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oscopelabs · 4 years ago

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Christopher Nolan: The Man Who Wasn’t There by Daniel Carlson

So, we’ll start with the fact that all movies are make-believe. It’s a bunch of actors on a set, wearing costumes and standing with props picked out by hordes of people you’ll never see, under the guidance of a director, saying things that have been written down for them while doing their best to say these things so that it sounds like they’re just now thinking of them. We all know this—saying it feels incredibly stupid, like pointing out that water is wet—but it’s still worth noting. There is, for example, no such person as Luke Skywalker. Never has been, never will be. He was invented by a baby boomer from Modesto. He is not real.

And we know this, and that’s part of the fun. We know that Luke Skywalker isn’t real but is being portrayed by an actor (another boomer from the Bay Area, come to think of it), and that none of the things we’re seeing are real. But we give ourselves over to the collective fiction for the greater experience of becoming involved in a story. This is one of the most amazing things that we do as humans. We know—deep down, in our bones, without-a-doubt know—that the thing we’re watching is fiction, but we enter a state of suspended reality where we imagine the story to be real, and we allow ourselves to be moved by it. We’ve been doing this since we developed language. The people telling these stories know this and bring the same level of commitment and imagination and assurance that we do as viewers, too. The storyteller knows that the story isn’t real, but for lack of a better way to get a handle on it, it feels real. So, to continue with the example, we’re excited when Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star because he helped the good guys win. For us viewers, in this state of mutually reinforced agreement, that “happened.” It’s not real, but it’s “real”—that is, it’s real within the established boundaries of the invented world that we’ve all agreed to sit and look at for a couple of hours. Every viewer knows this, and every filmmaker acts on it, too. Except:

Christopher Nolan does not do this.

There’s no one single owner or maker of any movie, and anyone who tells you different has their hand in your pocket. But there’s an argument to be made that when somebody both writes and directs the movie, it’s a bit easier to locate a sense of personhood in the final product. (This is all really rough math, too, and should not be used in court.) Christopher Nolan has directed 11 films to date, and while his style can be found in all of them, his self is more present in the ones where he had a hand in the shaping of the story—and crucially, not just that, but in the construction of the fictional world. Take away the superhero trilogy, the remake of a Norwegian thriller, the adaptation of a novel, and the historical drama, and Nolan’s directed five films that can reasonably be attributed to his own creative universe: Following (1998), Memento (2000), Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), and Tenet (2020). These movies all involve themes that Nolan seems to enjoy working with no matter the source material, including identity, memory, and how easily reality can be called into question when two people refuse to concede that they had very different experiences of the same event. Basically, he makes movies about how perception shapes existence. How he does this, though, is unlike pretty much everybody else.

Take Inception. After a decade spent going from hotshot new talent to household name (thanks to directing the two highest-grossing Batman movies ever made, as well as the first superhero movie to earn an Oscar for acting), he had the credit line to make something big and flashy that was also weird and personal. So we got an action movie that, when first announced in the Hollywood trades, was described as being set within “the architecture of the mind.” Although this at first seemed to be a phrase that only a publicist could love, it turned out to be the best way to describe the film. This is a film, after all, about a group of elite agents who use special technology to enter someone’s subconscious dream-state and then manipulate that person’s memories and emotions. The second half of the film sees team leader Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the rest of the squad actually descend through multiple nested subconsciouses to achieve their goal, even as they’re chased every step of the way by representations of Mal (Marion Cotillard), Dom’s late wife, who committed suicide after spending too much time in another’s subconscious and lost the ability to discern whether she was really alive or still in the dream-world.

I say “representations” because that’s what they are: Mal is long dead, but Dom still feels enormous guilt over his complicity in her actions, and that guilt shows up looking like Mal, whose villainous actions (the representation’s actions, that is) are just more signs of Dom not being able to come to grips with his own past. It’s his own brain making these things up and attacking itself, and it chases his entire crew down three successive layers of dream worlds. You get caught up in the movie’s world as a viewer, and you go along because Nolan is pretty good at making exciting movies that feel like theme-park rides. You accept that Dom and everybody else refer to Mal as Mal and not, say, Dom. Dom even addresses her (“her”) when her projection shows up, speaking to her as if she’s a separate being with her own will and desires and not a puppet that he’s pretending not to know he’s controlling. It’s only later that you realize that the movie is in some ways just a big-budget rendition of what it would look like to really, really want to avoid therapy.

Which is what makes Nolan different from other filmmakers:

None of this is actually happening.

Again, yes, it’s happening in the sense that we see things on screen—explosions, chases, a fight scene in a rotating hallway that’s still some of the best practical-effects work in modern action movies—but within the universe of the film, none of what’s going on is taking place in the real world. It’s all unfolding in the subconsciouses of Dom’s teammates. In the movie’s real world, they’re all asleep on a luxury jet. They’re “doing” things that have an outcome on the plot, but Nolan sets more than half the movie inside dreams. It’s a movie about reality where we spend less time in reality than in fantasy. Half the movie is pretend.

For Nolan, filmmaking is about using a dazzling array of techniques to create a visual spectacle that distracts the viewer from the fact that the real and true story is happening somewhere else: in the fringes we can’t quite see, in the things we forget to remember, or even in the realm of pure speculation.

Memento arrived like (and with) a gunshot. It seemed to come out of nowhere and leave people struggling to describe it, and they usually wound up saying something like “it goes backward, but also forward at the same time, except some parts are actually really backward, like in reverse, so it’s maybe a circle?” Written by Christopher Nolan from an idea originally shared with him by his brother, Jonathan (who eventually turned it into a very different short story titled “Memento Mori”), the film follows a man named Leonard (Guy Pearce) who has anterograde amnesia and can’t form new memories, so every few minutes he sort of just resets and has to figure out where he is, what he’s doing there, and so on. He’s on the hunt for the man who attacked him and his wife, leaving his wife dead and Leonard in his present condition, which you can imagine does not make the gathering and synthesis of clues easy.

What’s more, Nolan puts the viewer in Leonard’s shoes by breaking the film’s linear timeline into two halves—call them A and B—and then alternating between them, with the added disorientation coming from the fact that one of those timeline halves plays out backward, with each successive scene showing what happened before the one you previously saw. So, if you numbered all the scenes in each timeline in chronological order, they’d look something like this when arranged in the final film: Scene A1, Scene B22, Scene A2, Scene B21, Scene A3, Scene B20, etc. You get why it messed with people’s heads.

As a result, we spend most of the movie pretty confused, just like Leonard, whose suppositions about what might or might not take place next begin to substitute for our own understanding of the film. It’s not until the end that we find out the shoe already dropped, and that Leonard killed the original attacker some time ago and has since been led on a series of goose chases by his cop friend, Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), who’s planting fake clues to get Leonard to take out other criminals. In other words, we realize that the story we thought was happening was pretend, and the real story was happening all around us, in the margins, memories, and imaginations of the characters. The most honest moment in the movie is the scene where Leonard hires a sex worker to wait several minutes in the bathroom while he gets in bed, then make a noise with the door to wake him, at which point his amnesia has kicked in again and he briefly thinks that the noise is being made by his wife. He’s wrong, of course, but this is the only time in the movie that we actually know he’s wrong. It’s the only time we truly know what’s real and what isn’t.

Yet you can’t talk about Memento without talking about Following, Nolan’s first feature. Although the film’s production was so extremely low-budget you’d think they were lying—the cast and crew all had day jobs and could only film on the weekends, so the thing took a year to make—Nolan’s willingness to dwell completely in a make-believe world that the viewer never knows about is already evident. It’s about a bored young writer who starts following strangers through the city for kicks, only for one of those strangers to catch him in the act and confront him. The stranger introduces himself as Cobb—I kindly submit here that it is not a coincidence that this is also Leonardo DiCaprio’s character’s name in Inception, but you already knew that—and reveals himself to be a burglar, spooked by the tail but willing to take on an apprentice. Cobb trains the writer to be a burglar, only for the situation to ultimately wind up implicating the writer himself in a complex blackmail plot. You see, the writer didn’t latch onto Cobb in a crowd; Cobb lured him in. The whole movie has been Cobb’s story all along, with the writer as a patsy who doesn’t understand the truth until the final frame. None of what we saw mattered, and everything that actually happened happened off-screen just before or just after we came in on a given scene. It’s like realizing the movie you’re watching turned out to be just deleted scenes from something else. You can’t say Nolan didn’t show his hand from the start.

That same general concept—that the movie we’re watching is actually the knock-on effect of a movie we’ll only glimpse, or maybe never even see—underpins Nolan’s latest movies, Interstellar and Tenet, too. Interstellar has some concepts that are iffy even for Nolan (it makes total sense for someone to do something for another out of love, but somewhat less sense that that love somehow reshapes the physical universe), but it’s still a big, bold approach to exploring how time and perception shape our actions. As the film follows its core group of astronauts while they search for potentially habitable new worlds, they encounter strange visions and experiences that turn out to be their handiwork from the future reflected back at them. Sure, it raises the paradoxical question of whether they had a first mission before this that failed, so now their future selves are intervening to make the second one (which feels like the first one to the astronauts the whole time) successful, and all sorts of other stuff that your sophomore-year roommate would like to talk with you about in great detail. But so much of what we see isn’t the stuff that happens, or that winds up being important. There’s the great scene where the astronauts land on a planet near a black hole, which is wreaking havoc on how time passes on the planet. A minor disaster delays their departure for the main ship still in orbit, but when the landing team returns, they find that more than 20 years have “passed” since they left, with the one remaining team member on the ship having spent more than two decades waiting for them to return. It’s a moment of genuine horror, and it underscores the fact that what we thought was the one true reality was just the perspective of a handful of characters we happened to follow for a few minutes. There were whole things happening that changed the plot and story and direction of everything that would follow, and we never saw them; we didn’t even know we’d missed them.

Tenet is, of course, the latest and most recursive exploration yet of Nolan’s obsession with showing us a story that turns out to be mostly fake. It is almost perversely hard to even begin to explain the film (Google “Tenet timeline infographic” and have fun). One way to think about it is to imagine if the two timeline halves from Memento somehow existed at the same time, with people moving both forward and backward through time while inhabiting the same location. Basically, some scientists figured out how to “invert” the basic entropy of objects, so that they exist backward: you hold out your hand and the ball on the ground leaps up into it, because you’ve dropped it in the future, so now you can pick it up, etc. … Look, it doesn’t get easier to understand.

The upshot is, though, that we spend the film following the Protagonist (that’s his name), a CIA agent played by John David Washington, as he’s tasked with tracking down the source of the inverted stuff to figure out what’s unfolding in the future and why it’s suddenly started to make itself known in the present. He gets marginally closer to understanding the truth by the end of the film, but because this is a Nolan film that is maybe more expressly about the nature of reality than anything he’s ever done, his journey doesn’t so much take him forward as it does in a large circle. Because, and stop me if you’ve heard this, the true story of Tenet is taking place outside the Protagonist’s actions and knowledge, alongside him but invisible, often steered by people who themselves are moving “backward” through time and thus have already met the Protagonist in the future and are old friends with him by the time he meets them in his youth. Even more brain-liquefying, some of these people have been working under the orders of the Protagonist himself—the future version, that is—because his past self has already achieved the victories that allowed him to send the future people backward through time to meet his younger self so they’d achieve the victories that allow him to etc., etc., etc.

With Tenet, Nolan didn’t just make a movie that challenged perception, like Memento, or that dwelt in fiction, like Inception. He made a movie that can only be understood (to whatever degree true understanding is possible) by rewatching the movie itself, over and over, as the multiple timelines and harrowingly complex bits of cause and effect come into some kind of focus. The whole movie itself isn’t happening, in a sense, but is just the ramifications of something else, the echoes of a shout whose origin we’re straining to pinpoint. It both is and isn’t.

Christopher Nolan is a talented director of action-driven suspense thrillers. He’s canny at controlling the audience’s emotions, and he knows how to put on a dazzling show. Plus he’s fantastic at picking when to deploy non-computer-generated effects for maximum impact. But you could say that about a lot of other directors, too. What sets Nolan apart from the rest, and what makes him a director to keep watching and returning to, is the teasing way his movies wind up being just deceptive enough to fool you into thinking that you know what’s going on, then just harsh enough to disabuse you of that notion. Looking at what seems to drive him, I don’t think Tenet is his best movie-movie, but it’s his most-Nolan movie. It’s almost a culmination of his continuing efforts to tell stories where what you see and what actually happens are two different things. It’s not that he makes puzzles to solve. There is no solving these movies. Rather, it’s that he sculpts these delicate artifacts that only let you see two dimensions at a time, never all three, no matter how you twist your head. Craning back and forth, you can almost see the whole thing, but not quite. Some part of it will always have to exist in your memory. And that’s where Christopher Nolan likes to be.

#chrisopher nolan #tenet #memento #following #following movie #christopher nolan film #inception #inception film #memento film #tenet film #interstellar #interstellar film #oscilloscope laboratories #musings #film writing #beastie boys

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queermediastudies · 4 years ago

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Blue is, in fact, not only the Warmest Color, but her name is Emma - Alec Thomas

Blue is the Warmest Color is a 2013 film adaptation of a comic series of the same name, made by Julie Maroh in 2010. This film follows a French teenager named Adele, who is what seems to be very introverted and unsure of her place in the world. Adele dates a boy named Thomas at school, but when they eventually have sex for the first time, Adele is left unfulfilled by Thomas, realizing there might be more to her sexual identity than she knows, and decides to break off their relationship. Her openly gay best friend Valentin hears about her confusion, and decides to take her out to a men’s gay bar. Adele leaves Valentin and wanders off to a neighboring lesbian bar, where she ends up meeting Emma, the blue haired girl who is also a graduating art student. The two have resounding energy off one another almost immediately, and they become friends quickly. It isn’t long after that they kiss for the first time during a picnic, before they bloom into a full relationship with one another. Emma’s family is very welcoming of Adele’s presence and relationship, while Adele’s more conservative parents are told Emma is a tutor for Adele’s philosophy class at school.

The film fast forwards a few years, and we see Adele and Emma living together while they continue their jobs. While Adele finishes school and gets a job teaching at an elementary school, Emma tries to further her painting career by throwing parties to socialize among her art peers. It’s at one of these parties that we meet Lise, a pregnant old colleague of Emma’s. Emma makes fun of Adele’s current job choice, saying that her writing could do exceptionally well, and Adele asserts that she’s much happy with where she’s at now. It’s here where we see some disparities come to light, as it seems like Adele and Emma don’t share that much in common even anymore, and out of loneliness, Adele sleeps with a male coworker. Emma finds out about the affair, and subsequently and ferociously kicks Adele out, ending their relationship. 3 years pass before they end up meeting again, only to find out Emma is now in a relationship with Lise and has a family with Lise’s daughter, while Adele still cannot overcome her heartbreak. Adele expresses how in-love she is with Emma, and despite their strong connection, Emma declines, but tells Adele that she’ll always have an “infinite tenderness” in her heart for her. More time passes before we see the two convene one last time at one of Emma’s art exhibits, where the two meet, but don’t really connect. It’s clear that Emma would rather tend to all her patrons and guests at the party, so Adele congratulates her before quietly leaving the exhibit. The film ends. I argue this film is a generally a great depiction of a heart wrenching love tale between two women, which effectively explores themes of sexuality and queerness explicitly, in order to create a film that leaves audiences wanting more among an ambiguous ending.

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This movie definitely connects with some of the talking points we’ve discussed in class. Probably one of the easiest examples we see coming to light is in one of the first scenes in the film, where Adele’s friend group displays some signs of heteronormativity. In the clip above, we see Thomas staring at Adele from afar, with Adele’s friends insisting they’re “so obviously into each other”. Adele then begins to tune out of the conversation as the rest of the group starts discussing other cute boys, while Adele remains silent, clearly uncomfortable to some degree. It’s clear here that Adele’s friend group is using heteronormativity in the sense that they believe Adele is straight, despite no context being added whether they’ve discussed this before. Seeing as how the rest of the film pans out, they clearly haven’t discussed this. “For queer theorists, sexuality is a complex array of signifiers, social codes and forces linked to institutional power which interact to shape the idea of normal or deviant, good or bad, and which has the function of including and excluding people,” (Andersson, 2002, p. 3). In this scene, Adele is unsure of her sexuality, but it is clear how it should be demonstrated among the institution of her school in the ways of heteronormativity. This environment excludes any notion of queerness existing normally, which is reinforced by Adele’s friend group. This becomes problematic for Adele, as it feels as though Adele is almost pressured into going out and sleeping with Thomas because of her friends' heteronormativity enacted upon her. She is then only left to be unfulfilled, simply because she wasn’t attracted to men it seems at this point.

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The above clip happens once Emma and Adele start spending more time together, and Adele’s friend group at school seems to pay attention to this fact. They all begin to grill and question her about where she met this girl, only to find out it was at a gay bar. Her “friends” then start getting heated with Adele, begging her to “fess up” to being lesbian, and to “just admit it”, while another girl starts making remarks about how she doesn’t care if Adele is lesbian, but that she’s slept naked in her bed a few times and seen her checking out her ass, calling Adele a “whore”, and then asking the question “Does your bitch have a blue p---y?” before Adele starts to fight. While this is clearly homophobia, it’s carefully inserted into the film to show some of the general public’s opinion on gay or lesbian reception, those of which lines match pretty well with Adele’s parents ideals. You could compare this to a time where “homosexuals” were compared to Communists in the U.S. “Communists bore no identifying physical characteristics...Homosexuals too could escape detection...Because most people confronted with accusations of homosexuality during these witch-hunts quietly resigned, it is impossible to determine the number of careers and lives that were destroyed.” (Gross, 2001, p. 22). This scene almost plays out like an interrogation or a witch-hunt of Adele, which I think draws on some lines on queer folk having to “admit” their queerness publicly, while cisgender folk never have to admit their sexuality in the same way. This part especially demonstrates queerness in a real world lens. To me, this scene was put into the film in order to demonstrate the harsh world that queer folk often experience. It’s made for the audience to have a better understanding of Adele’s current position, and therefore allows the audience to become more compassionate with Adele’s struggles along her life, for simply choosing who she wants to love.

Another dominant theme we see arising out of this film is sexuality and pornography. That being said, I wouldn’t recommend watching this film with your parents in the same room, because boy, you would be in for a trip. The film’s graphic sex scenes are all pretty exposed for Adele and Emma, leaving almost literally nothing to the imagination of the audience. I think this is done in the film because it wants to show the raw and unfiltered bodies of the two lovers, and more obviously done to display queer love on screen. “Queer film study, then, understands cinematic sexualities as complex, multiple, overlapping, and historically nuanced, rather than immutably fixed...queer film study explores how and why the fluidity of all sexualities relates to the production and reception of cinema.” (Benshoff & Griffin, 2004, p. 2). We especially see this sexual fluidity occur within Adele, when she sleeps with Thomas at the beginning of the movie, along with her fling with a male coworker that ultimately ended her relationship with Emma. Adele’s sexuality isn’t ever exactly defined, which leaves it ambiguous to the audience, therefore showing that even Adele is still discovering what her sexuality is exactly. While the sex scenes are explicit, to me, I wouldn’t qualify them exactly as porn, because they are also increasingly dramatic with expression. In a way, if we didn’t have these scenes, I don’t know if the audience could even understand the level of obsession that Adele and Emma have for one another. It’s in these scenes that we get just a glimpse of what it means to love as humans, and how sex is one of many facets to deepen our love for one another.

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For myself, the above clip is one scene in particular where I think the movie doesn’t really hit the nail on the head. In the scene as discussed in the intro paragraph, it features Adele and Emma in a restaurant, a few years after they’ve broken up, with Adele confessing her deep love for Emma again. Emma declines Adele’s love, citing that she’s with someone else now, and thus leaves. Before Emma is able to do that however, there’s a pretty lengthy portion of the clip where the two begin to passionately make out with one another, even getting to literal third base blatantly happening at the dinner table. Don’t get me wrong, my issue isn’t at all with any of the pretty graphic sex scenes in the movie, but this one in particular stands out because it’s literally in public. Literally a waitress confirms an order for coffee before the scene starts, and then the camera even pans out at the end of the scene to witness two other customers dining a few tables away. I felt like this part ran into a few problems, since both Adele and Emma completely ignore everyone else in the room in order to sexually fulfill one another, which for me not only feels a bit insensitive to not only the other people in the restaurant, but a bit unrealistic and hypersexualized. I think this part is more damaging to queer identities, in the sense that the ideal is being pushed that when it comes to sex, they are completely unable to control themselves for their lust for one another. You also get a sense of the power of looking at these characters by the minor characters in this scene, which pins them as public interpretations of sexuality inside the restaurant unfairly. They are more than just the objects of lust being viewed upon by other customers and work staff, but this scene doesn’t help that argument whatsoever.

Much like most things in the movie, the ending is completely ambiguous. You see Adele walk off around a street corner, to supposedly never talk to Emma again. We see this love come together, fall apart, and have a smidge of possible recovery, only to be let down again. Shortly put, I wanted more out of this story, because it felt like it wasn’t over. Maybe the reason it ended was to show that things don’t always have a “Happily Ever After”, especially when it comes to real life. Overall, for myself as a cisgender white straight man, I think this film is great in terms of queer media exposure. I think white and straight people have been given too much in terms of amount of privilege, especially when it comes to roles in love stories in cinema. I was forced to be critical when it came to my analysis of this movie, simply because I wasn’t the identity featured in this movie. I had to interpret information from a queer lens, which made me more objective and honestly a bit uncomfortable - but in a good way. I was forced to feel and see the things these characters were experiencing, in the exact same exposed ways they were seeing them. In a way, I think that made me more drawn to the story, simply because I was experiencing something that I had never gotten the chance to see anywhere else. The fact that the entire film is in French plays a big role as well, as I noticed I was using a lot of nonverbal cues in order to determine how a character might feel at any point in time. To conclude, I think this movie does a mostly great job on representing queer identities in order to create a love story that is unequivocally matched to any other story you see. It hits on the realistic parts of life and love that humans experience, in order to show how rough love can truly be.

References

Andersson, Y. (2002). Queer Media? In E. Kingsepp (Ed.), Media Research in Progress. Stockholm: Stockholms University.

Benshoff, H., & Griffin, S. (2004). Queer Cinema the Film Reader. New York, NY: Routledge. Taylor & Francis Group.

Gross, L. (2001). Up from Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America. NEW YORK: Columbia University Press. doi:10.7312/gros11952

#queermedia #blue is the warmest color #moviereview #queermovie #loveislove

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just-honey-dewd · 4 years ago

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List of things I hope will happen in the Sonic Movie Sequel For some context...

After watching through the Sonic Movie (2020) several times, I’ve been getting ghosts of nightmares and daydreams regarding the sequel. I have specific, personal ideas for what I’d hope the sequel will cover since there was quite a bit of anticipation for more Sonic-esque lore and story during my third watch-through of the movie. So yeah, needless to say, this list is very much personalised, and the structure of it is pretty dense, so apologies to those who aren’t dense readers.

Oh, and surprise surprise, this’ll be long. So I’ll be hiding everything under the read more thingy. Click at your own discretion....

1) Sonic and Tails meeting (+ relationship)

I’m hoping Tails will have a significant difference regarding his character since he never grew up with Sonic, nor had any reason to look up to him. This would mean that any potential character arc for Tails will be pretty much untouched territory since most (if not all) the past takes on Tails’ first meeting with Sonic have been either underwhelming, insignificant to that continuity’s Sonic-&-Tails dynamic, or both. So I hope the movie doesn’t brush off the two’s introduction and that Tails is kept as a relatively significant character despite his not so close relationship with Sonic. I have personal fears that Sonic and Tails’ relationship will get rushed in the sequel similarly to the way the first movie rushes past 10 years of Sonic legitimately living in isolation by himself [(with little to no addressing of any experiences the kid would encounter through those years). I have some criticisms to make about the improper use of time skips in that movie, but that will be for another day.]

Anyhow, I hope the movie prioritises their relationship by NOT giving away too much screen-time to other characters, since him and Tails’ close sibling-friendship dynamic would need proper screen time to develop — this is UNLESS the movie team are planning on further deviating from the games and mainline continuities, which is a whole ‘nother can of worms...

Rewatching that ending scene, Tails lights up with hope at the thought of finding Sonic, which leads me to question whether he’s already met him or is simply elated at the success of finding him. I’m currently leaning towards the prediction that Sonic has a legend surrounding him and his speed and Tails knows him simply as that.

Thing is, will the reason he’s looking for Sonic directly endanger Sonic’s happiness and life on Earth, or will it poke at Sonic’s curiosity regarding his past and Longclaw? I feel the motive for seeking out Sonic will be the driving factor for how their relationship will develop and be executed. This set up for Tails’ introduction seems very clever to invoke some hype for Sonic fans, and give the writers themselves opportunity to put a unique take on Tails’ character — there’s potential to have his character be altered from even the modern games (which could be a good or bad, depending on how they interpret Tails’ current character, and what they think would require some reworking). I’ll address this further in the next point.

2) Tails’ Character

Tails’ current character is a mixed bag. In the games, he’s been written to be very cowardly and dependent on Sonic (Sonic Forces), a whiny asshole (Lost World), or just a lowly submissive sidekick. The comics do a better job with his character, but I do hope in the movie series he won’t end up being dubbed as ‘Sonic’s sidekick’ ever. The thought of that happening sounds pretty outlandish, maybe might even a bit insulting to the writers, since Sonic has been written as a more fleshed out character in the movie than he’s been written for quite the decade — I don’t see why or how Tails would be treated any different. But since it’s apparently pretty easy to write Tails into a pretty lame character, I’m gonna not have expectations once more till I see the final product, or interviews with whoever ends up voicing Tails.

I think in the movies, it’d work if Tails acted like a kid too (much like Sonic) but is perhaps more downplayed due to his (currently vague) responsibilities. Tails will probably still be a few years behind Sonic, so he still has that natural childlike innocence and naïveté — plus, without Sonic, I’d say he grew up to respond obediently to instructions and commands so this could be something Sonic might bump heads with. Tails could have a background lacking in familial relations, something that would be worthy of note in comparison to Sonic’s current living situation. Tails would likely also fall into being the expositionist character in the movie — which is both inevitable and acceptable on my part, as long as it won’t always be him. Also, it’d be cool if he either ends up abducting Sonic to bring him to their world, or acts as an initially polite chaperone for Sonic (and Tom, begrudgingly) — this would reinforce Tails as a character that can stand on his own without tying himself to Sonic, which is something I’ve been sorely hoping to see from his character for quite the while.

3) The Echidna Tribe, Tikal... (& Knuckles)

I’m pretty conflicted with this, since we have no info on what the sequel will be focusing on. But I figure, since the first movie went out of its way to introduce the Echidna Tribe early on — and subtly kicked off Sonic’s tragic backstory and, subsequently, the events of the first movie — they were to come back in the sequel. So what I have to say about them is... first off, they are not extinct — so we already have a major deviation from Sonic Adventure continuity, so there is almost no telling what the writers will do with em, which is both mortifying and exhilarating. Second, their motivation is at best drawn from inference — I predict that the Master Emerald exists in this story, and I predict Sonic being born with speed will be something of significance to the Echidnas (perhaps even told from a historical prophecy), but whether the Master Emerald and Sonic will be connected in any way will be hard to deduce with what little information there is. But I’m already making the bold prediction that they will play a major role in the sequel, so I’ll hold off on further speculation.

On to my Tikal paragraph... I want her to appear in this series, and I think it’d be more fitting she has more presence in this movie than Knuckles since her character directly tied into the Echidna Tribe as she was actively against their violence, so I could see her being an ally to Sonic and Tails, perhaps even being aware of Longclaw and knowing what happened to her. Tikal also just has a really cool theme from Sonic Adventure — just listen to it!

youtube

It honestly sounds like something that’d translate well into the big screen with the use of more diverse-sounding instruments, and would be fitting use of Sonic music for the fans, and for the narrative musically-speaking.

Regarding Knuckles... currently, the only thing even hinting at his appearance in the story is his natural ties to the Echidna Tribe, which I am betting (if he does appear) will most definitely be an active member in. There is so much potential for him to appear in this sequel, but the question is... how much of a role will he play? They could introduce him as a part of the Echidna Tribe, the guardian of the Master Emerald, or an isolated Echidna who isn’t closely tied to the Tribe.... honestly, there’s so much pathways to take his character.

Personally, I’d want him to actually not have a strong presence in the story (on his own at least) — more that I’d want him sticking with the group of Echidnas in the tribe. I want his character to not even be easy to pick out due to him wearing a mask. I don’t want him to stand out from his race, instead being subtly introduced as a reoccurring enemy for Sonic in the sequel (perhaps someone that actively chases after him or gets the closest to him) amongst the tribe. The best path to take with him personally is to have him be both among the tribe, but gradually exchanging dialogue with the main characters. Nothing as straightforward as him getting played by Eggman to antagonise Sonic for something he did — none a’ that. I want this movie to mostly focus on developing Sonic’s world, the Echidna Tribe and their lore, Longclaw’s character and/or history, and Sonic and Tails’ relationship. How Tom and Maddie fit into this story though, is one of the more daunting thoughts I have....

4) Tom and Maddie

Going by the fact that it’s been confirmed by James Marsden that he’s definitely gonna be reprising his role as Tom Wachowski for as many movies as desired, I’m expecting he’ll be in the sequel for a good amount of time. Whether this is gonna be good or bad for the sequel itself is up for debate, but I do see a bit of issue with him and Maddie’s inclusion in the story considering they have basically become Sonic’s surrogate parents and best friends — so I struggle to see how the sequel will successfully get into the lore of Sonic’s world without abruptly ripping apart Sonic’s happy family. Considering Tom ain’t gonna be left on Earth... if Tails brings Sonic back into their world, I can see him coming as a hesitant and apprehensive tag-along for Sonic's comfort. It’ll be hard to say if the sequel can be identified as more of a Sonic movie if Tom still accompanies Sonic into his world, but I think since Eggman is bound to return, casual audiences will still need an anchor to keep the movie from turning into just Eggman and a bunch of CGI anthropomorphic animals fighting on screen. But another issue I see here is the fact that Tom’s character in itself is rather plain in comparison to the identity of Sonic’s whole character and lore surrounding him. Tom offered normalcy, guidance, and friendship to an attention-starved, lonely, and vulnerable Sonic in the first movie. But since the sequel seems to be introducing a new variable — revelation regarding Sonic’s importance in his own world — what can Tom do aside from accompany and try to protect his hedgehog son? Tails will likely form a bond with Sonic that could rival Tom and Sonic’s budding familial-friendship, and Sonic has many other characters that can offer him friendship and love... not to mention that owl lady who “died” offscreen. The moment Sonic’s world becomes the focus of the movie, how will Tom fit seamlessly in the story? And how much of the movie will be any different from the first one? Will it still be on Earth or Sonic’s world?

Logic dictates that we’ve already seen enough of Earth, so with the introduction and set up of inter-dimensional transportation through rings, I’d figure it’d be time we focused on Sonic’s World. But given the trouble that had took place in trying to integrate Sonic into the real world (via. Sonic’s movie redesigns), I can only imagine what’ll take place in trying to migrate to Sonic’s World. Then again, it’s possible that the sequel takes place on Earth, which also sounds very likely, but less desirable to me.

Getting back on the topic of Tom and Maddie.... (yes, Ik I didn’t even bring up Maddie in that last paragraph don’t @ me)....

The issue I find I’m having with them as of writing this is the issue I found when watching Sonic X. In Sonic X, almost the exact same premise in the movie was used in the anime: Sonic characters existing in the real world. And unlike the movie, I found myself to immediately dislike the fashion in which the series wrote its human characters. To streamline my critiques regarding the anime, the human characters were bloating the cast, had very bland and unengaging personalities, and worst of all, would both serve no purpose for the overall story, and take screen time away from Sonic and his friends (who should’ve been the main focus of the story as they are the main appeal).

Applying this critique to the movie, the movie had done a fairly good job in making sure that Sonic characters and human characters had the appropriate amount of screen time, and it also justified the existence of Tom and Maddie — as they were one of a handful of notable inhabitants in the small town Green Hills, which Sonic resided in. They’re inclusion in the story was both necessary to the development of Sonic’s character, and surprisingly, Eggman’s. Tom and Sonic’s character arcs intertwined with one another. and interlocked with Eggman’s in the later half. For a rather underwhelming genre like buddy comedy, I found myself genuinely enjoying Tom’s character and felt genuine attachment to his and Sonic’s developing relationship. Which is why I’m all the more worried for how the sequel will continue on from this — since, from the look of things, Tom’s personal character journey seems to have concluded (any proceeding character arcs seem likely to pop up from Sonic instead of Tom’s own actions). So I fear I’ll inevitably lose attachment and love for the character, and in its place, misplaced frustration and irritation at his presence in the story.

So, uh... best of luck to the writers, cuz there’s gonna be a lot of juggling with the introduction of new characters and the continuation of other preexisting characters. Obviously Tom and Maddie will have to pull their weight if they’re gonna stay as prominent characters in the next Sonic Movie[(s) ?]

As unfair as this sounds, I’m not particularly excited for the next movie and am definitely worried for what’s to come for their characters.... all I can hope for is that if they come back and take up screen time, it is for good reason.

Also, I hope for more Tom and Eggman scenes. Should Agent Stone return, maybe he’ll come along for the journey into different dimensions (if there will be inter-dimensional travel prominently featured in the movie, that is...)

5) Eggman

Of all characters, I think Eggman has gone through the most interesting of changes — in regards to his backstory, character, and potential. Unlike his game counterpart, he isn’t an established to be connected to Sonic’s World, and was in fact tied to the human world. Now that he’s currently stuck in Mushroom what’s-it’s-name, there is no doubt that he’ll come out of it with his wits intact, his psyche damaged, and a newfound obsession with a certain blue hedgehog. I hope Jim Carrey can manage the comedic and genuinely threatening aspects of a man stripped of Earthly comfort and prestige, and now surrounded by foreign concepts of other worldly beings and power. I hope him becoming more acquainted with Sonic’s World will be represented with Sonic-music-turned-movie-soundtrack-appropriate music. In the end, I don’t expect Carrey to do a familiar take on Eggman of the games and previous cartoons, but I can imagine him effectively showing the effects of a year’s worth of isolation in a mushroom world on an already egocentric and eggcentric man. So I have positive thoughts for Eggman. If the sequel suddenly belly flops in quality compared to the first movie, I’ll still come for Carrey’s Eggman performance.

6) The main cast of characters for the sequel

To summarise, this is my compromise on what the main cast of characters in the sequel will be. Consisting of both the characters I want to see get focused on, and the characters likely to get focused on. For the record, I know that this is way too early to properly make any predictions about the main cast, but this is mostly tied to personal opinion, as well as deduction, so take these with a grain of salt.

Conclusion

Now, I could be way off with my speculations, but I think as of now, with little to no information about the sequel, my thoughts, desires, and worries for the sequel are justified (and of course a little much). But now that I got these out of the way, I’m hoping this will either collect dust here instead of the back of my mind, or that this could spawn more discussion in the future when more info about the sequel comes up in the seemingly far-off future of 2021.

#sonic movie sequel predictions #sonic movie #my posts #i'm thinking of organizing my posts more #but ik it's easier said than done given how sporadic i am with everything in general #i'll get better i promise #if y'all got any comments or opinions about this feel free to respond

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painted-starlight · 5 years ago

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White Disney Princess Problem: How Discussion of Historical Sexism in Europe is Avoided When They Had Every Opportunity to Portray it

And Also Acceptance into European Royalty is the Path to True Liberation?

Warning: Loooong Post (seriously, I’m not kidding), Disney Criticism, anti-T*angled, swearing, dissecting Disney princess movies, discussing the implications of classism and sexism in white princess films. I will be noting historical incidents of sexism in Europe, and how these instances are mysteriously absent in white princess films despite sexism playing a major role in portraying princesses of color’s culture.

Tl;dr/Summary: White Disney Princess Films have a reoccurring theme of showing how being part of white European royalty is the true path to liberation, even though historically this is a completely laughable concept. Sexism faced by princesses of color are portrayed as being ingrained in their culture and the films are explicit pointing their fingers.

Unlike their princess of color counterparts, the limited amount of sexism white princesses face is often whitewashed, downplayed, or even considered empowering.

This creates an implication that white European royalty and White European society is inherently more liberating for women, fairer than nonwhite cultures, and more humane. But in reality European royals were often notoriously sexist, and often violently so. Portraying white European royal culture as being inherently more freeing is historically inaccurate and irresponsible.

Also, I’m a picky little shit who delves into a lot of historical sexism that should be in the white princess films since Disney is soooo concerned about sexism enough to point it out in their princess of color films, but are mysteriously absent in their white European ones.

Important Note:

No, I don’t hate these films, I love many disney princess movies.

And no, I don’t hate the fact that these girls have simple wishes.

I don’t care if a character wants to go see the human world, or make a pretty dress, or paint or see lanterns or whatever. That’s FINE.

What I hate is that they make a huge stink about how this or that nonwhite culture mistreats women, or how it’s unfair, but they never do the same for white Europeans. They always portray white europeans as nicer, kinder, etc. and find a convenient excuse to ignore/gloss over/whitewash the violent sexism present in european history. That is my ultimate problem. The double standard.

The Double Standard

I find it very interesting how in portraying Disney princesses of color, that the tend to portray sexism and social inequality as something that is naturally ingrained in their society. Mulan and Jasmine come into mind for this, as their social structures are considered unfair and undermine their character arcs. The sexism they face is something to overcome and to prove themselves.

But with white Disney princesses, despite coming from Europe (which is often violently patriarchal and demanding of compliance of social expectations of gender—think Henry the VIII’s infamous desire for a male heir, the influence of the Church, popular portrayals of the Madonna with the Virgin/Whore dichotomy) they all tend to either not face sexism or dismiss the notion outright in their films.

It’s important to note that earlier white Disney princesses (like Cinderella, Snow White, Aurora) tend to be portrayals of idealized femininity. They were designed to be what is considered appealing to patriarchal standards. Highly feminine, domestic, and at times passive.

Obviously, their stories wouldn’t tackle sexism. The sexism is what what was considered appealing for white men. It was their idealized femininity, and this trend actually still continues today.

But these princesses legacy lives on. They affect white Renaissance Disney princesses and beyond. They have set the standards of what is considered “appropriate” for white princesses to be.

This infection has spread a great deal to how they marketed especially. Sparkles, glitter, princess outfits at all times. But this post is about their movies, and how white princess films have often sidestepped the issue of sexism in European royal society.

Belle

Yes, there is sexism in this movie. Yes, it portrayed as being bad. But when we look at context of the film, there is a noticeable ahistorical approach to class and expectations of gender in royal society.

The lower class is filled with expectations for Belle. She needs to marry in order to fit in. The opening song is demonstrative of what she doesn’t want to be: a woman who is ogled by men and forced to have as many children as possible. The village, without a “proper” royal hierarchy, makes their own by “electing” Gaston, a boorish sexist pig. In a way, they are considered worse off without the influence of a King or Queen.

The village in question is isolated, and are not considered a representative of the outside world. It’s an individual case, and it’s upsetting but not considered the norm.

The royals are what REAL freedom is, apparently. Where Belle has access to books, has a palace full of people who accept her for who she is, and has a connection to a prince who has been cursed. She is free to do as she pleases, with the Beast encouraging her love for reading.

EDIT (08/12/19):

Hm, I should really revise this wording, as it is a little vague. One of the key elements in understanding this movie’s themes is that Belle is initially Beasts’ prisoner.

There is no freedom until AFTER she changes him and he has the maturity to let her go (Though I believe she is ignorant of the rose being a ticking clock). But once she gets it, she is apparently “free” to do as she pleases.

Initially, it’s kind of like going from one prison (social expectations) to another (which is a literal one). But when regarding the narrative, it all places emphasis on individual choices. White European stories told by Disney tend to judge characters based on their choices and they never judge the culture itself, just choices people make.

While placing emphasis on individual choices is fine in a vaccum, they never do this for nonwhite cultures, particularly Renaissance disney films with nonwhite leads. Those films tend to rely on racial stereotypes to fill the cast and not give them as much understanding as their white counterparts.

The only reason the palace is in ruins is because the prince decided to judge people based on their looks. It turns not only himself, but his servants and the rest of the castle into twisted versions of themselves. The town fawns over Gaston and glorify his actions despite being an asshole, but it’s not something that is consistent with French culture.

It’s important to note though, that once the monarchy is reinstated, things end happily ever after. But if people really want to claim historical accuracy, the expectations from Belle wouldn’t end there.

(end note)

Sure, she would have access to books theoretically. But as a princess/queen, Belle would be expected to perform more feminine tasks and birth male heirs to inherit the throne. It’s in the culture of royals to do this. These expectations don’t go away.

Most European royalty, especially France, have been notorious during this time period (assuming it’s Pre-Revolutionary France) for its nobility being separated from the general public at large. Royals had their own culture and etiquette. Royalty often had a culture that was exclusively for themselves. One historical account had King Louis XIV relocating their court and government to Versailles because they didn’t want to be near all the poor people in Paris.

Which is probably where the creators of Beauty and the Beast (Disney film) based the idea of the village being separated from the palace came from.

Nobility also had strict ideas of what men and women’s roles are. In fact, you could argue that the idea that Belle would be “free” as a princess would be a laughable concept. Like it has been established earlier, European royalty had their own set of rules and restrictions based on gender and social expectations.

Merida

It’s funny how the inherently sexist practices of royalty are suddenly something to be proud of and find power in it when it’s European, and hated when it’s from a nonwhite culture.

In Brave, domesticity and performance of femininity are emphasized, much to Merida’s irritation, so it’s definitely truer to upper class customs than say, Beauty and the Beast.

Plausible Deniability aka “what sexism? I see no sexism!”

However, this movie dances around the concept that sexism has anything to do with this by creating plausible deniability at every turn. It’s about Elanor and Merida, not the system that binds them. It doesn’t help that Eleanor is the one who enforces these rules on Merida, not to protect her from harm coming from the men in these social circles that would hurt her for not performing femininity, but because “it’s tradition.”

Merida laments that her brothers don’t have the same responsibilities as her, but of course they don’t. They’re like, five. She hates having to be a princess because it’s work, but of course? She’s a princess.

It becomes a matter of her not wanting to do work and chalking it up to her being rebellious rather than a genuine effort to change anything about the social structure. It’s a generational difference that requires compromise, not upheaval.

She doesn’t want to lose her freedom, but it’s portrayed as something she has to do to grow up. The obligations make her sad but she has to ultimately deal with it, reasserting the theme of “compromise” with her relationship with her mother and the clans. In the end, it’s about her and her mother, not about how this system treats women at all. She doesn’t put any responsibility for this system on her father (who would reinforce these rules because he is the KING) because she gets along with him more than her mother.

That’s the problem with white princess films in general. They take problems that exist because of systemic and economic limitations and make it completely individualistic.�� It’s important to note that Brave appears to be tackling sexism, but it never actually addresses it in a genuine way.

Lesson for Battling Systemic Sexism in Brave: Don’t Change the System, Change the Person!

Merida’s desire for change is based on her mother’s demands, and doesn’t tackle the social expectations themselves straight on. The men around Merida, who MADE and uphold these rules, aren’t considered a threat and are pretty much never held accountable. They are too bumbling, too endearing, and too funny to be called out on their expectations.

The movies like, “oh yeah, this social structure is hindering and it’s sexist and whatever, blah, blah, blah but eVeryONE wants to follow their own path, not just Merida!!1” Her potential suitors don’t want to do this either. It’s totally not a sexism issue!!11

Even though historically, you’d have at least ONE suitor that didn’t care whether she wanted to or not, as it would be a power grab. But because they are so bumbling, they are almost all benign. The ending in itself is convenient as it allows Merida and Elanor to reconnect. But it doesn’t really change anything. Because it doesn’t want to. That wasn’t the point.

White Princesses: For Me, Myself, and I

Belle didn’t want to change how women were viewed, just her specific circumstances. Her plight is portrayed as systemic, but only in this one area that’s gone rogue. The world outside is more accepting, more free, and it’s in the confines of a royal castle. On a meta level, it’s kinda classist. I love the movie, don’t get me wrong, but on rewatch it seems to equate a lack of a monarchy ultimately leading into a mob mentality. Which, for France, makes sense. But when you have servants who just live to serve (no matter how vibrant their personality), I kind of get suspicious.

Ariel didn’t want to change how mermaids interacted with humans, she just wanted to go up and see the human world. The benefits of her turning her into a human (freeing Ursula’s victims) is a happy accident that lines up with her ending.

Merida just wanted to be free to do whatever she wanted, which is considered selfish. She is a princess, and being a princess is hard work (when you want to make sure your character finds power in sexist practices).

And to be honest, it’s fine to have a simple goal. Reconnect with your mother, make a pretty dress, see the lanterns, whatever. But the problem is the double standard when they go into films about people of color. They point out how sexist this non white culture is, how they mistreat women, but they never do the same for white princesses at all. These filmmakers always have some sort of excuse.

Ariel

Ariel’s story is indivualistic and while there are hints of her being unsatisfied with her role as a princess (with her line “bright young women, sick of swimming”), it’s more about her personal journey to be human. She’s not dissatisfied because of her society because of sexist/prejudice expectations, but because she wants to explore.

Once again, the world in which a white Disney princess goes into/winds up in a world of European royalty are considered a bastion of freedom. In the original tale, the prince is not idealized and she is miserable on the surface world when it turns out that all her sacrifice was for nothing.

I’ve had people argue that Triton’s prejudice (which is often mislabeled as “racism,” which….no it’s not) is a social problem, it really doesn’t play much of a role rather than provide an opposition to overcome on the path to being human.

Even if Triton was fine with humans and let her explore the human world, it wouldn’t be enough. She’d still want to be human, just maybe not going to such extreme lengths. When Ursula is defeated, others are freed from her curse, but that’s an unintentional side effect of Ariel’s journey, not the goal. Sure, she’s disgusted, but she��s not out to right any wrongs. It’s just her. Like most white princesses, this is about herself.

Elsa and Anna

Why is it that suddenly we have a powerful matriarchy when Europe has historically violently opposed the concept? You’d think that they would mention the sexism of royal European politics since she is the queen.

I have looked it up, and the only way she could assess power is if she had a son to inherit the throne and then act as Queen regent until he inherited it (as was the case of Queen Margaret of Denmark in 1387, who ruled Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Though she outlived her son and her successor was a relative after her death. Considering that this story presumably takes place in the early 1800s, that is a huge time difference and the politics of European royalty would be drastically different).

No Male Heirs?

In earlier storyboards, we have suitors for Elsa that she rejects. We also had a regent who took the throne for Elsa after her parents died before she was coronated. But that character was deleted. So it’s safe to assume that she is not only being coronated, but also has absolute power.

Elsa is pretty much universally loved by her people and doesn’t have any real serious opposition to her rule politically. The Duke of Weasleton is a joke, and he is more concerned about his trade being compromised rather than her being a woman.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but other than calling her a witch, his sexism isn’t as explicit as it should be and isn’t taken very seriously. His character is more defined by his dislike of magic, and is portrayed as suspicious, arrogant and cowardly.

In the end, it all came down to trade and goods. If Arandelle’s goods were damaged or expired from the winter, it might cause their prices to go up.But in reality, it’d just be easier for the Duke to look for a male relative of Elsa to usurp her and form some sort of alliance with him. And more historically accurate.

Hans, Kristoff and the Marriage Situation

Anna has the freedom to marry a commoner (Kristoff), a prince she was not previously engaged to (Hans), and she has the power to grant Hans authority. The mere fact that she was even allowed to be alone with him is cause for concern, as many upper class women had to have a chaperone when courting before they could even go walking together.

She isn’t pressured to marry Hans, she does it because she wants to. She just chooses him at a party. Surely she’d have an arranged marriage, or something?

Rapunzel

Obviously, because Ra//punzel is not raised to be a princess she would probably not be held to the same standards until she returned home. And I’m not gonna touch the animated series because it’s so far removed from the movie it shouldn’t be considered canonical.

But still, Tangl//ed the movie continues the trend of how being part of European royalty is pathway to freedom. She is only free when she is away from Mother Gothel (who is poor) and with her birth parents (who are rich).

Sexist Insults from Mother Gothel, But No One Else

She doesn’t encounter any sort of sexism in her society. It’s really interesting to note that these feminine expectations and sexist insults are put on her more by Mother Gothel than the village she encounters. But that’s more because Mother Gothel is trying to destroy her sense of self worth (by calling her chubby, encouraging long hair to preserve her own youth, etc.).

Modern Notions of Femininity vs. Historical Reality

Rapunzel herself already engages in traditionally feminine activities (reading is very limited, baking, arts and crafts, etc.) for a modern audience. This is absolutely key because Mother Gothel wouldn’t be able to afford such a variety of paint for Rapunzel.

Painting for the longest time was considered a high art for men and male apprentices. Women weren’t encouraged to pursue it and it wasn’t seen as something traditionally feminine until recently.

Painting as a hobby (such as Rapunzel’s colorful and pastel palette) is more of a skill that is acceptable for girls now, since paint and brushes are in abundance and availability.

You can skip over this next part about the painting if you want. It’s basically me griping about how Rapunzel’s painting habits would be next to impossible in real life to do in the 1800s unless she had her own workshop with her own apprenticeship and income.

Painting? Maybe... Painting on the Walls? No freaking Way

In reality, if this does take place in past Europe then she probably wouldn’t have access to paint as it was really expensive and you had to take things like climate, temperature, and color into account to transporting and making it.

Location was really important, as paint in Northern Europe wouldn’t be compatible with the temperature of Southern Europe (because it would melt). And in Rapunzel’s case, if you’re putting it on a wall, then it would have to last a long time without melting or chipping away over time. That is why old frescos (or Byzantine Wall Paintings) were chipped and rotted when they were rediscovered. Also, don’t even try to get blue, that color was crazy expensive lol.

Mother Gothel doesn’t appear to have the material wealth to afford it, otherwise she’d be able to afford way more and just import what she needs without leaving the tower. How could she afford all that paint? It was crazy expensive (unless you mixed it yourself). And that doesn’t even count the materials (brushes, color palettes, etc) needed to spread the paint across the entire tower.

According to BBC’s Life in Colour: The Surprising History of Paint:

By the end of the 19th Century almost any colour could be purchased for a relatively low price.

Throughout the 1800s, traditional methods of producing colours declined as cheaper, reliable, standardised chemical methods replaced them. Most artists and their apprentices no longer mixed their own paints but bought them ready-made from professional “colourmen”.

So yeah, either Rapunzel would have to make them herself or she got Mother Gothel to buy it premixed for her (this is assuming that this takes place in 1840). The pigments she made would have most likely been toxic to handle. This was over a century before the creation of non toxic paint. And since she, you know, put them on the walls and most likely inhaled them---that’s just a recipe for disaster.

Then again, it depends on whether or not she used oil based paint or water based paint. Oil based takes longer to dry than water based paint (6 hours!) and water based paint chips faster.

Now for what I think many of you will go for when attempting to refute these points:

Tiana.

Tiana’s story may take place in America with a more positive portrayal of the black community (though let’s be honest the whole thing with Vodoo being a force of evil is...ugh..) it still has some issues regarding condemning white people for their role in systemic racism and sexism.

Tiana, a Black Woman’s Struggles in the Jim Crow South

“B-But Tiana wants a resturaunt!!1 It’s a simple wish for herself! Take that11!!!”

Yeah, so?

Do people actually think her story has nothing to do with misogynoir???it takes place in the Jim Crow South.

Tiana faces systemic racism and is denied her dream based on her being black woman. Her entire character is centered around her connection to her heritage, her socioeconomic situation, and her culture. She may have married Naveen, but she had all the resources to buy her restaurant herself. Her liberation is her embracing her father’s words and living by them.

And even with all this, because it takes place in America the story bends over backwards to make white characters who are totally not racist. Like Renegade Cut’s Analysis of “Late Stage Disney,” we have a system of violence and suppression being purposefully created for the benefit of white people being portrayed as a case by case problem rather than a systemic one.

They try to tell the audience that those who greatly benefit from this system (like Charlotte and her father) are good and only evil meanies take advantage of it. No...wtf?? I love this movie but Charlotte “I’m here to steal the spotlight cause I’m white” La Bouff is honestly the worst part.

White princesses are white, and they don’t face systemic issues like systemic racism at all. They also just aren’t as involved in their culture because whiteness is so homogenized. They will never face that type of discrimination and the only way I can see them doing that is, well, talking about sexsm.

Which they don’t seem to be interested in exploring.

Final Thoughts

You’re probably wondering why I’m nit picking at so many of these white princesses. Well, a lot of fans argue that they are whitewashed because it’s “Historically Accurate (tm),” but these movies conveniently leave out the sexism that permeates white european royal politics.

You could argue that white princess films are based on modern sensibilties and don’t want to go too deep into sexism. The Little Mermaid is more in tune with modern attitudes toward (white) women, and it’s a fantasy for them.

But the thing about this is that the Disney Renaissance was a new age and if they wanted to talk about trials of gender discrimination, they did. They had no problems going into heavier subjects like this when they focused on Aladdin and Mulan. Hell, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin only came out within a year of one another, and the contrast between their portrayal of cultures and sexism is staggering.

The only exception I can think of was the Hunchback of Notre Dame (which isn’t a princess movie, so it doesn’t really count in this discussion because marketing really changes the game). But we don’t see characters like Quasimodo being promoted on toys, backpacks, and merchandise in the same way like we do Anna, Elsa, and Rapunzel. Not to mention, the movie has it’s own problems, such as Esmarelda representing negative sexualized stereotypes of Rroma woman.

While the Hunchback of Notre Dame has slightly more grace than it’s white disney princess counterparts, it still has problems that can effect the way that children view themselves and their cultures when through the lens of white people.

Overall, the numbers of positive depictions of white europeans that omit historical sexism and violence in princess films far outweighs the ones that portray them more honestly.

#long post #seriously this post is long #anti tangled #tangled crit #historical accuracy my ass #first thing that comes to mind when i think of european royals #henry viii doing nasty shit #disney criticism #this took soooooo long to write #and then i went on that tangent about paint

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bitchforkreviewz · 6 years ago

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JAMES BLAKE: ASSUME FORM. PITCHFORK IS PROFOUNDLY CONFUSED

Review of Pitchfork’s review: ASSUME FORM

In May 2018, James Blake released Don’t Miss it, a single that was met with praise and criticism. Similar to a dog wanting to piss on a fire hydrant, Pitchfork has put forth yet another opinionated/unsubstantial review. Lozano noted that there seems to be “two James Blake at play: The one who loves to party and the one who likes nothing better than getting under the covers of his weighted blanket.”He then later states that Don’t Miss it is another “beautifully brutal song to add to Blake’s catalog of sumptuous sad boy music.”

After this review came out, Blake tweeted this big thing where he basically says: (1) he could not help but notice that “sad-boy” is used whenever he discusses his feelings in a song. (2) states that this characterization is unhealthy and problematic when used to shame men whom are expressing their feelings, which contributes to the “historical stigmatization of men expressing themselves emotionally” (3) Blake states we are in a epidemic of male depression and suicide.

So let’s unpack this: what did Lozano get right? Or what did Lozano get really right? This line sums up Blake’s true talent and shows Lozano is not completely out of touch: “The song’s complexity, for better or worse, comes from how Blake plays with his voice.” Why is this review important, and why is James Blake’s response important and or relevant to Assume Form?

This review of Don’t Miss it, which is a track on Assume Form in a sense foreshadows what review was to come. However, one would think that this album would land differently after Blake’s vehement response to the review of the single Don’t Miss it, but once again Pitchfork apparently did not get the memo, and continued to put him in the SAD-BOY category.

You really begin to get the sense that Sherburne is profoundly out of touch when he states that the line “I will be touchable/I will be reachable,”sounds“clinical,” which leads one to ask the glaringly obvious question: did this guy even listen to this album or did he just look up the lyrics? Has this guy even listened to a James Blake song?? Clinical? WHAT KIND OF THERAPIST OR PHYSICIAN ARE YOU SEEING PHIL? (Phil, feel free to reach out and send over a contact if possible.) If a person were to read the line out loud in a monotone voice, was wearing a lab coat, held up a chart maybe?? Sure, I can see how he arrived at this conclusion, but what separates James Blake from other artists is his ability to infuse an ordinary line or phrase with a feeling/mood with his unique vocals, so no Phil this is not quite “clinical.” As your counterpart, Mr. Lozano had said: “The song’s complexity, for better or for worse comes from how Blake plays with his voice.”

Unlike, previous albums all centering around feelings of loneliness or alienation, Assume Form focuses in on intimacy and sacrificing one’s tendency to look inward for the sake of another person.

Let’s rewind to 2016 when The Colour in Anything came out, which Pitchfork rated an 8.2, in part, because we feel Blake is maturing when we look back at his older albums like “Overgrown.” We begin to see a new side of James Blake, a side of vulnerability. Even though, Blake showcases a more tender side in his music you still get that the overarching theme here, is isolation, while at the same time you can sense that Blake is more comfortable in that isolation, indicating Blake is more introspective. It feels like Blake has matured in more ways than one The Colour in Anything when considering his previous albums.

Assume Form comes out and it takes a whole different approach. Certainly, James Blake did not throw us a major curveball, but this is different than any other album he has come out with because he is in a relationship, and it is going fairly well. And for that, I would like to personally say: congrats James!!!!!! James Blake is no longer the guy who can’t believe his siblings aren’t speaking to him. He is blossoming into a developed human being right before our eyes.

As it has been noted in other reviews of previous albums, James Blake is no “lyrical genius,” this is known, put to bed, and dealt with, so please Phil, spare us on this one. Sherburn notes that “there is the skeleton of a different, more interesting album lurking beneath the surface.”

And sure Phil, ok Blake is a creative artist who has been experimental in his music and albums, so without a doubt this is not the last time we hear from “sad-boy” Blake, but he took a different angle, because he is in a different stage of his life. Please refer to the James Blake tweet about the “sad-boy” box.

Although, it has been stated on multiple occasions that Blake is no “lyrical genius,” it is important to note that Blake meticulously captures moments, feelings, moods, and experiences in Assume Form.

For example, throughout the album Blake highlights on a tension or a tug of war between Blake’s need for solitude and wanting to be in a relationship with this person. In Power On, he thinks he would be better off without this person and admits “I was wrong.” Letting go of one’s ego is a central theme in this album.

In “Are you in love,” is Blake asking “we good?” or “are we on the same page here??” It’s like going on a fourth date and everything going really well and you really like this person, but you make a joke self deprecating joke that doesn’t quite land with them, and is just kind of sad, because they were supposed to laugh and they didn’t and you are not going to laugh, so it is just silent for about twenty seconds too long and conversation then picks up and things go well. Obviously, you regret it, but since everything else went so well you think “OK things are good.” But even then, you are second guessing yourself and feeling like sending a text saying something like “yo, we good??????” or like “heyyyyyyy, lol was just joking earlier haha! Did not mean to get so dark whoooooops. Had fun let's do it again” But you decide not to because it is kind of weird and you should just shrug it off or play it cool, and maybe they will forget about it completely if you do not bring it up EVER. I can’t be the only one who as ever felt this way.

Moving forward, this is a vulnerable side of Blake. He capitalizes on the universal feeling of insecurity and the subsequent need for validation, especially in this time and age, where it is more common to feel inadequate and insecure than it is to feel in tune with another person.

“Don’t miss” it is a piece that underscores what you miss when you look inward.

”The world has shut me out/ If I give everything I'll lose everything/ Everything is about me/ I am the most important thing/ And you really haven't thought all those cyclical thoughts for a while?”

He continues to discuss the implications of looking inward:” And as it keeps going/ I could never be involved/ I could never really see in real time/ I could never be involved/ And as it keeps on going/ I could avoid real time/ I could ignore my busy mind/ I could avoid contact with eyes/ I could avoid going outside/ I could avoid wasting my life/ I could avoid/ I could avoid 20/20 sight”

Blake comes to the conclusion: “And as it keeps on going/ You forget whether it was the beginning or end/ When you can't believe your luck/ (When you can't believe your luck)/ You're with your friend/ When you get to hang out with your favourite person every day/ When the dull pain goes away/ Don't miss it (Don't miss it)/ When you stop being a ghost in a shell/ And everybody keeps saying you look well/ Don't miss it/ Like I did/ Don't miss it/ Don't miss it like I did/ Like I did”

Sherburn claims Andre3000’s verse in What’s the Catch “ humorous self awareness” is what the album lacks most of all. Yes Phil. Ok, I can agree that the album lacks humor, but the album certainly does not lack self awareness, and if “Don’t miss it” is not self-aware enough for you, I have one question for you. Would you like James Blake to physically remove his heart, and send it in a box to Pitchfork HQs?!?!? Blake is not blithefully in love, but rather, is grappling with himself and his ego, which is evidently his biggest obstacle in his relationship.

Sherburn is right in the sense that Assume Form is heavy, but what he gets wrong is that Blake’s album is not “stagnant,” but rather, quite the opposite. Assume Form reinforces the fact that Blake is evolving as not only an artist, but also as a human being.

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ink-logging · 6 years ago

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Random Comics Read Recently 1/26/19

Lumpin #131 (Vol. 26, No. 2; Winter 2018), Joe Tallarico ed.: This is the fourth and most recent all-comics issue of a free online leftist arts/culture/politics magazine that’s been around in various forms since the early 1990s; it came out almost a year ago, but I just heard about it recently. The theme is Future Worlds, and the list of contributors runs the gamut of visual styles. I tend to prefer either the purposefully visceral or icy, blown-out musings in our present cultural moment, so I liked these pieces by Krystal Difronzo, an artist and educator from Chicago--

And Tim Ng Tvet, a Norwegian web designer and artist for a literary magazine:

There’s also some comparatively familiar names involved, like Anya Davidson, Austin English, Juliacks, and Leif Goldberg.

Beach Academy 123, Mickey Zacchilli: The collected “Space Academy 123″ was one of my favorite comics from last year -- a perfect model for how a mass appeal serial can manifest from the idiosyncratic practice of its artist without anything discernible of the compromises we are assured have been necessary for such things -- and this online continuation is just as fun. It’s a ‘beach episode’, like an anime series will occasionally do, where all the characters go to the beach and hang out.

A lot of the time there’s a leering sexualization to this stuff, which Zacchilli omits in favor of more gags; as a result, what’s emphasized is another core appeal of such continuations - spending a little more time with characters you like.

Savage Dragon #241, Erik Larsen, Ferran Delgado, Nikos Koutsis, Mike Toris: One of the longest-running serial comic books still written and drawn by its creator, this foundational Image series continues to inhabit a vivified space where superhero drama is flatly sexual and superhero action is abrupt and bloody. We’re now into a problematic/melodramatic consequences-of-sexual-assault storyline, wherein the Dragon’s oft-insatiable partner Maxine mulls bitterly over her reputation as an exhibitionist in the midst of coping with trauma; frames of leering male eyes sit as uneasily alongside images of rampant horniness as they would in a Tinto Brass movie, or whatever - and, Larsen then spices up the stew yet more with a guest appearance by the now-public-domain C.C. Beck/Pete Costanza creation Captain Tootsie (a superhero pitchman for Tootsie Rolls), who functions as a sort of two-fisted ambient cloud of historical purity. But, I suspect anyone still reading “Savage Dragon” in 2019 is grooving on the improvisatory feel of somebody putting a comic together month after month, and is probably willing to allow the specifics of the plot to play out in dual use as fuel for what is yet to come. This is the character of superhero serials in general, but those aren’t controlled by the passions of a craftsman for long in the corporate sphere.

The League of Extraordinary Gentleman Vol. 4: The Tempest #4 (of 6), Alan Moore, Kevin O’Neill, Ben Dimagmaliw, Todd Klein: Kind of a fanservice-y issue, with lots of glimpses of prior Leagues only glanced upon before; the whole thing is set up as a homage to children’s anthology comics, so there’s lots of brief vignettes in affected styles. Also: a big twist, suggesting the superimposition of one reality onto another, as is now traditional in apocalypses written by Alan Moore. Also: multiple jokes about sexual assault, which feel acridly like Alan Moore reminding us he doesn’t let the squares tell him what to write. Also: a page-long math joke, which reminds us that Alan Moore smokes a ton of weed.

From Hell: Master Edition #3 (of 10), Eddie Campbell, Alan Moore, Pete Mullins, April Post: I’m listing Campbell first, because he is the driving force behind this revised and colorized re-serialization of the all-time classic, which some view with great suspicion. A colorization of “From Hell” - isn’t that gonna look like shit? Isn’t that a bad fucking idea? I try not to foreground those questions, because I think in situations like this, aesthetic judgments have a tendency to depoliticize what is inseparably a question of labor. DC Comics -- publishing unit of DC Entertainment, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. -- making the decision to recolor, say, “The Saga of the Swamp Thing”, is an economic decision made via their assumptions of how to best monetize their content; that this may benefit one or more artists, and possibly some involved with the creation of the work, is secondary these concerns. Or, in other words: that DC may include some creators in this process, reinforces the fact that they may just as well exclude them. That one of the creators of “From Hell” might spearhead a similar colorization can be driven by a similarly economic motive, but it is fundamentally different, in that it also functions as part of the practice of the artist, in tandem with works that benefit them. Of course, there is nuance; one creator of a “creator-owned” work may easily usurp control from others and do them dirty (to say nothing of any publishers out there rumored to demand all media rights as a prequisite to ‘creator-owned’ publication), but to reduce the discussion of these situations to qualitative is-the-book-good conclusions will only benefit the corporate big kids, as it flattens everything into judgment calls re: the skills of workers rather than the system in which they work. Nonetheless, if you really want to know if From Hell In Color is any good, my answer is “sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.” Sometimes it’s transformative - this page now looks like something out of Olivier Schrauwen:

-Jog

#JogList

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annathetrickster · 7 years ago

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with the voting gauntlet finished, its finally time for me to get started on my playthrough of FE4: genealogy of the holy war, as promised. i’ll be sharing my thoughts on it as i go along with the game since i know ppl have really been looking forward to that. thanks for your patience and sorry its taken me so long.

if you haven’t played this game yet and you don’t want it spoiled for you, you can blacklist #54462 to be extra safe, even though i will be keeping all of my thoughts as well as any spoilers tucked away under a read more.

for those of you interested in playing the game for yourselves, here is a link to everything i used to get it all rolling.

emulator (i used the 2nd to last link)

japanese ROM

translation patch (instructions on how to use this are on the site)

with all that said, here are my thoughts and first impressions of FE4 so far.

whoa whoa slow down. one historical moment of noteworthy importance at a time.. i literally just started this game have mercy on me.

i don’t trust you, kurth. i don’t trust you and and i don’t trust your face.

and there he is. gotta say he looks pretty damn handsome in this for a 1996 game. he’s got the whole sailor moon villan/utena aesthetic working for him, 10/10.

ah yes, who could forget the YEET desert.

the man, the myth, the legend, sigurd himself.

handsome? yes. DILF tier? debatable. they went a little too yaoi faced for my liking, but he’s definitely handsome. 6.5/10.

“im 11 so shut the fuck up”

S̶͢͞͡T̴̴͞Ŗ͏́͜Ǫ̶̢͞N̷҉G̕͞ ̶̕͘A͡͠͝N͝D̸͘͟҉ ҉́͟͏Ţ͟͢͡͞O͏̵͏͝U͜҉Ǵ̵̷̷͠H̨̢͜͢͞

not sure what i expected tbh. i never thought i’d say arden looks more handsome in heroes but here we are.

the movement arrow is kind of extra when you think about it. a least they were kind enough to make the range more clearly visible unlike FE1.

you know, i’d imagine graphics would be a turn off for many newer players. personally though, i love this aesthetic. it reminds me of shining force 1 which was honestly the game that got me into turn based in the first place, so this style is right up my alley.

imagine how fucking broken the fact that horses could move again after attacking would be in heroes. its practically a built in galeforce by default. horse emblem would be immortal.

rip in pepperoni, character i had literally no way of reaching in 1 turn.

of course marriage is the first thing on his mind, just like the european settlers ‘married’ the native americans. seems legit.

i love me some older FE games, but this blatalant trend of “you are a helpless woman, therefore you are my prize” is one theme i could live without. not even FE7 is free of this sin. its unfortunately realistic of what would happen, sure, but im glad they did away with these kind of themes in the newer games.

but wait! theres more!

troubadors can wield swords here which is very nice since they’re one of my favorite classes tbh.

the maps are definitely as massive as i expected, at least this game throws you a bone by taking multiple turns to burn down villages because really there’s no way you’re getting to them anytime soon.

so ive been playing for a bit now and i still have no idea how you’re supposed to see whether you can double or not, speed seems to be irrelevant to it, or at the very least its not the usual 5 point difference.

i really can’t imagine someone going directly from awakening/fates to this and not being driven up a wall at this point. this is definitely one for the more advanced/veteran crowd.

update: it’s at least a 3 point difference.

update 2: more than a 1 point difference

there’s also the whole calculation of atk - def = damage that you have to do for yourself. similar to how echoes did it. i dont mind that so much it just takes some getting used to. i do prefer the streamlined experience of being shown exactly how much damage i’ll deal before combat since it just feels like a math lesson otherwise.

brigand: fucking burns a village right in front of sigurd’s face

well i didnt make it to this last one in time. hopefully i didnt miss anything important.

i was wondering why the enemies stand on top of the castle rather than in front of it, but now i have even more questions.

there’s also no way of reaching him, and i don’t feel like dragging literally the one character who isn’t on a horse down here to deal with this one boss so..

?? sieze the throne with... sword??

OHH

besiege: surround (a place) with armed forces in order to capture it or force its surrender; lay siege to.

literally the first time in my life i see this word, but it makes a lot more sense now obviously.

first you beseige then you seize. an added layer of complexity that wasn’t really needed but, i can see them possibly doing something fancy with this in a potential remake. it does add a level of realism though, like the castles aren’t just decorations on the map that the character stands in front of and walks into, but rather obstacles you have to overcome.

hey she’s he’s alive. also sigurd does not fuck around, noted.

great, castle siezed.. so what do i d-

castle #2: SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER

oh my god there are multiple castles to deal with. i remember seeing this mentioned somewhere now that i think about it, probably in an ask or something but wow. you better set aside an afternoon, grab a snack, and strap in kiddos because this is gonna be a long ride.

and of course there are reinforcements why wouldn’t there be reinforcements.

also keep in mind, this is literally the prologue, not even the first chapter of the game yet. i think i hear the sound of multiple awakening-first fans rage quitting and going to find a youtube playthrough to watch instead.

its pretty obvious from arvis’s tone that he can’t stand sigurd, and sigurd is seemingly oblivious to that fact.

things you normally take for granted in newer fe games: being able to tell your units apart.

lets play find the healer shall we?

there she is. maybe on a TV screen these would be easier to tell apart since this is a super nintendo game after all, but as a ROM its pretty much a process of elimination to find the blue one cavalry unit without an obvious weapon in their sprite.

the seemingly “overpowered” built in galeforce of being able to move again after attacking seems a lot less overpowered after playing for a bit and a lot more like a necessary ability. being able to tee off on enemies is pretty much the only way you’re able to clear these maps in any reasonable amount of time.

finally.

all that trouble and you’re basically trolled with ‘sorry your princess is in another castle’

i think that’s going to wrap it up for part 1. i have to say i was definitely not prepared for the sheer amount of time it takes to clear one chapter. i was hoping to knock out a few chapters and post my thoughts after that, but at this rate i’ll only be able to manage one chapter a day so we’ll see how it goes in the future.

so far i like the game, and to be fair i was warned of the length and difficulty several times. but as we saw with ddlc, i tend to ignore warnings. im sure i’ll get used to it more as i progress through the game but right now it seems like the perfect game to play this is when you’re tired, but can’t seem to get to sleep and you’re looking for something to watch or do until you can’t possibly keep your eyes open for another second. if you’re ever in that position, that’s when you should fire this up.

i can definitely see it being offputting to a lot of newer fans, but im stubborn as hell and take this kind of thing as a personal challenge so i’ll definitely be doing my best to step up to the challenge and complete this game rather than backing down.

if you have any questions regarding the game or want to get my thoughts on a certain part of it i just ask that you try to keep it as spoiler free in your question as possible. or just use the reply feature instead.

thanks much for reading.

#thoughts #fire emblem #54462 #this was quite a ride honestly

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kitmcroninillustration · 4 years ago

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‘Gender, race, and media representation’ - Dwight E. Brooks and Lisa P/ Hebert (2006)

I n our consumption-oriented, mediated society, much of what comes to pass as important is based often on the stories produced and disseminated by media institutions. Much of what audiences know and care about is based on the images, symbols, and narratives in radio, television, film, music, and other media. How individuals construct their social identities, how they come to understand what it means to be male, female, black, white, Asian, Latino, Native American—even rural or urban—is shaped by commodified texts produced by media for audiences that are increasingly segmented by the social constructions of race and gender. Media, in short, are central to what ultimately come to represent our social realities.

While sex differences are rooted in biology, how we come to understand and perform gender is based on culture.1 We view culture “as a process through which people circulate and struggle over the meanings of our social experiences, social relations, and therefore, our selves” (Byers & Dell, 1992, p. 191). Just as gender is a social construct through which a society defines what it means to be masculine or feminine, race also is a social construction. Race can no longer be seen as a biological category, and it has little basis in science or genetics. Identifiers such as hair and skin colour serve as imperfect indicators of race. The racial categories we use to differentiate human difference have been created and changed to meet the dynamic social, political, and economic needs of our society. The premise that race and gender are social constructions underscores their centrality to the processes of human reality. Working from it compels us to understand the complex roles played by social institutions such as the media in shaping our increasingly gendered and racialized media culture. This chapter explores some of the ways mediated communication in the United States represents the social constructions of race and gender and ultimately contributes to our understanding of both, especially race.

Although research on race, gender, and media traditionally has focused on underrepresented, subordinate groups such as women and minorities, this chapter discusses scholarship on media representations of both genders and various racial groups. Therefore, we examine media constructions of masculinity, femininity, so-called people of colour, and even white people.3 On the other hand, given the limitations of this chapter and the fact that media research on race has focused on African Americans, we devote greater attention to blacks but not at the exclusion of the emerging saliency of whiteness studies, which acknowledge whiteness as a social category and seek to expose and explain white privilege.4

Our theoretical and conceptual orientation encompasses research that is commonly referred to as “critical/cultural studies.” Numerous theoretical approaches have been used to examine issues of race, gender, and media, but we contend that critical/cultural studies represent the most salient contemporary thinking on media and culture. More important, unlike most social and behavioural scientific research, most critical and cultural approaches to media studies work from the premise that Western industrialized societies are stratified by hierarchies of race, gender, and class that structure our social experience. Moreover, cultural studies utilizes interdisciplinary approaches necessary for understanding both the media’s role in the production and reproduction of inequity and for the development of more equitable and democratic societies. Cultural studies scholars have devoted considerable attention to studies of media audiences, institutions, technologies, and texts. This chapter privileges textual analyses of media that explicate power relationships and the construction of meaning about gender and race and their intersections (Byers & Dell, 1992). In addition, we draw considerably from research employing various feminist frameworks. Generally, our critical review of literature from the past two decades demonstrates the disruption of essentialist constructions of gender, race, and sexual identities.

Media representations of radicalised masculinities

Research on gender and media traditionally has focused on questions about women (and has been conducted primarily by women). In fact, as noted above, the focus on gender in media studies has come mainly from feminists. However, in recent decades the study of gender has expanded to include studies on men and masculinities (Connell, Hearn, & Kimmel, 2005). Feminist scholarship also has produced a proliferation of whiteness studies that include increased research on white masculinity and, to a lesser extent, white womanhood. This work interrogates gender identities and performances while exploring how masculine forms relate to patriarchal systems. Masculinity is defined broadly as “the set of images, values, interests, and activities held important to a successful achievement of male adulthood” (Jeffords, 1989, quoted in Ashcraft & Flores, 2000, p. 3). We agree with calls to refer to these gender roles as “masculinities” to reinforce the notion that ideals of manhood vary by race and class across time and cultural contexts (Dines & Humez, 2003, p. 733). Cultural studies’ focus on white masculinity as the invisible norm, and (to a lesser extent) on black men and black masculinity as deviant, works to reinforce the conception that black is the trope for race (Nakayama, 1994). Yet another intellectual movement inadvertently may have contributed to this notion.

Media representations of white masculinity

As the previous discussion illustrates, the fundamental delineation in media research is between the dominant, normative, white, heterosexual, and middle-class masculinity and subordinated masculinities. The crisis in white masculinity is perhaps the most overriding feature of constructions of dominant masculinity, and the most common response to this crisis is violent behaviour by white men (Katz, 2003). Shome (2000) uncovers the way in which the crisis of white masculinity is marked and negotiated in contemporary film. One dominant theme—that of the presidency or the U.S. government in crisis—evident in such films as Air Force One, Murder at 1600, Independence Day, Dave, and The Pelican As the previous discussion illustrates, the fundamental delineation in media research is between the dominant, normative, white, heterosexual, and middle-class masculinity and subordinated masculinities. The crisis in white masculinity is perhaps the most overriding feature of constructions of dominant masculinity, and the most common response to this crisis is violent behaviour by white men (Katz, 2003). Shome (2000) uncovers the way in which the crisis of white masculinity is marked and negotiated in contemporary film. One dominant theme—that of the presidency or the U.S. government in crisis—evident in such films as Air Force One, Murder at 1600, Independence Day, Dave, and The Pelican

Ashcraft and Flores (2000) also examine Hollywood film for ways in which masculine performances offer identity to middle-class heterosexual white men. Specifically, they analyze discursive performances in two films—Fight Club and In the Company of Men—that provide identity politics to “white/collar men” (p. 1). Each film’s discourse laments the imminent breakdown of the corporate man, “over-civilized and emasculated by allied obligations to work and women” (p. 2). To restore the beleaguered corporate man, the films (re)turn to “civilized/primitive” masculinity wherein the hardened white man finds healing in wounds (p. 2). Ultimately, this tough guy obscures the race and class hierarchy in which it resides by overtly appealing to gender division. As much of the research discussed above indicates, both whiteness and hegemonic (white) masculinity do not appear to be cultural/historical categories, thus rendering invisible the privileged position from which (white) men in general are able to articulate their interests to the exclusion of interests of women, men and women of colour, and children (Hanke, 1992, p. 186). Masculinity— whether black or white—must be uprooted from essentialist thinking that understands 16-Dow-4973.qxd 6/11/2006 1:42 PM Page 308 Gender, Race, and Media Representation–––◆–––309 gender—as well as race, class and many other constructs of personal and collective identity—not as biologically determined or subject to universal laws of science or nature, but as products of discourse, performance, and power.

https://www.corwin.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/11715_Chapter16.pdf

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zenosanalytic · 7 years ago

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Star Wars: The Last Jedi: Impermanence

So like I said, Rey’s story was probably my favorite part of the film, and it was my favorite because it played most to what I thought of as the film’s strongest points, which I identify as: dialogue, interaction, acting, its characters and, always very important to me, its Philosophy and Worldbuilding >:]

So Rey and Ren’s stories are pretty deeply intertwined, but I didn’t really get any Reylo vibes from TLJ. I def think that’s something to be worried about given that this is Disney and how that pairing would snap into convention, and the moment when they started fighting side-by-side did confuse and annoy me for a bit before I realized what it was about from Ren’s perspective(just your usually Sith assassination graduation). Part of why I didn’t get that feeling from it was that Ren’s story, while Driver’s performance was excellent, struck me as so limited and passively responding to/reflecting on Rey’s that it was practically ancillary to it. He was less his own character in the movie than a foil; a narrative device for Rey to bounce off of. Her desire to redeem him didn’t strike me that way either because Her motivation always felt to me to be about placing herself in the universe. Like: She didn’t want to redeem Kylo for his sake, or because of her feelings for him, she wanted to do it because that’s what Luke did. Which she directly says: “you ended the last war by redeeming Vader, so that must mean that’s how I will end this one, by redeeming my Vader, Kylo!” This gets into some larger ideas so I’ll back-up a bit for a sec.

Rey came to that island to find Luke, but that was really just a means to an end. Her real motivations were three-fold, two minor ones, getting Luke to go fight and getting Luke to train her, and one core motivation: finding out about herself. And these two minor ones are actually related to the core one:

if he trained her she would be his Apprentice, following his lead and teachings rather than having to figure out her own place and way; her confusion about her feelings and ignorance about herself wouldn’t matter, because he’d be giving her a purpose and clear social place. She wouldn’t have to struggle to figure out where she feels she belongs, who she feels she is and should be, and what she should be doing and why because he would be giving her all those answers.

if he went to fight she’d be the person who found Luke Skywalker, brought back The Legend to set everything Right again, and she’d have done her part without ever having to face the challenge of measuring up. Her anxiety about herself and her power wouldn’t matter because she wouldn’t be at the front of things; her role would be in the background, supporting the Real Heroes and Legends and following their lead.

So Rey’s main hope and fear, the source of both her drive and her anxiety, was always finding out about herself and orienting herself in this, for her, new social world she has dropped into, and in which she feels partly to be a stranger and a phony. That is made explicit when Luke questions her on who she is and why she’s there; iirc, her first two answers(”to bring you back, to train”) are stilted and awkward and he easily dispenses with them while her third, her confusion and fear about herself and her desire for him to help her make sense of it, is honest and heartfelt, and gives Luke real pause(and fear). Obvsl this is, on top of everything else, an analogy for becoming an adult so I’ll just get that out of the way as it’s pretty basic and not really what I find interesting about it. So her desire to redeem Ren was based not in sentiment for Ren but in her desire to fill Luke’s place. It is mainly an expression of her anxiety over feeling disconnected and socially adrift by attempting to solve it through role-modelling and repetition of her defining narratives; by abstracting her life via metaphor to the Legends she holds dear, and out-sourcing the anxiety of decision to the surety of history, though she doesn’t really understand the people involved in those events, and their experiences don’t really map to her circumstances.

So the whole “redemption” thing never struck me as romantic, because her interactions with Ren and desire to Redeem him were pursued for abstract immediate reasons in service to psychological primary ones. Affection and attraction had nothing to do with it. She does come to share a common feeling with Ren(quite directly in that they, as aware Force-Sensitives, can feel each others’ emotions and thoughts), but this is never affection; never sexual or romantic attraction. Rather it is true Sympathy; a recognition of emotional and contextual similarity. She sees her conflict, confusion, and unmooredness reflected in his own, though distorted by his different particulars.

And not only does she see his confusion and chaos(mirroring her own), but she also feels the stability and control he can exercise within that via his ambition, sense of purpose, and historical nihilism[1]. As someone in conflict, she wants that stability so she seeks to understand it where she finds it(Luke certainly isn’t displaying any). In a similar way and for similar reasons, though with some morbid inversions, Rey needs to understand how he could choose to throw away the family, friends and easy affection -the connections- which she most wants because she’s never had them. Her social universe, made up largely of people who knew him and who he abandoned, is filled with all these potentials for the affirmation and acceptance which she most desires, and which he destructively rejected. She has little idea how to cultivate these connections which he was born with -has never even been able to have them(until Finn[2])- and so she’s anxious about Fucking Up and, in one of these morbid inversions, is partly drawn to Ren as someone who has had them. As, I think, has been clear since TFA(and is powerfully and repeatedly reinforced in TLJ), Rey sees herself as abandoned and thrown away; she conceives of herself as an outsider but, more than that, as one who was rejected as “not good enough” and “not wanted”. Ren threw others away, chose to be an outsider, and she also needs to understand that because it’s inconceivable to her that anyone would make such a choice. That he knows Han loved him, and doesn’t hate Han(even, in fact, still says he loves him), makes this even more incomprehensible to her, which makes her need to understand stronger. And not only in an abstract sense of curiosity; by understanding why he threw away people and how he feels about that, she seeks to understand why she was thrown away, whether she was truly unwanted, and through that seeks the validation of her hopes for what her parents felt for her; seeks a morbid reflection of Ren’s murderous “love” for his father in an abandoning “love” in her parents. That’s why Ren’s “I didn’t hate him” line is so important, and why it hits her so true. That’s why she reaches out to him(beside the control and his place as foil to her own desires). In some ways he reflects her, but in others he is a surrogate for those who rejected her and her reaching out to him is part-and-parcel with her desire to understand them.

Which brings up another interesting part of her narrative, and this is where TLJ’s take on the The Force starts to get involved and developed. Luke defines The Force differently than Kanata did, not as an energy that “moves through and surrounds every Living thing”, but as the Energy between and connecting all things: its Flow, its Tension, and its Balance. Rey’s stated motivation, her greatest desire, is to know what her place is. But her real, unstated motivation is To Belong, because she’s never Belonged with anyone, she was always alone, and she thinks knowing her place will show her who she Belongs with[3]. This is her driving Tension -the source of Tension- in her story; the thing she wants most in the Universe. Which ties it to The Force; Tension is explicitly mentioned as an expression of it. Building on this, there is a place beneath the island associated by Luke with “The Dark Side” -a pool in a cave, one wall of which seems to be ice- which the movie explicitly aligns with this precise Tension: Rey is drawn to it, feeling that she will find answers about her parents(her Belonging) there. There are other metaphysical things about this place I’ll get to later: what’s important right now is this connection: Rey, to Tension, to The Force, to this Place, to the Dark Side. Taking this as an archetype and looking at the other Force users in the film, we can see a possible pattern: Ren’s Tension is the desire to be strong and measure up to, then surpass, then be free of, his heritage; to be without “weakness”, as he sees it: restraint, connection, and sentiment; To “Let the Past Die”, and be Free to pursue his own will/strength as and when he wishes. Giving in to that leads him to the Dark Side. Luke’s Tension was Anxiety over living up to his own Legend and being able to Defeat “The Dark Side”, and indulging in that Tension on one terrible night precipitated Ben’s final alienation. So the film seems to be arguing that this Tension in the Force is what the Jedi-culture(and thus Sith-culture) considers “The Dark Side of the Force”. This doesn’t just advance compelling worldbuilding; it situates Rey’s central conflict and motivation within that Worldbuilding; within her larger world. I find this sort of structural integration with character narratives really satisfying, and it brings an added meaning to conventional movie techniques for displaying emotion by projecting it onto the world(like placing her most intense moments of confusion, danger, and inner-conflict within environments of darkness, storms, cold, and wetness during times, for instance).

Thinking about it, I feel like maybe you could expand this(and thus The Force) to being a central theme of the movie? In each “Good” character’s narrative there is a Tension driving them which they, over the movie, learn to let go of(which, in turn, leads to their naturally fulfilling it). Luke lets go of his sense of failure at continuing the Jedi, finding peace and ensuring the Jedi continue. Poe lets go of his desire to Lead through Action and Heroics, which saves the remaining Resistance, especially their pilots, and in doing so becomes the leader he wants to be. Finn lets go of his myopic desire to get back to Rey and escape the First Order and starts to really fight for the ideas and people important to him, which leads him to defeat the FO personified by Phasma, brings him back to Rey, and ensures both their safety. It is in letting go that people achieve balance and fulfillment in this story. Conversely, Ren gives in to his desires for Power and Escaping the Past by destroying it, and thus ends up being entrapped by them, like the tragic, hubristic lead of an ancient Greek play. That idea of Enlightenment, Freedom, and Fulfillment coming from letting go, and suffering coming from holding on, is Very Buddhist and Very, Very Zen, which finally brings me to my Favorite aspect of this film ^u^ ^u^ ^u^

I’m obvsl not the first to draw a connection of inspiration between The Jedi and Zen(I’m actually pretty sure Lucas even said as much at one point, but I’m too lazy to look it up rn), but the return to a more Original Trilogy, Zen treatment of the Jedi and The Force is something I loved So Much[4]. The main Tension in this narrative is between the characters while the world is just... there in its Suchness, surrounding them, and they’re in it, and part of it, and their reactions to its Impermanence. Life lives and dies and lives again; matter is built, torn down, and built again; all physical things are locked within a Permanent cycle of Impermanence, and The Force is the sinew binding it all together, the Energy flowing permanently through the impermanent. And understanding and accepting that, even unconsciously, brings about release from pain, internal balance, and true fulfillment. Hence Rey’s Tension/Desire, and the Balance she achieves when she lets go of it; admitting her fears about her past and her desires for it without letting them control her. Hence Ren’s failure to achieve balance and freedom by giving in to the Tension of his Ambitions; his past, quiet literally in the projected “ghost” of his master, defeats him. Hence Rey’s Flow with The Force when she realizes the pattern set before her(the Rocks at the end; a clear callback to Luke’s earlier comments, and to Luke’s training with Yoda on Dagoba which the Island sequence is a reference to, and Luke’s line about “moving rocks” a direct quote from his Dagoba training).

And, in typically ironic Zen fashion, by giving up on her Desire to find where she Belongs, by accepting her greatest fears of the truth and meaninglessness of her natal rejection, Rey is inevitably brought precisely to where she Belongs: to the embrace of Finn and her new found family within the Resistance. I know at this point I’m repeating myself, but this is why the complaints about Rey “not training” never really flew[5]; one doesn’t need to “learn” how to “use” the Force, one already can “use The Force” because One is already attuned with it simply by existing. One is “Born Enlightened”, as it were. What one must do is “get out of the way”; not Try to move something with The Force, but allow The Force to Flow Through You and connect you to the universe such that your Will and its Will become one, and the thing you wish to occur occurs(and, conversely, you play the role you are meant to). TFA Got this, but TLJ both Gets it and explicates it explicitly to the audience.

The whole destruction/giving away/loss of iconic objects plays into Impermanence as well. Most obviously there is Yoda’s “the books don’t matter” comment to Luke, which is one of Zen’s most famous aspects; it denies a doctrinal, textual past, and gives primacy to the experience and learning through experience(though obvsl there ARE Zen books and doctrines; so another similarity :p). More broadly is the “suchness” mentioned earlier: Physical existence is As it Is, and also impermanent. TLJ confuses things a bit though because, while Buddhism acknowledges that all physical things are impermanent, it also recognized the impermanence of immaterial things like ideology, family and connection. Zen is particularly “rigorous” on this point through its (mis?)understanding of the doctrine of “voidness”, or Sunyata. Zen interprets the Heart Sutra,

Oh, Sariputra, Form Does not Differ From the Void,

And the Void Does Not Differ From Form. Form is Void and Void is Form; The Same is True For Feelings, Perceptions, Volitions and Consciousness

often taken as the primary text for this doctrine, as an affirmation that physical reality, identity, ideology -all Things- are “empty” projections of Void or “Nothingness”, which is the true reality which Enlightenment is direct awareness of and communion with.

TLJ, and SW in general, fumbles and commits the common Euro error of replacing a Buddhist conception of impermanence, and Zen conception of “Void”, with Platonic ideas preferencing the immaterial as “divine, immortal, and Real” in opposition to the flawed, illusory “mortality” of physical reality. So TLJ, while destroying or giving away important items, consistently ties that to the message that the ideals and concepts/feelings/ephemera those items symbolized or taught -Family, Relationships, Freedom and Justice and Democracy, oneness with The Force, The Resistance, Identity, Agency, Heroism, etc- are what is Truly Important and Lasting as opposed to immaterial possessions. That’s not very Buddhist and, in particular, it’s not very Zen, as Zen not only denies the permanence of both physical and ideal things, but makes a point of encouraging one to appreciate the impermanence of existence, material and immaterial, and to see an ultimate unity, rather than opposition, between material and immaterial, through their impermanence and Voidness. Star Wars includes many visuals that are true to this tradition(Luke’s final scene in TLJ, for instance, is an excellent example, especially as it is an obvious symbol of his life as a whole, and represents his attaining a final, complete community with The Force), but then it undermines it a bit with this far more prominent Idealism which, while |:T, is sadly expected and so I don’t let it bother me.

Though, from a fan perspective, I LOVE the idea of their being doctrinal disagreements about the nature of The Force among Force-sensitive and Force-using communities. It helps to make the world and its possibilities bigger if this fictional world reflects the uncertainty, and inevitable multiplicity of opinion, of real life. And, obvsl, it both creates more space for fans to fiddle around in, and presents an easy justification for doing so(well This, my own Personal Jedi Sect, thinks THIS...) >:] >:]

And, obvsl, Zen Yoda is Best Yoda, and reinforces the Zen treatment of The Force as well. Luke’s sarcasm and leaf-swatting of Rey was also a nice callback to the ole Swamp Hermit, and to Zen, which has in its history some pretty famously crotchety Teachers.

Ok, I think that’s it on this topic. If I come up with anything else about Zen, The Force, the TFA trilogy’s Force-Users, and TLJ, I’ll make another post and mutually link the posts. Thanks for Reading ^v^

[1]”nihilism” isn’t really the word I want here, but I can’t entirely metaphorically grab the term/concept I’m reaching for |:T I mean his whole insincere “let the past die” schtick

[2]Well there’s also BB-8, but I’m not sure if she feels that’s the same. She certainly knows her way around droids, and one gets the sense she likes them and gets on well with them, but at the same time she clearly doesn’t see her relationships to droids as being as fulfilling as those she has with biologicals; her responses to people are just much more intense and invested. Or Maybe this is just part of the Series Bible for SW: that bio characters generally not respond to droids like their equals, even if they are friendly and respectful towards them. The position and condition of Droids is a Whole Other Topic re: Star Wars, Politics, and Philosophy though, so I’ll stop there ftm.

[3]This is one thing about the story that makes Reylo worries understandable, I think, because one of the possible answers the film presents Rey as considering is “with Ren”, and there’s fundamentally a romantic implication in that. They’re both young Force-Users. They’re both, obvsl, very attractive and conventionally “fit”. They’re both conflicted, confused, and searching for answers which is a frequent romantic prelude in film. Moreover he presents himself as having answers to her questions and is obvsl trying to seduce and dominate her in ways that anyone who has ever dealt with passive-aggressive manipulators like him can recognize. Which are -again; sadly- common cinematic harbingers of romance and sex. The movie certainly plays with this, but while watching it I always felt that it was for effect, for characterizing Ren and their interactions, and I thought Ridley’s performance both completely refused to reciprocate this and presented a... unstated awareness of and resistance to Ren’s overtures. Which is why it didn’t ping me as “legit Reylo” and cause concern; she was aware of and quietly guarding against his bullshit even while seeking to understand him and learn from their connection. And this was all subtle and silent, conveyed purely through her physicality and line-delivery.

[4]Though, obvsl, it was rather shallow and aesthetical in the OT, like most early Euro attempts to adapt the concepts.

[5]aside from Luke’s training being all of “shot in the butt by a laser ball while blindfolded” before he blew-up the Death Star, and Rey getting more moments of Force failure than his missing the bullseye once and going for another pass

#Star Wars #The Last Jedi #Zen Buddhism #Buddhism #SW Worldbuilding #Movie Reviews #zA's Outside Viewing #analytic posts

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freelanews-blog · 5 years ago

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President Buhari’s visit to Russia and Get takeaways

President Muhammadu Buhari has returned to Nigeria from his four-day visit to the Russian Republic extremely happy with the success of the visit, which outcome is the best response to a few skeptical audiences back home, including a toxic newspaper editorial, “Buhari, Stay On Your Job,” by the Lagos-based Punch Newspaper asking him to not travel. Based upon the results, it must be concluded that the President’s mission was fully accomplished. The definite high point was the decision by the Russians to agree to a government-to-government understanding that would see them return to complete the Ajaokuta Steel Rolling Mill and commission it. Nigeria had expended well over USD 5 billion without it coming to fruition. When he campaigned early in the year for his re-election, which he won with a majority of four million votes, marking a difference of 14 per cent against his closest rival, President Buhari reiterated an earlier promise to complete Ajaokuta to provide jobs and the steel backbone that the nation’s industrial complex needed so desperately. Could this have been achieved if he had locked himself inside the Aso Rock Villa? The answer is obviously a “no.” Yet, this was not all that he secured. Presidents Buhari and Vladimir Putin opened a “new chapter” in the historically important relationship between the two countries as they both agreed to expand cooperation in energy sector, petroleum and gas, trade and investment, defence and security, mining and steel development, aluminium and phosphate, education and agriculture and a plethora of other issues which, to my pleasure had been spelled out in an elaborate manner by Tonye Princewill, an astute leader in the All Progressives Congress, APC in an opinion article he widely circulated. President Putin noted that the traditional friendly relationship between Nigeria and his country has gained a new momentum, symbolized by a 93 per cent growth in trade between the two nations in 2018, promising that “Russian companies are ready to offer their scientific and technological developments to their African partners, and share their experience of upgrading energy, transport and communications infrastructure.” In President Buhari’s view, this summit was a necessary anchor “to kick start what has been a very cordial and mutually beneficial relationship in past years…there are similarities between Russia’s journey under your leadership (Putin’s) and Nigeria’s aspirations for the future. We can learn a lot from the experiences of Russia’s ongoing reforms of transitioning from an oil dependent economy to a modern, diversified and inclusive economy.” Russia is clearly seeking to reconstruct the important role the country played in its Soviet era. They had traditionally supported African countries in their fights for independence and sought to build industrial infrastructure and develop national economies. In another sense, the focus of the summit on multilateralism, the advocacy for the reform of the United Nations and climate change action is a direct response to Trump era unilateralism. It is noteworthy that Nigeria got everything our delegation asked for. When German Chancellor, Angela Merkel visited President Buhari in Abuja in August last year, she made reference to a pertinent defect in the relationship between Europe and Africa when it comes to the promotion of projects. “When we give you a project, we show you the door to a bank. We tell you to go and obtain financing. The Chinese give you the project, they give you financing. That is something we will have to look at,” she said to President Buhari. Before the Europeans make up their minds on this, the Russians are now having a go at the idea. For every viable project Nigerian officials suggested in the course of this summit, the chances of the financing appeared within sight. It is in the light of this that one of Russia’s leading rail line service providers, MEDPROM indicated their interest in undertaking the 1,400-kilometer Lagos-Calabar rail track that will pass through all the states in the South-South sub-region. The agreement and MoU signed between the NNPC and the Russia’s Lukoil is another spectacular agreement along these lines. Lukoil owns seven refineries and a record turnover of USD 38 billion. The two oil giants will upgrade their commercial relationship to a government-to-government backed partnership, to work together in upstream operations and in revamping Nigeria’s ill-functioning refineries. The signing ceremony was witnessed by Timipre Sylva, Minister of State for Petroleum Resources. The Group Managing Director of the NNPC, Mele Kyari signed for the Nigerian side while Vagit Alekperov, President, signed on behalf of Lukoil. In support of this, President Buhari made clear that he wished to work with Russian businesses to improve the efficiency of our oil and gas sector, giving a strong assurance that his administration will “ensure this initiative is implemented within the shortest possible time.” Of no less significance is the MoU resolving past issues, paving the way for the revival of the rested joint venture between the NNPC and Russia’s gas giants, GASPROM for the development of Nigeria’s enormous gas resources and its infrastructure. In that waggish but poisonous editorial, the newspaper in question raised concerns about terrorism, kidnapping and general insecurity in the country. It asked a question, wondering why the President would travel abroad when there is, in the country, the problem of kidnapping and fire from oil tankers had caused the loss of life and devastation of shops. Yes, these are sad and unwelcome. This is a President who is praised for his prompt response to the Onitsha fire, first by releasing a message of commiseration same evening and thereafter, dispatching the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs on a condolence mission. The minister gave directive on the spot to the National Emergency Management Agency, NEMA for the immediate deployment of emergency assistance to the Southeast. Either out of ignorance or mischief, the Punch failed to see how important it is for the President to seek international support in tackling home grown terrorists, the Boko Haram, reinforced by 2000 ex-ISIS fighters as disclosed by Mr. Putin. Not only did President Buhari get that needed support to fight Boko Haram terrorists, he got the two countries to cooperate extensively in the strategic fields of defence, civil nuclear energy and in dealing with piracy and oil pipeline vandalism in the Gulf of Guinea. The Nigerian leader also got a deal for the technological upgrade and timely delivery of the balance of seven, out of an existing order for 12 Attack Helicopters. These, and an assortment of military hardware are direly needed by Nigeria to deal with the new wave of crime bedevilling the country. Interestingly, one of the three key themes of the whole conference is security. African states with Russia’s support have, as an outcome, drawn up a regional security architecture that would use new technological solutions to ensure security for cities, securing the borders and creating a buffer against the illegal movement of explosives, weapons, drugs and smuggling to reduce terrorist danger to the continent. Still on security, the Nigeria-Russia Military Technical Agreement that lapsed a few years ago without being renewed will be given due attention by Nigeria. Russia had been ready with her part. President Buhari gave a response to this, saying, “I have directed the Minister of Defence to work with the Ministry of Justice to conclude this matter within the shortest possible time.” The significance of this agreement lies in the fact that it opens the door to the procurement of military hardware, on a government-to-government basis, eliminating middlemen and reducing cost, as well as the training of military personnel, modernization of the armed forces, refurbishment and renewal of infrastructure and equipment, which President Putin said he is ready to assist Nigeria to undertake. The one perennial business and, if you like emotional topic between the two countries is the protracted issue of the Aluminium Smelter Company of Nigeria, ALSCON, Ikot-Abasi, Akwa-Ibom State. It too, will be resolved. President Buhari announced that he had asked the Ministry of Justice, “to submit a comprehensive report on the UC Russel (the Russian owners of the plant) matter…I want to assure you that the aim of our reforms is to ensure such investments are concluded and actualized in a professional and painless manner.” There are many of our citizens who do not reckon with the fact that this country has a nuclear programme for about 40 years, one however, that has not gone beyond the setting up of research stations. Arising from these discussions, President Putin invited President Buhari to join him in taking the next step in the implementation of the project by commencing the construction of the nuclear power plant. The two Presidents also addressed issues in education and agriculture. Russia said she would give additional scholarships. There are currently 100 Nigerian students studying under her scholarship and so far, 797 students from Nigeria have benefited from scholarships for training in Russia in various academic fields. On agriculture, Russia agreed to support Nigeria in laying a solid foundation for food security. This will partly come through raw materials (phosphate) supply for President Buhari’s very impactful Presidential Fertilizer Initiative that has seen the reopening of dozens of blending plants and the return to work of thousands of employees. Russia, now the world’s largest producer of wheat according to President Putin, will work with Nigeria in growing wheat to meet domestic and market needs. This is in response to President Buhari who made a request to Putin, that “we seek your Government’s support especially in the area of wheat production. Today, Nigeria produces less than one hundred thousand metric tons of wheat locally while our imports are projected to exceed five million tons in 2020. We therefore need your support to bridge the deficit which will create jobs and save our foreign exchange for other important areas like security, defence and infrastructure.” The two leaders also discussed regional and international issues of mutual interest, with President Buhari pointedly asking for Russia’s support for Nigeria’s aspiration to assume a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council, in the envisaged reform of the UN. Realizing that the relationship between our two countries had suffered the loss of the momentum characteristic of the Soviet era, President Buhari said “to move forward, may I suggest that our countries organize the fifth Joint Commission meeting to review and ratify all the agreements (about 40) contained in the Inter-governmental Nigeria-Russia Joint Commission on Economic, Scientific and Technical Cooperation Protocol of November 11, 2016,” to which his Russian counterpart agreed. For the African continent that been looked at as a potential bright spot in the world economy for a long time, the flurry of summits between the leaders of the major economies of the world and the Heads of African states and government is a clear indication of Africa coming of age. For Nigeria and President Buhari in particular, the Russia-Africa Summit had served the desire the two countries to diversify and further strengthen the bonds of our robust bilateral relations. A solid foundation has indeed been laid for the promotion of the mutually beneficial cooperation between both nations. Read the full article

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the-desolated-quill · 8 years ago

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Mel Gibson In Talks To Direct Suicide Squad 2: Shoot Me Now! - Quill’s Scribbles

You may recall that I wasn’t too fond of Suicide Squad (a phrase which here means I thought it was the cinematic equivalent of bowel cancer) and that I was reluctant to see a sequel to it (I believe ‘over my dead body’ were the exact words I used). Well not only are we getting a sequel to this pile of garbage (NOOOOOOOOOOO!), but we’re also getting a new director. Oh great! Anyone would be better than David fucking Ayer! Considering that he’s going to be too busy ruining the Gotham City Sirens movie, it would be good to have some fresh blood for Suicide Squad 2. Someone who was talented, competent and totally uncontroversial. So who do Warner Bros and DC have in mind?

No! Stop laughing! i did not use that GIF in order to create some elaborate visual pun. I’m legitimately shocked and outraged by this and that GIF best demonstrates my reaction upon hearing the news. The fact that it came from the movie Signs is purely coincidental... Honest.

Yes. Mel Gibson is in talks to direct Suicide Squad 2. Actor and filmmaker turned professional arsehole. Now before we go into why his potential appointment is wildly inappropriate, let’s remind ourselves of the many hilarious and wacky hijinks he got up to over the years. (Also I’m going to put a link to a YouTube clip that I encourage you to play while reading what’s below. It’s the theme tune to the British TV series ‘ZZZap!’ and it’s a frankly pathetic attempt to give this a sense of knockabout comedy fun and to alleviate the depressing reality you’re about to dive into. A bottle of alcohol might help as well. Unless you’re a recovering alcoholic like me, in which case you might want to breathe into a paper bag and go to your happy place for a while. Okay? Here we go!)

youtube

In the Spanish newspaper El Pais in 1991, when asked what he thinks of homosexuals, he said “They take it up the ass. (laughs, stands up, bends over, points to anus) This is only for taking a shit.” He commented further saying "With this look, who's going to think I'm gay? I don't lend myself to that type of confusion. Do I look like a homosexual? Do I talk like them? Do I move like them?" When asked whether he’d issue an apology to the LGBT community by Playboy magazine in 1995, he said “I’ll apologise when hell freezes over. They can fuck off.”

His film Braveheart received controversy for its offensive depiction of Edward II, Prince of Wales as an effeminate homosexual who was both weak and ineffectual. Gibson defended his depiction, saying he was “just trying to respond to history.”

He has made a number of anti-semitic comments over the years. The most infamous being in 2006 when he was arrested on a DUI charge, he went into an angry tirade, uttering the words “Fucking Jews. The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.”

The controversial The Passion of The Christ has been heavily criticised for its negative depictions of Jews and for its perceived attempts to blame the Hebrew people for the death of Jesus. Reviewer Katha Pollitt wrote in The Nation that Gibson had violated “just about every precept of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops own 1988 'Criteria' for the portrayal of Jews in dramatizations of the Passion (no bloodthirsty Jews, no rabble, no use of Scripture that reinforces negative stereotypes of Jews, etc.) [...] The priests have big noses and gnarly faces, lumpish bodies, yellow teeth; Herod Antipas and his court are a bizarre collection of oily-haired, epicene perverts. The 'good Jews' look like Italian movie stars (Italian sex symbol Monica Bellucci is Mary Magdalene); Mary, who would have been around 50 and appeared 70, could pass for a ripe 35."

An earlier version of The Passion of The Christ script was scrutinised by the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Inter-religious Affairs of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Department of Inter-religious Affairs of the Anti-Defamation League. They released a statement calling it “one of the most troublesome texts, relative to anti-Semitic potential, that any of us had seen in twenty-five years. It must be emphasized that the main storyline presented Jesus as having been relentlessly pursued by an evil cabal of Jews, headed by the high priest Caiaphas, who finally blackmailed a weak-kneed Pilate into putting Jesus to death. This is precisely the storyline that fueled centuries of anti-Semitism within Christian societies. This is also a storyline rejected by the Roman Catholic Church at Vatican II in its document Nostra aetate, and by nearly all mainline Protestant churches in parallel documents. ... Unless this basic storyline has been altered by Mr. Gibson, a fringe Catholic who is building his own church in the Los Angeles area and who apparently accepts neither the teachings of Vatican II nor modern biblical scholarship, The Passion of the Christ retains a real potential for undermining the repudiation of classical Christian anti-Semitism by the churches in the last forty years.” The Anti-Defamation League made a further statement saying that “for filmmakers to do justice to the biblical accounts of the passion, they must complement their artistic vision with sound scholarship, which includes knowledge of how the passion accounts have been used historically to disparage and attack Jews and Judaism. Absent such scholarly and theological understanding, productions such as The Passion could likely falsify history and fuel the animus of those who hate Jews.”

His father’s comments regarding the number of Jews that died in the Holocaust (claiming that it was significantly less than 6 million) was met with fierce criticism by writer Frank Rich in The New York Times. In response to Rich, Gibson said "I want to kill him…I want his intestines on a stick… I want to kill his dog."

In 2010, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Police Department launched in investigation into Mel Gibson after his romantic partner at the time Oksana Grigorieva claimed that she had been the victim of domestic violence. This was further supported by a recorded phone conversation between Gibson and Grigorieva. When she asked him "what kind of man is that who would hit a woman when she is holding a child in her hands, hitting her twice in the face?", he responded by saying "you know what, you fucking deserved it." He also said to her "you look like a fucking pig in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of n*****s, it will be your fault." Gibson later pleaded no contest to a misdemeanour battery charge.

LOL! Isn’t that just hilarious?... Oh wait. No it’s not. It’s fucking disgusting. WHAT THE FUCK ARE WB AND DC THINKING?!

Now I must stress at this point that nothing has been confirmed yet. The film itself is still in early development and talks have only just begun. There’s a chance that Mel Gibson might not be chosen and if enough people kick up enough of a stink, maybe that will speed the decision making process up a bit. But the fact that WB and DC would even consider this in the first place speaks volumes. The potential backlash alone should have made some alarm bells ring, surely.

The question arises whether or not it’s possible to separate the controversy from the man. If he does direct Suicide Squad 2 and does a good job, can we overlook his past mistakes. Honestly... no. I don’t think so. There’s a moral principle here. We have to demonstrate that that kind of behaviour will not be tolerated. Some say people are starting to bully and demonise Gibson for his past mistakes, but that’s not really true because the fact of the matter is Gibson has never at any point acknowledged what he’s done is wrong nor made attempts to correct his behaviour. Oh sure he’s ‘apologised’, but they clearly don’t actually mean anything. In fact he seems to show zero remorse for some of the things he’s done and has at time made excuses, such as with regards to his homophobic comments, in 1999 he said "I shouldn't have said it, but I was tickling a bit of vodka during that interview, and the quote came back to bite me on the ass." To me he seems more concerned about the backlash he received for his comments rather than admitting he said something demeaning to homosexuals and vowing to make amends.

And then of course there’s this statement he made in an exclusive interview with Deadline.com regarding the leaked tapes of the abusive phone calls:

“I've never treated anyone badly or in a discriminatory way based on their gender, race, religion or sexuality – period. I don't blame some people for thinking that though, from the garbage they heard on those leaked tapes, which have been edited. You have to put it all in the proper context of being in an irrationally, heated discussion at the height of a breakdown, trying to get out of a really unhealthy relationship. It's one terribly awful moment in time, said to one person, in the span of one day and doesn't represent what I truly believe or how I've treated people my entire life.”

I believe this is known in the trade as a big fat lie. The fact is he has demonstrated time and again to being racist, homophobic, violent and just an all round depraved individual. This has been shown not only through his comments but also through his work. And yes I am aware he has a drink problem and mental health issues, and I can empathise with that to a certain degree, but that does not in any way excuse or justify his behaviour. It’s hard to forgive and forget when Gibson has made precisely zero attempt to change his behaviour. The frequency and ferocity of his comments and outbursts suggests to me that he has a problem beyond alcohol and mental health problems, and therefore should not be indulged. And so I find it a bit offensive when the media suggests we should let bygones be bygones now that Gibson has made an Oscar worthy movie and that we should give him a congratulatory pat on the head every time he shows restraint or common courtesy (something that should come naturally to any decent human being), treating him less like a xenophobic bigot and more like your barmy conservative uncle.

So it’s disheartening that WB and DC, two companies who have been making great strides to make the DC Extended Universe as diverse as possible, would consider hiring a filmmaker who practically stands against that very ideal. (All the things Mel Gibson has said and done over the years sound like the kind of things Richard Spencer probably thinks about while he’s masturbating). Why Mel Gibson? I can think of one reason...

Hawksaw Ridge seems to have partially restored Gibson’s shattered reputation and both Gibson and WB presumably seem to think they could both stand to gain something from this. The DCEU would have an Oscar nominated director under their belt for added ‘prestige’ and Gibson could use a big budget movie, in a genre that’s become immensely popular and lucrative among the mainstream audience, to fully restore public confidence. Confidence that isn’t really deserved bearing mind that in an interview with the Daily Telegraph in 2010 he said "I am one tough motherfucker and you can't bother me anymore. You ask anybody what their number one fear is and it's public humiliation. Multiply that on a global scale and that's what I've been through. It changes you and makes you one tough motherfucker. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Yeah. Sounds truly remorseful for his past mistakes, doesn’t he?

It both angers and saddens me that WB and DC would consider someone as reprehensible as Mel Gibson for one of their films. But at the same time, I can’t say I’m surprised. Initially I was truly excited for the DCEU, seeing it as an opportunity to build off of the foundations the Marvel Cinematic Universe laid down and to improve upon it. It was to be a diverse, creator controlled franchise that would respect both the source material and the fans. Nowadays it’s hard not to see it as a potential failure in the making. While its diversity is to be commended, its creator controlled vision has been officially thrown out the window with numerous instances of studio interference after the underperformance and negative response to Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice. The most notable example being Suicide Squad, which was utterly butchered in an attempt to make it lighter in tone and more palatable to an audience, and now we wait with nervous tension as to whether a similar fate will befall Wonder Woman and the Justice League movies. We also seem to be moving dangerously close to the assembly line production that Marvel Studios run with their shared universe, where they just churn out movie after movie without care or attention to detail. And there’s the casting of big name stars as opposed to people who are actually right for the role in an attempt to get more bums in the seats (Will Smith as Deadshot anyone?). Mel Gibson potentially directing Suicide Squad 2 seems to be the epitome of that. Overlooking his bigotry and cashing in on a potential renewal in public interest and sympathy for him.

The tragic irony is that critics have wanted DC to follow the ‘Marvel Method’ and now they may finally be getting their wish. A bloated, nonsensical franchise whose studio cares more for money than quality. And even if WB do the smart thing and reject Mel Gibson, the fact that they even considered him a worthy candidate will forever colour my view of them.

#anti mel gibson #suicide squad 2 #dc extended universe #quill's scribbles

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analysis-by-vaylon · 8 years ago

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The question of genre in Star vs. the Forces of Evil.

In this post, I’ll be discussing the importance of genre in Star vs. the Forces of Evil -- in particular, demonstrating how the series tips its hand as to what its genre is, and why understanding the genre of the series is important.

This post is possible in part thanks to two users from the Star vs. the Forces of Evil subreddit who directed my attention to the episode “By the Book”: /u/ElHijodelQuesoDragon and /u/Pedrogi. Their names link to their respective posts; without their observations, I would have overlooked some otherwise crucial lines of dialogue.

As I mentioned before, the reason I have these analysis posts is because there’s an incredible outpouring of love, effort, and creativity that goes into the show's production, from directing to writing to storyboarding, and I believe that our duty, as an audience, is to fully explore the wealth of significance that the series creators have given to us -- it would just be a damn shame not to -- and, as a critic, I feel obligated to illuminate that significance so that all of us, including myself, can come away from the work having realized more meaning in it.

Now back to the topic at hand: genre.

My old Shakespeare professor would say that, when trying to understand an unfamiliar piece of literature, the very first thing we ought to do is determine its genre. The genre of a piece of literature informs everything about it: its language, tone, conventions, effects, audience expectations, ending -- all of it. If knowing a work's genre is the first step toward understanding it, then what genre is Star vs. the Forces of Evil?

The series itself draws attention to genre in the episode "By the Book," in the "romantic comedy" or Twilight parody scene:

Marco: "Glossaryck, you'll miss the whole movie if you stay in there. I thought you liked romantic comedies."

Glossaryck: "Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah. I've seen this one before, and the squid lady dies in the end."

Many people take this scene -- just check the YouTube comments for yourself -- to be foreshadowing: the film's characters, they claim, are analogues for Star and Marco. In other words, because Squid Lady and Werewolf Man can't be together, Star and Marco won't be together, either. Admittedly, this theory could be right, and this scene could indeed be the series meta-commentating on itself; I've seen some convincing arguments of this. On the other hand, I think we should seriously consider the possibility that the Twilight parody is actually misdirection. Why do I think that?

Simple: the film shown is not a romantic comedy at all!

If Squid Lady dies at the end -- if the story is about her and Werewolf Man being kept apart forever not only by society but by death -- then the Twilight parody isn't a romantic comedy, it's a tragedy.

Before going into further detail about that scene in particular, I’d like to discuss each of the genres -- that is, romance, tragedy, and comedy -- and their definitions, both modern and classical: some of their meanings have changed over time. The use of these words -- and Star vs. the Forces of Evil, if nothing else, is very conscious of what words it’s using -- reveals some interesting things about the series.

Romance is a genre whose meaning has shifted radically over the years. There's medieval romance, historical romance, Renaissance romance, and modern romance -- you can find a useful glossary to these terms here. Famous literary examples include The Song of Roland, The Tempest, and Don Quixote. Interestingly, every single one of the definitions of romance fits the series: it's an episodic tale about a particular warrior, who is in fact part of a much larger chronicle of warriors, as she rescues fair maidens and confronts supernatural challenges on exciting, wild adventures while simultaneously developing passionate feelings about someone. Check, check, check, and check; the show is most definitely a romance in every sense of the word.

A tragedy, in terms of classical drama, is a play that ends in catastrophe -- usually death and destruction, whether of people or an entire society. Lovers are kept from being together, families are torn apart, and entire ways of life are destroyed. Famous literary examples include the Illiad, Hamlet, and Death of a Salesman. The meaning has stayed fairly consistent over time.

A comedy, in terms of classical drama, is a play that ends happily. Sometimes they were amusing (i.e., comic), while at other times they could be quite serious -- but they always end happily. For Shakespeare and other Renaissance writers, this happy ending usually meant that the play ended with marriage: that is, with two different things coming together in harmony. Famous literary examples include the Odyssey, Much Ado About Nothing, and Harvey. Over time, the meaning of the word comedy has shifted in sense so that now, in modern usage, it means any amusing work. The series is certainly funny -- but is it a comedy in a classical sense?

That’s the central question of this particular analysis: is Star vs. the Forces of Evil tragedy or comedy? If you believe it’s tragedy, then you might take Squid Lady and Werewolf Man’s plight at face value as straightforward foreshadowing: like them, Star and Marco come from two different worlds, and, because of that, they can never be together.

I think the clue here, however, is that Marco calls the Twilight parody a romantic comedy when it clearly isn’t. This is the equivalent of the writers sending up a warning flag to the audience and shouting, “Hey! Pay attention!” Pay attention to what? The rest of the episode itself, actually: “By the Book” contains subtle but convincing evidence that the show is, in fact, a comedy in the classical sense -- and that therefore will end with Marco and Star being together.

Remember how I said that Renaissance comedies end with two different things coming together in harmony? Star and Marco are those two different things: Mewni and Earth, respectively. Star is quite literally an otherworldly being -- a magic-wielding, winged fairy -- and Marco is an ordinary Earthling. That the two of them should meet and fall in love is a tale as old as storytelling itself, replete with stories of gods, goddesses, and other supernatural entities falling in love with mortals -- just open any book of Greek myths for an example.

Sound far-fetched? Maybe at first -- but “By the Book” subtly reinforces, throughout the episode, the theme of two different things coming together:

Warnicorns are a mixture of something cute -- a unicorn -- and something meant for actual battle, but it isn't until Star reads from the book that she manages to cast the spell correctly and combine the two attributes.

Similarly, there's Star's cotton candy cloud which drops spaghetti and meatballs down on Marco -- again, the contrast reinforcing the notion that her magic isn't working right; in other words, in order for two different things to come together appropriately, she needs to do things by the book.

Even the Incantationdance itself is an example of harmonious union, since an incantation uses spoken language, and a dance uses body language, yet somehow it all works together when performed.

"Earth eleven o'clock or Mewni eleven o'clock?" "They're the same, Star."

Squid Lady and Werewolf Man, as previously mentioned.

The popcorn-candy mix. Sweet and salty working together!

Finally, the most important example of the harmonious union theme is, believe it or not, the Boom Nuggets and the soda stolen by Glossaryck. There's an urban legend that Pop Rocks (i.e., "Boom Nuggets") and soda pop together can kill you, and "By the Book" playfully references it. Interestingly, Glossaryck instead uses the (allegedly) deadly combination to "rocket [him]self from a trash compactor" and "save the day" -- a creative if unusual metaphor reinforcing the theme of the harmonious union of two different things which normally would be in opposition. Crazy, right? But it works: Glossaryck turns what might have been a tragedy (Pop Rocks and soda together kill people!) into a comedy (Pop Rocks and soda together can ... save the day!).

Oh, and one last thing, in case you still aren't convinced: Greek comedies originated in festivals celebrating Dionysus. They involved revelry, music, merriment, and dancing and singing.

So let's say all of this is right, and "By the Book" is pointing to evidence that Star vs. the Forces of Evil is, in fact, both a romance and a comedy (in both classical and modern usages of the words) -- what does it mean? Why is it important? Well, I believe that people have the wrong idea about the Twilight parody scene: instead of foreshadowing that Star and Marco won’t be together, it actually foreshadows that the series will indeed end happily: that air and earth, normally opposing forces, will be wedded in harmony -- cleaved together, if you will -- and Glossaryck, as demonstrated by this episode, will be the catalyst that causes that to happen. (The phrase “by the book” itself has some interesting connotations as well, but those might be left for another day.)

To sum up: I believe the Twilight parody in “By the Book” is the best indication yet that Star and Marco are destined to be together and will, in fact, be married by the time the series ends -- and as far as romantic comedies are concerned, that's about as by the book as you can get.

#star vs the forces of evil #analysis #genre #by the book #romance

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penzanews · 3 years ago

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Historical facts about World War II must not be distorted or hushed up

PenzaNews. Increasingly frequent attempts to distort history and to revise the role played by the Red Army in the routing of Nazism are connected with the strengthening of Russia. This was stated by President of Russia Vladimir Putin at the 43rd meeting of the Russian Pobeda (Victory) Organising Committee which took place via videoconference on May 20.

“We celebrated Victory Day only recently, on May 9, but we always say that we must not forget about these issues and continue to help our veterans after May 9 as well. We will mark one more important date soon, June 22, the horrible day when the Nazis treacherously invaded out homeland. This year we will mark 80 years since the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. It claimed millions of lives, and nearly all our families remember their losses and their heroes to this day. This personal connection is what defines our people’s sincere commemoration of the war and war veterans in Russia. It is only logical that the list of amendments to our renewed Constitution, which were wholeheartedly supported our nation, includes a provision on commemorating defenders of the Fatherland and preserving the historical truth. As you are well aware, we have always paid special attention to these issues. Regrettably, the ranks of the great generation of victors are thinning out. But this is only increasing our responsibility for preserving their legacy, especially now that we are witnessing increasingly frequent attempts to slander and distort history and to revise the role played by the Red Army in the routing of Nazism and the liberation of European nations from the Nazi plague,” the head of state said.

He stated that the reasons are clear, and attempts to hamper the development of this country, regardless of its name, be it the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union or Russia, were made in different times and historical epochs and under different political systems.

“These approaches and principles remain the same. There is one principle or rather, one reason for containing Russia: the stronger and more independent Russia becomes, the more consistently it defends its national interests, the greater the striving of foreign forces to weaken it, to discredit the values uniting our society and sometimes to slander and distort what people hold dear, the things that are instilled in the younger generations of Russians and which help them acquire a strong character and their own opinions. This is why all kinds of Russophobic individuals and unscrupulous politicians are trying to attack Russian history, to promote the ideas of revising the results of World War II and to exonerate Nazi criminals,” Vladimir Putin said.

“We cannot but respond to these actions in a suitable manner. As I have repeatedly said, we will rely on facts and do everything possible to ensure the continuity of historical memory in Russian society, so that decades and centuries from now, future generations will cherish the truth about the war and display a sacred and grateful attitude towards its heroes, as well as to their ancestors,” he added.

Although large-scale and mass celebrations are essential, we have to prioritise systemic work here, President of Russia stressed.

“We have to continue to declassify new archive records and to allow researchers to use them. We must provide people with new opportunities for learning about the destinies of their relatives, as well as their combat and frontline experiences. We must expand such projects as No Statute of Limitations, which makes a substantial contribution to exposing the vile deeds of Nazi criminals against this country’s civilians and which implements important educational programmes. They must be presented more broadly at Russian schools and universities. On the whole, it is of paramount importance that we ensure well-coordinated actions, methods and positions of all state agencies and public organisations linked with studying and preserving the history of the Great Patriotic War and also dealing with education and teaching patriotic values. We must not act separately while addressing these issues, where efficiency and success depend solely on joint work and concerted efforts,” Vladimir Putin said.

Speaking of the importance for Russian citizens of such a historical period as the Great Patriotic War, Professor Martin J. Sherwin, Department of History & Art History, George Mason University, emphasized its enduring importance.

“Whether it is the Soviet Union or Russia the Great Patriotic War is an enduring monument to national historical pride,” the expert told PenzaNews.

“How will it be understood and used is the historical question. Will it be celebrated to promote democracy or dictatorship? It is essential to democracy that independent historians have the opportunity to research, write and publish their work. But a nation’s history cannot be assigned to one group and so all sorts of people will promote their views,” Martin J. Sherwin added.

Therefore, in his opinion, it is essential that the work of serious independent investigators is available to the public to counter the efforts of politicians and others to distort history in the service of their ambitions.

“A just society requires agreed upon standards of behavior. Banning fascism, xenophobia, and racism are therefore appropriate because they are forms of political behavior that undermine fairness, decency and virtue,” the American researcher said.

In turn, Lewis Siegelbaum, Jack and Margaret Sweet Professor Emeritus of History, Michigan State University, called the events of the Great Patriotic War inviolable.

“The memory of the Great Patriotic War is as close to being sacred as anything I know of in contemporary politics. It has been fostered, shaped, and reinforced by Russia’s educational system, mainstream political figures, and the legacy media. Many of the themes – patriotic heroism and sacrifice, unique dimensions of loss, bonds of camaraderie, etc. – were forged in Soviet times and have been perpetuated since 1991,” Lewis Siegelbaum said.

From his point of view, the experience of professional historians is of great importance in describing the events of the Second World War, but they should not have sole responsibility for writing the history of this period.

“Novelists, film directors, and visual artists, among others, can also evoke and make meaningful aspects of the war that historians rarely touch,” the expert explained.

At the same time, Lewis Siegelbaum noted that attempts to distort and rewrite history take place throughout time.

“There is nothing new about politicians’ attempts to rewrite history by falsifying facts. Is it happening more now than in the past? Perhaps, although I don't know how one would measure that,” the historian said and added that social media have played a role here generally not for the better.

“It is and always has been important to actively oppose any manifestation of neo-Nazism, aggressive nationalism, racism, and xenophobia. Once naively thought to be relics outdated by the enlightened practices of democratic polities, these perversities have gained new adherents owing to the dynamism of neo-liberal capitalism that has marginalized and delegitimized collective identities that made sense in the past,” Lewis Siegelbaum said.

Meanwhile, Jacques Sapir, Director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, Head of the Center for Research of Industrialization (CEMI-EHESS), Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that the Great Patriotic War is certainly a major fact in Russian representations today.

“It has deeply marked every family. With 26 to 28 million deaths, it is naturally a major trauma,” the historian noted but added that the significance of the Great Patriotic War varies across age groups.

Thus, according to him, the generation born in the war and post-war years, who knew the veterans well, associate the pride of Victory primarily with suffering and loss, while their today’s descendants – young people under the age of 30 – have a more abstract sense of pride.

Answering the question about the increasing attempts to distort the events of those times, Jacques Sapir stressed that history is the domain of historians.

“But, there is history and memory, two quite different things. And, the latter is invariably instrumentalized by politicians. However, any instrumentalization carries with it the possibility of a desire to rewrite history, to erase certain events, to glorify or, on the contrary, to denigrate certain actors,” he said, stressing that all the falsifications take us away from reality.

In his opinion, no country can do without a national narrative, and therefore a form of instrumentalization – turning an event into an instrument of political influence.

“But, once that is admitted, it is still necessary that this national narrative does not turn into a national novelization. If the victory of Stalingrad, and next year we will commemorate the 80 years of Operation Uranus, the Soviet counter-offensive, was brilliant, it should be remembered that it was preceded, from June 1942 to September 1942, of a series of defeats. However, not wanting to face the mistakes of the past is to condemn yourself to repeat them,” Jacques Sapir said.

Nick Cull, Professor at Master of Public Diplomacy Program, the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, shared the opinion on the inadmissibility of distortion and concealment of historical facts.

“As a historian who has looked at issues of propaganda and memory in international politics, I see great significance how events are remembered by states and their publics and great significance in the things that are allowed to slip from memory too,” he said.

“There are some countries where the Great Patriotic War, World War Two remains a central historical experience and a source of reference points which politicians regularly invoke. This is certainly the case in Russia as in the UK and USA. My wish would be that as well as remembering our own internal suffering, resolution and bravery we all would also remember the positive aspects of working together to defeat a common enemy and the sacrifices of our allies. […] I wish that Americans in particular knew more about Russia’s war. Visiting the National World War II museum in New Orleans I found it is easier to learn about the suffering of ordinary people in Germany and Japan during the war than in Russia. It is a little different in Britain. The alliance with the USSR is remembered in part because of the role of British sailors in the Arctic supply convoys and in part because it is in the nature of the British character to seek out a counterbalance to American remembering the war as a solo effort,” the historian said.

In his opinion, professional historians have a vital role to play as a reality check not allowing politicians to stray from the truth.

“But it is a perpetual struggle and not always welcome from the general public who love their myths. Historians have also to hold other historians to account as there are always some willing to distort in the name of ideology. We have seen this in the west with the few historians like David Irving who strayed into Holocaust denial,” Nick Cull explained.

At the same time, in his opinion, one role of professional historians is to remind the world that the Holocaust was not the only atrocity of that period.

“All the combatant powers have to face their own misdeeds. Britain mismanaged the Bengal famine, the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and something terrible happened in the Katyn Forest and these things too must be reckoned into history,” the professor stressed.

“My preference is not to idealize the past but rather to come together and focus on the vision of a better future. This is actually what worked during the Great Patriotic War, and helped the world come together at its end,” he added.

Source: https://penzanews.ru/en/analysis/67129-2021

Photo: Kremlin.ru

#ww2 #worldwar2 #wwii

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upshotre · 5 years ago

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THE TAKEAWAYS FROM PRESIDENT BUHARI’S VISIT TO RUSSIA by Garba Shehu

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