The new And column is up, on the claims that talking about sexism, racism, homophobia etc. is “divisive,” except when you’re in favor of them.
•Roy Edroso looks at the right-wing reaction to the Ferguson shooting and subsequent violence. You’ll be fascinated to know that when cops shoot blacks on the street, it’s Obama’s fault.
•Hobby Lobby may be strong for its own religious rights, but it’s fine with preaching to school kids.
•A suicidal 18-year-old rape victim in Ireland asks for an abortion when the fetus is two weeks along. Although Ireland allows abortion in that situation, it took the authorities 17 weeks to decide she had to get a C-section instead. Because nothing’s better for suicidal rape victims than carrying their rapist’s baby for four months.
•From a few years back, a violent encounter between a young black man and cops (the violence being all on the cops’ side).
•To escape all the liberals on Facebook, try Reaganbook!
•Tyler Cowen, a libertarian who thinks mandatory vaginal ultrasounds are a great idea and that there’s no logical reason employers shouldn’t have the right to demand employees have sex with them also thinks the problem with the poor is they’re not moral enough, so they should try, say, converting to the Latter-Day Saints. Paging David Brooks, the dude’s on your turf!
My new And column and a couple of other links
Filed under economics, Politics, Undead sexist cliches
Time Travel Causality (#SFWApro)
The ability to cheat cause-and-effect is one of the things time-travel movies have to work around if they’re to work at all.
Consider Scarlet O’Hara. Much of Gone With the Wind is fueled by the fallout from Ashley Wilkes proposing to Melanie, then marrying her. Scarlet constantly schemes to win Ashley’s heart but the one thing she can’t do is change what’s happened. He’s fallen for Melanie, all her plans have to deal with that.
Give Scarlet a time machine (and once GWTW is out of copyright, I wouldn’t be surprised) and all bets are off. She can go back, try to change what happened, try to become the woman Ashley wants—which frankly I don’t think has a chance in hell of working, but I’m sure she’d give it a shot.
Time travel lets you cheat causality. It lets you not live with the consequences of your action. If your do-over doesn’t work out, you can try again, or undo your do-over. This, of course, can easily get out of hand, because if there are no consequences to someone’s actions, there’s no drama. So time travel films have multiple solutions:
•The one-shot deal. Peggy Sue in Peggy Sue Got Married and the protagonist of Before You Say ‘I Do’ get a chance to change their pasts, but it’s a one-shot deal. They’ve been magically dropped into an earlier time, if they can’t rewrite history then too bad, so sad.
•Practical obstacles. Time machines get stolen. Or break.
•Bad consequences. This is the Monkey’s Paw school of time-travel, where everything goes horribly wrong unless you either stop or put it back the way it was (case in point, The Butterfly Effect).
•Emotional decisions. At a key point in Minutemen, the protagonist plans to go back and undo the moment when he rescued a kid from bullies, because going up against the cool kids permanently ruined his social life. Then the kid he rescued, who’s been his best buddy ever since, reveals how much it meant to him to have a friend … and so the protagonist lets history unroll as it always did. Likewise the lead of Always Will wipes out his entire awesome do-over life so that his mother will end up happy (because by negating his power to do-over, he also eliminates the event that brought her together with his abusive stepfather).
•Loss of control. Groundhog Day movies (Groundhog Day, 12:01, Christmas Do Over, Last Day of Summer) are completely causality free: Nothing the protagonist does makes any difference to the next day. Bill Murray in Groundhog Day commits suicide, smokes, eats insanely unhealthy meals because he knows he’s trouble free. In a Groundhog Day episode of Stargate: SG-1, Jack O’Neal (Richard Dean Anderson) suddenly kisses Col. Carter (Amanda Tapping) because he knows she’ll forget so no consequences.
But the catch, of course, is that whatever or whoever is pulling the strings, it isn’t the protagonist. Freedom from causality is a trap, a time treadmill that keeps you running through the same temporal loop over and over. Victory is getting causality back, not escaping it.
I’ll see if I think of more methods as the book goes along.
Filed under Movies, Time Travel Book
I post to say that I will not be posting
I’m not sure if it was the heat (my theory) or not having gone the full length of the trail in a couple of weeks (TYG’s theory) but I’m completely wiped and stiff. I think the fact I consumed probably three-plus liters of water on the way is evidence for heat being the issue. But I might be wrong.
So anyway, too wiped for deep thought. Or even light thought.
Filed under Personal
And then the other stuff (#SFWApro)
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY (2014) is the second Marvel team to bear that name, an oddball group of SF characters that together turned into a hit comic and now movie. Chris Pratt plays Star Lord (“Who?”) a human interplanetary thief and mercenary reluctantly forced to turn hero to stop Kree fanatic Ronan (Lee Pace of Pushing Daises) from exterminating the peaceful world of Xander (run by Glenn Close as Nova Prime). Can forging a team out of tree-man Groot, genetic misfit Rocket Raccoon, brutal warrior Drax (Dave Bautista) and super-assassin Gamora (Zooey Saldana) stop Ronan and his sidekick Nebula (Karen Gillan of Doctor Who)? A very entertaining film in its own right, more so if you know enough comics to catch some of the names dropped along the way. For anyone who’s interested, Atomic Anxiety provides more in-depth analysis, and Brian Cronin looks at their comic-book roots in detail here. “I have lived my life among enemies—I will be happy to die among friends.”
MEN WITH GUNS (1997) is John Sayles’ drama about a Latin American doctor who decides to drop in on the students he sent out to treat the poor several years ago only to discover the ones who weren’t shot as collaborators by the military were killed as government stooges by the insurgents. Filmed entirely in Spanish (except for some native Indian dialect), this is grimly effective, even though I can see where it’s going. Mandy Patinkin and Maggie Renzi play tourists. “I was a soldier, but now I don’t wear a uniform—does that mean I haven’t killed anyone?”
Filed under Uncategorized
Two Yankees From Connecticut Walk Into an Arthurian Bar … (#SFWApro)
This post was originally going to include the Will Rogers version, but the VHS tape broke, so … (in case you’re wondering, I focused on TV time travel this week, so not as much as usual to review).
A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT (1949) opens with Bing Crosby’s Hank visiting Pendragon Castle and confounding a tour guide with his knowledge of Arthur’s court. This brings him to the castle’s crotchety owner (Cedric Hardwicke) who listens as Hank tells this amazing tale … Unlike previous adaptations, this unambiguously presents the Yankee’s trip as real, and unlike them, keeps the technological change minor—Crosby’s big accomplishments are building a gun and teaching swing to court musicians (surprising since they emphasize he’s an auto mechanic in the present). The film skips the eclipse twist at the start (it comes into play later) and resolves Crosby’s romance with Alisande (Rhonda Fleming) by having him meet her reincarnation/lookalike in the present day. William Bendix plays a buffoonish Sagramore, who was actually a big name in pre-Malory Arthurian legend but plays the fool in most Twain adaptations (one of my books blames this on Malory having the A-listers such as Lancelot prove their worth by clobbering Sagramore). Blandly amiable but the Technicolor visuals are way prettier than most of the later versions. “Don’t give up too soon/if you stub your toe on the moon.”
Keshia Knight Pulliam becomes A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT (1989) when she falls off a horse and wakes up in the past, where she helps Arthur and Guinevere (Michael Gross and Emma Samms) thwart the schemes of Morgan and Merlin (Jean Marsh [who also plays LeFay in Doctor Who: Battlefield] and Rene Auberjonois). As with Crosby, the tech changes are minimal (mostly cultural stuff, such as teaching martial arts and feminism) and the eclipse is held off for the climax. On the other hand, Paul Zindel’s script throws in details from Twain most adaptations skip, such as Sir Boss getting 1 percent of Camelot’s revenue and returning to the present by Merlin casting her into suspended animation (but the ending shows conclusively that Camelot wasn’t just a dream). Not particularly good, overall. “Flee, flee—she’s a voice witch!”
Filed under Movies, Time Travel Book
This week’s reading (#SFWApro)
Like The Burglary, THE LOST BATTALION: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationalism by Richard Slotkin is eerily familiar in portraying a WW I America where anything less than “100 percent Americanism”—i.e., absolute unquestioning loyalty and support for the war—was regarded as treasonous and where many whites (“Nordics” in the language of the time) were convinced that nonwhites simply couldn’t be true Americans. Slotkin follows the heroic wartime exploits of the Harlem Hellfighters (a black NYC battalion) and the Melting Pot Battalion (composed of Irish, Italians, Jews and Chinese, also from New York) as they performed spectacularly despite white skepticism and lack of support. Unfortunately, of course, the conviction that dedicated military service would confirm them as Americans proved tragically false as the country veered towards anti-immigration, anti-labor and accepted lynching as a necessary element of white supremacy. Reminiscent of my Screen Enemies of the American Way in showing the WW I era’s fear of enemies within.
EXCELLENT WOMEN by Barbara Pym has a wryly humorous spinster (“I am not at all like Jane Eyre, who must have given hope to so many plain women who tell their stories in the first person.”) coping with the disruptions caused by a quarreling couple moving in next door to her and a manipulative widow moving in on the local minister. The kind of low-key serious novel that usually doesn’t work for me, but Pym does very well, and unusual even today in suggesting a life unmarried isn’t a fate worse than death (though that said, the protagonist does come across awfully self-sacrificing at the end).
1066: The Year of the Conquest by David Howarth was one of the first history books I read that discussed how the big events such as William’s invasion are influenced by variables including weather (the Normans not being skilled sailors, the successful channel crossing was largely luck), culture (Harold’s army relied much more on untrained levies than William, who had a large mercenary force) and faith, Howarth arguing that William getting Papal blessing not only made it easier to rally troops but psychologically crippled Harold. Though that latters theory shows the downside of the book, even given the lack of hard information (there are at least nine different stories about whatever promise Harold may have made William during his 1064 stay in Normandy) Howarth likes to speculate too much about what was going on in people’s heads. Still a good job, and a good feel for life in England pre-invasion and how isolation was the norm for many of them (it’s quite possible many of the English had no idea their world had changed until long after the invasion).
THE WALKING DEAD by Robert Kirkman and multiple artists tells how a cop wakes out of a coma to discover while he was sleeping, the world was overrun by zombies. Reuniting with his wife and child, he finds the struggle for existence requires increasingly brutal choices, and that living humans are often the nastiest of all. In many ways this is an old-school post-apocalypse thriller (you could substitute mutants for zombies without much changing) but it’s a good post-apocalypse thriller. That said, the sequence with the drifter Michonne getting caught and raped by one villain, then getting payback, is about the I Spit On Your Grave level of revenge porn.
