a minority that simply could not be an acceptable element of society.

I hope and I pray that Hypatia is in heaven with her ‘sister’ Catherine; I hope and pray that she can forgive the sins of my Christian brothers who performed this act of barbarity against her. And I hope that she and Catherine are both praying for the families of those eleven people who were shot dead during their visit to the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh this past Saturday.

I said I was going to tell you two stories, but I lied. There is a third story. On Saturday morning, at 9:45 am, a man walked into a synagogue full of people getting ready to worship God. He opened fire on them because they were Jewish. He had a twenty minute reign of terror that claimed the lives of eleven people who had come to worship God. What should have been a time of peace and celebration was transformed into twenty minutes of blood, and shrieking, and horror.

In the past decade, the question of whether or not the United States was formed as a Christian country has been fielded many times. And it’s an interesting question. But here’s the thing; I don’t care whether the United States was formed as a Christian nation or not. That question is irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that we are currently the majority of this country (75% of our population at least identifies as Christian) and that means that we have certain responsibilities towards the minorities that live among us.

The mind behind this tragedy saw Jews as an anti-national force, an existential threat to the stability of our nation. Does that sound familiar? He saw Jews as foreigners, as the architects behind the decline of our nation, as the children of Satan, as the murderers of his God, Jesus Christ.

That’s right. Robert Bowers was a Christian, just like me. Beyond that, he was a Christian nationalist, someone who did not see any room for non-Christians in our public discourse. He drew upon traditions of antisemitism that run deep in my faith.

For a millennium, the Jew has been the visible “Other” that Christianity has defined itself against. The Jew has been declared guilty of murdering Christ, despite being as temporally removed from that event as you and I are today. The Jew has been slandered as a butcherer of Christian children, a mutilator of Jesus in the flesh, as a greedy parasite who has contributed nothing to society while leeching off of the ‘virtuous’ Christian man. The Jew has been rhetorically transformed into a foreigner, despite having lived among us since the beginning of our shared history. The very word “Jew” has been transformed into an insult.

And today we see the fruits of these actions. Saturday was the most devastating antisemitic attack to ever occur on American soil. But Saturday was not an isolated event. In 2017 alone, over 2,000 incidents of antisemitic crimes were reported. Rates of violence against Jewish people are at their highest since 1979. The world looks at the Holocaust as the worst that can possibly happen to a minority. And maybe the world is right to do so. But we can’t look at the Holocaust as the only bar by which we view violent suppression of minorities. When we do that, we can distance ourselves from the pain and the suffering that occur in our very midst. Because, hey, at least we’re not Nazis, right?

It’s not right. Christianity in the United States has been on the decline for decades, but we’re still the majority. And the scary thing about being the majority is that we have the option, if we so choose, to steamroll over minorities, whether by performing the acts of violence ourselves or by ignoring those acts of violence. It is so, so important that we fight that majoritarian impulse with all we have. That’s the road to madness; that’s the road to fascism. And we cannot let that happen. We have to fight against antisemitic rhetoric when we see it. We have to fight against relegating minorities to being somehow outside our national pale. Because the truth is, minorities don't merely live alongside us. Minorities are a part of us as a nation. And we have to protect our own.

[veneziahq-blog]

Age & Date of Birth: September 12th, 1984 | 32 Neighborhood: Murano Occupation: Personal Assistant at VENINI Glassworks | The Fraternity’s Assassin How long they have been in Venize: One month Gender & Sexuality: Female | Heterosexual Faceclaim: Mila Kunis

“She was half a human and half a hurricane, a half that’s living to destroy and a half that’s trying to survive.”

BIOGRAPHY

Triggers: death, violence, blood.

It’s said that opposites attract but sometime the line is too blurry. Perhaps we all aim for the same goal but from time to time feelings cloud up our reasoning and judgement - don’t believe it? Here’s the proof.

Milan sits at the centre of Italy’s largest urban and metropolitan area. Nobody should be fooled by the modern aspect of the city, since it’s one of the most ancient cities in Europe with more than twenty-six centuries of history and heritage…and dark secrets. Some many years ago, a clan of weavers discovered a mystical code hidden in a fabric based on mistakes in weave of the vertical threads. They called themselves The Fraternity and they spelled out names - targets - from these codes and formulated theories that these names were judged by Fate itself to be killed. According to them, the names come out of necessity. Necessity to maintain order in the world. Those are orders that must be executed, delivered to them so they may achieve stability out of chaos. With this fact, the weavers themselves became international elite assassins.

Francesco Giovanni was recruited to join The Fraternity long before he met Julieta, a devoted judge who took up one of the country’s most controversial and important cases only weeks after returning from their honeymoon. The news of colleagues being constantly bribed and threatened hadn’t stopped the woman from believing that justice needed to be served and Sicily’s most infamous man had to be put on trial. Back then, it was believed Julieta had been one of Salvatore Riina’s lovers and this was her chance to plan some personal vendetta but the rumours always remained outside the closed doors of the courthouse.

Not long after the trial came to an end with Salvatore imprisoned as an outcome, Francesco found himself steps away from taking over The Fraternity’s legacy. This sort of leadership was one that had always ran in his blood - maybe the same one that would make some distance grow between him and Salvatore in the future. That need for power and control had turned him into the group of assassin’s leader perfect replacement but those opportunities never came so easily and the man couldn’t believe his eyes when his wife’s name was delivered to him as his last target in order to demonstrate his loyalty and capacity to stay true to the code. Francesco could’ve hesitated but he had heard the stories of those who had failed to carry out their duties and whose selfish decisions of not bringing one person down had ended in worse consequences for a lot more of innocent people. But in this case, crossing out a name of the list was going to be painful for more reasons than he could think of. Although his wife was the target, the man knew this meant condemning their daughter to a dark reality. There was an invisible name, one that only Francesco and Julieta knew about: Gabriella. And taking away the life of a tiny human being who had left neither a good nor bad stain on the world yet wasn’t part of his plan.

Gabriella Giovanni was born on September 12th, 1984 to a loving mother and a father whose heart began to melt the moment his eyes met hers and noticed the smiles on both of his women. Julieta was wanted dead - the whole country had known ever since she went forward with the case that there was a reason why nobody had bothered to stop The Boss of the Bosses in such a long time. Even her own husband wanted her dead - did he? That didn’t matter. It was a task he had been designated to look after humanity - wasn’t that The Fraternity’s excuse for each of its killings? About two months after the Italian girl was born, her parents hosted a celebration of some sort where more bottles than needed were passed around like candy. This came as the perfect time and place to cause an accident which would leave no sign of whoever started it. As a candle fell over, the curtains caught on fire and the flames spread within minutes. Only a few people were able to get out - one of them being the shameless husband who soon made his way out of the incident with their daughter in his arms. The next morning the whole country woke up to the death of Julieta Giovanni.

Upon being named the new leader of The Fraternity, Francesco became aware of the fact that a baby wouldn't get along with the sort of lifestyle he was aiming for. Being a father was not part of his life’s goals anymore. If he wanted to make of that world a better one for her daughter in the future, the man was convinced of the fact that he had to devote his entire time to stopping others like the baby’s mother. That was how one of the group’s best members and a close friend of Francesco became the person Gabriella would grow to recognise as her father. She was brought up in the ghetto - such a neighbourhood where there are only three ways to get out: rap, sports or crime. The first one was quickly off the table and although she grew to be a competitive and energetic kid who could be seen running after a ball every afternoon, both her father and step-father knew that the female was gonna end up revolving her life around the last one.

Instead of being by his daughter’s side as she learned to find her place in that world, Francesco spent years at The Fraternity’s headquarters. He’d occasionally show up at Mr. Baldini’s house to check on his daughter but his visits became less and less frequent as Gabriella approached her teenage years. Only did her father learn years after being the head of The Fraternity that the entire group was only a small fraction of Riina’s empire. That man’s power wasn’t limited just to Sicily and probably reigned beyond the country’s borders but The Fraternity had been his way of keeping an eye on the city of Milan. Francesco spent endless weeks and months studying the fabric’s details and codes, searching for names here and there only to come across a box that contained pieces of the fabric which had been cut out - some names were from former members of the group who were still alive but not even in those did he find the name Gabriella Giovanni. All he was able to think was that the previous leader, who clearly sympathised with Salvatore Riina, was just another pawn of the whole empire. Francesco strongly believed Salvatore had used false kill orders to direct the Fraternity as mere contract killers. Therefore, the previous leader had added his wife’s name as a payback for his idol’s imprisonment or perhaps the boss himself had made such request. Either way, Francesco began to understand the power he held in the palm of his hand and that was enough to put his mind into looking for no other than the young Giuseppe Salvatore Riina - the one person who was catching everyone’s attention by threatening to break his own father’s records. Decided to make the best out of the discovery, Francesco made use of the same methods the previous leader had worked with in order to get some very special names to show up as some of his assassins’ targets but that were nonexistent in the fabric. He started manufacturing his own targets which he hoped would help him turn the Fraternity against the Riina men.

That was how one day the headlines of Salvi’s brutal assassination and previous release were seen everywhere. However, Francesco had been too easily fooled. He had underestimated Riina’s son. He was too confident to believe the same members who had once been followers of this man’s father would turn their back on the Riina legacy and possibly get rid of their own new king now he wasn’t behind bars. If anything, those assassins pretended to carry out their task when in fact they only worked on building the whole scenario for Salvi’s fake death. Francesco wanted him dead and that was exactly what they gave him and the whole country. Giuseppe Salvatore Riina was dead and with that said, Francesco allowed himself to take a deep breath of relief and brace himself for no more days of grief.

It wasn’t until Gabriella’s name showed up as one of the fabric’s name that Francesco reached out for his daughter. Cutting off that piece of fabric and hiding it amongst others that included his own name, Francesco got in the way of Gabriella’s future by deciding that it was time to introduce her to her past - a different one though, one that would be made up just to fulfil his own interests. At 22 years old, Gabriella’s hobbies were far different than anyone her age. For the first time, she had felt as if she belonged somewhere or she was actually needed when in fact, she was just one more of the many his father would probably use to get as far as he wanted.

Little does Gabriella know that his father was the one who killed her mother in that fire. She doesn’t even know her own leader is her father. These lies were the perfect way to make her join the Fraternity and become a determined assassin, hungry with revenge and willing to avenge the death of the mother she never met. As part of her training, she was given orders to kill people from the Loom of Fate, the ones that were believed to be part of the code hidden in weaving errors of the fabric. While on her first assignment, the woman had had second thoughts and hesitated killing her target. But it all paid off for her when she combined her agility and strength with her ruthlessness. Killing is as natural to her as breathing is to everyone else. Whenever Francesco ordered Gabriella to kill a person, she asked whether the target was the golden man whose existence had remained a secret for most of them. Many years went by as she perfected her abilities and became a deadly assassin -  bringing down one target after another as she waited for the real one. At one time, he granted her wish.

Only now, at 32 years old, did the suspicions and possibility of someone who was thought to be dead give her the chance to cross half of the country to study the evidence herself. She doesn’t know much about her new boss in Venezia - neither of them even know if the infamous mafia man could still be alive. To this day, having never been told of her true identity and using a fake one by being known around the new city as Sabrina Martignoni, all Gabriella knows is that her mother was killed in that fire by no other than her next target’s father - Maurizio Balducci if the rumours of his fake identity are true. One that, according to Fate, will follow in his father’s footsteps if she refuses to stop him.

Staying true to her beliefs and being aware of the fact that this same man she’s after could be a mere ordinary businessman (at least he’s seemed like that so far), Gabriella has decided to find out more about him first. Some similarities to Sicily’s most wanted man aren’t enough for Gabriella. Moreover, even if it’s him, she strongly believes one can’t be judge by its past or a relative’s actions. Maybe she’s wrong. Can this cost Gabriella her own life? Perhaps she’s playing with fire, waiting to be burn when she should just put out the candle with a determined blow. Little does she know the Riinas always seemed to be a step-ahead and not everyone around The Fraternity were to be trusted with the new plans for the woman around Venezia…maybe this may have become a new sort of cat-chasing-the-mouse in a sea of lies and truths game where it’s not sure whose role has the upper hand. Meanwhile her father thinks she’s completely by his group’s side, the stories and truths she may find out around Venice will teach many not to take her royalty for granted. There are no wrongs and rights for her anymore…that’s for sure.

PERSONALITY

Gabriella is a very determined, sarcastic, snarky, tough, headstrong, and almost fearless woman, capable of taking any challenge that is required of her to make justice and save others.  However, she was also hardened by her troubled life, making her greatly obsessed with overcoming weaknesses, taking up self defence classes, continuing on even when she was injured. Despite this, she is also very much capable of social interactions, having befriended her coworkers and aiming for her boss. It’s known this woman’s been through hell, and laughed in its face.

As she grew, she was considered one of the most friendliest and competitive kids around the neighbourhood. If she isn’t good at one thing, she’ll make sure she’ll become an expert very soon. But because of that mindset, a lot of people were intimidated by her. Often, people didn’t like to train with her only because they knew they weren’t a challenge enough for her. So, she trained on her own even in events when it was a must to work with a partner.

Though this woman can be rather blunt, misanthropic, sarcastic, bitingly cynical and cold she has a very vulnerable side which she only shows around those she cares, and she has a natural maternal instinct. She is usually very logical except for times when her emotions get in the way. Impatient and cruel at times, she can be rather vicious toward others both verbally and physically - often, she will react first and ask questions later. She will do anything to survive. She can looked overwhelmed but resilient, trying her best to make the correct choices despite making mistakes along the way.  

Despite her careless exterior, the pressure and blood in her hands made her more erratic and self destructive as she added dead people to the nightmares at night, leading to a recent alcohol abuse. She has found in certain substances what she needs to overcome some thoughts and conceive some peaceful nights of sleep.

[drylandlit-blog]

  BY STEVEN GRAY

Spoiler alert: the films discussed in this essay include Saving Private Ryan, The Stoning of Soraya M., and Zero Dark Thirty.

My parents didn’t own a television until I was twelve and they limited our viewing time. My mother would say: “You should learn how to entertain yourself.” I didn’t have that many channels but I also didn’t have commercials so it wasn’t bad advice; however, it left me vulnerable whenever I was exposed to someone else’s television. I wasn’t used to how coldblooded it was. I was haunted for months by a TV show I saw at my grandmother’s house: two young men were confronted by a street gang in the 1950s; one ran away, but his friend was beaten to death. When you’re five or six years old that is hard to process.

Forty years later (more or less) I was visiting my parents in Southern California. We hardly ever watched movies together since my father and I can talk for hours and my mother’s taste in movies was different than mine. We were watching a war film though, and when it was over they yawned and said goodnight and went to bed. It hadn’t phased them, but I sat there stunned and wide-eyed as the ramifications were hitting home.

One scene in particular: an American soldier encounters a Nazi in a house in a French village. They fight hand-to-hand, having run out of ammunition. (I’ve read about the lack of realism in war films where soldiers shoot their weapons for far longer than the weapons’ capacity for ammunition.) The American pulls a knife but the German grabs his wrist and overpowers him. The American ends up on the floor on his back with the German on top. The knife hovers over his upper torso, pointed down, and his resistance is ebbing as he tries to keep the knife away from his heart. The director (or the screenwriter) adds an insidious note to this life and death struggle. It takes on an intimate tone as the German leans down and whispers in the soldier’s ear about giving up and accepting death. The knife sinks into his chest and it is over.

When the German leaves the room, he passes another American soldier on the stairs. The latter has a rifle but is so petrified with fear he can’t use it. The German walks by him like someone whose spineless existence is not worth acknowledging. By that time I was floored and cursing Spielberg (or the screenwriter Robert Rodat) for the diabolic genius of the scene, however much it favored the Nazis. Fortunately they lost the war.

I had been exposed to quite a few films by then, but nothing like Saving Private Ryan (1998), especially when the soldiers land on Omaha Beach and walk into a buzz-saw. It took up half an hour at the beginning of the film and is so well done that veterans with PTSD are warned about viewing it.

Another film I found disturbing was The Stoning of Soraya M. (2008). Instead of hundreds of men being gunned down on the beach, here is one woman buried up to her waist while men throw rocks at her (including her son and husband). It’s a clumsy form of execution and it goes back thousands of years. Even worse, she hadn’t committed the alleged crime (adultery).

It’s an American film, set in Iran, and based on a book by a French-Iranian journalist, Freidoune Sahebjam. The film got mixed reviews, which was a little surprising. Rotten Tomatoes said it “…drowns out its message with an inappropriately heavy-handed approach.” Those hands have rocks in them. People were shocked and put off by the stoning scene. I thought the film was well done, however brutal and direct and hard to watch at times. The woman’s husband is such a slimy-casual sociopath you’re hoping he steps on a landmine. His marriage was becoming inconvenient and he found a way to get rid of his wife. Simple as that.

Other aspects of the film are not so simple and are addressed in this article, “Sensationalist Film Exploits Human Rights Issue in Iran.” Stoning in Iran is very rare. “[T]he Head of the Iranian Judiciary announced a moratorium on stoning back in 2002… Sadly, at least three people have been executed by stoning since then. Interestingly, all three were men.” Meanwhile, in the US over 1800 women were killed every year between 2003 and 2012. (In a third of the cases the men were husbands, boyfriends, exes, etc. In half of the cases the men used a gun.) And too many films require the death or terrorizing of a woman in order to generate a plot.

In The Stoning of Soraya M. a woman is executed by a method found in biblical times. In Noah (2014) you have a biblical story where the human race is condemned to death by the god of some delirious wishful thinkers in the desert. The only people who will survive are Noah and his family. The movie is ridiculous and disturbing. Noah plans to stab his daughter’s baby with a knife for theological reasons. The main problem is the original story from the Book of Genesis (in the Torah and the Old Testament). I wrote about it in an essay entitled, “Neo-Noah: The Bastardization of a Jewish Myth.”

I should note that I’m not including slasher films in this essay. I’ve seen very few and those were enough. The gore is unbelievable these days (and that’s just on Game of Thrones). It makes you wonder what sort of repressed urges are lurking in directors and viewers.

There are films I find disturbing which I’ve never seen. For example, J. Edgar (2011). The reviews were lukewarm. The screenplay is by one of the Hollywood castrati. It has no balls.

From The Guardian:

The movie does not quite reclaim Hoover for gay history, neither does it exactly claim a tragic status for Hoover’s imprisonment in the closet, nor quite suggest that his tentacular empire was a symptom of sexual repression. There is a weird, muffled neutrality to all this, a lot of pulled punches and fudged issues, as if screenwriter and director have made an uneasy alliance to create a Hoover they admire from different angles: the fictional love child of Harvey Milk and Dirty Harry. And there’s an infuriating final twist that sneakily preserves the movie’s impartiality.

It is unconscionable to cover such a vile person as J. Edgar Hoover with a “muffled neutrality.” He was head of the FBI for nearly half a century, during which time he was more intent on persecuting pot smokers and people in the civil rights movement than organized crime. “We want no Gestapo or secret police. FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail… Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him” (“The Secret Life of J Edgar Hoover“). That is not a leftwing radical speaking, it’s Harry S. Truman.

Hoover looked like a toad who wore his mother’s clothing with a gun in his hand (“FBI agents upset over movie alleging J. Edgar Hoover was gay“). So who do they get to portray him? Leonardo DiCaprio. Talk about historical revisionism. It makes you wonder about the extent of government propaganda in our culture. It has always been there to some extent, but the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 “explicitly forbids information and psychological operations aimed at influencing U.S. public opinion.” That was nullified by the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in 2012 (“The NDAA Legalizes The Use Of Propaganda On The US Public“).

We now have films like American Sniper (2014), glorifying a mercenary killer with a thousand-yard stare. And Zero Dark Thirty (2012) which exploits the dubious story of Osama bin Laden’s assassination in 2011 by U.S. Special Forces in Pakistan. Keep in mind that the FBI has stated it has “no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11” (FBI says, “No hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11”). We have no evidence that the unarmed man in his fifties who was shot when  American soldiers broke into his home was bin Laden. There were no photos or DNA test released, and the body was quickly dumped in the ocean. Supposedly he lived for years near a Pakistani military base and they didn’t know he was there. Even more suspicious: since the operation was run by the CIA any records of it cannot be accessed by the public. (The investigative journalist Seymour Hersh thinks the raid was staged.) And the film, which tries to put a positive spin on torture, was secretly aided by the CIA. (Read “Hollywood History: CIA Sponsored “Zero Dark Thirty”, Oscar for “Best Propaganda Picture” and “The director of the CIA secretly helped produce Hollywood’s biggest movie about the Osama bin Laden raid.”)

Then there are the 9/11 films which I refuse to see (except for the documentary Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup (2009)). There are several films about Flight 93, which is said to have crashed in a field in Pennsylvania when the passengers tried to take back the plane from the hijackers. It was probably shot down by a fighter jet since debris was spread over miles of countryside. The alleged crash site has little or no wreckage (“Highjacking The Highjacking: The problem with the United 93 films“). The films conform to the official fairytale of 9/11 and I find that disturbing, especially when someone like Oliver Stone makes a middle-of-the-road movie about a couple of responders trapped in the rubble. “World Trade Center doesn’t do much with 9/11, except to sentimentalize it for popular consumption” (Slate). Like that hadn’t been done already.

There is another aspect of movies which bothers some people: the casting. It’s an ethnic minefield, for one thing. Movies were invented and developed by people of European descent, but that doesn’t mean a white person should portray someone of a different race. When a famous white actor is used it may have more to do with box office concerns than racism, but tell that to those who want to see their own kind on the big screen.

There was a controversy about who should portray Frida Kahlo (who was Mexican and Jewish) in Frida (2002). They ended up with Salma Hayek (whose background is Mexican and Lebanese). It was a semi-obtuse choice, but imagine what a travesty it would have been if Madonna had gotten her clutches on the role (she tried to). Many people objected to Zoe Saldana (who I liked as a blue-skinned alien in 2009’s Avatar) in the role of a darker-skinned Nina Simone (Nina (2016)). A woman wrote the screenplay and directed the film, but according to the Guardian “… it is an inept, cliché-ridden story edited together in a treacly and cheap manner.”

I mentioned the miscasting in J. Edgar, but why would Leonardo DiCaprio play a sleazy stock broker in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)? Is it anti-Semitic to have a Jewish actor play a Jewish swindler? For that matter, why would the more positive role of a writer, David Foster Wallace (a Gentile), be given to a Jewish actor? (“Why The End of the Tour isn’t really about my friend David Foster Wallace“)

Other films I found disturbing:[1] The Deer Hunter (1978) – not so much when they’re eating monkey brains, but the Russian roulette scene (one of the actors reminded me of my brother). Repulsion (1965) by Roman Polanski – a woman is cracking up and cracks appear in the wall. Some people find his past disturbing and won’t go near his films. Inland Empire (2006) – David Lynch is one of my favorite directors but this one got away from him. He didn’t even try to make sense of it. I walked out of the theater cursing.

There was a short film I walked in on one afternoon at the Art Institute. The theater was nearly empty. A man on the screen was slowly and methodically disemboweling himself with a sword.

[1] I knew a sensitive and religious woman who would watch the most gory films, the kind I won’t go near. My father doesn’t go to the movies anymore because the sound-system in the theater is like a giant robot stomping on people. My mother-in- law hated The Revenant, mainly for what happened to a horse (she has two horses). My wife found Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas too disturbing to watch, along with Fatal Attraction (a rabbit is boiled) and Jaws (she saw it as a young girl). She got tired of a TV series, Mad Men, because of how women were treated in the 1950’s. No brides were burned, but many women were prevented from living up to their full potential.

  Steven Gray has lived in San Francisco since the 1970s.  His most recent book of poetry is Jet Shock and Culture Lag. He writes reviews for www.litseen.com. 

  “Miscasting, Propaganda, and Psychologically Twisted Violence: A Look at Disturbing Films” BY STEVEN GRAY Spoiler alert: the films discussed in this essay include Saving Private Ryan, The Stoning of Soraya M., …