Movie Review– X-Files: I want to believe

I have been away from blogland for long enough. Here’s a spoiler-free movie review of sorts. But first some background:

Being an X-files fan from back in the day, I was obliged to see the new movie that was randomly sprung on summer crowds. It was quite the stealth attack advertising campaign. Just mixed in amongst the usual smash-bang-boom stuff is a rather promising trailer…for a show that ended nearly a decade ago. But the trailer was spooky and just evocative enough of the things one likes about X-files– paranormal weirdness, shadowed conspiracy and The ‘Ship between Mulder and Scully.

The movie itself was a curious object, different from its trailer in ways I did not expect. It was like a two parter from season 4, when it was still fun, but there was now non-awkward character development mixed in with monster-of-the-week.

Now, normally ‘It was like an episode of the show’ is a criticism, but in this instance, it was a strength for the film. There was evocation without excessive explanation, and that’s just what X-files did best. And in this film, the actors did all their work very well. The loathing between David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson that generated so much wonderful tension is mellowed and weary here, creating a different kind of tension for the viewer (who is probably an X-files fan and thus expecting something very specific). They are done hating each other off-set, and so you have an interplay of curious rapport that was just not possible back in the day. Mulder and Scully transcend The ‘Ship in this film, and totally not in a way you’re expecting.

As well, the plot is a side-swiper. It presents a morally complex set of situations and then leaves the viewer turning them over as the film progresses. You keep checking and checking to see if they’re going to do anything with that moral complexity, and then the movie ends and you realise they just don’t know how. The reason is that it’s a movie about faith, and Catholic Christian faith very specifically– but the writers don’t actually know what they’ve written. And that’s because they aren’t Catholics, or even versed in the extensive range of Catholic responses to doubt and uncertainity in God.

But if you have even a passing acquaintance with those responses (any of them), then the movie is quite interesting to watch, even if they get it (Christianity) wrong. The dilemmas are that rich in possibility.

I liked it. As a fan, there were disappointments that were pretty much expected, but I wasn’t expecting a film full of completely unwitting theology. It was amazing to see it play out in all its flawed strangeness.

Apparently some people feel it’s anti-Catholic. I’d have to say it’s more uninformed about the complexity of Catholic Christian faith (and Christian faith in general). I can’t recommend anyone other than die-hard fans see it, or perhaps someone interested in watching the movie for theological analysis purposes. It lingers, yet not unpleasantly.

Like the show, it had some purely charming and/or intense moments. Also like the show, there were some clunky moments. It kinda summed up all I’ve liked and disliked about the X-files when I was watching it regular.

Lastly, since I am going on because the memory lingers so, the spooky bits are just the right kind of weird-spooky. Greatness eluded it, but it did not fail to fascinate. If I were rating, I’d say a solid seven of ten, or three of five.

Shoeboy’s Law of science fiction series

Any sufficiently lengthy science fiction series will degenerate into sexual wish fulfillment for the book’s author.

The canonical examples of Shoeboy’s Law are the Dune series, which includes such things as Amazons from space enslaving the human race with Tantric sex and the Ringworld series, which pretty much degenerates into the hero having sex with bearded alien women (aka “rishathra“). Other examples include the Foundation series (in which the Asimov stand-in upsets one of the other main characters by having Too Much Sex with the sexually insatiable telepath character) and the Rama series, where the anal beads come out around the third book and one is left wondering how exactly they got into space with the rest of the cast.

Here are some links to wiki entries for the first book or so of each series.

Dune
Ringworld
Foundation
Rama

I will update this with other sci-fi series that suit if it comes up.

Why don’t POC get to write what they know?

This comes up a lot. POC with life experiences outside the stereotyped narrative suite (most specially black POC, but certainly all other POC get their share of this in) get treated extremely ill by the (white) world at large.

A particular instance personal to me is rural upbringing. Black and Asian people who grew up on farms or ranches just leave most whitefolks outside of Texas and a couple other places completely baffled and sometimes angry. In light of the historic expulsion of such folks by whites (black people did in fact live everydamnwhere in America, until white people saw them living happily and had to Do Something about that), the idea that we’re all ‘just American’ or whatever is particularly galling.

Colorblind whites are the worst about this kind of thing. They have a narrative of ‘racist rednecks’ or whatever, and so POC growing up rural and not living in Jasper, TX just wreck that shiny story they comfort themselves with.

Also, alternawhites (who overlap strongly with the colorblind ones, of course). Your Burningman types– ugh, they will not let us be alterna, unless we’re female and Asian (and generally only Chinese or Japanese Asian at that, but sometimes Filipina, in my experience of alternafolk). Burningman itself is full of white people who, like, totally aren’t racist because they have this hot young tattooed Asian chick in their camp, dude!

But all that is not specifically to do with writing, and to clarify, I’ll have to bring up sexwork, since it is the most recent instance of white people doing this crap.

Re: sexwork, writing about it is fraught with peril as a WOC, because if your experience does not match an extremely specific narrative, you get told your experiences are invalid. I’ve been told my experiences are fictional and overblown and incorrect and misinformed, all because I fail at the ‘poor black (almost certainly single mother)’ sexworker role assigned to me. Saying and writing what I know gets me told I must be wrong or lying, basically.

So it’s difficult to write of my experiences, of the ways in which sexwork has marked me because what I know isn’t the standard narrative. And for us POC, this is kinda what leaves so many of us with near-permanent writer’s block. The constant and chronic invalidation, and pressure to stick only to the narrowest and most stereotyped of personas. We can’t be human and have our multitudes, each with unique and interesting and different experiences. We have to fit some small set of templates and if we crush the templates, whitefolks try to slap us down as mad upstarts.

It is so rude. And, of course, patronising and racist. But whatevs.

There’s no willingness to let us have our duelling/competing anecdotal evidences. We don’t get to be rural, or book-crazy and NOT self-hating, or computer-nerdy and not self-hating. Or you know, whatever.

Even in sci-fi and fantasy, it’s difficult to write what you know as a POC, because white poachers will come along and swear to you that you don’t know the first thing about your own mother’s cooking. But they do, since they lived in your country for six months and used the cuisine for their latest novel as delicacies of an alien race.

This is primarily about how much white people irritate me with their rudeness and denial of true humanity to, well, anyone else. But this is reflected in white whining about how POC writing can be ‘inauthentic’ (fail the stupid batch scripted narratives– argh!) at all. Their grubby selfish envy bugs me.

Curiously, all this is less bad in Texas. They’ll let black and asian rural folks be rural all the livelong day, except up north in the outlands nearish to Dallas.

I may rewrite all this later. Or leave it as an extended note.

Why I love the War Nerd.

The War Nerd is the only white guy I know of who writes about brown and black people as though they are behaving perfectly normally. He never fails to point out that white people would and have done the same in similar circumstances.

War isn’t hell– it’s only human.

What’s being done in say the DR Congo is horrifying, but it possesses a horrid brilliance. And it is perfectly, sadly human. Humans with pale skin do the same things. Destroying your neighbor’s fertility by brutalising the women to near-death and scaring the rest into the woods where they’ll die of exposure is intelligence. It is cleverness. It is human. And it is not something only ‘dirty black savages’ do.

Women make life. Without women, there’s no more humans. This is why rape continually happens in war. It is a tool– cruel, awful, and consistently effective. The women are demoralised (and often denigrated, depending on the culture). The men are rendered powerless– they could not protect their women. And of course, the raped and sundered tribe/country/province will not have new children who could revenge the wrong done.

War-rape is especially horrible because it never fails to achieve the desired effects. Physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual, cultural trauma. Rape as a tool of war covers every base.

The War Nerd doesn’t get that involved in it, but he shows an understanding of what constitutes ‘normal human behavior’ that is wonderful in its rarity.

Normally, typically, regularly, we humans, regardless of coloring are awful to each other– and we seek to be more awful because IT WORKS. IT DESTROYS OUR ENEMIES.

It is so far beyond ‘such and such ethnic group is more prone to violence’ Total BS. Humanity is prone to violence. That simple and that unsettling.

And this is why I read the War Nerd– he is honest about this, and always has plenty of examples of white people behaving identically to the ‘black savages’ or ‘Arab savages’, et al. Because he is willing to admit that human nature is not inherently kind and gentle. I appreciate that.

The Kushiel’s Dart series sucks.

It relies on a conception of prostitution that disregards the economics of prostitution in the real world, but uses the ‘alternate history’ tack to play at verisimilitude.

It is similar to the pdf about the Companion Inara– just full of romantic assumptions that aren’t reflected in history or the present day.

Perhaps the most repulsive aspect is making the heroine a super-healing ‘natural-born masochist’, who requires ‘pain and humiliation’ to be properly sexually gratified.

The second most insulting and repulsive bit is the way that sexuality is interpreted and handled. There is no underbelly in this fairyland of hedonism with suspicious rulesets. Plus, even I know that sex isn’t love, yet it’s the foundational religious and series premise (“love as thou wilt”), which is just…baffling. Because the ONLY practical definition of love is assorted sex acts and practices (except for the sex acts and practices that are disallowed of course–’as you wilt’ comes with some very strange catches)

Deep Throat is less insulting, mostly because it isn’t played straight.

If the Kushiel’s Dart heroine was driven by a desire for blood and damage to her own flesh, and could not heal easily, that would have been an interesting story, at least. As it is, it’s kind of a Mary Sue adventure, but with sex-for-pay instead of for free, as is the usual standard. There’s no comprehension of how suffering works, even when it’s pursued as a means of pleasure.

I should write my own books about some fantasy world where rape is the vilest of crimes and yet with no sense of irony prostitution of ‘natural masochists’ is considered teh awesum. And of course we never find out if anyone ever fakes it or fakes it in others for personal gain. But that is just one small example of there being no underbelly to this series.

One of the reasons sex-positivity tires me out is stuff like this, where the writer tries to put a religious-y coat of paint on hedonism, dress it in quasi-sacred garb. But practically speaking, love’s not solely or even primarily sex (and it is problematic to associate it with sex for pay primarily on top of that), and it’s kind of irritating to be presented with an agenda disguised as a fantasy series.

I could go on, but I will end my dissatisfactions here…

Dear Joss Whedon– Don’t take black ops so literally

The title says much of it, really. I do hope I am not the only one to notice that in Firefly and Serenity, Mr. Whedon made all of his Operatives black guys. Seemingly incompetent black guys, no less. Not to mention some more icky racial subtext from the Confederacy-aspect.

The key word is seemingly. In the Firefly ‘verse, because the heroes are all renegades from civilisation in one fashion or another (even Inara), having the Operatives supposedly be clever assassin types who keep getting flummoxed undermines the premise of their cleverness. That is to say, in the movie Serenity, Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Operative getting tricked just makes him appear incompetent and stupid. But his intelligence is merely constrained by expectations that the Firefly crew would behave as ‘civilised’ (softer) folk do among the Core planets.

That subtlety is quite lost in terms of presentation. Similarly, by portraying Jubal Early as a chatty psychotic in Objects in Space, Whedon undermines his presumed and stated competence/intelligence. Although Early is not an Operative, he is serving that function.

Shepherd Book, as an inactive Operative, narrowly escapes some of this, but all three ‘Black Ops’ serve a function similar to what happened to select black guys during Reconstruction, post-Civil War. The ones who were voted in as Republicans. Or the soldiers up North who were technically free but still stuck in subservient roles during the War.

Each Operative is clever, but yet flummoxed by country folk from down South. There’s blind devotion to a white-instantiated ideal that is crushed by shocking revelation. Jubal Early, as an insane bounty hunter is a subversion of this mini-trope, but because he ends up appearing stupid, the subversion just backfires. And I will not even get into the BLACKRAPIST thing that I can only hope was accidentally tossed in.

Is this where science fiction teevee is really at? Is this all POC, especially blackfolk, can hope for? White people can be absurdly clueless about race, and yet those three roles were large parts (one recurring). These roles allowed three black male actors to not play gangsters or rappers. Instead they played roles written to showcase intelligent, dangerous, interesting guys who ended up appearing incompetent and throwaway in practice. Le sigh.

When I get to discussing the Companions, then my irate side will come out. This is just a bagatelle.

a white man says something sensible about race and IQ

While I was on holiday with relatives, a wonderous post was posted by of all people, a Welshman. It was in many respects a sound retort to the usual round of polemic about intelligence, IQ and racial differences affecting it all thereof. I hadn’t expected it from such a quarter, but it’s a pleasure to come upon regardless.

The yucky Mal/Zoe dynamic in Firefly, or Joss Whedon is a little too Southern

In the short but sweetly lamented series Firefly, Joss Whedon has pretty well indicated that the captain, Mal Reynolds, is supposed to represent a post-Civil War Confederate soldier on the run from carpetbaggers. Using Civil War allegory in a sci-fi western sounds innovative, intriguing and a guarantee of at least a little amusement value.

Oh, but the subtext one finds when clueless white men are left to run loose with story development. The problem with using the Civil War as a subtext is that Joss Whedon’s ancestors weren’t slaves. So he seriously thinks that in Zoe, Mal’s second-in-command and only surviving member of his unit, he’s done a subversive little trick. She’s black! She’s a she! She can fight so good! She’s a soldier just like Mal, etc, etc.

Mr. Whedon must have fallen asleep during the part in class where they discussed how some slaves stayed with their masters even after emancipation.

The bitterness of alluding to a Civil War theme in Firefly is that Zoe is nothing more than a painful and classic cliche– the loyal slave, so loyal she doesn’t accept emancipation, but continues following every order Massa (Mal) gives her, no matter how incompetent or unreasonable.

Even her marriage to the ship’s pilot, Wash, unspools itself in accord with such a narrative. Marrying someone Massa doesn’t like and looks down on, who’s clearly less competent than she is. Yep, Wash could easily be an emancipated slave who knows he can’t compete with Massa. Or a poor white who finds Zoe overwhelming and beautiful, and remains resentful that her truest devotion will ever belong to Massa.

Interestingly, this view of events explains perfectly why Mal has never even made a pass at the Extremely Attractive Zoe better than any other interpretation possibly could. ‘He’s her commanding officer’ simply doesn’t fly as a reason why they never even attempted romance. But master-slave does. Bless Occam and his shiny razor.

Ironically, in trying to be ‘colorblind’ or ‘subversive’ or whatever he was thinking was racially ‘nicer’, Whedon did nothing except underline in red ink the very racial and class stereotypes he was presumably trying to sidestep, creating something in the Mal/Zoe dynamic that is quite uncomfortable to watch.

This article asks “Where are Mal’s slaves?”, but there the answer is standing near to Mal in every episode of Firefly.

The Firefly ‘verse is certainly full of interesting possibilities, but there’s a lot of worms under the cushions, squirmy little bits of cluelessness left behind for the viewer to wince at.

Another day, something about the Companions (geisha-like sexworkers) and their Guild.

this is what happens when you write about sexwork

…without talking to a damned sex-worker.

Warning– it’s a pdf.

That ‘scholar-fan’ is just– off. I don’t know if it’s the cheeseball academia-speak, or the confused assumptions, or the fact that this child took a blog post’s worth of commentary and streeeeeetched it out into sixteen pdf-pages of quasi-academic goofiness.

There is some interesting stuff going on regarding Inara, Companions, racial issues, gender issues, good old intersectionality of race/gender, and of course sex-selling more generally in the Firefly/Serenity ‘verse, but she failed to cover any of it, pretty much.

I will, hopefully before this holiday.