A Tale of Two Teenagers

Gaten Matarazzo

When do teenagers become responsible for their actions? I mean not just a legal sense, where legislators can draw an arbitrary line at age eighteen or twenty-one, but morally, in their community’s eyes. Are 18-year-olds sufficiently mature to make reasonable, informed decisions about their futures? I know plenty of parents who’d insist otherwise. What about 16-year-olds? 14-year-olds?

I got into a brief argument this week online over exactly how culpable Gaten Matarazzo actually is for his planned practical joke show, Prank Encounters. It hasn’t even been one week since I wrote that Matarazzo’s show, which hasn’t broadcast yet, signalled capitalism's death knell. Though an initial Twitter outpouring held Matarazzo entirely responsible for this disaster, I and others noted a high-school sophomore couldn’t possibly have done this alone.

This story comes concurrently with news about Kyle Kashuv, a Parkland shooting survivor and conservative activist, whose acceptance to Harvard University was rescinded last week, following revelations that, aged sixteen, he’d used racist and anti-Semitic language in private communications with peers. Unable to explain his bad choices to Harvard’s satisfaction, he finds himself yanked from America’s most prestigious university. Conservatives nationwide have cried foul.

I cannot claim moral superiority over Kyle Kashuv. In these very pages, I’ve already admitted engaging in deliberately inflammatory behavior, some painfully close to what Kashuv’s admitted. And I did it for the same reasons Kashuv gives, because I thought doing so made me look “as extreme and shocking as possible.” And I was older than Kashuv when this happened, so I cannot even hide behind claims of childhood innocence.

So I’m forced to take certain arguments off the table immediately. I cannot hold Kashuv personally culpable for his behavior, however morally abhorrent I find it, without inviting punishment for my own actions. Sure, I could note that, being more than twice Kashuv’s age, I’ve had more time for personal penance. But if every kid must first shrive their teenage sins before getting into college, how few Americans would ever afford higher education?

But this only invites more cow paths of moral reasoning. As bad as Gaten Matarazzo’s classist behavior is, does it really exceed Kyle Kashuv’s racist behavior? Matarazzo couldn’t have created a show without backing from Netflix, which owns assets valued at $54 billion. But Kashuv’s activist career is bankrolled by Charlie Kirk’s group Turning Point USA, which gets money directly from Foster Freiss, the DeVos family, and the NRA.

Where do the frontiers of culpability lie? Netflix invested Matarazzo with executive producer authority over his show, so some adults certainly believe him mature enough to make informed decisions over productions costing millions of dollars. But what criteria did they use? That’s probably a murkily defined area. They probably got to know Matarazzo personally beforehand, and deemed him mature because their relationship seemed sufficiently adult.

Harvard’s admissions officers cannot possibly know Kashuv sufficiently to do likewise. They needed to judge him from his public pronouncements, which have been numerous, as demonstrated by the number of photos which show him on national news programs, at the White House, and behind podiums branded with right-wing organization logos. Harvard needed to judge Kashuv, not personally, but based on his public record.

Kyle Kashuv, right, with one of his biggest fans

Thankfully, nobody ever photographed me flashing the Nazi salute in public. I probably would’ve fumbled my way through justifications as tin-earred as what Kashuv offered: as I’ve written, I thought the message my actions conveyed was so absurd that observers would think I intended the exact opposite of what that sign actually meant. Re-reading that last sentence, I clearly see how stupid and indefensible that sounds.

In my defense, I also didn’t start college until age 25.

On the one hand, any sixteen-year-old should know that White people don’t get to drop N-bombs with impunity anymore. And any sixteen-year-old who’s flipped burgers for dating money would know work isn’t funny. On the other hand, I was sixteen, even seventeen, when I flashed the Nazi salute for cheap shock value, and thought I was hilarious, until a caring adult explained how I actually looked. Who makes that loaded call?

Too many parents must wrestle, daily, with finding the magic line where a teenager becomes responsible. Parents I know and respect find themselves stranded on this question. Living in the public eye, as Matarazzo and Kashuv do, possibly makes outsiders perceive teens as more responsible than they really are. But if they’re responsible for their poor choices, I’m responsible for mine. Am I ready to own my poor choices in public?

Zen Chess for Beginners

Shimpei Sato (game designer), Onitama

New board games coming from mainstream publishers anymore tend to be too complex, require huge teams, or tie themselves to lucrative media properties. I seldom see games like chess or Go, timeless exercises of strategy, spatial reasoning, and friendly competition based upon trust and agreed-upon rules. And I especially see few with rules straightforward enough to savvy in one sitting.

Japanese game designer Shimpei Sato designed this game to mimic the experience of a traditional martial arts tournament. The game arrays one master and four pupils across a limited space, and gives them the goal of capturing opposing pieces. It requires players to think several steps ahead, which isn’t always easy. And unlike similar board games, it provides multiple ways to win.

Superficially, Onitama resembles chess, in having a geometric board and pieces. The board measures five squares by five, and each side has five pieces (ten altogether), so one-fifth of the board is occupied at the beginning of the game. But unlike chess, moves aren’t circumscribed by pieces’ nature. Available moves are determined by cards, which are dealt out at the beginning of the game, and which resemble traditional martial arts moves.

Any piece can move according to the cards players have available to them: many of the same basic lateral or diagonal moves that characterize chess. Thus there’s no memorizing which pieces can make which moves. However, here’s the trick: once you make one particular move, you remove that option from your choices, and pass it to your opponent. Any action you take, will become your opponent’s option on their next turn.

The game has sixteen possible moves available for players, but only five get used per game. I still haven’t seen all sixteen options yet (expansion packs are available). This means that every game has a distinct set of moves available, and one game won’t resemble the next. Like proficient martial artists bringing their unique skill sets to competition, this game changes every time you play it. Most board games can’t say that.

So the comparisons to the two obvious choices I’ve already mentioned, chess and Go, make sense. Yet it’s also a different experience, because the elegant simplicity of the rules (it took about two minutes to read the rulebook aloud) and fairly small board mean the game goes fast. It’s certainly possible for timid or deliberate players to drag the game by overthinking each move, but in practice, each individual game runs around fifteen minutes.

Some readers may find my repeated comparisons to chess and Go off-putting, because these games require a long learning arc, and an attention span many players lack in today’s success-oriented culture. I can’t stress enough: you can learn this game in mere minutes. You can play it before your coffee gets cold. Yet you can do this without exhausting its seemingly limitless ability to adapt to you.

The Onitama starting position (left) and in play (right)

Licensed from designer Sato for American production by Texas-based Arcane Wonders, the game design consciously channels images of Japanese beauty and Zen tranquility. The “board” is a scroll, actually printed on a non-skid vinyl mat, similar to a mousepad. The art resembles sumi-e painting, featuring woodland temples and disciples practicing standard moves. This design is somewhat stereotyped, though given the martial arts theme, that stereotype is perhaps earned.

The whole game folds into a box slightly smaller than four-by-eleven inches, smaller than most games manufactured by better-known companies like Milton Bradley or Parker Brothers. That makes it ideal for stuffing into a backpack or attache case and taking it around town. I’ve played in a coffee shop, a bar, and a restaurant, because it’s small enough to travel, and light enough to set up in a public place.

This combination of portability and simplicity makes it a good sharing game. Unlike Go, which can last for hours and involves hundreds of tiny stones that can become easily lost, Onitama has few parts and goes swiftly. Given time, I suspect that playing Onitama in a coffee house may become as popular as playing chess in the park, a boilerplate of good-minded people sharing an experience without spending money.

With very simple rules that make for easy learning, but the ability to evolve from one game to another, this makes an ideal all-ages game, a bridge to learning more complicated traditional board games which may require intense concentration students sometimes lack. I must admit, people playing Onitama against me have repeatedly cleaned my clock. Yet I keep coming back for its simplicity, strategy, and grace.

Breaking News: Netflix Declares Capitalism Dead

Gaten Matarazzo

A tsunami of coverage crashed this weekend following news that Netflix was launching a prank show, entitled Prank Encounters, targeting people looking for work. Hosted by Gaten Matarazzo, the curly-haired lisping kid from Stranger Things, Netflix promises a “terrifying and hilarious prank show takes two complete strangers who each think they're starting their first day at a new job.” In other words, it ridicules working-class people for needing jobs.

Much coverage regarding this announcement has focused on how this show’s premise innately punches down. A well-compensated Hollywood star, who first appeared on Broadway at the unlikely age of eight, openly considers non-famous people targets of public ridicule for their need for employment. (I make a distinction between employment and work.) But I’m more interested, here, in how Netflix, a private corporation, brazenly spits in the eye of capitalism.

Capitalism’s defenders claim their system’s morality depends on every interaction being strictly voluntary. There’s some truth to this: if I dislike one proffered interaction, like one job offer let’s say, I could hypothetically go find another. But this reasoning only goes so far. I can reject one individual offer, but I cannot abstain from all capitalist interactions, unless I intend to reject society altogether and live in a wickiup in the forest.

Therefore, so long as capitalism obtains in North American society, I cannot forego employment. Believe me, I’ve tried. As someone currently stuck in employment beneath my qualifications, I know the frustration of needing better work, that is, work which better accords with my abilities and economic needs. I’m not alone, either, as millions enter America’s workforce every year yoked with tens of thousands of dollars in student debt.

By treating such struggling would-be workers as public jokes, Matarazzo and Netflix submarine one of capitalism’s supporting principles: trust. I absolutely must trust my employer to pay me fairly, work me reasonably, and protect me against my job’s innate hazards. This show, however, broadcasts that nobody can trust any job offer anymore, no matter how solemnly extended, because employment is now essentially a source of amusement for the comparatively well-off.

Now I say that, knowing trust is routinely undermined in employment. My bosses have punished workers for discussing our wage (which is illegal). They’ve taught employees how to work around OSHA-mandated safeties, and ordered us to do so. Anybody who thinks America’s management class doesn’t conspire to keep wages depressed hasn't watched the news recently. Capitalism regularly undermines trust, though in ways usually invisible.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings

By turning employment into a source of amusement, though, Netflix has taken that usually covert undermining and made it explicit. They’ve openly declared that the rich who control Hollywood consider you, and your need for paying employment, funny. Even laying aside how that’s flagrantly punching down, I can’t get past the necessary contradictions. Capitalists tell us we must trust the system’s morality, then billboard that we can’t trust them one goddamn inch.

As Stranger Things enters its third season, young Matarazzo, aged sixteen, makes an announced $200,000 per episode, making him among streaming entertainment’s best-paid stars. Besides hosting Prank Encounters, Matarazzo also executive produces, so I don’t hold him exempt from this show’s moral depravity, despite his age. Per episode, Matarazzo makes nearly four times America’s median annual household income—then turns around and mocks his audience.

Even youth doesn’t excuse poor choices, because Matarazzo didn’t do this alone. A media corporation like Netflix has enough riding on individual productions that they implement multiple approval processes before anything gets produced, much less announced. Capitalism at that scale is notoriously risk-averse. Multiple executives, putatively reasonable adults, must have rubber-stamped this idea before it hit the public. There’s trust for you.

So, at an age when many youths get their first burger-flipping jobs to subsidize their meagre dating lives, Matarazzo uses the platform his celebrity provides to mock and belittle non-celebrities looking for work. Even if nobody gets hurt, I’d call this violent, because it involves a famous person, backed by a $25 billion corporation, using their combined might to humiliate the less advantaged. That’s some Marie Antoinette-level shit, friends.

Surely we all understand, to some degree, that we cannot trust our employers. We’ve all witnessed the growing gap between management and labor: the way, for instance, Jeff Bezos has become Earth’s richest human, while his warehouse workers can’t afford potty breaks. But this makes everything explicit. Capitalists look down on you because you need their almost-feudal patronage. Friends, maybe it’s time to walk away from a broken economic system.

Midnight Matinee at the All-You-Can-Eat Science Fiction Buffet

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 31
Takashi Yamazaki (writer/director), Returner

The mysterious extraterrestrial Daggra have overtaken humanity’s last fortress. With her species on the verge of extinction, Milly, a hardened, cynical warrior, steps into the time portal which carries her from 2084, clear back to 2002. Her mission: stop humanity’s First Contact with the Daggra, which will happen overlooking Tokyo Bay. But she’s missing important information, like how exactly to find this contact point, or what’s destined to happen.

This movie’s cover art, featuring Takeshi Kaneshiro posing with a pistol, mirror shades, and flapping black coat, suggests it’s a blatant ripoff of The Matrix, which was only three years old when this movie came out. If you think that, though, you’ve set your sights way too low. Writer-director Takeshi Yamazaki pillages story elements from dozens of American and international science fiction films, creating a beautiful, tantalizing smorgasbord of excess.

Arriving in Tokyo, Milly (Anne Suzuki, Snow Falling on Cedars) immediately prepares for violence; instead, she finds a city overrun with neon and commerce, where her wartime skills have little market. Except, of course, for one buyer: the Yakuza. Milly quickly falls in with paid assassin Miyamoto (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who thinks he’s killed her. He’s mistaken, since she arrived wearing armor. Naturally she tapes a bomb to his neck and demands his compliance.

Within the movie’s opening act, Yamazaki openly signals several of the movies he’s ransacking for ideas: the Terminator and Matrix franchises, Japanese kaiju movies like Godzilla, Hong Kong martial arts cop movies, American cyberpunk novels (the Yakuza subplot is redolent with bits recycled from William Gibson’s career-making works), and more. Yamazaki has stolen everything that wasn’t nailed down. It’s messy, and it ought to stink.

But it doesn’t. Yamazaki propels his story with the same playful glee and wretched excess of American directors like Sam Peckinpah and Quentin Tarantino, likewise famous for making massive, cornball collages of their favorite influences. This massive array of familiar science fiction and martial arts tropes, unmoored from their sources and slammed together with joyous fervor, coalesces into something distinct. Like Star Wars or LotR, it outgrows its sources.

Takeshi Kaneshiro (right) and Anne Suzuki on the brink of first contact, in Returner

Miyamoto doesn’t want Milly’s quest; he thinks her story of flying saucers and killer reptiles sounds ridiculous. But he knows her bomb works, so apparently he must comply, and he does. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Milly’s quest overlaps his, since the Yakuza boss he’s tracking has stolen the crashed Daggra spaceship. Cruel, venal Mizoguchi wants to strip the spaceship, and its injured pilot, for black market parts.


Milly and Miyamoto race against time, desperate to prevent the war Milly barely survived, but aware that Mizoguchi could make things infinitely worse. Milly has a secret weapon: she can move faster than the eye can see (“there is no spoon”), but only for short bursts. Soon they discover Miyamoto has his own secret, a telepathic link to the injured Daggra. Milly soon realizes everything she ever believed about her enemy was a lie.

Because of course it was.

Yamazaki brings together an international cast for a multilingual extravaganza. His characters move between Tokyo’s glamorous, colorfully lit upper crust and its suppurating underbelly, a transition made possible by Miyamoto’s lucrative skills in violence. And our heroes find themselves poised on the knife’s edge between pure science and its yucky commercial face. Every aspect of this story turns on themes of balance between mirror selves.

Taken together, this story wouldn’t work in a drier, more self-consciously cinematic picture. This movie is loud, saturated in color when it isn’t completely obscured in soot, and paced like a fireworks display. Yamazaki not only doesn’t disguise his takings from international cinema, he billboards them, announcing his bricolage as something proud and brash. It’s like a master-course in just enough of better films to create something new.

Naturally the film comes courtesy of the production house Toho, famous internationally as home of Godzilla and Akira Kurosawa. Besides its American influences, naked, scaly Daggra connect the story to its kaiju genes, while Miyamoto is clearly a modern, somewhat Americanized samurai. It’s consistent with much prior low-budget Japanese schlock fare, but Yamazaki makes it look anything but low-budget. Because he also steals crisp American cinematic gloss.

Critics hated this picture, naturally. It’s about as subtle as Alien vs. Predator on amphetamines. Yet its complete lack of restraint makes it something else, a big, sloppy applesauce of late-20th-Century cinematic aplomb. It doesn’t apologize for itself, nor should it, because it does what good movies should: it carries audiences along until the final, well-earned moments.

Are the Jedi a Religion? (Part Three)

Part One
Part Two

Writing in 1912, Émile Durkheim noted that religion was retreating from the forefront of European life. The dwindling of Catholic kings meant state authority no longer derived from church imprimatur. But that hardly meant European religion died. In Durkheim’s France, the catechistic slogan “Liberté Egalité Fraternité” and icons of the state demigoddess Marianne proliferated where crucifixes one hung.

For Durkheim, this impulse toward social unity defines what makes a genuine religion. When religious believers recite creeds and harmonize on hymns, the most important part isn’t the content, it’s the collectivity; religion ultimately doesn’t make us righteous, it makes us unified. This applies whether we describe early state religions, where God’s representative anoints the king, or oppositional religions, where believers, like trade unionists, collaborate against unrighteous earthly powers.

In Episode IV, Ben Kenobi, exiled to a distant and systemically neglected outpost of the Empire, waxes nostalgic: “For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic.” In the prequels, we see what this means: Jedi authority provides unity over a philosophically, linguistically, genetically diverse society. The Old Republic’s state authority wholly requires Jedi support; the Empire thus requires their overthrow.

We’ve established, in prior essays, that the Jedi have liturgical form, like a religion, and spiritual heft, like a religion. However, the same applies to Durkheim’s French Republic or, as I noted in Part One, the U.S. Marine Corps—and nobody would mistake these for religions. Fundamentally, we can define religions neither by what they say, nor by what they do, because the psychological rudiments nourished by religion have clearly secular parallels.

Therefore, we might define religions much like that most opposite of irreligious institutions, pornography: I don’t know what it is, but I know it when I see it. Yes, this definition is unsatisfying, but it encompasses the inherent tension which religion always carries. It also permits one important observation regarding the Jedi specifically: something religious can become secularized, while something profane can become sanctified, depending on how we handle it.

Throughout the prequels, the Jedi occupy a Temple, observe a Code, and practice spiritual disciplines like Zen Buddhists or Jesuit novices. Yet I’d contend, given their hand-in-glove relationship with the government, and their adherence to order over justice (witness the poverty and slaveholding on Tatooine and Naboo), that they’ve stopped being a religion in any meaningful sense, becoming an instrument of state authority, worshipping mainly continuity.

With their retreat to the margins, and their persecution by the Empire, however, I’d contend the Jedi become a legitimate religion. With many major religions, we witness a sense of fundamental loss: the Jewish Bible ends with a call for faithful Jews to reclaim the homeland. Christians mourn the loss of prelapsarian oneness with God. Buddhists strive to achieve oneness with the Brahma, the force from which all creation originates.

Likewise, the Jedi desire to reclaim, not the authority they once held, but the justice they once should have preserved. They become conscious of their losses, seek forgiveness, and walk a newly righteous path, the process Christians call metanoia, or conversion. This Jedi metanoia defines Yoda’s character arc, and also explains Luke’s loss and restoration of faith in Episode VIII. The Jedi, like Israel under Moses, must walk the wilderness to become a religion.

French philosopher Bruno Latour writes, among other points, that religious language serves mostly to transform the hearer: content of language places second to the effect it has on the hearer’s inward being. Temple-era Jedi, however, seek inward transformation only insofar as it breeds compliance with the Order, and with small-O order. Only with their official standing shattered, do the Jedi transform themselves rather than others.

That’s why I disbelieve that contemporary “Jedi” religions, founded only after the prequels delved into meaningful Jedi doctrine, are really religion. Jediism gives adherants the trappings of spiritual heft, but on questions of internal transformation, the principles ultimately just shrug, telling disciples that whatever conclusions they reach are ultimately fine. You needn’t undergo inner transformation; you needn’t even attend church. Whatever you believe is fine.

Like the Hebrew prophets, post-Temple Jedi call earthly powers to uphold justice. But they gain spiritual standing necessary to make that call only by relinquishing official standing and police authority. When you have credentialed state power, you cannot transform yourself; you can only comply or resist. That’s why the Jedi become a religion only in being exiled, because only then are they liberated from Marianne, to pursue their own Force.