Sand-eating

So, you're a group of aliens and you're watching the earth... and you notice that while the earthlings are interested in throwing up these satellites in order to help themselves show pictures of cats and share lasagna recipes, while carping about urbanisation, they don't occasionally send out a ship and circle their own moon. This is puzzling for you, but its also convenient, because here's this terrific real estate opportunity for you to build on, so you can set up your lab station to study these earthlings and maybe grab a few now and then for testing.

Then, lo and behold, after fifty years, a group of earthlings decide, in not really a lot of time, to throw a ship around the moon for reasons that aren't clear, but mostly seem bounded up in the same sort of performative political points that encouraged them to do it back in the day. But the noise of culture rolling up from the earth is just that, noise, so you miss it until nearly the last moment. And now here you are, base about to be in plain sight, as the earthlings go by in this year's version of a flying tin can. What do you do?

The beginning of My Dinner with Andre includes this in the opening monologue, in which Wallace Shawn explains his view of the world at the time he made the film, following his inability to get enough work in New York.

"I've lived in this city all my life. I grew up on the Upper East Side; when I was ten years old, I was rich; I was an aristocrat, riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort... and all I thought about was art and music. Now, I'm 36... and all I think about is money."

The film worked for him.  You can watch it here.  The IMDb trivia page for the film is interesting and should be read by anyone who wants to be a filmmaker, because not only was this intensely low-budget film a success, it did something that successful low budget films almost never do on their own merits: it changed the way intellectuals talk about film-making. The film was stupidly successful on an unimaginable scale for 1981, and is the only reason why Wallace Shawn was able to wrest his career from obscurity to the place where now we all recognise his immortal connection with the word "inconceivable."

I think the film is terrible. It came out in 1981, when I was 17 and surrounded by musicians and artists and other writers, who all gushed about the genius of the film in the same way they gushed about Jean-Luc Godard and Frederico Fellini, whose films I had seen and knew well enough to stay the fuck away from, since they were filled with a fascination about the tiniest most obvious parts of life as a way of avoiding talking about anything that actually fucking mattered. My Dinner with Andre addresses a familiar point-of-view that most anyone drifts into at some point between the age of 20 and 50: "I thought my life was about this, but now I realise that it's about that." But it's not "intellectual," it's pseudo-intellectual. All the clever, amazing things that Andre tells Wallace in the film amounts to tin-foil hat logic, not especially useful unless, coincidentally, you want to sell something to someone by telling them that life isn't about pain... a line, incidentally, I get from the writer of the book that contained the word "inconceivable" that Shawn would become famous for later.

It's not that Andre is stupid. He's not. He's passionate, he's rich with detail, he's anxious to explain and be understood and to delve deep into the thing that fascinates him, while Shawn provides a counterpoint that makes the film watchable because it's well-written. But it's a sham. It's all empty-headed nonsense. There isn't a single thought expressed so well in the film that can be applied to anything except to explain how the My-Pillow guy made millions. And for me personally it frustrates me to death that even now, 45 years later, comments under the film include, "I watched it for the first time years ago and it has truly made my life better."

Yes, exactly. That's what it's supposed to do. You're dying of thirst in the desert and this film gives you sand to drink... and you drink it because you don't know the difference between sand and water.  From a film directed by the guy who directed Wallace Shawn when he said the word that made him famous.

For such people who write such comments, an alien base on the far side of the moon sounds plausible.

It is for this reason why repeated exhortations about what "adventure" is fail. And why admonishing the fudging of dice fails. And why point-by-point demonstrations of the execreble writing of the white box set fails. Because no matter how passionate one is, or how precise with language, or how specific one's structured examples, or the demonstration of evidentiary success vs. staggering failure one provides, it never comes down to the listener listening and weighing the two points of view to come to a thoughtful conclusion about what to believe.

The only measure that ever counts is what the listener feels. Which the writer has no power to change. My Dinner with Andre does not succeed because it was well-written or exceptionally shot or because it came out at the right time or because the performers were artists. Those things are all true, for their time, but they aren't the reason why the film was successful. It was successful because it didn't ask anyone to change their mind. It offered them a bunch of patterns that people recognised, that pseudo-intellectual recognised, and then waved them about for 90 minutes in a way that made the audience feel smart to be watching a film like this. Which worked beautifully.

A DM who fudges does so because early in their development in that role, they attached themselves to the idea, most likely because they could not help themselves. It was just too hard to actually kill their friends, or even strangers, because their nature forbade it. So having attached first, like a limpet, all that was needed after was to rationalise it. That rationalisation varies but mostly its to "create a good game" or "to make sure the game stays fun," or whatever. The tendency of the intellectual is to argue with the rationalisation, but in fact the rationalisation is incidental. It could be anything, so long as it sounds plausible. Because the issue isn't whether or not it makes a better game, the issue is that, inside, they can't keep themselves from doing it. Fudging possesses them, not the reverse. They aren't strong enough, as human beings, to stop fudging. So argument is really just a waste of time.

This is the one lesson I've never been able to learn. And my recent understanding, lately, that I haven't learnt it yet, is embarrassing for me. This blog has been to construct an argument about this or that or the other thing, just as JB's post is, just as is any post about D&D or any subject that I respect, because I walk away from such posts and such videos with an awareness I did not have before. Because I am an intellectual, and not a sand-drinker, which is what makes me formidable and scary. Because I won't argue decently, respecting the listener's feelings about what this is or isn't or should be or feels better or what fits the pattern and hey, you can't actually prove there aren't aliens on the far side of the moon. I don't accept premises like those. But because I don't, I'm also unkind, and abusive, and cold, and rude, and any number of other things that sound like I'm in your house telling you that you've put your sofa on the wrong end of your living room. It's what makes me intolerable.

Because, seriously, if you were in a desert and you saw someone who was thirsty enough to drink the sand, you'd try to stop them, wouldn't you?

And if you couldn't succeed, and you had to just stand there watching them do it, that'd get pretty aggravating after, say, to pull a number out of my hat, 61 years.

But what makes it truly worse is the guy on my right who has realised the solution is to sell the drinker more sand. And he's making a killing at it.

All this is the reason why intellectuals tend to retreat from the system as they age rather than continue to fight it to the end. They get tired. They don't tire of the facts or the arguments or the wish to rigidly figure out the sense of a thing... but they do get tired of the quiet expectation that, "if you're not going to sell the sand, you could at least provide it for free."  Which is the role I should have adopted with this blog if I wanted it to be successful. I should have just called it "Free Sand" and then shovelled it into the mouths of my readers, making them all happy. I failed to do that. And therefore, demonstrably, I failed.

I am an excellent writer. Anyone here who thinks I couldn't have used that skill to proffer the sweetest-looking, brightest, most soft-grained sand imaginable is a fool. If I truly despised and disregarded my fellows, I could have built a sand-selling palace here, with vaulted ceilings and music playing and every kind of sand one's heart could desire. Because honestly, seriously... straight-talking it here... people aren't really that hard to lie to. They really aren't. And anyone who has read a few books, who has gotten through grade school and watched the way that bullies operate up close, comes to a point early on between knowing that you can either fuck these people over or serve them... and as it happens, all the money is in the former.

And mind, it's more than just the language. It's the intuitive understanding that underlies it, the comprehension about why the sand is being eaten and what for and why it's hard to stop and how deep the desperation goes, that encourages the fellow with sand in mouth to garble through the sand what an asshole I am in telling them to spit it out and drink water. Those are all little buttons, with little labels under them, arranged in a neat little row, and all it takes it to reach out and touch the one that works right now... and just like that, Johnny eats the sand he's told to eat.

If I am a rigid asshole, if I am inflexible, if I'm not ready to "see the argument" or "understand," it's bitcoins to donuts that I'm keeping my hand off the button that would pour out the sand you want me to pour out. I learned how to do that in High School, to subvert teachers, to placate principles, to get around bullies, to survive. It is so easy... you have no idea. Once you really understand how little is needed to manipulate a person's perception with lies — a small concession, stroking their ego, a little feigned uncertainty, some carefully timed sympathy, silence because the person needs to "stew," a little false seeing their point — they melt just so. But all that created in me when I tried it early in life was contempt... and I didn't like that feeling. I didn't lean into it. I didn't decide, "Hey, but it'll let me fuck people over and get paid for it."

And I shouldn't be telling you this now, but hey... I'm already an asshole. Not for doing this, obviously, but for not doing this.

So, lately, I haven't felt much like writing. Anything. Figuring this one out, I think. Getting pretty tired of yelling at the void. Lost a good friend over this kind of thing, whom I thought was a good friend and I haven't recovered. Lost a good friend over this last year, too. Seems I'm always doing this. I might just as well lie, all the time. Churn out some slopware. Or just walk. Because except for the prospect of running D&D tomorrow night, which is really why I love D&D, I just don't seem to be able to give a fuck whether people want to eat sand or not.

Safety Last Blog

The film blog Safety Last managed to climb over 200 page views yesterday (it's at 233 now), having reached 11 posts with a visit to every decade from the 20s to the 90s. It is limited in that I'm only reviewing films that can be seen on youtube, for free, so that readers don't have to work hard to find the film or pay money for it. Naturally, I don't expect readers to actually do so... for some reason the film has lost it's verve. Most argue that it's because people can't concentrate on one product for so long, but I tend to think it's because general knowledge has flattened to the point that people can't get anything out of characters that aren't exactly like themselves. That opinion arises from film commentary I see on youtube.

I haven't discuss the blog here because I wanted it to find it's own voice first. The movies reflect my eclectic taste in film, not what a film critic would pick. For example, I've posted eleven films and none of them were made by Kurosawa, Kubrick, Tarantino or Nolan. Shock and horror. Jeez, one of them is about 15-year-old girls. And pretty soon, I'm going to add an actual musical to the list. I haven't decided if it's going to be something from Doris Day or Julie Andrews. You'll just have to see.

For a long time I've argued that a DM has to comprehend film if any possibility of campaign-nuance is to be understood. That doesn't just include "D&D films"... which are for the most part the worst possible examples, since they reflect what Hollywood utterly misunderstands about fantasy or the like. There are exceptions, of course... but the point isn't that films themselves reveal the plots and structures of D&D elements, but that narrative, structure, elaboration, conflict or resolution are in fact universal to all films, yes, including romantic stories, comedies and musicals. Blindness isn't to be found in not seeing the "right" films, but in failing to understand that every film provides it's unimagined bit of value... which is the reason to get "good" film out of one's structured approach but rather to take the stance of "I will see all films..." in whatever time is left on this planet.

The benefit of this is not immediate. In fact, probably, the reader won't notice a benefit until past the first hundred films... which will only be true if they're the films the reader wouldn't normally see. Watching another Star Wars sequel won't add to one's store. Virtually every show, every bit of "content" now produced is rehashed from some other content done in some previous decade, better. I don't say this to disparage modern film and television making. I don't have to. It disparages itself. But I do say it to point out that content today used to be "story" once... and that one does better to go find the example of it when that's what it was.

This is enough.  Preachy D&D guy will shut up now... brings hope for millions.

Watching a Film with Women without Losing My Manhood

Going to take a short break and write another post today. I just finished watching Madame Web. I'd like to talk about it.

Went into it with the attitude, "Well, let's see how bad it really is." Because I had every reason to expect it to be. The internet buzz was vicious, incendiary and unrelenting on this film: it was bad, bad, bad. Some of my sites that I subscribe to deconstructed this film and found it loathsome, irrational, you name it. I was told it was another Marvel misfire, that Dakota Johnson gave an "awkward performance," that it was a "2000s throwback" and a lot of other things that essentially had buried this film for me.

But... was coming off Death By Lightning, which I watched yesterday, and had no more gas to do anything else tonight. Blog post written, other content designed... feeling up for something and found nothing to watch. So, like I said, "Oh what the hell, let's see how bad it is. Bet I don't last ten minutes."

I have to start by saying that cultural commentary just now is on autopilot. People see a cape, a studio logo, a few stills... and the next thing you know they're creating a bunch of "stickers" with words on them, ready made to slap on the product sight unseen. I've been told that Dakota Johnson had an "odd, detached delivery." Nonsense. She spoke like Dakota Johnson. Now it's fine if you don't like her, I don't really care, but anything about the way she delivered lines is just made up. That "2000s vibe." I've seen all those 2000s superhero movies. This isn't like any of them. It's not X-men or Sam Raimi or Constantine, all of which I've seen this compared with. The atmosphere? It doesn't have an "atmosphere," unless for some reason "filmmaking" is now somehow not what it has always been. 

I've seen arguments that if a thing doesn't "fit" with everything else, then it must be a new "species" of film. Like films must have a genealogy, they can't be defined as a moving process of narrative, character discovery, exposition, introspection and resolution. No, films "gestate." They're not deliberately fashioned by hard working individuals who have a vision. They come out of the womb instantly and fully made, and if they don't fit preconceptions, then it's the film that's wrong. 

What a pile of steaming horseshit the critical part of this culture has become.

I'll go into why I think the internet dumping ground didn't like this film. There are some unfortunate special effects choices that happen in the first few minutes. It accepts an invented cultural structure that seems like it's going to strongly influence the plot of the film... except it doesn't, at any point, actually do so. The structure exists to give exposition. But if a person watched the beginning of the film, and did not go on watching... then they would almost certainly extrapolate the wrong expectation from the film's first ten minutes. I think this alone accounts for a least a third of those who "didn't like it." They never saw the film at all.

A shaky CGI spider, an unfamiliar mythos, and they assumed they knew the whole thing.

It takes too long to get started. Most superhero powers of this genre function like a vending machine. Punch button, get powers, kick ass. This doesn't do that. More than half-way through the picture, the character still cannot "just turn her powers on." I think that drove quite a lot of people absolutely fucking nuts. The character is confused; she acts confused; she has every reason to BE confused. Anyone in the same situation would be. And when you're confused, you speak in a "detached, stumbling, slightly fearful manner." This is where the detached shit comes from. All you have to do is ignore the plot and assume it's the actress, and there you are. How do you arrive at that conclusion? You watch the entire film skipping 10 seconds/30 seconds at a time and assume you know everything that's going on. You don't know, but you write and present a youtube video anyway.

This is also where you get the "2000s vibe" shit... because in the same way, Raimi's Peter Parker needed time to "figure it out." Rachel Weiss in Constantine needed time to "figure it out." Wolverine was struggling with "figuring it out." That's not a fucking "2000s vibe." That's how films have been made since Buster Keaton's The General. Characters get information, figure it out, and we figure it out with them. But the vending machine of DC/Marvel cut-scenes have ruined filmmaking and characterisation. That's NOT the fault of a film that decides to pursue it.

Now, let's get down to the so-called real problem of Madame Web. It's not about a man. I don't exactly know when or how it became acceptable or even reasonable to decide that a little better than half the population of the planet were defacto unworthy of respect or conceptual storytelling, but this is where we've gotten, isn't it? Yeah, I know, the fucking gamers give a shit. And the little incels do too, the poor belated pillow humpers that they are. But I am totally unclear on how the rest of us are expected to actually get on board this train. Some of us have women in our lives, whom we love a lot, whom we would happily sacrifice ourselves for should it come to that. Quite a lot of us, actually. And daughters and sisters and mothers... and so I'm not really clear on why I'm supposed to forget things like what it's like to have a daughter, or care about girls or women, or such like, because some diddly-fuck with an internet channel screams about how "boys don't get attention any more." I'm getting pretty tired of that long-playing record (reference from another time, ignore it), and the time it's being given by the not-even-remotely-mainstream television media (also a relic of some 30 years ago). I'm just as happy to sit and watch a movie about a woman character figuring things out as a man character. If others aren't, well... I'm just very glad to say I don't have any males in my life like that. Not a one. I told the last to take a hike coincidentally 30 years ago, because I was tired of carrying him.

Sorry.  I feel somewhat incendiary about this, because I was very much misled by what I heard online, and since everything I heard online was bad, I'm not very keen with that community just now. And though I am 61, I'm fundamentally Bohemian, fundamentally a misanthrope of my own variety, and fundamentally not especially respectful of prudishness. So, when angry, I swear a lot.

Madame Web commits the SIN of having most of its lines spoken by four humans of the female gender. There are two supporting actors in the film that are male, and one villain that is male. The actor playing the villain is Tarim Rahim. He tends to play parts where he has a quiet intensity, an authority that radiates rather than bluster. Obsession, instinct, not high-testosterone coded. He's also pretty. Pretty doesn't sell well with the incels.

One of the supporting males, Mike Epps, gets about six lines and then... well, no spoilers. The other, Adam Scott, is well known for playing the basic sympathetic male he's playing in this film, notably in Severance. Thus — and this is stupidly important — this makes all the males in this woman's film all "pussy-boys." Un-Ak-ceptable!

The men don't drive the plot, the men don't achieve any important success, they don't contribute the hyper-key thing that the women critically need to succeed... they are the Captain Dunsel of film characters and that just is not how films have to be made as per the internet. There are rules we're supposed to follow, dammit (fuck knows why) and this movie didn't even come close to following them.

As such, there's no possible way this could be a good film. It doesn't matter what the women do, or what they believe or what they figure out without needing a man to propel, protect or sacrifice himself for them... the sin of doing it all on their own absolutely violates the first principle of The Protect the Male's Significance code! (Don't blame me if it's the PMS code for short).

I am a man. And weirdly, watching women figure things out without help, and come together to care and protect each other, doesn't make me feel emasculated. I don't know why. Maybe it's because I think with the lump above my shoulders, and not about using my hands to protect the tinier lump below my hips.

Yeah, it's "tinier." It's not bigger than my fucking head, is it?

I'm not going to talk about the plot. I enjoyed the film. It takes its time, it provides rational reasons for action, there are no significant plotholes... I'd watch it again. No, it's not a "great" film. It's not The Graduate. But it is a good film. And if you're an adult, and you haven't tried it yet because you're worried about what's been written about it... and you don't need to have your plot injected at warp speed, I think you'll have a pleasant time with it.

Barbara Stanwyck

For fun.

Resurrection

This isn't a post about worldbuilding — but there will be more of those.

This is a post about the failure of art.  I once sat in on a film class years ago, because it used the same room as my Roman history course that came after ... and hey, I can write anywhere.  I knew the prof from several interviews I'd taken for the university newspaper the year before, when I was also writing reviews of the university drama department's performances.  He and I would have coffee occasionally, disagree with each other a lot and respect boundaries.  I was allowed to sit in his class, so long as I didn't participate.

He used to tell his students remorselessly that screenwriting was about hitting marks.  10 minutes in, the protagonist gets kidnapped.  30 minutes in and the protagonist meets the bad guy face to face.  37 minutes and the murdered girl's sister shows up.  That kind of thing.

I don't like this sort of writing; but I don't write screenplays, either.  In any case, a writer's got to have some idea of just how much dry oats the audience will eat before they're given a drink of water.  And how long it will be, again, before their mouths get dry.  Virtually everyone in the industry knows that if you can't hit these moments precisely, you have no fucking business thinking you're a screenwriter.  I say "virtually" because there's one class that don't have to play by the rules.

Recently, encouraged to do so, I saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, from 2019.  I'm not going to say much; on the whole, Tarantino is a garbage director who over-embellishes cheesy pulp plots, catering to a congregation I don't have much use for.  Apologies to any of my supporters who feel that the sun rises and sets on Tarantino's work, and are rushing to remove themselves from my Patreon right now.  Let me help you.  'Course, if any readers out there don't support me and agree with me about Tarantino, throw me a buck or two.  I'm just your writing monkey.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood hits no beats whatsoever.  I didn't find it a bad film.  I rather enjoyed it.  Not for the story or the characters, they were trash.  But because the film's setting and timeliness contained elements that roused memories of mine that were long forgotten.  There's a scene in the film when the sun is setting, and a montage of restaurants turning on their lights (1970 being a time when the lights were not left on day and night), producing a sudden, deep rising electrical thrum.  I remember the sound of that thrum.  It was dead on accurate.  Very cool.

To pull out another example, I also recently saw The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.  This odd film from 2018 is written and directed by the Coen Bros.  And then almost never hit their beats ... at least, not in the traditional order.  I don't care, personally.  Whatever they wanna do, I'll sit and watch it.  

I enjoyed the film, especially the first half.  There are parts I'll watch again.  There are parts I don't care if I ever watch again, and I couldn't honestly encourage others to watch.  The film comprises six stories.  1, 3 and 4 did fine by me.  2 was meh; 5 took a while to digest, but I found peace with it.  6?  Well ... no.  Not for me.  Too clever-clever.

My point is that films don't need to conform to specific rules and principles of writing ... but the rules in general should stand most of the time, because of what happens when talentless hacks ignore them.  And how much worse it is when talentless hacks manage to glom together 190 million dollars, so they can piss it all away.

Now, I'm going to put up some spoilers.  It won't matter that I warn you, because you're going to keep reading anyway, but it's considered impolite not to warn about spoilers when including them.  These spoilers will apply to two different films.  I will keep the spoilers as vague and indefinite as possible; and all spoilers apply only to the first 52 minutes and 50 seconds of each film, including the opening logos and credits.  One of these films was released in 1999.  The other, in December 2021.

I won't comment excessively on whether or not I liked the films, though as regards the more recent one, I stopped watching at 52 minutes and 50 seconds.  I don't give a fuck what happens after that, because I watched the first slightly less than 53 minutes.  I don't need to see more.  In any case, what follows are two timelines, comparing film A to film B, in terms of what happens when.

We'll start with the later film, film B.

11:46.  The new Morpheus reveals himself as Morpheus.

15:44.  The co-worker whose name I don't care about is sitting at the coffee bar with Thomas Anderson and sees Trinity, or rather, "Tiffany."

20:52.  Thomas Anderson finishes talking to his boss, Smith, and starts talking to his analyst, "The Analyst."

25:35.  While Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane sings White Rabbit, Thomas Anderson eats steak.

30:03.  Thomas Anderson talks to "Tiffany" about her kids and motorcycles.

31:47.  Thomas Anderson meets the new Morpheus in the bathroom; an immaterial action scene follows.

37:54.  Thomas Anderson talks with his analyst again.

40:39.  Thomas Anderson moves to step off his roof and is super-predictably stopped by Bugs.

46:33.  Thomas Anderson is shown the red pill.

52:50.  Neo is welcomed to the "real world."

Film A.

11:46.  Trinity tells Neo that "the answer is out there" at the club.

15:44.  Morpheus tells Neo that "there are two ways out of this building" over the phone.

20:52.  With his mouth melded shut, Neo is thrown onto a table by two "agents."

25:35.  Before showing him into the room to meet Morpheus in the flesh, Trinity tells Neo to "be honest."

30:03.  Neo, having taken the red pill, is moved to the next room and seated next to a mirror; the others move about getting ready to recover Neo's body.

31:47.  The mirror is taking possession of Neo's hand.

37:54.  Morpheus shows Neo through the Nebuchadnezzar for the first time.

40:39.  Morpheus turns on the television in the construct loading program and tells Neo that he's seeing "the world at the end of the 20th century."

46:33.  Neo is waking up, having "popped" because he's unable to accept reality.

52:50.  While fighting Neo in the training program's dojo, Morpheus tells him, "Don't think you are; know you are."

Pacing.  It is all about pacing.

Safe Words

"The Miracle of the Andes", that's what they called it. Many people come up to me and say, that had they been there they surely would have died. But that makes no sense. Because until you're in a situation like that, you ... you have no idea how you'd behave. To be affronted by solitude without decadence, or a single material thing to prostitute, it elevates you to a spiritual plane, where I felt the presence of God. Now, there's the God they taught me about at school, and there is the God that's hidden by what surrounds us in this civilisation. That's the God that I met on the mountain."

— opening narration to the film, Alive (1993)

For those who don't know, in 1972 a plane bearing a Uruguayan Rugby team and their friends and family suffered an airplane crash into the remote Andes Mountains; 29 out of 45 died.  They were stranded for 72 days against the worst odds imaginable, in a sea of ice and rock, deprived of oxygen due to altitude in below freezing weather.  I won't say more, in case the reader would like to find the book or see the film.

Listening to the opening monologue a few minutes ago, having decided to watch the film again, I was struck by the dualism of the two gods spoken above.  Unquestionably, the first god is also the D&D model.  People tend to imagine gods — including the Christian god — much along the Greek model: as persons with agendas, sometimes good or bad, but always ambitious in some manner, whether it's to obtain sex with a herder girl or convince the locals that, "Yes, no kidding, I'm real and I'm you're god."  It's no great observation, since it's been written about constantly for thousands of years, but we see gods in our own image, with our own foibles and our own needs.  Even the Christian god needs a motivation we can understand: "he loves us" — though he has a helluva way of showing it, not to mention he's pretty damn picky about who constitutes "us."

Much better, however, than the narrator's other "God": the unbelievable force of concentrated, indescriminate death and indifference that lies outside those parts of the world we've managed to tame.  The God that lives in literal space, surrounding the earth itself in every direction, who waits patiently for silly fools to prance forth in thin metal and fabric suits mere millimeters from the worst environment imaginable ... no environment at all.  We don't represent that god in D&D, except possibly with the dice; and it's at precisely that point that the game gets "too real" for comfort and we have to back away and impose nerfing traditions to mitigate the raw, cold, brutal seriousness of the "god on the mountain."

What a bunch of pansies we are.

I had choices to pick from for this image.  Ones where, unlike the one above, the climber wasn't tethered.  This stuff is porn for climbers.  The more dangerous, the more absurd to commonsense, the better.  Pitons slip.  Rope breaks.  People die every year.  Actual death, mind you ... no fudging.

We gamers can't even comfortably imagine death, much less face it.  We have no desire at all to be elevated to a spiritual plane, even metaphorically.  There are no gods of nature in D&D.  Even the very bad ones, the gods of chaos, have an agenda ... and though its unknown, an arrival time as well, like a train that's perpetually late.  But nature is right here, right now.  It's ready to kill you today.  And it doesn't care.  Not a tiny bit.  We matter as much to nature as the particle of dust landing on the tip of your nose, just now.  The particle that could kill you — if it's the right particle.

Doesn't sound much like a game.  Doesn't sound "fun."  Sounds dismal.

Yet what is that girl doing up there, courting death?  What the fuck is that all about?

Well, now, you see ... our bodies are built in this weird, designed format, tailored by a constant interaction we had with this horrific natural god for literally millions of years.  That includes a lot of years before we were "surrounded" in this civilisation.  There was no civilisation.  There was only this solitary indifferent god — in a very non-metaphorical way you understand, because we hadn't invented metaphors yet.  All we had was our biology ... and to keep us alive, to permit the birthing of children that would keep the species alive, our biology developed a strategy that enabled us to cope with constant, terrifying spiritualism on the order of that plane crash turned up to eleven.  All. the. time.

Part of that strategy included flooding our body with intensely pleasurable drugs during moments of extreme danger.  Just think about how fucked up that is.  Your body chemistry is actually designed to reward you for courting life-threatening situations.  And judging from those who push the envelope in this regard constantly, the effect of this "drug" makes you feel god-like.

Take a moment and think about that combination of words.

Why in particular do we associate feelings of fear mixed with invulnerability with the word "god"?  Hm?  Any guesses?

I'll give you a hint.  The feeling occurred millions of years before the word did.

That's right.  We invented a word that captured the feeling, and now we use that word when we have that feeling; and we ascribe that word to other imaginary entities that we associate with being invulnerable and laughing in the face of danger.  True adventurers, if you will.

But you don't have to climb upside down to tap into those feelings, or drugs if you wish; like nature, which you're a part of, those drugs are right here, right now, locked into tiny vessels inside you just aching to be flushed into your arteries and veins.  Want to learn how?  Want to learn when and why D&D enables your imagination to jack you full of god-like chemicals?

Get rid of your safe words.  Ditch the screen, roll the die in the open.  Ditch the fortune points and any namby-pamby harnesses.  Let yourself feel scared.  Get a hitch in your throat.  Experience some trembling in your fingers as you reach for a die.  If you fall, you fall.

At least you'll live like a god.

Critical Thinking

Following up on the last post about film criticism, I tactfully declined to talk about "critical thinking."  So, what is critical thinking?  Straight definition: critical thinking is the art of analyzing and evaluating thinking with a view to improving it.  This is an enormously difficult thing to explain ... and I am not going to do better than Immanuel Kant in a blog post.  At the same time, "simplifying" the method is fraught with terrors ... so I go ahead from here trepidatiously.

If we wish to understand how a spoon works (at the moment an in-depth study presently taken up by my 8-month-old grandchild), we initially examine the spoon physically: how it can be held, swung about, used to poke at things ... and naturally how it feels in our mouths, since intrisincally we first discover how everything works by shoving it in our mouth.  Take note, however.  Before we can fully train ourselves to understand how a spoon works, we will have it demonstrated for us by competent others; and they will train us to hold it correctly (or incorrectly, with some people), bypassing our need for personal research.  The speed with which we learn the spoon's use depends on how much resistance we have against learning things.

Resistance is a tricky concept.  Resistance can occur because the learner is dead stupid or bloody minded.  But resistance can also occur because the learner does not trust that what the teacher does with a spoon is everything that can be done with a spoon.  It is in this second form of resistance that we find genius.

Kant divides reason through the operation of two components: (a) intuition, which is sense perception; and (b) understanding, which is a rational interpretation of the data given through sense perception.  Sense perception is what your five senses tell you about the world, including everything related to the physicality of the spoon: shape, smell, feel, sound and taste.  When you see someone else use the spoon, or you're trained to hold it just so by repetition (and forced to repeat that training through repetition), that is sense perception also.  But when you think about the spoon, reviewing your experience with the spoon, guessing at why or how the spoon is made, you are rationally interpreting the data.  When you take the next step, which is reviewing about how you've previously considered the spoon, related to what you're thinking about it now, then you are analysing your thoughts.  And when you take that analysis so that you may approach a better way to make the spoon, then you are participating in critical thinking.

Most youtube content creators fail at producing meaningful criticism because they think what they see or hear during the film, and especially what the film makes them feel, is film criticism.  It isn't.  To critique a film, first, the critic must be capable of seeing what problems the director, writer and crew must have faced in making the film as it is.  Using a somewhat infamous example, when Laurence Olivier chose to cast Marilyn Monroe as one of the leads in the film The Prince and the Showgirl [a brilliant film of the first order by the way, only a billion times better than anything Kubrick made], Olivier had Monroe to contend with.  Which was, by all later accounts, a horrific nightmare.  In a more prosaic sense, as I've discussed before, all films, even bad ones, are logistical trials on a par with Going to War ... with the added difficulty of ensuring that everyone gets through the experience alive (which, unfortunately, doesn't always happen).

Secondly, the reviewer must be able to interpret the relevant sensory information, and external knowledge of the difficulties involved, accurately and meaningfully.  A great many content creators do not understand film, they do not understand writing or direction, they do not understand budgeting, and thus why a particular scene plays as it does because it's what we could afford, or build in time, or logically fit into the continuity of the film's story.  Morons who bitch about CGI assume that every budget must be in the hundreds of millions, or else the film isn't worth seeing ... while failing the simplest smell tests: Hitchcock's brilliant film To Catch a Thief has several lengthy special effects "failures" because the film was released in 1955 ... and absolutely no one with a brain cares.  Filmmaking has limitations.  Comprehending this, and many other realities, is necessary to good criticism.

Thirdly, the reviewer must see why and how those problems were solved, as opposed to other ways those problems might have been solved.  It is not enough to point at a film and mutter that the direction or the acting fell short ... we must explain why and how it fell short!  Specifically, to follow the director's logic with a film like Being John Malkovich so that we can understand accurately why — although it is brilliantly made, written and acted — it really isn't a very good film.  For most persons, this is virtually impossible.  Those who both love and hate it will usually do so viscerally ... while simultaneously failing to realize that vast numbers were unable to appreciate any of the magnificent work put into the film due to the utter irrelevancy of the subject material.  Keeping in mind the goal of critical thinking is not to argue that a film is "good" or "bad" ... but to use what we know about a film to make a better product.

By deconstructing films, then, and examining their methods of solving problems related to the creation of art, we can advance our reasoning on how to solve additional, as yet unencountered problems that will come up with as-yet unfounded artistic endeavours.  In short, we are not lauding the past.  We are building towards a future.  When a film reviewer wallows in the beauty of an object, while at the same time failing to see that object as a method that can be applied further on in making better objects, the reviewer is simply describing a spoon.  It is not critical thinking.

It was intended, at this point, that I apply these same arguments to the examinations and discussions of role-playing games, but alas, it is getting late.  I did say I intended to move forward with trepidation.  Some things should not be rushed.  So let's pick this up with RPGs in another post.

The Rare Examples of Good Film Criticism

I like questions.  I understand there are people who fear that someone will ask them a hard question, but for me, questions are a gift.  A question I can't answer, doubly so — because it describes something I should be thinking about, or researching.

Naturally, I'm not here to answer questions about medicine, the law, mathematics or physics.  This is a D&D blog ... and I'm a soft-science/humanities sort of fellow.  So getting a question about the arts, that's in my bailywick.  On Monday, Dennis Laffey asked,

"You've mentioned YouTube movie "critics" like Lindsay Ellis and maybe Patrick Willems with some disdain (IMO Willems is better than Ellis, but YMMV), and I understand why. So my question is, are there any film critics/analysts on YouTube that you would recommend?"

This is a question I'm researching all the time.  I've wasted far too many hours chasing film critiques on youtube, only to come up empty.  I love film; and when I seek the opinion of someone investigating film, I want to see people who understand what a critique is, what it's for, why film is made, what it arouses in the viewer, how filming is accomplished as an art, what choices were made by the makers and why, preferably without the speaker needing to graft their own agenda into the process.

"Agenda" describes the urge by the reviewer to insert their personal feelings regarding the film's content: the need to say whether or not they liked the film, the need to discuss whether or not the film has broken some covenant that art has with the political will of society, the need to argue whether or not certain characters were given enough lines, or whether the subject material is "valid," or a host of other qualms that would suggest that the purpose of filmmaking it to satisfy a will of the public to see visuals that ONLY meet with their prejudices.

Obviously, the popularity of a film depends on how many people are pleased by its plot, characters and themes.  Popularity has nothing whatsoever to do with whether a film is well made or relevant.  It is a great failing of youtube creators that they understand neither what it means to make a film well or what makes a film relevant.  Very often, many film reviewers fall into a trap of believing that a film is "well made" when it is technically well made.  This is why we see so many reviewers gushing over films made by Kurosawa or Kubrick.  I appreciate when an analyst fruitfully addresses technical prowess, such as this piece by Every Frame a Painting.  EFP stopped posting videos four years ago, a shattering loss.  From a filmmaker's perspective, the series is usefully descriptive about what the director's perspective, the structure of scenes, pacing and space.  I used to love every time EFP posted; but, at the same time, most of his work disappointed, because so little was said about writing or story.  Sorry, but technicals do not make a meaningful film.  No matter how many people want us to worship and adore Kubrick, we can't.  He had nothing to say about the concrete lives of concrete people.  His choice of stories were always irrelevant.

Very few content creators are as consistent as EFP.  Watch everything he's made.  Frankly, I think his worst piece was this one ... which also happened to be his last.  I simply don't feel that Marvel films are lacking because of their music.  On the other hand, watch this video at least twice and this one at least three times.  You're a fool if you don't.

Discussions of a film's overall relevancy are rare and hard to find.  Frustratingly, those persons who are capable of this kind of analysis rarely choose to do films that I would watch more than once.  But that is a matter personal taste — and as I've said, analysing a film and liking a film are entirely different things.  At the same time, watching analysation of a film and liking the film being analysed need not be compatible ideas.  I'm willing to watch a good analyst take apart a film I didn't like — and even willing to sit through the critique even if the analyst states matter-of-factly that they like the film.  Liking/disliking a film is not a deal-breaker.  What matters is what's said about the film's relevance.  I hope that's clear.

Ian Danskin discusses a wide variety of subjects and occasionally discusses film or a film-maker.  Of those, I recommend this about Guillermo del Toro, this 8-part series about the avenging female and this one about the Japanese film The Handmaiden.  I wish there was more.

Dan Olson lives here in Calgary with me, though shit knows what I'd say to him in person.  Like Danskin, he produces work on many subjects, but he's done a lot of work with film.  Starting with the older stuff, I'd recommend this one on Fight Club, this one on Sam Witwicky, this one on the End of Evangelion and very definitely this ironic one on Matrix Revolutions.  For his later work, if you've got the steady nerve, drag yourself through his 2 hour, 42 minute three-part series on the Fifty Shades of Grey movies ... and remember, I'm promoting the quality of the critique and not the quality of the film.  Also this one on Contagion.  There are more, but on the whole, I feel Olson is beginning to lose his way.  I've written about Olson before.

I strongly dislike critics or analysts who spend three quarters of a 15 minute video recounting the plot in excessive detail, only to end by saying, "I didn't like it."  I dislike those who badmouth films because of camera-angles, jerky cam or anything to do with cameras, really.  I dislike those who say "the acting was bad," while making no effort at all to explain why, how or even what "good acting" is.  Like they would know.  I dislike a lot of film reviewers.  Those that were good in the day are gone now, their sites pulled down ... hell, I can't even remember what the sites were called.  Every now and then I think I've found a new content creator; I watch two or three of their videos and think, "Those were pretty good."  Then I watch one more, screaming at the screen, "WHAT THE FUCK?" because they've just explained that the two main characters in a rom-com actually represent Israel and Palestine, Torquemada and Isabella or some other ridiculous pairing of black-and-white historical or religious figures.

Film critique on youtube is one festering pile of shit.

I am constantly looking for better and I am constantly disappointed.  But I'll go on looking.

Real

Watching the 2009 movie, The Trotsky.  They're talking about making a change through protesting, and the aged law professor is saying,

"Everytime I would try to pull a demonstration together, it was just a disaster.  Unless we had some fascist on the campus that would yell at us, it would turn into this gigantic sock-hop.  The point is, everybody came just to be 'part of the scene.'  Just to be in the club.  No one there realized that it's never real, until it stops being fun."

If you were part of the Black Lives Matter marches this last summer, then you may have seen that; and wondered why nothing came out of it.

Because this is a D&D blog, let me paint an obvious picture.  Any time you run as a DM, there will be a significant number of players who will show up because what you've created is a "club."  People, especially socially awkward people, will do anything to belong to a club, even investing themselves in something they don't care about.  Part of your role as a DM is to figure out who is there to be in the club, and who is there to play D&D. 

Resolve

It annoys the hell out of me when I see people bitching about superhero films.  Compared to the wide, deep, incomprehensible stream of garbage movies pouring out of Hollywood in these past ten years, at least superhero films have straightforward stories, applicable narratives and unique characters.  Yes, some are garbage, like the two Ant-man films, but for the most part when I sit down to watch one, I know I'm not going to be bored or pushed to adopt a social political agenda.

Be warned, I'm going to embed a piece of one that I know the gamer-boys hate:



Recently, talking about what skill set a player acquires when playing D&D over several years ~ real D&D, not adventurers league shit ~ a reader proposed that the skills are those related to executive functions.  Wikipedia defines these as attentional control, cognitive inhibition, inhibatory control, working memory and cognitive ability.  In simpler terms, listening, focus, self-control, holding information well and multi-tasking.  I think this is 100% true, but that this is supported by one other thing: the strength to ignore failure and keep going.

Some will take it as trite, but a fundamental narrative beneath all the Marvel films is that these people were capable, intelligent and heroic before they were enhanced with powers.  This narrative seems to get lost in the complaining and bitching that superheroes apparently exist in the universe to solve all our problems.  Yeah.  Who the fuck do you think is solving all your problems right now?  You?  Or some person who has decided to sacrifice their fun and leisure time in Mother's Basement to take on a 75-hour a week job digging the world out of the shitpile it's in?

The writer was careful to write the character of Carol Danvers as someone who had been taking hits and getting up again before she became a superhero ... just like you're free to do, if you've got the resolve and the willingness to overcome pain.

I appreciate the hurt that comes from losing a character, or having your game plans exploded in a few minutes by a bad die roll.  But the people who pretend to be heroes, but cannot be heroic enough to put on a game face when their character dies, or when Jerry gets the +4 sword in the toss and not them, are pathetic.  The game as written is tough, babycakes.  Shut the fuck up and grow a pair.

Mazes and Monsters: a Breakdown

Mazes and Monsters is a 1982 made-for-TV morality play that warns viewers against the dangers of participating in role-playing games, suggesting that the game form appeals to those with deep neurotic impulses. Directed by Steven Hilliard Stern, a group of college students indulge in the game called Mazes and Monsters, until one of their number, Robbie Wheeling, becomes unable to separate fantasy and reality, filling his head with voices and sending him off on a confusing quest related to the unsolved disappearance of his brother, years ago.

Heavy-handedly, the film attempts to identify the playing of role-playing games as a partial cause of Robbie's mental illness, though it is clearly established that his behaviour is part of a pre-existing pattern prior to the film. Additionally, it is equally established that Robbie's parents are self-motivated and unwilling to properly manage these earlier patterns, ending in Robbie being thrust irresponsibly into the same circumstances and stress-related environment that previously caused his earlier, unexplained break-down.

Continued on the blog, the Higher Path, available through my Patreon. Please support me with a $3 donation and gain the complete series of estate posts related to the post above, as these have all been written.

Why I Am NOT Going to See the Joker Movie

Featuring a full post.

It starts here.

Let me preface by saying that this post is not about the new, 2019 movie, Joker.  I have not seen the Joker movie and I don't know anything about the film.  This post is specifically about the character the Joker, that has been with us for some time, and which was transformed specifically from an ordinary criminal clown into something darker by Alan Moore's story, The Killing Joke.

Let me also preface by saying that I am a white male, and that I was, once, a young white male.

Of late, I've been harried on twitter and elsewhere for my decision not to see the new movie, usually with the argument that I cannot "have an opinion without giving it a chance."  My position is that almost certainly, nothing about the basic character of the Joker is changed in the new film ~ and this, in my opinion, is borne out of the excitement and anticipation I heard from fans prior to the film's release, and the excitement and satisfaction of those exact same fans who saw the film.  Clearly, these fans, prior to seeing the film, wanted to see more of the character they already knew, and clearly, they came away from the film having seen more of the character they already knew.  I do not need to see a hammer fall to know that it will when I let go.  Therefore, I do not need to see the Joker film to decide how I feel about the character, the Joker.

Unlike those who are most vocal about the character, I was alive and well and 25 years old when Tim Burton's version of Batman came out with Jack Nicholson playing the part.  I experienced the fan-boy gushing about the "new darkness" of the character then, with all the hype and tribalism that created, in which my generation happily ditched the campy Cesare Romero character in favor of this exciting, bold, vicious, madcap insane version.  It was blatantly clear in 1989 that this love-affair was pursued by a particular kind of white male, who gushed exhaustively about the character's free use of violence as a form of expression.

I did see the film and I considered it a vapid mess.  It drove the coffin nail in the lid with regards to Tim Burton and me, beginning a long, unpleasant series of multiple experiences being in rooms with white males expounding the genius of a character that randomly and "cleverly" kills people for no particular reason except as a form of personal expression.  It doesn't matter if they die, it doesn't matter who dies, all that matters is that they die in a way that's interesting.  This baton was thereafter taken up by a host of serial killer movies that spawned throughout the 1990s, including Silence of the Lambs, Seven, Natural Born Killers, Citizen X, Kiss the Girls and Copycat.  The genre began to falter after 2000, as the plots grew weaker and more esoteric, culminating in 2007's Zodiac, a serial killer film that hardly shows any serial killing.

With the passing years, Nicholson's version of the character grew less and less popular with the new generation, so that these conversations about the brilliant, wonderous magnificence of the Joker diminished ... and I might have been happy except that Christopher Nolan picked a very capable actor to play his Joker in The Dark Knight, where again the character was darkened with a sharpie sufficiently enough to inspire a whole new generation of specifically oriented young white men to again take up the Joker's cause celebre.  Once again, I was told the new film would be "terrifying" and "brooding," just as I had been told about Burton's vision ... and once again, seeing the film, I found it a ghastly mess of plot holes, irrelevant philosophy, prattling bullshit and insipid dialogue and writing.  None of that mattered, however, because the Joker was alive and well and deeply beloved again.

So, again, I found myself in the same round of endless crappy discussions in rooms with white males about how murder and irrational behaviour is really an exciting art form of a sort, or at least transformatively a form of release and structured anger against the establishment.  I hadn't realized it at the time, but there were certain comparisons to be made with those white men who did not realize that Fight Club was a morality play against fighting, and not an invitation to stupidly fight in small darkly lit basements.  I did not make that comparison in 2008.  I had not yet been woke.  I remember my principle thought at the time was that if we could simply castrate all the dumbfuck white men who loved the Joker's character, we could fix many problems of the world within a generation.

It was clear after 2008 that the Joker's popularity was gathering speed.  Unlike Burton's introduction, Nolan's version had the benefit of youtube and social media.  Nicholson was rebranded "camp," reducing that depiction to the level of Cesare Romero, and I did get some satisfaction from the world deciding, at last, that the 1989 film was actually shit, along with the three films that followed.  I had said so from the beginning, and mostly using the exact same phrases that are often used today.  Apparently, I was ahead of my time.  Sadly, I'll have to wait until 2038 before the social version of today's media turns on Nolan and acknowledges that that movie was shit, too.

Is the reader, no doubt in love with the Joker, good and ramped up now?  Well good.  Buckle up.  This is just the beginning.

Further clarity about the Joker's character was made possible by 2016's Suicide Squad, in which Jared Leto's character is presented with such bold, pornographic delight as to spectactularly outline with crystal clarity the innate fascination with the character of young white males.  In particular, the flame war that ensued surrounding that character.  I won't go into it.  We were all there.  Most importantly, the flame war demonstrated that the Joker was not merely a character, and not merely a series of artistic versions spawning back to the 1940s (literally, April 25th, 1940).  The original was a psychopath with a warped sense of humor, who became Romero's goofy prankster as the comics industry was "cleaned up" post-war.  By 2016, the Joker had grown into a form of political identification ... and one that could easily inspire direct violence and irrational stupidity on a deepened scale.  Not only did Holmes want to be the joker; there were thousands of voices on the internet ready to defend Holmes' right to want that.  We were through the looking glass.

So I began to pick the matter apart from this new perspective, not having any real answers to provide.  I already did not like the character ~ so anything I was going to say would undoubtedly be biased ~ as surely, the Joker-loving reader considers me to be now.  And yet, what is a Joker-lover except biased?

I am not being bombarded with demands that I see the new film, Western Stars, despite my not liking Bruce Springsteen, either (who is also hallowed by a particular kind of white male).

True enlightenment came about a year ago, when I was working at a retail store as a writer and client manager.  One of the co-workers there learned of Todd Phillips' coming film and at once proceeded to orgasm all over himself about the choice of Joaquin Phoenix as the character.  Phoenix has a peculiar reputation and it was assumed that he, in particular, would really be able to relate to the Joker character.  This was encouraged by this teaser trailer released in 2018, that my co-worker played repeatedly on his desktop without headphones.  The English version seems to have been scoured from the net, but it was alive and well last year.

Nothing about this teaser suggested I had any interest in watching the film.

Because my co-worker was willing to argue, and being a young white male, we had about a dozen back and forths about the Joker, what the Joker stood for, who liked him, why, what the best sort of movie about the Joker would be and so on.  My co-worker was, yes, a white male, 33 years old, but somewhat less than grown-up because of his age, having spent his life mostly in jobs that enabled him to play at being an I.T. guy.  He had most of the characteristics of this sort of person.

I began to organize a theory.  The Joker, I reasoned, appeals to white men because, as a whole, white men feel dissatisfied by the present political state of the world.  They are told day and night that they have a certain "entitlement" on account of being white, which they don't personally feel as they look around at their minimum-wage, heavy labor jobs in which they have no actual power and for which they receive no appreciation or attention.  They do not realize that their expectation of power and attention is, itself, a function of the entitlement they feel.  If they weren't white, they wouldn't expect these things, or get mad when they don't manifest.  But they cannot understand this.  They just know they're unhappy and that they hate what they see as a constant, rancorous persecution of their innocent existence.

And, in fact, it is innocent.  They did not choose to be white and they did not choose to be entitled.  It was foistered on them without their complicit approval.  But innocence in birth and status does not translate to social responsibility and educated awareness.  Their innocence is not the crime, but their insistence of being innocent, their declarative shouting that they have a right to be innocent, the facile resistance they have towards having anything but innocence, determines ultimately that they really aren't any more and that they're using this bullshit innocence as a shield, protecting them from waking the fuck up and realizing they are still responsible for the sins of their parents.

In the Joker, these white men see something they can identify with: a character who resists the system, but not for political reasons, not for class reasons, not for the sake of money or authoritative power ... but purely for the priviledged right to resist, in part because that resistance doesn't have to be justified or explained or defended.  White men want to be angry and to fight back, but they don't want to talk about it, because talking only leads to arguments they cannot produce logic against.  The Joker doesn't argue.  He doesn't explain.  He doesn't have "reasons."  He is pure rebellion, in the can.  He is the angry white man's poster boy.

For non-white men and for women, the Joker is way, way too close to the toxic, randomly encountered white male asshole who decides today is the day to gang together to mock a woman, push a black man down a hill, paint 'slut' across a woman's doorway, torch a Semite's car or pour a milkshake over an Oriental's girlfriend, while grinning and strutting like a cock on the walk ... much like the post Burtonesque Joker tries to look in every fucking scene of every movie I've seen.  When combined with cruelty and violence, laughter and fun-times are cruel faces stuck on top of cruel intentions.  This was made more than clear decades ago by Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.

In the short run, white men can really warm themselves to the character ~ but in the long run, the Joker is a really lousy poster boy.  There's no real pay-off to emulating or behaving along the Joker's example.  As much as white men might identify with him, most are smart enough to know they can't randomly and creatively kill strangers.  Most white men aren't really this character.  They know where the line is.  They go and see the Joker and gush about him vicariously.  Not realistically.

Still, that installs an awareness of how impotent white men who bow to the system are.  That's fine for a guy like me, who finds other reasons to feel empowered, but for a lone white male who can't find a better icon that the fucking Joker, this is a bleak, scrubby, salt-sown field.  Not one damn thing is going to grow here except an inability to take effective action and a pervasive sense of being unfairly judged.

Sooner or later, that's going to result in violence: violence against others or violence against self.  And this is not good for anyone's soul.

But I am not going to take a political stand on this issue, or promote censorship or tell anyone else to see the newest film.  At the same time, however, I am not going to be told that I cannot make up my mind about something toxic just because I haven't swallowed this shit.  I've swallowed enough already, to know what the fuck it is.

A Review of Captain Marvel

My chance tonight to see the film, so at last I can stop dodging every word written about it on the internet.

I'd like to deconstruct it but I'd have to see it again first, as I'm digesting.  I know a lot of people think films like this are fluff; but people see what they pay attention to and I've noticed very much with the rise of youtube film reviewers that they don't seem to see very much.  There's meat here to chew ... but admittedly it isn't the meat that would satisfy the appetite of a 30-something fanboy who thinks that film-making has been on the skids since Casino.

There are some expositional troubles with it in the first 25 minutes ~ not inconsistencies, not inaccuracies, just "troubles."  Mostly from a pressing need to gunshoot its way through the build-up to placate audiences who can't spend another five minutes drinking in the full dialogue, pacing and setting.  It goes back to that thing about not paying attention.  For a lot of viewers, if the actors slow down long enough to talk, it becomes (apparently) impossible to see or hear anything that's going on.

I'm a fan.  I like about two-thirds of Marvel films; this was a departure from the usual form.  You'll see people online blathering that its "the same old thing," but AGAIN, they're not seeing and they're not hearing.  There are quite a number of quiet themes at play in the film that are tapping into a certain kind of viewer, one who has the patience to let the actors talk about things that matter to them, while enjoying characters who don't scream every line or feel the need to be grotesquely "cool" in every scene.

Should you see it?

If you've think 4chan has "some merits," I'd say no.  If you're the sort that watches Extra Credits or Kurzgesagt because you think it's "educational," you should likely give this movie a pass.  If you're deeply involved in let's play content on youtube, or you're thinking about taking that UofC course on StarCraft, you're going to find this movie moves way, way too slowly.

On the other hand, if you like women and would like to see them perform in parts that don't pander to the fact that they're women ~ that is, treats them like human beings with believable personalities ~ then you might be surprised by this.

I was ... but only because it turned out to be exactly what I expected it to be.  I'm usually wrong.

Brie Larson

As I might have predicted, Brie Larson, aka Captain Marvel, is being raked over the coals prior to the opening of the film on March 7th by a plethora of disgruntled, complaining, angst-driven white men, who see nothing ironic in claiming anger about something that is virtually impossible to find online.

Not seeing the start of this "contraversy," perhaps because I don't have a television or because I watch little entertainment-driven promotional content beyond trailers, I haven't been able to find an exact quote of what Larson actually said.  I was able to find a second hand comment that she, apparently, doesn't care what a 40-year-old white man thinks about her movie or her being the lead in it.

Naturally, this is more than enough reason for thousands of white man-boys to rush forward in a sexist backlash that claims Larson is being racist.  Apparently, I am also racist, since I don't care what a 40-year-old man-boy at his computer also thinks.

Now, to be fair, there are a great many who would classify me as a "man-boy."  I play games, I write games, I'm obsessed with a game, I'm not exactly a "man" in what would be my father's definition of the word, so when I trash man-boys I think it's fair to say I'm on the inside.

But this ridiculous crap disgusts me.

Frankly, I'm looking forward to Captain Marvel.  And I'm not going to pretend here: I'm looking forward to watching a manificently-clad woman kick the living shit out of whatever gets in her way, with (if the trailers can be trusted) both sarcasm and matter-of-fact pragmatism.  I think that is fucking sexy.  I would be happy to help pay for the machine that crushes woman-hating man-boys into pulp so that it can be sold as dog food to raise money to make more movies like this one.  I hope it is good, and not like the filmatic dog-vomit that Black Panther gave us last year.

Yes, the oscars happened last night and sooooo many people thought that Black Panther was going to win ... which baffles me because we've all seen the oscars crabble along like an old man with the gout being eaten from the ankles up by a snake taking it's time.  The oscars love to taunt-bait its audience with popular films that can then be handed out the shit awards of "costume design" and "best achievement in production design," with apparently includes making films where the trains in the distance are model fucking trains and look like they are.  But that is so the oscars can say, "see, we recognized the film; it's inclusion in our bullshit film factory farce was totally justified."

Last night I participated in my yearly ritual of re-grouting the bathroom tiles because I want to look at attractive, productive work, something totally unlike the oscars.

Where was I?  Oh yes, sexually abusive whiny white men and their hurt feelings because a recently successful woman got herself put into the lead role of a picture that's bound to make a shit-ton of money these white men will never see.  Never mind that these white men complaining about Larson's racism are the same white men bitching about football players kneeling or defending cops shooting black kids.  Fuck all that.  A woman has a movie part and ... we ... are ... angry.

And she doesn't care.  Wow, the indifference of attractive women, eh?  That same brutal indifference that makes every attractive woman think that, like, she's a person, and that she owes it to herself not to consort with, say, man-boys.

The sheer GALL of this woman who spent a year preparing physically and mentally for a grueling part, whose life is now quintessentially hinged on whatever the critics and internet write about her efforts come March 7, to not kowtow to every man-boy online in pre-gratitude for their willing approval.  How dare she not do so immediately?  We have computers!  Doesn't she know we could ruin her life  ... just ... like ... that?

I think maybe she's gambling on people with more power to make the final decision.

Assuming she ever said anything at all.  I have no proof of it.  I can't find the original interview where she supposedly said this thing.  And the internet lies, lies, lies all the time when it can't find a reason to hate someone.

WELL,

I feel better.  This has been bugging me for three days.  If anyone is still around, I'll try to write a real post later today.  Meanwhile, I'll let my 15-year-old teenage self splash up a big goddamn poster, the kind I would have definitely bought amidst my raging puberty.

(see, I'm the real sexist; I like girls, pretty much for the reason I'm biologically supposed to like them)

She can beat the hell out of me anytime.

The Superhero Flame War

I like films.  Enormously.  I don't really care what the subject of the film is, so long as it is done in a way that causes me to think, engages me emotionally and presents situations and characters that remain believable and rational.  I don't need to like the characters, such as a film like Nightcrawler, where I actively despised the character.  I don't need to identify with the characters, such as Temple Grandin, to whom I cannot relate at all.  The characters do not have to be recognizable; I don't have to have a previous association with them; I'm perfectly capable of meeting and falling in love with the characters upon my very first encounter, such as I felt in the film Hanna.  I can also find a movie brilliant even when I absolutely detest the actors, such as I felt when watching The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, with Ben Stiller.  Animated films can be brilliant and deserving of high praise, like The Croods or Wreck-It Ralph.  At the same time, I can also enjoy disturbing films, such as Suburbicon.  I don't care if a film is foreign, like the Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [more properly,  "Men Who Hate Women"] or the Quebecois Decline of the American Empire.  I rarely like a horror film, but I can usually respect something obscure, like the Japanese Audition.  I know of no genre that I can't name a film from that deserves to be seen several times.

Which is why I don't understand the knee-jerk hatred that has gathered around superhero films.

Superhero films are a genre.  Just as musicals were in the 1940s, horror films were in the 1950s, westerns in the 1960s, cop movies in the 1970s, slasher films in the 1980s and crippled-person films in the 1990s.  If the reader thinks there are "a lot" of superhero films around now, believe me, this is nothing compared to how much time was given to making films about gunslingers.  As a kid, there were at least ten hour-long dramas on television based on some western theme, and any given week featured one to three new western films.  This kind of innundation would be incomprehensible to a present audience.

Because I like film, I try to watch mostly everything that looks like it might be directed well or present those things I started with: intelligent dialogue, a meaningful conundrum, purposeful storytelling.  If I could leave it up to my personal opinion about these things, I would probably be happier.  Unfortunately, I can't.  I'm far, far too concerned with what others think ... and this leads me down the path of what other people think about films.  It's part of the meta-experience that pulls at me.

If you are like me, you have spent too much time watching opinionated people discussing what is right or wrong with either Marvel or DC films.  In this time, with the particular genre ruling the film-making experience at this time, the debate is never-ending.  Well, fear not.  I'm not going to write a post about what is what with this versus that.  Though believe me, I've tried.  I trashed those efforts.  There is an answer ... but I'm convinced that any attempt to isolate the answer would be a wasted effort.  I am coming to believe that the subjectivity of the audience has reached such a fever-pitch that all deconstruction of film culture is presently moot.

I can be convinced by argument to try a movie; and I can find that my convictions about a film can be changed, once I see the film.  I have a long list of films that I've liked, that I absolutely believed that I would never watch, or that I would absolutely hate.  The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is an excellent example.  As I said, I hate Ben Stiller.  Worse, I adored the original short story by James Thurber as a child, and I have long been a fan of the original movie from 1947, with Danny Kaye.  The idea that something by Ben-fucking-Stiller could be made, pissing on those memories, virtually guaranteed that I would never, ever, watch that goddamned film.

Then something sparked my interest.  I can't even remember what it was.  Some reference to the film on something I caught on a youtube video, suggesting it wasn't a remake.  Then a copy of the film came across my radar when I was still a provider-employee for video-on-demand; I was provided a free opportunity to watch it through the system and ... alone ... I watched it.

I can identify when my mind was changed about the film.  It was this shot right here:

This is less than a minute into the visual film.

As I've tried to explain, I have watched a lot of movies.  I know perfectly well that millions of people saw this shot at the beginning and got nothing whatsoever from it ... but there are several things in this shot that convinced me, viscerally, that I was not watching another fucking Zoolander.  And, as usually happens, it wasn't until the third or fourth time watching the film (been about eight times now) that I could identify why this shot jerked me out of my expectation and brought me around to watching the film with an open mind.

To begin with, the colors are muted.  I realize many people feel that muted colors are now some horrible evil in cinema; for me, the shadows across the building, the starkness of the details, the deliberate attempt to show an environment that isn't soothing or simple (there's a lot of jumble in this picture) is a refreshing sign that the film is going to be about something real.  This is helped by the very small touch of the film credit: New Line Cinema felt that it was appropriate for their efforts to be displayed in a moderate, nuanced manner.  When a film company does that, it says to me, "We care more about this film than we do about ourselves."  That is a rare sentiment and always welcome.

If there is an issue with the discussion and critique of superhero films just now, it is that plainly the reviewers care far, far more about themselves, their pretensions, they're sense of personal nostalgia and their need for pandering than they do about the films.  I am not "tired" of superhero films ... but I am tired of critics who seem to think that the media footprint of the character prior to the film matters.

Take the DC vs. Marvel conundrum ~ without, thank you, falling into that swamp.  Clearly, the Marvel films have been more successful.  That cannot be debated.  Individual films are commonly compared against one another, cherry-picked according to the pundit's personal agenda, but the overall success of Marvel's efforts in the last 10 years exists in an entirely different ballpark from DC's over the same period.  The internet is not wrong when they note that something has clearly happened here, and that it deserves study and interpretation.

However, that study needs to divorce itself from arguments like, "Are DC characters the equivalent of Marvel characters" or "Are the characters depicted by the movie studio accurate to what the characters were in the comics"?  These are meaningless, subjective, useless discussions that in no way move the needle towards understanding why what Marvel is doing works very well and why what DC/Warner is doing works ... not as well.

Warner is making movies that make both a cultural imprint and, mostly, money.  Warner is not failing.  It is not doing as well as Marvel, obviously; but in and of itself, if Marvel didn't exist, Warner's record would not be all that different from any company making movies about a particular genre over a ten-year period.  Movies succeed.  Movies fail.  What has to be remembered is that most movies find an audience; it takes a truly bad film not to do that.

I want here to go into a digression where I talk about the true obscurity of films that simply drift off everyone's radar, though the film might have, at one time, been considered a critical success.  I can pick any number of films from the 1970s, made in my lifetime, that have utterly disappeared from any discourse about film that I've seen in the last twenty years.  Julia, for example; or McCabe and Mrs. Miller.  Films that once people went to again and again when discussing something about film-making or storytelling.  Films that are never mentioned now; that make even a filmophile look archaic and out of touch with the world when mentioned [for the record, I categorically dislike both films, in every regard as films, chosen for that reason].  Films disappear because, despite the efforts of critics to make them popular, simply fail to be popular.  For a reason.

It generally isn't possible to say which films will drift out of social consciousness and which won't, with the passage of time.  I am increasingly of the opinion that the Oscars ought to be awarded to a collected group of nominees from twenty years ago, celebrating the films of 1997, not 2017; because at least there's a chance we might agree on something that has survived the test of time for at least twenty years.  How many of us, for example, really believe that The Shape of Water will be relevant in 2037?  How relevant is The Artist, from six years ago, now?  Heard anyone mention it lately?

DC/Warner films are finding an audience.  They're not finding as large of an audience as Marvel, however ... and there are reasons for that.  It is clear that the executives of Warner lack vision.  The Marvel films were started by a group that were expressly assembled to create one kind of movie.  Warner makes all kinds of movies, and so their motivations in movie making, as a studio, are different.  The particular elements of a celebrated character such as Batman are not substantially different to their bottom line as the celebrated characters of Paddington the Bear [Paddington 2], Rick Deckard [Bladerunner 2049], the events at Dunkirk, King Kong [Kong: Skull Island] or any of the other characters behind films that were made in 2017 (all of these were).  Warner Bros. cares that Justice League does well at the box office, but as a studio it does not care more about the film than it does about itself.

And that is the critical element.  Marvel's reputation mattered when Iron Man was made.  It's reputation continues to matter.  But "DC" was never a studio.  It was a group of products owned by a studio, whose reputation will survive as many profitable critical disasters as Warner is prepared to make.

It became clear, very early on in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, that this was a vanity project made by Ben Stiller (of all people), that was never expected to make serious money.  The movie was being made because the maker had a message, believed in it, and was prepared to see the message through, at great expense, whatever the consequences.  The film is quirky in parts; occasionally turns a joke that drops with a heavy thud; and is absolutely not trying to pander.  It breaks a lot of rules, about character, pacing, presentation and theme.  And it doesn't care.

It is easy to see, in numerous instances, that Marvel is doing something similar.  The questionable morality underlying the incredibly popular Black Widow character; the maladroit rudeness of Dr. Strange; the hokey un-American indifference of Captain America to by-the-book legalities; the callous selfishness of Tony Stark; these are all issues pounded upon by self-informed critics who fail to recognize the substantial basis for these characters: their likeability is irrelevant.  They don't exist to be liked.  They're not written for the sake of being popular.  They're being created according to the personal whims of a set of writers who have been encouraged to go their own way.

No cosplayer strutting around in a Black Widow catsuit (and at a game-con, that describes literally hundreds of women) fully embraces the character from identifying with the character.  That's supposed to be the Holy Grail of character creation, we are told: that an every-man or every-woman will be liked, because the audience will identify with that person.  It turns out, the audience really doesn't give a shit.  No one in the audience really imagines that they are like the character of Andy Dufresne from Shawshank Redemption; dour, bookish, in love with opera ... but they like the idea of him.  They like the idea that escape from prison is possible.  The audience likes ideas.  Characters exist to perform the idea.  On their own, most characters are awful.

Millions of man-boys love the idea of Batman; they love the idea of having so much money they can act however they wish; they like the idea of being able to beat up people, but being so righteous that they never kill anyone; they like the idea of being super-strong and never needing anyone, fulfilling their ultimate loner fantasies.  But none of those man-boys want to spend ten years reading books and taking courses to become the person of considerable intellect that Batman has to be; they don't actually want to live everyday in pain from the repeated fractured bones that Batman has sustained; they're not really comfortable with the alone part, which they don't actually have to experience in the film, because after a few minutes, something happens to Batman.  But they like the idea.  The idea of it is cool.

Unfortunately, the characters of Batman and Superman have become exhaustively explored and remade into marble monoliths ... the idea has stultified into a fetish.  The problem with a fetish is that, like the perfect girl in the perfect lingerie on the perfect bed in the perfect house, if it is done just a little bit wrong, it ruins the moment.  All she has do to is snort when she laughs and the boner goes away.

Warner understands that; and because it understands that, it can't afford to create too much product for too much money for an audience that no longer cares what story Batman or Superman are doing, as long as their boner isn't ruined.  There's no wiggle room.  There's no opportunity to give the product to a bunch of writers and say, "Do whatever feels right."  The chance to do that was already given twice.  It's too late now.

Marvel has the terrific benefit of blue skies.  Black Panther?  The Winter Soldier?  Thor?  Blue skies.  Whether they work or not, as characters, as movies, there's no marble plinth on their backs.  We can hate what Tony Stark stands for, we can scoff at Hawkeye's relevance, we can question the fundamental morality of Nick Fury ... but we can do so without a half-century of makes and re-makes.  Even the fanboys who love the comics, who hammer the anvil for the sake of the comics, can't manifest in large enough numbers to subvert the unrestrained willingness of a community of writers and filmmakers who are prepared to create characters who are free to exist as whatever they happen to be, pandering be damned.

More superhero films?  Sure.  Bring them on.  As long as they're good.  I enjoyed the 2017 Marvel films.  I have no doubt I'll enjoy the 2018 Marvel films.  It takes less than ten hours out of the year to watch them; I don't find that particularly irksome.  Not nearly as irksome as I would find watching anything that was nominated for an Oscar this year.