The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides's third novel, The Marriage Plot, has what is probably one of the most perfect opening paragraphs I've ever read:

To start with, look at all the books.  There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen , George Eliot, and the redoubtable Brontë sisters.  There was a whole lot of black-and-white New Directions paperbacks, mostly poetry by people like H.D. or Denise Levertov.  There were the Colette novels she read on the sly.  There was the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now to provide textual support in her English honors thesis on the marriage plot.  There was, in short, this mid-sized but still portable library representing pretty much everything Madeleine had read in college, a collection of texts, seemingly chosen at random, whose focus slowly narrowed, like a personality test, a sophisticated one you couldn't trick by anticipating the implications of its questions and finally got so lost that your only recourse was to answer the simple truth.  And then you waited for the result, hoping for "Artistic" or "Passionate," thinking you could live with "Sensitive," secretly fearing "Narcissistic" and "Domestic," but finally being presented with an outcome that cut both ways and made you feel different depending on the day, the hour, or the guy you happened to be dating: "Incurably Romantic."

It's not just that this is an extremely well-written paragraph, engaging and compelling despite being, essentially, a list, nor that it sets up the novel's heroine (Madeleine), her personality (incurably romantic and ambivalent about this fact), her situation (college student), and the novel's preoccupations (books and romance) in a few short sentences.  What's remarkable about this paragraph is how quickly and effectively it establishes The Marriage Plot as a novel for and about bibliophiles, even as it sets about making them feel welcome.  It's a paragraph that captures the special relationship book-lovers have with their books--the way that some books have special significance because of the person who gave them to us, or the time of our life in which we discovered them, or for being a particularly handsome edition, or a guilty pleasure amidst a lot of required reading--and not only affirms the book-lover's conviction that the books we read are a meaningful reflection of our personality, but does so by using the books she reads to reflect its heroine's personality, even stressing that it has started with this personality test rather than any other introduction.  And it's a paragraph that recognizes that next to reading itself, one of the chief pleasures of being a bibliophile is scanning other people's bookshelves.  This is a novel, Eugenides seems to be telling us with his opening paragraph, in which we can do both at the same time.

Coming nearly a decade after Eugenides's previous novel, the Pulitzer-winning Middlesex, The Marriage Plot is, despite its long gestation, a less expansive, less freewheeling work than its predecessor.  It is, nevertheless, an effortlessly readable novel, and one that bears out the promise of its opening sentences by being about books, reading, and how our preferences in both define us and reflect out personalities.  As more and more characters are introduced by their reading preferences, however, the niggling suspicion aroused by the novel's opening solidifies into a genuine concern--that is an awfully old-fashioned library.  Even taking into account Madeleine's scholarly preoccupations, or her incurable romanticism, the absence of any contemporary literature from her bookshelves (even Updike's Coupling is only there for reference) is jarring.  Nor is Madeleine unique.  The novel takes place in 1982 (something we wouldn't have been able to guess from our perusal of Madeleine's library), and yet the still-prominent great white men of American letters--Updike, Roth, Bellow, Mailer--rate only brief and rare mentions; the talked-about books of the day--this is a period in which authors like J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Kingsley Amis, John Irving, and Ian McEwan were either kicking their careers off or in their prime--go unread by the novel's characters; genre fiction of any kind is entirely absent.  If we were to take the fiction read by The Marriage Plot's characters (which is, admittedly, the smaller part of their reading; most of the characters read primarily nonfiction) as a guide, we would have to conclude that Western literature had stopped somewhere around the 1920s.

That this is in service of a scheme would be obvious even without the hint of the novel's title, but Eugenides makes his project clear when he explains why Madeleine's particular interest, the marriage plot--in which social realism is filtered through or reflected in a character's (usually a woman) search for a good mate--is an endangered, possibly extinct species.

In Saunders's opinion, the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance.  In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about.  The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage.  Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel.  And divorce had undone it completely.  What would it matter when Emma married if she could file for separation later?  How would Isabel Archer's marriage to Gilbert Osmond have been affected by the existence of a prenup?  As far as Saunders was concerned, marriage didn't mean much anymore, and neither did the novel.  Where could you find the marriage plot nowadays?  You couldn't.  You had to read historical fiction.  You had to read non-Western novels involving traditional societies.  Afghani novels, Indian novels.  You had to go, literarily speaking, back in time. 

Eugenides, then, is writing a novel that is both an attempt to port the marriage plot into modernity, and a story about a lover of marriage plots trying to justify her predilections in the face of a hostile literary scene.  He therefore furnishes Madeleine not only with a pair of suitors--brilliant, manic-depressive science major Leonard, with whom she falls madly in love, and aimless spiritual seeker Mitchell, who is convinced that Madeleine is destined to be his wife but whom she thinks of only as a friend--but with a challenge to her literary sensibilities in the form of the burgeoning field of semiotics, which holds that texts are significant not as stories, with characters, themes, and morals, but as sets of culturally determined symbols.  Eugenides does a good line in poking catty fun at the professor and students in Madeleine's Semiology 201 seminar, painting the latter as black-clad, sickly hipsters amongst whom "Madeleine's natural healthiness seemed suspect, like a vote for Reagan," and concluding of the former "Semiotics was the form [Professor] Zipperstein's midlife crisis had taken.  Becoming a semiotician allowed Zipperstein to wear a leather jacket, to fly off to Douglas Sirk retrospectives in Vancouver, and to get all the sexy waifs in his class."  But underlying this is a genuine animosity that takes semiotics as anti-literature--quite literally, as when Madeleine theorizes that "most semiotic theorists had been unpopular as children, often bullied or overlooked, and so had directed their lingering rage onto literature."  When the star pupil in Madeleine's semiotics seminar states that "Books aren't about 'real life.'  Books are about books ... how do you write about something, even something real and painful--like suicide--when all the writing that's been done on that subject has robbed you of any originality of expression?" Madeleine's response is that this is "both significant and horribly wrong.  It was maybe true, what he said, but it shouldn't have been."

This overwrought positioning of the novel's heroine as the champion of story and character against the forces of plotless, emotionless postmodernism put me in mind of Lev Grossman's 2009 screed in the Wall Street Journal, calling for a resurgence of plot in contemporary fiction.  Which turned out to be apt, since The Marriage Plot bears quite a few similarities to the novel in which Grossman tried to put his article's ideas into practice, The Magicians.  Both are college novels.  Both center around passive, whiny protagonists whom the readers are expected to sympathize with and even pity.  Both are novels about a certain subgenre of literature--portal-quest fantasy in The Magicians, marriage plot novels in The Marriage Plot--and both play the same metafictional game, in which the story's hero is a fan of this genre, who both accepts, albeit grudgingly, that they could never live within their favorite kind of story, and finds themselves doing just that, allegedly complicated to reflect reality and modernity.  So it was probably inevitable that I should dislike The Marriage Plot, which suffers from the same core flaw as The Magicians, an aggravatingly smug cluelessness about its own genre.

The fact is, Eugenides's argument doesn't hold water.  The marriage plot is certainly no longer as dominant as it was in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it is by no means extinct.  In novels like Dorothy L. Sayers's Gaudy Night, A.S. Byatt's Possession, Norman Rush's Mating, and Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector, modern novelists not only port the marriage plot into the present but use it to examine the very issues that, according to Madeleine's professor, render it inert--why marriage?  What form should marriage take?  Is it possible, especially for women, to be married and yet remain themselves and maintain their autonomy, emotional and economic?  (I've deliberately left pure historical fiction off this list out of fear of veering into pastiche, but there's an argument to be made for including Sarah Waters's Tipping the Velvet--the marriage plot for lesbians--and John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman--the anti-marriage plot.  When discussing this review with a friend, she pointed out that social realism doesn't have to refer to an existing, present-day society, and suggested Lois McMaster Bujold's A Civil Campaign.)  None of these are books that The Marriage Plot's characters are familiar with (in fairness, only the Sayers was published before 1982, but my list can hardly be exhaustive, and anyway it was Eugenides's choice to set the novel in that year), which seems, as it was in The Magicians, like a deliberate choice that leaves Eugenides a clean slate on which to craft his own version of the modern marriage plot, but only serves to highlight how paltry and limited his version of such a beast is in comparison to the works he has wished out of existence.  Where Sayers, Rush and the others joyfully break free of the marriage plot's conventions, both social and literary, Eugenides remains boxed in by both.  For all his pretensions to revolution, what he's produced is little more than a highbrow Twilight, whose plot is defanged, and whose characters are dehumanized, by the too-obvious shape of the story he's chosen.

The story is a fairly simple one.  There is a heroine, the wrong man she falls in love with and marries, and the right man who suffers as he waits in the wings for her to notice him.  Though Eugenides is obviously trying to complicate these character types, he doesn't do enough to get around the fact that our knowledge of the three leads' roles informs, affects, and finally clashes with our emotional reactions to them.  To start with, look at our heroine.  As appealing as it is that Madeleine is characterized first and foremost through her reading preferences, as the novel draws on it becomes clear that being a reader is her only personality trait, and that despite graduating from an Ivy League school and spending four years away from home, Madeleine's personality is still largely unformed.  She's childish and spoiled, still willing to be infantilized (and supported) by her parents, and a lot of her behavior seems calculated to inoculate herself from anything that might be difficult or challenging.  That's not a bad starting point for a character, even a heroine, but Eugenides never quite manages to develop Madeleine the way the heroine of a marriage plot novel ought to be.  Her story isn't about becoming more mature or indeed any sort of personal growth, but about falling in love.  And even that isn't rendered convincingly--her passion for Leonard, who even before his illness becomes apparent is chilly and emotionally withholding, is never very persuasive, and within her romantic attachments Madeleine remains passive and unobservant.  When Leonard, despondent over the crippling intellectual and physical side effects of his mood-stabilizing medication, secretly stops taking his pills, Madeleine notices only that he's lost weight and regained his lust for life (and for her).

The marriage plot is unique in the canon of Western literature in being a form that is predominantly about women, and Eugenides doesn't hesitate to use this fact as yet another cudgel against semiotics, drawing a stark comparison between the latter's misogyny (Madeleine's first encounter with semiotics, through her roommate's boyfriend, ends when "Madeleine said she was going to make coffee.  Whitney asked if she would make him some, too") and the former's feminism, as when Madeleine attends a conference on Victorian literature and not only makes two female friends but rubs elbows with such luminaries of feminist criticism as Terry Castle and the authors of The Madwoman in the Attic.  This would be a simplistic contrast even if Eugenides's modern take on the marriage plot did not so thoroughly sideline his heroine, but he undermines it even further with the character of Mitchell.  Mitchell's Greek surname and his upbringing in the Detroit suburbs mark him out as a stand in for Eugenides himself, which makes his positioning as the right man to Leonard's wrong one somewhat dubious, but the more we learn about Mitchell, the less he seems like anyone's idea of a Mr. Darcy.  There might be something sympathetic in Mithell's desperate spiritual seeking--he's one of those people who find the idea of faith very seductive but can't manage to feel it, and in keeping with the novel's bibliophile preoccupations, he's introduced trying to force belief in God by reciting Franny Glass's Jesus mantra from Franny and Zooey--but his journey takes a predictably narcissistic form.  Volunteering in Mother Teresa's indigent hospital in Calcutta (as Eugenides did after graduating from college), Mitchell recoils from the patients and the messy work of tending to them.  The fact that he recognizes how unsympathetic it is for a privileged white Westerner to feel sorry for himself for not being willing to touch people who are dying in squalor doesn't make Mitchell's angst over this fact any more appealing--or any less familiar from a thousand other stories featuring just this type of character.

But the crowning glory of Mitchell's awfulness is, undeniably, the fact that he is a Nice Guy par excellence.  It's hard to know what the worst example of Mitchell's poisonous attitude towards women is.  Is it the way that his every interaction with them is filtered through his self-pity over the fact that so many of them don't want to sleep with him?  How he alternately cozies up to Madeleine and lashes out at her--usually in ways that infantilize her or belittle her intelligence--when she makes it clear that she doesn't want to be more than friends?  The fact that, when Madeleine, having finally had enough, informs Mitchell in a letter that she wants nothing more to do with him, his response is that "Madeleine had been putting Mitchell off for so long that her refusals were like boilerplate that his eyes skimmed over, looking for possible loopholes or buried clauses of real significance"?  The way he mansplains to his roommate's girlfriend when she makes the--one would think, entirely indisputable--observation that the Abrahamic religions are steeped in patriarchy, which leads to a heated argument that comes to an abrupt end when Mitchell "jokingly" asks whether she's on her period?  My favorite would have to be the scene in which Mitchell hears from his recently out friend Larry about Larry's disastrous relationship with a Greek named Iannis--"Almost immediately, he'd begun asking Larry how much money his family had ... If they went to a gay bar, Iannis became insanely jealous if Larry so much as looked at another guy.  The rest of the time he wouldn't let Larry touch him for fear people would learn their secret.  He started calling Larry a "faggot," acting as if he, Iannis, were straight and only experimenting."  That Iannis caters so blatantly to the homophobic stereotype of the foreign gigolo is a problem in its own right, but what strikes me is that Mitchell's response to Larry's litany is that "It was comforting to learn that homosexual relationships were just as screwed up as straight ones."  In other words, upon hearing that his friend was entangled with a borderline abusive fortune hunter, Mitchell's response is that this is just like being with a woman.  As unimpressive as Madeleine is, the idea that Mitchell might be her--or any woman's--true love is so terrifying that it makes the experience of reading those chapters The Marriage Plot that concern him almost like a horror novel.

But the greatest impediment to enjoying The Marriage Plot as a marriage plot story is the fact that Leonard, the story's alleged wrong man, is the most sympathetic and interesting character in the novel.  It is, to begin with, enormously problematic that the reason for Leonard's unsuitability as a mate is the fact that he is mentally ill.  The chapters told from Leonard's point of view, detailing his struggles with the side effects of his drugs, and his growing despondence over the conviction that under the drugs' influence everything he's wanted from life--his scientific career, his relationship with Madeleine--is permanently outside his reach, are heartbreaking.  That the relationship between Madeleine and Leonard is doomed, and damaging to both of them, is obvious shortly into the novel--Madeleine is too young and too inexperienced to cope with Leonard's illness and his needs, and far from helping him, her frustrations goad him into taking risks with his drug regimen in order to be the man she fell in love with.  But by telling the story of this relationship within the form of a marriage plot and casting Leonard as the wrong man, Eugenides encourages us to read his manic-depression not as a tragic affliction, but as a moral failing.  He even seems aware of this, hanging a lantern on the problem by having Madeleine accuse her disapproving mother of just the same flaw that afflicts his novel, but this does not get around the core problem, which is that Leonard, in order to play his part in the story he's been cast in, needs to be gotten rid of.  In a classic marriage plot novel--such as The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, of which The Marriage Plot is strongly reminiscent--this is achieved through death, and the prospect of that death hangs constantly over the novel in the form of Leonard's increasing hopelessness over his situation, and his psychiatrists' repeated warnings that manic-depressives are prone to suicide.  Not helping matters is the fact that many reviewers have taken Leonard as a stand in for David Foster Wallace (Eugenides has disputed this reading), who also suffered from mental illness and did kill himself in 2008.  Leonard's death would therefore not only complete the real life parallel but act as yet another blow against semiotics, Wallace having been a famous standard-bearer for postmodernism.  In other words, Eugenides has written a novel in which the suicide of the most sympathetic and pitiable character is painted as a necessity of plot--and a rebuke to the semiotician star pupil's claim that even suicide can no longer be written about originally--calling so much attention to the fact of that necessity that we could never be expected to accept that suicide as organic to the story or characters.

In fairness to Eugenides, he's clearly aware of everything I've written here--of Madeleine's passivity, Mitchell's misogyny, and Leonard's mingled appeal and artificiality.  He's quite clearly crafted each of his characters deliberately in order to buck against their assigned role in the story.  The problem is that, as it turns out, dismantling the marriage plot and its characters doesn't result in a clever, thought-provoking exercise--or, at least, not as Eugenides has done it.  It just leaves you with a muddled, unsatisfying mess, neither a touching realist novel about the struggles of a young couple with the husband's mental illness, nor a mannered romance about the finding and getting of husbands, but some halfway concoction that doesn't scratch any sort of literary itch.  As if desperate to pull a rabbit out of a hat and prove that the whole exercise had a point, Eugenides ends the novel with a string of reversals.  Leonard does not, in fact, kill himself, but he does leave Madeleine for her own good.  Mitchell rushes to her side, but the two aren't united in romantic bliss.  Instead, Mitchell finally lets go of his dream of being with Madeleine, and signals this by asking her whether there is

any novel where the heroine gets married to the wrong guy and then realizes it, and then the other suitor shows up, some guy who's always been in love with her, and then they get together, but finally the second suitor realizes that the last thing the woman needs is to get married again, that she's got more important things to do with her life?  And so finally the guy doesn't propose at all, even though he still loves her?  Is there any book that ends like that?

The answer Eugenides wants us to give is obviously "well, there is one now," thus cementing his claim to fame as having modernized the marriage plot and been a great feminist while doing so.  But once again, this just doesn't hold water.  Is a last-minute display of menschliness in the book's final pages really supposed to make up for 400 pages of Mitchell's misogyny?  And what about Madeleine, who ends the novel as passive as she started it, her happy ending achieved not through any of her own choices but through the love and selflessness of her two suitors, who make decisions on her behalf?  Leonard, meanwhile, isn't even present for this ending, and as if realizing that his happy ending is hollow without a satisfying conclusion for Leonard--a conclusion that, as he's constructed the character and his predicament, is highly unlikely--Eugenides does the equivalent of telling us not to worry, everything will be fine, when he has Mitchell--who has met Leonard all of once--muse that "It was possible that he might recover from his depression; in fact, given time, it was more than likely."  Far from cleverly justifying the novel's perceived flaws, then, The Marriage Plot's ending only compounds them, and the sense that Eugenides has bitten off more than he can chew.  In patting himself on the back for the revolutionary spin he's put on the form, Eugenides only sheds a harsher light on the paltriness of his vision and achievement.  For me, the effect of his exercise has been to send me back to the cleverer, more resonant authors who have done far better work with the marriage plot, as a reminder that, despite the hash that Eugenides has made of it, it is still a relevant, vibrant form.

The Dark Knight Rises

I've been thinking for some time about how fandom reacts when its beloved auteurs fail.  When someone like Aaron Sorkin produces something as preachy, self-satisfied, and misogynistic as The Newsroom, fandom reacts with dismay, but is that surprise justified?  In Sorkin's case, all of these flaws were baked into his work going back as far as Sports Night, and they were ignored, excused, and forgiven because what he was producing was of such high quality.  Is it really surprising that a writer who has been showered with unconditional praise and adulation should feel free to indulge their worst impulses, and revel in bad habits they might previously have worked to curtail?  I mention this because going into The Dark Knight Rises, I was determined not to make this sort of mistake.  The previous volume in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight, was an excellent film--thrilling, sharply plotted, one of the best superhero films of the last decade.  It also ended on a risible note, with Batman choosing to take responsibility for the crimes of crimefighter turned psychotic murderer Harvey Dent, on the belief that the people of Gotham couldn't handle the truth of Harvey's fall from grace, and that without his shining example to guide them they would fall into barbarism and criminality.  It would have been easy to ignore this troubling conclusion in favor of the excellent film that preceded it.  To do as fandom is too prone to doing, and say "yes, this story is problematic, but it's also such a good story!"  But this would be to ignore the strain of fascist authoritarianism, of Great Man fetishism, that has run through all of Nolan's Batman films.  In the trilogy's concluding volume--in which, after being relegated to observer status in The Dark Knight, Batman would once again take center stage--it seemed reasonable to assume that these problematic themes would be intensified rather than toned down.

I was prepared, in other words, for The Dark Knight Rises to be an excellent story with a contemptible message.  But what Nolan, along with brother and collaborator Jonathan, has delivered is so much more disappointing.  The Dark Knight Rises is a flabby, talky film, prone to pounding in its points with a hammer, then repeating them several times to catch up the slow audience members.  It has a silly plot whose twists, with one notable exception, are telegraphed well ahead of time, and which hangs together only because the film as a whole is too dreary to arouse the kind of scrutiny that would lay bare its many plot holes.  Most of these flaws can, indeed, be traced back to the Nolans' determination to reinforce their Randian vision of Batman as the only person who can restore Gotham to its glory.  Most noticeably, the film bogs down in its final third because the Nolans whisk Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) away from the beleaguered city for months so that he can gain enlightenment and return to Gotham even more heroic than he left it--a process that is achieved by having various Magical Foreign People spew repetitive cod-philosophy at him while he has a training montage.  But the Nolans also undercut this theme, in ways that, far from granting it the complexity it so desperately needs, only serve to neuter it.  In the end, the Nolans seem to lack the courage of their convictions.

In the early scenes of The Dark Knight Rises, there's almost a sense that the Nolans are about to back off from the high-handedness of The Dark Knight's ending.  In the eight years since that night, the sainted and hollow memory of Harvey Dent has been used to clean Gotham's streets, but only by stripping away the civil rights of those deemed criminal, and the architect of this process, Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), is sick with himself over the lie that he's promulgated.  What soon becomes clear, however, is that rather than feeling shame at having lied to the people of Gotham, or at having sold them the fantasy of a savior, what irks Gordon is the fact that he's sold them the wrong savior, and that Batman remains maligned and despised.  As if to drive home the theme of unappreciated heroism, we learn in the film's opening scene that the mayor is planning to fire Gordon.  "He's a hero," Gordon's gladhanding, politically-savvy second in command protests.  "A war hero.  This is peacetime," he's told.  Bruce Wayne, meanwhile, is a shut-in, his body ruined by his crimefighting escapades, his mind still reeling from the loss of his lover Rachel.   He's the subject of sneering rumor and speculation, not least from the board of his company, whose fortune he's squandered on a clean fusion project that he later shut down with no results.  He did this, we soon learn, to keep the technology out of the hands of those who could turn the reactor into a bomb.  This echoes the subplot in The Dark Knight in which Bruce builds a machine that can spy on anyone in Gotham, then destroys it after one use because no one should have such unlimited power, and nor is it the only instance of such thinking in The Dark Knight Rises--by the end of the film, the revelation that Bruce has bought yet another company, or concealed yet another technological development, to keep it out of the wrong hands, feels almost like a running joke.  The film, of course, means it entirely in earnest, and accepts that Bruce not only has the right but the authority to decide which technologies are safe enough for the general public to use.

Far from toning down The Dark Knight's message, then, The Dark Knight Rises takes it to even further extremes.  This isn't simply Batman having the moral authority to act as judge and jury on Gotham's criminals.  This is Batman--and Bruce Wayne--as John Galt, the mysterious, reclusive, omni-competent, super-rich industrialist who is the only hope for the future.  The Dark Knight Rises extends Batman's authority past crime, into technological progress, and even into social welfare--when Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Officer Blake, a Batman believer who is one of the first to uncover signs of the film's villain, starts his investigation by following up the murder of a homeless teen, he learns that the boy was kicked out of his group home because the cash-strapped Wayne Foundation has stopped funding it.  In other words, it's not just the police that needs to be augmented by a caped crusader, but every level of government that must be replaced by private enterprise and private philanthropy.  And when that private benefactor is mocked, derided, hobbled in his efforts to keep his community safe and even hunted down for those efforts--why, then he will retreat from his obligations, and the result will be disaster.

That disaster comes, fittingly enough, in the form of a people's revolution--or rather, this being that sort of movie, in the form of a revolution that claims to be on the people's behalf but is really a force of evil.  Bane (Tom Hardy, wasted under a mask that conceals most of his face and in a role that demands little of him but an imposing physique), the last surviving member of the League of Shadows, the villains of Batman Begins, arrives in Gotham seeking revenge.  He steals Bruce Wayne's fortune, defeats and disables Batman, and converts that dangerous fusion reactor from a few paragraphs ago into a nuclear bomb.  This he uses to hold the entire city hostage, an act that he describes as the liberation of Gotham's citizens--from a corrupt government, from Commissioner Gordon's lies about Harvey Dent, and from the oppression of the moneyed classes--but which is really a preamble to the bomb's inevitable explosion.  What follows is equal parts Communist and French revolutions, with Gotham's rich and powerful rousted from their homes and marched into show trials as enemies of the people--in a court which is presided over by Batman Begins's deranged (and, when last seen, committed) villain, Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy), who looms over the accused from atop a pile of desks.

Now might be a good time to stop and boggle at the fact that the Nolans' Batman films are renowned for their realism.  The image of Crane perched on those desks is a reassuringly Alice in Wonderland-ish touch, a hint that we're meant to take the city's sudden descent into Jacobinism with a grain of salt.  Alas, it's but a brief reprieve from the po-faced seriousness with which The Dark Knight Rises otherwise serves up this plot.  The Dark Knight managed to make comic book characters and plots seem organic to the real world because it injected a single irrational player--the Joker--into a system whose other participants, cops and criminals alike, were rational, and therefore had no idea how to approach a force whose choices and motivations they couldn't fathom.  The Dark Knight Rises fills Gotham with these irrational players--not just Bane but an army of henchmen who seem to have no recognizably human reactions or emotions, and will gladly die at Bane's command--and has them do ridiculous, cartoonish things--Bane traps Gotham's entire police force in the city's sewers, and then instead of killing them he keeps them prisoner for months, at the end of which they march out, uniforms barely mussed, ready to fight Bane's forces--all while pretending that this is a meaningful political statement.

A silly premise might have been forgivable if the film had developed its implications in interesting ways, but, much like The Legend of Korra last month, The Dark Knight Rises uses its villain as a means of avoiding those implications.  Both stories are ostensibly about the cities they are set in and the battle for their soul, and yet those cities--their culture, their norms, and most of all their people--are curiously absent.  Like Korra's Amon, Bane claims to be acting on behalf of the city's underclass, and establishes a policy of violent persecution against the upper classes.  And as we were in Korra, we are kept entirely in the dark on the question of how the people of Gotham feel about this.  Do they support Bane?  Do they oppose him?  Do they think he has the right idea but the wrong methods?  Are they, as seems most likely, divided between these options according to their social status in the pre-occupation world?  The Dark Knight Rises ignores all these questions.  The people responsible for Gotham's suffering are only Bane and his followers (whose ranks are not, as far as we can tell, swelled by Gotham's have-nots), and the people responsible for stopping him are only the few policemen who managed to evade Bane's trap, the authority figures whom he has deposed--no civilians join the resistance.  Anyone who does not fall into either of these groups is completely ignored. 

Gotham spends months under Bane's rule--months that you'd expect to have a profound impact on the social, psychological, and cultural life of the city--but upon his defeat all we see are its citizens stepping out of their homes (as if they'd spent all that time indoors), ready to resume their lives as if the very fabric of their society hadn't been ripped to shreds.  What's interesting is that the Nolans had an opportunity here to reinforce their authoritarian message and show why Batman is necessary--because when stripped of both their white knight, the lie of Harvey Dent, and their dark knight, the citizens of Gotham turn to Bane, a false savior.  The film could have shown us Gothamites turning on one another, informing on their neighbors and signing up to do Bane's bidding--the nightmare scenario that justified Batman's choice to take responsibility for Harvey Dent's crimes.  Instead, the Nolans prefer to serve up a fantasy of docile, patient goodness, of a populace content to wait for Batman to save it without doing anything--good or evil--on its own behalf.

Since Bane is planning to blow up Gotham, his claims of populism are easily dismissed--can be taken, in fact, as an attack against the very notion of popular, anti-capitalist protest.  Even more disappointing, however, is the fact that The Dark Knight Rises squanders the opportunity to address the class struggle in a more nuanced way, through the character of Catwoman.  For a lot of Batman fans, Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight had to clear an impossible hurdle in the form of Jack Nicholson's turn as the character in Tim Burton's Batman.  For me, the iconic Batman villain performance is Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman, and I was very nervous to see what the Nolans and Anne Hathaway would make of the character--not least because, let's face it, Christopher and Jonathan Nolan have a woman problem.  It's not as pronounced as Aaron Sorkin's or Steven Moffat's--the Nolans' women are generally competent, rarely hysterical or weepy, and have interests other than landing a husband--but it has nevertheless marred most of their films, in which women are either love interests (often dead ones), or minor plot tokens with little in the way of personality or motivations.  So it was something of a surprise to discover that Hathaway's Selina Kyle, though she doesn't hold a candle to the scary intensity of Pfeiffer's performance, is one of the Nolans' best female characters (and my favorite part of the film), followed close behind by Marion Cotillard's Miranda Tate, the visionary who contracts with Bruce to build the fusion reactor.  Both women have their own agenda and aspirations which are given their own space in the narrative, not just as they reflect on the hero's journey or his feelings--the first time this has been true of a woman in a Nolan film since Carrie-Ann Moss's character in Memento.  Hathaway's Selina, in particular, has her own arc of growth over the course of the film, and she is also the one who gets to defeat Bane (though only after it's revealed that he is actually the film's secondary villain).  At the film's end, she is the only character in the cast whose further adventures I'd like to learn about.

All that said,  the cost of this compelling character arc is that Catwoman's rough edges are filed off, and with them her politics.  Perhaps wisely given their track record with female characters, the Nolans choose to veer away from the angry feminist slant that Burton gave Catwoman, and instead make her a class warrior.  A jewel thief, she justifies her crimes simply by the fact that she steals from those who have so much, and tells Bruce Wayne that "you're all going to wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us."  Unlike Bane, Selina says things like this in earnest, and also unlike him, she is for the most part a sympathetic character, whose moments of villainy are usually the result of straitened circumstances rather than malice, and whose bitterness over having been dealt a bad hand that has forced her to make increasingly bad choices shines through her disaffected mask and lends moral authority to her views.  Through her, then, the film could have given us another perspective on the class struggle that Bane sparks, one that could have suggested that he is playing on a legitimate grievance.  Instead, the film uses the earnestness of Selina's convictions to dismantle them.  When she sees the violence that has accompanied Bane's revolution, the suffering of the rich whom she had previously reviled, Selina repents of her desire for revolution, and by the end of the film she is fighting by Batman's side to defeat Bane.  The message here is clear--capitalism, however predatory, is still better than the alternative--and it's Selina's own believability as an enemy of capitalism that helps to sell it.  What's more, the fact that she's positioned as a love interest for Bruce Wayne--the very representative of everything she despises--helps to undercut Selina's convictions, which are overpowered by her affections for Bruce.  One can't help but compare this turnaround to Pfeiffer's last scene in Batman Returns, in which she tells Batman "I would love to live with you in your castle ... I just couldn't live with myself."  That Catwoman had the strength to give up what she wanted for the sake of her beliefs; the Nolans' Catwoman doesn't.

Of course, by the time this turnaround happens, Batman himself has backed away from the authoritarianism, the Randian dogma, that permeated the first half of the film.  The crux of Bruce's long sojourn away from the city (which is the reason that Bane's occupation of Gotham lasts so long despite the fact that the film can't convincingly portray the effects of such an ordeal, and indeed glosses over most of that period as far as Gotham is concerned) is that he is courting death.  This echoes Albert's repeated admonitions in the film's first half, and indeed the tone of the entire film is slanted to both warn us and lead us to expect Batman's death.  In case we weren't clear on just what kind of death he's heading towards, the film has Selina offer to leave Gotham with Bruce, because "you don't owe these people any more.  You've given them everything."  "Not everything.  Not yet," is his reply.  And if that were not enough, the film's surprise villain stabs Batman in the side.  That's right.  After three films, including one of most critically lauded superhero film in years, and a mass of critical and fannish buzz building up to a consensus on the uniqueness and depth of the Nolans' vision for Batman, their final statement on the character is: Batman as Jesus.  The same tired, unoriginal, hokey theme that has shown up in just about every superhero film in the last decade.  (Adding insult to injury is the fact that Batman's self-sacrifice is nothing of the sort; though he tells the other characters that he is embarking on a suicide mission, he knows that he has a chance of survival and has merely chosen to fake his death.  The film, in its fetishizing of this "death," completely ignores this inconvenient wrinkle.)

At the end of The Dark Knight Rises, Blake, who has spent the film as Batman's de facto apprentice, laments to Gordon that no one will know who truly saved Gotham.  This is such a whiny thing to say that it's unbelievable--who cares who saved the city or whether they're acknowledged?  Surely what's important is that the city was saved, and surely that's all a true hero would care about?  But Gordon himself seems to be of Blake's mind--the last thing he says to Batman before sending him off to what he thinks is his death is that Gotham deserves to know who saved it.  The conclusion that both Gordon and Blake reach is that Gotham knows who its hero is--it's Batman, whether or not the city knows that Bruce Wayne was the man behind the mask.  And indeed, Gotham unveils a statue of Batman in one of the film's final scenes, even as Blake, who has resigned from the police force (because, he says, he now feels that the system is preventing him from doing good), discovers the Batcave and becomes the new Batman.  But this is only to reinforce the mealy-mouthed conclusion to which the Nolans' have brought their vision of Batman the Great Man.  The truly authoritarian, Frank Miller-style Batman doesn't care about the public's accolades--nor, indeed, their condemnation.  He acts because he believes his strength and competence give him the authority to act and the ability to know which act is right, regardless of what the public or government think of him or try to do to him.  A work like Miller's The Dark Knight Returns forces its readers to face up to the inherent fascism of such a worldview, and challenges them to either fall in line or get out of the way.  The Nolans, on the other hand, want to have their cake and eat it too.  Their Batman, Blake's Batman, and even Bruce Wayne's Batman are all Batmen in desperate need of approval.  They want a moral authority that transcends government and the will of the people, but they also want the government and the people to like and appreciate them.

As objectionable as I find the Great Man fetishism of the Nolans' Batman films, I might have still respected it had they, like Miller, taken it to its logical conclusion, but instead the Nolans' Batman trilogy concludes not with an examination of Batman's right to act, but with a reinforcement of the notion that it is tragic that his actions are not properly appreciated.  In this scheme, the persecution that Batman suffers isn't just the cost of doing business, but a necessary component of his apotheosis.  Like Jesus on the cross, he has to be mocked and tormented by a small-minded mob before he turns around and magnanimously saves them all.  What The Dark Knight Rises amounts to is a great, self-pitying cry of You'll see, one day I'll be dead and then you'll be sorry.  I'm mainly sorry that I didn't stop with the previous film.

Brave

It may at first seem strange to say that Brave is a movie with a lot to prove.  After all, Pixar remains one of the few Hollywood studios whose name is a hallmark of quality, and it closed out the last decade with the one-two-three punch of Wall-E, Up, and Toy Story 3, a trio of films so sublime and so perfectly formed that in their wake an aura of infallibility seemed to attach itself to the studio.  Even if that aura was tarnished by the misstep that was last year's Cars 2--the first Pixar film to be critically ignored and shut out of the Best Animated Film Oscar category since its creation--there's no denying that, going by the numbers, Pixar is the most consistently excellent studio in Hollywood.  Of course, another way of putting it is that after Toy Story 3, there was nowhere for Pixar to go but downhill, and there are signs of trouble besides Cars 2's tepid reception--the fact that a studio that once prided itself on the originality of its stories will, by next year, have produced two sequels (Toy Story 3, Cars 2) and one prequel (Monsters University, which depicts the college years of the protagonists of Monsters Inc.) in the space of four years is deeply worrying, suggesting that Pixar is falling in line with Hollywood's other juggernaut animation studio, Dreamworks, and with the general Hollywood tendency to eschew originality in favor of multiple sequels, prequels, and reboots, of which the recent The Amazing Spider-Man, a pleasant but entirely unnecessary effort that mostly recapitulates the beats of a movie that came out only ten years ago, is but the latest example.  So Brave, as Pixar's first original story in three years, had a lot riding on it.  And when you add to that the fact that the film comes as a reply to the voices--raised most loudly in the wake of Up, which opened with the introduction of a magnetic, adventurous female character only to kill her off after ten minutes, but by no means silent before it--pointing out that for all Pixar's originality and flair, the stories it created were predominantly stories about men, the burden of expectations is more than doubled.

Brave opened in the US a few weeks ago, so by now you will have heard that it has not proven equal to this burden.  Though by no means a bad film, it lacks the narrative and thematic complexity that have characterized previous Pixar films.  It's a simple story--much simpler and more shopworn than "a robot whose job it is to clean up the polluted Earth falls in love with a more advanced robot and follows her into space" or "a grieving, elderly widower decides to honor his wife by flying their house on the adventure they never got to share"--and very simply, and obviously, told--this is the first Pixar film I can remember, for example, that opens with a voiceover in which the main character explains (unnecessarily, for the most part) her world and her situation to the audience.  The worldbuilding in most Pixar films is characterized, and elevated, by its attention to idiosyncratic details--Wall-E doesn't just love Earth culture, he loves Hello, Dolly!; Carl wasn't simply inspired by film serials about adventures and derring-do, he was inspired by a particular explorer who, among other things, likes to fit his dogs with collars that allow them to talk.  Brave, on the other hand, seems to run more on clichés.  You've got your medieval Scottish castle, with a king, a queen, princes and princesses, visiting nobles, servants, warriors--all very well done, but in a very familiar way that the film never bothers to shade in or make its own.  The wacky, imaginative detail we've grown accustomed to seems here to have been replaced by funny accents and ethnic stereotypes.  (I'm quite curious to see what the reaction to Brave in the UK will be, since for all that it is a very funny film, most of the humor boils down to "look how Scottish these people are!")  The result is a world that, for all the obvious effort put into bringing it into vivid, gorgeous life, feels thin, and that thinness extends to the film's plot, which proceeds in rather obvious, clomping beats that seem to squander its running time.  There just isn't that much that happens here (especially in comparison with the nimble, fast-moving plots of previous Pixar films), and what happens is, again, obvious and familiar.

The real problem with this sense of familiarity, however, isn't the way it seems to indict Pixar's ability to craft original stories, but in the way it seems to indict Pixar's ability to write stories about women.  Far more than its thin world or plot, or its reliance on clichés, what troubles me about Brave is that when, after fifteen years of being synonymous with originality and unbridled imagination, the folks at Pixar finally set out to write a story about a girl, what they came up with is essentially a Disney Princess Movie.  Quite literally, at the most basic level--our heroine, Merida, is the first-born daughter of the high king--but also in terms of the story it chooses to tell.  Like Belle and Jasmine, Merida's story kicks off because she is being pressured into marriage, but actually craves a life of adventure.  And like Mulan, she rejects the feminine pursuits she's been encouraged to master in favor of martial ones--archery, horseback riding, mountain climbing, and the general joy in her physical accomplishments.  The film seems to owe a particular debt to Beauty and the Beast, and its climax, in which a transformed character is restored to humanity by Merida's declaration of love, feels almost like a direct quote.

On one level, this is very disappointing.  Boys, it seems, can in Pixar's conception lead any sort of story.  They can be the caretakers of a small child's imagination, or the architect of a plan to protect their home from invasion, or a doting, over-protective father.  They can learn how to be a chef, or go into space, or travel to South America in a flying house.  But when asked to tell a story about a girl, the first thing Pixar plumped for is a princess who is told she can't do things because she's a girl.  That this turns out not to be true is a heartening message, but it was already a heartening message in 1991, and the fact that we're still concentrating on climbing that hurdle more than twenty years later is dispiriting.  Because the fact is that by going back to this well, by bringing up terms like princess, marriage, and the conflict between "masculine" and "feminine" pursuits, what Pixar is saying is that a boy's story can be about anything--adventure, grief, parenthood, longing for companionship, learning to be the best at what you love--but a girl's story is always and forever about being a girl.  How much more encouraging would it have been, how much more positive a message would it have sent, if Pixar's first story about a girl were no different from their stories about boys except for the gender of its protagonist?

All that said, there is another way of looking at Brave, and that is that it is trying to examine, and in many ways dismantle, the conventions of the princess movie.  For one thing, there's no love interest.  One of the main points to be laid against Disney Princesses is that for all that their stories may revolve around self-actualization, they invariably end with romance and marriage.  Belle sings about wanting more than a provincial life, but what this ends up meaning is marriage to a rich man.  Jasmine isn't even the heroine of her story, and though she protests that she isn't "a prize to be won," narratively that is her role.  Even Mulan ends her story not as a general but as a girl receiving a suitor.  In Brave, Merida says that she doesn't want to get married, and the film takes her at her word.  The three suitors who come to her father's castle to vie for her hand remain minor characters, played mostly for laughs.  Instead, the central love story in Brave is between Merida and her mother, Elinor.  It's Elinor who pressures Merida to be feminine and ladylike, and Elinor who arranges the contest for Merida's hand, which drives a wedge between mother and daughter.  Merida's rebellion leads her to buy a potion that will change Elinor's mind about marrying her daughter off, but instead it transforms Elinor into a bear.  In order to reverse the spell Merida must heal her relationship with her mother.  Especially when one considers how little space mothers, and the relationship between mothers and daughters, take up in movies, and how particularly in movies about girls--be they Princess Movies, movies about Strong Female Characters, or some cross between the two--mothers are sidelined, either dead or just not very important, this emphasis is refreshing and laudable.

Even more intriguing, however, is the ambivalence with which Brave treats both Elinor's insistence on ladylike decorum, and Merida's preference for martial pursuits.  The film showcases the latter, and Merida's joy in them and in her physicality, in its early scenes, and after her transformation Elinor learns to appreciate her daughter's accomplishments in this realm, and even develop a few of her own.  But Brave remains skeptical of the value of these accomplishments, especially when it contrasts them with the way Elinor uses her power.  Elinor draws her power from femininity--she's the sort of woman who, by behaving like lady, gets to insist that the men around her behave like gentlemen, and as the film opens she's using that power to try to make peace between fractious clans, and needs Merida to follow her lead and use her femininity in order to accomplish this by marrying one of the clans' heirs, a plan to which Merida is resistant.  Merida's first attempt to avoid marriage involves showcasing her martial abilities.  She chooses archery as the field in which her three suitors will compete for her hand, then beats them all at it.  It's a badass moment, but Merida's (and our) triumph are soon punctured by Elinor, who points out that by humiliating her father's guests, Merida is risking war.  In one of the film's climactic scenes, we see that Merida has learned this lesson.  With the lords she enraged on the brink of fighting, she steps in (in a direct echo of an earlier scene in which Elinor had calmed a rambunctious mob by walking into it while female) and talks them all down, echoing her mother's words about the importance of cooperation and peace.

Brave ends with a reversal of roles--Elinor the bear saves the day through force of arms, by fighting off the demon bear Mordu (another transformed human) who has been terrorizing the kingdom, while Merida saves it through feminine skills, by sewing together the tapestry depicting her family which she had previously slashed, a condition of lifting the spell.  So on the surface it seems that we've reached a sort of equilibrium, with both martial and domestic pursuits treated as equally important and potentially life-saving.  But this conclusion feels less important, and less central to the film's message, than Merida's choice to adopt her mother's point of view and her methods--to the extent that she very nearly agrees to marry one of her suitors before Elinor stops her--in the earlier scene.  Ultimately, Brave comes down on Elinor's side.  It may buck the tradition of Disney Princess Movies by not giving Merida a love interest and by ending with her still single, but this is quite obviously a temporary state.  Merida and Elinor's compromise is that Merida can choose who she wants to marry and when.  She doesn't get to choose not to marry, however, nor does she get to choose to run off and live a life of adventure, or to inherit her father's throne on her own.  Merida's fate--which the film and the character are so concerned with--is to become Elinor.  One day she will marry a prince or chieftain, become queen, and like her mother, use her influence on her husband and his lords to bring peace and cooperation to their land.

This isn't entirely a bad message, of course.  In this era of Strong Female Characters, it's worth saying that being warlike isn't a good thing just because a woman does it, and that being a peacemaker might be better (though I can't help but wish that peacemaking and femininity were not so frequently linked, as they are in Brave).  Being a wife, a mother, and a force for peace and civility are all things of value, and this is a point worth making.  But one does wonder whether a medieval patriarchy is the best setting in which to show off that value.  The fact is, the kind of feminine power that Elinor ascribes to--the angel in the house, the font of decorum and civility, the woman who, by behaving like a lady, forces the men around her to behave like gentlemen--is a pernicious lie, one that remained ubiquitous well into the last century and still has significant power today, and which feminism has worked hard to root out.  Elinor may be a diplomat and a leader, but she is those things only because of who her husband is, and she maintains her power only on the sufferance of her husband and his vassals.  All it takes is one sufficiently powerful man who won't play the game--or who won't play it with her, since her power derives not simply from being a lady but from being a lady attached to a particular man--to take all her power away.  For all their tendency to fall into the valorization of strength of arms, stories about women warriors gained popularity because they offered a corrective to the complementarian fantasy of this sort of feminine power, this strength through weakness, reminding women that power that is your own is better than power that is contingent on the goodwill of men--goodwill that often doesn't exist.

Brave tries to reconcile these two ideas of female power, but the only way it can do this is to posit a fantasy world in which all men are rambunctious but harmless children, who would never lift a hand against a woman and can always be whipped into gentlemanly shape by a stern word and a disappointed expression.  That's a dangerous message to send to young girls (and to young boys too), especially coupled as it is with the film's deprecation of martial strength.  For all the interesting things Brave tries to do with the Princess Movie template--it is, for one thing, a movie that treats being a princess as a job and castigates its heroine for shirking it--it can't get away from the inherent patriarchal assumptions at that template's core.  Or rather, it won't--a lot of the film's problems could have been avoided if its setting were not so famously associated with rampant misogyny, or if its conception of princessing as a job were extended to its obvious conclusion of making Merida the heir to her father's throne, combining his strength of arms with Elinor's desire for peace.  The result is a movie that, for all its best efforts to complicate this story, still assumes that a story about a girl is a story about being a girl.  What we need, however, are stories about girls and women who can do or be anything, not in spite or because of their gender but regardless of it.  This, it seems, is too much even for Pixar's unbridled imagination.

A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge

It sometimes seems that Frances Hardinge is the best kept secret in YA. People who have read her seem unanimous in the view that Hardinge ought to be a major superstar, whose books are greeted with fanfare and exhilaration. But though she's always well reviewed, Hardinge remains under the radar, particularly among the adult readership of YA fiction who should be embracing the sophistication and complexity of her worlds. Part of the problem, of course, is that Hardinge doesn't write the kind of dystopias that have been the dominant and popular flavor in YA since at least The Hunger Games (and that her novels skew a bit younger than those books, with pre-adolescent protagonists who rarely have romance on their minds). Or at least not blatantly, since nearly all of Hardinge’s novels take place in restrictive societies and focus on the lone voice (usually that of a young girl) that dares to challenge them. It's just that Hardinge’s dystopias are more detailed and a great deal more thought out than the “cheerleaders have been banned and the government controls pets” variety, to the extent that their restrictiveness is often not obvious on a first glance, and her protagonists are not thinly disguised modern teens, but products of their society, steeped in its culture and conventions, and often warped by it in ways that the reader might find alienating.

In my favorite of Hardinge's novels, Gullstruck Island, the restrictive society of the titular island is shaped by nature and history, most obviously by the island’s overactive volcanoes and the different attitudes that its native and colonizing inhabitants have towards them. Her latest novel, A Face Like Glass, takes the opposite approach—its setting, the underground city of Caverna, is manufactured and rooted in artifice, in the various mechanisms that Caverna’s citizens have devised in order to make a sealed underground cave system livable for hundreds of years, and the customs that ensure their continued survival in such an unnatural environment. I confess that I prefer the former approach. The emphasis on natural environment and on the pressures that nature brings to bear on human settlements in Gullstruck Island imposed a degree of realism on the way that Hardinge imagined and built the island’s society that to my mind only enriched the novel, whereas a sealed, artificial environment gives her the freedom to create outlandish customs and policies simply because that’s the way they do it here—as she did in her previous novel, Twilight Robbery, whose heroine visits a city in which people are categorized as good or evil according to which hour of the day they were born in. Happily, A Face Like Glass seems cognizant of this pitfall, and instead of using Caverna's artifice as a crutch it plays it up and makes it the focus of the novel. Caverna's society not only survives through artifice, but has made it the foundation of its culture, a highly stratified society whose upper echelons, the great families who curry for favor and advantage in the court of the Grand Steward, are locked in a subtle dance of manners, etiquette, and subtle insults (behind these fixed smiles and feigned politeness, of course, vicious rumor mills and assassination plots run rampant). But the most profound and dominant expression of Caverna's artificiality are its Faces.

In the overground world, babies that stared up at their mother's faces gradually started to work out that the two bright stars they could see above them were eyes like their own, and that the broad curve was a mouth like theirs.  Without even thinking about it, they would curve their mouths the same way, mirroring their mothers' smiles in miniature.  When they were frightened or unhappy, they would know at once how to screw up their faces and bawl.  Caverna babies never did this, and nobody knew why.  They looked solemnly at the face above them, and saw eyes, nose, mouth, but they did not copy its expressions.  There was nothing wrong with their features, but somehow one of the tiny silver links in the chain of their souls was missing.  They had to be forced to learn expressions one at a time, slowly and painfully, otherwise they remained blank as eggs. 

These learned expressions, numbered and named--"Face 41, the Badger in Hibernation"; "No. 29 - Uncomprehending Fawn Before Hound"--are a brilliant way of literalizing the fundamental falseness that lies at the core of the kind of royal court that runs Caverna. Caverna's aristocrats wear masks made of their own flesh, schooling their expressions to suit the prevailing mood, the political climate, the day’s fashion, or simply their personal goals. But Hardinge doesn't leave it at that. She works out the implications of a society in which facial expression is artificial in several fascinating ways, from the personal—a character who muses of her lover that "Every one of [his] small, dark smiles she had carefully designed for him at one time or another, to suit his face and his character.  And now these smiles had more power over her than anything else in the world."; another who is told that "There is a feeling deep down inside you ... You don't really know what it is, or how to describe it.  You do not have the Face for it.  And so you scan all the Face catalogues, and ask for Faces every birthday because perhaps, just perhaps, if you had the right Face, you might understand what you are feeling"—to the political. In Caverna, Faces are a hallmark of privilege. The rich and aristocratic can afford the fine schooling in which they are taught a wide variety of Faces, and will even hire Facesmiths to create custom expressions for them, but the poor are raised in crèches where they are taught a minimal range of expression which reflects their place in society—"Erstwhile did not have any angry or annoyed expressions.  Worker and drudge-class families were never taught such Faces, for it was assumed they did not need them." The limit to their expressiveness also serves as a way of keeping the poor in their place, as a character muses when she observes the crushing, oppressive conditions they live in.

How could the drudges rise up against bullies like the foreman?  Rebels needed to look at each other and see their own anger reflected, and know that their feeling was part of a greater tide.  But any drudge who glanced at his fellows would see only calm, tame Faces waiting for orders.

The speaker here is our heroine, Neverfell, a classic outsider-insider figure who crashes into Caverna's conventions and mores and leaves them in shambles. Found wandering the caves of the cheesemaker hermit Grandible (one of Caverna’s unique qualities, and the source of its wealth, is that among its inhabitants are craftsmen who know how to make True delicacies—"wines that rewrote the subtle book of memory, cheeses that brought visions, spices that sharpened the senses, perfumes that ensnared the mind and balms that slowed ageing to a crawl"; Hardinge therefore has a lot of fun going into the details of Grandible’s arcane and often quite dangerous cheesemaking—his cheeses explode, or give off noxious gasses, when improperly treated—and the hallucinatory, mindblowing effects of his wares), a former courtier whose rejection of corrupting society is signaled by his having only one permanent expression, Neverfell is raised in isolation until the age of thirteen. When a runaway rabbit shows her a passageway out of Grandible's tunnels (a reference that Hardinge doesn't belabor but which is nevertheless obviously on her mind), the curious, impulsive, emotionally volatile Neverfell takes the opportunity to explore a world that she has been desperately aching to see, and immediately finds herself becoming a pawn in Caverna's political games. As Grandible has concealed from Neverfell, but as we could easily have guessed (even without reading the book's back cover) , Neverfell has the titular face like glass, on which her uncontrollable emotions are immediately apparent. This makes her the object of curiosity and attention. Facesmiths want to study her; the secret police believe that she is a spy from the outside; Caverna's five hundred year old Grand Steward, whose pleasures have desiccated after such a long life, wants to live vicariously through her naked emotional responses; and powerful courtier Maxim Childersin wants her for some unspecified purpose whose darkness the naïve Neverfell, won over by Childersin's kindness, won't consider.

Hardinge has threaded the needle of Neverfell's mingled innocence and knowingness, making her both an outsider to Caverna (quite literally, as her expressive face attests) and someone who is of Caverna, a little too precisely to be entirely believable.  Raised in isolation, Neverfell knows virtually nothing about Caverna's running--the better for the characters she meets to explain it to her, and us--but her emotional investment in Caverna's values, and especially its class system--her awe at the Grand Steward and his court, or her thoughtless acceptance of the conditions of the drudges--seem more fitting for a character who has grown up steeped in its society, not locked outside of it, and their purpose is clearly to intensify Neverfell's anger and disillusionment when she gains a fuller understanding of how Caverna works.  For a novel that works hard to tell a story about artifice without calling attention to its own artificiality, this is a rare misstep, but it is lessened by the more interesting, and more prominent, aspect of Neverfell's personality, the fact that she is emotionally damaged.  It's common for YA protagonists to be unrealistically immune to trauma--consider Harry Potter's mostly sunny personality after years of abuse--but Hardinge quite refreshingly avoids this trope.  A lifetime of living underground and in near-isolation has taken its toll on Neverfell, and in ways that we might consider offputting and unattractive--she's prone to sleepwalking, to the malaise that Cavernans call being "out of clock," when their natural cycle and Caverna's artificial one fall out of sync, and to panic attacks from which she recovers "shuddering and sick, devastation around her and her fingernails broken from clawing at the rock walls and ceilings."  And, even when judged against normal standards rather than Cavernan ones, her lack of emotional control, her tendency to say and do exactly what she's thinking as she thinks it, are jarring.

A Face Like Glass is a novel about Neverfell's emotional healing, but gratifyingly, that healing doesn't take the form of her becoming more normal or conventional.  Several characters try to teach Neverfell emotional control--by which they mean, try to teach her to restrain her impulses and not to show her every emotion on her face.  What they mean by this is that Neverfell should feel less--when her friends are concerned that the Grand Steward will see Neverfell's rage over the state of the drudges in her face, they take her to a Facesmith, who tries to reason those feelings away by reassuring her that drudges prefer hard work to luxuries and are incapable of feeling true pain and sadness--but Neverfell, and Hardinge, repeatedly stress the legitimacy of her anger and sadness.  The control Neverfell needs to learn isn't of her feelings, but of her environment--how to best express her rage in a way that is productive and helps to alleviate that rage's cause.  That control is achieved, in large part, by Neverfell learning to understand herself--to uncover the trauma of her past and the effects that that trauma has had on her--but that understanding doesn't equal complete healing.  At the end of the novel, Neverfell still bears the scars of her experiences, but she's learned to live with them, and taken control of her life.

If I'm slightly less enamored of A Face Like Glass than I was of Gullstruck Island, it's because I value Hardinge's worldbuilding skills so highly, and the deliberately constructed world of Caverna--constructed both within the story and without it, as an illustrations of Hardinge's arguments about class--shows them off less impressively than Gullstruck.  But Hardinge is more than just a worldbuilder, and in Neverfell and her journey she shows off her tendency towards nuance and complexity as well as in any of her worlds.  That same nuance may be what's keeping Hardinge from becoming a superstar--her novels lack an obvious hook and don't lend themselves to a simple selling pitch--but hopefully the work of her ardent fans will help to spread her name, and make her a slightly less well-kept secret.

The Legend of Korra, Season 1

When I watched the Nickolodeon animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender a few years ago, it was, despite the recommendations of a few rabid fans whose blogs I follow, with no small amount of doubt and trepidation.  When I finished the series, having become a rabid fan myself, and tried to pass on that rabid fannishness to some friends, it occurred to me what a tough sell Avatar is.  If you're not a fan of animated (and specifically anime or anime-style) shows, or of children's TV, the series could very easily have flown under your radar (in fact it's likely that the title will cause associations with either James Cameron's unrelated movie, or M. Night Shyamalan's by all accounts dreadful live action film adaptation of the show's first season).  It certainly doesn't help that the series take a while to get up to speed, and that its first ten episodes are broad and very consciously child-oriented--I wouldn't blame someone from my corner of fandom who watched Avatar's pilot and concluded that the show was Not For Them, not least because I very nearly did the same.  Which is a shame, because once you get past the hump of the show's first half season, Avatar develops into a smart, engaging, and most of all fun series that fans of Harry Potter and Farscape will eat up with a spoon.  Featuring complex, multifaceted characters and relationships, a deft handling of race and gender, and a riveting adventure plot punctuated by thrilling and stunningly animated action set pieces, it's a series that fans of smart genre fare owe it to themselves to become acquainted with--which is no help, since as we all know, "it's really good" is not a convincing sales pitch.  So when Nickolodeon announced that Avatar's creators were returning with a sequel series, The Legend of Korra, I was pleased not just because of the chance to spend more time in the Avatar universe, but because of the opportunity that the show seemed to afford to introduce new fans to that universe on terms they might be more comfortable with.  Shorter, better animated, and focusing on older characters than Avatar, The Legend of Korra seemed like the perfect gateway drug for the two shows' universe.  I was doubly disappointed, then, by what Korra's first season has delivered--not only a lackluster story that has squandered an intriguing setting and characters, but a tone deaf handling of the show's themes that belies its alleged maturity.

Avatar takes place in a pre-industrial world whose people are divided into four nations according to the four classical elements--earth, fire, air, and water.  These elements inform the culture and national character of each of the four nations, and within each nation there are certain individuals, known as "benders," who can manipulate their element--causing fire to shoot from their hands, for example, or forcing the earth to form whatever shape or structure they desire.  The spiritual leader of this world, who can control all four elements, is called the Avatar, and they reincarnate into the world again and again, cycling between the four nations.  As the series opens, the earth and water nations have for a century been under attack by the fire nation, a war that began with the extermination of the air nation, and with it, it is generally believed, the Avatar.  When two water nation children, Katara and Sokka, find the twelve-year-old Avatar, Aang, frozen in a block of ice, they set out together to help Aang master the remaining elements and defeat the fire nation.  The Legend of Korra opens 80 years after Aang's victory, and its title character is the Avatar that follows him, a water nation teenager who has already mastered the water, earth, and fire elements, and who in the series premiere sets out to learn airbending from the one remaining master of the form, Aang's son Tenzin.  To do this, Korra travels to Tenzin's home of Republic City, established after the war to foster better relations between the four nations.

The Legend of Korra thus, from its outset, sets itself apart from Avatar in several significant ways.  Avatar ranged all over its world, and frequently visited urban settings--the fortress of the northern water tribe, the great earth nation cities of Omashu and Ba Sing Se, the fire nation capital.  In each of these settings, the color scheme, design sensibility, and functionality were informed by the nation's dominant element.  In Republic City, these national boundaries have been dissolved, and the advent of an industrial revolution in the decades separating the two shows means that the bending powers that had ensured the smooth running of cities in Avatar (the public transport system in Omashu is powered by earthbenders, who move stone carriages along tracks that they have carved in the ground) have either been superseded or augmented by technology (one of the characters in Korra, a firebender, gets a job shooting bolts of lightning into the city's power grid).  This results in a setting that, though still fantastical in many ways, is mostly reminiscent of a 19th century city--with the same Asian inflections that dominate the design of both series.  In Avatar's story, the spirit world played a significant role--through Aang's interactions with his previous incarnations, through his lapses into "the Avatar State," in which the force that runs through the Avatar line manifests through him and performs tremendous feats, and through his forays into the spirit realm, which give the show's animators the opportunity to venture into Miyazaki-esque surrealism.  Korra's world and story, on the other hand, are almost purely materialistic.  Though Korra is prodigy who has mastered three of the four elements--the ones that Aang struggles with throughout his story--with ease, her skill is purely martial.  Throughout most of the first season she has no connection to the spirit realm, her previous incarnations, or the Avatar State.

In other words, with Korra, the two series' creators have switched subgenres, transitioning from epic fantasy to something like steampunk.  Along the way, they've also created a story that is more mundane, and less purposeful, than Avatar's.  Aang and his cohort were on a quest with a very clearly defined victory condition--defeat the fire nation, end the war, save the world--and intermediate goals--master the remaining three elements (the show's three seasons are titled Water, Earth, and Fire, corresponding to the element that Aang masters in each one).  When Korra arrives in Republic City, the stakes of her story are significantly lower--she's eager to learn airbending and frustrated when it doesn't come easily, but it's her own self-image, not the fate of the world, that hangs in the balance.  There's so little urgency to her quest, in fact, that she has the time and inclination to join a pro-bending team--Republic City's favorite sport, in which teams of benders use their powers to score points and knock each other off the court--alongside brothers Mako and Bolin.  It's only very gradually that the challenges facing her begin to manifest themselves, and only near the end of the season that these challenges take the form of a traditional action-adventure plot.

It should be said that this willingness to change their world and the type of story they tell within it so completely is something that Korra's creators should be lauded for, not least because despite the enormous differences between it and Avatar, there's never any doubt that they take place in the same world, or that the one's setting could, over the course of less than a century, become the other's (this is all the more impressive because Korra avoids leaning on the crutch of the previous series's characters and settings--though one of Avatar's main characters appears as an old woman, and several others appear as forty-year-olds in a flashback, these elements are used minimally, and for the most part it's down to the new characters to establish the show's sense of place and history).  In its early episodes, Korra raises several interesting questions about the effect of modernity on the Avatar's place in society: with national identity becoming less important, or even noticeable, in Republic City's melting pot, the Avatar's role as a bridge between the nations appears to have been superseded, and with technology on the ascendant, bending may be losing its importance as well.  The season's villain, Amon, adds another wrinkle to this question.  The leader of a group calling themselves the Equalists, Amon argues that benders have erected a tyranny over non-benders, and seeks to overturn it through acts of terrorism carried out by an army trained in "chi-blocking"--which temporarily disables bending powers--and through his own ability to permanently remove those powers.

It's in its handling of these questions, and of the stories that emerge from them, that The Legend of Korra falls flat.  In its early episodes, the show struggles to integrate the slowly building Equalist menace with the more mundane concerns of Korra's life, and the result is a season that feels alternately fitful and stalled.  Though the subplot about the pro-bending tournament ends up feeding into the Equalist story in an interesting way, with a thrilling Equalist attack on the tournament final, it's hard not to feel that earlier episodes focused on Korra's pro-bending training are wasting valuable time.  And the equally time-consuming parallel love triangles--between Korra, Mako, and Bolin, and between Mako, Korra, and Mako's girlfriend, the industrialist's daughter Asami--have no such justification for their existence, especially so early in the series's run, when the characters' personalities and relationships are still too faintly drawn to support so much romantic melodrama.  Even when the Equalist threat becomes more prominent, however, the story doesn't snap into focus, because Korra herself is so very reactive.  Aang defied many of the conventions of child protagonists in fantasy stories--having been raised to the role of Avatar, he had a deep understanding of himself and his responsibilities, but never lost his childish glee and sense of play.  Korra is a more familiar, Harry Potter-ish type--affable, thoughtlessly and reflexively heroic whenever she's brought face to face with injustice or suffering, but neither very bright nor terribly inclined to think about the world around her and how she can affect it.  She spends too much of the season responding to Amon's obvious taunts and following the lead of the shady Republic City councilman Tarrlok, who uses the Equalist threat to cement his political power, and later as a justification for restricting the rights and movements of non-benders, and even when she takes charge of the fight against Amon, her tactics remain shortsighted and poorly thought out--in the season finale, she decides to seek Amon out despite the fact that he's defeated her in every one of their previous encounters and she has no idea how to turn the tables--and yet rewarded by the narrative--while trying to execute this foolhardy scheme, Korra learns something about Amon that allows her to defeat him.

Korra never manages to integrate its heroine's flaws and strengths into a fully developed character.  Whenever it comes close to acknowledging her failings, it falls back on highlighting her heroism, so that Korra's moments of triumph--especially when she finally breaks her spiritual block--feel less like accomplishments and more like writerly fiat.  In this, unfortunately, Korra is very much in line with the rest of the series's young cast.  Mako is a handsome blank, Bolin never grows beyond the role of comic relief, and only Asami--who is dealt dual blows over the course of the season in the form of the realization that her boyfriend loves someone else and the revelation that her father is in league with Amon, but is able to put her hurt feelings aside in the face of the more urgent threat of the Equalists, becoming the group's best tactician and a formidable fighter despite having no bending powers--is a genuinely interesting character.  The adult characters fare somewhat better--Tenzin is a square whose fuddy-duddiness conceals a strong anti-authoritarian streak, which feels entirely right both as a response to Aang's carefree personality and as a reflection of it, and Republic City's police chief, Lin Beifong (daughter of Avatar's Toph) is a tough as nails law and order type whom Korra rubs the wrong way, and whose relationships with Aang and Tenzin are only slowly revealed.  This, however, only serves to reinforce the sense that Korra is falling into the same pitfalls as the Harry Potter books, overshadowing its young protagonists with adult supporting characters whose adventures and stories come to seem a great deal more interesting.

Even worse than its problems with pacing and characterization, however, is The Legend of Korra's handling of the Equalist storyline.  Simply put, Amon claims that benders are oppressing non-benders, and the show never bothers to tell us whether this is true--doesn't, in fact, seem to think that the answer is very important.  When she first arrives in Republic City, Korra encounters a protester decrying bender oppression.  "What are you talking about?" she impulsively calls out.  "Bending is the coolest thing in the world!"  This is such a clueless, privileged bit of point-missing that one can only imagine that an important component of the season will involve showing Korra how the other half lives.  For a while, it seems that Mako and Bolin's role will be to do just that--when the brothers, who have been on their own since they were children and even briefly involved with criminal gangs, find themselves short of cash, Korra explains, with mock humility, that she can't help them: "I got nothing.  I've never really needed money.  I've always had people taking care of me."  "Then I wouldn't say you have nothing," is Mako's acidic reply.  Very quickly, however, Mako and Bolin's humble origins are forgotten (as is Korra's cluelessness).  They become part of Korra's inner circle--which also includes, as befits the Avatar, the movers and shakers of Republic City.  Within Korra's limited perspective, non-benders are almost entirely absent, and the ones she encounters are either Amon's henchmen or those who are part of her group and firmly opposed to Amon, such as Asami or Tenzin's wife Pema.  In both cases, when these characters address themselves to the issue of tensions between benders and non-benders, it's only to discuss whether they support Amon's tactics--the question of whether his aims or theories are correct is never even raised.  Unaffiliated non-benders from outside of Korra's privileged circle are encountered only as undifferentiated masses--the crowds who flock to Amon's rallies, or the protesters rounded up under Tarrlok's reactionary policies. 

Even absent the voice of ordinary non-benders, The Legend of Korra paints a disturbing picture of their status in Republic City--a picture that is never fully acknowledged by its characters.  Benders seem to hold a disproportionate amount of power and influence in Republic City's government--all of the city's police force are earthbenders, for example, and though it's not clear whether the city's ruling council is also made up solely of benders, when Tarrlok suggests that non-benders be subject to a curfew, only Tenzin objects.  In an early episode, Tarrlok sends Korra on a raid on what he terms an Equalist stronghold, but what she finds when she gets there is a dojo in which non-benders are practicing chi-blocking.  Given that by this point we've learned that both Mako and Bolin's parents and Asami's mother were killed by firebender criminals, and that when Korra arrives in the city she sees bender gangsters extorting protection money from a shopkeeper, it doesn't seem unreasonable for non-benders to want to learn how to protect themselves, but the possibility that chi-blocking is not an indicator of evil is never entertained by the characters--or indeed the show, which quickly reveals that the people at the dojo are indeed followers of Amon.  Most damning is the simple fact that Amon amasses huge numbers of followers--he has hundreds of henchmen to do his bidding, and great crowds cheer for him in the street--a man who has terrorized their city and promised to hunt down and mutilate their fellow citizens.  When Korra attacks him, they turn on her, and only reject Amon once they learn that he's lied to them and is, in fact, a bender himself.  Unless we assume that the people of Republic City are credulous dupes, we have to choose between two equally unpleasant interpretations: either the city's citizens are evil, eager to turn on those whose powers they resent like a crowd of non-mutants on X-Men, or they have a genuine grievance that only Amon is addressing, and which he has inflamed into hatred and violence.  Either way, defeating Amon doesn't even come close to addressing the problem, something that is ignored by the season's triumphant ending.

There's a sense that Korra's writers are aware of the corner they've painted themselves into, because a lot of the season is dedicated to shifting the goalposts of their argument.  At the end of the season, Korra is told that Amon "truly believes bending is the source of all evil in the world."  This echoes with the fact that, though Amon and his followers frequently use the language of oppression and tyranny when discussing bending, the examples they cite of benders' perfidy are not of prejudice or systemic inequality, but of individual cases of violence.  In their final confrontation, Asami's father tells her that she is "aiding the very people who took your mother away," to which she replies "You don't feel love for Mom anymore.  You're too full of hatred."  In other words, we're in X-Men territory--benders are hated and feared not because of what they've done, but because of what they could do, and resentment of them is a prejudice that blames an entire group for the actions of some of its members.  But while the X-Men model works when the superpowered individuals are a beleaguered minority group that has only begun to emerge into the public consciousness, it's less persuasive when they're a well-known phenomenon that has been folded into every aspect of civic and economic life, and whose members hold key positions in society.  There needs to be some work explaining how benders, through their own actions or as a result of unrelated social change, have lost the public trust, and this isn't something the show does--the suggestion that technology is edging out the need for bending, for example, is something that is only faintly present in the season's early episodes, and then abandoned entirely, and though instances of bending violence are mentioned repeatedly, at no point do either the show or the characters consider that bending and criminality might have become linked in the public consciousness.  Similarly, around the middle of the season the writers try to make up for the absence of any indication that non-benders are oppressed by having Tarrlok initiate his restrictive policies.  "You're doing exactly what Amon says is wrong with benders," Korra tells him, implying that until those policies had been enacted, Amon had been wrong.  But just as Amon couldn't have done all the damage he did on his own, without supporters and people who believed in what he was preaching, Tarrlok can't criminalize non-benders without at least the acquiescence of the city's power structures and its bender citizens--an acquiescence that, in itself, indicates a problem that the show won't face up to.

It's a sad thing to say, but it feels as if, by aiming at a more mature tone and subject matter than Avatar's, The Legend of Korra throws its inherent immaturity into sharper relief.  When it comes down to it, the show isn't willing to say that terrorists are just people like you and me, whose abhorrent actions might be rooted in legitimate grievances, or that large-scale, violent persecution of minority groups can only be achieved through at least the tacit approval of most of the people, not just the ones wearing scary uniforms.  You could argue that that's too heavy a moral for a children's show, but another way of looking at it is that for a story aimed at young people to stop short of this moral--to create a world in which people cry persecution merely because they resent the dominant elite, and social unrest is the work of supervillains and their armies of masked henchmen--is to send a very irresponsible message.  Supervillains like Amon and Tarrlok would have worked in Avatar (in fact, like Avatar, Korra ends by humanizing both characters and explaining, if not justifying, their choices), which for all its intelligence and complexity never sought to escape the conventions of epic fantasy.  Korra's ambitions are higher, but it fails to achieve them and neglects its characters and story to boot.  I still recommend Avatar to just about anyone who is looking for a fun, smart, compelling fantasy story they can be sucked into, but if you're looking to get into the Avatar universe, start with the original (and give the first season at least until its midpoint), and leave Korra until you know you've been won over.

Prometheus

There are a lot of things I like about online fandom, but one of its traits that gives me pause is the speed with which it forms an overwhelming, inescapable consensus about certain pop culture artifacts.  Not to keep beating a much-too-lively horse, but this strikes me as a much bigger problem than the dreaded spoiler.  It's one thing to know what's going to happen in a movie, but quite another to know how you're expected to react to those events--to know that The Avengers has been judged the greatest thing since sliced bread, or that Prometheus, Ridley Scott's prequel-but-not-really-but-actually-yes to Alien, is generally reviled.  Which is not to say that I disagree with the fannish consensus about Prometheus, which is indeed a terrible, terrible film.  But I am a bit troubled by the fact that when I settled into my seat at the movie theater on Saturday, a mere week after Prometheus's release and without having gone to great lengths to take the temperature of fandom regarding it, I already had no expectation of enjoying it.  Instead, the question foremost in my mind was, what could possibly be so bad about this movie to justify not just disappointment or negativity, but the palpable sense of outrage that has tinged the conversation surrounding the film? 

Having watched the film, I'm not sure I'm much closer to an answer.  Again, I think Prometheus is a terrible, terrible film--messily plotted, peopled with unpleasant characters whose decisions one can only explain through a catastrophic combination of idiocy, lack of professionalism, and sociopathic tendencies, and littered with half a dozen themes, character arcs, and throughlines, none of which come to any sort of fruition, and most of which work at cross-purposes to one another.  Plus, there are hardly any scary bits, and no action scenes to speak of.  I'm just not sure that it's quite so terrible as to justify the opprobrium that has been heaped upon it, to the extent that I'm wondering if there isn't a reverse Avengers affect in play.  I liked The Avengers, but couldn't quite understand why it aroused such extreme love in large portions of fandom, and by the same token I'm having trouble understanding why Prometheus, terrible as it is, is the subject of so much outrage.  Were people expecting great things from Ridley Scott?  The man hasn't directed a truly excellent film since Blade Runner.  Are fans upset at the damage that Prometheus does to the Alien franchise?  You'd think that a fandom that has managed to reason away of existence both of the Alien vs. Predator movies, Alien: Resurrection, and, in the case of certain purists, Alien³, would have no trouble doing the same to this movie.  I can see how science fiction fans, in particular, would be upset at Prometheus's anti-science, anti-evolution bent--the titular ship embarks on its ill-fated journey to the alien moon LV-223 because our heroine, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), believes it to be the home of aliens whom she has dubbed The Engineers, who created the human race.  When it's pointed out to her that she hasn't got a shred of scientific proof for this theory, Shaw simply replies that it's what she chooses to believe.  Not a very compelling audience identification figure for science fiction fans, then, especially as in her zeal to prove her theory--which is explicitly likened, on several occasions, to religious fervor, not least in the way that several characters restate Shaw's mission as the quest to meet her makers--Shaw smugly ignores every common-sense safety precaution and research protocol, and plays a substantial part in bringing about the disaster that kills almost all of the Prometheus's crew (in fairness, Shaw is matched for recklessness and lack of professionalism by pretty much every other character in the movie, but she's the one we're meant to identify with).

On the other hand, science fiction film and TV have been moving away from scientific rationalism and towards a vague sort of deism for the better part of a decade, and Prometheus's writer, Damon Lindelof, was one of the standard bearers of that movement in his work on Lost, so it can hardly come as a surprise that Prometheus continues that trend, especially as the film's trailers all but laid out its Von Däniken-inspired plot.  So while I can see how fans might be disappointed by the film's anti-science stance--which is anyway somewhat ameliorated by the revelation that though Shaw is right about the Engineers, they are far from benevolent parents, and in fact created the organism that would go on to evolve into the original films' Alien in order to unleash it on Earth and destroy their creations--I'm not sure that it on its own justifies the vehemence of the negative reaction the film has received. 

But that, I think, is a clue to the answer I'm looking for.  Taken on their own, none of Prometheus's flaws, serious as they are, justify the revulsion it's elicited, but taken together?  Just about the only thing that works in the film are its visuals, which combine H.R. Giger's by-now iconic and still wonderfully creepy designs for the alien ship with CGI and some clever interface design, creating an environment that is both lived-in and foreign, and culminating in one of the film's two truly successful scenes, in which the android David (Michael Fassbender), activates the control room on the alien ship that Prometheus finds, and becomes the focal point of a symphony of holographic astronavigation information.  If you take just about any other approach to the film, though, you'll fall flat.  Want to learn where the Aliens came from?  Prometheus does contain answers, some silly--the elephant-like head of the alien in the control chair in the original film turns out to have been a helmet concealing a humanoid face, which no one on the Nostromo noticed--and some interesting--after four films in which the Weyland-Yutani Corporation repeatedly tries to get its hands on the Aliens in order to use them as weapons, it's darkly funny to discover that the Engineers created them for precisely the same reason (and it's somewhat to the film's credit that we don't find out the Engineers' reason for wanting us dead is that humanity is just so awful, an infuriatingly supercilious conclusion that too many science fiction stories are happy to plump for--though it seems that Scott's original vision may have included this wrinkle, and that the film can still be read as saying this)--but there's a gap between the film's ending and Alien's beginning that seems hard to bridge, and also unnecessary.  Want to find the answer to Shaw's questions about the origin of the human race?  The film leaves them, and her subsequent desire to know why the Engineers decided to destroy humanity, completely unresolved.  (There's a strong sense that Prometheus's ending is intended to tease a sequel, but given the film's catastrophic box office results that is now mercifully unlikely.)

The film's themes fare no better.  Want to find out more about David, whose nature the film repeatedly puzzles over even as it shows him alternately saving the crew's lives and endangering them, for no reason in either case?  These contradictory actions, and David's own expressions of mingled fascination and revulsion towards humanity, never cohere into a comprehensible character, and David's motivations, sanity, and personality remain opaque all the way to the credits, in no small part because after playing a major, plot-advancing role in the film's first two acts, he is unceremoniously sidelined for its denouement.  Want some more development of the previous films' themes of gender and sex?  For the most part, Prometheus leaves this aspect of the franchise alone.  The Engineers are all male, but nothing is made of this, and though the film's mid-segment seems suddenly to remember that pregnancy, motherhood, and the appropriation of both by a masculine power structure are important themes in the franchise, its handling of them is at once over the top and perfunctory--no sooner have we learned that Shaw is infertile than she turns out to be pregnant with a proto-alien and is sedated by David (who was creepily sort-of lusting after her in the film's early scenes), then breaks free and seeks her own solution to the problem.  This leads to the film's other truly successful scene, in which a naked Shaw locks herself in an auto-surgery unit and watches, fully conscious, as she is cut open and the proto-alien is removed from her body, and then must escape from the unit as it hisses, spits, and tries to capture her.  As effective as this scene is, however, it's also terribly broad, taking an already not very subtle theme and intensifying it to the point that it seems almost like self-parody (the same is true of a later scene in which the last surviving Engineer is vanquished by Shaw's now fully-grown "baby"--his death is so blatantly meant to recall sex, or rape, that the power of the correlation is complete denuded).  More importantly, it's an interlude that seems almost entirely disconnected from the rest of the film, to the extent that when a bloody and traumatized Shaw wanders into an inhabited part of the ship, she's met only with puzzled stares, because everyone else has been going about their business and hadn't even realized that something bad was happening to her.

In other words, pretty much everyone who watches Prometheus will find something about it that they dislike intensely, to the point that it ruins the film for them, and when those individual dislikes are fed into each other in fandom's crucible, the result is a critical mass of hate.  For me, Prometheus's core flaw is the way that the film's self-conscious and over-obvious attempts to recall Alien keep running up--and even playing up--Lindelof's obvious incomprehension of what made Alien work.  Prometheus opens on the image of a ship in space, and with an opening crawl that introduces that ship and its complement, and ends with the recorded message of that ship's sole survivor, an almost word-for-word recreation of Ripley's final message from Alien.  It has a female lead, and a menacing android character.  There is a scene in which a character refuses to let crewmembers aboard the ship because one of them is infected with an alien pathogen, and a false bottom ending in which our heroine arrives at the seeming safety of an escape pod only to find an Alien waiting there for her.  But everything is backwards, reversing what was interesting and appealing about the original film.  Shaw, as I've already said, is an unappealing character, absorbed with her quest to the exclusion of almost all other considerations until the awfulness of what she's discovered become inescapable (in other words, until it kills her boyfriend and impregnates her).  She seems more like Aliens's Burke than a Ripley.  The character who tries to stop the infected person from coming aboard is actually the one signposted throughout most of the film as a villain--Weyland Corporation's on-board representative, Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron).  Despite which, she is the closest the film comes to a Riply character, being the only member of the crew to reject the fool's errand that her company has embarked upon, and hoping--as Ripley does in Aliens--that the expedition will be for naught.  Vickers is no heroine--she's infected with the same stupidity as the rest of the cast, and is in addition selfish and craven, lacking Ripley's compassion and moral authority (for those traits, we turn to Idris Elba's Captain Janek, who would be a shoe-in for the film's Ripley if he weren't even stupider than Shaw, massively underserved by the plot, and also a man)--but she's the only one with enough common sense to keep the infection off the ship (later, when she's off the bridge, Janek simply lets an infected--and, as he should well know, long dead--crewman on board, which dooms most of the crew) and the only one who distrusts David from the start, which makes her the easiest character in the film to sympathize with.  Unfortunately, the film ends by dropping a house--or rather a spaceship--on Vickers's head, as if to make it clear which of its final girls we're meant to root for.

Perhaps what's most annoying about the way that Prometheus misapprehends Alien is the use it makes of the Weyland Corporation.  In the Alien films, Weyland-Yutani was more of a villain than the Alien.  As Genevieve Valentine explains in her recent, excellent essay, the franchise begins because the corporation has embedded, deep within the computers of all its ships, a directive that declares its employees expendable in the face of the opportunity to capture an Alien specimen.  The fact that she is expendable is what dogs and dooms Ripley--and her crewmates, and the colonists of LV-426, and the marines who accompany Ripley there, and the prisoners on Fiorina 161--not the Alien, and even more than it, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation is faceless, inhuman, and ultimately unbeatable (there will always be more corporate officers, after all--you feed a Burke to the Alien, and a Bishop turns up to replace him).  In Prometheus, Weyland's impersonal, coldly calculating nature is replaced with a boatload of daddy issues.  The mission to LV-223 is a spiritual quest that the fiscal-minded Vickers considers a waste of time and manpower, and as we discover around the film's midpoint, its actual purpose is to bring the dying Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce under a ton of old age makeup) to beg for immortality from the Engineers.  Vickers, who turns out to be Weyland's daughter, and David, who calls Weyland "father," are both desperate for his approval and for the freedom that his death will grant them, which echoes in both the film's title and the discovery that humanity's parents have turned upon it and must be murdered lest they murder us.  As overheated as this theme is, what makes it even worse is how completely it defangs the franchise's most terrifying villain.

The story we've been told about Prometheus's inception is that it was originally envisioned as a prequel to Alien, then spun off into its own story, and then brought back to the franchise, but to me it feels that the truth must be the other way around--that the film was first an original story, and only then folded, rather inexpertly, into the Alien franchise, the joints and fittings still showing quite clearly.  Maybe that's why, despite its too-obvious echoing of the original film, Prometheus feels less like an homage to Alien, and more like a dark retelling of 2001: A Space Odyssey.  The imagery of the film's opening scene--a shot of the Earth illuminated from behind by the sun--recalls 2001 so strongly that it is almost unnecessary to go on and see an Engineer kill himself--and possibly jump-start human evolution--at some distant point in our past.  David even makes more sense as HAL in android form--unlike Alien's Ash he, after all, has no directive to cause mayhem, but does so for his own inscrutable, perhaps insane reasons.  And, of course, the film's preoccupation with meeting aliens who uplifted humanity and learning their purpose for us echos with 2001 and 2010.  Unfortunately, reading Prometheus as a twisted retelling of 2001 is just as unsatisfying an approach as any other we might take towards the film.  The revelation that our alien parents are villains is trite, and tritely handled, and despite a few exceptions like David's scene in the control room (and despite the soundtrack breaking out the classical music at the slightest provocation) Prometheus doesn't even approach 2001's immersive audio-visual majesty.  Prometheus may not be the worst movie ever, and may not deserve the intensity of the scorn heaped upon it by fandom, but it is a waste--of money, talent, and not one but two iconic science fiction film franchises.  That, maybe, is something worth getting worked up over.