Even if we're not quite there, it feels as if we're on the verge of a golden age for televised novel adaptations. For years, irate book fans responded to every bowdlerized, incoherent film adaptation of their favorite works by claiming that TV was the natural medium of book adaptations--the famous "miniseries on HBO" meme, which keeps cropping up despite the fact that there are so many other channels and content venues producing good material (and that HBO doesn't actually make that many miniseries). But unlike British TV, which has never met a bestselling or classic novel it couldn't turn into a six-part mini, American TV has been slow to catch up, only reaching for novels as its source material if it could wring them of everything but their basic concept and turn them into a procedural. Slowly but surely, however, this seems to be changing. True Blood blazed the trail, and Game of Thrones's mega-success proved that there was gold in them thar books, and now all of a sudden we've got forthcoming series based on James S.A. Corey's Expanse series, on Neil Gaiman's American Gods and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake trilogy, and four John Scalzi novels optioned for television. What's interesting is how often these adaptations work as a means of bringing genre to a television market that's normally averse to it, whether it's urban fantasy, epic fantasy, science fiction, or YA (on shows like The Vampire Diaries and Pretty Little Liars). You could even claim True Detective as a not-so-distant outlier to this trend, since the show's first season was written by a novelist and shares many of the themes of his novels, and carried the overt influences of several horror writers.
And now, with Starz's Outlander, whose first season went on hiatus last week, we have what might be the first Romance television series on a general-interest channel. Based on the series of novels by Diana Gabaldon, Outlander is the story of Claire Randall (Caitriona Balfe), an English battlefield nurse who, in 1945, takes a second honeymoon in Scotland with her husband Frank (Tobias Menzies), as a way of reconnecting after the long separation of the war. While exploring some standing stones said to possess mystical properties, Claire is transported to 1743, to the middle of a pitched battle between the local Scottish landowners and the forces of the English king. Brought to the castle of the local laird, Colum MacKenzie (Gary Lewis), Claire soon makes herself so useful with her advanced medical knowledge that he refuses to allow her to leave, and his brother Dougal (Graham McTavish) involves her in his plot to raise money for a rebellion on behalf of the Stuart dynasty. Claire also catches the eye of Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan), a dreamy fugitive from English justice, and of Black Jack Randall (Menzies again), her husband's sadistic ancestor, an officer in the King's forces.
It's important, when watching Outlander, to take it on its own terms. As science fiction fans, for example, we might expect the series to explore the implications of its central conceit, the fact that Claire has traveled through time. Can she, for example, change the future? And if so, should she--we've already, for example, seen Frank, a historian, tell Claire that Dougal's rebellion is doomed to failure, and that in a few years the clans will lose a disastrous battle that will effectively spell the end for Scottish self-rule, so should Claire try to save her new friends from this fate? Outlander seems to have no interest in these questions. The time travel McGuffin is used to bring Claire to the past (and will presumably be used to return her to her own time when the story is over), but it isn't discussed when she's there. We're apparently not meant to wonder why Claire, in particular, was chosen for this adventure, or how the magic of the stones works. Time travel jumpstarts the story, but isn't part of it.
Similarly, if you're looking for a serious handling of the show's historical setting, Outlander is not for you. The show is hopelessly caught up in a romanticized, Braveheart-esque conception of the Scottish-English dispute, seeing the former as brave freedom-fighters--not aristocrats trying to enthrone a sympathetic king--and depicting the latter as sadistic colonizers for whom no atrocity against the local population is too heinous (there has been a semi-serious suggestion that the reason the show hasn't yet been purchased by a UK TV channel was so as not to inflame Scottish nationalistic feeling before last month's independence referendum).
What Outlander is, undeniably and unabashedly, is a work of genre romance--the story of a woman's overwrought, melodramatic journey towards passion in the arms of a rugged, adoring man. This is a series that dedicates an entire episode to Claire and Jamie's wedding (they have been forced to marry in order to protect Claire from Black Jack, a classic romance trope), and specifically their wedding night. The tropes of the romance genre--the marriage of convenience that leads to real passion, the men who all fall in immediate lust with our heroine, the frequent threats to her wellbeing from which she's rescued by her handsome love interest--are what drives Outlander's plot, and the most important character arc for Claire is the realization that she is in love with two men, which will undoubtedly lead up to an agonizing choice between staying in the past with Jamie and returning to the present and Frank.
It should be said that, as a romance, Outlander has some, or rather two, crucial problems. They are: Frank and Jamie. Menzies has always been an excellent performer, and when Outlander gives him the opportunity he invariably steals the show. He's a lot of fun as Black Jack Randall, and the only actor who manages to make a real, three-dimensional person out of the rather overheated, cliché-ridden dialogue given to the 18th century characters--a scene in the season's sixth episode, "The Garrison Commander," in which he reminisces about flogging a Scottish criminal (who is, of course, Jamie) with mingled disgust and excitement almost instantly makes him the series's most magnetic character. But while the television medium allows Outlander to keep Menzies on our screens in a double role, his skills as an actor mean that we're never tempted to mistake Black Jack for Frank, nor does Claire's love for her husband infect her disgust at his ancestor. This means that Frank remains more an idea than a person, and more importantly, that his relationship with Claire never leaps off the screen in a way that justifies Claire's devotion to him. Though the show deviates from the book by showing us flashbacks of Frank and Claire's relationship, and returning to 1945 to explore his growing despair as he searches for her, in none of these scenes do the actors have enough chemistry to convince us that we're seeing a great love.
Heughan, meanwhile, has great chemistry with Balfe, and not much else. Jamie is meant to be young (I think, perhaps, a bit younger than the actor playing him, and certainly younger than Claire, though Heughan and Balfe are only a year apart) and inexperienced--the show makes much of the fact that he's a virgin who needs Claire's guidance in the bedroom. But even taking that into account, the character is surprisingly blank. There doesn't seem to be much between him and Claire except attraction and his puppyish devotion to her--which is not nothing, of course, but also not a love story for the ages.
What makes Outlander work despite--or perhaps even because of--the thinness of its two love interests is Claire herself. Genre romance, after all, is often less a love story between two equally complex people as it is the story of the gratification of its heroine's desires. That Frank and Jamie's devotion to Claire isn't terribly convincing isn't a flaw in the show because they are not the point of the story, she is. And Claire herself is an engaging, frequently complex and occasionally unlikable figure. She's stubborn, a little overfond of drink, and frequently too pleased with her own cleverness. She is also, however, intelligent, inquisitive, and game for pretty much everything (something that I wish the show made more of is the fact that Claire has just come back from war--where, incidentally, she saw death on a scale that would make any of the manly warriors around her quake in their boots--and would thus be a great deal more accustomed to hardship and sudden changes in her circumstances than just your average 20th century woman). Outlander is the story is Claire plowing through the obstacles set before her--Colum's imprisonment of her, Dougal's conviction that she is a spy for the English, Black Jack's conviction that she is a spy for the Scots, her own growing attachment to Jamie--in her efforts to get back to the standing stones and (as she believes) her own time. That she frequently falls flat on her face due to her limited power and even more limited understanding of the situation she's landed in is what makes her human. That she immediately picks herself up and tries again is what makes her heroic, and her story worth watching.
It also may be why Outlander has been so quickly hailed, by so many TV critics, as a work of feminist storytelling. To be sure, there aren't so many stories about women on our screens that a new one isn't worth celebrating, and especially one that is so proud of its genre, and of its preoccupation with female desire and the female gaze. Much has been made of the fact that Claire enjoys sex and has an active sex-drive, and is unabashed about instructing her lovers in how best to please her (a scene in the premiere episode in which she requests and receives oral sex from Frank has been particularly celebrated, and though I think this is less unusual than some commentators seems to believe--The Good Wife did it several years ago--it's certainly not commonplace). Claire's own desire is reflected in the show's shooting, and in the way it stages its love interests, Jamie especially, in a way that allows her, and the audience, to appreciate their physique. That episode-long wedding night is quite clearly designed to be erotic to female viewers (or, perhaps, to viewers who are attracted to men), with many lingering shots of Jamie's nakedness, and of Claire's pleasure in looking at and having him.
This is all, obviously, both admirable and sadly rare, and I agree that Outlander should be lauded for its emphasis in this arena. But still I balk at calling the show feminist and am surprised that it has been embraced as such. Or, to be more precise, Outlander's feminism seems to me like what I thought feminism was when I was a young teen (which is, coincidentally or not, around the time that the books were first appearing)--the means for the self-actualization of a single, usually quite privileged, woman. The stories I read at that age were usually about a single, remarkable girl who bucked the insistence that she couldn't do things because of her gender, and whose specialness was often signified by a disdain for girly things such as makeup or sighing over boys. Her success was achieved not by toppling the system that discriminated against her, but by being the exception to that rule, gaining the admiration of men and the love of one particularly hunky and special one. Outlander is not quite that egregious--Claire does form relationships with women (though these mostly disappear after the series's first few episodes), and as noted, the show's emphasis is on the girly subject of romance--but it is nevertheless the story of a woman who is unique, who wins love and respect by not being like those other girls.
Take, for example, the series's disinterest in exploring its premise. For a long while, I couldn't understand why time travel was even necessary to the story. When Claire arrives at Castle Leoch, she makes up a story about being an English widow who has lost her belongings and servants, but this could just as easily have been the truth. There's nothing in Claire's story--not her knowledge of medicinal plants, nor the fact that she has a living husband--that couldn't have worked just as well if she were not a woman out of time. As the season draws on, it becomes clear that Outlander is using Claire's temporal displacement as an explanation for her independence, and unwillingness to be governed be the men around her. Claire, we're told, is a "modern" woman, and thus fundamentally different from her foremothers--"Welcome to the 20th century!" she brightly tells Frank when he marvels at the fact that she's going off to the front while he, an intelligence officer, is staying behind in the relative safety of London. This is not an unusual approach for the kind of feminist fiction I read as a girl, and it's one that treats feminism as purely an individual process, not a reaction against social forces--as if, in the 18th century, there were no women who were strong-willed and determined to be treated with respect, and as if the only thing a woman who did possess those qualities needed to do in order to be given her equal rights in this period was to demand them. (It's interesting to compare Outlander with Octavia Butler's novel Kindred, another story about a woman who is whisked to the past, and an uncomfortable romantic relationship, by a time travel McGuffin. Like Claire, Kindred's Dana is strong and keenly aware of her own worth, but these traits do nothing to protect her when she finds herself a black woman in the slave-holding, antebellum South. The system that perceives her as less than human doesn't care that Dana disagrees, and rather than bending that system to her will, Dana is so oppressed by its dehumanization of her that she begins to buy into it.)
One of the effects of being so caught up in second-wave ideas of what constitutes feminism is that Outlander has almost zero intersectional awareness. So Claire is insistent on being treated with respect despite her gender, but has no problem with being waited on hand and foot by other, lower-class women. Admittedly, this is a pitfall that a woman from 1945--even a feminist--would be likely to fall into, but the show seems equally unconcerned with these women, depicting them as happy servants, who genuinely have no greater concerns in life than to worry about Claire's drama. Claire thoughtlessly expects to be treated like a lady, and the narrative so thoroughly shares that assumption that when she momentarily steps down from that role and joins a group of village women who are beating wool, it's treated as a lark, a bit of noblesse oblige, rather than the reality of life for most women around Claire, and something that could have easily been her lot too.
One of the interesting ways in which Outlander expresses its blindness towards class is Claire's clothing. She arrives in Castle Leoch in a ragged (and period-inappropriate) dress, and is immediately given something to wear by the kindly, maternal housekeeper Mrs. Fitzgibbons (Annette Badland). But as her stay in the castle draws on, Claire's dresses grow finer and finer, and are accessorized with jewelry. Another story might have made something of this point--that Colum, eager to make Claire forget that she is a prisoner, was showering her with fine gowns and jewelry, thus precipitating a conflict between a thoroughly understandable love of nice things (especially for a nurse who has spent five years in blood-soaked uniforms), and Claire's desire not to become too comfortable in captivity. But the kind of story that Outlander is can't allow its heroine to be vain, or to care about pretty dresses--that's the kind of girly affectation that she's supposed to be better than. So the fact Claire walks around in fur-trimmed cloaks is treated as something that just happens, rather than a function of her newfound social class. (Another interesting point of comparison here is The Hunger Games, which in many ways is a modernization of the kind of Special Girl stories I read as a girl. Like Claire and the heroines of those stories, Katniss is beautiful but too sensible to care about her beauty, but unlike Gabaldon, Suzanne Collins doesn't pretend that that beauty is something that just occurs. Attention is paid to the teams of stylists who work to make Katniss stunning, to the political implications of allowing them to make her over, and to the statements they and she make with their fashion choices.)
But perhaps the biggest problem I have with dubbing Outlander a feminist show is the simple fact that, in a mere eight episodes, it has unseated all other claimants--including Game of Thrones, the previous and seemingly unbeatable champion--for the title of the rapeyest show on TV. There is scarcely a single episode in the show's already-screened half-season in which Claire is not subjected to some form of sexual violence, and more often than not these are brutal, graphic attempted rapes. Very nearly the first thing that happens to her in the 18th century is that Black Jack tries to rapes her, and the fall season ended with him tearing her clothes off and bending her over a table, only for Jamie to charge to her rescue. In the interim, Claire suffers sexual violence from people as disparate as Dougal (who veers from wanting to kill her, to trying to rape her, to becoming her ally, to developing romantic feelings for her), random men at Castle Leoch, and deserting English soldiers, not to mention lots of lewd comments and sexual harassment from the show's minor (and generally positive) characters.
On its own, this isn't necessarily a bad thing (unless you're sensitive to graphic depictions of sexual violence, in which case stay the hell away from this show). I don't want to say that Outlander's depiction of 18th century Scotland as a rape free-for-all is realistic, because I have no way of knowing if that's true and anyway historical realism isn't this show's primary concern. But the show does take the prevalence of sexual violence, and the culture that these imply, a lot more seriously than other rape-happy entertainments. It allows Claire to be angry about what happened to her and to insist on its illegitimacy, and forces the men around her--who don't approve of rape but clearly don't think that preventing it should be their top priority--to take a side on the matter. When Jamie tells Claire, in the second episode, that no harm will come to her so long as she's around him, she immediately asks "What about when you're not around?" reminding him and us that what's important here is her safety, not his machismo.
That attitude fades, however, as the season draws on and as rape starts being used not as a way of teaching us about Claire, but as a way of putting her and Jamie together, and making him look good. In the fifth episode, "Rent," Claire finds Jamie sleeping outside her room in an inn where they're been collecting taxes for Colum. He explains that the men downstairs have become rambunctious and he was worried that they'd come up to Claire's room. Most women would consider "there was a non-zero probability that you'd be gang-raped tonight" a major turn-off, but Claire, and the episode's, focus is not on how horrible this situation is, but on how chivalrous Jamie is being in protecting Claire from it. By the season's end, in which the horrifying brutality of Black Jack's final attack seems to exist solely to make Jamie look like more of a hero when he sweeps in and stops it, it's clear that rape, and being rescued from it, is practically a form of foreplay for these two. Nor is Claire ever allowed to experience trauma or anxiety from her repeated assaults. On the one occasion that she reacts like a normal person to almost being raped, wandering around in torn clothes and muttering to herself immediately after the attack, and then withdrawing emotionally from Jamie and treating him with abruptness, we're told that the real reason she's angry isn't that she's once again very nearly been violated, but having allowed herself to become comfortable in the past, forgetting her mission to get back to Frank.
Finally, there is something increasingly odd and disturbing about how often Claire is almost raped. I don't mean to say this as a complaint, and I'm certainly not wishing for the deed to be done. But every time that Claire ends up on her back with her clothes torn, only to be saved before penetration, only serves to reinforce the feeling that Outlander cares about rape only inasmuch as it increases the drama of Claire's story, but that actually raping her would make her ineligible to be its heroine. That impression is reinforced by the fact that the only victim of completed rape in the series's--Jamie's sister, who lets Black Jack have his way with her to keep him from killing her brother--is never seen or heard about after her assault. It's one thing to say--as Outlander does, repeatedly--that rape is horrible. It's quite another to acknowledge that women can go on with their lives after being raped, and that rape can be only a part of their story, and this Outlander does not seem willing to do.
I feel a little embarrassed to come to the end of this litany of faults and admit that, despite all of them, I still find Outlander strangely watchable and appealing. A lot of this is down to Claire herself, who for all that she is a romance heroine in a romance story, is still an appealing, human figure. Much like Game of Thrones, there's a lot of force in simply wanting to know what happens next in her story, even if the characters and setting around her are less interesting. And then there's the simple fact that Outlander is unique--a story about a woman that is both an adventure and a romance, and also a bit of pulpy fun that you don't have to take too seriously. If TV executives take from the show's success the lesson that female-led stories, and romances, are worth making, then maybe the show's flaws are worth forgiving. But I hope that the next Outlander--maybe the next book adaptation about a woman--has a broader sense of what it means to be feminist. That isn't simply the story of a woman, but the story of women.
Thursday, October 09, 2014
Sunday, September 28, 2014
Thoughts on the New TV Season, 2014 Edition
Well, here we are again. As has become traditional, the US networks scheduled a boatload of new shows for the week of Rosh HaShana (happy 5775 to those of you celebrating!), which is very convenient as it gave me some time to wade through the deluge. As usual, there are some shows I just don't have much to say about--I don't need several hundred words to say that Scorpion is awful and dumb, and as compelling and propulsive as the pilot of How to Get Away With Murder was, there isn't much to say about that show yet, and probably won't be until it starts developing its characters and themes as well as its plot--and a few that have already got me thinking. Here are my thoughts on the fall's first batch of new shows.
- Forever - ABC's new procedural wants so desperately to be this year's Elementary that it's almost funny. Like the surprisingly successful Holmes adaptation, it centers around an Englishman in New York, who has remarkable deductive abilities and a somewhat quirky and macabre worldview, and who teams up with the police, and a female partner, to solve crime. The two shows even have virtually identical title cards and musical cues. What sets Forever apart from its obvious inspiration (though not from a million vampire shows that preceded it) is that its hero, Henry Morgan (Ioan Gruffudd) is immortal, for reasons that he himself doesn't understand. Whenever he dies, Henry reappears, naked, in the nearest body of water--a detail that is presumably linked to his original death, which occurred while trying to protect a sick slave from being murdered on the passage from Africa (I'm reserving judgment on this backstory, since the show is already quite flashback-heavy and, I suspect, will deliver more details about what brought Henry to the ship and what he thought he would find there; but obviously this is a premise that has the potential to be horribly racist in about twelve different ways).
The show's first two episodes have already started hinting at a mythology--most intriguingly, Henry has begun receiving phone calls from another immortal, who claims to be thousands of years old to Henry's mere 200. But so far Forever doesn't seem terribly interested in exploring the meaning and effects of immortality in any but the most superficial of ways. It's interesting, for example, to hear Henry explain what the worst ways to die are, or to discover that his sole confidante, played by Judd Hirsch, is actually his adopted son, but so far there's been no exploration of Henry's attitude towards death, the state rather than the means of getting to it, and his eagerness to investigate and solve murders starts to seem a little odd when you consider that this is a man who has seen generations come and go and might be expected to be a little cavalier about people being prematurely shuffled off this mortal coil. In the series's second episode, the police gun down a young man who is holding Henry at knifepoint, and there's no discussion of whether he should feel guilt or pity, given that he was never in any real danger. Even more frustrating, given that Forever wants to be Elementary so badly, is its failure to introduce a Joan Watson character, someone who can puncture Henry's arrogance and get at his humanity. Instead, all the cops on the show--including the female lead and obvious future love interest (Alana De La Garza)--are awed by Henry and constantly left in the dust by his intelligence and strange way of looking at the world. What keeps Forever going despite these flaws (and despite featuring some awful dialogue and even more awful voiceovers) is Gruffudd himself, who brings so much energy and charm to the role of Henry. Even if you don't quite buy that he's lived through two of the most turbulent centuries of human history, you want to keep watching him to see what will happen next. If Forever can up its game to match his performance, it might become something worth watching.
- Gotham - I had such low expectations from this pilot that I almost didn't watch it at all. I'm sick and tired of the prequel craze (and especially a prequel for a comics universe in which I have only a glancing familiarity, so that a lot of the names dropped by a show like Gotham go over my head), but even more than that, I'm less and less interested in Batman, the character and the concept. A show dedicated to demonstrating how crime-ridden and corrupt Gotham is, so as to make the audience long for the day when a caped crusader can clean up its streets, didn't strike me as a good use of my time. But though the Gotham pilot has its moments of reveling in the depravity of Gotham's dirty streets (and in the brutality that the police exercise in response to it), it ended up suggesting a more interesting, more compelling story. A lot of this is down to the cast--casting Ben McKenzie and Donal Logue as rookie detective Jim Gordon and his shady mentor Harvey Bullock is already overpowering the show's roster quite a bit, especially compared to other superhero series, but add Sean Pertwee and Jada Pinkett Smith in recurring roles and you've got a show that looks like it's aiming as much for the prestige market (or for the seriousness of films like Nolan's Batman trilogy) as comic book fans. McKenzie is particularly good in the tricky role of the straight-shooting, slightly naive cop who is being urged to compromise his principles, managing to imbue a familiar character type with enough gravitas to make us believe him when he vows to clean up Gotham's streets. But what makes the Gotham pilot truly compelling is how it weaves a web of connections between its secondary and minor characters that makes its titular city feel alive and interesting (particularly intriguing was the revelation of a romantic connection between Renee Montoya and the future Barbara Gordon, or teenage pickpocket Selina Kyle witnessing the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne). It's these connections--and the strong acting the gives them life--that makes Gotham intriguing, for the chance to explore the city that gives the series its title, even if we know that the premise of the Batman universe means that Jim Gordon's promise to clean it up can never be fulfilled.
All that said, I can't help but wonder if the prequel approach doesn't serve to expose the flaws in the Batman universe in a way that Gotham can't, by its very nature, address. Prequels, by definition, are driven by inevitability--we know that future heroes and villains will one day take up those mantles, even if we might want them not to (it was arguably one of Smallville's core flaws that it had no idea how to resolve the problem of having created its most compelling character in the young Lex Luthor). But telling a story about a crime-ridden city means discussing inevitability of a very different sort. In the pilot, Gordon encounters a child named Ivy Pepper, whose father is an abusive small-time crook who is framed and murdered by the police, more or less in front of his daughter. It feels fairly obvious that a child who starts from those sorry circumstances will not end up living a productive, law-abiding life, but in this particular case we know that this is a certainty, and that this child will grow up to become the villain Poison Ivy. It's hard to know how to react to this knowledge. If Gotham were a straight-up crime drama we would treat Ivy's story as a tragedy, an example of the vicious cycle of abuse, neglect, and criminality. But because of the show's comics roots, what we're actually meant to feel is a frisson of excitement. Instead of rooting for Ivy to get past her awful background, we're meant to feel glad that we've seen the first stepping stone on her path towards villainhood. As the popular meme has it, Batman is a billionaire who goes out at night and beats up poor criminals, without any thought given to the social and economic causes that underpin crime. If Gotham wants to be a Batman prequel, it has to ignore those same causes, to treat future criminals as a necessary component of its story rather than a tragedy waiting to happen. With its strong cast, I can easily imagine Gotham working as a crime drama, but I suspect that it will be warped out of shape by its inevitable future.
- Madam Secretary - American TV takes a second stab at the Hilary Clinton story (following the abortive series Political Animals, today probably best known as the second TV series, after Kings, in which Sebastian Stan plays a vulnerable, damaged gay man). Though I can't help but wish that television did not still find the idea of a woman in a position of power so exotic (see also Commander in Chief from a few years back), it's nice that these stories are being told at all, and the pilot for Madam Secretary wisely downplays the gender angle--its title character, Elizabeth McCord (Téa Leoni) is remarkable less for her gender than for her abilities and intelligence. Unfortunately, the slant that the pilot decides to put on Beth's rise to the position of Secretary of State (following the mysterious death of the previous office-holder which is presumably going to be an important throughline in the coming season) is that she is unpolitical, not part of the Beltway mafia, and is thus able to Get Things Done--not least because she lacks aspirations for a higher office. It's extremely frustrating to see, again and again, stories that claim to be about politics but which have such a reflexive and ultimately childish disdain for it (one of the things that makes The Good Wife a great TV series is that it allows its characters to be ambitious and politically savvy without claiming that this makes them monsters). The main story of the pilot involves Beth using back channels to rescue two American college kids who entered Syria trying to join the anti-Assad rebels (it's interesting how real-world politics catches up with shows that claim to depict it: where as recently as a month ago such an attempt would have been seen as misguided but admirable, now ISIS-mania has the world's governments trying to criminalize it; of course, some things never change--the two boys are clean-cut, suburban white kids, not, heaven forbid, Arab-Americans). But by "back channels," I mean getting in touch with contacts from Beth's previous life as a spy, and personally negotiating for the boys' release, which is incredibly small fry for someone with the power of the whole State Department behind her. I'm interested enough in Madam Secretary to keep watching--and the show does have a strong cast and sharp dialogue that make the prospect of keeping up with it less than onerous--but I wish I believed that it was actually interested in a real conversation about politics (not to mention women in politics) rather than the simplistic, black-and-white stories it tells in its pilot.
- Red Band Society - There's probably an interesting story to be told about the friendships and dramas that develop in a children's hospital ward. Unfortunately, Red Band Society is less interested in being that show as it is in being a boarding school soap that just happens to take place in a hospital--an absurdly luxurious hospital where patients live full-time even though there's no reason for them to do so (maladies that, according to Red Band Society, require you to live in a hospital include: osteosarcoma, cystic fibrosis, and waiting for a heart transplant), and where parents never visit except for the one guy who has lost his visitation rights because he caused the accident that put his kid in a coma, and who therefore masquerades as a volunteer. Having recently experienced the hospitalization of a family member--at a very nice private hospital, I should note--I recognize nothing about how Red Band Society conceives of hospital life. Real hospital are cramped and uncomfortable. Every available bit of space is crammed with equipment and supplies for which there's never enough room, and the staff are always running back and forth, doing a million things before they can get to you and your needs. In comparison, the hospital in Red Band Society feels like, well, Hogwarts, with a firm but kind-hearted head nurse (Octavia Spencer) who seems to have nothing better to do with her time than police, discipline, and gently encourage her patients, as if she were their teacher and not a medical professional. The young actors who play the sick leads are all strong, and the pilot gets an appropriate amount of drama out of, say, a 14-year-old boy taking a last run before his cancerous leg is cut off. But the pilot seems less interested in the obvious stakes of a hospital drama set on a children's ward than it is in teenage melodrama that, no matter what the success of The Fault in Our Stars would seem to suggest, isn't made any more interesting just because the kids it's happening to might be dying.
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
The Problem of Mike Peterson: Thoughts on Agents of SHIELD and Race
[Note: This post is the result of thoughts that I've been having since the end of Agents of SHIELD's first season in the spring, and which I haven't seen addressed elsewhere. I held off on writing and publishing it because I wasn't certain that I had the proper grounding to do justice to the issues it discusses, and because I wasn't sure that it was my place to discuss them at all. Nevertheless, as the second season draws closer it seems important to me that this subject is broached. If readers with more grounding in anti-racism want to point out errors or bad arguments, I'd be happy for their input. Similarly, if there are discussions of this subject that I've missed, I'd be grateful for links.]
We first meet Mike Peterson in the Agents of SHIELD pilot. As I wrote in my essay about the show, the pilot positions both Skye and Ward as its point of view characters, establishing parallel but opposite trajectories for them--Ward, the obedient company man who needs to be taught to bend the rules; Skye, the anti-authoritarian spy in the belly of the beast who secretly craves stability and order--that are overturned in the post-Winter Soldier episodes. But from watching the pilot's first act, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Mike is an equally important character to these two. Skye's voiceover introduces the series, and Ward's mission in Paris establishes him as an identification figure who then carries us to SHIELD headquarters and Coulson. But bridging those two scenes is our introduction to Mike, the first of the pilot's main characters to be shown on screen. When he saves a woman from an explosion by jumping unaided from a tall building, it's only natural for us to assume that he's our hero.
Mike's true role in the story, however, is quickly established during Ward and Coulson's first meeting. "That's a superhero, Agent Ward," Coulson announces. But SHIELD isn't a show about superheroes. It's a show about people who deal with superheroes (among other things). And so with one fell stroke, Mike Peterson is repositioned. From a potential protagonist, he becomes a subject, someone for our actual heroes to deal with. Someone for SHIELD to manage, hide, and control.
The modern MCU comes to life in the closing moments of the first Iron Man film, when Tony Stark rejects the cover story offered to him by SHIELD and Coulson (who, sounding almost bored, drawls that "this is not my first rodeo") and instead redefines the terms by which superpowered individuals operate by announcing to the world that "I am Iron Man." Winter Soldier completes that upheaval by razing SHIELD to the ground, but in the episodes of Agents of SHIELD that lead up to that story it's clear that no one--least of all Coulson--has gotten the memo. He still views himself as someone who has the right and the authority to control (and occasionally deploy) people like Iron Man, Captain America and, of course, Mike. That's not necessarily an unreasonable stance--high-handed as Coulson's demeanor to Tony is, his experience is a valuable asset, and surely no one in their right mind would have assumed that Tony Stark should be left unsupervised with superpowers. But it establishes that Phil Coulson's definition of "superhero" is a fairly narrow one, and perhaps includes less freedom of choice than most of us would associate with the word.
Further complicating matters is the fact that despite Coulson's chosen terminology, Mike is not a superhero. He's a supersoldier (or rather, a stepping stone on the way to creating one). It's the tension between those two terms that drives the overwhelming majority of the MCU, especially in Phase II. A hero--as Coulson and SHIELD are reluctant to admit--is self-directed and unique. A soldier is, in his essentials, interchangeable with all other soldiers, and more importantly, his job is to follow orders. The stories told in the MCU are almost always about attempts to create supersoldiers that end up producing superheroes (or villains) instead, and the powers that try to force those superheroes back into a more limited role. Captain America was created as part of a supersoldier program, and dismissed once it became clear that the program's goal--an army of people with his strength and abilities--couldn't be achieved. The Winter Soldier is Hydra's attempt at the same result, minus Cap's pesky free will, and Black Widow was similarly created to be a fearsome soldier who couldn't question her orders. The Hulk came into existence following an attempt to recreate Cap's serum, and when the military tries to weaponize that result what they achieve is literally an abomination.[1]
The Iron Man films, meanwhile, ponder the gap between superhero and supersoldier by positing a superpower that is wearable and transferrable. Tony is a weapons manufacturer who develops a distrust of the people using his weapons, but his solution to this problem is to build something that can turn anyone into a living weapon. He seems surprised that the immediate response--by both the government and villains--is to try to appropriate, steal, or replicate this technology. But though Tony insists that the Iron Man armor is a part of him, its actual handling in the three Iron Man films often puts the lie to that claim. Tony can operate the armor without being in it (which effectively makes it a drone, and thus no different from Ivan Vanko's imitation suits in Iron Man 2); the armor can be overridden despite containing a pilot; Iron Man 3 suggests that the suit has a mind of its own, and at the end of the film Tony triumphs by summoning an army of suits, each with its own name and personality. In the end, the only way Tony can remain a superhero--rather than the general of a robot army--is to destroy the suits that gave him his power to begin with.
In that same film, the MCU introduces yet another supersoldier serum, Extremis (which is yet again tested on vulnerable, in this case disabled, soldiers), and in Agents of SHIELD it is combined with the Iron Man-like Deathlok technology to create supersoldiers whose free will is done away with through the simple expedient of putting bombs in their heads and threatening their loved ones. By the season's end, John Garrett and Ian Quinn are offering to sell the US government an army of slaves, and no one in uniform seems to find this objectionable.[2]
One of the earliest subjects of the Cybertek/Centipede program that eventually produces Garrett's slave soldiers, Mike Peterson undeniably starts off on the supersoldier side of the divide. What's more, his vulnerable position--he's an out-of-work factory worker and single parent struggling to make ends meet--makes his exploitation all the more obvious. But something funny happens when Mike begins experiencing the effects of the Centipede serum--he insists on seeing himself as a superhero. What other people might, quite reasonably, view as a traumatic, abusive experience, he reconfigures as an origin story (and not without justification, since almost all superhero origin stories are rooted in a traumatic and/or abusive event). While everyone around him insists that Mike is simply the subject of an experiment--and an experiment that has failed to boot, of which Mike is simply a leftover--he persists in believing that the powers he's been given confer upon him the responsibility to act as a hero, and that the world will bend itself to accommodate this belief.
If this is sounding very familiar, it's because I've just described the plot of the first Captain America movie. There is, however, one crucial difference between how the MCU treats Steve Rogers and Mike Peterson. Steve Rogers is a failed supersoldier who insists that he is a superhero, and the narrative ultimately rewards him for this insistence. The people around him recognize his innate heroism and flock to him, and he eventually amasses the moral authority to call out and topple the institutions that tried to deploy and control him. Mike Peterson, on the other hand, is a failed supersoldier who insists that he is a superhero, and the narrative punishes him for it. Throughout the SHIELD pilot, his conviction that he can be a hero is pathologized and treated as a symptom of his exploitation. By the end of the episode, the Centipede serum has so compromised Mike's judgment and grasp of reality that his attempts to be heroic have taken an inexorable slide towards villainy (not to mention that unlike Cap's serum, his is inherently flawed and threatens to turn him into an unwitting explosive). His heartbreaking speech to Coulson at the pilot's end seems to suggest that he wants to be a hero not because of some powerful inner drive, but because to do so would alleviate his feelings of inadequacy as an ordinary man.
Steve Rogers is white. Mike Peterson is black.
To be clear, there's room in the MCU for stories about people who are granted superpowers and don't know how to deal with them, and, in theory at least, a show like Agents of SHIELD is the perfect venue in which to explore such stories. The First Avenger goes to great lengths to establish that what makes Steve a hero is not the supersoldier serum but the innate traits that he possessed even as a 90-pound weakling, and not possessing those traits--having, in fact, the same flaws as every other person in the world--is hardly a character defect. But the choice to cast a black actor as Mike, and array against him a team made up completely of white and Asian[3] actors, has implications that the SHIELD pilot doesn't know how to deal with. There is in the pilot an undercurrent of awareness that Mike's feelings of inadequacy aren't unique to him, but are the product of a social and economic system that is implacably arrayed against men of his race and class--as stressed, for example, by his final placement against the mural "City of Dreams/River of History" in Los Angeles's Union Station. But the show is too caught up in its ideas of heroism and villainy to fully acknowledge that Mike's problem is systemic, not individual. That lack of context leads to Mike embodying the stereotype of an Angry Black Man, whose rage, though perhaps justified, is undirected and a danger to everyone around him (Mike is literally a bomb) and must be dealt with.
The episode's climax, in which Mike is shot in the head mid-sentence, after which the inspirational music swells and Coulson's team congratulate each other on a job well done, is hard to watch even when you know that the shot was from a stun gun. It completes Mike's dehumanization, his transformation from a superhero, to a problem that needs to be dealt with, to a thing, who doesn't even merit the dignity of getting to complete a thought before being gunned down by a white man.[4]
The second time we meet Mike is in the tenth episode of the first season, "The Bridge," in which Coulson brings him in as a consultant to help take down Centipede. In the interim, two things have become clear. First, that the show desperately needs to get back to its central mythology, because as lukewarm as the pilot was, the standalone episodes that followed have been even worse. And second, that the show has a serious problem with black people, whom it invariably depicts as evil, crazy, or the victims of evil and crazy people. Mike Peterson's future as Garrett's slave has already been presaged through the character of Akela Amador (Pascale Armand), the only black SHIELD agent of any importance that we've seen in ten episodes, who has been coerced into committing murder and mayhem and ends the episode in prison. Ruth Negga's Raina has been established as the season's first recurring villain, and the closest the show has come to a positive, self-directed black character is Ron Glass's Dr. Streiten, who had a few brief lines in the pilot.
So to begin with, Mike's return as a SHIELD agent feels like a welcome step in the right direction. The revelation that his powers have been stabilized and that he's been recruited into SHIELD seems like a counterbalance to the profound problems of his handling in the pilot, a way of giving him the heroism he craved while allowing for his thoroughly human flaws. But from the beginning, "The Bridge" seems to be working hard to make us feel that there is something wrong and unnatural about Mike's position, and that his newfound heroism can't last. "Did I beat Captain America's score?" he brightly asks his training instructor when we first see him, reminding us of the parallel between the two characters; but the response is a derisive snort and a shake of the head. No matter how badly he wants to, Mike still can't measure up.
When Mike arrives on the Bus, Coulson is quick to announce that this assignment is his second chance, and that "there won't be a third." This is one of the scenes that cemented to me just how much I dislike Coulson in his Agents of SHIELD incarnation.[5] It's perfectly natural for Mike to want to assure Coulson and the team that the behavior they saw in the pilot won't recur--in much the same way that someone who suffers from mental illness might want to reassure someone who has seen them at their worst that they can manage their condition. But Coulson has no right to judge Mike, or to behave as if the events of the pilot were somehow his fault instead of something that was done to him. The idea that Mike has squandered his first chance already has no basis in reality.
And yet "The Bridge" not only validates Coulson's attitude, it has Mike accept it almost cheerfully. In fact, Mike's behavior is the most uncomfortable and disturbing thing about this episode. His attitude towards Coulson and his team is discomfitingly subservient. He's constantly flattering and talking up the white members of the team, happily telling Coulson, FitzSimmons, and Ward how they saved him back in the pilot (his relationship with Skye is more equitable and friendly, and he has no meaningful interactions with May). He doesn't even seem to mind that he's expected to sleep on a mattress in a prison cell. To be sure, the fact that Mike is so unnervingly happy and eager to please is meant to be uncomfortable, a deliberate choice on the part of the writers and the actor, but the purpose of those choices is to bring us back to the same conclusion reached by the pilot: that Mike's heroism is false, and unsustainable.
And indeed, as soon as Centipede grabs his son, Mike "fails" to be a hero by choosing to trade Coulson for him. This a fairly classic dilemma that comic books like to place before their heroes--save the person you love, or do the right thing--and as always it is an unfair and inhuman choice that can only be resolved through writerly fiat. It's notable, for example, that Captain America has never been faced with such a choice, and other superheroes usually manage to cheat their way out of it.[6] The fact that Mike--one of only a few black superheroes in the MCU--is placed in such a position with no way of worming his way out of it except doing as his son's captors demand, says more about SHIELD's writers, and the role they want Mike to play, than it does about Mike himself. When Mike, having rescued his son, immediately turns around and does the heroic thing by trying to rescue Coulson, his reward is to be blown up. That ending--and the coda to the next episode, "The Magical Place," in which Mike is revealed not to have died but to have been forced into the first step towards becoming Deathlok--cements our realization that rather than counteracting the message of the pilot, the show is trying to reaffirm it: whenever Mike Peterson tries to be a hero, he is punished for it.
For very nearly all of his appearances until the end of the season, Mike Peterson recedes, and J. August Richards plays the character of Deathlok. It's important to note that name change. Deathlok is the name of the cybernetics project that eventually replaces a good half of Mike's body, and as we learn late in the season, Mike isn't even the first Deathlok. And yet in "The End of the Beginning," it's Coulson's team who have begun referring to Mike by this name. The people who know Mike better than any other SHIELD agents, who know that he is being coerced and how, and who know--assuming that Skye told them so after recovering from her shooting in "T.R.A.C.K.S," and why wouldn't she--that even within the confines of that coercion Mike is trying to fight back and to minimize the evil he does, are the very people who take away his name and give him the name of the machine that's turned him into a monster. And because these people are our heroes and identification figures, they teach the audience how to see Mike--teach us, in other words, that Deathlok is what he is.
While the audience might feel more sympathetic towards Mike than the characters apparently do--and while the show does allow us to see, in his private moments, that Mike is suffering, as when he's forced to replace his own arm with a robotic substitute--whenever Mike interacts with SHIELD characters after "The Magical Place" he gets what can only be described as a villain edit. Dramatic, scary music swells whenever he comes on screen, the characters react in horror when they see him ("How did you get past Deathlok?" Skye asks Coulson when he rescues her in "Nothing Personal." "Deathlok is here?" is his fearful response), and Richards himself plays the character as if he were the Terminator. We can assume that Mike is shutting down his emotions because he doesn't want to deal with what he's become and been made to do, but the fact remains that when he shows up on screen, the show wants us to be anxious and afraid.
What's interesting--and not a little disturbing--about the stretch of episodes in which Mike is Deathlok is how liberating that role is for him. Gone is the loser weeping over his inability to be a hero, or the wannabe company man desperately eager for the (white) heroes' approval. It's not just that becoming Deathlok gives Mike power (which he anyway already had before Raina and Garrett captured him). It's that it seems to free him to talk back, to say no. Being Deathlok puts Mike in the Hydra hierarchy, where for once, and even taking into account that he is effectively a slave, he isn't on the bottom rung. This means that he can frustrate people like Quinn or Ward when they treat him like a tool or a robot, refusing to shoot Skye on Quinn's behalf because those aren't his orders, or belittling Ward's dismay over his tactic of stopping Ward's heart in order to coerce Skye into decrypting data that Garrett wants. It means that he can demand answers, and a serious consideration, from Raina, rejecting her claim of solidarity with him by reminding her that she is responsible for the nightmare that his life has become.[7]
Perhaps most importantly, being Deathlok allows Mike to become the only character in the first season to throw it in the face of a member of Coulson's team that they have been enabling evil, and that they have no right to claim the moral authority of heroes. When Skye tries to persuade Mike not to do Garrett's bidding in "Nothing Personal," he, for the first time since he met her or Coulson, rejects her right to judge him or suggest courses of action for him, reminding her that the position he's in is largely of her making: that he left his son in her care, and she blithely handed him over to Hydra. In a season that expects us not to notice or care about the profound professional failure that Hydra represents for most of the SHIELD characters[8], Mike is the only person who gets to point out that maybe the people who failed so completely the first time around shouldn't be trusted with cleaning up the mess and starting over.
It's hard to know how to take this change in Mike's personality, the fact that he becomes indisputably cooler the moment he takes on the Deathlok moniker and role. On the one hand, speaking uncomfortable truths to heroes and villains alike gives Mike a unique authority. But on the other hand, our knowledge that he is himself a slave, and a murderer, undermines those truths. Either way, every instance in which Mike acts as Deathlok and proceeds with more purpose and confidence than he ever did as a would-be hero reiterates the message of these mid-season episodes: Mike Peterson is most himself when he is being a villain.
Mike's final appearance (so far) is in the season finale, "The Beginning of the End." His arc in this episode is clearly meant to be triumphant. He gets to turn the tables on Garrett, who has begun to think of him as a tool rather than a person, an extension of his own will who has no views different than his own (in fairness, this is how Garrett thinks of everyone, and what, given the opportunity to mold an operative from a young age, he made Ward into). As soon as Skye frees his son, Mike attacks an outraged, uncomprehending Garrett, stomping his face into the ground with his robotic leg. And yet the show can't resist turning this into Coulson's moment, not Mike's. "Mr. Peterson is free to do whatever he wants," he piously intones, as if to further underline a difference between himself and Garrett that should have been obvious, and which is anyway nothing to crow about--not enslaving people is surely the bare minimum of human decency, not something worthy of celebration. And so instead of being a moment of triumph for Mike, his liberation becomes the story of how he was given his freedom by Coulson's team[9] (and, in fairness, Nick Fury, though the two men don't interact), neatly paralleling the season premiere (though at least he doesn't get shot this time).
Even worse is Mike's final scene, in which he refuses to reunite with his son. Again, the fact that Mike feels guilt for his actions and wants to make amends is only natural, but just as in "The Bridge," he accepts the authority of Skye and the rest of Coulson's team to judge him. He tells Skye that she can look through the camera that has replaced his eye to see that he will only be trying to do good, implicitly accepting that she has the right to spy on him just as Garrett did (it remains unspoken that Skye and Coulson will also have the power to detonate the bomb in Mike's head at any time). Passing judgement on Skye, and rejecting the moral authority of SHIELD by pointing out the very obvious truth that it has been corrupt for nearly as long as it has existed, is something that Mike only gets to do when he's a villain (which obviously undermines those arguments). To be a good guy, Mike Peterson has to accept the right of Coulson and his team to judge him.
In the Marvel comics, Deathlok (a title given to several characters, none of whom are named Mike Peterson) is alternately a victim, a villain, and a hero. When given the freedom to choose, he usually fights alongside the Avengers. The end of Mike Peterson's arc in the first season of Agents of SHIELD leaves open the possibility that he, too, will transition into a heroic role. This does not absolve SHIELD of the problematic terms with which it's told Mike's story, nor of the way that it continues to treat him as subservient to Coulson and his team. But at the end of the first season last spring, I felt at least some hope that, going forward, Mike's story would be a heroic one.
One of the reasons that this post became urgent to write, however, was a transcript I read a few weeks ago of Comic-Con interviews with Brett Dalton and J. August Richards. Dalton talked about his hopes for a redemptive arc for Ward (he also expressed the belief that Ward did not kill his dog, which I'm hoping the show will prove him wrong about). Richards talked about Mike's progression as a villain. Now, I'm on record as calling Ward the only interesting character in Agents of SHIELD's main cast, and I can think of several ways in which a redemption arc for him could be interesting and successful (which is not to say that I trust the show to do so, but the thing is possible). But even so, I find it mind-boggling that anyone could look at these two characters side by side, and call Mike the villain. That someone involved with the show could do so is chilling.
As much as Skye is intended as Ward's parallel, Mike is too (once again, the pilot introduces all three characters in quick succession). Part of the reason that the show is so eager to cast Mike in the Deathlok role in the post-"Bridge" episodes is that doing so makes it more ironic when Ward--who spends these episodes reacting in outrage to Mike's crimes--is revealed as the season's true villain. And of course Ward and Mike are both Garrett's lackeys, the one acting under duress and eager to turn on his master at the first opportunity, and the other loyal to a self-abnegating degree, and past the point of reason. But after the revelation of Ward's villainy, we'd expect the show to reposition Mike as a heroic or at least sympathetic figure. Instead, he continues to be treated as a villain up until the moment that Coulson and Skye free him. As the Comic-Con interviews suggest, that perception is not about to change.
Ward and Mike are both victims or abuse, whose ability to freely choose between right and wrong is compromised (albeit in very different ways; Ward is obviously deeply psychologically damaged, but no one forces him to do any of the evil things he does over the course of the first season, and he passes up many opportunities to make better choices that Mike doesn't get). And yet we seem to be headed towards an absurd situation in which Ward is given a second chance with which to atone and turn his life around, while Mike is held responsible for his own victimization, treated like a villain for a combination of limited options, bad luck, and the crimes of others.
Grant Ward is white. Mike Peterson is black.
[1] The first of the Marvel One Shots, "The Consultant," extends that story when it reveals that the military still believes in The Abomination's potential, insisting that he join the Avengers Initiative.↩
[2] Guardians of the Galaxy touches on the supersoldier theme obliquely through the characters of Rocket, Gamora, and Nebula, all of whom were remade against their will, in the latter two cases explicitly into a fearsome killers. The Thor films don't address it at all, but when that series incurs into the world of Agents of SHIELD it's in ways that reflect on it: we learn that the Asgardians gave their soldiers weapons that could turn mild-mannered Peter MacNicol into a bloodthirsty killer; the sorceress Lorelai's power is to compel men to fight and die for her, and she mocks the supposedly free-willed Sif for obeying orders she doesn't agree with because they come from Odin--who is actually Loki in disguise.↩
[3] For all its problems with black characters, it's worth noting that SHIELD is unique in fielding not one but two Asian women in its main cast, and that some fans have read the show as commenting specifically on the Asian-American experience. It seems reasonable to ascribe this to writer and producer Maurissa "Nobody's Asian in the Movies" Tancharoen, which is a valuable reminder of how much diversity and nuanced representation on-screen depend on the presence of diverse writers and producers behind the scenes.↩
[4] I haven't read the comic, but from the plot description it occurs to me that Mike's arc in the pilot has echoes of the limited series comic Truth: Red, White & Black, by Robert Morales and Kyle Baker, in which it's revealed that Cap's serum was originally tested, Tuskegee-like, on black servicemen, who were denied the chance to become superheroes far more definitively than Steve Rogers. The comic, however, ends with Steve acknowledging Isiah Bradley's right to the title of Captain America, and Marvel continuity routinely refers to Bradley as the first to hold it.↩
[5] Not helping matters is the fact that "The Bridge" is also the episode in which Coulson explains to Ward that "every woman is a mystery." Grrr.↩
[6] See, for example, Tony Stark in Iron Man 3, when he sends the remote-controlled armor to save the imperiled President while jetting off himself to rescue Pepper.↩
[7] It's interesting to note the differences in how Mike relates to people in his Deathlok guise. With white men like Garrett, Quinn, and Ward, he is a blank-faced automaton, following orders but refusing to engage them emotionally or to be sucked into their personal drama. He only engages with people (women) of color, like Skye and Raina, even if it's only to accuse them and call them out for their hypocrisy.↩
[8] See, for example, the opening scene of "Nothing Personal," in which Cobie Smulders's Maria Hill airily complains about being made to testify before Congress about SHIELD's activities and Hydra's infiltration of it. It's a scene that's meant to make Hill look cool, as she compares Congress to children who can't cope with the realities of the situation. But try mentally replacing Smulders with a middle aged male bank executive circa 2009, and then tell me if her contempt for elected officials and inability to accept that she might be called to account for her mistakes are still charming and admirable.↩
[9] By this point, the team has been joined by B.J. Britt's Antoine Triplett, who feels like a deliberate (and desperately needed) response to the widely publicized criticisms of the show's depiction of black characters. While it's obviously significant that Ward (with his "Hitler youth" looks) is replaced by a black man, Trip also stands in stark contrast to Mike--he is SHIELD royalty, a legacy of Captain America's original integrated team, and seems to possess the effortless heroism that Mike lacks. I'm not quite certain where the show is going with that contrast, or with the character of Trip in general.↩
We first meet Mike Peterson in the Agents of SHIELD pilot. As I wrote in my essay about the show, the pilot positions both Skye and Ward as its point of view characters, establishing parallel but opposite trajectories for them--Ward, the obedient company man who needs to be taught to bend the rules; Skye, the anti-authoritarian spy in the belly of the beast who secretly craves stability and order--that are overturned in the post-Winter Soldier episodes. But from watching the pilot's first act, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Mike is an equally important character to these two. Skye's voiceover introduces the series, and Ward's mission in Paris establishes him as an identification figure who then carries us to SHIELD headquarters and Coulson. But bridging those two scenes is our introduction to Mike, the first of the pilot's main characters to be shown on screen. When he saves a woman from an explosion by jumping unaided from a tall building, it's only natural for us to assume that he's our hero.
Mike's true role in the story, however, is quickly established during Ward and Coulson's first meeting. "That's a superhero, Agent Ward," Coulson announces. But SHIELD isn't a show about superheroes. It's a show about people who deal with superheroes (among other things). And so with one fell stroke, Mike Peterson is repositioned. From a potential protagonist, he becomes a subject, someone for our actual heroes to deal with. Someone for SHIELD to manage, hide, and control.
The modern MCU comes to life in the closing moments of the first Iron Man film, when Tony Stark rejects the cover story offered to him by SHIELD and Coulson (who, sounding almost bored, drawls that "this is not my first rodeo") and instead redefines the terms by which superpowered individuals operate by announcing to the world that "I am Iron Man." Winter Soldier completes that upheaval by razing SHIELD to the ground, but in the episodes of Agents of SHIELD that lead up to that story it's clear that no one--least of all Coulson--has gotten the memo. He still views himself as someone who has the right and the authority to control (and occasionally deploy) people like Iron Man, Captain America and, of course, Mike. That's not necessarily an unreasonable stance--high-handed as Coulson's demeanor to Tony is, his experience is a valuable asset, and surely no one in their right mind would have assumed that Tony Stark should be left unsupervised with superpowers. But it establishes that Phil Coulson's definition of "superhero" is a fairly narrow one, and perhaps includes less freedom of choice than most of us would associate with the word.
Further complicating matters is the fact that despite Coulson's chosen terminology, Mike is not a superhero. He's a supersoldier (or rather, a stepping stone on the way to creating one). It's the tension between those two terms that drives the overwhelming majority of the MCU, especially in Phase II. A hero--as Coulson and SHIELD are reluctant to admit--is self-directed and unique. A soldier is, in his essentials, interchangeable with all other soldiers, and more importantly, his job is to follow orders. The stories told in the MCU are almost always about attempts to create supersoldiers that end up producing superheroes (or villains) instead, and the powers that try to force those superheroes back into a more limited role. Captain America was created as part of a supersoldier program, and dismissed once it became clear that the program's goal--an army of people with his strength and abilities--couldn't be achieved. The Winter Soldier is Hydra's attempt at the same result, minus Cap's pesky free will, and Black Widow was similarly created to be a fearsome soldier who couldn't question her orders. The Hulk came into existence following an attempt to recreate Cap's serum, and when the military tries to weaponize that result what they achieve is literally an abomination.[1]
The Iron Man films, meanwhile, ponder the gap between superhero and supersoldier by positing a superpower that is wearable and transferrable. Tony is a weapons manufacturer who develops a distrust of the people using his weapons, but his solution to this problem is to build something that can turn anyone into a living weapon. He seems surprised that the immediate response--by both the government and villains--is to try to appropriate, steal, or replicate this technology. But though Tony insists that the Iron Man armor is a part of him, its actual handling in the three Iron Man films often puts the lie to that claim. Tony can operate the armor without being in it (which effectively makes it a drone, and thus no different from Ivan Vanko's imitation suits in Iron Man 2); the armor can be overridden despite containing a pilot; Iron Man 3 suggests that the suit has a mind of its own, and at the end of the film Tony triumphs by summoning an army of suits, each with its own name and personality. In the end, the only way Tony can remain a superhero--rather than the general of a robot army--is to destroy the suits that gave him his power to begin with.
In that same film, the MCU introduces yet another supersoldier serum, Extremis (which is yet again tested on vulnerable, in this case disabled, soldiers), and in Agents of SHIELD it is combined with the Iron Man-like Deathlok technology to create supersoldiers whose free will is done away with through the simple expedient of putting bombs in their heads and threatening their loved ones. By the season's end, John Garrett and Ian Quinn are offering to sell the US government an army of slaves, and no one in uniform seems to find this objectionable.[2]
One of the earliest subjects of the Cybertek/Centipede program that eventually produces Garrett's slave soldiers, Mike Peterson undeniably starts off on the supersoldier side of the divide. What's more, his vulnerable position--he's an out-of-work factory worker and single parent struggling to make ends meet--makes his exploitation all the more obvious. But something funny happens when Mike begins experiencing the effects of the Centipede serum--he insists on seeing himself as a superhero. What other people might, quite reasonably, view as a traumatic, abusive experience, he reconfigures as an origin story (and not without justification, since almost all superhero origin stories are rooted in a traumatic and/or abusive event). While everyone around him insists that Mike is simply the subject of an experiment--and an experiment that has failed to boot, of which Mike is simply a leftover--he persists in believing that the powers he's been given confer upon him the responsibility to act as a hero, and that the world will bend itself to accommodate this belief.
If this is sounding very familiar, it's because I've just described the plot of the first Captain America movie. There is, however, one crucial difference between how the MCU treats Steve Rogers and Mike Peterson. Steve Rogers is a failed supersoldier who insists that he is a superhero, and the narrative ultimately rewards him for this insistence. The people around him recognize his innate heroism and flock to him, and he eventually amasses the moral authority to call out and topple the institutions that tried to deploy and control him. Mike Peterson, on the other hand, is a failed supersoldier who insists that he is a superhero, and the narrative punishes him for it. Throughout the SHIELD pilot, his conviction that he can be a hero is pathologized and treated as a symptom of his exploitation. By the end of the episode, the Centipede serum has so compromised Mike's judgment and grasp of reality that his attempts to be heroic have taken an inexorable slide towards villainy (not to mention that unlike Cap's serum, his is inherently flawed and threatens to turn him into an unwitting explosive). His heartbreaking speech to Coulson at the pilot's end seems to suggest that he wants to be a hero not because of some powerful inner drive, but because to do so would alleviate his feelings of inadequacy as an ordinary man.
Steve Rogers is white. Mike Peterson is black.
To be clear, there's room in the MCU for stories about people who are granted superpowers and don't know how to deal with them, and, in theory at least, a show like Agents of SHIELD is the perfect venue in which to explore such stories. The First Avenger goes to great lengths to establish that what makes Steve a hero is not the supersoldier serum but the innate traits that he possessed even as a 90-pound weakling, and not possessing those traits--having, in fact, the same flaws as every other person in the world--is hardly a character defect. But the choice to cast a black actor as Mike, and array against him a team made up completely of white and Asian[3] actors, has implications that the SHIELD pilot doesn't know how to deal with. There is in the pilot an undercurrent of awareness that Mike's feelings of inadequacy aren't unique to him, but are the product of a social and economic system that is implacably arrayed against men of his race and class--as stressed, for example, by his final placement against the mural "City of Dreams/River of History" in Los Angeles's Union Station. But the show is too caught up in its ideas of heroism and villainy to fully acknowledge that Mike's problem is systemic, not individual. That lack of context leads to Mike embodying the stereotype of an Angry Black Man, whose rage, though perhaps justified, is undirected and a danger to everyone around him (Mike is literally a bomb) and must be dealt with.
The episode's climax, in which Mike is shot in the head mid-sentence, after which the inspirational music swells and Coulson's team congratulate each other on a job well done, is hard to watch even when you know that the shot was from a stun gun. It completes Mike's dehumanization, his transformation from a superhero, to a problem that needs to be dealt with, to a thing, who doesn't even merit the dignity of getting to complete a thought before being gunned down by a white man.[4]
The second time we meet Mike is in the tenth episode of the first season, "The Bridge," in which Coulson brings him in as a consultant to help take down Centipede. In the interim, two things have become clear. First, that the show desperately needs to get back to its central mythology, because as lukewarm as the pilot was, the standalone episodes that followed have been even worse. And second, that the show has a serious problem with black people, whom it invariably depicts as evil, crazy, or the victims of evil and crazy people. Mike Peterson's future as Garrett's slave has already been presaged through the character of Akela Amador (Pascale Armand), the only black SHIELD agent of any importance that we've seen in ten episodes, who has been coerced into committing murder and mayhem and ends the episode in prison. Ruth Negga's Raina has been established as the season's first recurring villain, and the closest the show has come to a positive, self-directed black character is Ron Glass's Dr. Streiten, who had a few brief lines in the pilot.
So to begin with, Mike's return as a SHIELD agent feels like a welcome step in the right direction. The revelation that his powers have been stabilized and that he's been recruited into SHIELD seems like a counterbalance to the profound problems of his handling in the pilot, a way of giving him the heroism he craved while allowing for his thoroughly human flaws. But from the beginning, "The Bridge" seems to be working hard to make us feel that there is something wrong and unnatural about Mike's position, and that his newfound heroism can't last. "Did I beat Captain America's score?" he brightly asks his training instructor when we first see him, reminding us of the parallel between the two characters; but the response is a derisive snort and a shake of the head. No matter how badly he wants to, Mike still can't measure up.
When Mike arrives on the Bus, Coulson is quick to announce that this assignment is his second chance, and that "there won't be a third." This is one of the scenes that cemented to me just how much I dislike Coulson in his Agents of SHIELD incarnation.[5] It's perfectly natural for Mike to want to assure Coulson and the team that the behavior they saw in the pilot won't recur--in much the same way that someone who suffers from mental illness might want to reassure someone who has seen them at their worst that they can manage their condition. But Coulson has no right to judge Mike, or to behave as if the events of the pilot were somehow his fault instead of something that was done to him. The idea that Mike has squandered his first chance already has no basis in reality.
And yet "The Bridge" not only validates Coulson's attitude, it has Mike accept it almost cheerfully. In fact, Mike's behavior is the most uncomfortable and disturbing thing about this episode. His attitude towards Coulson and his team is discomfitingly subservient. He's constantly flattering and talking up the white members of the team, happily telling Coulson, FitzSimmons, and Ward how they saved him back in the pilot (his relationship with Skye is more equitable and friendly, and he has no meaningful interactions with May). He doesn't even seem to mind that he's expected to sleep on a mattress in a prison cell. To be sure, the fact that Mike is so unnervingly happy and eager to please is meant to be uncomfortable, a deliberate choice on the part of the writers and the actor, but the purpose of those choices is to bring us back to the same conclusion reached by the pilot: that Mike's heroism is false, and unsustainable.
And indeed, as soon as Centipede grabs his son, Mike "fails" to be a hero by choosing to trade Coulson for him. This a fairly classic dilemma that comic books like to place before their heroes--save the person you love, or do the right thing--and as always it is an unfair and inhuman choice that can only be resolved through writerly fiat. It's notable, for example, that Captain America has never been faced with such a choice, and other superheroes usually manage to cheat their way out of it.[6] The fact that Mike--one of only a few black superheroes in the MCU--is placed in such a position with no way of worming his way out of it except doing as his son's captors demand, says more about SHIELD's writers, and the role they want Mike to play, than it does about Mike himself. When Mike, having rescued his son, immediately turns around and does the heroic thing by trying to rescue Coulson, his reward is to be blown up. That ending--and the coda to the next episode, "The Magical Place," in which Mike is revealed not to have died but to have been forced into the first step towards becoming Deathlok--cements our realization that rather than counteracting the message of the pilot, the show is trying to reaffirm it: whenever Mike Peterson tries to be a hero, he is punished for it.
For very nearly all of his appearances until the end of the season, Mike Peterson recedes, and J. August Richards plays the character of Deathlok. It's important to note that name change. Deathlok is the name of the cybernetics project that eventually replaces a good half of Mike's body, and as we learn late in the season, Mike isn't even the first Deathlok. And yet in "The End of the Beginning," it's Coulson's team who have begun referring to Mike by this name. The people who know Mike better than any other SHIELD agents, who know that he is being coerced and how, and who know--assuming that Skye told them so after recovering from her shooting in "T.R.A.C.K.S," and why wouldn't she--that even within the confines of that coercion Mike is trying to fight back and to minimize the evil he does, are the very people who take away his name and give him the name of the machine that's turned him into a monster. And because these people are our heroes and identification figures, they teach the audience how to see Mike--teach us, in other words, that Deathlok is what he is.
While the audience might feel more sympathetic towards Mike than the characters apparently do--and while the show does allow us to see, in his private moments, that Mike is suffering, as when he's forced to replace his own arm with a robotic substitute--whenever Mike interacts with SHIELD characters after "The Magical Place" he gets what can only be described as a villain edit. Dramatic, scary music swells whenever he comes on screen, the characters react in horror when they see him ("How did you get past Deathlok?" Skye asks Coulson when he rescues her in "Nothing Personal." "Deathlok is here?" is his fearful response), and Richards himself plays the character as if he were the Terminator. We can assume that Mike is shutting down his emotions because he doesn't want to deal with what he's become and been made to do, but the fact remains that when he shows up on screen, the show wants us to be anxious and afraid.
What's interesting--and not a little disturbing--about the stretch of episodes in which Mike is Deathlok is how liberating that role is for him. Gone is the loser weeping over his inability to be a hero, or the wannabe company man desperately eager for the (white) heroes' approval. It's not just that becoming Deathlok gives Mike power (which he anyway already had before Raina and Garrett captured him). It's that it seems to free him to talk back, to say no. Being Deathlok puts Mike in the Hydra hierarchy, where for once, and even taking into account that he is effectively a slave, he isn't on the bottom rung. This means that he can frustrate people like Quinn or Ward when they treat him like a tool or a robot, refusing to shoot Skye on Quinn's behalf because those aren't his orders, or belittling Ward's dismay over his tactic of stopping Ward's heart in order to coerce Skye into decrypting data that Garrett wants. It means that he can demand answers, and a serious consideration, from Raina, rejecting her claim of solidarity with him by reminding her that she is responsible for the nightmare that his life has become.[7]
Perhaps most importantly, being Deathlok allows Mike to become the only character in the first season to throw it in the face of a member of Coulson's team that they have been enabling evil, and that they have no right to claim the moral authority of heroes. When Skye tries to persuade Mike not to do Garrett's bidding in "Nothing Personal," he, for the first time since he met her or Coulson, rejects her right to judge him or suggest courses of action for him, reminding her that the position he's in is largely of her making: that he left his son in her care, and she blithely handed him over to Hydra. In a season that expects us not to notice or care about the profound professional failure that Hydra represents for most of the SHIELD characters[8], Mike is the only person who gets to point out that maybe the people who failed so completely the first time around shouldn't be trusted with cleaning up the mess and starting over.
It's hard to know how to take this change in Mike's personality, the fact that he becomes indisputably cooler the moment he takes on the Deathlok moniker and role. On the one hand, speaking uncomfortable truths to heroes and villains alike gives Mike a unique authority. But on the other hand, our knowledge that he is himself a slave, and a murderer, undermines those truths. Either way, every instance in which Mike acts as Deathlok and proceeds with more purpose and confidence than he ever did as a would-be hero reiterates the message of these mid-season episodes: Mike Peterson is most himself when he is being a villain.
Mike's final appearance (so far) is in the season finale, "The Beginning of the End." His arc in this episode is clearly meant to be triumphant. He gets to turn the tables on Garrett, who has begun to think of him as a tool rather than a person, an extension of his own will who has no views different than his own (in fairness, this is how Garrett thinks of everyone, and what, given the opportunity to mold an operative from a young age, he made Ward into). As soon as Skye frees his son, Mike attacks an outraged, uncomprehending Garrett, stomping his face into the ground with his robotic leg. And yet the show can't resist turning this into Coulson's moment, not Mike's. "Mr. Peterson is free to do whatever he wants," he piously intones, as if to further underline a difference between himself and Garrett that should have been obvious, and which is anyway nothing to crow about--not enslaving people is surely the bare minimum of human decency, not something worthy of celebration. And so instead of being a moment of triumph for Mike, his liberation becomes the story of how he was given his freedom by Coulson's team[9] (and, in fairness, Nick Fury, though the two men don't interact), neatly paralleling the season premiere (though at least he doesn't get shot this time).
Even worse is Mike's final scene, in which he refuses to reunite with his son. Again, the fact that Mike feels guilt for his actions and wants to make amends is only natural, but just as in "The Bridge," he accepts the authority of Skye and the rest of Coulson's team to judge him. He tells Skye that she can look through the camera that has replaced his eye to see that he will only be trying to do good, implicitly accepting that she has the right to spy on him just as Garrett did (it remains unspoken that Skye and Coulson will also have the power to detonate the bomb in Mike's head at any time). Passing judgement on Skye, and rejecting the moral authority of SHIELD by pointing out the very obvious truth that it has been corrupt for nearly as long as it has existed, is something that Mike only gets to do when he's a villain (which obviously undermines those arguments). To be a good guy, Mike Peterson has to accept the right of Coulson and his team to judge him.
In the Marvel comics, Deathlok (a title given to several characters, none of whom are named Mike Peterson) is alternately a victim, a villain, and a hero. When given the freedom to choose, he usually fights alongside the Avengers. The end of Mike Peterson's arc in the first season of Agents of SHIELD leaves open the possibility that he, too, will transition into a heroic role. This does not absolve SHIELD of the problematic terms with which it's told Mike's story, nor of the way that it continues to treat him as subservient to Coulson and his team. But at the end of the first season last spring, I felt at least some hope that, going forward, Mike's story would be a heroic one.
One of the reasons that this post became urgent to write, however, was a transcript I read a few weeks ago of Comic-Con interviews with Brett Dalton and J. August Richards. Dalton talked about his hopes for a redemptive arc for Ward (he also expressed the belief that Ward did not kill his dog, which I'm hoping the show will prove him wrong about). Richards talked about Mike's progression as a villain. Now, I'm on record as calling Ward the only interesting character in Agents of SHIELD's main cast, and I can think of several ways in which a redemption arc for him could be interesting and successful (which is not to say that I trust the show to do so, but the thing is possible). But even so, I find it mind-boggling that anyone could look at these two characters side by side, and call Mike the villain. That someone involved with the show could do so is chilling.
As much as Skye is intended as Ward's parallel, Mike is too (once again, the pilot introduces all three characters in quick succession). Part of the reason that the show is so eager to cast Mike in the Deathlok role in the post-"Bridge" episodes is that doing so makes it more ironic when Ward--who spends these episodes reacting in outrage to Mike's crimes--is revealed as the season's true villain. And of course Ward and Mike are both Garrett's lackeys, the one acting under duress and eager to turn on his master at the first opportunity, and the other loyal to a self-abnegating degree, and past the point of reason. But after the revelation of Ward's villainy, we'd expect the show to reposition Mike as a heroic or at least sympathetic figure. Instead, he continues to be treated as a villain up until the moment that Coulson and Skye free him. As the Comic-Con interviews suggest, that perception is not about to change.
Ward and Mike are both victims or abuse, whose ability to freely choose between right and wrong is compromised (albeit in very different ways; Ward is obviously deeply psychologically damaged, but no one forces him to do any of the evil things he does over the course of the first season, and he passes up many opportunities to make better choices that Mike doesn't get). And yet we seem to be headed towards an absurd situation in which Ward is given a second chance with which to atone and turn his life around, while Mike is held responsible for his own victimization, treated like a villain for a combination of limited options, bad luck, and the crimes of others.
Grant Ward is white. Mike Peterson is black.
[1] The first of the Marvel One Shots, "The Consultant," extends that story when it reveals that the military still believes in The Abomination's potential, insisting that he join the Avengers Initiative.↩
[2] Guardians of the Galaxy touches on the supersoldier theme obliquely through the characters of Rocket, Gamora, and Nebula, all of whom were remade against their will, in the latter two cases explicitly into a fearsome killers. The Thor films don't address it at all, but when that series incurs into the world of Agents of SHIELD it's in ways that reflect on it: we learn that the Asgardians gave their soldiers weapons that could turn mild-mannered Peter MacNicol into a bloodthirsty killer; the sorceress Lorelai's power is to compel men to fight and die for her, and she mocks the supposedly free-willed Sif for obeying orders she doesn't agree with because they come from Odin--who is actually Loki in disguise.↩
[3] For all its problems with black characters, it's worth noting that SHIELD is unique in fielding not one but two Asian women in its main cast, and that some fans have read the show as commenting specifically on the Asian-American experience. It seems reasonable to ascribe this to writer and producer Maurissa "Nobody's Asian in the Movies" Tancharoen, which is a valuable reminder of how much diversity and nuanced representation on-screen depend on the presence of diverse writers and producers behind the scenes.↩
[4] I haven't read the comic, but from the plot description it occurs to me that Mike's arc in the pilot has echoes of the limited series comic Truth: Red, White & Black, by Robert Morales and Kyle Baker, in which it's revealed that Cap's serum was originally tested, Tuskegee-like, on black servicemen, who were denied the chance to become superheroes far more definitively than Steve Rogers. The comic, however, ends with Steve acknowledging Isiah Bradley's right to the title of Captain America, and Marvel continuity routinely refers to Bradley as the first to hold it.↩
[5] Not helping matters is the fact that "The Bridge" is also the episode in which Coulson explains to Ward that "every woman is a mystery." Grrr.↩
[6] See, for example, Tony Stark in Iron Man 3, when he sends the remote-controlled armor to save the imperiled President while jetting off himself to rescue Pepper.↩
[7] It's interesting to note the differences in how Mike relates to people in his Deathlok guise. With white men like Garrett, Quinn, and Ward, he is a blank-faced automaton, following orders but refusing to engage them emotionally or to be sucked into their personal drama. He only engages with people (women) of color, like Skye and Raina, even if it's only to accuse them and call them out for their hypocrisy.↩
[8] See, for example, the opening scene of "Nothing Personal," in which Cobie Smulders's Maria Hill airily complains about being made to testify before Congress about SHIELD's activities and Hydra's infiltration of it. It's a scene that's meant to make Hill look cool, as she compares Congress to children who can't cope with the realities of the situation. But try mentally replacing Smulders with a middle aged male bank executive circa 2009, and then tell me if her contempt for elected officials and inability to accept that she might be called to account for her mistakes are still charming and admirable.↩
[9] By this point, the team has been joined by B.J. Britt's Antoine Triplett, who feels like a deliberate (and desperately needed) response to the widely publicized criticisms of the show's depiction of black characters. While it's obviously significant that Ward (with his "Hitler youth" looks) is replaced by a black man, Trip also stands in stark contrast to Mike--he is SHIELD royalty, a legacy of Captain America's original integrated team, and seems to possess the effortless heroism that Mike lacks. I'm not quite certain where the show is going with that contrast, or with the character of Trip in general.↩
Monday, September 15, 2014
All Change
It seems like only yesterday that I was announcing on this blog my new position as Strange Horizons reviews editor. That day, however, was nearly four years ago, and in that time I've worked with incredible people and helped bring fantastic, thought-provoking, necessary criticism into the conversation about genre. It's been a privilege, and an enormously rewarding experience (not least in the form of two Hugo nominations), and I'm extremely grateful for it. Four years, however, is a long time, and as editor in chief Niall Harrison announced today in an editorial, I will be stepping down from the position of reviews editor at the end of the year.
So first, I want to take this opportunity to thank all of the reviewers I've worked with in the last four years, the department's contact managers, Donna Denn, Dan Hartland, and Tim Moore, the Strange Horizons proofreaders, and last but not least the readers and commenters who reminded us every week how vibrant and passionate (if, sometimes, a little too vibrant and passionate) the community of genre fans and readers are. (We are working on getting comments back on reviews and the blog, and I'm hopeful that before I step down this will have been achieved.)
Second, I want to welcome and wish the best of luck to the new reviews team: senior editor Maureen Kincaid Speller, and editors Aishwarya Subramanian and Dan Hartland. Those of you who read the magazine will recognize all three from their reviews for the department (as well as their own blogs), and will join me in feeling certain that I'm leaving it in more than capable hands. I'll be working with all three to hand over the department until the end of the year, and I'm very excited to see what they bring us.
Third, we are still working to staff up the department. Along with Niall's editorial, we've published a call for a media reviews editor, to handle reviews of film, TV, games, and other media. This is a subject that's been handled ad-hoc for most of the department's lifetime, and it feels like more than time to have someone focusing on it full-time. In addition, at the Strange Horizons blog Niall has published a call for new reviewers. If you're interested in writing for the Strange Horizons reviews department, drop us a line--more details about what we're looking for and how to contact us are at the link. We are, in particular, looking to increase the diversity of our reviewing body, and will be glad to hear from women, PoCs, LGBTQ people, and other under-represented groups.
Fourth and finally, what's next for me? There are a few projects I'm working on that I hope to be able to tell you more about in the coming months, and of course I always want to get more writing done on this blog, and will hopefully have more time to do that now. But reviews editor or not, I am still--as I have been for almost as long as I've been writing online--a Strange Horizons reviewer, and you'll be seeing my work, and that of so many other smart and talented people, in that magazine for, I hope, some time to come.
So first, I want to take this opportunity to thank all of the reviewers I've worked with in the last four years, the department's contact managers, Donna Denn, Dan Hartland, and Tim Moore, the Strange Horizons proofreaders, and last but not least the readers and commenters who reminded us every week how vibrant and passionate (if, sometimes, a little too vibrant and passionate) the community of genre fans and readers are. (We are working on getting comments back on reviews and the blog, and I'm hopeful that before I step down this will have been achieved.)
Second, I want to welcome and wish the best of luck to the new reviews team: senior editor Maureen Kincaid Speller, and editors Aishwarya Subramanian and Dan Hartland. Those of you who read the magazine will recognize all three from their reviews for the department (as well as their own blogs), and will join me in feeling certain that I'm leaving it in more than capable hands. I'll be working with all three to hand over the department until the end of the year, and I'm very excited to see what they bring us.
Third, we are still working to staff up the department. Along with Niall's editorial, we've published a call for a media reviews editor, to handle reviews of film, TV, games, and other media. This is a subject that's been handled ad-hoc for most of the department's lifetime, and it feels like more than time to have someone focusing on it full-time. In addition, at the Strange Horizons blog Niall has published a call for new reviewers. If you're interested in writing for the Strange Horizons reviews department, drop us a line--more details about what we're looking for and how to contact us are at the link. We are, in particular, looking to increase the diversity of our reviewing body, and will be glad to hear from women, PoCs, LGBTQ people, and other under-represented groups.
Fourth and finally, what's next for me? There are a few projects I'm working on that I hope to be able to tell you more about in the coming months, and of course I always want to get more writing done on this blog, and will hopefully have more time to do that now. But reviews editor or not, I am still--as I have been for almost as long as I've been writing online--a Strange Horizons reviewer, and you'll be seeing my work, and that of so many other smart and talented people, in that magazine for, I hope, some time to come.
Tuesday, September 02, 2014
Lucy
Three things you will probably have heard by now about Lucy, Luc Besson's latest film and his first foray back into proper, no-holds-barred science fiction since The Fifth Element. One, that the film's success demonstrates the viability of a female-led action/SF movie, and cements Scarlett Johansson's position as the reigning queen of filmed SF (or at the very least co-reigning queen, along with Zoe Saldana). Two, that its handling of race, and particularly of its Asian characters, whom it depicts almost uniformly as violent drug dealers who menace and threaten to rape its innocent white heroine, is irredeemable. And three, that it unwisely nails its colors to the mast of the "humans only use 10% of their brains" meme, despite the fact that no one buys into it any more and that most SF fans would find it an extremely annoying strain on their suspension of disbelief. These things are all true and worth talking about, but what I find interesting about Lucy--which is not, I hasten to point out, a good film in any sense of the word, but which depending on your personal tolerance for that sort of thing might be called entertainingly weird--is how its effective and extremely misleading marketing campaign leads you to expect something very different than the film actually delivers. Most people, I imagine, will go into Lucy expecting a superhero film, when in fact it is quite the opposite--an anti-superhero movie.
An American student in Taiwan, Lucy (Johansson) is coerced by her shifty boyfriend into delivering a locked case to his employer, Mr. Jang (Min-sik Choi, who manages to convey an amusing, low-key sense of menace despite speaking solely in untranslated Korean). Things quickly go south, and Lucy finds herself dragooned into couriering a packet of a new designer drug, PCH4, which has been sewn into her stomach. Instead of being ferried to the airport, however, Lucy finds herself in the hands of another group of thugs (it's never made clear what happened here, though we can assume that one of Jang's cronies double-crossed him) who attack her when she resists their pawing advances, rupturing the drug packet. The resulting overdose inadvertently proves the theories of Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman) that if humans could learn to use more of their brains, we would gain control over our bodies, over the bodies of other people, and finally over matter itself. The rest of the film is broken up by title screens announcing that Lucy is has now reached 20% brain capacity, 50%, etc., as her abilities develop according to Norman's timeline and she draws closer to the elusive 100%. (Though much has been made of the annoyance of a movie so dedicated to this canard, the unscientific moment that I found truly frustrating was a scene in which Norman is questioned about his predictions of what each usage level would enable, admits that they are only a theory, and then compares them to the theory of evolution, ignoring the fact thatNewton Darwin was theorizing based on observed data, whereas his theory is mere guesswork.)
In the scenes immediately following the overdose, the film seems to be following the familiar template of a superhero story, in which an experience that should be horrifically traumatic or even fatal instead imbues our hero or heroine with special powers and allows them to take control of their world. Lucy wastes little time in dispatching her captors and freeing herself, and quickly makes plans to remove the leaking drug packet from her body and figure out what has happened to her. But what almost immediately becomes clear is that if Lucy is a superhero, it is along the lines of Watchmen's Doctor Manhattan. Unlocking the unused parts of her brain has made Lucy so much bigger than ordinary people that she has become essentially inhuman, and perhaps monstrous. Much has been made of a scene in which Lucy cavalierly but non-fatally shoots an innocent Taiwanese taxi driver because he doesn't speak English and can't take her where she wants to go, but there's been surprisingly little discussion of a scene immediately following, in which Lucy forces her way into a hospital operating room and kills the patient on the table (because she's glanced at his tests and concluded that he was going to die anyway) so that the doctors can operate on her. (If you really want to, you can use scenes like this to try to justify the film's racism by claiming that it is Lucy who is indifferent to these deaths, not the movie. This, however, is clearly not Besson's intention, and anyway does not explain why the film's villains are exclusively Asian, or why even post-overdose Lucy is able to relate to white, American women like her mother, or the roommate whom she diagnoses with kidney failure and gives medical advice to.)
Watching the film, I was surprised to recall reviews of it in which the pre-overdose Lucy is referred to as an unintelligent party girl. In fact, Lucy is a painfully ordinary but hardly reckless or stupid person. She seems to be someone who is enjoying the party life while abroad but who also recognizes its limits. In the opening scene, she's seen explaining to her boyfriend that she has to go home and study, and never even considers delivering the case for him until he forces her to do it by handcuffing it to her wrist. Her reactions to falling into the clutches of dangerous criminals are disarmingly human and believable, with just a enough of a hint of courage to make us root for her to triumph. When she's being driven to what she thinks is the airport, we get to hear Lucy's internal monologue, as she tries to reassure herself that she is still alive and might yet survive this ordeal. That person--the very human, flawed young girl who made some bad judgment calls but ultimately was just in the wrong place at the wrong time--disappears after the overdose, and the film seems to be arguing that far from being transformed into a heroine, she has effectively died. Johansson's flat, emotionless affect after the overdose seems designed to convey that Lucy is a completely different person who is quickly losing touch with who she used to be. In the film's most affecting scene, she calls her mother from the hospital as the drug packet is removed, and while there are hints in their conversation of the girl Lucy used to be, they are filtered through her growing strangeness--she explains that she can remember her whole life, including suckling from her mother as a baby--and it's clear that she is calling to say goodbye, while she still has enough human left in her to be able to relate to her parents.
The rest of the film seems, deliberately or not (and I confess that I lean towards the "not" reading) to be trying to disassemble some of the tropes of the superhero origin story. Every moment that we might expect to be triumphant and badass is instead realigned to highlight Lucy's growing strangeness and inhumanity. When she returns to Jang's hotel room from a position of strength, it's not to wreak righteous vengeance, but because she wants information about where the other couriers carrying PCH4 have been sent. She seems largely indifferent to the suffering she causes Jang, musing that she now realizes that the things that made her who she was were in fact "obstacles" to achieving her true potential. A car chase scene in Paris might have been expected to be fun and pulse-pounding, but instead it continues the film's theme of depicting Lucy as indifferent to collateral damage, and when the policeman accompanying her (Amr Waked, whose character is positioned as Lucy's tether to humanity but is so underserved by the script that he ends up feeling like an afterthought) warns that she's going to get both of them killed, Lucy merely intones that "we never really die." Perhaps the most egregious example of how indifferent Lucy--and perhaps also the film--is to the conventions of the action movie is a scene in which she squares off against dozens of Jang's henchmen, and instead of fighting them simply causes them to float to the ceiling, walking past them as if they weren't even there.
The problem with all this--and the reason that Lucy ends up as more an interesting failure than a watchable film--is that it isn't a story. Besson has an interesting premise, and an actress who can carry it (it's interesting to note how much of Johansson's bid for major Hollywood stardom in the last year has depended on playing in- or post-human women, and how successful that tactic has been), but he doesn't have a plot. Though the film makes much of Lucy's progression towards using 100% of her brain, the fact remains that from the moment she hits 20%, she's effectively unstoppable, so that none of the film's action movie tropes have real resonance. And though, as I've said, it's interesting that the film undermines so many tropes of superhero movies, its ideas of what to replace them with are limited and not very compelling. Lucy manages to skate past the common Hollywood pitfall of depicting the super-intelligent as unemotional and lacking in sympathy--her disconnect from humanity comes not from accelerated intelligence but from her massively broadened perspective, and she's clearly still affected by the realization that the drugs in her system will inevitably kill her, and by the question of how to leave something behind that will allow humanity to learn from her experiences. But in trying to depict what it means to be posthuman, Besson falls back on clichés--from the cutaways to nature documentaries that parallel Lucy's situation in the early parts of the film, to scenes late in the story in which she travels in time, meeting dinosaurs and early hominids. Even worse is the cod-philosophy that Lucy spouts as she tries to explain her new worldview. While obviously Besson couldn't have been expected to truly articulate what it's like to be posthuman, the fact that he tries, in lieu of delivering an actual story, is a major flaw in the film--as is the fact that he keeps Jang, and his plot to kill Lucy, around long past the point where he ceases to be an actual threat. Lucy is short enough (89 minutes) that its forays into weirdness as it attempts to articulate how big Lucy has become don't have time to outstay their welcome, but the film's ending still comes as a bit of a relief.
Much like Johansson's earlier Her, Lucy is interesting less for its story and characters and more for the world it suggests but has no interest in exploring--a world in which posthumanism has been unlocked, in which anyone can take a drug that gives them superhuman powers while robbing them of their humanity, and in which people who have unlocked their full potential effectively become gods who can now interfere with ordinary human life in whatever way they like. It's a shame that Besson can come close to recognizing the true implications of his story only to fall back on action movie clichés and meaningless philosophical ramblings (and an even greater shame that he was unable to tell his story without resorting to easily avoidable racism). Still, while I can't exactly recommend Lucy--your enjoyment of it will largely depend on your tolerance for pointless weirdness, and on how much you feel that Scarlett Johansson playing a woman with superpowers compensates for that weirdness--I am glad that it was made. If only as a reminder of how ideas about SF and posthumanism, no matter how simplified and unscientific, are percolating into popular culture, and as a promise that perhaps, some day, someone will make an SF film worth of those ideas, and of Johansson's talents.
An American student in Taiwan, Lucy (Johansson) is coerced by her shifty boyfriend into delivering a locked case to his employer, Mr. Jang (Min-sik Choi, who manages to convey an amusing, low-key sense of menace despite speaking solely in untranslated Korean). Things quickly go south, and Lucy finds herself dragooned into couriering a packet of a new designer drug, PCH4, which has been sewn into her stomach. Instead of being ferried to the airport, however, Lucy finds herself in the hands of another group of thugs (it's never made clear what happened here, though we can assume that one of Jang's cronies double-crossed him) who attack her when she resists their pawing advances, rupturing the drug packet. The resulting overdose inadvertently proves the theories of Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman) that if humans could learn to use more of their brains, we would gain control over our bodies, over the bodies of other people, and finally over matter itself. The rest of the film is broken up by title screens announcing that Lucy is has now reached 20% brain capacity, 50%, etc., as her abilities develop according to Norman's timeline and she draws closer to the elusive 100%. (Though much has been made of the annoyance of a movie so dedicated to this canard, the unscientific moment that I found truly frustrating was a scene in which Norman is questioned about his predictions of what each usage level would enable, admits that they are only a theory, and then compares them to the theory of evolution, ignoring the fact that
In the scenes immediately following the overdose, the film seems to be following the familiar template of a superhero story, in which an experience that should be horrifically traumatic or even fatal instead imbues our hero or heroine with special powers and allows them to take control of their world. Lucy wastes little time in dispatching her captors and freeing herself, and quickly makes plans to remove the leaking drug packet from her body and figure out what has happened to her. But what almost immediately becomes clear is that if Lucy is a superhero, it is along the lines of Watchmen's Doctor Manhattan. Unlocking the unused parts of her brain has made Lucy so much bigger than ordinary people that she has become essentially inhuman, and perhaps monstrous. Much has been made of a scene in which Lucy cavalierly but non-fatally shoots an innocent Taiwanese taxi driver because he doesn't speak English and can't take her where she wants to go, but there's been surprisingly little discussion of a scene immediately following, in which Lucy forces her way into a hospital operating room and kills the patient on the table (because she's glanced at his tests and concluded that he was going to die anyway) so that the doctors can operate on her. (If you really want to, you can use scenes like this to try to justify the film's racism by claiming that it is Lucy who is indifferent to these deaths, not the movie. This, however, is clearly not Besson's intention, and anyway does not explain why the film's villains are exclusively Asian, or why even post-overdose Lucy is able to relate to white, American women like her mother, or the roommate whom she diagnoses with kidney failure and gives medical advice to.)
Watching the film, I was surprised to recall reviews of it in which the pre-overdose Lucy is referred to as an unintelligent party girl. In fact, Lucy is a painfully ordinary but hardly reckless or stupid person. She seems to be someone who is enjoying the party life while abroad but who also recognizes its limits. In the opening scene, she's seen explaining to her boyfriend that she has to go home and study, and never even considers delivering the case for him until he forces her to do it by handcuffing it to her wrist. Her reactions to falling into the clutches of dangerous criminals are disarmingly human and believable, with just a enough of a hint of courage to make us root for her to triumph. When she's being driven to what she thinks is the airport, we get to hear Lucy's internal monologue, as she tries to reassure herself that she is still alive and might yet survive this ordeal. That person--the very human, flawed young girl who made some bad judgment calls but ultimately was just in the wrong place at the wrong time--disappears after the overdose, and the film seems to be arguing that far from being transformed into a heroine, she has effectively died. Johansson's flat, emotionless affect after the overdose seems designed to convey that Lucy is a completely different person who is quickly losing touch with who she used to be. In the film's most affecting scene, she calls her mother from the hospital as the drug packet is removed, and while there are hints in their conversation of the girl Lucy used to be, they are filtered through her growing strangeness--she explains that she can remember her whole life, including suckling from her mother as a baby--and it's clear that she is calling to say goodbye, while she still has enough human left in her to be able to relate to her parents.
The rest of the film seems, deliberately or not (and I confess that I lean towards the "not" reading) to be trying to disassemble some of the tropes of the superhero origin story. Every moment that we might expect to be triumphant and badass is instead realigned to highlight Lucy's growing strangeness and inhumanity. When she returns to Jang's hotel room from a position of strength, it's not to wreak righteous vengeance, but because she wants information about where the other couriers carrying PCH4 have been sent. She seems largely indifferent to the suffering she causes Jang, musing that she now realizes that the things that made her who she was were in fact "obstacles" to achieving her true potential. A car chase scene in Paris might have been expected to be fun and pulse-pounding, but instead it continues the film's theme of depicting Lucy as indifferent to collateral damage, and when the policeman accompanying her (Amr Waked, whose character is positioned as Lucy's tether to humanity but is so underserved by the script that he ends up feeling like an afterthought) warns that she's going to get both of them killed, Lucy merely intones that "we never really die." Perhaps the most egregious example of how indifferent Lucy--and perhaps also the film--is to the conventions of the action movie is a scene in which she squares off against dozens of Jang's henchmen, and instead of fighting them simply causes them to float to the ceiling, walking past them as if they weren't even there.
The problem with all this--and the reason that Lucy ends up as more an interesting failure than a watchable film--is that it isn't a story. Besson has an interesting premise, and an actress who can carry it (it's interesting to note how much of Johansson's bid for major Hollywood stardom in the last year has depended on playing in- or post-human women, and how successful that tactic has been), but he doesn't have a plot. Though the film makes much of Lucy's progression towards using 100% of her brain, the fact remains that from the moment she hits 20%, she's effectively unstoppable, so that none of the film's action movie tropes have real resonance. And though, as I've said, it's interesting that the film undermines so many tropes of superhero movies, its ideas of what to replace them with are limited and not very compelling. Lucy manages to skate past the common Hollywood pitfall of depicting the super-intelligent as unemotional and lacking in sympathy--her disconnect from humanity comes not from accelerated intelligence but from her massively broadened perspective, and she's clearly still affected by the realization that the drugs in her system will inevitably kill her, and by the question of how to leave something behind that will allow humanity to learn from her experiences. But in trying to depict what it means to be posthuman, Besson falls back on clichés--from the cutaways to nature documentaries that parallel Lucy's situation in the early parts of the film, to scenes late in the story in which she travels in time, meeting dinosaurs and early hominids. Even worse is the cod-philosophy that Lucy spouts as she tries to explain her new worldview. While obviously Besson couldn't have been expected to truly articulate what it's like to be posthuman, the fact that he tries, in lieu of delivering an actual story, is a major flaw in the film--as is the fact that he keeps Jang, and his plot to kill Lucy, around long past the point where he ceases to be an actual threat. Lucy is short enough (89 minutes) that its forays into weirdness as it attempts to articulate how big Lucy has become don't have time to outstay their welcome, but the film's ending still comes as a bit of a relief.
Much like Johansson's earlier Her, Lucy is interesting less for its story and characters and more for the world it suggests but has no interest in exploring--a world in which posthumanism has been unlocked, in which anyone can take a drug that gives them superhuman powers while robbing them of their humanity, and in which people who have unlocked their full potential effectively become gods who can now interfere with ordinary human life in whatever way they like. It's a shame that Besson can come close to recognizing the true implications of his story only to fall back on action movie clichés and meaningless philosophical ramblings (and an even greater shame that he was unable to tell his story without resorting to easily avoidable racism). Still, while I can't exactly recommend Lucy--your enjoyment of it will largely depend on your tolerance for pointless weirdness, and on how much you feel that Scarlett Johansson playing a woman with superpowers compensates for that weirdness--I am glad that it was made. If only as a reminder of how ideas about SF and posthumanism, no matter how simplified and unscientific, are percolating into popular culture, and as a promise that perhaps, some day, someone will make an SF film worth of those ideas, and of Johansson's talents.
Friday, August 22, 2014
London and LonCon
Well, here I am, back from London and Loncon, with much to tell. I combined my third foray to Worldcon (and my first as a Hugo nominee) with a family vacation, both of which were delightful if a little tiring--a classic "I need a vacation after this vacation" situation. The experiences of both convention and city are already swirling in my head, so I'd better get them down while it's still possible to make sense of them.
- The City - I've been to London many times, but the last time I toured it, rather than simply stopping on my way from one place to another for a bit of shopping or theater, was in 2001. And this trip was also the first time my family and I had vacationed together since 2008 (longer if you include my aunt, who joined us for the first weekend as an early birthday celebration for her and my mother). We ended up doing a lot of the tourist standards, many of which have changed substantially since I last visited them--the whole area surrounding the Tate Modern, for example, has been built up into a river walk that I hadn't seen before (plus the Millennium Bridge, which I found both ridiculous and delightful). And, of course, the city is constantly rebuilding itself, with new buildings going up all the time--my aunt, who is an architect, would have been thrilled to spend her entire time in London looking at them.
I really appreciate that so many of the London museums are open free of charge, but on this trip it was the temporary (and thus ticketed) exhibits that linger in my memory: the Matisse cutouts at the Tate Modern (open until September 7th) were lovely and, to me, a little more accessible than some of the other work there (though I was also very taken by the surreal, and rather clearly slipstream-y, drawings of Louise Bourgeois); Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK at the British Library (closed on August 19th) was as insightful and eye-opening as advertized, offering a counterpoint to the familiar, US-based narrative of the medium's emergence and growth into political engagement (though I would have appreciated it if the exhibit did not take its dark tone so literally--at times I found it difficult to read some of the explanatory texts). At the V&A, we saw two very different exhibits--Disobedient Objects, about the material culture of protest movements (open until February 1st), and Wedding Dresses (open until March 15th), whose title is self-explanatory, and where I was amused by the gender (im)balance of the crowds.
Other highlights of our time as tourists include lunch at Nopi, one of Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi's restaurants. You might recognize those names from their recent blockbuster cookbook Jerusalem, and though the book is truly excellent, I was a little bemused by the idea of going all the way to London to eat Israeli/Palestinian food. I shouldn't have been concerned. Though the flavors at Nopi were familiar, the dishes were their own creation, and expertly prepared. Highly recommended--and be sure to check out what is probably the most ridiculous ladies' bathroom in London. I'm a little more dubious about our theater excursion, Book of Mormon, which was funny and very well done, but not really to my taste. The skewering of Mormonism was more thoughtful than I was expecting, but the conclusion the show reaches is more than a little trite, and I'd be curious to know how the show's handling of race has been received by more knowledgeable critics. And though I'm loathe to complain about this from my living room outside Tel Aviv where the air conditioner is just barely keeping the 83% humidity at bay, the weather left something to be desired--we'd planned for temperatures in the mid-20s with occasional showers, and got high teens with frequent downpours. Still, on the whole this was a very successful vacation.
- Accessibility - When my family and I planned this vacation a year ago, it was in the belief that my mother, who had recently undergone a double knee replacement, would be back to normal by the time we traveled. Flash forward a year, and my mother's knees are still giving her trouble, so we ended up traveling and touring with a mobility scooter. This afforded us some unexpected privileges--as the able-bodied companions of a disabled person, my brother and I benefited whenever our mother was waved through lines (this was particularly helpful when a public transport snafu brought us to the theater two minutes before curtain time)--but also some challenges. The underground was out of consideration, and although we were able to get around with the help of buses and copious wheelchair ramps on sidewalks, my sense is that London accessibility was designed with the assumption that disabled people always have someone able-bodied traveling with them. From the fact that most buses don't have Oyster card swipe points at their back door, to the number of times that my brother and I had to lift our mother's scooter those few steps to get into a building (fortunately, she's able to walk short distances with a cane), it quickly became clear that she'd be having a very different trip if she were traveling alone--though, I should be clear, still a better time than she would have had in Israel, where the assumption seems to be that disabled people all have cars, or stay home. (For some further thoughts on accessibility in London, check out the recent LJ posts by Mari Ness, who was clearly attempting the London-while-disabled thing on a higher difficulty setting than us.)
- The Convention - LonCon 3 was held in ExCel, the gigantic convention center in the redeveloped Docklands area. The size of the venue dwarfed even what turned out to be the second-largest Worldcon ever, but this was far from a bad thing. I never found myself short of a place to sit at any of the panels I went to (though I understand that people who attended program items with big-ticket participants like George R.R. Martin or Patrick Rothfuss tell a different story); there were rarely any lines in the bathroom; and there was always a free table in the long food gallery. The convention itself seemed to acclimatize itself to this space quite well, and was in general very well-run (one exception and personal peeve: I didn't receive my Hugo nominee packet, with certificates and pins, when I registered, and later when I went to program ops to ask about it was given a Hugo nominee ribbon and not even told that I was supposed to receive anything else; by the time I realized this, no one seemed to know where the Hugo materials had gone). The sheer number of attending members meant that I was constantly hurrying past people I desperately wanted to stop and talk to who were themselves hurrying somewhere else, but nevertheless I was able to meet and talk with a large number of people, including many I'd previously only known online.
- The Program - I'm far from the first person to say this, but the program at LonCon was fantastic. There was rarely a slot in which I didn't find three or four panels I desperately wanted to go to--and that's accounting for the fact that my interest lay primarily in the literature and media tracks (my brother, who was more interested in the space and science panels, seemed to have an equally fascinating time). Some highlights: Occupy SF: Inequality on Screen (Thursday, 15:00-16:30; Martin McGrath (m), Carrie Vaughn, Roz Kaveney, Laurie Penny, and Takayuki Tatsumi), which discussed the presentation of class issues in SF film and TV. The panel began with moderator McGrath offering the thesis that present-day SF is afraid of poor people, and went on to discuss whether this had changed from the past (when more SF authors were at least fellow travelers if not outright Communists), and whether the dominant forms of popular SF--the superhero story, the dystopia--are capable of addressing class and inequality. Content and Form: Writing SF/F in Non-Western Modes (Friday, 13:30-15:00; Amal El-Mohtar (m), Aliette de Bodard, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, JY Yang, and Nick Wood) was a fascinating discussion by genre writers from non-Western cultures of whether and to what extent they find themselves boxed in by Western storytelling modes--by the expectation, for example, of three-act structures, or stories focused on individuals rather than communities, or big heroic endings--and how they can incorporate the modes of their own culture into their work.
I also had the strange and humbling experience of attending a panel that kicked off from something I'd written: You Don't Like Me When I'm Angry (Sunday, 15:00-16:30, Mary Anne Mohanraj (m), Martin McGrath, Stephanie Saulter, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Nin Harris) built on a passage from my review of X-Men: First Class to discuss how anger is perceived in popular culture, and what its value is. The participants discussed their own personal experiences of injustice and oppression (and the anger that resulted) in a way that I could never have done, and also wondered whether genre fiction, with its fixation on the heroic narrative, could ever be capable of dealing with the reality of impotent, damaging anger, or whether it would always vilify it. And on Friday at 21:00, I was dragged into a panel that I never would have looked into myself but which turned out to be one of the con's most unexpected delights. You Write Pretty (Frances Hardinge, Christopher Priest, E.J. Swift, Greer Gilman) charged its participants to each pick a sentence they found beautiful and talk about why. I was expecting a writing seminar, but instead all four participants approached the assignment as readers--albeit thoughtful and talented ones--and talked about the different ways of achieving affect, and the ways in which each genre and mode worked its magic on the reader in different ways.
- My Panels - Unfortunately, I'm terrible at taking notes in my own panels, so I can only offer the vague impression that they all seemed to go over fairly well. Happily, some of them have been written up elsewhere. Kate Nepveu wrote up my Sunday panel The Gendered AI, moderated by Charlie Jane Anders and with Nic Clarke, Michael Morelli, and Jed Hartman, which I thought went particularly well, and Ana S. has a nice long summary of The Review is Political (moderated by Kev McVeigh and with Tansy Rayner Roberts, Elias Combarro, and Alisa Krasnostein).
This convention was the first time I'd been asked to moderate panels, and both times I was anxious, for different reasons. At Saturday Morning Cartoons: The Next Generation, the other participants (Amal El-Mohtar, Abi Sutherland and Andrew Ferguson) and I discovered that we were each familiar with different shows, and I was concerned that the panel would turn into the spoken equivalent of a wall of text. But we were able to find commonalities between the shows, and ended up discussing whether the brand of silliness that is thriving in genre cartoons, for kids and adults, could ever make its way back to live-action TV (this panel also benefited from having the best sort of audience, clearly familiar with the shows we were talking about, and more interested in discussing them than squeeing over them). For my second panel as moderator, The World at Worldcon: Israeli SF/F, I was concerned that the topic would only be of interest to fellow Israelis, but though these made up a good half of the audience (and, like proper Israelis, frequently interrupted the panel discussion to add their own input), I was surprised by the number of interested foreigners. The other panelists (Lili Daie, Noa Manheim, Einat Citron, and Liat Shahar-Kashtan) and I discussed Israeli fandom (which tends to be younger and more female than the Worldcon crowd), fiction, media, and (of course) politics.
- The Hugos - At which I lost. Twice. This was, obviously, a disappointment, but I feel that in both categories I (or the group with which I was nominated) made a good showing. Strange Horizons came within sixteen votes (!!!) of winning the Best Semiprozine Hugo, which is a result that none of us were expecting and which leaves us feeling extremely energized. And while my second place to Kameron Hurley in the Best Fan Writer category isn't nearly as close--she beat me by a handy 250 votes--it was a category in which hundreds of people put me in second place to what was clearly a juggernaut (Hurley also won the Best Related Work for her essay "We Have Always Fought," and in his acceptance speech for Best Fanzine, Aidan Moher gave partial credit for his win to the fact that it was published on that blog). And it helps that in both categories I feel that we lost to worthy opponents, to whom it is no shame to come second.
In general, in fact, the Hugo results are solid. Most categories have respectable winners, though in some cases I would have (and did) choose differently, and in some categories--XKCD's "Time" winning Best Graphic Story; Sarah Webb winning Best Fan Artist; most of all, Sofia Samatar winning the Campbell--the results are extremely gratifying. Unlike a lot of people, I never thought that Larry Correia's Sad Puppy ballot had a real chance at a good showing--the Hugo tends to be susceptible to manipulation at the nominating stage, but once the larger voting population gets a look at the nominees, a course-correction usually occurs. So that fact that Vox Day, for example, lost to No Award in the Best Novelette category, while amusing, didn't come as a surprise. Which is not to say that I wasn't surprised when the voting and nominating statistics were published (within seconds of the ceremony's end; we were reading them on our phones on our way to the Hugo Losers' Party), with revelations like that fact that The Wheel of Time never even came close to winning the Best Novel category, or that the Doctor Who voting block finally appears to be splintering, reminding all us Hugo commentators of how little we really understand this award. The most interesting discovery, to me, came in the nominations breakdown, where I discovered that, if it hadn't been for Correia and for the Wheel of Time campaign, this year's Best Novel ballot would have had four women on it, with Lauren Beukes's The Shining Girls and Sofia Samatar's A Stranger in Olondria only a few votes short of a nomination each. I'm sure that Correia and his cronies will be only too thrilled to know that they had this effect, but for the rest of us, it should be a reminder that the Hugo should be about rewarding today's excellence and promoting tomorrow's diversity, not pandering to a nostalgia for yesterday.
The ceremony itself, meanwhile, was nicely done, but I'm afraid I wasn't in a state to appreciate it. I think I enjoyed myself a lot more when I attended the Hugos as a member of the audience, wearing jeans and comfortable shoes and making snarky jokes with my friends when stuff I didn't like won, than sitting in the front row waiting for my name to be called out (or not). One definite upside, though, is that I found myself sitting several meters away from Peter Davison and David Tennant, who came to support The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, though I sadly didn't get the chance to speak to either one.
- The Future - I'm extremely unlikely to attend next year's Worldcon at Spokane, and though Kansas City in 2016 is more plausible (in that I have a lot of family in St. Louis that I haven't seen in years), the thought of Missouri in August doesn't exactly appeal. I think that Jonathan McCalmont has a point when he argues that it's time for North American dominance of the Worldcon to end, and for the convention to start living up to its name. It's impossible to look at the size and vibrancy of LonCon 3 and not feel that it represents--or should represent--the convention's future, and though Worldcon doesn't always have to be enormous, I would like to see it leave the US more often. So I very much hope to be able to announce, this time next year, that I will be attending Worldcon in 2017 in Helsinki (and to that end, it's worth noting that supporting members of a Worldcon can vote for site selection, albeit for an additional fee). Whichever Worldcon I end up attending next, however, it will have a lot to live up to.
Thursday, July 24, 2014
My Worldcon Schedule
The Worldcon program was published today, and just from a quick glance I can already tell that I am going to be a) worn off my feet running from panel to panel, and b) overcome by agonizing choices between conflicting but equally awesome events. I'm truly looking forward to this convention.
My own excellent slate of panels is below. In addition to these, I will be on hand at the Strange Horizons brunch, on Saturday from 10AM to 12AM, at party tent A.
My own excellent slate of panels is below. In addition to these, I will be on hand at the Strange Horizons brunch, on Saturday from 10AM to 12AM, at party tent A.
- A Reader's Life During Peak Short Fiction
Friday 12:00 - 13:30, Capital Suite 10 (ExCeL)
There are now more speculative short stories published than any one person can hope to read -- or even find. So how do fans of the short-form navigate this landscape? With so much ground to cover, how does an individual reader find stories they like -- are we more author-driven in our reading habits? Conversely, how and why do particular stories "break out" and become more widely known? To what extent is the greater volume of material enabling -- and recognising -- a greater diversity of authors and topics? And what is the place of short fiction in today's field -- testing ground for ideas, the heart of the discussion, or something else?
Jetse de Vries (M), Elizabeth Bear , Abigail Nussbaum , Jonathan Strahan , Alvaro Zinos-Amaro - Saturday Morning Cartoons: The Next Generation
Friday 16:30 - 18:00, Capital Suite 2 (ExCeL)
Alongside the much-discussed golden age of animated cinema, we're living in a golden age of animated TV. Shows such as Gravity Falls, Venture Brothers, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Adventure Time, and Avatar: The Last Airbender can be as clever, funny, politically challenging and emotionally sophisticated as any live-action show. This panel will discuss when and why the best of these shows work so well -- as well as the constraints they still face, and whether some of them fall short of their ideals.
Amal El-Mohtar , Abigail Nussbaum , Abigail Sutherland , Andrew Ferguson - The Review is Political
Saturday 12:00 - 13:30, Capital Suite 2 (ExCeL)
Every review is a political act because every review makes choices: about which aspects of a work to focus on, what context to provide, which yardsticks to use, and more. And while no choices are neutral, some can be the default -- a focus on plot and character, for instance, and less discussion of style and politics. What other defaults can we identify in SF and fantasy reviewing? How are reviews that depart from those defaults challenged? Are any defaults changing -- and if so, how can we help that process along?
Kevin McVeigh (M) , Abigail Nussbaum , Dr. Tansy Rayner Roberts , Elías Combarro - 2014 Hugos: Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form
Saturday 13:30 - 15:00, Capital Suite 16 (ExCeL)
Our panel will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the nominees, try to second-guess the voters, and tell you what else should have been on the ballot.
Carrie Vaughn (M) , Tanya Brown , Kim Newman, Abigail Nussbaum , Mary Turzillo - The Gendered AI
Sunday 13:30 - 15:00, Capital Suite 2 (ExCeL)
Strictly speaking, there's no reason an artificial intelligence should express gender in human terms (or at all). Yet in much recent film and TV -- such as WALL-E, Her, Person of Interest, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Caprica -- gender and/or sexuality has been integral to the vision of AI. How have such portrayals affected what stories are told? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What would it mean to imagine a genderless AI -- or a queer AI?
Charlie Jane Anders (M), Nic Clarke, Michael Morelli, Abigail Nussbaum, Jed Hartman - The World at Worldcon: Israeli SF/F
Monday 13:30 - 15:00, Capital Suite 13 (ExCeL)
In her essay, "The Man From the Yellow Star", Elana Gomel asserts that, as a general rule, "Israelis do not read science fiction and fantasy." In a 2013 interview published at Strange Horizons, Lavie Tidhar and Shimon Adaf addressed the same issue, identifying a "bias towards naturalism" in the way Israeli fiction is discussed. But things may be changing. Who can we say is writing Israeli SF/F? How are the market and the fan community developing? And who should Anglophones be hoping to get the chance to read?
Abigail Nussbaum (M), Galia Bahat, Lili Daie, Noa Menhaim, Einat Citron, Liat Shahar-Kashtan
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