Becoming Something Else: Thoughts on Arrow

For the last decade and a half, as superheroes have migrated from the pages of comics to the very heart of mainstream pop culture, they've been almost exclusively the purview of feature films.  This despite the fact that the long-running, episodic, open-ended comics medium and the bite-sized film medium map very poorly onto one another, a disconnect that has told in what passes for most superhero films' plots.  So the X-Men films have warped an ensemble story into a star vehicle for one character, the Marvel films have uniformly sketchy plots and forgettable villains, the Spider-Man films remain, even before the unnecessary reboot, caught in the gravity well of their hero's origin story, and the Superman films have simply failed to take off.  Only Christopher Nolan's Batman films, for all their problems, have managed to tell an actual story, and even then, it's a story that tends towards its hero's abdication of his heroic role, not his continuing adventures.  Television seems like a much better fit for superhero stories, to the extent that superhero conventions have been showing up in procedural TV series for years--Angel and Person of Interest both have a great deal of Batman in their DNA, for example.  And yet with one glaring exception, attempts to translate existing comics properties into television series have fizzled and died, while original superhero series like Heroes have found themselves stranded in a no man's land between the two mediums' conventions. 

That glaring exception is, of course, Smallville, whose long shadow (quite literally--it's terrifying to think this, but it holds the record for longest-running American genre series) might have something to do with the chilly reception that other attempts to port comics characters to TV have met.  It's certainly a big part of the reason that I was so singularly unimpressed with the pilot for Arrow, a show that, now in the middle of its second season, might just prove to be another exception to the no superheroes on TV rule.  In its pilot episode, Arrow seemed to indulge in all of Smallville's (and the CW network's, the home of both shows) most annoying traits--blandly handsome, wooden leads, an emphasis on romance as overbearing as it is puerile, overheated emotions declared in too-obvious speeches, a tangled backstory involving the hero's father, and an aversion to the supposedly campy tropes of the comics, like costumes and catchphrases, that does absolutely nothing to make either show seems mature or realistic.  In the year and a half since this violently negative reaction, however, Arrow has slowly gained in popularity and acclaim, which finally encouraged me to give it another look.  What I found was a series that, while still suffering from a lot of CW-ish flaws, is nevertheless a lot better and more enjoyable than anyone watching its pilot could ever have hoped.  More importantly, Arrow is a series that actually takes advantage of the television medium to do something comics-like, and uses it to offer a genuine engagement with the superhero concept.

Based on the lesser-known DC character the Green Arrow^[1], Arrow begins with the return of Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) to his home of Starling City, having been cast away on an island for five years after being shipwrecked while sailing with his father, billionaire industrialist Robert Queen (Jamie Sheridan).  The reactions to Oliver's return are decidedly mixed--his mother Moira (Susanna Thompson), sister Thea (Willa Holland), and best friend Tommy Merlyn (Colin Donnell) are overjoyed but also unsure how to cope with the changes in his behavior and personality, while his former girlfriend Laurel (Katie Cassidy) and her father, police detective Quentin Lance (Paul Blackthorne) are incensed, since Oliver went on the ill-fated trip with Laurel's sister Sarah, whose loss has decimated their family.  Oliver, meanwhile, has returned to Starling City with a purpose, a list of names bequeathed to him by his father of people who have failed Starling City--corrupt politicians, embezzling bankers, slum-lords and mobsters.  Though by day he continues to play the shallow, hardy-partying playboy he was before his ordeal, by night Oliver poses as a vigilante known as The Hood, using the archery and martial arts skills he learned on the island to hunt these people down and force them to atone for their sins--or, if they refuse, simply kill them.

This is, to say the least, an unpromising beginning.  The show's premise is, at one and the same time, too reminiscent of Batman (in particular, Nolan's Batman Begins, a similarity that persists throughout the first season) and steeped in a sub-Occupy rhetoric that feels exploitative and skin-deep.  The fact that Oliver seems not only to have survived on the island but to have become a super-soldier on it (it is strongly implied, for example, that the timing of his return isn't coincidental but a choice, and that he could have arranged for his rescue to happen far sooner than it did), promises a Lost-like missing backstory--which is to say, a show more interested in filling in the missing pieces of its past than in developing its story and characters into their future--which is indeed doled out in flashbacks interspersed with each episode.  The show immediately begins teasing the resumption of Oliver and Laurel's romance, in the time-honored fashion of establishing a love triangle between them and Tommy, which would be groan-worthy even if it didn't require us to ignore the surely insurmountable obstacles to such a reconciliation.  Most importantly, the fact that Oliver is an unrepentant killer--and not just of the people on his father's list, but of their henchmen and lackeys--is shocking and unpleasant, all the more so because he is so unconflicted about it.  The impression formed is of a show trying to trade on Smallville-style soapiness, Batman-style darkness, and the hot button issues of the day without any real sense of what any of these components mean in themselves, and of what kind of story it wants to tell.

And yet, as the first season draws on, Arrow steadily improves into a compelling, engaging series.  Partly, this is simply a matter of execution.  After a dozen or so forgettable one-percenter-of-the-week episodes, the show's storytelling kicks dramatically into gear, barreling through plot twists and complications with little in the way of narrative dead weight.^[2]  Visually, too, Arrow is impressive, utilizing what must be a limited budget to deliver top-notch, masterfully shot and choreographed fight scenes.  Whatever the show's narrative failings, after the middle of its first season, it is never boring to watch.

At least one of those narrative failings, however, Arrow's seemingly muddled definition of heroism, turns out to be a deliberate choice.  "To save my city," Oliver tells us in every episode's opening narration, "I must become something else."  It takes a while to realize this, but Arrow's central thesis is that Oliver has no idea what that something else is, and that he is making many mistakes and wrong turns on his path to figuring that question out, and to becoming an actual hero.  That Oliver's original mission in Starling City, crossing off the names in his father's list, is unheroic both in concept and execution is something that is repeatedly drummed into us--through Detective Lance's disgust at the carnage he leaves behind him, but even more than that, through Oliver's own inability to defend it.  When other vigilantes emerge in Starling City, either independently of Oliver or in emulation of him, he moves to neutralize them without ever being able to articulate, to them or to himself, just what makes his vigilantism different and justifiable.

When, over the course of the first season, other people learn Oliver's secret, their initial reactions are almost invariably dismay and rejection.  The first of these is John Diggle (David Ramsey), Oliver's driver and bodyguard, who is brought into the fold early on.  Diggle's induction into Oliver's team would be a welcome change if only because it gives Oliver someone with whom he can discuss his nocturnal activities, thus eliminating the tortuous voiceovers that plague the show's first few episodes, but he quickly becomes one of Arrow's most important components.  Though his initial reaction to learning Oliver's secret is to declare that "You really did lose your mind on that island" and call him a criminal and a murderer, Diggle comes around to Oliver's arguments that Starling City needs extra-legal protection from the predation of people too rich to be touched by the law.  But he continues to challenge Oliver's ideas of how that protection should look, encouraging him to look past the straightforward mission of his father's list and address crime wherever he finds it.  Later in the season, the team is joined by techie Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards), who also declares her ambivalence towards Oliver's methods, and agrees to help him and keep his secret only in exchange for his help on her own project.  Though that thread is underplayed for the rest of the season--Felicity quickly buys into the vigilante party line^[3]--it's her focus on this alleged side project that leads Oliver to discover the season's central villain, and takes him to the next level on his journey towards true heroism.

The most important character to discover Oliver's secret in the first season, however, is Tommy.  Arrow places trauma, the recovery from it and the failure to recover, at the center of most of its character work, suggesting, for example, that Oliver's experiences on the island--where he encountered a host of violent enemies and was forced to endure and commit heinous acts in order to survive--make his difficulties in reintegrating to his old life not dissimilar from those of a soldier returning from war.  The rest of the cast, too, is coping with their own traumatic experiences--Diggle is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, and is also reeling from the death of his brother; Laurel and Quentin are still picking the pieces up from Sarah's death and the destruction of their family; when Oliver challenges Thea for acting out, she reminds him that "my brother and my father died... you guys all act like it's cool, let's just forget about the last five years.  Well I can't.  For me it's kind of permanently in there."  That trauma, the realization of the world's fundamental unfairness and of their own smallness and vulnerability before it, is what lies at the heart of most of the characters' willingness to at least consider that the vigilante is a force for good, so Tommy, as the only member of the cast who is relatively un-traumatized, plays a vital role as the voice of normalcy and sanity.  Unlike Diggle and Felicity, he can't talk himself into Oliver's point of view, decisively declaring that Oliver is "a serial killer" and eventually cutting off their friendship.  Before that happens, however, Arrow puts us into Tommy's headspace, in an episode in which he's forced to bribe a city official who wants to investigate Oliver's lair, which lies under the nightclub they've opened together, and then stall the police who want to search it.  The episode makes it clear how seedy and underhanded these actions seem to Tommy, and all to protect a friend whose compulsions he neither respects nor understands.

Of course, Arrow isn't Watchmen.  Even in its early episodes it ultimately comes down on Oliver's side, and is clearly moving towards a wholehearted embrace of his vigilantism.  But the format of a television series gives the show more room and time to build up to that point organically, and in unexpected ways.  When we watch a Spider-Man movie, we know that Peter Parker's uncle Ben will die because of Peter's indifference.  What should be a defining, life-altering trauma becomes just another set-piece to get through before the actual story can start.  Arrow, because it's taking such a long, meandering path through Oliver's origin story, can embroider it in interesting ways--as when Oliver forms a bond with a woman who, like him, is stalking the streets at night killing criminals, going so far as to invite her on his crime-fighting escapades, only to realize that she lacks even his flawed judgement and self-control.

Arrow allows characters like Diggle, Quentin Lance, and Tommy room to express their disapproval of Oliver without him having a good answer for them, because at that point in the show's story such an answer doesn't exist.  More importantly, it allows him to learn from their criticism and slowly refine his idea of what the "something else" he wants to be actually is.  Tommy's rejection of Oliver in the first season leads him to reconcile with his estranged father Malcolm (John Barrowman), who turns out to be the season's main villain.  This eventually leads to Tommy's death, an event that so shatters Oliver that he leaves Starling City and goes back to the island--as bold a declaration of his failure to reintegrate into his old life and find a place for himself in it as he could possibly make.  When he returns, Oliver announces a new mission, one of heroism and personal example rather than vengeance and violence, but his progress towards achieving that goal has been haphazard.  He resolves to stop killing, but already in the first half of the second season there have been occasions on which he's been unable to keep that resolution; he changes his moniker from the Hood to the Arrow, but most of the citizens of Starling City use the two names interchangeably, and some still call him simply "the vigilante."  This suggests a series in which it might take several seasons for Oliver to become the Green Arrow that comic book readers know, and one in which we can be privy to the process of developing that character's image and credo.

Somewhat less successful, but still quite interesting, is Arrow's handling of class.  One of the few things I did pick up about the comics' Green Arrow is that he's considered the left-wing answer to Batman, and especially in the current political climate, in which the fascism of the Nolan Batman films has been getting more and more pushback as people notice how problematic it is for a billionaire to go out at night and attack poor criminals, there's space for a story in which the Batman analogue is focused on systemic, economic crime.  As I wrote at the beginning of this piece, Arrow's social consciousness initially seems skin-deep, but as the first season draws on it becomes clear that issues of class are baked into every aspect of the show's world--in which the class war is a literal one, with the privileged classes drawing first blood.  Malcolm Merlyn turns out to have been the leader of a group, which also included Oliver's parents, of rich people who have felt the sting of street crime in Starling City--Malcolm's wife was murdered by muggers outside the free clinic she established in the Glades, Starling City's worst neighborhood; another member's daughter was raped.  In a Batman-style story, these people would be the heroes, cleaning up the streets of riffraff and scum.  In Arrow, they're the villains, who have failed to realize that their suffering is a symptom of a disease they've helped cause, and whose proposed "solution," dubbed The Undertaking, is to level the Glades and kill its inhabitants.  Despite his best efforts, Oliver is only able to partially prevent the Undertaking; at the end of the first season, a large segment of the Glades is destroyed and hundreds of people are killed.

As I've said, there are some obvious similarities here to Batman Begins, which revolves around a plan by the League of Assassins (who also appear as villains in Arrow's second season) to destroy Gotham because they perceive it as hopelessly corrupt, and believe, as Malcolm Merlyn does of the Glades, that "it can't be saved, because the people there don't want it to be saved... They deserve to die.  All of them."  As in Arrow, that plan is only partially successful, encompassing only the Narrows, Gotham's own bad, crime-riddled neighborhood.  The difference between Arrow and Nolan's Batman films, however, is that after Batman Begins, the Narrows--whose inhabitants were driven mad, but not killed, by the League of Assassins's neurotoxin--are never mentioned again.  In Arrow, the Glades, and the aftermath of the Undertaking, remain a central component of the show.  In response to the outrage of the Undertaking, some of the citizens of the Glades respond by emulating their supposed champion, forming posses of masked vigilantes who set out to murder the alleged architects of the attack, or simply the random rich.  Some of the comic's central villains emerge as a direct response to the Undertaking, most prominently Sebastian Blood (Kevin Alejandro), a mayoral candidate who has made retaking the city for its ordinary citizens his rallying cry (and is using Oliver and his family as whipping boys to rally support to his cause), even as he amasses an army of super-soldiers for some as-yet undisclosed purpose.^[4]

As refreshing as it is to see class issues addressed so baldly on American TV--and in genre TV, no less--Arrow's handling of these issues often leaves something to be desired.  It is, for example, enormously problematic that the only reaction to the Undertaking to emerge from the Glades is a villainous one.  Even more of a problem is the fact that the voices of ordinary Glades citizens are almost entirely absent from the show.  Arrow does a good job of humanizing the Undertaking's architects: Malcom Merlyn is believably damaged (or, again, traumatized) by his wife's murder, and is shown to justify his monstrous actions by claiming to be protecting his son (when a shocked Tommy protests at his father killing a disarmed opponent, Malcom explains that he killed the man "as surely as he would have killed you"); even more interesting is Moira Queen, whose participation in the Undertaking is grudging at best--she knows that Malcolm is responsible for the sinking of Robert's yacht, and he has threatened Oliver and Thea--but who fails to grasp, until it's very nearly too late, that she has a responsibility to the hundreds of other families who are also in danger.  But, perhaps predictably for a series whose champion of the oppressed is himself a billionaire, the voices of the ordinary citizens of the Glades are entirely absent from Arrow's second season.  When Moira is acquitted of murder for her role in the Undertaking (an acquittal that, we later learn, was orchestrated by Malcolm, who intimidated the jury), we see Oliver's ambivalence about the verdict, but not the outrage of the people whose homes she helped destroy and whose loved ones she helped kill.^[5]

Nevertheless, Arrow is committed to the notion of crime as a social, rather than individual, problem, and of economic crime as being equally destructive as street crime, if not more so.  It's particularly notable that even at his most unheroic moments, Oliver can be remarkably sympathetic towards people who are driven to crime, much more so than Diggle, who encourages him to address street crime (which Oliver dismisses as "a symptom") but also takes a much more black and white view of it.  When Oliver investigates, at Diggle's urging, a bank robbery that left a cop critically injured (even in his later, crime-fighting incarnations, Oliver doesn't really care about property crime), he discovers that the thieves are a family who fell on hard times after his father closed the factory where their father was employed.  Though Diggle insists that the robbers are guilty regardless of their misfortunes, Oliver tries to reason with the older man, and to give him an out that would prevent any further robberies without the family going to prison.^[6]  At the same time, Arrow doesn't shy away from the fact of its main character's privilege, and how it can blind him.  There's a strong sense that Oliver's certainty that his vigilantism is justified (while other vigilantes must be stopped) is merely an extension of his pre-island personality, the spoiled rich kid who could have anything he wanted and hadn't heard the word "no" often enough.  And in the second season, when Oliver arranges for Felicity and Diggle to be close to him in his everyday life by making them, respectively, his assistant and driver, it falls to them to remind him how humiliating these subservient roles are for people who, in reality, are his partners and allies.

For all the good things I've said about it, I wouldn't want to oversell Arrow.  This is still a CW show, which can mean soapy storylines, too-obvious dialogue, and some infelicities in the writing.  In Arrow's case, a particular problem are the island flashback scenes.  Though they've grown more interesting as the show has progressed, and introduced some appealing characters--most notably, Slade Wilson (Manu Bennett, best "known" as the Hobbit films' Azog), a mercenary who becomes Oliver's friend and mentor, but with whom he had a bitter falling out--these sequences are still rather inelegantly presented, dumping a portion of backstory into each episode with little attempt to tie into the present day events or maintain an even pacing.  Another sort of problem is the show's diversity, or lack thereof.  In its rich neighborhoods and its poor ones, Starling City is almost uniformly white, and there's no sense that it contains ethnic enclaves--black characters, like Diggle or Moira's second husband Walter (Colin Salmon) seem to exist in isolation, not as part of a community.  And perhaps most importantly, as the show has drawn on and as Oliver comes closer to his destiny as the Green Arrow, its rooting in real world economic issues is beginning to fade.  However problematic Oliver's mission against one percenters was in the first season, it did have real world implications.  In the second season, his enemies are more and more often comic book villains, whose roots in socio-economic issues are growing more difficult to discern.

Nevertheless, Arrow is still worth a look--for a fun story, for good action scenes, for compelling characters (I've said little here about the acting, but Amell in particular has surprised me by growing into his role, ably conveying the many facets of Oliver's personality and his emotional journey as he rejoins the human race).  Most of all, for its handling, however flawed, of class issues, and for being, at least for the moment, the most interesting live-action treatment of a superhero story, in film or TV.

---

^[1]Lesser-known, that is, to people like myself, who get their superheroes through cultural osmosis and film/TV adaptations, not comics--where the Green Arrow is, I gather, a central figure.  A lot of the discussions I've seen of Arrow have focused on how the show adapts its source material and how beholden it feels to it, but my interest is in the series as its own entity.↩

^[2]Other reviewers have referred to this breakneck pace as Arrow learning the lesson of The Vampire Diaries, another CW series that overcame an inauspicious premise and pilot by being fearless with its plotting, but since I never gave that show a second chance, my frame of reference is a little different--the show that Arrow reminds me of, whenever I look up to realize that so much has already happened and yet we're barely at the middle of the episode, is Scandal.↩

^[3]In general, Felicity is Arrow's most problematic character, a fact that surprised me since one of the few things I knew about the show going in was that she was a fan favorite.  Rickards is a fine performer who imbues her character with presence and verve, and her rapport with Amell is winning (it's easy to see why Oliver and Felicity have become fandom's favorite pairing), but all this only serves to obscure the fact that she has little in the way of a personality.  Especially after the fig leaf of her reason for keeping Oliver's secret is done away with, it's simply taken for granted that she will stick around and continue risking death or imprisonment for no discernible reason.  While most other characters on the show--even the generally-disliked Laurel, who has spent the second season in a well-earned but hard to watch downward spiral that still feels more realistic than anything Felicity has ever done--are given their own friends, family history, and interests, Felicity appears not to exist outside of Oliver and his mission.↩

^[4]For all that their political perspectives on the same story are so diametrically opposed, something that Arrow and Batman Begins have in common is that neither one acknowledges the role of government and social policy in addressing (or exacerbating) economic inequality and the root causes of crime.  In the Batman films, the only department of Gotham's government we see is the police (while homeless orphan are left to billionaires like Bruce Wayne to see to).  In Arrow, Oliver seems aware of how limited his power to affect society on a large scale actually is, even in his guise as the philanthropic CEO of his father's company, but doesn't make the obvious connection to agitating for welfare and pro-equality laws and policies, while Sebastian Blood, though he talks about the importance of government and is running for mayor, obviously has other ideas about how to achieve change.  It's tempting to blame this on bad writing, but really it strikes me as a symptom of a larger trend in American pop culture (and culture in general), in which the role of government to do anything but punish wrongdoers is only rarely understood or admired.↩

^[5]This is also an aspect of the show in which its CW-ness works against it--though some characters, like Diggle or Thea's boyfriend Roy (Colton Haynes) are supposedly from the Glades, they look like the standard CW actor, who spends two hours at the gym every day and whose hair is professionally styled.  Even more importantly, there is no sense of a cultural gap between the Glades and Starling City's upper class--Roy has no problem dressing for a party at Thea's house, or switching between the modes of behavior in the Glades and those of the Queens' mansion.↩

^[6]Another amusing example of Diggle's law and order mentality comes later in the first season, when Oliver, having realized that his mother has some connection to his father's list, confronts her in his guise as the Hood, only for Moira--alone among all the one percenters that Oliver has attacked--to pull out a gun and shoot him.  Diggle's response--that Moira must be guilty if she wouldn't trust the word of a known killer who has promised not to hurt her--was rather different than mine--that Oliver clearly gets badass-ness from his mother.↩

2013, A Year in Reading: Best and Worst Books of the Year

I read 47 books in 2013, a marked improvement on last year's dismal showing but still far from where I'd like to be.  I still find myself in periods where reading just doesn't appeal, but happily these are interspersed with others when it's the only thing I'm interested in doing, and hopefully the latter will grow more common in 2014.  And, as in 2012, what my reading lacked in quantity it made up for in quality--despite the title, there are no "worst" books this year, nothing that I'm genuinely angry about having read (or even the fact of its being published), and as regular readers of this blog may notice this year's list of best books and honorable mentions is quite a bit longer than previous years' (and might have been longer still if it hadn't been for some culling--I may yet wake up next week and realize that one of the half-dozen books that were bubbling just under this list actually deserved to be on it).

Probably the biggest reading "event" of 2013 was my epic read-through and review (1, 2) of the Arthur C. Clarke shortlist, something I hadn't done since 2008.  Though I found the shortlist variable (and am ambivalent about the eventual winner, Chris Beckett's Dark Eden), the experience of immersing myself in so much recent SF, and then having to write about it in long-form in what felt, towards the end, like a feverish haze (it still amazes me that my review came out anything like coherent given that I put the finishing touches on it hours before its publication) was heady enough that I'm almost tempted to do it again this year.  Another important reading event was my participation in Crooked Timber's seminar on Felix Gilman's The Half-Made World and The Rise of Ransom City (the latter of which is one of those books that might, if the wind were from a different quarter, have made this year's best books list).  Having to consider a work from the point of view of an essayist, rather than a reviewer, was challenging and interesting, and I'm pleased with how my contribution came out.  But I also very much enjoyed reading the contributions of other participants, and the resulting discussion.

A little less than half the books I read in 2013 were by women, which was not a foregone conclusion given the weight that the all-male Clarke shortlist had.  Around the middle of the year I made the conscious decision to balance my reading, and read at least one book by a woman for every book I read by a man.  I haven't stuck to that resolution very religiously, but it's definitely a guideline that I plan to keep in mind.  Books in translation made up 15% of the year's reading, which I'm fairly certain is a high point, but also a number worth improving on.  I had several reading projects planned for this year that I never got around to--a continuation of the Women Writing SF series from a few years ago, and a large stack of recent Israeli genre books that I wanted to blog about.  Perhaps having made those intentions public means that I'll finally get around to carrying them out in 2014.

Without any further ado, then, here are 2013's best books, its honorable mentions, and its dishonorable ones, in order of the author's surname.

Best Books:

• Seraphina by Rachel Hartman
  
  In a field suffused with YA novels about plucky young girls with secret powers in an unforgiving world, it's easy to dismiss Hartman's debut out of hand.  The fact that its fantasy creatures of choice are dragons certainly doesn't help--it conjures up far too many examples of authors who treat dragons like oversized, sentient cats.  But Hartman's dragons are remarkably fresh and unsentimental, as is her titular heroine, whose bravery and competence are convincing without being overstated, and who conveys the anguish of living a double life, and of doubting her own humanity, without losing sight of the fact that her problems are not the most important thing in her story.  The most impressive thing in Seraphina, however, is the novel's broad, detailed world, and how Hartman establishes it, complete with a storied history, culture, and geography, in a relatively slim novel without ever letting the plot's pace flag.  As appealing as I found its central story--which revolves around prejudice, religion, and the painstaking process of making peace--what makes me eager for Seraphina's sequel(s?) are the half-dozen sub-plots and side quests that Hartman introduces in it, creating a sense of a fully realized world that I am eager to continue exploring.
  
  
• Intrusion by Ken MacLeod (review)
  
  If I ran the Clarke award, MacLeod's understated but quietly devastating novel would have won it with hardly any competition.  Working in the time-honored tradition of social SF, MacLeod raises questions about the meaning of freedom when he imagines a world in which government interference in its citizens' lives is well-intentioned and often benevolent, but nevertheless onerous.  This makes it a challenging read if you're someone who thinks that seat belt laws and public smoking bans are a good thing, but rather than browbeating his readers MacLeod creates a world that is stifling almost from the book's first sentence, and places at its center a vivid, sympathetic heroine whose refusal to accommodate her society's definition of public good isn't entirely understandable, even to herself.  Intrusion is not without its flaws--a secondary plotline in which a character is caught up in brutal anti-terror tactics is more heavy-handed than the main plot strand, and the book's conclusion is somewhat overheated.  But as an example of what SF can do, even with a very limited segment of its toolbox, it is both masterful and exciting.
  
  
• The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates
  
  Bar none, the weirdest, most exhilarating book I read in 2013.  Oates is one of two authors on this list whom I read for the first time this year, and The Accursed sets a high bar that it is hard to imagine the rest of her writing clearing, if only because no one could possibly be writing stuff this strange on a regular basis for decades.  At its heart a ghost story about the misfortunes of a single, upper class American family in the early 20th century, The Accursed proceeds in multiple plot strands and shifting styles to become something much baggier than that simple description suggests.  It gestures at a simple explanation for its characters' suffering, indicting them for the repressive system that they prop up and benefit from, and for the vicious, frequently brutal prejudice against black people in which their culture is steeped.  But always when the novel seems about to resolve itself and reveal a method to its madness, it twists away and recommits to the inherent irrationality of its events.  All of which is to make The Accursed sound difficult and weighty, but in reality this is a propulsive, exciting, frequently quite funny novel that begs you to keep turning the pages, whether through characters who remain sympathetic despite frequently deserving their suffering, a knowing and witty pastiche of seemingly every major work of 19th century literature, or the gonzo outrageousness of its plot.
  
  
• Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi
  
  The other author into whose bibliography I made a late foray in 2013, and if Mr. Fox is any indication I have no idea why I waited so long.  A novel in stories whose parts--multiple retellings of the Bluebeard story as well as realist fiction tinged by it--are as engaging as its whole, in which an author in the 1930s is castigated by his muse for killing off women in his stories, and his dissatisfied wife suspects him of having an affair with a woman who may be a figment of his imagination.  Mr. Fox veers wildly between styles and modes, but its three main characters remain vivid in any guise, and the romance between them is as sweet as the issues that underlie the novel--the role of women as muses, helpmeets, or murder victims, but never artists in their own right--are trenchant and painful.  This is a witty, funny, romantic work, whose pleasures are both cerebral--working out the connections between the stories and the way that each one reflects on the framing story and the novel's themes--and deeply emotional.
  
  
• A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar (review)
  
  Samatar's debut takes a while to resolve itself, seeming, in its first half, like a beautifully written travelogue of a vividly imagined fantasy world.  This in itself, of course, is no mean accomplishment, and the rich, poetic prose with which A Stranger in Olondria relates the experiences of its narrator in the titular empire is very nearly worth the price of admission in its own right.  But it's in its second half that the book transitions from accomplished to genuinely special, slowly and subtly introducing themes of race and colonialism in a way that makes them resonate all the more when they finally become apparent, and weaving into them a powerful discussion of the power of books, one that avoids the soppy sentimentality that such discussions usually descend into.  Reminiscent in some ways of Jeff VanderMeer's City of Saints and Madmen, A Stranger in Olondria is also very much its own, unique creation, a powerful reminder of what fantasy is capable of even within the seemingly limiting category of secondary world fantasy.

Honorable Mentions:

• Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks (review) - A vital component of Banks's Culture sequence, this novel functions as a sort of puzzle, which only resolves in its final pages.  This made for a frustrating read, but one that in retrospect only gains in power and importance.
  
  
• Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick - Focusing on the stories of six North Korean defectors, Demick's book is both an engrossing, heartbreaking primer on that country's history and present misfortune, and a portrait of how ordinary people cope with life in an irrational system--of the lengths they go to, first to justify their world, and then to escape it.
  
  
• Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist by Erich Kästner - The same satirical sensibility that made Kästner such an exceptional children's author is here used to skewer and lament pre-war German society, with results that are both funny and terrifying.
  
  
• 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (review) - A whirlwind tour through the solar system of 300 years hence combined with a sweet love story between a woman from Mercury and a man from the moons of Saturn.  Though not without its flaws (chiefly its handling of Earth and the question of first world aid to third world countries), the sheer scope of the novel's worldbuilding, and the touching humanity of its characters, made it impossible to resist.
  
  
• Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih - Small but perfectly formed, this portrait of a small village in post-colonial Sudan touches on a myriad subjects in less than 200 pages, and veers between naturalism and allegory.  And yet it never feels overstuffed or shapeless, and its ideas about the lingering effect of colonialism are powerful and undeniable.

Dishonorable Mentions:

• NOD by Adrian Barnes (review) - A near future apocalypse novel that, under its gloss of originality, is essentially a bog-standard zombie story.  That the narrator is profoundly unpleasant is clearly deliberate, but just what this is in service of escapes me.
  
  
• Zero History by William Gibson - The Bigend trilogy ends with a whimper, as Gibson continues to rehash ideas about technology and its effect on the world that, while groundbreaking ten years ago, feel like old hat today.
  
  
• Dodger by Terry Pratchett - That Dodger is poorly written and not very funny is perhaps to be expected (and perhaps also not something that it is fair to criticize Pratchett for, though his publishers are certainly fair game).  That it continues the alarming trend of Pratchett's progressivism ossifying into milquetoast, middle class liberalism, however, is simply a tragedy.

Recent Reading Roundup 35

One last edition of recent reading roundup for 2013, before the obligatory summary of the year's reading (coming on December 31st and not a moment sooner, she said, glaring darkly at certain people and publications who list their favorite reads of the year in November, for pity's sake).  This one comes with a particular slant--a few weeks ago, I received a care package from NYRB Classics, that delightful purveyor of rediscovered, unjustly forgotten works in beautiful packaging.  Since I already had a few of their books in my TBR stack, it seemed appropriate to end the year with an NYRB Classics binge (plus one other book).  Not all of these books are ones I would have selected for myself, but the result has been to shine a light on some corners of literature (much of it in translation) that I might not otherwise have explored, and it reminds me once again just how valuable this imprint is.

• Against a Dark Background by Iain M. Banks - Since Banks's tragic death earlier this year, I've found myself rationing his remaining unread books, all too aware that there will never be any more.  For my first dip back into Banks's bibliography, I chose Against a Dark Background, which turned out to be a questionable decision--it's certainly not the book that can sustain the goodwill and fond feelings aroused by Banks's passing, indulging as it does in so many of his worst writerly tics (another way of thinking about it, of course, is that it was better to get Background out of the way, so that my last experience of Banks's science fiction will hopefully be a more positive one).  Set outside of the Culture sequence, Against a Dark Background is the story of Sharrow, an aristocrat and former soldier whose family has been in a decades-long feud with a fanatical religious cult, who believe that their messiah can only be born after Sharrow's female line is destroyed.  When the cult wins the legal right to hunt Sharrow for a year, she rounds up her former war buddies and goes in search of the only thing that could buy back her life, the last remaining Lazy Gun, a weapon that kills by altering reality so that its target finds themselves in lethal circumstances.  The Lazy Gun is only one of the many ornate, borderline-ridiculous details of Against a Dark Background's worldbuilding, which is baroque even by Banksian standards, and as will occasionally happen in his writing the novel's story and characters are buried under all this invention.  As in Banks's debut, Consider Phlebas (with which I was not impressed), the relatively simple treasure hunt story is related in a series of set-pieces whose purpose is mainly to show off Banks's gonzo inventiveness and the characters' smallness before the enormous, bizarre universe they live in.  And as in that novel, the result is an airless slog, impressive for the work that has gone into each of its settings, but lacking any sort of propulsive storytelling or compelling characters.
  
  Unlike Consider Phlebas, however--which gave the Culture series a useful grounding in establishing the horrors of the Idiran war but whose worldbuilding felt superfluous to that point, as if Banks were merely showboating--Against a Dark Background's overstuffed setting ties into the novel's central idea, of a society being crushed by the weight of its own history.  Approaching its "deca-millennium," Sharrow's civilization is overburdened by ancient laws, ancient institutions, and ancient social conventions, as well as a myriad competing philosophies and factions, all fighting over ground so well-trodden that no one could ever truly own it, making change and progress all but impossible.  It's a grim idea, made even grimmer by Banks's conclusion that there is no escaping it except through total destruction (and perhaps not even then), and reflected in Sharrow's own cynical, self-destructive personality.  Banks does a good job of laying out just how Sharrow became the hardened, self-absorbed person that she is--she's not only lived her whole life under the shadow of an assassination plot that claimed her mother when she was very young, but has also lived in a toxic combination of unlimited power (as an aristocrat in a society completely beholden to its past) and terrifying vulnerability (as an impoverished young woman whose relatives are either neglectful or actively predatory).  But this doesn't make her any more pleasant to read about, especially when her adventures destroy and even end the lives of the people who are caught up in them.  Against a Dark Background is a deeply cynical novel--grimdark from before grimdark was even a thing--and Banks is certainly a skilled enough writer to pull that sort of thing off (though he seems to have flinched a little--after the book's publication he released a consolatory epilogue which puts a slightly more positive spin on Sharrow's story), but between that grimness and the novel's stifling worldbuilding, it's an almost punishing read.  Though that may have been Banks's intention, I'm glad that I still have other books by him to look forward to, which can wash the taste of this one away.
  
  
• The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf - Published in 1842, this slim novella is a horror story with a strong religious component that, to me, somewhat undermines its power.  On a beautiful Sunday afternoon, a rural community gathers to celebrate a christening in one of the neighborhood's oldest and most respectable families, whose grandfather suddenly begins to relate a tale of terror: how, hundreds of years ago, the peasants of the region made a deal with the devil to help them complete an impossible task set for them by a tyrannical feudal lord, in exchange for an unbaptized baby.  When the peasants try to trick the devil by baptizing the babies born in their community in secret as soon as they're born, he sends the titular black spider, a monstrous creature whose very touch causes death, and which terrorizes the community until one brave, pious woman manages to trap it.  Described in a few sentences, this seems like too simple a story to sustain even this short volume, but Gotthelf weaves it well, in particular the details of the community, past and present--their terror of the cruel knight, their debates over whether to take the devil's deals, the slow acceptance, when the black spider appears, of the necessity of giving up a baby.  The Black Spider is at its best when it focuses on human frailty--whether it's the peasants turning on each other and refusing to accept blame when the consequences of their choice come back to haunt them, or the knight realizing that he's painted himself into a corner by forcing his serfs to sell their souls but being too proud to admit it, or even the framing story, in which the seemingly benign customs of the christening lunch conceal status anxiety and simmering resentment.  But Gotthelf (the pen name of Albert Bitzius, a Swiss pastor and reformer) is far more interested in his story's religious component, repeatedly stressing the peasants' religious failure--their choice to make a deal with the devil, which damns them irretrievably--over their failure as neighbors and members of a community.  Coupled with the uncomfortable fact that the characters responsible for the devil getting a foothold in the community are all women, whose core failing is being insufficiently modest and self-effacing (while the woman who traps the spider is praised for her piety and self-sacrifice), this makes for some frustrating reading.  At points, The Black Spider is genuinely scary, in both its supernatural and human components, but its author's worldview is too present, and too incompatible with mine, to make it a perfect read.
  
  
• Red Shift by Alan Garner - Garner is well-known in the UK as the author of YA fantasy, but Red Shift, a strange not-quite-time-travel novel, was my first encounter with him, and it leaves me both curious and a little hesitant about exploring his writing further.  Strictly speaking, Red Shift isn't really a genre work.  It proceeds in three parallel plot strands--in the 2nd century, the 17th century, and the 1970s--but, though there are hints that these three stories are bleeding into each other, for the most part this feels more like a literary device than an actual fact of the novel's world, and the connection between the three strands seems more thematic than factual.  What gives Red Shift its genre feel is its style, which switches between the three time periods with no warning, sometimes mid-paragraph, and gives the reader so little information with which to ground themselves that working out where, or when, we are in any given segment of the book becomes an act of investigation, making this rather slim volume a slow, almost painstaking read.  That opaqueness extends to the events within each of the three plot strands.  In the distant past, a few defectors from the lost ninth Roman legion try to survive amidst the violent British tribes; in the 17th century, the residents of a small English village barricade themselves in the church when marauding French troops are spotted; and in the recent past, a emotionally unstable young man tries to maintain a long distance relationship with his girlfriend, whose career aspirations, in stark contrast to his lack of prospects, threaten to take her even farther away from him.  Working out these details, however, means battling against Garner's deliberate refusal to do any worldbuilding work--to explain what the legionnaires mean when they talk about Cats and Mothers (the names they give the local tribes), or why Tom and his girlfriend Jan are in the kind of financial and social straits they find themselves in.  This has the effect of making Red Shift seem almost hallucinatory, an effect that is intensified by the frequent shifts between time periods.  It also has the effect of making the modern love story--which is paralleled with different relationships between characters who are clearly intended as Tom and Jan's stand-ins in the other time periods--feel like the novel's most central, most important element, even when contrasted with the violence and high stakes of the other plot strands.  When that relationship crumbles, under the weight of difficult circumstances and Tom's emotional problems, Garner's stylistic choices and time-shifting storytelling intensify that loss until it feels like the world-shattering event that Tom perceives it as.  By its end, Red Shift is a powerful, disorienting, and discomforting book, but this doesn't quite erase the memory of how difficult, and often frustrating, it was to get through and puzzle out, which makes the prospect of continuing to read Garner a not entirely appealing one.
  
  
• Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist by Erich Kästner - One of the few authors to escape the blanket rejection of anything German that was riding high in Israeli society as late as the 80s, Kästner's children's books have been a staple of Israeli juvenile culture for decades, to the point that he seems almost to have been adopted into the culture (HaBima's production of Pünktchen und Anton, adapted by noted Israeli humorist Ephraim Kishon, is deservedly considered a classic of Israeli children's theater).  His work for adults, however, has for the most part remained undiscovered, even by this appreciative audience--a brief attempt to translate his adult-oriented mystery novels in the late 90s seems to have fizzled out.  The present moment, however, in which wartime European novelists like Hans Fallada, Irmgard Keun, and Hans Keilson are enjoying the same newfound popularity in Hebrew that they have been in English, seems more hospitable to a rediscovery of Kästner, and I'd be curious to see whether Going to the Dogs (originally published as Fabian in 1932), will make the transition into Hebrew (not least because I think that Kästner's dryly witty, staccato style translates much better into Hebrew than English).
  
  In the meantime, however, we have NYRB Classics' edition, and what it reveals is a novel that, under the guise of Kästner's familiar, slightly old-fashioned tics--as in his children's books, for example, he maintains he 19th century affectation of opening each chapter with a summary of its events--is a quietly devastating, deeply political work.  The hero, Fabian, is an advertising copywriter in 1920s Germany, whose life teeters, and eventually falls off, a knife's edge.  Jobs are being eliminated overnight, even the people who do have jobs can't afford to live off their earnings, and the only people offering solutions, from the left or the right, are totalitarians and thugs.  Unable to move on with their lives or hope for the future, Fabian and his friends resign themselves to short-term pleasures, to drunken debauchery and anonymous hook-ups.  But Fabian, as the novel's subtitle tells us, is a moralist, and can't help but stand in priggish judgment of himself and his society, even though he has no better solution.  As a portrait of pre-war Germany (and an indictment of the "reasonable" middle class who allowed themselves to be dragged into Nazism because they lacked the conviction to demand or offer an alternative), Going to the Dogs is masterful, evoking both pity and rage at the blindness with which Fabian's society stumbles into war.  But there are also aspects of the novel that feel universal, and particularly relevant to the present moment, as when Fabian interacts with his elders--his father and his former teachers--whose generation embroiled their country in war and economic collapse, but who are short-sightedly incapable of seeing why the younger generation can't achieve the same things they did, and blame it on the laziness and shiftlessness of youth.  It's a reminder that some things never change, and that our present moment holds dangers that we haven't fully comprehended, so it's a shame that Going to the Dogs has such a glaring blind spot when it comes to its female characters, who often bear the brunt of Fabian's moralism.  Whether they sell their love (usually the only thing they have to sell), or give it away for free, Fabian seems to regard women in the same position as him with blanket disapproval, and Kästner depicts them, almost universally, as either predatory or weak, but never as complicated or sympathetic as his male hero.  It's an unfortunate blemish in a novel that otherwise feels achingly relevant.
  
  
• Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih - Sofia Samatar recommended this novel in her list of five Arabic novels to read before you die.  It was also selected as the most important Arabic novel of the 20th century by the Arab Academy in 2004 (which is why it was my first stop on Sofia's list), and having read the book, even without a grounding in any other Arabic literature, I can see why.  In a deceptively slim volume, Salih somehow manages to cover an enormous range of topics--colonialism and post-colonialism; tradition and modernity; the life of an assimilated Arab in Europe and the life of a European-educated Arab back in his home country; government corruption and local politics; the life and relationships in a small village; relations between men and women, whether governed by traditions and social mores or the flouting of them; the dread of what a post-colonial future will bring to the Arab world.  That Salih manages this at all is stunning, but that he does so in a book that is as artful, as beautifully written, and as touching as Season of Migration to the North is almost impossible to believe.  The core story involves the Sudanese narrator returning to his home village after getting his education in England, and growing curious about a new neighbor, who obviously shares his education but conceals it, and his past.  This beginning, however, promises a much more straightforward story than Salih ends up delivering.  The neighbor, Mustafah Sa'eed, dies shortly after his introduction, and the narrator intersperses his investigation into Sa'eed's past with the day-to-day details of his life, which include observing how modernity (which often means Western values and technologies) encroaches into life in the Sudan, and how its folded into the old ways of life, both good and bad. 
  
  At times, Migration feels aimless, a portrait of the Sudan at its present moment--the scene in which the narrator listens to the old people of the village discuss marriage and their sexual history is funny and vivid but seems to exist solely to give us a sense of how life in the village works.  At others, it seems to reject this kind of realistic portrait-painting for a more overheated allegory of Arab-European relations--Sa'eed, we learn, had a string of lovers in England, all of whom were drawn to his exoticism like moths to the flame, and with the same self-destructive results, and his defining trauma was a marriage to a woman whom he could neither love nor leave, and whom he ended up killing.  That these very different modes tie together well enough to feel like organic components of the same story, which is simultaneously allegorical and realistic, is yet more evidence for how great an achievement Migration is.  In fact, if I have any criticism of Migration, it's that it feels too big, too all-consuming, too definitive, as if its statements about the role and influence of European colonialism on Arab countries had settled the matter once and for all, leaving no room for anyone to add anything to the conversation.  I'm sure, however, that that's not the case, and happily I have the rest of the books on Sofia's list to look forward to.
  
  
• The Glass Bees by Ernst Jünger - At first glance, Jünger appears to sit well with those other rediscovered pre-war and wartime European authors I mentioned in my discussion of Going to the Dogs above, but a quick glance at his biography suggests a less savory story.  Jünger appears to have had a talent for standing just to the left of the wrong side of history, somehow managing to talk his way out of meaningful consequences for his associations.  You wouldn't necessarily know that from The Glass Bees, however, which feels almost like a companion piece to Going to the Dogs.  Though published in 1957, it is set, like Dogs, after a world-changing war and in the midst of economic upheaval, but its setting isn't precisely our world.  The narrator, Richard, is a former cavalry officer who made a career change to armored weapons acquisition after his branch of the military collapsed, and who played a small, unsung role in the not very peaceful transition from monarchy to republic.  This biography largely tracks with events in Germany during and after WWI, but Jünger's descriptions are vague enough (and in some cases deliberately universalized--Richard's name, like the names of many of his former colleagues in the army, is English rather than German) that The Glass Bees feels as if it takes place in its own invented world.  This feels particularly true when Richard is offered a job working personal security for Zapparoni, an industrialist who sells robots who do everything from performing household tasks to working in factories to appearing in movies.
  
  The novel itself only covers Richard's interview with Zapparoni, and the bulk of it is filled up with his reminiscences of the world of Empire, honor and tradition in which he grew up, and with his observations about what the world has become now that these have been lost, with the interview giving the story only the very flimsiest of skeletons on which to hang these reveries.  Some of these interludes are extremely well done--Richard is cynical and sardonic as only a former idealist can be, and his stories of his training in a doomed type of warfare, and of the people who failed to make the transition from the more courtly world he grew up in into the more crass world of the present, are affecting without being too sentimental about that lost world.  So, too, are his musings about the effect of technology on society, which are sometimes eerily prescient.  Zapparoni is an almost Steve Jobs-ish figure, and Richard's analysis of the miniature high-tech industry he spawns, and of the effect of his robots on society, feels utterly of the moment.  Analysis, however, is very nearly all that Richard does, and The Glass Bees often lapses into long stretches of him telling us, rather than showing us, what a world with Zapparoni's technology, and his power as a super-rich industrialist, looks like.  In these segments, Richard's sardonic tone works against the novel.  He comes off like a blowhard, who likes to show off how well he understands the world even though the actual circumstances of his life--a disgraced military officer with so few prospects that he's forced to take a shady job which will almost certainly lead to an early death--by no means justify his superior, knowing tone.  In its best moments, The Glass Bees is a feat of worldbuilding whose power is rooted in being both strange and familiar, historical and futuristic.  But in its worst moments it feels as if Jünger has sat us down for a long, meandering, self-satisfied lecture.  The two modes alternate enough that there's a lot here worth reading for, but the end result is far from satisfying.
  
  
• Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky - A lecturer on theater and culture in Imperial and then Soviet Russia, Krzhishanovsky wrote for decades fiction that was absurdist and surrealist, and thus banned by the Soviet censorship.  His fiction wasn't rediscovered until decades after his death, and Autobiography of a Corpse is one of the first published collections of Krzhizhanovsky's stories in any language.  What's interesting is that the stories here address political issues only obliquely, if at all--in the title story, for example, the protagonist receives a letter from the previous inhabitant of his room, who committed suicide in it, which references WWI and the revolution, but only as background details.  What was presumably considered dangerous and seditious about these stories is not anything in their content, but their treatment of the world as something fragile, a thin membrane of normalcy which is little more than an agreed-upon delusion.  In "The Collector of Cracks," for example, an author attempting to harness fairy tales to deliver easily digestible, middlebrow irony encounters the title character, who has seen through the facade of reality that even fabulist fiction relies on for its power.  Some stories are driven by absurdist premises: in "In the Pupil," the narrator believes that a woman loves him only while he can see his reflection in her pupil; when this reflection, a tiny version of the narrator, materializes in the real world, he reports that the reflections of all the beloved's previous lovers are trapped in an oubliette behind her eye, reminiscing about their past with her and trying to work out why she fell out of love with them.  In "The Unbitten Elbow" (one of the more overtly political stories in the collection), a man announces that his greatest ambition is to bite his elbow, and becomes a celebrity, whom the authorities use as a distraction and as a way of conning money out of the public, all while he devours himself in pursuit of his goal.  In other stories, however, Krzhizhanovsky's musings about the thinness of reality seem disconnected from any concrete plot elements, however strange or surreal.  Stories like "Postmark: Moscow" read more like stream-of-consciousness musings about the nature of the titular city, and I found them tougher going.  Autobiography of a Corpse is split fairly evenly between these two types of stories, and thus offered mingled pleasures and frustrations, but it is nevertheless clearly the work of a remarkably assured writer, one whose rediscovery hasn't come a moment too soon.

Recent Movie Roundup 18

Wow, it's been a while since we did one of these.  Usually fall and early winter are a dead season for movies, with the summer's blockbusters having died down and the winter's prestige films not having arrived yet, but this year there's been a deluge of genre and genre-adjacent work.  I've written about some of these films--Gravity and Catching Fire--at greater length, and some others, like Frozen or About Time, will have to wait until I catch up with them out of the movie theater.  Here, however, are some shorter thoughts on recent releases.

• The Congress - Ari Folman's follow-up to Waltz With Bashir, an (apparently, very loose) adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Congress, stars Robin Wright as a version of herself, who is offered the chance to jump-start a moribund career by allowing herself to be scanned and turned into a digital, eternally young actress.  Twenty years later, Wright travels to the titular congress to see what changes scanning technology has wrought on human society.  The first half of The Congress, in which Wright debates the pros and cons of being scanned, put me strongly in mind of the films of Andrew Niccol--it has the same kind of gorgeous, lushly lit, highly stylized look, and gives off the same impression of a world that has perhaps a few dozen people in it and whose worldbuilding would fall apart if you thought about it for even a moment.  The second half, in which the film transitions from live action to animation, is something much weirder and harder to define.  At the congress, Wright catches a glimpse of a society in which anyone can choose how they present themselves to the world, but when she's caught in an attack by anti-technology activists, her--and our--grip on reality slips completely.  From there, she travels to the far future to see how humanity is remade by total access to drugs that allow one to shape their own reality--and exist in complete isolation from everyone else, who is doing the same.  That the film is hard to parse and often nonsensical is obviously not a point against it, since its central theme is that of constructed reality, and the alienation that results from it.  And even at its most opaque, The Congress offers some wonderfully psychedelic animation as an illustration of how foreign the world of the future has become.  In fact, my problem with the film is that it isn't weird enough.  In her tour through the future, Wright is guided by a former scanning engineer voiced by John Hamm, who spends most of his time explaining the world to her, which eventually leaves The Congress feeling more like a treatise than a story.  Even the throughline about Wright trying to find out what became of her son can't quite overcome the fact that the film is an extended and luridly animated infodump.  The Congress is worth seeing for its animation, and simply because there hasn't been anything else like it in genre cinema in a long time.  But when it comes to opaque, non-linear genre films in 2013, it is definitely the also-ran to Upstream Color's winner.
  
  
• Thor: The Dark World - In a lot of ways, the second Thor film is a massive improvement on the first.  The plot reaches for something a little more complex than the first film's half-baked redemption-cum-origin-story narrative, and integrates previously underused characters, like Natalie Portman's Jane Foster or Idris Elba's Heimdal, more fully into that story.  The film features the same fish out of water humor that was Thor's most endearing trait, but doesn't use it as a crutch the way that film did--where I found myself, while watching Thor, waiting for the Asgard scenes to pass so that we could get back to Chris Hemsworth's comedy antics on Earth, The Dark World makes them compelling in their own right (not least because most of the action sequences take place there, and are quite kinetic and fun), and the transition to the more jokey tone of the Earth-set scenes is not so jarring.  Most importantly, however, The Dark World manages to avoid the massive pitfall that is Tom Hiddlestone's Loki, an unrepentant, psychotic mass-murderer who was also the most compelling character in the first film (and is arguably one of the most appealing figures in the whole Marvel movie franchise).  The danger of making Loki a misunderstood victim, or letting him walk away with the movie (again) is ever-present, but The Dark World manages to strike a balance in its handling of him.  It features Loki heavily, but in such a way that the audience is never allowed to forget what he is.  This Loki, who has been imprisoned as a result of his actions in The Avengers, is bitter and steeped in self-pity, blaming everyone but himself for his crimes, able to see (and ruthlessly castigate) everyone's flaws but his own, and fundamentally, constitutionally unhappy.  The Dark World makes a compelling argument that Loki is, on some level, mentally ill, and the film's best scenes are the ones he shares with Thor, which drive home how difficult it is to care about someone who may be incapable of returning or deserving that love.
  
  All of this, however, is to make The Dark World sound a great deal better than it actually is.  As much as it improves on its predecessor, this film also confirms me in my feeling that the Thor films are the lemon of the Marvel cinematic universe.  The plot may be more complex than the Thor's, but it is just as McGuffin-driven--an all-powerful object called the Aether which has the power to destroy all creation--and its solution consists of throwing technobabble at the problem and, when that proves insufficient, throwing Thor at it (at which he succeeds, despite the Aether's hysterically built-up power, by sheer dint of his main character-ness).  Though a stab is made at giving Jane more to do, she still spends the middle segment of the movie as, quite literally, a damsel in distress, and the technobabbly nature of the film's final act means that her day-saving efforts in it don't register as strongly as this earlier passivity (neither, by the way, does her romance with Thor, which is still completely inert and unconvincing).  Worst of all, Thor himself remains a bland, uninteresting character, his newfound gravitas and sense of purpose in the wake of Thor's events ringing as false as that film's selfish, oafish version of the character (in that sense, one of the film's biggest missteps is a cameo from Chris Evans's Captain America; though it makes for a very funny scene, it also reminds us that that sub-franchise has managed to create a main character who is earnest, stalwart, and fundamentally good but also interesting, while the Thor films haven't).  So long as Loki is around, the Thor films will have life in them, but even in The Dark World's interesting handling of the character there are cracks (most frustratingly, playing Stellan Skarsgård's Erik Selvig, whose abuse at Loki's hands in The Avengers has left him permanently damaged, for comic relief; for a film that takes Loki's mental illness so seriously, it's disappointing to see such a flippant treatment of a mental breakdown he caused).  The story set up by the film's ending feels like yet another go-around on a familiar track, and doesn't leave me hopeful about the future of this sub-franchise.
  
  
• The Challenger Disaster and An Adventure in Space and Time - Isn't it always the way?  You wait around for years for a dramatized reenactment of historical events of interest to SF fans, and then two come along at once.  The subject matters of these two films couldn't be more different: The Challenger Disaster tells the story of Richard Feynman's role on the commission investigating the explosion of the eponymous shuttle, exposing the failed institutional culture at NASA that led to it, while An Adventure in Space and Time, which was made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, dramatizes the program's inception and early days.  Nevertheless, they make some surprisingly similar narrative and stylistic choices (almost uncannily, both films end by playing their closing credits over a recording of the real events they had previously dramatized--Feynman showily exposing the rigidity of the infamous O-rings under low temperatures in a televized session of the inquiry commission, and William Hartnell as the first Doctor bidding farewell to his granddaughter Susan).  I expected both films to be a great deal more procedural than they ended up being--to get into the minutiae of how the Rogers Commission operated or how Doctor Who as we know it came into being--but instead they seem to take it as read that the audience knows most of these details.  They both take a more impressionistic approach, dropping in and out of events (and often eliding or underplaying the big "a-ha!" moments of discovery or invention), and focusing instead on the feeling--of both the characters and the audience--that what's being depicted is important and historically significant.
  
  This works better on The Challenger Disaster, whose argument (which, for all I know, may be a known historical fact) is that everyone at NASA, and vast swathes of the US government, knew or at least strongly suspected the cause of the Challenger explosion as soon as it happened, and that Feynman's importance was less as a scientist or investigator and more as an outside voice willing to call out the way that bureaucracy and politics had been allowed to drown out science in NASA's decision-making.  And it helps, of course, that with seven lives lost and the future of the American space program at stake, the film doesn't have to work too hard to sell the momentousness of its events.  There are some people, I know, who might say the same about An Adventure in Space and Time, but though I like Doctor Who and recognize the accomplishment of a single program running (through however many regenerations) for half a century, I'm not one of them, and so the tone of hushed awe that the film often strikes, in lieu of a more detailed look at how Who came into being, aroused my cynicism more often than my sympathy.  (After all, for all that the characters frequently pause to marvel at how special and significant their show is, the reason that Who's 50th anniversary was marked with such pomp and ceremony is that the program is once again popular and making the BBC tons of money; does anyone, for example, think that in three years NBC will do nearly as much to mark the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, a franchise that now exists only in a zombified form?)  An Adventure is at its best when it allows its characters to argue for Who's significance, as when the show's first producer, Verity Lambert (Jessica Raine), fights for the episode introducing the Daleks over the objections of the BBC's head of Drama Sydney Newman (Brian Cox), who wants the program to strike a more high-minded, educational tone, by arguing that they represent an important message about tolerance and compassion (it also helps that the film offers a counterpoint to Lambert's claims, in several scenes in which the show's juvenile audience is seen to embrace the Daleks as just the kind of "bug-eyed monsters" that Newman wanted to avoid).  But too often the film seems, to its detriment, to take that significance for granted.
  
  What saves both films--Adventure from its self-importance, and Challenger from its total lack of surprises--are their lead performances.  As Feynman, William Hurt conveys not only intelligence but a genuine belief in the power of science and scientific inquiry to make life better.  His outrage when scientists and engineers allow their judgment and conclusions to be superseded by business and political interests (which he also directs at himself, for his participation in the Manhattan Project) is all the more palpable for being understated, a sort of dark bemusement at the lethal foolishness and short-sightedness he discovers when he looks closer at Challenger and the culture that created it.  His performance, however, isn't one of cool superiority and righteous indignation--in fact, I'd say that there is something almost Doctor-ish about Hurt's Feynman, who is driven by profound humanist principles and forges instant connections with those who, like him, aren't content to simply keep their heads down and do their job--in this story, Bruce Greenwood's General Donald Kutyna and Eve Best's Sally Ride, who help Feynman find and expose the truth about Challenger.   (It might, however, have been worthwhile for the film to acknowledge that whatever effect Feynman might have had on NASA culture was only temporary, that less than twenty years later a small-mindedness similar to the kind he exposed would lead to the loss of another shuttle and its crew, and the end of the program.)
  
  It's the Doctor, too, who is the heart of An Adventure in Space and Time.  Though Lambert, and her struggles as the first female producer in the BBC's history, are the focus of the film's first half, she fades into the background after the show becomes a success, and it's David Bradley's performance as Hartnell that comes to fore.  The crux of the film is that Hartnell, naturally enough, never thought of himself as "the first Doctor" but simply as the Doctor, and Bradley captures his joy and sense of responsibility towards the role, as well as his sadness when he realizes that the show will go on without him.  That sadness--the recognition that, for all that it has become an enduring institution for its fans, Doctor Who was a fleeting, irretrievable experience for its creators and the people who worked on it--is the film's most complex note, so it's a shame that, in its final moments, An Adventure in Space and Time sinks back into the fug of self-congratulation, focusing more on the folks watching in 2013 than on the characters in the 60s.  (In particular, a last minute cameo in which Hartnell seems to sense his connection with the long line of actors who will follow him is clearly all about the fanservice; the character of Hartnell, as developed by the film until that point, would have no reason to take comfort from the knowledge that the role he thought of as his own was in fact only his in stewardship.)  Despite these flaws, both films are worth watching, if only for the novelty of such serious attention (and production budgets) being paid to stories about people who, to quote Craig Ferguson, work hard to make sure that intellect and romance will triumph over brute force and cynicism, whether in the real world or in the stories we tell.  In their own way, they both seem to embody the spirit of science fiction, and I would be happy to see one or both on next year's Hugo ballot.
  
  
• The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug - I've seen a lot of reactions calling Desolation an improvement on the first volume in Peter Jackson's bloated Hobbit trilogy, and while I can see where these are coming from--it's certainly a more exciting, more propulsive film than An Unexpected Journey, whose meanderings occasionally crossed the line into a dull slog--I wonder whether that's not a function of the source material.  Desolation covers some of my favorite parts of The Hobbit, including the journey through Mirkwood, the dwarfs' capture and imprisonment by the wood elves, and their escape and arrival in Lake Town.  This gives Jackson, and his co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, a lot of scope for action and chase scenes, and makes for a less episodic story (especially as this adaptation contracts the timeframe of these events, which in the novel take several weeks, into a few days).  Nevertheless, to my mind Desolation and Journey are very much of a piece, which is to say that I enjoyed them while recognizing that they are neither faithful to the original book nor particularly good in themselves.  The flaws of self-indulgence, of a dissonance between the story Jackson is adapting and the tone he wants to strike, and of being more interested in (for the most part, invented) details about the early rumblings of the War of the Ring than in the actual story of The Hobbit, are back in force here, as are some increasingly distracting directorial tics.
  
  Jackson seems to have little faith in the ability of his actors or his script to elicit an emotional response, because nearly every time a scene seems to be gearing up for some genuine character interaction (as opposed to characters expositing at each other to move the plot along), he cuts away and lets the New Zealand scenery, or some CGI version of Alan Lee's art, or the overbearing soundtrack, do the heavy lifting.  And, if you thought the escape from the hall of the goblin king in Journey, with its shifting and crumbling walkways, its improbable feats of acrobatics, and its careening camera, felt a little too much like Jackson compensating himself for the fact that he will probably never be asked to direct an Indiana Jones film, Desolation features three such sequences.  All are well done and kinetic, but the cartoon physics and the characters' seeming indestructibility leach all urgency and tension from the film, finally giving the impression that we're watching a theme park ride or a level in a computer game--a far cry from the fight scenes in the Lord of the Rings films, where every blow had real heft and consequences.  Perhaps most importantly, though Desolation tries to acknowledge the importance of mercantilism (and its rejection) in The Hobbit--its two interim villains are the elf king Thranduil (Lee Pace), who tries to extort a share of Smaug's hoard from Thorin, and the Master of Lake Town (Stephen Fry), who spews 1% rhetoric so thick there might as well be a neon sign flashing THEME behind him--it can't get away from the fact that Jackson has irrevocably changed Thorin, from the book's hard-headed, greedy pragmatist, to an angst-ridden but heroic warrior.  The film's insistence that Thorin is blinded by greed--which includes repositioning the Arkenstone as his equivalent of the one ring, seducing him with its promise of wealth--thus has very little grounding in the character it has created.
  
  Nevertheless, Desolation has its pleasures, not least among them the discovery that it's not just Martin Freeman's performance as Bilbo that's carrying this new, lesser trilogy.  Bilbo has a fantastic scene early in the film in which he begins to realize the power that the ring is already exerting on him (one of the few instances in which Jackson's attempts to turn The Hobbit into a prequel to The Lord of the Rings work, genuinely imbuing the older, simpler story with added power rather than simply changing it beyond recognition).  But for the rest of the film he fades into the background, moving the plot along but no longer its emotional core (even the vaunted confrontation between Bilbo and Benedict Cumberbatch's Smaug falls flat, with the two characters failing to spark against each other as Bilbo and Gollum did in Journey).  Instead, new characters come to the fore and discover new notes in this hybrid story.  These include Pace's Thranduil, who is recognizably elvish even as he plays a villainous character, content to ignore the darkness sweeping over Middle Earth so long as his realm remains safe, and Evangeline Lilly's Tauriel, an invented character whose story is pure Mary Sue--she's a fearsome warrior who is the only one of Thranduil's subjects to recognize the coming danger of Sauron's return and object to his isolationist policy, and ends up in a love triangle with Orlando Bloom's Legolas and Aidan Turner's Kili--but who nevertheless turns out to be one of the film's bright points, for the first time humanizing the trilogy's throughline of Middle Earth's old powers realizing that they must set aside petty differences and prepare to fight Sauron.  Her rapport with Kili, too, is one of the few places in which Desolation lets its characters breathe, and Turner, who also comes to the fore in this film, justifies the added presence given to his character in Journey.  Like Journey, Desolation is a film best enjoyed for its moments rather than its whole, and the fact that these moments don't rest solely on Freeman's shoulders give me hope that, however lumpy and misshapen the Hobbit trilogy ends up being, there's something genuine at its core that makes it more than an addendum to the Rings films.

Review: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Over at Strange Horizons, I review Catching Fire, the second film in the Hunger Games series.  I was quite excited going into the movie, since while I'd read the first book before seeing the film based on it, and have picked up the major events of the third book, Mockingjay, by fannish osmosis, I went into Catching Fire "clean," knowing nothing about it.  In hindsight, I probably should have wondered about that, since Catching Fire turns out to have little reason to exist as a story in its own right, and in that absence ends up drawing attention to the Hunger Games series's core flaws.  A lot of the complaints I raise against the film are therefore probably problems with the book, but where The Hunger Games managed to address a lot of the weaknesses of its source material, Catching Fire hasn't done so--or perhaps the problem is that, not having read the book, I'm less aware of how the film alleviates its problems, and thus less inclined to excuse its flaws.

Five Comments on Gravity

It's hard to imagine two films that are more different than Upstream Color and Gravity, but in one sense at least they ping me the same way--they both seem like films about which it would be a waste of time to try to write a conventional review.  Or at least, the way I write reviews, focusing on plot, character, and theme.  Like Upstream Color, Gravity is a film whose power lies elsewhere, in its visuals and design, and in the way it reaches directly for emotions like fear and anxiety.  That's not to say that there haven't been interesting reviews of the film (I'm fond of this one, by Wai Chee Dimock at The Los Angeles Review of Books), but as I did with Upstream Color, it seems to make more sense to gather my stray observations about the film rather than write a proper review.

• Watching the film, I was reminded of an essay I read in 2009, by a reviewer who was trying to explain away negative reactions to James Cameron's Avatar by, essentially, claiming that people who didn't like the film had been watching it wrong.  Avatar, his argument went, was a plotless movie.  To complain about its dull story, thin characters, and self-contradictory message was to miss the point, which was the film's visual spectacle and immersive cinematic experience.  This is, obviously, a ridiculous argument to make about Avatar, but it suits Gravity to a T.  Not because Gravity's visual spectacle outweighs the thinness of its plot and characters--that's a determination that every viewer has to make for themselves--but because it lacks the kind of dumb, insistent, offensive plotting with which Avatar weighs down its own stunning visuals.  Gravity is simple enough to describe in a single sentence--two astronauts, played by George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, are stranded in orbit when a debris storm destroys their shuttle--and yet that description tells you virtually nothing about the film.  Its script is essentially one drawn out, constantly worsening disaster scenario, whose power is rooted in the judiciousness with which director Alfonso Cuarón and his son and co-writer Jonás pace the film's moments of tension and relief, the way that they allow us to breathe when the astronauts appear to have been saved, only to reveal yet another complication--low oxygen, equipment malfunctions, that same cloud of debris coming back around the Earth to pummel them again--that worsens their already precarious situation.  It's a brilliant bit of disaster writing, but it's not, strictly speaking, a plot, and Gravity works because of the way it realizes that disaster--and the astronauts' experience of being helpless and alone in orbit--in such an immersive, visceral fashion.
  
  Which makes the script's attempts to invent an emotional arc for Bullock's character seem more than a little like a failure of nerve.  For the most part, Bullock and Clooney don't really have personalities to play.  Their characters embody the traits for which the actors have become known--his twinkling charm, her approachable warmth--and don't develop any further (to the extent that though it's easy to mentally replace Clooney with Robert Downey Jr., the actor originally attached to the male role, it's hard to imagine Gravity with Angelina Jolie, whose public persona is very different from Bullock's, playing the female part).  They are both--and particularly Bullock, who spends the latter two thirds of the movie on her own after Clooney's character sacrifices himself to save her--audience identification figures, only slightly more rounded than the first person player character in a video game.  And like that figure, they exist mainly as an every-person through whom the audience can project themselves through, and into the film's nerve-wracking scenario. 
  
  So when Gravity tries to give Bullock an emotional arc, there's little for the actress to hang it on.  I was pleased, at first, when the film revealed that Bullock's character had lost a daughter and had no other family--it seemed like a rejection of the too-common assumption, in disaster stories, that characters need a reason to want to survive.  In its final third, however, Gravity interweaves Bullock's predicament with her grief--choosing to make one last stab at returning to Earth is also a choice to relinquish the numbness she sank into after her daughter's death and live again.  It's not a point that the film belabors, but it also feels unnecessary and, given how thin the character is, not very well-realized--the pain of losing a child, and the difficulty of choosing to go on after that loss, can't be captured in a few trite lines of dialogue, and Bullock isn't the actress who can elevate that thin material to make her character's return to life truly resonant.  It's not deal-breaker for me, but I think that I would have been very happy with Gravity as a perfectly-realized disaster piece with gorgeous visuals and minimal character work.
  
  
• Does Gravity need Bullock's character to be a woman?  As I've said, Bullock's Dr. Ryan Stone is the film's main audience identification figure, and Sady Doyle has written an excellent piece about the importance of casting a woman in such a role, especially in a technology- and jargon-heavy, and thus supposedly male-oriented, film like Gravity.  The film's success, Doyle argues, puts the lie to the claim that men can't identify with female heroines the way women habitually do with male heroes.  Doyle's point is important (and it remains valid despite he caveats I'm about to pile on it), but underpinning it is the assumption that Gravity would be exactly the same movie if Stone were played by a man, which I don't think is true.  In interviews, Cuarón has said that he and his son envisioned the film's lead as a woman because they wanted "to strip it from heroists," a non-word that has caused some flurry of interpretation and consternation.  But to me Cuaron's meaning seems obvious from the film itself--he needed Stone to be a woman because she is defined, first and foremost, by her vulnerability.
  
  In the film's first third, Stone is frantic, just on the verge of panic.  Her relationship with Clooney's Matt Kowalski, the mission commander, is one of dependence.  In the film's opening moments, before the debris appears, he's helping her complete a technical assignment while she shakes off nausea.  Later, after she's been flung away from the shuttle, he calmly, even cheerfully talks her through the procedures she needs to follow to help him find her.  After they're reunited (a scene in which Stone clings to Kowalski, and, when he tells her that he's about to pay out the line with which they're tethered so that he can use his maneuvering jets, begs him not to) Kowalski quite clearly manages Stone, acting alternately paternal and lightly flirtatious, distracting her with jokes, questions about her life, and most of all an insouciant, untroubled tone that never wavers, even when he launches himself into space. 
  
  To be clear, Stone's panicked reaction is entirely normal and reasonable, regardless of her gender, as is the fact that Kowalski feels the need to handle her--especially given that, as we learn at the beginning of the film, Stone is a rookie astronaut on her first mission, who's only had six months of training (her panic actually makes more sense than her sudden burst of competence and devil-may-care spirit in the film's final sequence).  But it's hard to imagine a movie--and certainly not a big-budget Hollywood movie--giving those kinds of character beats to a male character, and it is even more difficult to imagine the kind of dynamic that develops between Stone and Kowalski being replicated if their genders were reversed, or if they were both men (at least, not without making the Stone character significantly younger than Kowalski, while Clooney and Bullock are only a few years apart in age).  Doyle is right that Gravity is unusual in being a blockbuster film mostly carried by a female lead, but Stone herself isn't so unusual a figure--when it comes to suffering beautifully, being battered about by circumstances, and powering through with pluck and determination, modern pop culture tends to reach for women (for a recent example, look at the current season of Homeland, and the pummeling that it has dealt to Carrie Mathison).  It will be interesting, for example, to compare Gravity to J.C. Chandor's forthcoming film All is Lost, which has a very similar premise, but whose sole survivor character is an older man played by Robert Redford.  Already from the trailers it seems that Redford's character's competence is never in as much doubt as Stone's, and I would be surprised if his performance turns out to be as rooted in vulnerability and fear as Bullock's is.
  
  That's not to say, however, that Gravity salivates over Stone's suffering, or expects us to pity her.  However unbelievable, her arc over the course of the movie is one of growing competence, and her final actions to get herself back to Earth are just on the verge of cartoonish heroism.  Even more importantly, the way that Cuarón shoots Bullock seems designed to showcase her strength even before she realizes it herself.  Bullock is a tall, imposing woman, and though she spends most of the movie swaddled in bulky spacesuits, when she emerges from them she looks anything but vulnerable.  More than a few jokes have been made about the underwear Stone reveals when she shucks off her spacesuit (including the observation that it leaves little room for the adult diaper she ought to have been wearing), but to me the operative mood of that scene isn't titillation, but awe.  When she reveals herself as a body, rather than just a head floating in a suit she can barely control, Stone suddenly seems powerful, all strong arms and muscly runner's legs.  Those legs serve her in good stead in the film's final disaster, when her landing pod's floats malfunction and it sinks into the water, forcing Stone to swim against the gush of water filling the pod and out of her dead-weight spacesuit.  It's not at all believable that someone who has spent a week in microgravity (and the last ninety minutes scrambling from one temporary haven to another and nearly dying from oxygen deprivation) could make that swim, but Bullock's physicality sells it.  When she crawls, and then walks, onto a shore in the film's final moments, the camera hugs Stone close, shooting her from below as she rises to her feet, and then climbing up her body.  It's a shot that could easily have seemed prurient, but instead it reaffirms Stone's strength--she looks like a giant, as powerful and tangible on the earth as she was vulnerable and ephemeral in space.
  
  
• It's disappointing to have to say this, but even in a film in which only three actors appear on screen (with two others present as voices, and another two bodies which may or may not have been modeled on actual actors) it's still the non-white guy--another member of the shuttle crew named Shariff (Phaldut Sharma)--who dies first, taking a piece of debris to the head in the film's opening disaster scene.
  
  
• As much as it is an immersive, absorbing film, I think that for most people watching Gravity there will also have been a small voice piping up throughout it, wondering: how did they do that?  Is that bit animated or real?  How was this effect achieved?  How much of this film was created on a set, and how much in a computer?  After learning some more about the film's absurdly complicated creation process--which Cuaron describes as combining the worst challenges of live shoots and computer animation--what struck me was that Bullock's performance, which is being praised to the level that she's considered a safe bet for an Oscar nomination, is a construct, as much the work of animators and technicians as it is hers.  There's a degree to which this is true about any performance, but when you read about how Ryan Stone was created it seems almost like a metaphor for this collaborative process.  Bullock's movements in some scenes had to be minutely choreographed well before the shoot, because the objects she'd be interacting with would only exist in a computer.  For the scenes in which Stone floats in zero G aboard various space stations, Bullock was suspended in a rig, her limbs manipulated by a team of professional puppeteers.  I was reminded of a similar (and, arguably, much better) constructed performance, by Andy Serkis as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films, which like Bullock's was the product of both an actor and a team of technicians.  There's obviously more than one reason why Serkis was never considered for an Oscar while Bullock is almost certain to be nominated for one--he's a lower profile actor, the campaign to get him nominated was a fan-driven affair and not, as far as I know, seriously pursued by the studio, Gollum is more obviously a construct than Stone--but I wonder if we haven't also reached a point where this kind of marriage of craft and technology is being taken seriously, and what that bodes for the future, as computer animation becomes a more integral component of filmmaking.
  
  
• Is Gravity science fiction?  There's nothing counterfactual or futuristic about the film's technology, and its premise is even based on a real theorized worst case scenario.  Nevertheless, it's been embraced by fans as being at least SF-adjacent, simply for portraying space exploration and for straining for some degree of accuracy in doing so (though as astrophysicists and actual astronauts have pointed out, the film takes many liberties with the realities of life in space).  But I wonder whether Gravity's SFnal credentials don't hail from a different direction, one that old-school genre and space fans might be more suspicious of.  Gravity fits right into a sub-genre that has been slowly emerging over the last decade, of films nominally focused on space exploration and life in space, but which inevitably turn into horror stories.  Recent release Europa Report has been praised for the accuracy with which it depicts a mission to Jupiter's moon, but its story still revolves around the astronauts discovering something that goes bump in the night.  So, apparently, do other recent space-set films like Last Days on Mars or Stranded, and even a film with such high stakes as Danny Boyle's Sunshine felt the need to add a horror component to its story to make it palatable.  Among recent space-set movies, I think that Moon alone stands as the exception to the rule that the only stories that can be told in such an environment are about the characters being picked off one by one by evil aliens, mysterious contagions, or space madness.
  
  Gravity is slightly different--it's more a terror film than a horror film, and the danger that threatens its characters is perfectly understood and even mundane, the result of the botched destruction of an old satellite, rather than something that jumps out at them from the shadows.  Nevertheless, it is a film that works hard to justify its opening statement, that "Life in space is impossible"--and if it wasn't impossible when the film started, it certainly is by its end, which sees all major man-made objects in Earth's orbit destroyed while space exploration is rendered impossible for decades to come.  That's obviously in keeping with the conventions of disaster films, which habitually feature death and destruction on an unimaginable scale, then ask us to cheer at the survival of a few main characters regardless of how difficult (or impossible) it will be for them to rebuild.  But somehow Gravity feels different.  For a film that seems designed to appeal to space nuts and science fiction fans to, essentially, poison space without even acknowledging that it has done so seems almost too cruel.  It doesn't make the film any less exhilarating, but it does leave a bad taste spoiling the triumph of Stone's survival.