The Bird Box Paradox

Netflix’s sudden hit Bird Box opens with Sandra Bullock, an actress who has attempted (with mixed success) to stretch away from romantic comedies and action potboilers, bringing two children together and immediately scolding them. She demands absolute compliance, saying that if they don’t obey, they’ll die. Then she blindfolds them, ensuring they cannot see anything contrary to her description of the world.

I often mock sudden, overnight sensations. Media attractions which flare up suddenly tend to burn out equally quickly, like disco. Being human, though, I accepted the hype and watched anyway. Even knowing my learned resistance to such overnight successes, I found the product thought-provoking and disappointing in equal measure.

Having established its moment of post-apocalyptic, authoritarian dread, the movie flashes back to the moment society ended. The morning starts with Bullock’s Melanie going through the motions of life. She’s pregnant but unattached, an artist but massively lonely: we’ve long accepted that artists, in media, are either drunken sybarites or unwilling loners. Middle ground is impossible.

As quickly as normality is established, it’s overthrown. Seemingly ordinary people begin smashing their faces against plate glass. Pedestrians step in front of moving cars. The shift from suburban blandness to massive self-destruction happens so suddenly that we almost can’t explain it… except, importantly, that it started in Russia. This matters to our analysis later.

Like Blair Witch or Cloverfield, this film generates horror through American fears of losing control. It mixes the worst of these predecessors, which, when audiences think about them for one moment, make no sense and aren’t scary. Whether it’s Cloverfield’s chaotic, destructive streets, or Blair Witch’s man-eating woods, this movie doesn’t find an unfrightening moment it can’t pass up.

And, I’m sorry, nobody but Shirley Jackson and Lord Dunsany ever withheld their monster, and sustained horror. This story’s monster is ancillary. It matters only because it gets the ball rolling; real fear emerges from isolation and paranoia. The terrible creature that shows us something so horrifying that it creates an irresistible urge to self-destruction, maybe made sense in the abstract. But it never convinces me. Not here, or in Cloverfield or Blair Witch.

Sandra Bullock in a widely circulated promo still from Bird Box.

Most of the movie’s heart takes place inside a California McMansion. The characters can’t venture outside, can’t discover anything about the outside world, can’t see beyond their walls. If they venture outdoors, they must remain blindfolded, completely cut off from eyesight, the sense through which sighted humans receive the largest fraction of their information. They must learn, know, and discover nothing. It’s the reductio ad absurdum of suburban isolation.

One friend described Bird Box as resembling the movie A Quiet Place, except with blindness rather than silence. I disagree. In A Quiet Place, people must make no sound. They must remain unnoticed, and they must achieve that by creating no information. In Bird Box, however, they cannot remain unnoticed. Instead, they must seek to know nothing themselves. They must willfully, consciously, seek to receive no information. They must permanently know nothing more than they did at the beginning of the movie.

As a result, the characters gain, and preserve, the ignorance they had the moment they locked the front door. Sandra Bullock and John Malkovich clash because they have different reads on what’s happening, and how to respond. But they’re forbidden to investigate any further and gain new knowledge. Their perceptions, once fixed, are unchangeable, because no new information is allowed in the house.

So, follow me here: a plague of ignorance begins in Russia and overtakes America. It makes people self-destructive, and fixes our prejudices immovably. It flourishes by selling our own fears back to us. It makes people willing to kill one another over the willingness to let anybody else into the compound. Watching Bullock’s character arc, people apparently become increasingly intolerant of attempts to fix the problem. And the plague of ignorance is incurable, because the information that could combat it is, by nature, tainted, and therefore by definition untrustworthy.

Have I missed anything?

Whatever horror this movie generates doesn’t come from the monster. It comes from understanding that this story presents a microcosm of American life right now. I like the idea. I believe the best literature strikes a chord because, on some fundamental level, it’s about us, the audience.

Yet, as M. Night Shyamalan keeps proving, keeping the audience ignorant of the monster seldom heightens horror; it generally leaves viewers restive. This movie has the potential to be about so much more. But that’s a potential it never particularly achieves.

Deep Space and the African Frontier

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 95
Nnedi Okorafor, Binti

On the cusp of young adulthood, Binti, a maiden of the Himba people of Namibia, receives word she’s been accepted to Oomza University, the galaxy’s most prestigious institution of higher learning. But attending means leaving her homeland, something no Himba has ever attempted. Still, Binti accepts her family’s scorn, because her gift for mathematics offers so much potential. Only when she’s off Earth, however, does she discover how violent and fraught the galaxy really is.

Attempting to summarize this novella feels slightly disingenuous, because author Okorafor deliberately subverts our expectations. Early pages (this book is so short, it doesn’t even have chapter divisions) channel familiar science fiction stereotypes, from Isaac Asimov and Orson Scott Card to Starfleet Academy. The “young person venturing to discover herself among the stars” boilerplate is so familiar, even veteran genre authors struggle to to prevent it sounding overused and tired.

Then, somewhere around page 20, Okorafor completely reverses everything. Exactly what happens is too important to reveal. And though it happens very early, in a book running under 100 pages, that’s a pretty significant investment. Okorafor deliberately leads audiences into thinking they’re reading a comfy sci-fi boilerplate, then upends what we’ve been coached to expect. Suddenly Binti is alone, scared, and certain she’s going to die in the silence between the stars.

This encapsulates the theme, not only of this novella, but of much of Okorafor’s work. Caught in the push-pull between tradition and modernity, Okorafor’s heroines often struggle to mark a path that embraces the one, without excluding the other. Can a gifted but provincial girl from a settled people really join an integrated, multicultural galaxy? Must she choose between her people’s old-fashioned ways, and the larger society’s demands for assimilation? I’ll answer beforehand: not easily.

Nnedi Okorafor

Binti feels her people’s call. She wants what her family wants, including useful work, marriage, and a family among her kinfolk and ancestors. But she believes she can’t achieve her true potential living in her father’s shadow, making pocket technology for the village. (Oops, the people’s purity is already compromised, but in a way they can conveniently rationalize.) With the bravado only teenagers can muster, she flees her homeland after nightfall, running away to join the stars.

If only everything were as morally distinct as it appears from ground level. Binti soon discovers Oomza University’s scientists have a history of taking things that don’t belong to them. Their justification is purely humane and reasonable: we need to know and understand the various species of the galaxy. But the Meduse, a poor but dauntless species, doesn’t forget when they’ve had something sacred stolen from them. Soon Binti is the only one who can broker a peaceful solution.

The Himba are a real people, resident in northern Namibia. (Daughter of Nigerian immigrants, Okorafor often uses African peoples in her fiction.) Okorafor uses their famous rituals, adapted appropriately to reflect her technologically altered future, to express a people who have retained their identity amid the galaxy’s push for mechanical sameness. Binti’s willingness to retain some of her people’s rituals, while judiciously discarding others, becomes the trait that saves her from someone else’s war.

Okorafor calls her style “magic futurism.” Many of her books incorporate aspects of folk magic and traditional beliefs. However, she concedes, the constant march of technology, and the cultural and environmental changes it forces, mean peoples aren’t eternal. Societies change under pressure; even Binti’s very traditional father makes his living building “astrolabes,” similar to tablet computers, but much more powerful and complex. His people’s rituals make him a technological adept, a sort of futurist wizard.

Okorafor and her publisher originally intended this novella to be freestanding, separate from her other books. She mostly writes for the lucrative Young Adult market, though she’s written a handful of novels for adults, too. But this novella’s success (Nebula and Hugo awards, plus multiple further nominations) led her to create a trilogy. The second and third volumes are full-length novels, expanding themes introduced in the first novella. They’re intended to be read in sequence.

Dedicated readers could polish off this novella in under one afternoon. Despite the density of Okorafor’s internationalist themes, it doesn’t demant slow, ponderous reading. It has enough science fantasy gee-whiz to propel audiences along briskly, never bogging down in minutiae. But it also has sufficient threads driving it, of modernity versus tradition, of internationalism versus identity, of technology versus family to satisfy intellectually demanding readers. It’s complex, yet quick. And it lingers long after you set it down.

Let's End the Unending War

Donald Trump

Here’s something I bet you never thought you’d hear me say:

I support Donald Trump’s decision to draw down American troop commitments in Syria and Afghanistan.

The President’s decision to reduce, and potentially even eliminate, America’s troop commitment, has come under intense scrutiny. Policy wonks and Pentagon specialists have criticized it. This decision possibly precipitated James Mattis’s decision to resign as Secretary of Defense. The punditocracy has made bank publishing solemn “think pieces” about this decision, the reasoning that went into it, and why it’s an ostensibly bad idea.

Admittedly, this action probably reflects Trump’s well-known strategy of impulsive decisions driven by cable news commentary. I doubt altogether whether Trump consulted his top generals, defense specialists, or diplomats before making this choice. It will now be incumbent on somebody deep within the bowels of the West Wing to craft the actual withdrawal strategy that Trump probably selected while sitting up in bed.

That being said, it’s the right choice.

America has maintained troop commitments in the Persian Gulf and the Levant for decades. After the massive troop commitment of Operation Desert Storm, America built hardened bases in Saudi Arabia, a decision so abhorrent to many Muslims that Osama bin Laden cited it, in English, on the front page of the al-Qaeda website. We’ve been shooting at, or actively preparing to shoot at, somebody in that region for nearly thirty years now.

An entire generation of young Americans will soon be old enough to enlist for the first time, and they’ve never known a world where America wasn’t engaged in a shooting conflict with somebody in that region. Active but undeclared war in the Middle East has become, for them, an American birthright. Whether it’s al-Qaeda, Iraq, ISIS, Hamas, or the Assad regime, they simply enter the military secure in the knowledge that they’ll have a deployment over there, shooting at somebody conveniently non-English-speaking and brown.

Barack Obama

And what have we gained for this infinite commitment? We haven’t secured peace between Israel and Palestine. We haven’t prevented Iraqi pogroms against Jews, Christians, and Sunnis; we maybe even hastened them. We haven’t even secured that sweet, sweet Iraqi petroleum that had Halliburton drooling on the evening news. I struggle to imagine we’ve gained anything.

In short, we’ve committed American troops, and their supporting resources, to a war with little purpose, no reward, and no visible exit strategy. Our commitment in Afghanistan has exceeded two of our longest military commitments ever: Vietnam and the Second Seminole War. In terms of duration, strategy, and sloppiness, this war is now comparable to only one prior conflict: our long guerilla war against the Apache Nation.

Donald Trump campaigned, partly, on a pledge to draw down America’s overseas military commitments. He made strident arguments against President George W. Bush’s actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. But his statements also attracted support, sometimes grudging, from Democrats weary of President Obama’s protracted drone war campaigns. Obama didn’t end America’s overseas wars, he just moved many of them off the DoD’s books, and onto the intelligence community, with disastrous international PR consequences.

Thus, the President’s decision to draw down Syrian and Afghan commitments may have been, as some pundits suggest, a cynical ploy to finish a delayed campaign promise, at a time when his political capital is running low. But y’know what? I can live with that. Because we’ve spent nearly half my life putting American soldiers on the firing line; converting American wealth into war materiel to destroy things instead of roads, schools, and research facilities to create; and squandering America’s moral standing in the larger world.

Please don’t mistake me. This doesn’t make me a Trumpista. He’s anchored his entire political career on naked racist appeals, squandered our opportunities to address global warming, and made us into an international laughingstock. It may take years, even generations, to undo the damage Trump has inflicted on America’s global standing. I’m not his ally now.

George W. Bush

But I’d rather encourage him when he does something right, than merely snipe when he does something wrong. That’s how the marketplace of ideas works, despite what Internet discourse has implied. Maybe I don’t agree with the President’s reasoning on this decision. But I agree with his action.

This war has continued too damn long, with vague purpose, no end, and massive cost. Yes, things are bad over there, but we’ve accomplished little to improve it. And maybe Russia and Iran will gain dominion in that region, but so what? Let them have that morass. Let them pay the high international costs. It shouldn’t be America’s responsibility anymore.

Rudolph the Dog-Earred Stereotype

It’s Rudolph Meme season again! You know the one I mean (above), a cheap pseudo-Marxist reading of the song that suggests your value, if you’re different, derives from your instrumental utility. I remember figuring that reading out fifteen years ago, as a sophomore-level English major excessively proud of having discovered inequality in classic literature. And like undergrads everywhere, I had to share my discovery with everyone.

I was wrong. And dumb.

I've suggested recently that it does songs a disservice to hear them without their context. Words received at the surface level as pretty awful these days come from a time where those words meant something very different. Songs have unique problems, since we listen passively, often while doing other things. But that makes it more important, not less, that we understand the historical milieu from which music originates.

In Rudolph’s case, that milieu is the Great Depression, and its kissing cousin, World War II. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” began life as a coloring booklet published as a supplement to the 1939 Montgomery Ward catalog. For readers younger than me, the catalogs published by the Sears & Roebuck or Montgomery Ward companies were the Amazon.com of their day, making luxury shopping and top-of-the-range goods available to Americans living outside major cities.

“Monkey Ward,” as people called it, published the first Rudolph story, written and illustrated by poorly-paid copywriter Robert L. May. Here’s where we get the first glimmerings of Rudolph’s backstory: according to one source, Robert May grew up in a relatively wealthy family that lost everything in the 1929 stock market crash. May took the Monkey Ward job because he needed the money, a problem compounded by needing to cover his wife’s very expensive cancer treatments.

So May was Jewish, at a time when anti-Semitism was still commonplace and socially acceptable in America. He was poor, and not only poor, but newly poor. And he had cancer in his family, at a time when Americans said “cancer” the way we now say “HIV.” Safe to say, this guy had firsthand experience with outsidership in a closed society.

Yes, the other reindeer mock Rudolph for being different. But if we recontextualize Rudolph’s difference from mere physical freakishness, we get a completely different reading. If we read Rudolph’s red nose as symbolic of Jewishness, poverty, or both, we see something completely different. Rudolph isn’t a nonconformist, as the popular meme above implies. He’s a member of an oppressed minority, whether oppressed by White people or by capitalism.

Take it further. We don’t know much about Robert May’s personal life and knowledge, but it’s conceivable he saw the connection between the red nose, a highly visible symbol of difference, and the yellow stars forced on his fellow Jews in Europe. The song doesn’t specify what “reindeer games” Rudolph couldn’t join. But European Jews couldn’t hold certain trades, own their own houses, or save money past fixed limits.

The parallels start getting chilling.

Like you, I grew up watching the 1964 stop-motion Rudolph special, one of the oldest programs that still regularly runs on network TV. That depicts Rudolph as the victim of routine schoolyard bullying, a rebel against postwar America’s White suburban mediocrity. In some ways this makes him almost a proto-hippie. It’s no coincidence that this special hit American airwaves just as the first Baby Boomers began reaching adulthood.

But both this adaptation, and the song we sang (written by May’s brother-in-law Johnny Marks), came along later. The song didn’t appear until 1949, ten years after May’s coloring book. The TV special didn’t debut for a full quarter-century after May’s story. They’re both distorted by America’s involvement in World War II, and the national realignment that happened afterward. Our understanding of Rudolph comes from second-generation stories with their own agenda.

Robert May’s original story, read in light of the impoverished Jewish experience in 1939, feels completely different. Rudolph becomes somebody not just mocked and belittled, but actively oppressed, because a tyrannical majority believes the power structure they’ve created is foreordained. Rudolph needs rescue by the North Pole’s national leader. But that leader won’t buck the system unless imminent emergency forces his hand.

So yeah, Rudolph isn’t a Marxist finger exercise. He’s a plea for leaders to stand against systemic injustice—coupled with an acknowledgement that they won’t unless they’re forced to. In that way, when we look at increases in racism, poverty, and war-mongering in Earth’s wealthiest nations today, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is arguably as relevant now as he’s ever been.

Follow-up: Rudolph the Dog-Earred Stereotype Part Two

Theatre of the Unremembered

Jonathan Gillman, Looking In

Many of us who participate in theatre have dreams of transforming the world around us. But it’s hard to change adults’ fixed minds, especially when faced with the constant demand for “entertainment.” If only we knew how to reach audiences before their expectations calcified, before they became deaf to art’s social potential. If only we could reach a broader, more diverse audience...

Hartford, Connecticut’s Looking In Theatre creates topical content for teenagers, by teenagers. Director Jonathan Gillman auditions interested teens from around the state, who want in for unique reasons. He doesn’t favor art stars, or teenage proto-celebrities who do well in high school theatre; he favors teens willing to imbue some aspect of themselves into their scenes. This means he often gets teens whose lives reflect the struggles they depict.

And what struggles those are. Gillman and his performers, who act without props or costumes or sets, create scenes where teenagers play teenagers, facing the problems which plague teens everywhere. From topics so familiar they’ve become banal, like drugs and peer pressure, to topics adults often fear to address directly, like relationship violence and rape, Gillman’s performers delve unflinchingly into issues teens face daily.

Gillman uses Second City-like techniques to guide his performers in creating their own content. By his own admission, if he wrote scenes for these actors, the performances would probably lack immediacy. But the performers choose topics close to their hearts, and work intimately to turn raw experience into something intense onstage. Gillman coaches them to reach the next level, but doesn’t force their content into staid directorial visions.

This book is Gillman’s account of one year directing Looking In. He admits, from the beginning, his account is lightly fictionalized, to protect his performers’ privacy. And what privacy they need to protect! The intimacy of dealing with other teens on topics of such searing urgency often results in personal disclosures. The boy concerned with bullying? He was locked in his own locker last year. The girl concerned with parental roles has two alcoholic parents.

Jonathan Gillman

Early on, Gillman emphasizes he doesn’t choose his performers for their personal problems. But troubled teens generally find themselves attracted to his program. One kid he describes was able to accept his own homosexuality after seeing gay characters depicted in his program as perfectly normal. Tellingly, this performer’s ability to accept his homosexuality gives him power to play some of the program’s most repellently heterosexual characters. Yay for art.

Gillman doesn’t burden readers with lengthy philosophical justifications or on ruminations about teen experience. Like his theatre itself, he doesn’t preach, he merely shines a light. However, for the more pointy-headed among us, his philosophical familiarity with thinkers like Paolo Friere, Bertolt Brecht, or Augusto Boal is visible. He creates art specifically to expose audiences to ideas and places they’ve never encountered before… importantly, without being boring.

The Second City comparison above isn’t flippant. Having guided performers through creating their individual scenes, Gillman also creates set lists so his actors’ separate creations come together into a single, unified play. Actors will carry one character across several scenes, allowing for development from situation to situation. This results, in Gillman’s telling, in a convergence of ideas, where audiences realize individual struggles reflect larger problems.

And the cumulative experience isn’t merely preachy. Gillman emphasizes the importance of humor in reaching audiences. Topics like, say, the pressure for sex and the liberty to refuse, can be funny, when stripped of ninth-grade health class pedantry. Gillman doesn’t want to heap topical performances on audiences’ heads simply because they’re important. He wants viewers to have a complete, immersive experience in teenage anomie.

Gillman doesn’t provide a handbook for creating programs similar to his. There’s no manifesto here, no list of meaningful improv exercises for creating characters or heightening situations. But he describes the rehearsal process in such exacting detail that others willing to recreate this experience at home could follow his guide. Thus Gillman comes across less as a prescriptive lecturer, than a mentor walking us patiently through the steps of program creation.

Don’t mistake this for “important” nonfiction. Gillman crafts a memoir of leading youths through the creative process, and their own struggles, with open heart and novel-like pacing. And he’s unstinting on his own difficulties, as a married man far older than his performers, continuing to lead these teenagers. Like his actors, Gillman crafts, though experience, something more profound than fiction could dump in our laps. In telling his story forthrightly, he encourages us to do better.

Star Wars and the Modern Mythology Battles, Part Two

This essay is a follow-up to Star Wars and the Modern Mythology Battles, Part One

All that being said, my ultimate problem isn’t between whether Disney Star Wars has changed too little, or not enough. My problem is, it presents an essentially solid-state universe, in which advancements from prior episodes don’t actually change much subsequently. This claim wouldn’t make sense with the pre-Disney movies, where the galaxy moved from democracy to tyranny, then back. But Walt’s people irrevocably changed the concept of justice as it applies in Lucas’ mythic galaxy.

Shortly after The Force Awakens debuted, I noted that movie established war as the galaxy’s essential state. Our protagonists can’t stop fighting, because the galaxy ordains them that essential role. Instead of accepting a well-earned appointment to the galaxy’s equivalent of the executive cabinet, Princess Leia returns to fighting the same war that’s dominated her life for at least forty years. Hell, even a military legend like Chesty Puller got to retire after thirty-seven years.

About three months ago, an internet critic calling himself Thor Skywalker noted that the Disney Star Wars works primarily by walking back everything the prior six movies accomplished, returning the characters to square one. I normally disregard self-made critics, because the internet gives every egotistical whiner a megaphone. (Don’t look at me that way.) But this person raises an important point I hadn’t considered: Disney Star Wars fundamentally changes what the prior movies were about.

George Lucas’ original movies contradicted themselves. His original trilogy pitted intrepid, individualist characters against an autocratic government, seeking to re-establish democracy. The prequels seemingly questioned democracy, and focused more on restoring balance to the Force. Either explanation makes sense, and either explanation is supported by the resolution of Episode VI. Sure, the prequels changed character motivations for Obi-Wan and Yoda, and often struggled with continuity. But ultimately, wobbles notwithstanding, they all reached the same destination.



Episode VII undermines everything. It changes the names of the war’s protagonists, and replaces Emperor Palpatine with Supreme Leader Snookie (or whatever), but it structurally declares that the first six movies accomplished nothing. By the end of Episode VIII, the Resistance, which is the Rebellion rebranded for 21st-Century America, is so small, its entire membership can fit inside the Millennium Falcon. Yet we’re promised that, in one more movie, this sub-arc will somehow resolve itself.

George Lucas famously claimed he wrote the original Star Wars script with two books on his desk: Webster’s Dictionary and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. The latter describes the mythological journey heroes in multiple religions and folk traditions undergo. The seemingly ordinary hero leaves home, journeys through the magical realm, and is transformed. But to Campbell, the final stage matters as much as the journey: the mythic hero must ultimately return home.

Most great mythologies spend as much time on the hero’s return as on his [sic] leaving and journey. Jesus must venture into the desert and be tempted, but must also return to carry the message. Sinbad must sail into lands of monsters and terror, but must also return to tell his story. And if Hollywood’s three-act structure gives short shrift to denouements, the idea that Luke Skywalker must return from war, remains at least implicit.

These two films have essentially stolen every accomplishment Lucas created. They destroyed two Death Stars? Ta-da, Starkiller Base! They ended the Sith? Eff you, say the Knights of Ren. Everything that we’d consider an accomplishment has been reversed. The characters cannot return from war. They either keep fighting until mortality catches them, like Princess Leia, or they find ways to retreat from reality, like Han Solo returning to smuggling, or Luke and his self-imposed exile.

In the first part of this essay, I complained that the Disney Star Wars “feels bound by cultural impediments it doesn’t actually have.” This meant the values of what defined “normal” in 1977, specifically White, don’t apply forty years later. Here I expand that meaning to say: the cultural myth that mattered in 1977 isn’t the myth that defines us in 2018. Lucas, writing in Vietnam’s immediate aftermath, needed to reckon with war and identity.

Though military embarrassments in Iraq and Afghanistan haunt America today, the cultural question is: how to govern a shattered, self-destructive coalition of millions? The Disney Star Wars could’ve made a powerful, profitable myth from Han, Leia, and Luke rebuilding a galaxy left polarized and distrustful by the Empire’s retreat. But Disney, the cultural juggernaut that, with its Fox acquisition, could soon control American culture, flees the present. The result isn’t mythology, it’s a time capsule.

Star Wars and the Modern Mythology Battles, Part One

Passing the baton of conflict onto the next generation

To call Star Wars fans’ reaction to recent movies, and in particular The Last Jedi, “mixed,” would be an understatement. The movies have indeed breathed new life into a franchise over forty years old, and garnered new generations of fans. However, the death of founding heroes earned well-deserved pushback from the first generation of fans, and the way the stories have thus far basically recycled tropes from the original movies show catastrophic lack of imagination.

This first-generation fan has mixed feelings. Certain complaints against the third trilogy are completely misplaced. As I’ve written elsewhere, complaints against Han Solo’s death miss the point: Solo lived a life standing against injustice, whether through economic resistance as a smuggler, or military resistance as a Rebel. He dedicated his life to opposing injustice, and earned a heroic death, standing up, speaking the truths of his heart. If only the franchise actually let him die.

More petty opposition has more destructive consequences. The flippant online harassment campaign against Kelly Marie Tran, co-star of The Last Jedi, revealed latent racism and sexism at the heart of Star Wars fandom. A handful of people were plain-spoken about hating a WOC in their beloved franchise, but far more used dog-whistle language. One-by-one, they could plausibly deny their racism. Lumped together, the bigoted pattern becomes impossible to disregard… though some insist on doing so.

This hatred has long roots in Star Wars. Given his incorporation of Buddhist and Islamic mythology into the original trilogy, I’d have difficulty justifying calling George Lucas racist. However, the first movie, latterly retitled A New Hope, originally had almost no non-white characters. While Lucas was perhaps not personally racist, he shared the institutional racism of 1977, an attitude that presumes White people are “normal,” and POC are “racial.” This attitude is tough to shake.

When several critics, including “Miss Manners,” Judith Martin, pointed out his galaxy’s chillingly Caucasian complexion. Lucas had dignity and honesty enough to correct himself. But his corrections still existed within the context of post-Vietnam Hollywood, and therefore didn’t change much. And improved less. He started by incorporating more Black actors into the background of action scenes: there are multiple Black Rebels on Hoth, and of course, they die like flies. As they do in Hollywood.

But Lucas also invented Lando Calrissian, who isn’t a particular advancement. Lando’s goals, besides collaboration (read: assimilation) with the Empire, include an attempt to seduce a White woman. Maybe this isn’t as problematic in a galaxy far, far away, but Lucas basically retreats here into common racial stereotypes. Lando Calrissian basically resembles an escapee from a Schlitz Malt Liquor ad, a depiction not improved by Donald Glover’s sexually omnivorous depiction in the Han Solo movie.

Rey and Finn fleeing the Luftwaffe—erm, I mean TIE fighters—strafing their squatter camp

So yeah, questionable racial depictions run deep in Star Wars. This attitude carries into the newest trilogy, where the Asian woman adheres to a mystical woo-woo religion, and a Black woman, Lupita Nyong’o, appears only as voice to a computer-generated character. This pattern doesn’t mindlessly reiterate the attitudes of the original trilogy, as one central character is a Black man. But it accepts the idea that White, even in a distant galaxy, is somehow normal.

When Doctor Who cast a woman, for the first time in over fifty years, in the lead, I took exception when activists complained that the character was still White. The “C” in “BBC,” I noted, stood for “Corporation,” and the BBC needed to acknowledge its corporate customer base, which is still preponderantly White. I granted Doctor Who latitude in reinventing its lead—especially after Peter Capaldi’s final episode, which addressed the character’s historic shortcomings directly.

I’m less forgiving of Star Wars for one reason: Rey, Finn, and Poe are different characters than Luke, Leia, and Han. Mark Hamill didn’t regenerate into Daisy Ridley; new actors were cast to play entirely new characters. They aren’t bound to the same kind of historic baggage the Doctor has. The Disney Star Wars unfortunately feels bound by cultural impediments it doesn’t actually have. And I can’t easily overlook the problems this causes.

George Lucas’ original Star Wars trilogy remains a landmark of American mythology… when viewed from the context of 1977. I’ll overlook certain limitations that transgress my ethics, because 1977 was a different planet. (Rimshot.) I’m less forgiving of the new trilogy because both its creators, and “fans” resisting even minor changes, espouse a social code that doesn’t exist anymore. Mythology, in the Joseph Campbell sense, is timeless, but arises from its time. And it isn’t 1977 anymore.

TO BE CONTINUED

Wilderness Planets and the Human Frontier

Kathy Tyers, Shivering World

Dr. Graysha Brady-Phillips never intended to become a frontier scientist, but she needed the money. She needed something else the colonists on planet Goddard, orbiting Epsilon Eridani, might offer: their renegade geneticists might have a cure for her incurable chronic illness. But to achieve that cure, she must earn the colonists’ trust, no mean feat when your mother actively prosecutes geneticists. And when your planet may be terminally cooling.

Novelist Kathy Tyers, like her protagonist, trained as a microbiologist, then rediscovered herself as a schoolteacher. This novel brings these threads together: Graysha works as a soils specialist, but gets her greatest joy from teaching colonist technicians to become scientists themselves. And when her frontier job assignment becomes a murder mystery, she investigates the crime using the best tool available to her: science and hard facts.

Planet Goddard is an ice ball on the fringes of human exploration. There’s no hyperspace in Graysha’s world; travel between planets requires a long, slow, Oregon Trail-like slog. This means everything is literally life-or-death, and some attempts at terraforming worlds have resulted in tragedy. This reality is compounded, in this setting, because the terraforming agency is a for-profit corporation, and if frontier worlds can’t make bank, they aren’t worth working.

Brady-Phillips, however, believes human life worth living. That includes her own. Raised in her mother’s imposing shadow, Graysha wants a quiet life, teaching children and eventually having her own. Her genetic death sentence only compounds her problems. But a handsome colonial administrator with high ambitions reawakens her big-picture passions, especially when she discovers he possesses a spiritual confidence long missing from her life.

Kathy Tyers

Graysha’s mother runs the powerful Eugenics Board. Unlike past eugenicists, this board wants to prevent tampering with human genetics; a rogue sect of genetically engineered humans, in this world’s past, attempted to hijack human evolution; the Eugenics Board, backed by a powerful state church, wants to prevent that ever happening again. But that means they cannot countenance any human genetic research, even when a humble schoolteacher faces a terminal condition.

If this seems like many, confounding threads, I won’t disagree. Tyers offers a massively complicated plot, so intricate I haven’t even introduced every thread. She introduces a world where advancing technology has altered everything it touches. Though her story foregrounds a scientist, working in her laboratory, Tyers displays character conflicts and an complex community, battles of religion and faith, and even pop culture’s corrupting influences. The complexity is stunning.

Frontier mythology often looms large in science fiction: sometimes blatantly, as with Han Solo or Malcolm Reynolds, but more often covertly. But despite the promise of wild worlds untamed by human hands, it frequently rebounds onto worlds already occupied by native species or prior colonists. (Indeed, like westerns.) Tyers, however, puts focus onto a planet previously unoccupied, and the tedious labor necessary to breathe life into a lifeless rock.

Besides this, I must acknowledge Tyers’ attention to a realistically crafted chronic illness. Her heroine has a condition she know will eventually kill her, and which she’ll pass to her children, should she ever have any. She’s designed elaborate and subtle ways to keep moving when her illness burdens her beyond coping, and has found work-arounds to avoid the outside moral judgements people often heap on the suffering.

All that being said, I particularly admire Tyers’ commitment to anchoring her storytelling on science. Graysha Brady-Phillips is a serious working researcher, specializing in life far removed from terrestrial origins. What goes into taking a lifeless world and making it settleable? Besides her own background, Tyers’ acknowledgements page lists several researchers she consulted, giving this story a firm scientific milieu, avoiding the rococo science favored by many paperback authors.

Tyers first published this novel in 1991, to moderate acclaim. Following her first husband’s passing, Tyers went into semi-retirement for several years, and re-emerged by revising several of her novels, emphasizing spiritual themes previously only latent in the story. This particular novel she re-released in 2004, and again in 2018. I never read the original, but appreciate how this revision investigates spiritual themes, without overwhelming real-world science.

I like saying a novel invites a large, diverse audience. Tyers writes the intrigue, action, and romance that novel readers desire, but grounds it in real science and plausible speculation. She’s created what Tolkein called a “secondary world,” a setting so complete and consistent that audiences feel we’ve traveled there. I grew up on science fiction, but have grown jaded recently. This feels like the books I grew up reading.

Baby, It's Pretty Cold In Here, Too

Frank Loesser and Lynn Garland

Seems like every December anymore, we have the debate: is “Baby It’s Cold Outside” offensive? The winter jazz standard, by Guys and Dolls composer Frank Loesser in 1944 to sing as a novelty duet with his wife, Lynn Garland, has become infamous for a man plying a woman with alcohol and persuading her to stay with him overnight. Several radio stations have banned the song, but a few have reversed themselves under public pressure.

The controversy, which has simmered for years but really only opened up to widespread public awareness in the last five years or so, turns on how we should interpret Loesser’s narrative. On the one hand, the male voice’s disdain for the female voice’s protests, while she sings things like “What’s in this drink,” suggest he’s manipulating her. Some critics have called him a sexual predator. I’ve heard some amateur pundits call him a date rapist.

By now, we’ve all heard the counterargument, that the song is laden with post-Depression stock jokes and sexual politics. Women back then couldn’t outright consent, because of social pressures; the female voice must perforce couch her desire to stay with her lover in acceptable protests. The song advances through a sequence of arguments that Loesser’s first-generation audience would’ve found predictable and funny, and finishes with the pair singing in beautiful, consenting unison.

This year, I encountered a new counter-counter-argument, that art, like language, changes. Our definition of acceptable sexual behaviors has evolved, we now believe men should take women’s word at face value, and clinging onto a Howard Hawks-era screwball comedy interpretation yokes audiences to the past. Let things go, we’re told. The world changes, and our artistic interpretation criteria need to change with it.

I can’t completely accept this argument. All art reflects the context in which it’s created. If we cannot require audiences to understand the social milieu, we cannot really appreciate any art from a prior generation. From Ovid and Shakespeare, to sacred texts like the New Testament and the Koran, works that were downright progressive in their time look reactionary and knuckle-dragging when pulled from that historical context.

(This is especially problematic with holy texts. Whenever fundamentalists say “I’m just saying what the Bible says,” they miss an important point: everything in the Bible was written in response to something else, and that something else might not be explicit in the text.)

However, that being said, people don’t perceive all art equally. When people read books or watch plays, they tend to focus on that effort exclusively; with the exception of audiobooks, people don’t, indeed can’t, read while doing something else. By contrast, audiences frequently perceive music passively, putting the radio or iTunes on for background noise while cleaning, doing homework, or hosting a party.

So maybe, because “Baby It’s Cold Outside” doesn’t jump the same mental hurdles that “Much Ado About Nothing” does, we should accept that people cannot comprehend its context, at least not without significant coaching. It’s a top-40 song, not High Art. Yet I can’t accept that either. I’ve argued with loved ones about how to interpret popular songs before, especially when they express outdated sexual mores.

As long as “classic rock radio” exists, new generations can discover songs like Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” or Marshall Tucker’s “Heard It In a Love Song,” both of which, by today’s standards, are aggressively disrespectful to women. I’ve argued that we should hear both songs in their historical context. Forcing our understanding onto these, or any, songs, sucks the artistry out, while depriving us of opportunities to step outside ourselves.

That, though, may be the most important factor in this debate: while we’ve become more attuned to people in our own context, more conscious of (for instance) women as independent beings with their own sexual motivations, we’ve also become willfully blind to anyone different. That’s why kids flip their shit over Halloween costumes, and we insist cute postwar novelty songs mimic current social mores no matter what. Because everyone has to think, act, and be like us.

These debates matter, because how we interpret the outside world becomes, ultimately, how we interpret ourselves. We have an obligation to understand other cultures, peoples, and times in their own terms, not according to standards we impose on them. Because the minute we begin insisting everyone conform to us, we become yoked to how we think in some particular moment. We become rigid and hidebound. And inevitably, we get overtaken by changing social mores, too.

The Transforming Journey of Tom Waits

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part 13
Tom Waits, Mule Variations

Despite his outsized influence in America’s singer-songwriter community, Tom Waits hasn’t been particularly productive throughout his career. He regularly goes five or more years between albums (at this writing, he hasn’t released any new content since 2011). At times he’s gone over a decade between tours. His singles generally don’t chart. And when he does record, his works are so eclectic, they’re impossible to market and seldom find an audience.

This, Waits’ best-selling album, won him his second Grammy award, for Best Contemporary Folk Album. On first consideration, this seems an unlikely category. The album begins with “Big In Japan,” a prime example of Waits’ screaming-and-hollering style he perfected in the late 1970s. Most lyrics on this album have a sidelong, beatnik jazz style, and the instruments have a lo-fi sound more common to indie rock than anything folk oriented.

Yet I’d contend this album captures the folk ethos perfectly. Waits picks sounds that have entered the American cultural consciousness from various genres, and have become part of our shared experience as a people. From these elements he creates a collage of distorted sound and off-kilter lyrics that reflects we, the audience, back at ourselves, just mangled enough to remind us how crooked we are, below the surface.

Designed to fill an entire CD, a feat most singer-songwriters still avoid, this album sprawls across the influences that Waits has used throughout his career. “Georgia Lee” and “”House Where Nobody Lives” have the slow-moving gait of classic country blues, while “Get Behind the Mule” and “Cold Water” have a harsher edge, a desire, seemingly, to reprimand the listener. The shift of influences seems designed to keep us back-footed.

Other tracks don’t fit genre molds as easily. “What’s He Building?” is a strange prose poem with a background reminiscent of a horror film scored by Mike Oldfield. “Black Market Baby” and “Filipino Box Spring Hog” don’t sound like any established market niche, more like wall-to-wall sonic chaos captured near closing time at a bar where a band has stopped caring what the audience thinks. Waits never stops being musical, but frenzy often overcomes harmony.

Tom Waits

Like most Waits albums, this one produced only one retail single, “Hold On.” This song more resembles the romantic baritone Waits tried to emulate in his earliest albums, which he eventually dropped. Is he deliberately trying to create something radio-friendly, to trick listeners into buying something they don’t anticipate? Perhaps. Or he’s channeling his inner San Diego middle-class youth, and the studio thought the single might sell.

Fans argue about how to interpret “Chocolate Jesus,” the track Waits famously performed on Letterman. Is Waits being deliberately sacrilegious? Is he disparaging Christianity? Waits has been notoriously elusive and contradictory about his spiritual roots. However, in light of this album’s closing track, the rip-roaring barrelhouse gospel sing-a-long “Come On Up To the House,” I’m inclined to suspect “Chocolate Jesus” reflects ambiguity about commercialized Christian trappings, not Christianity itself.

Waits didn’t assemble a studio band for this album. Instead, he employs an all-star ensemble of rotating guest artists, including Charlie Musselwhite, Les Claypool, John Hammond, and Marc Ribot. Most songs involve fewer musicians than you might expect; the dynamic sound arises from the energy of the playing, not the number of instruments being played. Waits uses multitracking far less than most contemporary artists. The result is austere, but frenetic.

Taken together, the album’s various tracks create a sonic landscape as uneven as any national park. We careen through the categories of American music, never allowed to settle on one genre long enough to get comfortable. We reach this album’s final, percussive chords, confused about where we’ve been, but confident we’ve taken a journey. The experience has certainly changed Waits, and probably us too. And we’re ready to go again.

Various record labels keep releasing Waits, but always struggle to market his genre-resistant compositions. Upon release, this album did moderately well, despite lacking support. Rolling Stone gave it three stars on initial release, but apparently changed their minds later, granting four-and-a-half stars in their later album guide, and deeming this one of the 500 most important albums ever released. Which reflects Waits’ usual reception: initial confusion, followed by acclaim.

Not everyone likes Tom Waits. His coarse voice and eclectic style often discourage new listeners. But audiences willing to persevere will find Waits an experience they revisit time and again. This album rewards multiple listening, and provides unexpected insight beneath its layers. And it is folk music, because it’s about its audience’s experience.