#tried to capture their complexities in one post and failed miserably

[charles-jpg]

charles leclerc & max verstappen | il predestinato & the inevitable

1. unknown / 2. hanif abdurraqib/ 3. leonardo da vinci / 4. unknown / 5. yves olade / 6. joan tierney / 7. alice oseman

[ljf613]

Zuko’s Memory Bias

I’ve talked about Azula’s potential memory bias towards her mother. In that same thread, I mentioned that Zuko also has memory bias towards his parents. What I didn’t think about until I was writing my recent post on his relationship with Azula is how those same biases may have affected the way he perceives her. 

(Warning: This is a very complex topic, and I suggest not reading/engaging if you find it potentially triggering or are unable to deal with it in a nuanced way. I am NOT trying to downplay abuse, nor am I trying to gaslight those who’ve been victimized by it.) 

Azula the Liar 

In “Zuko Alone,” we get a good sense of what Zuko’s life was like as a child. We see him interacting with his mother, sister, and (briefly) his father. And we get some insight into a line from “The Avatar State.” 

[ID: Excerpt from the transcript of the ATLA episode “The Avatar State.” Zuko: “You lied to me! [Cut to Azula, who appears confident.]” Azula: “[Smugly.] Like I've never done that before.”/ End ID] 

There are two scenes in “Zuko Alone” where Zuko accuses Azula of lying to him. Look at these lines, and see if you notice a common denominator. 

[ID: Excerpt from the transcript of the ATLA episode “Zuko Alone.” Young Azula: “[Sing-songy.] Dad's going to kill you! [Seriously.] Really, he is.” Young Zuko: “Ha-ha, Azula. Nice try.” Young Azula: “Fine, don't believe me. But I heard everything. Grandfather said Dad's punishment should fit his crime. [Imitates Azulon.] ‘You must know the pain of losing a first-born son. By sacrificing your own!’“ Young Zuko: “Liar!” Young Azula: “I'm only telling you for your own good. I know! Maybe you could find a nice Earth Kingdom family to adopt you!” Young Zuko: “Stop it! You're lying! Dad would never do that to me!”/ End ID]

[ID: Excerpt from the transcript of the ATLA episode “Zuko Alone.” Young Zuko: “Where's Mom?” Young Azula: “No one knows. Oh, and last night, Grandpa passed away.” Young Zuko: “Not funny, Azula! You're sick. And I want my knife back, now. [Zuko tries to grab it, but misses as Azula quickly moves out of the way, and loudly grunts.]”/ End ID]

Do you see it yet? Twice Zuko thinks Azula is making some kind of joke, and both times (as far as canon shows us, though I’ve seen headcanons that argue differently) Azula is actually telling the truth. 

Azula has no qualms about lying to acheive her goals. We see this multiple times over the course of the series. But if all we had to go by was these two scenes, we might paint a very different picture. 

Because there’s another, more subtle thing that both of these scenes have in common: both times, Zuko chooses to believe that Azula is lying, rather than accept that a parent (read: Ozai, because both of these things are really his fault) has failed him. 

The Beast 

There’s a kind of cognitive bias that often occurs with victims of abuse. Rather than try to explain it, I’ll give an example of a fictional character from a different story who is a very clear example of how and why it happens. 

In book one of Trials of Apollo (The Hidden Oracle), we’re introduced to a girl named Meg McCaffrey. Meg is strong, tough, and great in a fight. She explains that it’s all because of her stepfather, who took her in off the streets and trained her. She seems to genuinely care about him, and talks about him affectionately. 

But there’s another man in Meg’s life: The Beast. The Beast is a constant presence in her nightmares. He killed her first father, and we soon learn that he’s one of the primary antagonists of the story, and planning on destroying the world. 

But eventually, we discover the truth: The Beast and Meg’s stepfather are the same person. 

Meg’s stepfather is an abuser, one who’s used a common tool of abusers everywhere-- detatching from the tool he uses to abuse her and anthromorphizing it. “Don’t make me angry,” he says, “or you’ll wake up The Beast, and then whatever happens is on your head.” 

And because Meg needs to believe that her stepfather cares about her, she projects all her negative feelings about him towards this figmentary “Beast” and blaming him for all the problems in her life. 

Are we noticing the connection to Zuko and his relationship with his father yet? 

My Father Loves Me 

For the first two and a half seasons (especially in season 1), Zuko is convinced that deep down, his father loves him, cares about him, wants him back home. He has to believe that, because if he doesn’t, then what has been the point of everything he’s done until now? 

Which means that tricking him into an Agni Kai and then burning his face must have been justified. It means that capturing the Avatar really will get him back his honor. It means that everything that’s gone wrong in his life is his own fault. 

Or, at least, almost everything. 

You’re Like My Sister 

The first time we ever hear of Azula (other than that shot of her smiling at the Agni Kai in “The Storm”) is when Zuko is talking to (unconcious) Aang after he captures him in “The Siege of the North, Part 2.” 

[ID: Excerpt from the transcript of the ATLA episode “The Siege of the North, Part 2.” Zuko: “I finally have you, but I can't get you home because of this blizzard. [Stands up and looks outside the cave.] There's always something. Not that you would understand. You're like my sister. Everything always came easy to her. She's a firebending prodigy, and everyone adores her. My father says she was born lucky. He says I was lucky to be born. I don't need luck, though. I don't want it. I've always had to struggle and fight and that's made me strong. It's made me who I am.”/ End ID] 

There’s something interesting happening here. This is the first time Zuko’s been able to be totally honest about his feelings around Aang, and what does he do? He starts comparing Aang to, of all people, Azula. He’s projecting. He clearly has all of these negative feelings towards Azula, but he can’t do anything about them. So instead, he’s taking it out on Aang. 

Take every single interaction between Aang and Zuko in season one. Now realize that from Zuko’s perspective, he was dealing with his sister. 

Taking Aang prisoner on his ship? Azula. Constantly trying to capture Aang, only to be outsmarted by him? Azula. Shooting a blast of fire when Aang extends a potential hand of friendship? Azula. 

Because Aang, like Azula, is a perceived obstacle between himself and his father’s love. 

Father Says She Was Born Lucky 

Ozai didn’t just belittle Zuko-- he pitted his children against each other. He made it clear to Zuko that, even from the moment he was born, he would never, ever be as good at his sister. 

And all of this has caused a lot of rage and turmoil inside of Zuko. As self-depricating as he is, he does realize that not everything that’s gone wrong in his life is his fault. But we’ve already established that blaming his father would shatter his worldview. 

So who else does he have to blame? 

Azula. 

Azula, who was born lucky. Azula, who’s just so perfect. Azula, the prodigy. Azula, who everyone adores. Azula, who got everything. Azula, who always lies.  

Azula Always Lies 

Zuko talks a lot about honor. He talks a lot about capturing the Avatar. But when he’s stressed, when he’s feeling pressured, when he’s thinking about all the ways his life has gone wrong, he uses a different mantra. 

[ID: Excerpt from the transcript of the ATLA episode “Zuko Alone.” Young Zuko: “[Chanting in a low voice.] Azula always lies. Azula always lies.” Cut to the older Zuko, lying in green grass, holding his traveler's hat to his chest. Zuko: “Azula always lies.”/ End ID]

Azula always lies. 

”Azula always lies” is comforting. It means “father doesn’t really consider me a miserable failure.” It means “he was never really going to kill me.” 

Instead of getting angry at all the ways his father has failed him, Zuko can just blame it on Azula’s lies. That way he doesn’t ever have to admit the real problem. 

Now, I’m not saying that Azula was a perfect sister, or even a particularly good one. I’m not saying that she never lied, because we know she did. I’m not saying she didn’t hurt him, or trick him, or manipulate him. What I’m saying is that Zuko’s skewed perception has lead him to blame her not only for all the ways she hurt him, but also all the ways Ozai failed him. 

“Okay,” you’re saying. “Say I agree with you. Say we assume that all of his negative feelings that really should have been directed at Ozai were instead directed at Azula. But that doesn’t matter now. Zuko eventually did realize that his father was wrong. They had a whole dramatic confrontation where Zuko told him what a horrible father he was and everything! He’s not projecting anymore, and his current feelings towards his sister should only be indicative of her actions and behaviors. Right?” 

Wrong. 

How Cognitive Bias Works 

Cognitive bias is insidious. It doesn’t just affect one memory, it ripples outwards, affecting all of them. And the vast majority of the time, we don’t even notice it happening. 

Zuko called Ozai out for two things, and two things only. 

[ID: Excerpt from the transcript of the ATLA episode “The Day of Black Sun, Part 2: The Eclipse.” Zuko: “For so long, all I wanted was for you to love me, to accept me. I thought it was my honor I wanted, but really, I was just trying to please you. You, my father, who banished me just for talking out of turn. [Points a broadsword at his father.] My father, who challenged me, a thirteen-year-old boy, to an Agni Kai. [Cuts to shot of Ozai, looking angered.] How could you possibly justify a duel with a child?”/ End ID]

Zuko blames Ozai for his banishment, and for the Agni Kai. That is it. 

To be clear, I am not saying that Zuko thinks Ozai was a perfect father before all of this. Not at all. Zuko is aware that Ozai is “the worst father in the history of fathers.” 

But it isn’t like he’s gone back and inspected every single memory that involved Ozai and pinpointed all of the ways Ozai abuzed, manipulated, and gaslit him. He can’t. That requires both a level of objectivity he hasn’t reached, as well as a frame of reference for what normal looks like. Any victim of abuse-- especially childhood abuse-- will tell you that even though they know they were abused, they will often have or witness random interactions that will leave them thinking, “wait, this is what normally happens in this kind of situation? You mean [x] was also part of the abuse?” 

Not to mention that while Zuko didn’t examine his feelings towards Azula at any point before the finale. He had his epiphany about Ozai, and realized that his father had been wrong, but he’d always thought Azula was wrong. 

So while Zuko is aware that he had a bad father, he hasn’t actually stopped to consider how much of his anger towards his sister is actually about his father. 

(Again, I’m not blaming Zuko. None of this is his fault, any more than he’s at fault for the Air Nomad Genocide or the war. It’s just the reality of his situation.) 

Conclusion 

So what am I saying here? 

I’m saying that Zuko’s perception of his sister-- his anger, his frustration, his understanding of who she is-- is fundamentally biased. I’m saying Zuko isn’t viewing her from her own merits. I’m saying that Zuko doesn’t actually know her. He thinks he does, but he’s wrong. 

I’m adding another thing to the list of reasons why Zuko is not the person to try and help Azula through her trauma. 

I’m giving yet another example of how the fandom’s perception of Azula is also biased-- because the vast majority of our understanding of Azula’s character comes from Zuko. 

And unlike Zuko, we can detach ourselves from the narrative enough to realize that it might be worthwhile to re-examine our view of her.

[lady-plantagenet]

Unsolicited Book Reviews (n3): The Sunne in Splendour

Rating:

⭐️⭐️⭐️(+1/2?)

Even before I had an account, I tended to go to tumblr to see people’s opinions before buying a histfic. Certain books are either severely underrepresented, where I feel like there needs to be something on them, whereas others, though talked about enough, something more can still be said about them. So for my quarantine fun, I have decided to start a series where I review every medieval historical fiction novel I read. Hopefully, it will either start interesting discussions or at least be some help for those browsing its tag when considering purchasing it.

TL;DR: Keep in mind that I’m harsh with my ratings. I don’t expect my historical fiction to offer some sort of insight about the human condition or be some perfectly manicured prose, but this book’s biggest detriment was its lack of depth. Some scenes packed a serious emotional punch, but then again I am attached to this era and given the length, it would be insane not to. I learned a lot - no lie, but while my background knowledge on the wars of the roses has become enriched, I feel no closer to Richard.

Plot: We follow Richard III from a young boy at eight right before the catastrophe that was Ludlow to his death and a few years after. This story seems to be told through omniscient third person point of view, which creates issues when it comes to voice - a lot of the characters sound the same (John ‘Jack’ Howard, Francis Lovell, Richard Catesby to name a few). This is only a natural consequence of the sheer amount of people Penman chose to portray. I’m honestly still grateful for this as I was not a fan of Richard III’s POV, but really enjoyed Richard Neville Earl of Warwick’s, Margaret of Anjou and Cecily Neville’s. Everytime these three were the center of the chapter, it was truly enjoyable and multi-faceted which comes to show that Penman is capable of writing complexity when she wants to. I would also like to add that the author’s knowledge of medieval life (e.g. the food, the dogs, the nature of battles) was a high point of this novel and did something to counter-balance the rampant late 20th century flavour in this novel. She tries way too hard to adapt a medieval man such as Richard to our modern values to propagate her Richardian Agenda, which ultimately underscored this.

It must be said though that the author clearly did her research as most of what she said regarding minutae such as: what day of the week it was, where the characters were at one time, details of documents, who did what in which battle, what laws were passed etc... I had just come back to this time period after some years and I thought I knew all there was to know, yet, here comes this book which springboarded me into a wealth of new research - I suppose I am grateful for that. However, do not let that delude you into thinking it is comprehensive. There were historical innacuracies which I can only guess were intentionally made for the sake of the author’s Richardian goal e.g. Anne Neville being forced into her marital duties when historicalMargaret of Anjou made it clear that there would be no consummation until Warwick would prevail at Barnet, Isabel Neville being ‘abandoned’ by her husband in France when really it was only about 4 months they were apart and it would have made no sense for Isabel to sail with an invasionary force, Richard III abolishing benevolence tax because he thought it unfair as opposed to the reality which was that he had failed in his initial attempt to raise them because the population opposed, Richard III allowing the marriage between Jane Shore and Thomas Lynsom when in reality he had initially opposed it... Historical fiction is entitled to innacuracies but given that the author made it clear in her afterword that the only time she strayed was setting a scene in Windsor as opposed to Westminster, it is dishonest to conceal the aforementioned blips, especially when they are so unobvious that it would take a seasoned enthusiast to spot them. As you can tell they either do have a negative bearing on Richard’s image as a saint or show detractors in a positive light, clearly neither that which she was in a mood to explain away.

Characterisation: I can not stress enough how well Cecily Neville was portrayed, every scene she was in, I felt. She tends to be a very difficult character to get because of the whole illegitimacy rumour which casts shades of doubt. She was proud but also pious, subservient but also commanding... just an incredible woman of gravity. I enjoyed Warwick in all his flamboyancy as well and Edward IV was masterfully portrayed as the intelligent but forgiving man that he was. You could clearly see how despite his indulgent character, he knew when it was time to be serious, it was a joy to read the scenes where he strikes people into subserviancy. Anne Beauchamp was also quite a treat for the little time we had with her.

There were also some portrayals of mixed quality: George Duke of Clarence for one, his warped sense of humour and charm were well presented, his unpredictability adequately captured. The issue I have though is that no man is unpredictable to themselves and while it may make sense for other characters to see his temperaments as those like a weather vane it would make no sense for it to be this way in the chapters where he is the POV. Penman’s basically wrote him off as crazy (I mean literally mad) for the majority of the story which is utter tripe given that the whole madness angle is a modern invention. I won’t write more on this now as it deserves its own post (btw if anyone wants me to elaborate on anything I said so far send me an ask). Last thing I will say though: the last scene we have with him is utterly tragic and still sticks with me today, honestly the best writing in this novel was during the ‘Anne’ Book and ‘Protector of the North’ in the years surrounding George’s death. Speaking of, where do I begin with Isabel Neville and Elizabeth Woodville? Their marriages with Richard’s brothers are portrayed negatively for no other reason than to set up Richard and Anne Neville as a perfect love story. This story-telling technique is cheap as hell and I did not expect to find it in a novel so highly acclaimed for its ‘quality’. Let me make this clear: The marriage which was hailed as a love match at that time was that of Elizabeth Woodville and Edward IV. Anne and Richard could have been just as much a marriage of politics as George and Isabel’s, or the latter’s just as much a love match. George fought for Isabel just as much, if not more than Richard did for Anne, George stayed loyal for a surety whereas Richard’s bastard John’s conception may have coincided with his marriage according to Hicks, Marrying Anne was highly advantageous for Richard as marrying Isabel for George... I could go on. Therefore, why is Isabel constantly described as wretched, miserable and at one point abused(!) by her husband whereas Richard was nothing but gentle to the happy Anne. The Mary of Burgundy proposal story is often cited as proof that George only cared about power... but what about Richard’s proposal to Joanna of Portugal one month after Anne died? This may sound minor but it’s a perfect example of the author trying hard to make Richard a modern romantic figure which he wasn’t. I think he may have loved Anne Neville, but that doesn’t change the fact that he was a medieval king and made marriage provisions after her death to secure the succession. For a 800+ page novel about Richard III some seminal pieces of information were left out such as his seizure of the aged Dowager Countess of Oxford’s Howard fortune, the mysterious circumstances in which George Neville Duke of Bedford died young and unmarried after becoming his ward. All in all, do not let the wonderful historical detail fool you into thinking this is a complete account of Richard III’s day to day life.

Don’t even get me started on the Woodvilles... They were all treacherous villains and social climbers who belonged in hell. EVEN ANTHONY WOODVILLE - what has he ever done to Penman or anyone? All scenes with Elizabeth Woodville at the beggining were bedding scenes pretty much, which shows that the author saw her as nothing more than a heartless seductress. There was even a point where Edward in his rage said: ‘you would lie with a leper if it meant you becoming Queen’ and I was just shocked at that. I was further shocked when her daughter Elizabeth of York was musing that if her mother had been a good wife her father wouldn’t have needed to stray and I was just like... ‘I thought we were trying to be sensible in this book 0_0’ - How is it appropriate to have a woman blamed for her husband’s infidelity? How can we have such blatant classism and sexism on the one hand and late 20th century wokeness on the other? It’s what I said earlier, the author can’t prop up Richard and Anne without putting down all other couples in this book. By the end of the book I was honestly finding myself cheering for Elizabeth Woodville as she was becoming the woman with sense and cunning as we all know her, the saving grace of this entire characterisation was that Elizabeth became the only person with a brain by the end (I doubt this was the author’s intention). Down here in this category of bad characterisation I will add Richard and Anne themselves. Anne Neville though often absolutely adorable to me lacked any personality trait apart from being in love with Richard and past sexual abuse by Edward (which didn’t historically happen). Anne’s father and only sister die and she barely thinks about them, which severely undermines her portrayal as a loving and empathetic person. Her death scene and wane was tragic and affected me as a reader but holy Christ before that the author was very heavy handed throughout the book with her martyrisation of Anne, even when she was a young girl and everything was going well she cried in nearly every goddamn scene. Yes, this is Warwick’s daughter we are talking about. Richard (unlike the real great man that once lived on this earth) was similarly flawless and any small flaw he had was something like: ‘too trusting’, ‘acts then thinks’ - essentially ‘too good for this world’ flaws. No one is like this, least of all the real Richard who would not recognise this weird contrived romanticisation of a man. The saving grace of all this is that he admitted around the end to himself and Anne that he did want to be king a little bit, which YES, at least we get that because no one goes through all the procedures he did and endangers the survival of their house, unless they wanted to become king, at least a little bit. All in all, if Penman’s Richard III is the real man, all I have to say is: thank god his reign was cut short because this character would have made a terrible and weak monarch.

Prose: And here is where another of the stars was deducted. The prose is largely very pedestrian. It was full of modern phrases such as ‘hear me out’, ‘He thinks I am in the wrong’ ‘he can’t get away with this’ and other such likes. Also, I know it’s difficult to write a book where everyone’s names are Elizabeth, Edward, Richard and Anne, but apart from ‘Nan’ which was a nickname of that time, the modernity of ‘Bess’, ‘Bella’ or ‘Lisbet’ and the use of them in-text and not just dialogue, did much to draw me out of the medieval era. This is not just a criticism towards Penman but a grand majority of historical fiction novelists of this period. Having said that, her choice to cut conjunctions and use the word ‘be’ intead of ‘is’ or ‘are’ did not bother me at all and I found it effective in dating the language a bit. I appreciate that writing in poetic prose for 800+ pages is extremely difficult, but other’s have done it. And even in other novel where that’s not the case, the writing is still profound and impactful and conveys a deeper meaning, whereas here it’s more of a fictionalised history book. The author appears to have some imagination as the few scenes she made up e.g. Catherine Woodville’s visit to Richard or Edward summoning Edmund’s previous carer John to talk about Edmund as he was trying to deal with the grief of losing George, any scene with Cecily Neville in it, Anne Neville and Veronique (OC lady-in-waiting to her) when they were in hiding, Rosamund and Richard at the end, Margaret of Anjou when she was lodged at that abbey, When Stillington visited George before his death to give him a rosary and last rites and he refused to get them from him, Anne and Richard going to Middleham and Isabel’s lying in state were just some of them. However, even if you took all those well-written scenes and stuck them together they would not be more than maybe 150 pages which is not good in such a massive novel. I really don’t know how I would rank the prose, I feel weird saying it’s at the low bestseller level because at least it’s not overwritten and annoying, however, it lacked a lot of soul most of the time, which is dissapointing given what Penman had to work with. I can see that the author has some strengths, for example she’s good at writing about the weather and the natural landscape, she’s also good at describing facial expressions. But her massive flaw is dialogue and flow - especially the latter. The flow is hindered by her abject inability to weave historical events and their happenings into the prose, so she often settles for an exposition dump, especially when it comes to some male chatacter’s POV such as John Howard, Francis Lovell or Buckingham. A lot of the characters exposited at each other too, which wasted the opportunity for some serious character profiles. Basically too much telling and not enough showing. In conclusion, It didn’t always feel clunky, expository or laboured, but it way too often did for the good to be redeemed by the bad prose-wise.

In Conclusion, I cheated on this book a couple of times when it dragged, but got right back into it whenever the good sections came along. It is one of these books which people cannot stop raving about and I can’t stress how much I wanted to love it when I got it. It’s nice being a fan of something a lot of people are too for once, but it was just not to be. But at least now I can say I have read the cult classic of this histfic niche which apparently everyone has read and cried over. Even though it took me 7 months where others got through it in a week through sleepless nights. Despite all the negativity in this review, I would still reccomend it as it is a solid book and written by someone who clearly gets the conflict and time period. You will learn lots with this book (I intend to keep it as a sort of timeline) regarding things that you might otherwise find too dry to research in depth e.g. battle strategies and sieges. But what you will not learn about is the characters’ psychologies and personalities though Penman tries very hard and heavy-handedly to exposit their feelings to us.

[sweetsmellosuccess]

NYFF 2020: Part 1

It’s been a curious season of festivals  —  as always, Venice, TIFF, and the NYFF go more or less back-to-back-to-back, making for an almost indecent amount of captivating offerings for all but the most gluttonous of cinephiles  —  but not without its charms. In this time of massive uncertainty in the industry, amongst film distributors and theaters particularly, it’s deeply reassuring to know the medium is still capable of powerful statements, exquisite imagery, and haunting performances as it ever has.

Mind you, next year at this time, if there’s still no widely available vaccine, there might be a more serious dearth of selections, but for what has been an unsettling and mostly miserable 2020, we can thank the stars that films are often shot a year or more in advance of their release.

This year’s NYFF (still ongoing, as I write this) has provided some glories and some failures, more or less in keeping with the usual standard. Herewith, a quartet of selections, ranging from a resurrected Hungarian triumph, to a modern French non-romance, to the debut of a new and energizing auteur.

Damnation (1988) Dir. Bela Tarr

Perhaps no setting in cinematic history is more appropriate for shooting in low-contrast black and white than late ‘80s, post-communist Hungary. Bleak, drab, and pelting with rain, the landscape bleeds in shades of grey. Bela Tarr’s 1988 film, a newly restored 4K edition from the Festival’s “Revival” section, begins with a long shot of a ski lift-like apparatus, endlessly transporting buckets of coal to a repository, whose grinding machinery offers a looping hum throughout the film. Much as Tarr’s various musical interludes include similarly cyclical drones of accordion music, are the men and women of this nameless small city seemingly doomed to their various loops of behavior and experience. In Tarr’s Hungary, everyone looks haunted and morose, like a selection of down-on-their-luck rummies in a dive bar at last call. One such bar patron, Karrer (Miklos Szekely B.), is deeply in love with a beautiful, depressed (unnamed) nightclub singer (Vali Kerekes), married to a loutish man, Sebestyén (Gyorgy Cserthalmi), in bad debt to the wrong sorts of people. When Karrer’s friend, bar owner Willarsky (Gyula Pauer), offers him a potentially lucrative gig picking up a mystery package abroad and bringing it back to him, Karrer instead offers it to Sebestyén as a means of getting him out of debt, but more importantly getting him away from his wife, so their affair can continue apace. Tarr’s films move slowly, with long, static shots, or slow-panning camera movement, but within his frame, he packs in detail  —  from the pellet-like surface of a wall, to the expression of a group of people huddled under a station roof, staring out at the endless rain  —  and adds in acute sound effects as further punctuation (the sound of a man close shaving over his scruff with a straight-edge, for example, or water dripping from an unseen leak). As with his 1994 opus, Satantango, he includes extended shots of drunken merriment, with people dancing, stumbling, falling over each other, and coming back again, but the effect isn’t exactly heartening. As packs of stray dogs work their way over muddy, mostly deserted fields, and Karrer continues to imbibe the depressed resignation of his life’s trajectory (“the fog settles into your soul,” Willarsky helpfully explains), Tarr’s film, his first collaboration with Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, presents a remarkably tactile vision of life under a blundering political machine, well past the point of repair. With its deep shadows, and obvious femme fatale, you could make the case that the film is a ripened Noir, but one with much of the magistry beaten out of it, tarnished in the mud of the fields. Karrer wears a trenchcoat, alright, but it’s only there to keep out the rain.

Mangrove (2020) Dir. Steve McQueen

Frank Crichlow (Shaun Parkes) didn’t mean to create a community, exactly, when he opened his restaurant in the section of West London that had become home to many immigrants from Trinidad and Jamaica. He just wanted to have a clean business that wouldn’t attract undue police attention, as his former nightclub, Rio, had done. As more and more natives of the Caribbean moved abroad, however, there became a greater need for a place where the community could gather and feel at home. Frank’s place became a local landmark, and Frank himself, a reluctant leader of the growing movement against the continual police harassment many of the residents faced on a daily basis. In this, he wasn’t given much of a choice: Led by a deeply racist police force  —  more or less personified by writer/director Steve McQueen in the form of the sneering PC Frank Pulley (Sam Spruell)  —  Frank’s place had been unnecessarily raided nine times in six weeks. So, when approached by local Black activists, including Darcus Howe (Malachi Kirby) and Altheia Jones-Lecointe (Letitia Wright), he agrees to take part in a peaceful protest against the constables. Naturally, the police turn violent, and in the resulting chaos, nine protestors, including Frank, Darcus, and Altheia are arrested. Over time, they are tried, acquitted, and re-tried for even more serious charges. McQueen’s film, another segment from Small Axe, his chronicle of London’s West-Indies neighborhood through the decades, focuses on this specific case, not just because two of the defendants decided to represent themselves (proving to be adept barristers), but because it became a landmark part of the British crusade for civil rights (even though, as the film’s postscript explains, Frank was still routinely harassed by the police for another 18 years after the trial). To capture the sense of the complexity of the community, McQueen employs a David Simon-esque narrative hodge-podge of smaller scenes from different characters’ vantage points and views, allowing us an in-depth sense of the neighborhood and the stakes, while rarely dipping into the more played out elements of the courtroom genre. I would say, in light of the recent racial protests after the Louisville grand jury failed to hold two of the three officers involved in the death of Breonna Taylor responsible, the film could not be more prescient, but, sadly, this would have also been true just about anytime in the last three decades. As Frank says of the incorrigibly racist leaders and henchpeople continually holding them down, “These people are like vampires, you think you beat them, but they keep coming back again.”

The Salt of Tears (2020) Dir. Philippe Garrel

From the flinch-inducing title (a direct translation from the French), which sounds like a YA novel steeped in melodrama, to the mournful piano soundtrack of the intro, Philippe Garrel’s (very) French counter-romance would seem to indicate a different sort of film than what he’s actually made. It’s a bit of flim-flammery from a celebrated director unafraid to throw his audience for a loop or two (take that title, which proves to be thoroughly ironic until the very last scene). Luc (Logann Antoufermo), a young man from the provinces, has come to Paris to take an entrance exam at an exacting wood-working institute in order to receive a degree in joining, in order to better emulate his woodworking father (Andre Wilms), a kind, elderly man with a “poet’s soul.” In Paris, he happens to meet Djemila (Oulaya Amamra), a sweet young woman falling hard for the handsome Luc, who callously breaks her heart after he returns to his village. Back home, he takes up with Genevieve (Louise Chevillote), an old high-school flame, who also falls deeply for him, getting pregnant in the process, but when he unexpectedly gets accepted to the woodworking school, he dumps her to return to Paris, where  —  you guessed it!  —  he meets up with yet another woman, Betsy (Souheila Yacoub), a stunning brunette whom, we are told via our occasional narrator (Jean Chevalier), is finally “his equal.” Or more so, to be precise, as she takes in a second lover (Martin Mesnier) to their apartment, making the unhappy Luc live as a threesome. Garrel’s charting of Luc’s endless relationship explorations themselves gets tiresome, but the director isn’t much interested in his protagonist’s romantic investments, as he is the callousness of Luc, and the young in general  —  Luc crushes two loving women; then himself gets crushed; while treating his loving father as yet another irritation from time to time  —  and the manner in which their decision-making has often not matured enough to include the expansiveness of empathy. They know not what they do, until it’s too late.

Beginning (2020) Dir. Dea Kulumbegashvili

Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s debut feature, about a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses working as missionaries in a small village outside Tbilisi, and the abuse they endure at the hands of religious extremists, captivates and bewilders in equal measure. The film begins with a long single shot from inside a “prayer house,” as congregants slowly file in and fill the pews, eventually allowing David (Rati Oneli) to begin his sermon concerning the story of Abraham, willing to sacrifice his beloved son in order to appease God. The shot remains static for so long, building its own rhythm, that it becomes that much more shocking when a side door suddenly opens, and an unseen assailant tosses in a fire bomb, lighting the floor and sending everyone into terrified tumult. Kulumbegashvili’s film is filled with similar striking compositions, long single shots with very little camera movement, the edges of the frame gradually generating increasing levels of apprehension, as the action swirls often out of our visual range. She has a way of filming the opposite of what you expect: Several key conversations between pairs of characters are shot with the focus on the reaction rather than the speaker, and vitally significant scenes are crafted with characters’ backs to us, such that we can’t read their expressions or get our normal bearings. It’s a similar conundrum for the missionaries themselves, especially Yana (Ia Sukhitashvili), David’s dutiful wife, a former actress, who tries to make the best of their difficult situation, even in the face of such violent opposition to her husband’s proselytizing, a job David, ambitious he is, sees as the key to rising up in the Church’s hierarchy. After their prayer house is burned to the ground, David leaves for a few days to meet with the Elders in order to secure funding for its replacement. Into that void, enter a detective (Kakha Kintsurashvili), who appears one night to “talk” with Yana, but ends up intimidating her into a sort of sexual compromise, an event that leaves her strangely unfazed, even, it might be said, oddly curious. From there, things get both more dire, and more peculiar, with Kulumbegashvili’s implacable camera remaining stoically witness to her characters’ increasingly distressing plight. As curious as it can be tonally, she is so in command of her narrative, the film is never less than compelling, even as tragedy becomes something else entirely. By film’s end, true to David’s earlier sermons, it’s clear that at least his most devoted acolyte has taken in the biblical lessons he proffered, for better or worse.

[thehiddenlawyer]

Mother’s Milk

Before you read-- please keep in mind that I’m REALLY not mentally...stable enough to write coherently so y’know. Enjoy <3

Apparently, the only way to untangle what my brain’s going through is to realize that my experience of Mother’s Milk isn’t just from the perspective of Patrick a survivor of sexual abuse, but also the addict, the potential alcoholic, a potential mother, a lover of difficult men and situations (these last two are Mary), and the helpless outsider looking in (Robert), and someone who is completely horrified of messing up so badly that their preventive measures completely backfire and bring full-circle (Patrick again).

During my first reading of Mother’s Milk I found I didn’t connect to it as much as I had with the other books in the story and I’m not sure why. I think my brain focused so completely on Some Hope and the aspects of Patrick as the survivor trying to find his way into the world that Mother’s Milk was too abstract for me to understand.

I kept thinking, even after I reread the novels, that the reason I wasn’t able to connect to the fourth novel was because I’m not a mother, and I have a pretty healthy relationship with my parents. I think the world of my parents, they’ve given me more than I could ever hope for, they’ve sacrificed and have continued to sacrifice, for my sisters and I on a profound level. Like all parents, they’re human and they made mistakes, they’ve given me my fair share of baggage again, like all parents, no matter how careful they are.

So I have continued to read the book as a fan of literature and found myself enthralled with Edward St. Aubyn’s representation of motherhood and childhood, and the understanding of the child of his mother and father, and eventually his sibling. It’s such breathtaking, pure prose, an imaginative take on Patrick’s children. If you’ve read the novels you know that the perspective shifts a lot, that we see the point of view of different characters, not just Patrick. So when the baby narrator talked about his father who couldn’t stop talking in the hospital room, I remember my heart in my throat wondering if the baby’s father was Patrick!

Imagine my surprise last night when I watched Mother’s Milk and found that I connected so much more to this bit of the story than I’d imagined earlier. I still don’t think I fully understand what happened, and I don’t understand my reactions to a few bits of it—I just know that I reacted, and maybe as I verbally vomit all over this post I can figure out a few things through my exhaustive question for narrative exhaustion.

This was also the biggest deviation between the book and the show by the way, the book is so complex because it’s mostly cerebral, a lot of it is Robert’s understanding of his father and his father’s situation and the relationship his father has with Eleanor. The book shows Robert’s sympathy more, Patrick doesn’t fail as viciously as he does in the show. But the show does capture Patrick’s desperation to be a better father and to protect is children from the poison of his past and his own life, but he tries so hard that it backfires and he comes back full circle. There’s this gorgeous scene in the book when they’re in a shitty hotel room in New York (after having gotten kicked out of a few others because Patrick is David’s son and he has to get them thrown out of a few places first) where Thomas and Mary are sleeping in one room but Robert can’t sleep so he goes to the living room where Patrick’s supposed to be sleeping on the sofa bed but he’s in  this manic state, caught between insomnia and drunkness and he simply absorbs his father’s verbal vomit. Robert tells Patrick to stop because he’s frightened and Patrick does, and he apologizes and winds up reading to his son instead.

While the books are filled with loving, touching moments like that, I think the episode really lacked that bit of humanity that Patrick has.

I’m starting to realize that I’m disappointed with this episode.

It conveys what it needs to convey, it highlights everything it should highlight, especially Robert’s understanding of Patrick but it does it contained in an hour long tv episode. I think they could make a full length feature film with Mother’s Milk with all the correct details and I’d watch it a million times.

The Addict

Through therapy and research and counselling, I’ve discovered that children who suffered trauma or specifically sexual abuse at a very young age tend to have addictive personalities. It’s a coping mechanism, it’s something comfortable and familiar, something easy to turn to when everything else is up in the air. If you take the alcohol and drugs out of the connotation of addiction, you’ll see that it’s simply repetitive, comforting behavior, something to blur the edges of reality not through chemical haze or a high but the simple psychology of doing something to distract you from your own thoughts.

I have a very addictive personality and it shows itself in a lot of ways. I call it stubbornness, my family and friends prefer to think of it as a healthy sense of curiosity and a thirst for knowledge. But once I get a…noun in my head, I have to pursue it and I have no control over it. And I say noun because it can be a person (BC, Nick Cave, AB, even people that I latch on to like @sobeautifullyobsessed) place (Fort Point in San Francisco, Baker Beach, Half Moon Bay, London, Molly’s flat) or a thing (alcohol, cigarettes, writing….writing is the biggest one) or an idea (Sherlolly, any idea I’ve ever had to write any story or a character that inspires my thoughts like Patrick or Christopher Tiejens).

It’s HARD.

I’ve tried my best to let go of these distractors because I can SEE I’m out of control when I’m in one of my “manic states”. When I’ve latched onto this noun so hard that’s permeating everything I do, everything I think, everything I say. These nouns distract me from work, from school. You’ve SEEN my posts where I should be studying but I can’t stop watching something or reading something or writing something. Through therapy and meditation, I noticed that I latch on like that when the past bubbles too close to the surface, where the violence and shame that whispers across my skin is a little too close to the surface and I need something else to occupy my brain for those moments.

That’s addiction explained in general, now I want to talk to you about alcoholism before I connect it back to Patrick.

I struggle with alcohol. A combination of my addictive personality and the chemical affects of alcohol have been a lure since I was a teenager, and I’ve been very painfully aware that it’s a rabbit hole waiting to swallow me up. I made a conscious decision when I was 16 that I wouldn’t touch alcohol until I turned 21, and once I turned 21, I tried to never buy alcohol for myself but in my family and my culture it’s always present so I’ve always been around it. When I moved it, I’ve been living with foot on solid ground and one in the rabbit’s hole. With my health crises, I swore it off completely and succeeded for a while to stay sober but I’ve been predictably failing miserably these past few weekends.

I’ve tried to never drink alone but I’ve done it several times and secret, which is a warning bell. The problem is always that it’s a secret, and I drink to pass out.

I drank A LOT last night during the wedding, I felt myself slipping away and had exercise some control and stop. I am aware that I was giggly and talkative like I always am when I’m sloshed—I don’t know if it’s a gift or a curse. No one ever knows I’m drunk, and I’m never a sad or angry when I’m around people. When I’m, alone that’s a different story.

And drinking helps you disconnect from you skin, lets you float away from things you don’t want to confront, things that you’d rather go unthought.

For someone who has lived through trauma (and let me enumerate for you what I have been through: sexual abuse by multiple parties as a child, becoming a refugee when I was 8 and being forced out of my home to come to a country where I knew nothing and no one and my parents knew nothing and no one, I’ve lived through life-threatening illness and recently, having survived law school, my body tried to kill me again and I’m still dealing with that bit of reality) you can see why drinking and disassociation and addiction is such a lovely thought for us.

I would much rather look at my life objectively. I sometimes like to imagine what it’s like hearing my story as someone who doesn’t know me, who hasn’t been around me. How can one single person experience being raped as a child, becoming a refugee, cancer, suicidal thoughts and addiction, and still function?

Well…you can, it just comes with a lot of extra little side effects that you probably aren’t aware of.

Like Patrick can be a husband, a father, a survivor of being raped repeatedly by his father with an indifferent mother, he can be a drug addict, an alcoholic, and a barrister.

He can be all those things.

The side effects are when you’re not careful, the smallest notion, the smallest idea or thought can push you over the edge.

I can sit here and have conversations about being raped and function perfectly but one day someone will something small and (I loathe this word) trigger me and I go down to a spiral. I drink, I seek my other addictions, because I need to not be me for a little bit, I’d rather just watch someone else deal with being me.

You can fight it and fight it and fight it. You can lay awake nights dreaming of that escape that you KNOW ruins your life and you someone make it through one more second without it until you just can’t. until one tiny thing pushes you over the edge and it’s a house of course that falls. You drink too much, you smoke too much, you neglect your responsibilities, you push away everything that is good about yourself because you need to wallow in the bad, to convince yourself that you are a shitty person because shitty things happened to you.

I do that all the fucking time, I’m doing it right now. I should be studying for the Bar, I shouldn’t be drinking, I shouldn’t be smoking, I shouldn’t be writing, I shouldn’t be reading anything that’s not related to the Bar. But I’m not, because it’s comforting self-destructive behavior, it’s something I know how to do, it’s easier than all the rest of it.

For Patrick, it’s the same. I’m not asking you to excuse any of his behavior, because I can’t forgive him for giving up on himself because I feel like he’s propelled me to giving up on myself too (I really have these past few days just thinking about Mother’s Milk and At Last) but this is urging you to understand why he fails so miserably, why he flushes years of sobriety down the toilet, why he can’t stop making his parents mistakes and adopting them as your own.

The harder you run, the easier it is to fall and that’s what happens to him.

Potential Mother

My ideas about motherhood are laden with trauma and feminism, they’re this psychotic, bipolar, schizophrenic blend of narcissism, selfishness, abject fear of failure as a mother, fear of lack of control over what happens to my child, hating the idea of becoming nothing but a stay-at-home mom after working so hard to become more…so reading and watching Mother’s Milk the potential mother in me is watching it in terror.

Because all I can imagine is finding the man I love, the man I adore, the love of my heart and soul, predictably attracted to his darkness and intensity, trusting him enough to let him father my child only to come to the realization that he’s not as strong as I need him to be, that I’m going to have to step up to bat and be everything to our child because he’s failing.

The thought of leaving that potential love in favor of my child’s wellbeing sickens me to my stomach. I can’t bare the thought and that potential mother shrivels at this unlikely hypothetical.

God I don’t even want to think about what that’s like.

I can’t bare to think what Mary goes through! (And yet I do, as @sobeautifullyobsessed has been reading via my extremely random ass prose)

So we circle back to Julia and what happens with Patrick and I again preface this with a few things- these are my thoughts based on my own background and prejudices, my own life experiences and my understanding of the characters in the novels and the show. This is my opinion based on addiction and personalities and trauma, my understanding love.

Julia is a very, very, very messed up individual. She every bit as pompous and unbearable git as Patrick is. The difference is that Julia enjoys the cruelty of their world while Patrick takes comfort in the routine of it- it’s a world he knows, disappointment and anger are emotions that he understands better than happiness or forgiveness. It’s easier to default to negative emotions rather than positive or productive ones (as I’ve been learning these past few days).

Julia should not have encouraged Patrick. And Patrick should have walked away.

But they didn’t because they’re both damaged individuals.

There’s no excuse.

There’s no excuse in claiming that Mary was being cold to Patrick, there’s no excuse in saying that Patrick was feeling lonely and bored and needing sex and Julia was available.

If he really wanted to, he could have found Mary, could have told her, could have confided in her.

GOD the way he clings to her in the beginning after he tells her he’s been disinherited, the smile on his face when he’s in bed and she tells him they’re going to pick up Kettle, the way they lay on the couch together and talk about needing a holiday from their holiday….he actively, consciously, with malice aforethought pushes her away. He’s confused between wanting her so much he can’t stand it and wanting to push her away just in case he makes the same mistakes his father did, same mistakes his mother made. And while attempting to run away from all that, he makes his own, fresh mistakes with Mary. He knows it too, he says exactly that while he’s on the poolside with Julia.

He could have turned to Mary but she’s new, the joy she could bring him, the promise of peace and forgiveness with her standing beside him is too much light for someone who knows darkness like an old friend.

He should have turned to Mary.

As for Julia—let’s go back to their relationship shall we. In the books, when they first meet, she’s underage and talks him into having sex with her. In the show, the only positive thing she does is show up at the end of Never Mind and put her hand over his forehead. In Some Hope she tries to break his heart and his best friends heart by forcing him to fuck her when he’s in no condition to make a rational decision Here, she does the same thing. She should’ve pushed him away.

A good person in her shoes would have pushed him away.

I cannot and will not deny that Benedict Cumberbatch the actor and Jessica Raine the actress have wonderful chemistry together and they’re so sexy together, they’re interactions are stunning, crackling with energy.

But but BUT the toxic relationship between Patrick and Julia should NOT be sexualized or idealized. Cheating on your devoted and loving spouse is NOT sexy. Taking advantage of someone with clear emotional issues, struggling with sobriety, hanging on to it by a thread, is NOT sexy. It can never be sexy, and it should never be sexy.

Christ my heart hurt for Mary. I’ve been seeing discussions on here and on twitter about when Mary knows that her husband is being unfaithful—she knows the second it happens. Watch her the morning after, when he stands next to her and says “now we can have fun!” The poor thing knows and she tries to excuse it away because she loves him, and she understands the pain he’s in, the confusion he’s experiencing.

In this love triangle, only Mary Melrose comes out in tact. Julia and Patrick…they mess up big time, and Patrick knows it.

And instead of stopping, instead of trying to find someway back to being a husband and father, he pushes Mary further and further away because it’s so much easier than confronting their life together.

God he wants to be with her so much but he doesn’t know how.

There’s a feeling of decapitation, like missing a limb, losing the words that you want to say but they’re not there, they’ve flown the coop.

I want to confess, I want to live in your heart, I want the warmth of your soul, the warmth of your smile but darling it’s easier to push you away now because what if I disappoint you again, what if I break your heart again? I need to cut you my love, before you cut me.

I’ve had that conversation so many fucking times man….

Love me but I need you to hate me to function.

Love me, be my escape, but I need to make you hate me because I don’t want to see disappointment in your eyes.

 -----------------------------

Guys, I’m completely certain I’m not making any sense because I’m really in a bit of a free fall right now and there’s no landing in sight.

I might add more to this, make it more coherent but this is all I got. And I’m not making sense.

[tuchimuchibrainvomit]

Netflix’s Death Note -- I’m Not Mad, I’m Just Disappointed

I’ve wanted to do a real in-depth critique and response towards one of my earliest posts about the Death Note movie on Netflix, but first I had to go back to watch the anime and read the manga to really formula my thesis and case study

Let’s start blunt:

Netflix’s Death Note (NDN) is a terrible movie.

We can get that out of the way. But my real thoughts are not so much on why it was awful...

Yet rather, the amount of potential to be a decent film and create an identity for itself. For a short “review” of this film -- the acting’s hokey, the CG is little ridiculous and the plot nonsensical mess of contrivances that tries to create a deep mystery, but at center elements of creating a compelling and truly thrilling mystery.

And that’s what to analyze today:

Not “Why Netflix’s Death Note Was Bad”, but “How COULD Netflix’s Death Note Be A Compotent Mystery”.

Let’s start from the basics of an adaptation.

We all know an adaptation will never be 1-to-1 with the original source material, however it is an adaptation’s job to convey to the audience the themes, emotions and intentions of the original works.

NDN, fails on all three accounts. Now let’s break it down:

Firstly, Themes:

Looking at the original Death Note manga, the central themes of the series were the cat-and-mouse mind games of the two main characters Light and L. What NDN was, was a gory action flick in the vain of Final Destination.

You see where the fundamentals went wrong from the start? The writer clearly did not have an idea of what made Death Note the experience that it was and the Death Note as an object itself was more of a means to an end -- creating a compelling series of mysteries.

Now, using the events that transpired in NDN itself -- How could this start to get the feel of Light and L’s mind games:

I could see the seeds sewn in NDN with the final events of Light’s plan...

However, what this lacked was the input of L and his own counter strategy. And this is where NDN’s L really failed to capture what made the original special. The focus on L being a more “realistic” -- and I use realism in the term of the film making style and not actually pertaining to reality -- character and have more human reaction very much weakened the other worldly intelligence that made the original L so interesting.

It’s one of the few times that progress was made with Light Turner, but this would be in vain as the first 3/4 of the film failed at creating a truly intelligent and complex Light. In fact, this is kind of what Mia was becoming, but they only went halfway with both of them.

Secondly, Emotions:

What do I mean by emotions?

More or less, the feelings that the movie was to facilitate from the audience itself and this is the one that NDN gets closest to understanding, but still fails miserably in execution.

In the original, Death Note wanted its users to both feel on edge and excited, but also in a place where they could understand Light and L -- almost as if they were watching the events play out and seeing each plan in motion and how they were successful or not in their mutual scheming.

And while the chase scene in NDN is ridiculous, I won’t outright discredit the metaphorical feeling of a cat-and-mouse chase -- however presented more physically than mentally. This paired with the main theme being lost really hurt the movie’s chances of creating interesting battles of wit.

Light Turner -- feels too much. He’s far too emotional to allow the wit that he begins to present towards the end of the movie to have audience throughout the film. And this is a problem and all has to do with splitting the dual personalities of Light Yagami into Light Turner and Mia. In fact, I would have enjoyed if Mia had become the central character as a means to incorporate Light’s steady decline from sympathetic to a murderer with a God complex. And this is just one example of how the film could have been stronger.

L -- also feels too much. The idea of L going into an emotional rampage over the death of Watari flies in the face of how cold and intellectual L is. And while this is a different twist on a what-if L remained alive long enough to mourn Watari, it fails that L does not take that as initiative to chase Light harder in wit, rather than creating a chase that leads to nowhere.

Mia -- actually feels the right amount. She’s supposed to be Misa, but quickly begins to be the dualism of Light’s personality. Which, I also think was not inherently a bad thing, but too many bad ideas and plot contrivances actually lowered the amount of potential she had.

I’ll come back to this a little later on.

Thirdly, Intentions of the Original Work

What does Death Note intend to do with it’s audience?

It presents a story about two genius playing metaphorical chess with each other to catch one and kill the other. It shows the downfall of a genius with hints of sociopathy break down into a god complex that removes morality and limitations to his ambition by giving him limitless power. It shows the nature of man, life, death and control. Light and L manipulate MANY people on their conquest to defeat the other and even after his death, his tailing of Light never ceases. Near and Mello just happen to be the legacies of L and are nowhere near as compelling or interesting but the point still stands.

NDN does none of that. But I want to look at why this is both a good and a bad thing for the sake of the film:

Here, this should explain plenty on why.

NDN tries to be more of a cash grab on the respected Intellectual Property of Death Note, using its name to turn a profit. It is turned more into a teen drama as that is what will be familiar to American audiences, even if we can all agree teen dramas in this day and age are a waste of time.

Even if Adam Wingard is a fan of the original Death Note, his film does not present an adaptation that pays respect to Death Note -- but is using Death Note’s IP as a means to make money.

I can understand WHY this happens because films need to make money and thus taking risks is a lot harder to do since the focus seems to be less on artistic integrity for the film medium, but on turning profit. This is not a new concept either, it’s just something that is more blatant that it has been in the past.

But let’s talk more about NDN not for it’s failure as an adaptation, but rather the potential to be a satisfying mystery, and an interesting development of a character that was put out before he had enough time to cook.

Let’s start with Light and HOW he had the potential to be a compelling character.

Nat Wolff and his terrible acting aside, there was a point in the Netflix Death Note film that genuinely started to become intriguing. And I HATE to recap with these words, but here we go:

While Light and Mia are at their high school prom (Ugh, I want to die),  Mia reveals that she wrote Light’s name in his Death Note as a means to scare him into forfeiting the notebook to her. 

Which first I’ll say, Bravo Mia -- you were the character I was rooting for since you were closest to the original Light Yagami as a manipulative sociopath. Too bad you weren’t enough to save this horrid film.

This was a bit of potential that urked me to not be handled with care, Mia COULD’VE been an interesting character and personally I feel would have worked better as the main protagonist (Notice: Protagonist does not equal Hero).

And in an act of petty revenge, Light sets up an entire scheme using the Death Note that results in his name being erased from death by being engulfed in flames and Mia dying.

There are some problems -- like how the rules of the Death Note make no sense in the movie’s universe and are more of a plot contrivance than something used to create genuine intrigue.

But I like this turn of events in Light, I started to see a new side of him emerge and become a manipulative genius that he could have been for the entire film. I don’t mind the fact that he starts as a wimpy geek, this is NOT Light Yagami, I disassociate the two. But, his change is so jarring with no real progression throughout the film that Light comes off more as a lucky jackass than a real calculative person.

And this is a MAJOR problem when you want a character to develop.  And I get it, this is a movie.  It has a time limit to wrap itself up, but this should have been done with better care. You have to have a natural progression from where the character starts to where he ends up. Him being timid teenager with a Death God in the first two acts to immediate sociopathic genius just because his girlfriend tricked him is NOT natural progression. It comes off as contrived and uncoordinated.

(If you haven’t seen my Madoka Rebellion review, check it out. This is ONE of the reasons why the series of Puella Magi Madoka Magica is not as good as the Rebellion movie in my opinion. The progression of some characters -- except Homura, Madoka and Sayaka feel jarring, like Kyoko, who is my favorite character but is not given enough time to truly change naturally. And Mami, ugh, Mami, I like your design but I saw your impending death coming so fast it was uncanny, you were better developed in the alternate timelines, but I digress.)

For an example of how the Death Note anime does this well is in Light Yagami himself.  From the start, he is a genius, popular and well-respected by both his peers and the police. However, you can tell he has signs of sociopathy, not having much sympathy for those who do not abide by laws.  Once he is given the Death Note, he is skeptical, as any intellectual would be. But after learning the truth, he starts to become corrupted by his power, culmanating into a complex, where he takes a Machivellian approach to creating his “Perfect World”

And I can hear you saying the anime had multiple episodes to get this right, but that doesn’t mean a movie cannot do it as well.

Take James Cameron’s Avatar for example, the main characters go from scientists to environmentalists. It is not jarring to see them want to protect what they have studied and the Na’vi that they have learned the culture of. This was done in one lone movie, and that shows that Netflix’s Death Note could have done it to. It needed to better pace Light’s fall from grace and timidness into a confident one.

Same goes for L, who has the opposite problem in NDN. L starts of as fairly confident, obtuse and clearly slightly autistic... But, his descent into a gun-toting maniac comes without much clarity. Sure, his motive was in Watari’s death, but L never shows any personal agency to represent the respect he had so earned. L needs Watari for everything, which for L doesn’t work with how he is depicted to be.  He’s a genius and a detective who has solve many crimes on his own, but why I found myself asking, HOW?! He’s so unstable that pricking his finger seems like enough to set him off. No one that unstable should be anywhere near a crime scene or trusted by police. And while the ending shows this, at the same time I asked why did the police TRUST him in the first place.

See how it makes no sense?!

Light is about how he got from Step A to Step C. L is about how he got to Step A in the first place.

Mia is the same way.  How is this cheerleader, who by all intents and purposes is depicted to be less intelligent than Light, albeit quirkier, such a genius?!

She even says “I’m a fucking cheerleader, Light?”

Is she the head cheerleader? She shows no signs of being a manipulative genius until she gets the Death Note. Which is SIMILAR to Light Yagami, but for all the wrong reasons. Mckenzie Zales, she is not. Most Popular Girls in School may be about cursing Barbie dolls, but atleast we understand where Mckenzie’s brilliance is from. She’s the head cheerleader, she manipulated her way to the top as a little girl. Her personality and her intellect are never in question. But Mia’s are in constant questioning. Hence the title of this article, I’m not mad, but disappointed.

Mia had potential to be interesting but we saw no progression.Sure, she LOOKED a bit off her rocker, but the audience is never clued in on this. She’s characterized as a hot cheerleader to us from Light’s perspective and I’m certain he’s not supposed to be an unreliable narrator based on how he is SUPPOSED to be perceived. We have nothing, not a hint of a doubt until the reveal of her insanity.

And this is where I want to talk about writing mysteries:

I’ll be upfront, I hate the series Sherlock. HBomberguy did a fantastic review on it, articulating my reasons extremely thoroughly. But that video is an hour long, so I’ll sum it up.

The key to a good mystery comes in four things:

1.) The Set Up. Show us the problem. What do we know and what needs to be answered? 2.) Investigate. What is being shown/revealed to the audience that plays a major role in solving the mystery? This can range from explicitly said or shown, to a Chekov’s Gun, Red Herrings or minor background details that gets some attention. 3.) Hypothesis. Using what we’ve seen, what can the audience articulate as the solution to the case? 4.) The Reveal. And this is VERY important and the easiest to mess up -- when the answer is revealed and how the protagonists got to the solution, it should involve ALL the things that the audience had been shown beforehand and be reasonable. 

Or to sum it up, violently:

DO NOT HAVE A PIECE OF EVIDENCE THAT LINKS EVERYTHING TOGETHER BE REVEALED AT THE LAST SECOND DURING THE EXPLANATION!! 

THAT’S BAD MYSTERY WRITING!!! There is a reason why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was such a good mystery writer and used logic and control over the world he creative to build compelling mystery. There is a reason why people say to read Umineko No Naku Koro Ni’s sound novels and not watch the anime.

They give the audience enough information to hypothesize the answer in a reasonable manner and when the answer is inevitably revealed, the pieces make sense and if your hypothesis was wrong, it was because YOU did not put the pieces together properly and you have only yourself to blame. 

That’s how a puzzle works, is it not? If you are missing a piece to it, you CANNOT solve the puzzle. 

Let’s use an example above of how it fails:

Using Umineko’s anime, we’ll use Episode 2 -- Turn of the Golden Witch the 4th, 5th and 6th Twilights (Murders based on an Epitaph).

In the novel, we see a room with three dead bodies, one dead in a chair with a stake in his stomach, one dead on the floor with a stake in his leg and the other with her head laid on a desk and a stake beside her and a bullet wound to the head.

In the anime, we see a room with three dead bodies, one dead in a chair with a stake in his stomach, one dead on the floor with a stake in his leg and the other with her head laid on a desk and a stake inside of her head.

Now, this series is about disproving magic and that every death could happen logically and does happen one way logically. Does something seem off in the anime?

That’s right, why is there a stake in her head?! In the novel, it was beside her head!

In the 7th novel, it is revealed that she committed suicide by shooting herself in the head with a rifle that fell behind the desk due to a complex set up, the stake was a red herring to make people assume she was murdered by it and that she/he (it’s complicated) was the true mastermind of the tragedy in the series.

This little inconsistency breaks the mystery and would be impossible to answer as suicide, since the stake was in her head and her wound was NOT a bullet wound. 

See how the mystery falls apart when you have the answer and look back?

In any adaptation or any mystery in general, DETAILS ARE IMPORTANT!!

Sherlock has a habit of presenting Sherlock as a genius because he finds something that solves the mystery that the audience is never shown. And while this does make Sherlock SEEM intelligent, his logic is anything but as the audience must play a role and have ALL evidence required to confirm a mystery and its solution.

This is why games like Ace Attorney and Danganronpa work well, there is enouhg evidence in most places to theorize and when a new piece of evidence is brought it, it is merely to confirm what the audience all ready knew was true. For example, in Danganronpa’s first case,

Kirigiri, the main heroine finds a piece of evidence to confirm the player character’s innocence in a crime where he and the victim switched rooms. This revelation is inoffensive because the player knows that they were innocent, the rest of the cast does not. While Danganronpa is the pinnacle of the mystery genre, the writing is competent when it comes down to crafting a good mystery.

Now let’s bring this back to NDN and why the mystery of the finale fails SPECTATULARLY!!

Similar to Sherlock, when Light Turner reveals his master plan, we are only shown glimpses of him writing names from a computer screen. However, we are not shown who or what he is writing. And if that’s not bad enough, a new rule is set in place that is never explained or introduced to the audience or to make it perfectly clear: 

“WHEN DID THE DEATH NOTE EVER SAY THAT LIGHT COULD CONTROL FATE BY MAKING HIS NAME ON THE LOOSE SHEET FALL INTO A FIRE BY WRITING THAT MIA TAKES THE PAPER ON HER WAY DOWN TO HER DEATH AND DROPS IT INTO A FLAMING BARREL IN THE AIR!?! I’M SORRY BUT I DON’T THINK LIGHT OR MIA FOR THAT MATTER HAS THE ABILITY TO CALCULATE WHERE THE NEAREST FIRE COULD BE AND DROP IT!!”

... And even more offensive, the story could have used some logic, Mia is a smoker, we see her smoking. He could have written that she used her lighter to burn up the page before falling to her death, but NO, it had to be super dramatic and artsy, instead of actually thinking a mystery through. 

Even in the rules the movie made up, it could not follow them. Remember, Ryuk states that EVERY death and actions taken leading up to it must be possible and be possible by that person’s immediate knowledge, a major part of Light’s plan is not logical.

I know, this movie irks me.

Not because of the acting or the writing or the adaptation itself, but for the fact that when the movie TRIED to be a competent mystery, it left the audience in the dark and broke immersion just to be artsy. It had potential to atleast be a compellingly intriguing finale, but it did not have enough faith in its writing nor the audience to actually think about how Light’s plan can be explained by what the audience had seen.

Sigh... I guess it’s time to wrap this up...

Netflix’s Death Note... 

I’m not mad at you for being bad. I’m disappointed in you not taking advantage of your source material, creating an interesting cast, and for failing to be a genuinely intriguing mystery.

You wanted to be artsy and you failed to abide by your artist integrity and be an interesting take on a brilliantly creative premise. 

And to me, that’s the most tragic part...

I’ve been Tuchi, This is my Brain Vomit, And I hope you always bloom proudly,

-- TUCHI OUT... (God, I need an aspirin...)

[dareread]

Skin in the Game is necessary to reduce the effects of the following divergences that arose mainly as a side effect of civilization: action and cheap talk (tawk), consequence and intention, practice and theory, honor and reputation, expertise and pseudoexpertise, concrete and abstract, ethical and legal, genuine and cosmetic, entrepreneur and bureaucrat, entrepreneur and chief executive, strength and display, love and gold-digging, Coventry and Brussels, Omaha and Washington, D.C., economists and human beings, authors and editors, scholarship and academia, democracy and governance, science and scientism, politics and politicians, love and money, the spirit and the letter, Cato the Elder and Barack Obama, quality and advertising, commitment and signaling, and, centrally, collective and individual.

But, to this author, is mostly about justice, honor, and sacrifice as something existential for humans.

Let us first connect a few dots of items the list above.

Antaeus Whacked

Antaeus was a giant, rather semi-giant of sorts, the literal son of Mother Earth, Gaea, and Poseidon the god of the sea. He had a strange occupation, which consisted of forcing passersby in his country, (Greek) Libya, to wrestle; his trick was to pin his victims to the ground and crush them. This macabre hobby was apparently the expression of filial devotion; Antaeus aimed at building a temple for his father Poseidon, using for material the skulls of his victims.

Antaeus was deemed to be invincible; but there was a trick. He derived his strength from contact with his mother, earth. Physically separated from contact with earth, he lost all his powers. Hercules, as part of his twelve labors (actually in one, not all variations), had for homework to whack Antaeus. He managed to lift him off the ground and terminated him by crushing him as his feet remained out of contact with his mamma.

What we retain from this first vignette is that, like Antaeus, you cannot separate knowledge from contact with the ground. Actually, you cannot separate anything from contact with the ground. And the contact with the real world is done via skin in the game –have an exposure to the real world, and pay a price for its consequences, good or bad. The abrasions of your skin guide your learning and discovery, a mechanism of organic signaling, what the Greeks called pathemata mathemata (guide your learning through pain, something mothers of young children know rather well). Most things that we believe were “invented” by universities were actually discovered by tinkering and later legitimized by some type of formalization. I have shown in Antifragile how the knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something universities have been very busy hiding from us.

Libya After Antaeus

Second vignette. As I am writing these lines, a few thousand years later, Libya, the putative land of Antaeus now has a slave market, as a result of a failed attempt of what is called a “regime change” in order to “remove a dictator”.

A collection of people classified as interventionists (t0 name names, Bill Kristol, Thomas Friedman, and others) who promoted of the Iraq invasion of 2003, as well as the removal of the Libyan leader, are advocating the imposition of additional such regime change on another batch of countries, which includes Syria, because “it has a dictator”.

These interventionistas and their friends in the U.S. State Department helped create, train, and support, Islamist rebels, then “moderates”, but who eventually evolved to become part of Al-Qaeda, the same Al-Qaeda that blew up the New York City towers during the events of Sep 11 2001. They mysteriously failed to remember that Al-Qaeda itself was composed of “moderate rebels” created (or reared) by the U.S. to help fight Soviet Russia because, as we will see, these educated people’s reasoning doesn’t entail such recursions.

So we tried that thing called regime change in Iraq, and failed miserably. We tried it in Libya, and now there are now active slave markets in the place. But we satisfied the objective of “removing a dictator”. By the exact same reasoning, a doctor would inject a patient with “moderate” cancer cells “to improve his cholesterol numbers”, and claim victory after the patient is dead, particularly if the post-mortem shows remarkable cholesterol readings. But we know that doctors don’t do that, or, don’t do it in such a crude format, and that there is a clear reason for it. Doctors usually have some skin in the game.

And don’t give up on logic, intellect and education, because a tight but higher order logical reasoning would show that the logic of advocating regime changes implies also advocating slavery. So these interventionistas not only lack practical sense, and never learn from history, but they even make mistakes at the pure reasoning level, which they drown in some form of semi-abstract discourse.

Their three flaws: 1) They think in statics not dynamics, 2) they think in low, not high dimensions, 3) they think in actions, never interactions.

The first flaw is that they are incapable in thinking in second steps and unaware of the need for it –and about every peasant in Mongolia, every waiter in Madrid, and every car service operator in San Francisco knows that real life happens to have second, third, fourth, nth steps. The second flaw is that they are also incapable of distinguishing between multidimensional problems and their single dimensional representations –like multidimensional health and its stripped, cholesterol-reading reduced representation. They can’t get the idea that, empirically, complex systems do not have obvious one dimensional cause and effects mechanisms, and that under opacity, you do not mess with such a system. An extension of this defect: they compare the actions of the “dictator” to the prime minister of Norway or Sweden, not to those of the local alternative. The third flaw is that they can’t forecast the evolution of those one helps by attacking.

And when a blow up happens, they invoke uncertainty, something called a Black Swan, after some book by a (very) stubborn fellow, not realizing that one should not mess with a system if the results are fraught with uncertainty, or, more generally, avoid engaging in an action if you have no idea of the outcomes. Imagine people with similar mental handicaps, who don’t understand asymmetry, piloting planes. Incompetent pilots, those who cannot learn from experience, or don’t mind taking risks they don’t understand, may kill many, but they will themselves end up at the bottom of, say, the Atlantic, and cease to represent a threat to others and mankind.

So we end up populating what we call the intelligentsia with people who are delusional, literally mentally deranged, simply because they never have to pay for the consequences of their actions, repeating modernist slogans stripped of all depth. In general, when you hear someone invoking abstract modernistic notions, you can assume that they got some education (but not enough, or in the wrong discipline) and too little accountability.

Now some innocent people, Yazidis, Christian minorities, Syrians, Iraqis, and Libyans had to pay a price for the mistakes of these interventionistas currently sitting in their comfortable air-conditioned offices. This, we will see, violates the very notion of justice from its pre-biblical, Babylonian inception. As well as the ethical structure of humanity.

Not only the principle of healers is first do no harm (primum non nocere), but, we will argue: those who don’t take risks should never be involved in making decisions.

This idea is weaved into history: all warlords and warmongers were warriors themselves and, with few exceptions societies were run by risk takers not risk transferors. They took risks –more risks than ordinary citizens. Julian the Apostate, the hero of many, died on the battlefield fighting in the never-ending war on the Persian frontier. One of predecessors, Valerian, after he was captured was said to have been used as a human footstool by the Persian Shahpur when mounting his horse. Less than a third of Roman emperors died in their bed –and one can argue that, had they lived longer, they would have fallen prey to either a coup or a battlefield.

And, one may ask, what can we do since a centralized system will necessarily need people who are not directly exposed to the cost of errors? Well, we have no choice, but decentralize; have fewer of these. But not to worry, if we don’t do it, it will be done by itself, the hard way: a system that doesn’t have a mechanism of skin in the game will eventually blow up and fix itself that way. We will see numerous such examples.

For instance, bank blowups came in 2008 because of the hidden risks in the system: bankers could make steady bonuses from a certain class of concealed explosive risks, use academic risk models that don’t work (because academics know practically nothing about risk), then invoke uncertainty after a blowup, some unseen and unforecastable Black Swan, and keep past bonuses, what I have called the Bob Rubin trade. Robert Rubin collected one hundred million dollar in bonuses from Citibank, but when the latter was rescued by the taxpayer, he didn’t write any check. The good news is that in spite of the efforts of a complicit Obama administration that wanted to protect the game and the rent-seeking of bankers, the risk-taking business moved away to hedge funds. The move took place because of the overbureaucratization of the system. In the hedge fund space, owners have at least half of their net worth in the funds, making them more exposed than any of their customers, and they personally go down with the ship.

The interventionistas case is central to our story because it shows how absence of skin in the game has both ethical and epistemological effects (i.e., related to knowledge). Interventionistas don’t learn because they are not the victims to their mistakes. Interventionistas don’t learn because they are not the victims of their mistakes, and, as we saw with pathemata mathemata:

The same mechanism of transferring risk also impedes learning.