zdarsky:

reyesrobbies:

things modern x-men comics should reference more: wolverine giving kurt a giant photo of himself for his bday

marvel please let me do a one-shot called THE PICTURE OF JAMES HOWLETT

(via zdarsky-deactivated20200105)

7 years ago  /  5,038 notes

Extremism, the need for narrative and Star Wars

overanalysingstarwars:

On the night of the Paris shootings, I was rewatching The Neverending Story for the first time in decades (I have a distinct memory of watching it for the first time after doing my 11-plus, so it is pretty much exactly 30 years since I first saw it). My brain, being my brain, inevitably started building strands between these two events and pulling them together.

For anyone who hasn’t watched it, or has forgotten, the underlying message of The Neverending Story is sort of a Geek Manifesto. Bastian, a bookish, imaginative child in grieving after the sudden death of his mother, is told to stop dreaming by his father and bullied at school for being weird. He comes across a book and reading it, gradually starts to realise that he is part of the story he’s reading. Fantasia, the world in which it is set, is dying because “people have begun to lose their hopes and forget their dreams” and thus creating The Nothing. There is a part where the film goes all conspiratorial and suggests that this is being manipulated by people wanting to control the world: “people who have no hopes are easy to control - and whoever has the control has the power” says the evil werewolf Gmork, who describes himself as the “servant of the power behind The Nothing”. It’s a familiar trope; those who believe in nothing believe in anything, and it is only the true believers who can save the world.

I enjoyed the film, some of the subtleties of which I think I missed as a child. It reminded me at times of Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison, in a good way. And there’s a great moment when the film breaks the fourth wall, which I find quite chilling. But the message was a hard one to swallow in the shadow of the latest Daesh/ISIS atrocity. Who, in this all-too-real scenario are we meant to see as the believers, and who the nihilists? As far as most decent people are concerned, it is Daesh who are the nihilists, but it is equally clear that they consider themselves to be on a mission, quite literally from God. And the reality is that atrocities throughout history have been committed by people who believed very strongly that they were fighting for their dreams and hopes, against an enemy who they had dehumanised to such an extent that they could contentedly shoot them in cold blood or march them into gas chambers. There’s an odd link between this, the Daily Mail’s recent cartoon portraying immigrants as rats…

…and the Nazi’s portrayal of Jews…

This point hit me again on Wednesday when I listened to Hans Frank on the Today Programme. Frank’s father was Hitler’s personal lawyer and sentenced to death in Nuremberg. Asked what it was like growing up “knowing your father was a monster”, Frank was very quick to respond:

“He wasn’t a monster. A monster would excuse him. He was a well-educated German…brought up as a Catholic - so he knew by heart and by brain what is right and what is wrong.”

“He was politically responsible for every dead Jew, every dead Polish, man, wife and child.”

It’s unfair to the original author of The Neverending Story, Michael Ende, to accuse him of similarly dehumanising who he considered to be the enemy - I haven’t read his book and the film notoriously ends the narrative halfway through. In contrast to the film’s “Disneyfied” ending, as Ende allegedly put it, the book sees Bastian enter Fantasia (or rather “Fantastica”) and making a mess of things. I haven’t read it.

What does any of this have to do with Star Wars? Earlier this week, Spanish state television got the logos for al-Qaida and the Rebel Alliance mixed up, which has caused the internet a brief moment of hilarity.

The thing is though, al-Qaida and Star Wars have some common ancestry. The Foundation series of books by Isaac Asimov, is a key influence of Star Wars. The name of the first book, in Arabic, is al-Qaida and there has been considerable speculation that Osama bin Laden, may have been influenced by the book as a young, nerdy, pampered Saudi youth. 

There are certainly many parallels between the struggle presented in the Star Wars films and current Middle Eastern unrest. Much as I love Star Wars, I find it impossible to watch A New Hope these days without seeing it as a story about the radicalisation of a young man and his Jedi trainers as really quite manipulative. Luke is of course told about his origins very much from “a certain point of view” - which is a nice way of saying that Obi Wan utterly misled him to believe his father was dead and not a leading enforcer for the Empire which he wanted him to rise up and fight.

We don’t see Yoda and Obi Wan alone together, except for one scene in The Empire Strikes Back where they discuss Luke - and Leia - very much as if they are little more than tools for their own ends:

Even when Luke is about to rush off to fight Vader, very much against their wishes, they fail to tell him that Vader is in fact his father. I find it hard to look at either character without deploring quite how cynical and manipulative they are. And that only gets worse when you look at the prequels.

Say what you like about Episodes 1-3, which are undeniably deeply flawed films, but I can never completely condemn them for the simple reason that Lucas was, to coin a phrase, attempting to get the audience to take a step into a larger world. He clearly failed, distracting us with garbage like Jar Jar Binks, lacking the courage of his convictions by making Dooku a cardboard cut out villain rather than the enigmatic figure he so nearly was, and of course, the dialogue. But at its heart is the suggestion that not only does the Republic fall because it and the Separatists are being manipulated by Sidious, but that the institutions of the Republic, namely the Senate and the Jedi Council, have become hopelessly corrupt.

The corruption of the Senate is rather inelegantly presented. It doesn’t amount to much more than the audience being told, repeatedly, that the Senate is corrupt and lots of tiresome scenes of people in rubber suits waving their arms around aggressively in Senate sessions themselves. The Jedi by contrast are at all times presented as heroes, and yet their decisions are consistently and almost universally wrong. Leaving to one side the whole nonsense about what to do about the Prophecy of the Chosen One, where a council of supposedly wise and intelligent beings are universally incapable of realising that bringing “balance of the force” might mean their long forgotten enemies coming back rather than disappearing even further, there’s the fact that they discover that someone has commission an entire clone army to be constructed in their names and deleted all records of the existence of the planet they were being made on, and yet they seem to just shrug their shoulders and get on with kickstarting a war in which millions of people would subsequently die.

There’s cocking up and being naive. And then there’s Yoda.

Oh, and before I move on, there’s also this troubling business with force ghosts. It’s established that the ability to merge with the living force and interact with the living was only discovered recently, by Qui Gon Jinn in fact, and Yoda and Obi Wan then spend the next 20 years meditating about it. I can’t help but wander if this isn’t a bad direction for the Jedi to go down; as soon as you start believing there’s a form of life after death then, well, the gloves are off. Obi Wan, after all, deliberately martyrs himself so as to further push Luke down his path towards hating Vader. But he would almost certainly have been more wary of doing so if he didn’t believe that “if you strike me down I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” It’s hard to get away from the idea that Obi Wan and Yoda spent the 20 years between Episodes 3 and 4 moving even further away from certain restrictions within their faith that existed for thousands of years for very good reasons.

I wish I understood better what Lucas’s intentions were when he made the Prequels. His point is clearly that the Jedi bring it on themselves; in The Clone Wars this point is much better underlined, particularly with Ahsoka’s eventual disenchantment. But he never spells it out in the films themselves and even tonally steers the audience in the opposite direction. Is that poor storytelling, or hidden depths? My vote is for the former, but the effect I find is that the films are open to endless interpretation. At a time when we were knee deep in films with big reveals, from Fight Club to the Matrix to the Sixth Sense, the Prequels eschewed this fashion and left it to thousands of aficionados to speculate about them ever since. Is this brilliance or ineptitude? Somewhere in the middle, I think.

But the fundamental point is well made: the black and white set up in Episodes 4-6 was established because of the screwed up situation the Republic found itself in in Episodes 1-3. For many, these grey areas are what they hate about the Prequels - it simply isn’t “Star Wars”; for me, it is the best aspect of them. And there’s a common theme throughout the series, which is that it seems aware of its own artifice. Heroic characters, once you scratch the surface, end up being not so heroic. Villains end up being reflections of our own problems. Just as Luke sees himself behind Vader’s mask in the cave, isn’t Palpatine little more than a distorted mirror image of the Republican ideal? Goodness knows, I enjoy the spectacle and thrill of the films, but its these weird niggles that keep me obsessing about Star Wars. And, if I’m honest, I’m terrified that it is this discordancy that Episodes 7-9 will end up junking.

Our brains seem to be wired to attune to heroic narratives; it was interesting to see the film Suffragette conform almost perfectly to the Hero’s Journey. That narrative however is treacherous at best, encouraging us to label people as warriors and monsters. It allows us to get manipulated. I think George Lucas understands that, and that his Star Wars films subtly subvert it. Far too many people however, don’t appear to have the same appreciation, and that leads us in a cycle of violence and despair.

(via bigredrobot)

7 years ago  /  64 notes