The Revengers' Tragedy: Thoughts on the Fifth Season Finale of Game of Thrones

Yesterday afternoon, before I'd watched the final episode of Game of Thrones's fifth season, I read this essay by Aaron Bady about the show, in which he argues that it has overshot its natural ending point, and therefore no longer has anything to say:

What has changed, I think, is that tragedy has become pornography. Not literal pornography, of course, because very specific forms of gratuitous sexual titillation have been consistent throughout. Put some boobs on screen is one of the boxes each episode needs to check off, and consistently does. But what is the point of evoking terror and pity by hurting characters like Sansa or Cercei? Watching Ned, Catelyn, and Rob die was horrible not only because they were good people, but because we were watching the patriarchal fantasies of Good Kings dying with them. They represented something, the possibility of a return to the way things should be: the tragedy was coming to realize its impossibility. The Starks were the tragic heroes, because, from Ned on down, their heroic qualities were what doomed them, made their deaths inevitable. George R. R. Martin's innovation was to suggest that "Goodness" is a tragic flaw. 

After writing three books in four years, Martin lost the plot; since the Red Wedding, basically, he's written two books in fifteen years, and they're a hot mess. He'd written himself into a corner, and it will be interesting to see if HBO can write him out of it. I suspect he's totally stuck, and here's why: one way to end the thing would be with the Return of the King (google "R+L=J" if you want to know how it could happen), which would make A Song of Ice and Fire into a tragedy with a happy ending. But a tragedy with a happy ending is not a tragedy, and this is Martin's dilemma: if the King returns, and all is well that ends well, then we have returned to the narrative that he so devilishly skewered in the first three books. If we watched a nightmarish horror, in which good guys finish last, we'll wake up to discover that it was all a dream: actually, good guys finish first!

This is not only close to what my take of the show has been for a while, it actually neatly captures the reasons I felt so unmotivated to keep reading the books past the first one: it was clear that Martin was writing a crapsack world in which everyone sucks and no one deserves the throne, so why should I care who wins it?  More importantly, in the background of this story, Martin was setting up an epic battle for survival between humanity and ice zombies, which would inevitably belie the cynicism of his main story by delivering a foretold hero to save the world--so why should I even respect him for being a cynic?

Bady's argument feels particularly apt at the end of this exhausting fifth season, in which the show seemed finally to have been snowed under by the sheer volume of the conversation about it.  As if subliminally sensing that Game of Thrones had long since run out of anything to say, its commentators seemed determined to fill the void by saying everything possible about it--about its use of rape, about its gleeful embrace of violence against the innocent and helpless, about the odd but completely predictable phenomenon of an adaptation outpacing its source material, about the increasing tensions this is causing for fans of the books, and, inevitably, about what it means that we can't stop talking about Game of Thrones.  Every Monday morning for two and a half months, twitter has been full of people ranting about the latest depravity to happen to a beloved character, people swearing off the show forever (until next week), and people mocking the first two groups for not noticing the kind of story they were watching.  As someone who for years has been saying that Game of Thrones is little more than a well-made soap opera with no one worth rooting for except the servants and peasants, I ought to feel some sympathy with the latter group, but what I've mainly been feeling is overwhelmed, and increasingly unclear why I'm still watching the show.  It's not that I don't like it anymore--I mainly watch to find out what happens next, and on that level the fifth season delivered a fair bit of progress--but that I'm increasingly feeling the pressure to be invested, either for or against, in something that surely doesn't deserve that investment.

This was my feeling yesterday afternoon.  And then I watched the fifth season finale, "Mother's Mercy," and something really strange and unexpected happened--I found myself thinking about Game of Thrones as a story that was trying to make a point.  To be clear, "Mother's Mercy" is not a very good episode.  Even by the laxer standards on which we judge this show's premieres and finales, it is bitty and scattershot, barely giving any character their due in its rush to tie up all their stories.  It's full of deaths and trauamtic events that barely get a chance to land because as soon as they've been established, the episode rushes off to the next one.  In one particularly tone deaf example, the character of Sansa Stark is last seen jumping off the battlements of Winterfell.  Common sense, and Sansa's behavior in the scene immediately before, in which she announces that she would rather die than submit to any more brutal mistreatment by her sadistic husband, Ramsay Bolton, would suggest that this is a suicide, but the scene isn't shot or treated like the final exit of a beloved, important character (and, of course, there has been no announcement that Sophie Turner has left the show).  And yet it's impossible to imagine how Sansa could have survived.  In a nutshell, this is the problem with all of "Mother's Mercy."  In the guise of wrapping up this season's stories, it's actually setting up an endless number of cliffhangers for the next, but--partly because of their sheer number, partly because of poor execution--very few of these cliffhangers manage to create suspense.  The season ends less with tension, and more with confusion.

And yet, looked at from another perspective, "Mother's Mercy" is a shockingly coherent hour of television.  Much has been made of the truly epic number of main character deaths in this episode, but a more accurate way of putting it would be that these deaths are merely the outcome of its actual preoccupation, revenge.  In almost every one of its subplots, the fifth season finale shows us charactes getting their longed-for revenge.  And in every one of those stories, that revenge turns out to be futile, self-destructive, and pointless.  Take, for example, Ellaria Sand, who in this episode finally achieves her season-long goal of killing Myrcella Lannister in revenge for the death of her lover, Oberyn Martell, at the hands of a Lannister knight.  The futility of this gesture is baked into its very description--Ellaria has murdered an innocent child who had nothing to do with Oberyn's death (which was anyway as much of his own making's as anyone else's).  In so doing, she's doomed herself, and probably also her daughters, to death or exile, and probably started a war between Dorne and King's Landing, while handing the Lannisters a valuable hostage in the form of Trystane Martell, Myrcella's oblivious fiancé.  Even the murder weapon speaks to the madness one sinks to when plotting revenge--seemingly contrite, Ellaria kisses Myrcella goodbye while wearing poisoned lipstick, which, when we last see her, begins to take its effect on her as well.  Ellaria has literally taken poison in the hopes that someone else will die, and though unlike Myrcella she has an antidote, the self-destructiveness inherent in that gesture speaks volumes.

Or take the episode's final scene, in which the erstwhile, quietly heroic Jon Snow is murdered by his fellow Night's Watch members, in revenge for his choice to bring their mortal enemies the Wildlings past the Wall.  Aside from the fact that Jon has for some time been one of the few truly positive characters left on the show, and that the ringleader of this betrayal, Alliser Thorne, is a petty, mean-spirited man motivated as much by political jealousy as genuine conviction (he was heavily favored to be named as the new Lord Commander of the Night's Watch before Jon swooped in and got the job), this is an extraordinarily foolish, destructive act.  Jon is one of the few people on Westeros to understand that the real threat to the kingdom isn't its civil wars, but the coming army of ice zombies.  Allying with the Wildlings was absolutely the right move--it gives the Night's Watch a much-needed increase in numbers, and denies the White Walkers, who can resurrect the dead and make them fight on their side, their own increase.  By killing the only Night's Watch member the Wildlings trusted, Thorne may have doomed the Watch--and much of Westeros--to a fate worse than death.

But if Myrcella and Jon's deaths are events the audience can be trusted to root against, what about acts of revenge we've been fervently rooting for?  For several seasons, Arya Stark has been keeping a list of people who have hurt her or her loved ones, and whom she intends to kill.  In "Mother's Mercy" she gets the chance to cross off one of those names, Meryn Trant, who killed her beloved fencing master Syrio Forel.  Trant is an all-around terrible person--he beat and stripped Sansa on Joffrey's orders, and Arya is able to get to him because of his fondness for raping young girls--and yet when Arya returns from killing him to the House of Black and White, where she has been training to become a faceless assassin, she's chastised and punished.  To be sure, the Many-Faced God's philosophy doesn't bear much scrutiny--Arya killing her own target out of her own thirst for revenge is bad, but killing the target assigned to her by the Faceless Men, who were commissioned by a supplicant on their own quest for vengeance, is good--but there's no question that what Arya does to Trant is more destructive to her than to him.  She doesn't just kill him (as she has already done to other names on her list); she butchers him, torturing him while she explains exactly why he deserves to die at her hand.  It's certainly a more horrible death than the quick poisoning intended by the Faceless Men for the swindling insurance agent who was Arya's actual target, and the fact that she's able to deal it out so calmly suggests that she's on her way to becoming a far greater monster than Trant ever was.  When Arya's story ends with her receiving some supernatural punishment that includes losing her sight, it's hard not to feel that this is what's best for everyone.

Or take Cersei Lannister.  Unlike Arya, Cersei has never been someone the audience was meant to root for.  She's a bad person who has done terrible things--strictly speaking, the entire war that has consumed Westeros for five seasons is of her own making, as she killed her husband rather than allow him to find out that their children were actually her brother's--and she makes truly terrible decisions.  The predicament she finds herself in in "Mother's Mercy"--imprisoned by the fanatical religious sect the Faith Militant, who have accused her, quite rightly, of adultery, incest, and murder--is her own fault, since she empowered the Faith in the first place, in a misguided, thoughtless power play against her new daughter-in-law Margaery Tyrell (whose fate, as of the end of the season, remains unknown).  So if anyone wants revenge against Cersei, it's probably the audience, who have been waiting for her comeuppance for years.  And yet when that punishment arrives, it's horrible.  Shaved and stripped naked, forced to walk through the streets of King's Landing while the commoners (who, again, have every reason to hate her) pelt her with rotten vegetables and manure and shout obscenities at her, Cersei, who has never been less than entirely human even when doing and saying the most appalling things, is heartbreakingly sympathetic, the camera remaining fixed on her face as she tries, and fails, to endure her ordeal with dignity.  The punishment she receives says more about the sadism and judgmental glee of the people who force her to endure it than it does about Cersei, and, unsurprisingly, its effect is not to make Cersei contrite or reflective, but to confirm her in her belief that everyone is against her, and that she's right to resort to violence and cruelty to get her own way.  The audience may have been wishing for Cersei to get what she deserves for as long as they've been wishing for Arya to kick ass and take names, but in both cases, getting what we want tastes like ashes.

(Having said all that, we might also stop to consider how blatantly sexualized Cersei's punishment is.  We might consider the fact that at the same time that she's being punished for her crimes, her brother Jaime, who committed all the same crimes as her and also raped her, is receiving forgiveness and acceptance from his daughter-by-incest Myrcella.  True, the scene ends with Myrcella dying in Jaime's arms,  which can be taken as a punishment, but then we might consider that while Cersei's punishment is humilating, Jaime's is grandly tragic--and, more importantly, does not actually happen to him but to a woman he cares about.  And we might consider how typical this is of this episode in general, in which, for example, Theon Greyjoy finally breaks the hold that the sadistic Ramsay Bolton has on him--by killing Ramsay's slightly less sadistic and certainly less powerful girlfriend Myranda.)

The most powerful statement that "Mother's Mercy" makes about the futility of revenge comes from the most honorable, sympathetic character in the series, and from an act that no one--in or out of the show--will take as cruel or unjust.  The stalwart knight Brienne has spent the fifth season staking out Winterfell, waiting for a sign of trouble from Sansa.  In the opening scenes of the episode, she's disturbed from her watch by the news that Stannis Baratheon--whom she has sworn to kill in revenge for his murder of his brother, a kind and decent man whom she loved and swore allegiance to--is marching on Winterfell.  Stannis comes to "Mother's Mercy" as one of the most hated characters on the show, having sacrificed his sweet, affectionate daughter Shireen to the fire god R'hllor in the previous episode in exchange for favorable weather.  The unsurprising result of this is that half of Stannis's men desert (and his wife Selyse takes her own life), turning his planned siege of Winterfell into a rout.  By the time Brienne gets to him, he's defeated in body and spirit and calmly accepting of death.  Brienne, meanwhile, isn't cruel or sadistic.  She gives Stannis a quick death and explains why she's killing him, to which his only response is that she is doing her duty.  Of all the many deaths on this show or in this episode, this is probably the most just and the most kind.

And yet, because Brienne chooses to pursue vengeance, she misses it when Sansa is finally able to call for help, lighting a candle in the window of Winterfell's tallest tower as Brienne instructed her to.  To be sure, this is more than a little silly and over-literal: has Brienne been standing watch on the same spot for all the weeks of the fifth season?  How short a span does Sansa's candle burn, anyway?  But there's no escaping the very simple message: by choosing revenge, Brienne abandons her duty to Sansa and leaves her without a protector.  Brienne kills Stannis with the sword she named Oathkeeper, given to her by Jaime as a symbol of her oath to Catelyn Stark to protect her daughters, and of Jaime's own quest for redemption (which, to be fair, Brienne embodies far more than he does).  By choosing revenge, even on someone who truly deserves it and who even welcomes death, Brienne breaks her oath to both Catelyn and Jamie, and, however unwillingly, dishonors herself.

As Bady writes, the first three seasons of Game of Thrones have a single, simple, perhaps simplistic message--that the righteous do not triumph simply because they are righteous; that goodness, far from being a path to success and power, is actually an impediment to them.  And, as he writes, the next two seasons of the show suffered because once that message had been well and truly hammered home with the Red Wedding, there was nowhere for the story to go except to nihilistically repeat it.  "Mother's Mercy" suggests that there is actually somewhere to go from this point.  The natural response to learning that goodness leads to suffering is to hope for comeuppance--for the good guys to become powerful enough to punish their oppressors, and for the bad guys to get what's coming to them.  What "Mother's Mercy" tells us is that this, too, is not a good philosophy of life.  That revenge, even if it's deserved and dispassionate, is an evil that blows back on the people who deliver it, perpetuating and increasing the amount of suffering in the world rather than achieving justice.

To be clear, I'm not saying that Game of Thrones is suddenly a good or meaningful show--it's still a well-made but overrated soap opera about unpleasant people whose main appeal is finding out what happens next.  But I find it terribly exciting that, years after I'd given up hope of ever seeing such a thing again, the show is actually trying to say something.  That what it's saying happens to be a hard but important truth, rather than the juvenile glibness of "goodness is a weakness," is just more icing on the cake.

That said, it is worth noting that the answer the show gives to the futility of vengeance is the same answer it gave to the vulnerability of the good.  Or rather, the same person.  Daenerys Targaryen is one of the few characters on the show who does not spend "Mother's Mercy" committing or experiencing vengeance.  Having fled the city of Mereen, which she conquered in the fourth season, on the back of one of her dragons, she finds herself captured by Dothraki raiders.  For any other woman on the show, this would herald a lot of attempted (or completed) rape.  For Daenerys, it probably means she'll be in charge of the khalasar by the second episode of season six.  The rules have never seemed to apply to Daenerys, not because she's a particularly good leader or politician--her reign in Mereen was marked by toppling the existing, evil power structure and customs and offering nothing to replace them, which unsurprisingly led to resentment and eventually rebellion; it's almost a relief when the episode ends with the more pragmatic, politically savvy Tyrion and Varys taking over the city, even if this represents one female white savior being replaced by two male ones.  No, Daenerys is special because that's how she's been written.  Becuase her role in the story means that she doesn't face the same moral hazards as the other characters.  She can experience trauma and humiliation without becoming embittered or damaged.  She can take revenge without losing her soul.  She can embrace power without being corrupted.  In the end, we come back to the problem Bady identifies--Game of Thrones, and Martin before it, try to tell a story in which real stakes and consequences are injected into a fantasy world, but in the end it's all in the service of the return of the queen.  Perhaps the example of "Mother's Mercy" means that this story has more life in it yet, but, as much as this episode surprised me, that seems like too much to hope for.

The Iain M. Banks Master List

As I wrote earlier this week, my review of The Hydrogen Sonata completes a decade of reading and reviewing Iain M. Banks's science fiction, and it seemed appropriate to put together a master list where all of these reviews can be found in order.  Not all of these are full-length reviews (though most are) and there are several books I might end up revisiting, in which case I'll update this post.

The next obvious step, however, is Banks's non-genre writing.  I don't know if I'll be as inspired to write about those books as I was by his SF--I've never gotten the sense that his mainstream writing was as groundbreaking as his work in genre--but time will tell.

The Culture Novels

• Consider Phlebas (published 1987, reviewed 2006, full-length review) - Part of me wants to revisit this novel, which isn't very good but is so very important to setting the tone and preoccupations of the Culture sequence.  The other part of me remembers what a dour slog it was.
  
  
• The Player of Games (published 1988, reviewed 2010, full-length review) - In hindsight I think my review of this book, though generally positive, ends on a more negative note than it deserved.  It's a fantastic novel with a great plot, and a necessary counterpoint to the negativity of some of the other Culture novels.
  
  
• Use of Weapons (published 1990, reviewed 2006, full-length review) - I wrote recently that Use of Weapons is a perfectly-formed novel undermined by a ridiculous final twist.  That's undeniably true, but this is still one of the most important, and best, Culture novels.
  
  
• Excession (published 1996, reviewed 2008, short review) - Of all the Culture novels, this is the one that probably most deserves a second look.  In hindsight its importance to the overall tone of the series (and particularly the later novels) seems obvious, and I'd like to revisit it and maybe give it the consideration it deserves.
  
  
• Inversions (published 1998, reviewed 2014, short review) - This, on the other hand, has probably gotten all the consideration it's going to get.  A stealth Culture novel, it's an interesting experiment but doesn't do much that the other books don't do better.
  
  
• Look to Windward (published 2000, reviewed 2013, full-length review) - It's hard to call this my favorite Culture novel since it is so bleak, but it's definitely one of the best, and this is probably my favorite Banks review.
  
  
• Matter (published 2008, reviewed 2009, full-length review) - The first of the three later, and lesser, Culture novels, and in hindsight the best of the unimpressive bunch.
  
  
• Surface Detail (published 2010, reviewed 2011, full-length review at Strange Horizons) - The only time I've reviewed Banks for an outside publication.  I wish it could have been a review of a better novel, but Surface Detail is baggy and unfocused.
  
  
• The Hydrogen Sonata (published 2012, reviewed 2015, full-length review) - The last of the Culture novels and, sadly, the worst.  There's still a lot here to enjoy but it's not the ending the sequence deserved.
  
  
• The State of the Art (published 1991, reviewed 2016, short review) - Banks's only short story collection, which mainly demonstrates that he wasn't really suited to the short form. Valuable for completists, and for the title novella, but most of the interesting ideas in his work are explored better elsewhere.

Non-Culture Novels

• Against a Dark Background (published 1993, reviewed 2013, short review) - This was the first Banks I read after his death, and that perhaps fueled an overly-negative reaction.  It isn't great--it revels in its bleakness and is much too long--but the knowledge that there were only so many of his books left for me to read made it seem worse than it was.
  
  
• Feersum Endjinn (published 1994, reviewed 2006, very short review) - Like Inversions, this feels like an experiment, and though it's probably a more successful one, there's also not much to say about it.  There's a giant castle.  It's neat.
  
  
• The Algebraist (published 2004, reviewed 2005, full-length review) - Where it all started.  My first Banks, and in hindsight my favorite of the non-Culture novels.  I don't know how well it would stand up today, now that I'm more familiar with the tropes of his writing (in fact looking back I'm not certain why Banks felt the need to create a new universe for this story; perhaps he simply felt the existence of the Culture would make the novel's events impossible).  I might end up revisiting it as well, though that feels less urgent.

Review: Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman

Over at Strange Horizons, I review Rachel Hartman's Shadow Scale, the sequel to Seraphina, one of my favorite books of 2013.  One of the things that most impressed me about Seraphina was how it managed to juggle so many characters, plotlines, and worldbuilding details without ever seeming overstuffed or rushed.  Shadow Scale doesn't quite manage that trick--it's longer, more episodic, and less focused than the previous volume.  That said, there's still a lot in it to love--the novel's world, characters, and ideas are as fresh and interesting as they were in Seraphina, and Hartman still combines an exciting fantasy plot with a smart exploration of issues of gender, race, and identity.  She's one of the more interesting writers currently working in YA fantasy, and I look forward to whatever she does next.

The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks

Whichever book ended up being the last stop in my meandering progress through the SF novels of Iain M. Banks--a journey that began nearly ten years ago--it was bound to be a bittersweet experience.  That that book has ended up being The Hydrogen Sonata only makes it more so.  Banks could not have known, when he sat down to write this novel, how little time he had left, or that it would turn out to be the last entry in the Culture sequence.  And yet The Hydrogen Sonata is suffused with death, with questions about the meaning of life, of how (and when) to leave it, and with anxiety about what comes after it.  If the book itself is not quite the capstone that the Culture sequence deserved, then the coincidence of its timing and subject matter lends it significance and weight.

Like the other recent Culture novels, Matter and Surface Detail, The Hydrogen Sonata is not properly a story about the Culture, which plays a supporting role only.  The focus here is on the Gzilt civilization, a contemporary of the Culture, who very nearly became a founder race but instead chose to strike their own path.  Now, ten thousand years later, the Gzilt have decided to Sublime, ascending to a higher dimension where the truly advanced civilizations of Banks's universe live an enternal but only dimly-understood existence.  It's a time of celebration, of settling accounts, and accordingly the remnants of the long-Sublimed Zihdren, a race who shepherded the Gzilt onto the galactic stage, send an emissary to reveal that the Book of Truth, the religious text which has strongly shaped the Gzilt's worldview, was actually an experiment by a Zhidren scientist.  The reactions to this revelation are swift and extreme--the forces loyal to the Gzilt leadership, represented in the novel by Septame Banstegeyn, the most powerful Gzilt politician and the man most directly responsible for the decision to Sublime, ruthlessly seek to suppress it, killing the Zihdren emissary and even going so far as to murder thousands of Gzilt citizens.  A group skeptical about the Subliming project, meanwhile, recruits one of its members, the musician Vyr Cossont, to track down Ngaroe QiRia, a Culture citizen who claims to have been alive at the time of its creation, and find out from him whether the Zihdren's claim is true.

The Hydrogen Sonata's story proceeds in several concurrent plot strands.  In one, Vyr is rescued from an attack by Banstegeyn's forces by the Culture ship Mistake Not..., who takes it upon itself to help her with her mission.  In another, a Contact agent who knew QiRia is reactivated in the hopes that she can find him.  The third follows Banstegeyn as he goes to increasingly extreme and immoral lengths to keep the Subliming on track, while also revelling in his own power and the fruits of it.  The fourth largely revolves around the discussions of the group of Culture Minds who have witnessed the destruction of the Zihdren ship, and who form a cabal dedicated to investigating the matter and deciding what, if anything, should be done.  There's a lot of zipping back and forth between the various planets in Gzilt space, a few space battles, and the requisite feats of Banks-ian invention--I was particularly fond of the hedonist Ximenyr, who has been preparing for the Subliming by throwing a years-long party, and who has modified his body to give himself fifty-something penises, with four hearts to power them.

What's oddest about The Hydrogen Sonata's structure, and about the book in general, is how closely it mimics that of Surface Detail.  As in that novel, there is a plucky but clueless woman from outside the Culture who teams up with a sardonic and unexpectedly lethal ship's avatar; a Contact agent who ends up doing a lot less than we'd expect; a villain whose evil is signposted by making him arrogant, vain, and sexually rapacious; and a group of Culture Minds who are trying to manage the situation from afar (this plot strand recalls Excession as much as Surface Detail, and indeed that novel's Interesting Times Gang is even namechecked).  But then, perhaps this mirroring is less surprising when one considers that the two novels' subject matters are themselves mirror images.  Surface Detail was a novel about a manmade hell--about civilizations that try to manufacture justice by condemning the stored mind-states of their deceased citizens to virtual torment.  The Hydrogen Sonata is a novel about an actual, provable heaven--even if, as the novel is at pains to note, no one knows what the Sublime is like, and all attempts to study it have failed.  Both are, fundamentally, stories about death and what comes after it.

The problem with The Hydrogen Sonata--which becomes even more glaring when you notice its similarities to Surface Detail--is that the subject of the Sublime isn't actually very interesting.  Especially in comparison to the elaborate, baroque hells in Surface Detail, and to the chewy questions they posed--what does it say about a society that it chooses to enact justice through torture?  Is revenge ever justified?  What level of violence can be excused in the pursuit of justice?--the Sublime, and the decision to end one's existence in this plane and ascend to another, are frustratingly vague.  (To be clear, I didn't think Surface Detail did a particularly good job of answering these questions, but merely raising them made it more interesting than The Hydrogen Sonata.)  Partly that's by necessity--describing heaven is a lot trickier than inventing hell--but even when Banks has the chance to write around the problem, by discussing the attitudes of those about to Sublime, he doesn't seem to know how to handle the question.  Our windows onto Gzilt society are Vyr, who is conflicted about Subliming but seems content to go along with it; Banstegeyn, who is as far from an evolved consciousness as one might imagine and who seems to have instigated the Subliming largely because it flatters his sense of self-importance (in one scene, he extracts a bribe from the representative of a species hoping to gain access to Gzilt planets and technology in the form of a promise to name a star after him); and various military officers, who have no qualms about committing atrocities (among other things, causing the real deaths of thousands of fellow citizens who were days away from living forever) because they're just following orders, and anyway, soon none of it will matter.

All of this points to a larger problem with The Hydrogen Sonata, and with the later Culture books in general: Banks never managed to create another alien civilization as interesting as the Culture.  The Gzilt are extremely undeveloped, unconvincing as a civilization distinct from the Culture but equal to it in technological and cultural complexity, and not particularly interesting.  They're meant to have reached a civilizational pinnacle--to have decided, as a culture and by popular vote, to leave this plane of existence, and yet it's never clear why.  A civilization that made this decision should, it seems, have something special or different about them.  Its citizens should behave differently--tired of life, inward looking, excited about the future, anything.  Instead, the Gzilt feel like placeholders, their existence justified merely by the fact that the Culture would never make the choice they are making, so another species has to be invented in order for Banks to tell a story about it.

Late in the book, someone finally says what any sensible reader will have been thinking for hundreds of pages--that whether or not the Book of Truth is a lie doesn't actually matter.  If the Gzilt have truly made the monumental decision to Sublime, this revelation (which many of them will anyway surely have guessed) isn't what's going to stop them.  But because we have no idea why the Gzilt wanted to Sublime in the first place, the fact that the central question of the novel turns out to be meaningless only makes the novel as a whole feel even more so.  In his review of the novel, Adam Roberts suggests that the Gzilt's ordinariness is part of the point--that Banks is poking fun at the SF trope of ascending to a higher plane of existence (and of the religious concept of the Rapture) by making the people about to achieve it as ordinary as we are, and perhaps even less admirable (for one thing, none of the villains of the novel are ever punished or even exposed, and no one in Gzilt society seems interested in an accounting for the thousands of deaths that result from the novel's events).  But the kind of satire he's suggesting, if it was indeed Banks's intention, requires a much sharper, more focused novel than The Hydrogen Sonata, which like most later Culture novels is baggy and meandering.

Of course, all Culture novels are ultimately about the Culture.  Surface Detail's fixation with the hells offered a contrast to the Culture's decision to address injustice in the here and now, before people die, and offered yet another opportunity to muse on the costs of that determination.  If The Hydrogen Sonata doesn't have much of interest to say about Subliming, that's probably because the Culture itself isn't interested in it.  And in the absence of that final frontier, what's left to it?  What's left to anyone, in fact, in a post-scarcity society, where life can be as long as you like?  The answer that Banks has always given, where the Culture is concerned, is "self-satisfied do-gooding," and The Hydrogen Sonata offers a particularly cynical take on that truism when the Minds who have been pursuing the answer about the Book of Truth--and who have caused, albeit indirectly, a great deal of damage and death in that pursuit, as they compelled Banstegeyn's forces to use ever more extreme force in order to suppress it--decide to do nothing with it, and leave Gzilt space, congratulating each other on a job well-done.  Like everyone, The Hydrogen Sonata seems to be saying, the Culture is just filling up time, and if its actions aren't leading up to a grand act of good (or evil), who cares?  It's something to do.

Perhaps the reason that The Hydrogen Sonata has left me so unsatisfied is that it's impossible to read it without being aware of the counterpoint to that conclusion.  In the world of Banks's novels, everyone can live forever.  In the real world, so many people live shorter lives than they deserve.  Some people die when they still have so much left to give to the world.  Some get a prognosis of a year, and then die two months later, robbing them and their loved ones of even those brief, paltry months.  For a Culture novel that is so much about death to have so little to say about this heartbreaking truth, especially now, feels like a waste.  The Culture has always been a civilization that did not have to deal with our problems, but rather with the ones that emerge when poverty, suffering, and inequality are eliminated.  For once, that feels insufficient.

I didn't expect The Hydrogen Sonata to be very good--the buzz was against it, and none of the recent Culture novels have been on the level of the earlier ones.  But I hoped that it would have more meat on it, more that it wanted to say or do.  I wanted to have more to say about it, even if it was all bad.  Instead, the most cutting criticism I can make of the novel is this: in my paperback edition, there is a publisher's interview with Banks.  In it, he refers briefly to his future plans for more SF books, to further ideas about the Culture that he'd like to write about.  In an entire novel about death and leaving the world, there is nothing that moved and saddened me as much as that interview, and the knowledge that its promise will never come to pass.

Persona by Genevieve Valentine

The problem with writing a review of Genevieve Valentine's new novel Persona is that the first and most urgent compliment I want to pay this novel might come off as a criticism.  Persona, you see, is The Hunger Games minus the actual hunger games.  To the uninitiated, this might sound as though I'm calling the novel unexciting or lacking an actual point.  But if you're like me, and you thought that the best and most interesting part of Suzanne Collins's novel was not the survival games in the arena, or the rebellion against an evil, despotic government, or the overwrought relationship troubles of teenagers--if, instead, the thing you found most fascinating about The Hunger Games was the celebritization of politics, the use of fashion, public persona, and carefully crafted ersatz relationships to shape public policy and opinion--then the idea of a whole novel focused on just that aspect of the story will probably seem utterly delightful.  Happily, Valentine seems to be of the same opinion, and even more happily, she's a sharp enough writer that there are more than enough thrills and plot twists to be found in her story, even absent the fights to the death between children.

Suyana Sapaki is a Face, in a world of the future in which diplomacy is conducted through a form of reality TV.  Instead of the UN, we have the IA, an organization where each nation is represented by a person who is more than just an ambassador.  Faces are embodiments of their nations, so personal relationships between them are both reflections of, and ways of achieving, closer business and government ties.  Rather than career diplomats, Faces are essentially well-trained models and performers, chosen for beauty, poise, charisma, and the ability to take direction well.  The IA itself is reminiscent of a high school or a cutthroat entertainment industry, with cliques, power couples, mean girls, and unexpected alliances.

It must be said that this premise doesn't make a lot of sense, and that Valentine doesn't work very hard to justify it (we never, for example, find out whether the world of Persona is a continuation of ours, with the UN having been replaced by the IA and the Face system, or whether it's simply an alternate universe).  But then, that isn't really her focus.  Rather than turn her worldbuilding efforts on explaining how this (rather ridiculous) system came about and functions, Valentine is instead focused on exploring its effect on the people trapped within it.  When we meet Suyana, she's chafing against the condescension of her handler, Magnus, a professional diplomat who sees her as little more than a trained show animal.  But Suyana, we quickly learn, is not only intelligent and skilled at reading and manipulating people, but desperate to be of service to her country, the United Amazonian Rainforest Confederation, which is besieged by American business interests.  As the novel opens, she has been negotiating a public and physical relationship with the American Face, in the hopes that this will give her leverage to help her country maintain some amount of independence, particularly in the face of the environmental depredation caused by resource extraction.

As well as being an author, Valentine is a gifted blogger on a wide range of subjects, one of which is fashion.  I've always found her emphasis when writing about this or that red carpet refreshing and insightful--where other fashion commentators will focus on the details of a particular dress and who wore it better, Valentine overlays that concern with an awareness that everything we see in such events is a carefully crafted statement, that the actors (and particularly actresses) on the red carpet are working: promoting their current movie, or gunning for work in the next one, or simply trying to craft a public persona that will help them carve out a niche for themselves in a business in which youth and beauty are everywhere, but personality is a dangerous and often double-edged sword.  Persona feels like the fictionalization of these write-ups, for example when Suyana complains about the ethnic costumes she's often forced to wear, echoing Valentine's observations about the Miss Universe national costume competition:

"The IA stylists have shoved me into more beaded dresses and shawls than should ever exist.  I never get more than a C minus red carpet grade. ... The PR materials always say it's highlighting our national identity," she said. "Like there's only one.  Like anyone's interested in helping us protect it.  It can be pretty funny, so long as you don't think about it, but once you're in the chair it's not funny anymore.  Some countries get their own stylists, but if you're using the IA stable, they don't much care who they're working for, and you end up looking the way they assume everyone assumes you look."

Suyana's keen understanding of how much of her public persona is made up of stereotypes and assumptions is part of her power.  She knows how to disappear into the role of the simple native girl, but she also knows how to use those expectations to draw attention to herself when she refuses to meet them.  Valentine paints her as someone who is ambitious, savvy, desperate to make a real difference, and extraordinarily lonely.  Late in the novel, we discover that her relationship with the American Face, if it comes off, will be her first intimate contact (a revelation that also drives home just how young Suyana is).  Persona's story kicks off when, on the way to an early negotiation of the terms of this relationship, Suyana is caught in an assassination attempt.  Despite the counterfactual premise, the novel's plot is actually a fairly old-fashioned political thriller, with Suyana bouncing between one putative ally and another, trying to work out who she can trust and who tried to kill her.  This gives Valentine an excuse to not only delve into Suyana's own personality, but give us a glimpse of how other Faces--both fresh-faced newbies and old hands--deal with the pressure of a life in which there is no personal or private, and their emotional entanglements all have political ramifications.

In a world in which politics is managed through the mechanism of celebrity, it's not surprising that espionage and political gamesmanship are left to the tabloid press.  Persona's second protagonist is Daniel, a "snap" who gambled that the unknown UARC Face was on the verge of a big break, and was perfectly positioned to record her murder.  Instead of staying detached, however, Daniel saves Suyana's life, and ends up on the run with her.  One can feel Valentine straining against the conventions of such a story--she knows that the predictable structure of this kind of thriller demands that Suyana and Daniel fall in love, but she also wants Persona to be the story of how Suyana takes control of her own life and career, and there's a bit of creakiness when these two impulses jar against each other.  Daniel's plot line becomes much more interesting when Suyana learns the truth about him and abandons him to the illegal paparazzi/spy agency that recruits him on the strength of his assassination photographs, which allows him to articulate the role that snaps play in the novel's world:

If he was being honest, he'd admit there was something visceral about looking at the sheer volume of secrets that Bonnaire Atelier and Fine Tailoring was holding on to.  This was unfiltered, live, prime evidence from fifteen countries, each photo waiting for the right moment to trap a hypocrite or sink a shady deal of tip the scales of public opinion.

If Daniel was sure of one thing, it was that people in charge were only ever honest when they thought they were being watched.  And there was a sea of watchful waiting power, right in front of him.  

Persona is not a perfect novel: despite being quite short, there doesn't seem to be quite enough plot to carry it all the way to its end.  And the emphasis on Daniel, who alternates point of view with Suyana for most of the story, feels unjustified by an ending that focuses almost exclusively on her, and on how she maneuvers her ordeal into a new lease on her career and her public image, finally wresting some respect and autonomy from Magnus while lying in wait for the people who tried to kill her.  The ending, in fact, cements the feeling that Persona is only the opening gambit in a longer story, and that Suyana and Daniel's adventures will continue in future volumes (perhaps comprising a Hunger Games-like rebellion?).  Still, for an opening gambit, this is an extremely promising one, introducing a sharp, tough heroine whose power is nevertheless rooted in her ability to work a crowd, charm an audience, and assemble the right outfit, and a world where these skills, instead of being devalued as they too often are in genre, are at the root of politics and diplomacy.

Tomorrowland

"When I was younger, the future was... different."  So says Frank Walker (George Clooney), one of the heroes of Brad Bird's Tomorrowland, in the opening narration that acts as a frame for the film's story.  It probably says everything you need to know about this movie that Frank--and the film itself--seem entirely unaware of the irony and self-contradiction inherent in a statement like this, and in case you were still in any doubt, the movie immediately flashes back to the 1964 World's Fair, where an 11-year-old Frank (Thomas Robinson) has arrived to submit his entry in a young inventors' competition--a jetpack.  When questioned about the utility of such a creation, Frank thinks for a moment, and then explains that if he were walking down the street and saw someone flying above him with a jetpack, he'd be inspired to believe that anything was possible: "Doesn't that make the world a better place?"

Bird is probably best known for directing Pixar's The Incredibles, still the best superhero film ever made despite--or perhaps even because--of its deeply uncomfortable political subtext.  Tomorrowland shares The Incredibles's retro-futuristic aesthetic (which, to be honest, probably looks better in animation than in live action--there's a rather pronounced uncanny valley effect that speaks very loudly to the problems with how people in the 60s imagined the cities of the future), and its overt politics, but it does not manage the earlier film's flawless amalgam of message and story.  The Incredibles is a troubling work because its story is so compelling and so well-constructed that it all but forces you to buy into its quasi-fascist worldview, without ever truly coming out and stating it.  Tomorrowland is a clunkier piece of storytelling, at points so loaded with infodumps, and so fond of the genre trope in which the protagonist is launched (quite literally) into a new world, that I found myself thinking of it more like a two-hour pilot for a TV series than a feature film--the whole thing feels more like setup for a story than the story itself.  It's also a lot more blatant about its message, which is delivered in canned speeches at several points throughout the movie.  If, like myself, you find that message questionable (or at least founded on questionable assumptions) then the film's baldness can be taken as a point in its favor, since it makes it easier to argue with.  But it's hard not to regret The Incredibles-level work that we might have had with a more canny writer (Tomorrowland's script is credited to Bird, Damon Lindelof, and Jeff Jensen) at the helm.

After a rather protracted opening segment in 1964, in which young Frank is given a pass to the titular Tomorrowland--a place of technological wonders and flawless urban planning--by a mysterious little girl called Athena (Raffey Cassidy), the action flashes forward to the present, where our heroine is the effervescent, scientifically-minded teenager Casey Newton (Britt Robertson).  The daughter of a NASA engineer who still dreams of going into space, Casey spends her nights trying to sabotage the deconstruction of a local launch platform, and her days frustrated by the litany of hopelessness--political, environmental, and cultural--fed to her at school.  "How can we fix it?" she demands of her flustered teachers.  When she's given a glimpse of Tomorrowland, she becomes obsessed with reaching it, which puts her in the path of the grown-up Frank and of Athena, who turns out to be childlike robot (this means, among other things, that the main romantic plotline in the film is between Clooney and a ten-year-old girl; in fairness to Tomorrowland, the handling of this is less weird than it might have been--largely because Cassidy is great and consistently steals the show out from under her two co-stars--but still pretty weird).

To actually describe the progress of the plot from the moment our three heroes are brought together--which involves being pursued by homicidal androids and lots of bouncing from one point on the globe to another--is to draw attention to how inessential most of it is.  The point seems to be mainly to provide excuses for kinetic action setpieces (which are well done but eventually a little repetitive--there are only so many times Frank can bundle Casey up into something that isn't supposed to function as a vehicle only to reveal that that's what it is), and for the cynical Frank to bounce off the optimistic Casey.  At some point, the end of the world comes into play--the people of Tomorrowland built a machine that shows the future, which revealed that the Earth is doomed.  When they tried to warn humanity, they instead discovered that the subliminal images of apocalypse they transmitted were being embraced, used as fodder for pop culture and an excuse to do nothing about the world's problems.  In disgust, they shut themselves away from the world, but Frank insists that there is still hope--that people like Casey, with their boundless capacity for optimism, are capable of changing the future, and that it is in fact the narrative of hopelessness being fed to the world that is creating that hopeless outcome.  If Tomorrowland provides the world with an image of hope and a better tomorrow, Frank and Casey insist, it will inspire people to create it.

There's a certain class of science fiction fan who will eat up Tomorrowland and its message with a spoon, and it should be said that there's a lot worth celebrating in the film.  Simplistic as it is, the message that it's important to believe in the possibility of change is a worthwhile one, and the fact that it's placed in the mouth of a girl, and a technically-minded one at that, is refreshing and laudable.  But if you're like me, you'll probably also find Tomorrowland unbearably hectoring, and it's worth examining why.  To me, it all comes down to Frank's thoughtless assertion about how he had a better class of future back in 1964.  You need to be pretty damn arrogant to expect that fifty years on, people should still desire the same future you dreamed of as a child, and pretty damn ignorant too--jetpacks are actually a really bad idea, and people in 1964 could not have imagined the microchip and telecommunications revolutions that have made such incredible changes in the world (allowing, for example, a woman in Israel to speak to people all over the planet at the speed of light).   

Tomorrowland's argument is that the future that we in the present imagine is inherently worse than the one that golden age SF imagined.  To my mind this is stretching the point quite a bit--I refuse to believe that no one was writing post-apocalypse in the 1960s, and as popular as the genre is today it doesn't hold a candle to the popularity of the inherently hopeful superhero genre.  But even if we accept the film's premise, to argue that this shift comes down to nothing but a personal failure of the present generation is to ignore some very important political realities.  Frank is a baby boomer, a member of a generation who enjoyed unprecedented government protection of their rights and safety, a social safety net, and huge public works projects, and who then turned around and pulled the ladder up after them; there's a reason why young people today, facing a future of debt, inequality, and environmental collapse, don't feel like imagining a rosy tomorrow.  Setting the film's backstory in 1964 also puts it just on the cusp of immense social upheaval that would, quite reasonably, have changed the way that we imagine our future in ways that the movie for the most part doesn't acknowledge--though the final scene shows Frank and Casey recruiting people of many different ethnicities from all over the world, in the body of the movie the cast is entirely white (with the exception of an evil robot played--impeccably, of course--by Keegan-Michael Key).  Most importantly, Tomorrowland seems to take it as a given that the imagined future of 1964--that secret world of jetpacks, monorails, and shining concrete-and-glass skyscrapers--is inherently good, and I don't think the film earns that assumption.

At their worst, dystopia and utopia have exactly the same problem.  They are both stories about an elite.  When Frank arrives in Tomorrowland, he's told that it's a place where the bright and energetic can build a better tomorrow without "politics and bureaucracy" getting in the way.  This is, of course, exactly what you get when half a dozen bright people who can't imagine that there's anything they don't understand get together and decide that no one in the history of humanity has had the idea they're having right now (as usual, XKCD already has this dynamic pinned down).  When you actually get out in the real world, however, with its seven billion inhabitants, politics and bureaucracy become, not impediments, but necessary tools for getting anything done.  Often, the ideas that seemed so brilliant on paper turn out to be unworkable when you have to apply them to actual human beings, who aren't willing to let you overturn their lives for the sake of an experiment.  There's a certain type of science fiction writer who seems to find this terribly depressing, and who instead of trying to write about human society in its full, dizzying complexity, decides that they can tell their readers something meaningful about the world by removing all but a tiny fraction of a percent of the people who live on it, whether by positing an apocalypse, or, as Tomorrowland does, by whisking its heroes off to a magic world where only the smart, special people get to go.

When you actually put that world on screen, however, it becomes clear just how unreal this vision is.  The Tomorrowland that Frank and Casey see never looks like a real city.  It's too designed, too homogenous, too clean.  Real cities grow in patchwork.  They develop in response to the needs of their inhabitants (if we're lucky, that is).  It's completely unsurprising when Casey arrives at the real Tomorrowland and finds it abandoned, unmaintained, full of broken glass and crumbling concrete.  This is what happened to the grandiose urban planning projects of the 60s, the ones that thought they could design new humans to live in them--all that's missing is the graffiti.  So it's more than a little unbelievable that the movie ends with Frank and Casey restarting the Tomorrowland project, planning to bring people to that city of the future that now looks like a forgotten, overgrown past.

I found myself comparing Tomorrowland to another recent kids' film, Big Hero 6.  Though technically a superhero movie, it shares many qualities and preoccupations with Tomorrowland.  Like it, it's a story about the struggle between despair and hopefulness (albeit on a personal level, with the hero struggling to find a way to overcome his grief over the death of his brother, and the villain having succumbed to despair after losing his daughter), and also like Tomorrowland, it is a story about inventors, about young people who believe they can change the world through the force of their intelligence and ingenuity.  But where Tomorrowland imagines that the only way to achieve this is to whisk its dreamers away from the mundane, troublesome world that is holding back their brilliance, Big Hero 6 is determined to stay connected to it.  Its imaginary setting of San Fransokyo is everything that Tomorrowland wants to be but isn't--a vibrant, multicultural, livable city where people of all classes and backgrounds meet.  Its inventor characters aren't cut off from the world, but working in the middle of it and responding to it, creating things that people around them might find helpful and useful.

Of course, San Fransokyo is a fantasy (and a particularly saddening one, given that in our world San Francisco is increasingly becoming a city for the rich) but it's important to note what kind of fantasy it is.  Big Hero 6's protagonist, Hiro, can become a hero because he has the infrastructure around him that allows him to--a city where he can live and move around and experience many different walks of life, a university where he can be challenged and given tools to develop his skills, a legal system that doesn't criminalize him when he acts out after experiencing terrible loss, and which prioritizes his rights over those of corporations.  If you want an optimistic vision of the future that I'd like to sign on to, this would be it, far more than Tomorrowland's sterile playground of the elite.

Mad Max: Fury Road

Before I start talking about Mad Max: Fury Road, I should probably say that I haven't seen any of the other films in the Mad Max series, and that I'm not feeling a particular need to catch myself up.  This should not be taken as a criticism of Fury Road, which is indeed as brilliant and exhilarating as advertized, and whose gorgeous, pulse-pounding action scenes put the rest of Hollywood's blockbuster movies to shame (in particular, the recent Avengers: Age of Ultron, whose busy but weightless extravaganzas of destruction now seem almost embarrassing in comparison; one wishes that Marvel would send all its directors to George Miller for lessons).  But Fury Road is also a fairly self-contained piece of filmmaking--essentially a two-hour-long chase sequence--that neither requires nor rewards an investment in its characters or world beyond the scope of its story.  I've seen the film compared to Gravity, another gorgeous, propulsive action movie with minimal story and characters, and the comparison seems very apt.  Like Gravity, Mad Max is utterly absorbing while you're watching it, but I don't feel any particular interest in visiting its world again.

Part of this might have something to do with the fact that the film's title character often feels like the least essential thing about it.  Tom Hardy has rather quickly gained a reputation as the thinking person's action star, and fans have been waiting for him to find his breakout role, but I'm not sure that Fury Road is it.  The film begins with Max, a survivor in the desertified, post-apocalyptic hellscape in which the series is set, being captured by the henchmen of the warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), who plans to use him as a "bloodbag" for one of his crazed warriors.  When one of Joe's top lieutenants, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), escapes on a decked-out big rig in which she has stowed five of Joe's enslaved "wives," Max is carried along with the pursuing war party as a snack for the road.  For the rest of the film, even as he demonstrates the ingenuity and survival instincts that have kept him alive for so long, Max seems less mad than depressed, haunted by the deaths of loved ones he couldn't save, and driven to keep running and fighting not because he has any hope for the future, but because he doesn't know how to do anything else.  It's a surprisingly low-key character turn for a movie that features, among other things, an army of death-crazed warrior-boys who travel with their own death metal guitar player, suspended in mid-air before a wall of speakers that has been mounted on an off-road vehicle, the better to provide a soundtrack for their orgy of destruction.  Hardy doesn't exactly get lost in the shuffle as a result, but when the film ended with him bidding farewell to its characters and moving on, I didn't exactly feel motivated to follow.

Still, if Max feels less like a mover of the plot than someone who has stumbled into it and is just trying to get out alive, that's obviously part of the film's intention.  Fury Road is Furiosa's story.  She's the one who came up with the plan to rescue the wives, and she's the one whose backstory--she was kidnapped as a child from an idyllic, matriarchal society, a "green place" where she hopes to return--ends up driving the movie.  This fact is part of the reason that Fury Road is being lauded for its feminist credentials, and though these are obviously present (Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler was apparently brought in to consult on the script) and treated seriously, I think there's a danger of blowing them out of proportion.  A lot of what Fury Road does with regards to women--making the prime mover of the story a woman who is not sexualized or treated as the hero's prize, featuring multiple female characters, not all of whom are young and beautiful, passing the Bechdel test--is not so much revolutionary as the very baseline of what we should expect from most movies--what we would expect, if we hadn't become so accustomed to the toxic sludge of misogyny that Hollywood blockbusters have been serving up for twenty years.  In fact, the more I think about it, the more Fury Road seems not like a revolution, but like a throwback to the action films of the 80s, before the genre gained the respectability that comes from being Hollywood's primary source of revenue, back when it was still possible to put women and people of color front and center, to be weird and grotesque, and not have to worry about courting an audience made up of thirteen-year-old boys.

(The slightly exaggerated enthusiasm with which Fury Road's feminism has been received is presumably the reason that some of the problems with how the film handles its female characters have so far been elided from its critical reception.  For one thing, the film indulges in the particularly annoying trope of a woman who has spent ages planning a heist or an escape or a rebellion, but who for some reason needs the help of the man who has just now stumbled upon the plan to carry it out.  Fury Road isn't as bad on this front as, say, Guardians of the Galaxy, but it certainly knocks you out of the story when Furiosa reaches one of the crucial stages of her escape plan, and suddenly needs Max's help to get through it even though he's only been on her rig for a few minutes.  For another, though Furiosa herself isn't subject to the male gaze--she's all close-cropped, salt-and-pepper hair, sensible clothes, and of course a wicked-looking prosthetic arm--the wives aren't so lucky, and it feels particularly significant that they're all young, beautiful, thin, and clothed in skimpy, diaphanous shawls (especially as we see that Immortan Joe has other wives--older, obese women who are pumped for mother's milk like literal cows--who are not part of the escape plan).  The first time we and Max see the wives, they're washing the dust of their escape off each other with a hose as their minimalistic clothing clings to their bodies and goes see-through.  In the screening I attended, the young men sitting in the row behind me did not sound as if their consciousness was being raised.)

What feels much more important to Fury Road's feminist credentials than any particular character or plot point is the very premise of the movie.  I've seen reviewers try to read Fury Road as a statement about human trafficking and sex slavery, which honestly makes about as much sense as trying to read it as a screed against pumping women for mother's milk.  Both of these plot points are merely exaggerated expressions of the true evil at the heart of the movie, toxic masculinity.  Immortan Joe treats women as possessions, brood mares, and cows, yes, but he also treats young men as cannon fodder.  His "war boys" are literally that, children raised to desire nothing but violence, taught that a glorious death in battle will secure them immortality in Valhalla, either unfamiliar with or openly hostile to all soft emotions.  Much attention is paid to their traditions, all of which are designed to glorify both Joe and the boys' sacrifice of their bodies and sanity in the pursuit of his quest, but when Joe removes his favor, the war boys are revealed as what they are: empty children incapable of grasping the complexity of the world, clinging to fairy tales told to them by an uncaring parent.  The brilliance of the movie is less in telling a woman's story, and more in so baldly demonstrating how old men with power will use young men as their tools and weapons, by teaching them to hate and fear women.

This emphasis on toxic masculinity is, however, a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, this is the dirty, diseased secret at the heart of so much of our culture (and our entertainment in particular) and it's refreshing to have it out in the open, even if the message is likely to fly over the heads of much of the audience (and some reviewers).  On the other hand, it means that Fury Road is a feminist work that is ultimately about men.  The only real character arc in the movie belongs not to Max or Furiosa, but to Nux (Nicholas Hoult), a war boy who starts the movie in love with death, and ends it having learned to value kindness and friendship.  Women, meanwhile, are left inert by a story like this.  If masculinity, taken to its illogical extreme, is held up as a cult of death, then femininity--which represents emotion, compassion, and of course motherhood and the possibility of new life--is inherently good, and this leaves no room for women to change, grow, make mistakes, and of course feel angry and vengeful.  The film has the good sense to give the wives different personalities and attitudes--from the saintly Angharad (Rosie Huntingon-Whiteley), who preaches forgiveness towards the war boys, to the more militant Toast (Zoë Kravitz) who is happy to blow their brains out--but none of them, nor for that matter Furiosa, is as damaged or as angry as their situation would seem to demand.  They've all held on to their souls in a way that that the men (including Max) haven't managed to, and it's hard not to feel that this is because they are women.

Fury Road ends with Immortan Joe's death, and with Furiosa returning to his stronghold as a conquering hero.  In another movie, this might have been taken as an ambivalent, even bleak ending.  In the unforgiving world of this series, after all, one dictator isn't much different than the other.  Furiosa might not keep a harem or train child soldiers, but she'll still need workers to do the backbreaking labor of pumping water from beneath the ground, and warriors to fight off the other tribes in the area.  It feels odd to say this, but a film less committed to a feminist message might have been willing to acknowledge that a woman's victory isn't necessarily a victory for good.  (Another way in which the film's feminism obscures its other problems is the near-uniform whiteness of its cast.)  But then, in the world of the Mad Max movies, the triumph of good probably isn't a real option.  The best you can hope for is survival, and a brief respite from struggle.  This Fury Road delivers, and, more importantly, earns.  At the end of its explosive, deranged chase, you genuinely want its characters to catch their breath and feel safe for a little while, even if a moment's reflection leaves you wondering just how safe they truly are.

The 2015 Hugo Awards: A Few Thoughts as Voting Opens

Nearly a month after the announcement of this year's Hugo nominations, the story has settled down from a furious boil to a steady simmer.  The best sources for ongoing discussion and the increasingly silly backpedaling from the Rabid Puppy camp continue to be Mike Glyer's File 770 and James Nicoll's LJ, but I wouldn't blame anyone for feeling overwhelmed by the sheer breadth and depth of the discussion.  The purpose of this post, then, is to highlight a few key pieces of information that are particularly relevant now that voting has opened.  I'll probably repost this once or twice as we get closer to the voting deadline.

• Voting for the 2015 Hugo awards is now open, and will close on July 31st, 11:59 PDT.  You are eligible to vote if you are an attending or supporting member of Sasquan, the 2015 Worldcon in Spokane, Washington (to clarify: members of the 2014 and 2016 Worldcons, who were eligible to nominate for this year's Hugos, can only vote for the winners if they are also members of Sasquan).  If you're already a member, you should either have received or will soon receive your membership number and PIN, which are necessary for online voting.  If they don't arrive by next week, you can get them on the PIN lookup page, or by contacting the award's administrators at this address.
  
  
• You can become a supporting member and exercise your voting privileges at any point between now and the voting deadline.  Sasquan has experienced a massive boost in membership since the Hugo nominees were announced, almost all of it made up of supporting memberships.  Supporting members are also eligible to receive the Hugo voting packet, which will probably be released towards the end of this month.
  
  
• Since the nominees were announced, several changes were made to the ballot.  Two of the Rabid Puppies nominees were disqualified and removed from the ballot.  Two other authors--Marko Kloos (Best Novel, Lines of Departure) and Annie Bellet (Best Short Story, "Goodnight Stars")--asked to be removed because they did not wish to be associated with the Rabid Puppies campaign.  After the award's administrators announced that the ballot was finalized, two other nominees, Black Gate (Best Fanzine) and Edmund R. Schubert (Best Editor, Short Form), announced that they were declining their nominations as well, though their names still appear.  The final ballot can be seen here.
  
  
• There's been a lot of discussion about what the correct approach to voting should be this year.  My policy is still that, with the exception of the Dramatic Presentation categories, I will be No Award-ing all the Puppy selections (that said, I will be placing the Puppy-endorsed episode of Grimm nominated in Best Dramatic Presentation: Short Form under No Award, because it isn't very good at all). Deirdre Saoirse Moen has a guide if this is how you'd like to vote.
  
  
• In addition to No Award-ing the Puppies, there are two other categories where I will be voting No Award for all nominees.  I've already written about the Best Fan Writer category, and in addition I will not be voting to give a Hugo in the Best Novelette category, even though it contains a non-Puppy nominee in the form of Thomas Olde Heuvelt's "The Day the World Turned Upside Down."  Chance has written eloquently about the many problems with this story, which does not deserve to win a Hugo by default.
  
  
• Speaking of Chance, she's thrown herself on the grenade of the Rabid Puppies' short fiction selections, and is reviewing them one by one with sad and hilarious results.  Her reviews are required reading, first if you like funny and snarky writing, but also if you're still under the impression that literary merit has anything to do with this campaign.
  
  
• In addition to voting for the Hugos, supporting members of Sasquan may vote in the site selection ballot to choose the location of the 2017 Worldcon.  I would very much like to see the Worldcon come to Helsinki, so I will definitely be voting in this election, but the process is a bit complicated.  To vote for site selection, you not only need to be a member of Sasquan, but you have to pay an additional site selection fee of $40.  This fee will be converted into a supporting membership of whichever bid wins the right to host the 2017 Worldcon.  While it is possible to vote for site selection online (by scanning your ballot and emailing it to the convention), at the moment Sasquan is only taking payments for this additional voting fee via check or money order, which obviously puts international voters at a significant disadvantage.  The convention has promised that online payment will be available in a few weeks, and I'll make announcements about that, either here or on my twitter feed, when it happens.

An Impressionistic Painting: Thoughts on Daredevil

In the fifth episode of the new Netflix series Marvel's Daredevil, lawyer-by-day, vigilante-by-night Matt Murdoch (Charlie Cox) explains to his new friend Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson) how he sees the world.  Blinded in a childhood accident, Matt discovered that his other senses had become superhumanly sharp, allowing him to perceive far more than ordinary people.  "You have to think of it as more than just five senses," he tells Claire.  "I can't see, not like everyone else, but I can feel.  Things like balance, direction, micro-changes in air density, vibrations, blankets of temperature variations.  Mix all that with what I hear, subtle smells.  All of the fragments form a sort of... impressionistic painting."  It's a speech that offers insight not only to Daredevil's title character, but to the show itself, which often feels less like a straightforward narrative than an impressionistic work in its own right, zooming in and out of its story in a way that seems almost random.  It's a novel approach, especially in genre TV, but one that hasn't entirely paid off, resulting in a series that is brilliant at points, but whose whole is curiously unsatisfying.

The third effort to bring Marvel's cinematic universe to the television medium, Daredevil is also the opening volley in a project that is the televized equivalent of the ambitious Phase I.  Over the next two years, Netflix plans to release three other series--AKA Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist--featuring Marvel characters and set in roughly the same environs as Daredevil, culminating with a team-up of the four shows' heroes in The Defenders.  While the cinematic universe has been spectacularly successful, however, Marvel has so far floundered in its TV efforts.  Agents of SHIELD remains so in thrall to the events of the larger story around it (it is currently setting up events that won't pay off until 2019) that it has yet to develop characters or a story that are compelling in their own right.  Agent Carter has a dynamite main character and spectacular action scenes, but struggled to find a story to tell with them, even when limited to only eight episodes.  Daredevil rather badly needed to make a splash, and perhaps for that reason it has struck a much darker tone than the rest of the MCU (another reason is that it draws on the work of Frank Miller, who has written some of the definitive Daredevil stories, and who acted as a consultant on the show).  The core of the series is Matt's frustration with his belief that the city he loves (specifically Hell's Kitchen, the neighborhood where he grew up and still lives) is being lost to crime and corruption, and his struggle with the question of whether the best way to address this is as a lawyer, fighting for the rights of the poor and disenfranchised, or as a masked vigilante, who beats up criminals and seriously debates killing the crimelords who control them.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Daredevil--and, initially at least, the most compelling--is how fully it takes advantage of the streaming TV model, and of the expectation that it will be watched in a single or at most a few large gulps rather than week-by-week.  Freed from the need to win over an audience with standalone episodes (which hardly any genre show does well anymore, unfortunately) or to be accessible to viewers who tune in halfway through the season, the show allows itself to be structureless.  There is no straight line running through Matt's crimefighting and his pursuit of the criminal gangs plaguing Hell's Kitchen, and the show feels free to elide the parts of the story that it finds boring or unnecessary.  The first episode ends with Matt using his super-hearing to pick up the sounds of a kidnapping in progress.  The second episode begins with Claire, a nurse, finding him badly injured in the dumpster behind her building.  As she patches him up, he explains that he's been pursuing the kidnapped child and ran afoul of some people involved in the crime, but the show trusts that we don't need to see that connective tissue.

The expectation of binge-watching also allows Daredevil to draw out explanations of its world and title character.  When we first meet Matt, he's already patrolling the streets and performing seemingly impossible feats.  It takes five episodes for us to learn what his powers are and how he uses them; seven, to learn who trained him to fight and put the idea of vigilantism in his head; and ten for him to articulate why he decided to don the mask and how he justifies his violent actions.  By the same token, the season's villain, Wilson Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio), known in the comics as Kingpin, is only introduced at the end of the third episode, and the season's eighth episode is dedicated almost entirely to him and to laying out his past.

As the first season draws on, however, the shapelessness that was initially so intriguing becomes a burden.  It saps tension from the story, which was anyway never particularly propulsive.  Fisk actually achieves the bulk of his dastardly plan at the end of the fifth episode, when he bombs several city blocks which he plans to redevelop (as noted in this brilliant dissection of the show, Daredevil simultaneously oversells and undersells the evil of a villain whose master plan is basically gentrification).  For the rest of the season, Matt is playing catch-up, trying to either prove that Fisk is a criminal or decide whether he wants to kill him.  But instead of building to a climax, the story seems rather to stumble onto a solution that allows Matt to confront and defeat Fisk without doing most of the legwork required to bring him there.

As the season grows more slack, it also becomes easier to notice that a lot of the innovation that Daredevil supposedly brings to the MCU--the emphasis on class and on the effect that crime and corruption have on the poor, the central importance of an urban setting which the hero vows to protect, the use of rich plutocrats as villains--are things that were done just recently, in the first season of Arrow.  To be fair, this is less a case of plagiarism than of two works drawing from a common source (more precisely, Arrow's first season is a blatant riff on Batman Begins, which in turn was heavily influenced by the work of Frank Miller).  But there's no denying that there are elements in Daredevil that feel as if they were lifted directly from Arrow.  Fisk's evil plan to save the city from corruption by destroying the parts of it that he has deemed too diseased echoes both Malcolm Merlyn on Arrow and Ra's Al Ghul in Batman Begins.  The season's tenth episode, "Nelson v. Murdock," centers on the disgust and dismay felt by Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), Matt's best friend and law partner, when he learns Matt's secret.  The episode is designed to show Matt how a normal, sane person reacts when they learn that he has dedicated his life to violence, but Foggy's reaction is almost word for word the one expressed by Tommy Merlyn on Arrow when he learns Oliver's secret.

To be sure, Daredevil is often much better made than Arrow, particularly the early episodes which were quite dire (it also has an obvious advantage over Arrow in being a story about class whose characters actually come from a working class background).  But it is not so much better as to completely distract from the fact that it's retreading very familiar ground, and in some cases it actually falls short.  The most crucial of these, unfortunately, is Matt himself.  Like Arrow, Daredevil is the story of how its title character grows into heroism, but the show rarely seems willing to commit to actually depicting that process.  It spends a lot of time explaining Matt's background to us, but very little time on Matt himself.  Cox is very good at showing us the various masks that Matt presents to the world, but when it comes to the anger and ugliness that lie beneath, he's rarely given enough to work with.

Matt's character arc over the course of the first season revolves around the dilemma of whether he should kill Fisk.  That's a fairly inert plot--no story that puts so much emphasis on whether or not our hero will kill a single bad guy is going to end with him doing the deed--and made even more so by the lawyerly way in which the show phrases the question--in the second episode, Matt brutally tortures a man for information and throws him off a roof, but it's OK because he lands in a dumpster and only ends up in a coma.  Arrow was actually much smarter about this issue--it started with Oliver already an unrepentant killer, and let him slowly walk back from that state over the course of its first season.  One of the problems of telling a superhero story in a gritty, "realistic" tone is that the closer you get to setting your story in something that resembles reality, the clearer it becomes that superheroes are actually a really bad idea, and that people who choose to go out at night in masks to beat up criminals are pretty messed up.  So giving your hero some space to become a better person without actually giving up the vigilante lifestyle, as Arrow does, is a good idea.  Daredevil, in contrast, paints itself into a corner--if Matt commits this particular murder, he's damned--and has nowhere to go from that point.  It ends up embroidering around the question, sometimes in ways that are very compelling--Matt's conversations with a priest (Peter McRobbie) who challenges him to decide whether he's looking for a reason not to kill Fisk, or a justification for doing so, are a consistent highlight of the season--but never in a way that leaves him room to grow or change.

Matt's flatness stands in even sharper contrast when he's compared to Fisk, who is simultaneously Daredevil's greatest accomplishment and its biggest stumbling block.  Played to perfection by D'Onofrio, Fisk is at once ruthless and deeply vulnerable.  He is also one of the series's most emotionally available characters.  In one of his earliest scenes, he makes an awkward but extremely sweet pass at a gallery owner, Vanessa Marianna (Ayelet Zurer), whose relationship with him is the season's central romantic plotline.  He has a strong, supportive friendship with his assistant Wesley (Toby Leonard Moore), who seems to genuinely care for his boss, and whose affection is clearly reciprocated.  In a show full of masculine posturing, Fisk is the only character who allows himself to behave in decidedly unmasculine ways--when Wesley is murdered, Fisk sits for a long time holding the dead man's hand in his own, and plants a kiss on his forehead before leaving.  And yet Fisk is also a deeply damaged man, scarred by the abuse of his father, whom he murdered to protect his mother, and harboring deep reserves of rage.  When his first date with Vanessa is interrupted by one of his criminal associates, Fisk kills the man in a fit of incandescent, irrational anger, shouting "you embarrassed me in front of her!"

It's an impressive, complex portrait, and I very much hope that genre prejudice will not preclude D'Onofrio from receiving some award attention for it.  But it's also a huge problem for the show that contains it, because Fisk turns out to be massively more interesting than anything else on screen, including of course the show's titular hero.  As a lot of superhero stories do, Daredevil mirrors its hero and its villain--both come from a working class background, both had violent fathers (though Matt's father, a boxer, was never abusive towards him), both care deeply about their neighborhood and believe that it has fallen to them to save it, and both struggle with deep-seated rage.  There's even an obvious echo of Matt's condition in Fisk's defining moment, when he stares unseeing at a blank wall, unable to drown out the sounds of his mother being beaten.  But the parallel runs so deep and Fisk is such a dominant figure in the story that it feels less as if Daredevil has mirrored Matt and Fisk, and more as if it has given them the exact same character arc, and let Fisk do it better.  By the end of the season, it is Fisk, not Matt, who has had a complete character arc and experienced a transformation (and it is Fisk's decisions, not Matt's, that move the plot, his own bad choices that lead to his downfall far more than Matt's heroics).  In a way, this was inevitable the moment the show chose to center itself around the question of justified violence--Fisk, who is not a hero, can come to the logical conclusion of this dilemma in a way that Matt never could, embracing his own villainy in the season's final moments.  By the end of its first season, Daredevil feels a lot more like Fisk's story than Matt's, and though this is interesting and clearly the result of deliberate choices, it's also unsupportable, especially within a universe as fundamentally conservative as the MCU.

The impressionistic storytelling, the shapeless plotting, the choice to humanize its villain and place his story at its center--these are all ways in which Daredevil tries to work within the conventions of prestige crime shows like The Wire or True Detective (and one of its core problems is that, well made though it is, it lacks the level of writing that can take these challenging tropes and weave them into a compelling story).  Another example is the over-emphasis on male characters at the expense of any women in the cast.  There are three women in Daredevil's main cast, and none of them feel particularly well served by the first season.  Claire appears in only a few episodes (Dawson is apparently intended as a crossover character between the different Netflix shows, and as her character in the comics has connections to Luke Cage she will probably be seen in his show) and seems to function primarily as a caretaker and sounding board for Matt, though she also has enough good sense to shut down their nascent romantic relationship when she realizes that he has no intention of stopping his vigilantism.  Vanessa gets more screen time, but her relationship with Fisk is frustratingly one-sided.  We learn enough about him to understand why he falls for her so deeply and so quickly.  But we learn almost nothing about Vanessa (who is hardly ever seen away from Fisk--there is only one scene in the first season that she does not share with him), much less anything that would explain why she's not only willing to date a man whom she knows to be a violent criminal, but so quickly ties her life to his, involving herself in her crimes and agreeing to go on the run with him at the season's end.

The one bright spot on the female character front is Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), a client of Matt and Foggy's who becomes their receptionist.  Unlike Claire and Vanessa, Karen is the driver of her own story, in which she investigates the criminal conspiracy that led to her being falsely accused of murder, and which inevitably leads to Fisk.  Woll is excellent at conveying not only Karen's determination, but the hint of mania that underpins it as she browbeats and steamrolls her way towards the answers about the events that tore her life apart.  Though driven by noble intentions, Karen's zeal to get at the truth and find justice for herself and others leads her to act recklessly and often unethically, and unlike Matt there is space in the show for her to become somewhat unlikable without completely losing her way.  Unfortunately, Karen's plot strand is also the season's least successful, least interesting aspect.  Her investigation somehow manages to be simultaneously too detailed and not detailed enough, drowning the viewers in a flood of meaningless names and places while signposting major breaks in the case that don't actually make any sense.  In the season's later episodes, Karen and her partner, the journalist Ben Urich (Vondie Curtis-Hall), discover that Fisk killed his father--not so much by being ace investigators but because the truth more or less falls in their laps--and walk around convinced that they have a smoking gun, even though it should be obvious that a twelve-year-old boy who killed his abusive father would be a figure of sympathy, not scorn.  It's a story undeserving of its main character, and it helps to cement the feeling that Daredevil is a lot less interested in the women in its story than in the men.

(Much has been made of the fact that the people behind the show's scenes are almost entirely men--only one of the season's episodes, for example, was co-written by a woman--and one of the ways in which this feels most obvious is the show's handling, or rather its failure to handle, women's relationship with violence.  Both Claire and Vanessa choose to become romantically involved with men whom they know to be violent, and at no point is it ever suggested that they fear that violence could be turned onto them.  It's obviously not unrealistic for women to ignore the danger that their romantic partners pose them, but the show itself never seems to consider that this is a questionable choice--despite showing us repeatedly that both Matt and Fisk have deep reserves of rage which they often have trouble controlling, we're apparently meant to take them at face value when they assure the women in their lives that "I would never hurt you."  Karen, meanwhile, comes to Matt and Foggy's attention after she's drugged while on a date with a man, and yet the obvious implications that such a setup would have for most women are never considered--drugging her is merely a means to framing her for her date's murder.  This is not the only way in which Daredevil's pretense of "realism" runs aground on the shoals of its limited perspective--for a show about poverty and class, it's jarring that the perspectives we see belong almost exclusively to white people, and it will be interesting to see the show analyzed from a disability rights perspective--but to me it was the most obvious.)

Sporadically brilliant but ultimately inadequate, Daredevil is a marked improvement on its predecessors, but still not the home run that Marvel needed to launch their Netflix experiment.  There's probably a longer discussion to be had about why Marvel does so well in its movies, but has so far struggled to expand its universe into television (while DC has had the exact opposite results).  My previous theory was that television series need room to grow and become their own story before being folded into a wider universe (one of Arrow's problems in its lackluster third season has been that so much of its storytelling is in service of jumpstarting more and more spin-offs set in its world).  But Daredevil is undeniably its own thing--even as it cribs to blatantly from so many sources.  Perhaps the problem is simply that Marvel's TV shows have the same storytelling flaws as their movies, which tend to half-ass their plots and cover for it with fun character moments and exciting action scenes.  That's not an approach that can work in a multi-part story, and especially not when your main character can't quite hold the spotlight.  There's still a lot here worth watching for, and certainly enough to build on in the second season, but I hope that future Marvel series have a stronger sense of their main character, and a more interesting story to build around them.