Friday, March 15, 2024

Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen, Part 2

This essay follows my prior review, Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen. In the review, I attempted to avoid spoilers. In this essay, I make no such effort; if you would like to watch the movie, please do so before reading any further here.
Princess Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) has had it with your myths, in Damsel

When Prince Henry tosses his bride, Princess Elodie, into the dragon’s chasm, on one level we witness a conventional myth. Like Jesus or Orpheus, Elodie must pass through the grave, defeat the chthonic monster, and return bearing the truth. On another level, we witness an uncomfortable reality that past myths elided: that the truth our hero brings from beyond the grave isn’t what we want to hear. And we don’t know how that truth will change us.

Tolkien and Lewis aggressively embraced fairy tales in a specific context, following the degradations of two world wars. Both fought in World War I before becoming scholars, then sat helplessly through World War II and the Blitz. As Christians, both men believed true morality existed, but they couldn’t see it around them. So they sought moral certitude in distant lands and times, an evasion of the present which Lewis himself acknowledged outright.

Today’s fairy tales, like the movie Damsel, emerge from a different context. Where both Tolkien and Lewis yearned to restore divinely anointed god-kings to their fairylands’ thrones, we live in the backwash of colonial empires, unable to pretend the past we admire consisted of unadulterated goodness. No matter where we live, our land was seized from another people, maybe recently, maybe centuries ago. But literally everyone lives on stolen land.

Damsel enacts this myth in stark realism. Queen Isabelle of Aurea and her superficially charming son, Henry, live on land stolen from the dragon. They admit this during the closing rituals of the marriage ceremony. They must propitiate this distant past through continual sacrifice, through the blood of those descended from the original settlers. Aurea’s continued glittering prosperity relies on someone reënacting that original conquest.

Here we might benefit from consulting prior religious scholars. Émile Durkheim believed that religion begins by extoling the people’s innate virtues; God, Durkheim believed, came late to religion. What Durkheim called “primitive” religion simply preserves the people’s shared virtues by ritualizing them. Mircea Eliade went further, seeing the liturgical calendar as a continuing reënactment of the religion’s founding moments. We walk forever in our prophets’ shoes.

In this regard, Queen Isabelle acts not as her nation’s political leader, but its priest. (No commoners speak in this movie; every character is aristocratic, or an aristocrat’s courtier.) She enacts her nation’s founding sacrifice, preserving peace and stability through blood. Sure, she uses a technicality to weasel out of the actual sacrifice, making beautiful foreigners pay Aurea’s actual blood debt. But the forms matter to national religion, not the spirit.

Princess Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) and Prince Henry (Nick Robinson)

Passing through the grave, Princess Elodie returns with the capital-T Truth that Aurea’s founding myth is a lie. Aurea’s founding king attacked the dragon, not to preserve his people, but to enlarge his own glory; he slaughtered the land’s original inhabitants, the dragons, purely for spite. The dragon appears monstrous to living humans because mythology has created this terror, but Truth says humans must abandon this belief and confront their own guilt.

The parallels with modernity are so stark, they need acknowledged but not explicated. As an American, I realize my Anglo-Saxon ancestors seized this land from its prior inhabitants. But that’s what Anglo-Saxons do, as they also previously conquered Britain from its Celtic inhabitants. Not that those Celts were innocent, as their mythology describes seizing Britain from Albion, a terrible giant whose exaggerated evil resembles that of Elodie’s dragon.

Every human nation sits on conquered land. Every nation also has founding myths to justify that conquest. Virgil invented a conquest myth to justify Roman military might, and India’s earliest Vedic poetry is a fight song in praise of seizing a neighboring tribe’s women. Only recently has public morality evolved to consider conquest unsavory, mostly after two World Wars, when technology made conquest both visible and grisly in wholly new ways.

Damsel ends with Aurea’s capital in flames. Though the camera lingers on Queen Isabelle’s death, we know nothing of the civilians caught in that conflagration. Because although every myth and fairy tale agrees that exposing the Truth will liberate the oppressed, we don’t know what comes next. The Bible claims that the triumphant Truth will simply conclude this Age. This movie follows the scriptural precedent, burning human kingdoms down and sailing into a vague future.

Lewis and Tolkien loved fairy tales because they believed their mythology could address modern questions without modern moral blurriness. Damsel arguably takes the same tack. However, it proceeds from an assumption that the mythic past wasn’t as pearly as prior generations believed.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen

Millie Bobby Brown as Princess Elodie in Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's Damsel

What is it with filmmakers chopping off Millie Bobby Brown’s hair? The haircuts are explicitly gendered, too, or anyway counter-gendered. In her first featured role, Intruders, she gave herself a weirdly genderless half-bob to emphasize the show’s supernatural themes. Stranger Things obviously involved her learning how to be a girl. Now, in Damsel, another self-inflicted haircut signposts her transition from “princess” to “warrior queen.”

Any analysis of Damsel necessarily involves admitting this is a movie for mainly young audiences. Grown-ups will almost obsessively notice the prior media products this movie pinches from. This includes obvious borrowings from LotR and Game of Thrones, and less widely viewed fare, like 2019’s Ready or Not and your nephew’s latest Dungeons & Dragons campaign. There’s even a helpful map carved into a wall, guiding player characters to safety.

Younger viewers, unburdened by prior experience, will probably enjoy this movie, simply for MBB’s character. Princess Elodie spends nearly half the movie onscreen alone, sometimes accompanied by a CGI dragon. She’s dressed inappropriately for the environment, still wearing her wedding dress, and has no tools, weapons, or food. She extemporizes survival gear from whatever comes to hand. Princess Elodie is, admittedly, gripping to watch.

Queen Isabelle tempts Elodie from her icy, impoverished homeland by promising her son, Prince Henry, as a groom. Elodie, though a princess, is reasonably self-reliant, and chops wood herself to provide for her subjects during an unusually bitter winter. But Prince Henry and the Kingdom of Aurea offer Elodie the opportunity to see a larger world and live without constant fear. Despite her youth, Elodie acquiesces to this arranged marriage.

Unfortunately, the movie’s trailer already spoiled the twist that caps Act One: the marriage is a lie. Isabelle and Henry need Elodie as a sacrifice for a nameless dragon whose mountain overshadows the kingdom. Cast headlong into the dragon’s lair, Elodie must struggle not only to escape, but to uncover the long-simmering ancestral lie that makes her sacrifice necessary. Because her survival doesn’t matter if Queen Isabelle sacrifices Elodie’s sister.

Robin Wright, who kick-started her career playing a similarly betrothed ingenue in The Princess Bride, portrays Queen Isabelle with the same oily deceit she probably learned from her co-star, Chris Sarandon. (Yet another cinematic borrowing.) Meanwhile the dragon, voiced by Iranian-American actor Shoreh Agdashloo, seems transplanted from Shrek—yes, seriously. Because Elodie’s and Shrek’s dragons share character motivations entirely female in nature.

Yes, that’s a stereotype, but a useful one.

Robin Wright as Queen Isabelle in Damsel

Elodie’s character arc isn’t new, or even particularly recent. The “Princess Rescues Herself” trope certainly predates my awareness of fantasy literature: almost from the moment Tolkien solidified the genre’s standards, fans began rewriting Arwen-type characters into greater self-reliance. But MBB invests this road-tested story arc with the gravitas she brings to characters like Eleven. Elodie is strong, not because it’s a genre boilerplate, but because she has no other choice.

Brown conveys her internal transformation externally. She’s thrown into the dragon’s pit still wearing her satin wedding dress, without tools or weapons. The more determined Elodie becomes to survive, the more pieces of her elegant gown tear off. She fashions bandages from her skirts, a glowworm lantern from her sleeves, a climbing piton from her corset stays. Piece by piece, the emblems of luxury transform into the tools of survival.

This results in an outcome that may give some parents pause: the more resilient and self-assured Elodie becomes, the more naked she becomes. That’s also where the hair-chopping comes in, as her long, elegant tresses become an impediment to survival. Elodie emerges victorious and muscular, but also showing plenty of skin. She saunters into her triumphant scene reduced to torn, scorched undergarments, looking like a Frank Frazetta splash panel.

Given the movie’s primarily young target audience, this nakedness, coupled with some Game of Thrones-ish violence, will give some parents pause. It doesn’t rely on explicit sex or coarse language, and anyway, most middle-grade viewers have probably seen content more graphic online anymore, so tweens and early teens will undoubtedly enjoy it. If your kids are grade-school-aged, though, maybe consider watching beside them, just in case.

Some prior critics lambasted this movie for unrealistic standards. Eldie outruns fire, survives catastrophic injury, and handles a sword correctly the first time she grabs one. Apparently some people find this implausible in a movie with an immortal fire-breathing dragon. Picky, picky, picky. The movie’s intended audience will have no such qualms; they’ll simply enjoy watching Elodie survive. And parents will enjoy watching their kids enjoy it.

Saturday, March 2, 2024

The Modern Anglo-Japanese Troubadour

Jan Miklaszewicz, The Promise: A Narrative Poem

In a distant valley of a distant nation, the word comes down: our prince is going to war, and the knight of the village must report. The knight’s wife has a grim premonition, but it isn’t within the knight’s star to say no, so he girds on his sword and marches into battle. Every night she walks the village parapets, watching to see whether and when her beloved soldier returns.

English poet Jan Miklaszewicz dresses his narrative in Japanese vestments; his knight is a samurai, and his lord a daimyo. But the themes of Miklaszewicz’s verse novella are familiar from countless Childe ballads and French troubadour rhymes. The image of a knight with conflicting duties occurs in numerous folksongs and official poetry. We only wait to see whether the beloved’s fatal visions are doomed to come true.

Miklaszewicz writes his novella in tanka, a major Japanese verse structure. Usually written in a single line of kanji, the English-language tanka usually breaks into five lines, with strict syllable counts. Japanese tanka usually aren’t narrative themselves, but most often embedded in a larger prose narrative, like their more famous offshoot, the haiku. Miklaszewicz instead expands the form, using the syllable count to define the stanza counts of his chapters.

The feudal Japan Miklaszewicz describes is a dreamland, a no-place devoid of proper nouns. It’s dotted with waving grasses and ancient shrines, and village life is languid until the daimyo’s call arrives. Attentive readers will recognize the landscape from Chretien de Troyes’ mythical Arthurian Britain. This isn’t a knock against Miklaszewicz’s storytelling: as C.S. Lewis pointed out, true virtue is always in another time, in a distant land.

Thus freed from strict realism, Miklaszewicz lets his familiar troubadour themes play out. Nothing really new happens, if you’re familiar with the English folk ballad tradition, but that doesn’t mean there’s no suspense. The Childe ballads contain enough variations that their stories could go multiple directions, and we never know what comes next until it happens, then it seems downright inevitable. The same thing happens here.

And Miklaszewicz uses his medieval verse form artfully. His language is so rhythmical that readers can practically here the plucked shamisen behind the stanzas. Miklaszewicz’s Japan evokes images from sumi-e paintings and Hokusai’s block prints: fragrant, melodious, and mythical.

In their village home
she senses a subtle shift,
a kindling of hope,
and in the eye of her mind
she glimpses his sweet return,
Jan Miklaszewicz

(Every stanza and chapter ends with a comma, emphasizing that we haven’t reached the end. Miklaszewicz doesn’t include a period until the final line.)

Let me interrupt myself to address an important concern that more attentive readers might’ve already anticipated. I recognize the risks inherent in a Western poet using Japanese verse forms and a Japanese mythical setting. Colonial-era European writers like Lord Byron or Rudyard Kipling exploited “inscrutable Orient” twaddle to romanticize imperial conquest. I’ve read enough Edward Said to know that Orientalist mythmaking has had adverse consequences.

Yet Japanese poets themselves wrote considerable volumes of similar dreamland exploration. Bashō, who popularized the haiku form, wrote travelogues so expansive and mythical that recent critics question whether he visited the described places. Travel, to medieval Japanese writers, wasn’t about accurately depicting the visited lands; it was about the subjective experience of abandoning one’s comfort zone and wandering off the map.

In that regard, Miklaszewicz does what most modern Anglophone poets aspire to accomplish: making the familiar unfamiliar, the distant near, and the real world subjective. He uses comfortable themes his likely readers will recognize from folk ballads and traditional poetry, but filters them through his imagination. The product is cozy, without being sleepy. And it rewards multiple levels of reading, from the casual to the scholarly.

I mentioned French troubadours previously. These traveling poets, and their Irish colleagues the bards, made their names by composing and singing verses about distant lands, mythical battles, and noble warriors. Miklaszewicz joins that tradition, updating it for a more cosmopolitan and literate age. His versifying is both familiar and new, using pre-Renaissance storytelling conventions for an audience more familiar with a diverse world. His product is surprising and comfy.

This poem is melodious, sweeping, and short: committed readers could savvy it in one sitting. Miklaszewicz’s storytelling carries readers along without resistance. Yet like the best poetry—including the Childe ballads I keep mentioning—the verse rewards a slow savoring and lingering contemplation. Reading it, we feel transported outside ourselves, and upon returning, we feel we’ve truly traveled somewhere magical.

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Burnt Offerings in America, Part Two

This essay is a follow-up to Burnt Offerings in Modern America
Émile Durkheim

Unfortunately, when men (and it’s mostly men) like Thích Quảng Đức, Mohamed Bouazizi, or Aaron Bushnell offer themselves as burnt offerings, we don’t know where those offerings go. With burnt offerings of animal flesh in the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Hebrew Tanakh, offerings go directly to God or the gods, who take delight, pleasure, and nourishment from humans’ sacrifices. Nowadays, we lack such confidence.

Nearly all early civilizations practice some form of blood sacrifice. Some are dramatic, like Abraham’s averted sacrifice of his son Isaac, or Menelaus’ unaverted sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia to start the Trojan War. Others are merely grotesque, as the human sacrifice supposedly practiced among the Mexica (often misnamed the Aztecs), a narrative mainly remembered in lurid Spanish retellings. But early religions agree, the gods require blood.

However, religions generally move away from blood sacrifices. They gradually replace spilled blood with the first fruits of the people’s harvest, or gold, or ultimately the cheerful work of devoted hearts. We might imagine, optimistically, that True Believers gradually realize their gods require human hands to perform divine missions. More realistically, they probably realize that propitiating sky spirits with gifts doesn’t do much by itself.

Émile Durkheim believed that pre-literate Earth Spirit religions started without gods. Early peoples, in Durkheim’s telling, sought the people’s well-being, and selected a totemic image, usually an animal, to represent the people’s collective spirit. Across succeeding generations, though, worshippers forgot the image’s original symbolic meaning. They took metaphorical stories literally, and started worshipping spirits which their priestly ancestors never intended anyone to factually believe.

Durkheim, and his rough contemporary Sigmund Freud, wrote extensively about what they termed “primitive” totemic religions in Africa and Australia. Unfortunately, they wrote without visiting those places. Both thinkers wrote mainly about their own places and times. Watching religion fade from French public life, Durkheim saw “Liberté, Egalité, et Fraternité” and images of Marianne, the personification of France’s national spirit, march into the spaces God recently vacated.

No society, Durkheim believed, could survive long without having something it considers sacred. Societies create mythologies, wither of sky spirits or of national heroes like Robespierre and George Washington, to embody the nation’s spirit and embolden shared identity. Whether the object of worship is Jehovah or Paul Revere, what we worship isn’t really the identity which might have existed somewhere, once. It’s the moral principle that identity represents.

Aaron Bushnell

Which necessarily elicits the question: what principles do Americans consider sacred?

American patriots seek sacred principles in the Declaration of Independence or the Federalist Papers—while conveniently ignoring impolitic passages, like the “Merciless Indian Savages” clause. Without either a king or a state church, America has recourse only to Enlightenment philosophy and humanist precepts. Christian Nationalists might think America has a state church, but only in vague terms; pressed for details, they, like most Christians, fall quickly to infighting.

Americans demand that schoolchildren learn the mythology of Thanksgiving, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance daily. These myths and rituals serve social needs left vacant by religion’s retreat from public life. They give Americans a unifying narrative and shared identity, while we recite public moral statements in unison, exactly like the Apostles’ Creed. As in church, these secular values are vague, but they’re shared, which is what really matters.

Those American principles, however, have not withstood scrutiny. Tales of American atrocities which trickled in slowly from the Philippine-American War or Mexican Border War, accelerated in the Twentieth Century. War crimes in Vietnam or Operation Desert Storm hit the nightly news, and the hideous violence and mission drift of the Global War on Terror happened instantaneously online. Now America’s proxy wars in Ukraine and Gaza are streaming live.

When Aaron Bushnell immolated himself this weekend, he wore his military uniform, then live-streamed his suicide on Twitch. Therefore, he didn’t just destroy himself. American secular religion, embodied in his uniform, burned first. And he distributed the image to goggle-eyed Americans instantaneously, circumventing a commercial media apparatus that’s often seen its independence undermined by state intervention, especially during wartime. This wasn’t just a statement, it was a religious declaration.

Therefore, only one question remains: will True Believers accept this declaration? Bushnell’s suicide was only secondarily about his stated beliefs; like the Pledge of Allegiance or the Apostles’ Creed, his final manifesto was necessarily vague. Religion isn’t about information, it’s about the True Believers themselves, and it doesn’t intend to educate them, but to transform them. Are we, who take Bushnell’s principles seriously, willing to let ourselves be transformed?

Monday, February 26, 2024

Burnt Offerings in Modern America

Aaron Bushnell

Yesterday afternoon, a man identified as an active-duty Air Force intelligence analyst lit himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington. Firefighters smothered the flames and rushed the individual, tentatively identified as Aaron Bushnell, to a local hospital, but Bushnell died of his injuries. According to his manifesto, Bushnell described Israel’s ongoing barrage of Gaza as a “genocide,” and described his military participation as “complicity.”

Two years ago today, I published an essay entitled “War Is Not the Answer, Except When It Is.” I compared Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a war that remains ongoing, with Operation Desert Storm, America’s first military intervention in Iraq. An American response in Ukraine sure looks justified, I wrote, but it looked justified in Iraq, too. We now know the justification for war in Iraq was falsified by PR professionals.

PR surrounding the current conflagrations in Ukraine, Gaza, and Yemen have been spotty. After initial international furor, the Ukraine war has retreated from headlines, except when Republicans withhold funding for military support. America’s decision to jump into Yemen attracted initial outrage, but failed to sustain feelings. Only the Gaza conflict remains a reliable headline-grabber, and not necessarily for the right reasons.

The Gaza death toll threatens to exceed 30,000 this week. As the Netanyahu government forbids Palestinians to leave Gaza, but continues strafing civilian neighborhoods, the conflict increasingly resembles the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto. Yet English-speaking journalists find themselves shackled to a pro-Israeli narrative. Public-facing writers for MSNBC and the BBC have found themselves benched, their stories spiked, for criticizing Israel.

Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation makes sense in historical context. From Vietnam to Tunisia, protestors have lit themselves on fire to force change in the public awareness, and to draw attention to widespread government corruption. Thích Quảng Đức’s suicide in Vietnam closely preceded the coup which overthrew President Dien’s illegal regime. Mohamed Bouazizi helped kick-start the Arab Spring, leading to pro-democracy revolutions.

Mehdi Hasan

Yet one cannot help questioning whether either death did any good. American involvement in Vietnam dragged on another decade after Thich’s death, while the Syrian civil war—which, like the Ukraine conflict, has lost Western front-page headlines—is currently well into its thirteenth year. If Aaron Bushnell’s death moves the needle for American public awareness, I applaud his sacrifice, yet I wonder whether it’s actually done any good.

Taken together, these facts force me to question who benefits from the current trajectory in American and world affairs. American silence on the Gaza atrocities has damaged the Biden Administration, but it hasn’t exactly won favor for opposition Republicans, who are aggressively pro-Netanyahu and pro-Putin. Networks losing their star journalists aren’t exactly seeing ratings boosts. Nobody but defense contractors profits from blood and destruction.

American presidents love overseas war. Because presidents also serve as commander-in-chief of the military, American military successes accrue to the President’s reputation, while defeats tarnish his name forever. Flag-waving, naming enemies, and ginning up nationalist slogans, help unify American voters around the state, and the President as head of state. The opposition party knows this, certainly, and will withhold money to deny the other side a win.

Except that hasn’t happened this time. Unlike Operation Iraqi Freedom, which certain candidates famously voted for before they voted against, American commitments in Ukraine and Israel have not produced massive national unity. Nobody’s flying flags and chanting “United We Stand” in facing down dictatorial right-wing regimes in Moscow or Jerusalem. George W. Bush parlayed Iraq into a second term, but Joe Biden is currently watching his coalition shatter.

Like Lyndon Johnson before him, we’re watching the Biden Administration snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. A fairly popular president with a relatively successful economic agenda (more on that to come) managed to alienate his own backers by supporting an unpopular war in an anti-democratic state. Just as Johnson’s personal collapse ushered in the manifestly criminal Nixon, Biden is currently holding the door for Donald Trump.

It’s tempting to describe Aaron Bushnell’s suicide as a sacrifice. But we often forget that, in origin, the word “sacrifice” doesn’t mean to give something up, it means to make something holy. Just as many early civilizations relinquished burnt offerings to petty, tyrannical gods as bribes to protect the people, Bushnell’s death represents a cosmic order that doesn’t protect the ordinary people from overwhelming whimsy on high.

For Bushnell’s death to actually sanctify America, we must start by asking ourselves: what in our country requires burnt offerings? What do we hold sacred, and why isn’t it helping?


Continued in Burnt Offerings in America, Part Two