Thought Twists: Star Wars: The Force Awakens

I hear that the best way to get trending is to talk about a movie that came out 2 years ago.

Centuries ago, the trailer for The Last Jedi came out. Like any good teaser, it encourages speculation. So much of what gets people excited about Star Wars is the speculation. Is Rey related to Luke or Obi-Wan? Will Luke turn to the Dark Side? Is Finn the only black Stormtrooper in the galaxy? Will Chewie ever get that hug?

The problem is, in order to fuel speculation like this, the audience has to be in it--more than 100% in it. And I'm not sure I'm 100% into Star Wars anymore.

The original trilogy (OT) was real to me in a way that very few follow-ups have ever been able to recapture. I was able to overlook questionable things like Ewoks because the OT was like my Bible--my belief overpowered anything that didn't make sense to me, anything that a less devoted viewer might be inclined to criticize.

And between the OT and the prequel trilogy (PT), there were the books, which became known as the Expanded Universe (EU). They would not be canon, but for a long time they would be the only Star Wars stories available. With nothing to contradict them, they were canon by default. Some of those stories were excellent. I am rather fond of the Thrawn trilogy and the Rogue Squadron series. Other books didn't meet my expectations, but that was okay. I knew that these were mere mortals writing Star Wars books, not Master Lucas himself.

And then there was the PT, and things started going wrong from there. It's an interesting phenomenon, observing someone who has loved something for so long feel so obligated to defend it from all criticism. I think many Star Wars fans felt this way after watching The Phantom Menace. From their point of view, it is not okay for there to be a bad Star Wars movie. That would be against their religion. They become apologists. They focus on the positive. Jar Jar wasn't that bad. And wasn't that lightsaber duel cool? And aren't political allegories neat?

I have been guilty of this. I loved Star Wars, and there wasn't room enough in my heart for a bad Star Wars movie. So I did what all right- or left-leaning people do when their own political candidate is a piece of shit. I made excuses. I blamed the naysayer for not having an open mind. I lied to myself.

By the time Attack of the Clones came out, I was more prepared to be a skeptic. I'd seen enough activity online to confirm that Episode I's flaws could not be ignored or explained away. And so I sat through chunks of Episode II actually wincing.

Episode III was more satisfying, but not without flaws.

What I will say about both the PT is that all of them contributed at least one thing new and substantial to the overall mythology. The PT in particular showed us Jedi culture and demystified them quite a bit. They showed us how a mighty Jedi Order could be led astray and destroyed from within. They showed us Jedi who were lost and confused--not just Anakin, but even Yoda himself, who in his wisdom failed to prevent the Sith lord from coming to pow

Movies don't have to be perfect. I've listened to enough Kevin Smith and Nerdist podcasts to appreciate just how difficult it is to make a good movie. Everything in the filmmaking process has to go perfectly, from script to completion, and the odds of this happening seem daunting. But that in itself is just another apology. Sympathy for the challenge of the process doesn't seem like a valid reason to ignore a movie's flaws. At best, you can forgive it. At worst, you can resent it.

A cartoon came out--Clone Wars. It was very good. It came quite close to making the PT better retroactively.

And then Disney bought Lucasfilm and produced The Force Awakens, the first in a new trilogy (NT).

My theory is that Hollywood tends to over-correct for past mistakes. The first Hulk movie was too cerebral, so the follow-up was full of mindless action. The Batman franchise had become a parody of itself, so Nolan's Batman Begins took itself very seriously--so seriously that every ridiculous comic book element in the film had to be rationalized, right down to the part where Alfred asks Bruce why he is compelled to dress like a bat.

Bruce says, "Bats frighten me. It's time my enemies shared my dread."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsHJpvExUEY

You know what would have been much cooler? If he had said nothing at all. Allow us to entertain the possibility that our protagonist might be insane. But no. He can't be weird or goofy, like Schumacher's Batman. He needs to be serious.

In that similar kind of way, I see The Force Awakens as Disney's attempt at a course correction for the franchise. They attempted to bring back the action, pacing, and appealing characters that made Star Wars a success. And for the most part, I think they succeeded.

What they didn't have was a good story. They had the beats of a good story, but not the meat of a good story. The story itself felt like a retread of the OT--which itself already had two Death Stars and spent two movies on a desert planet. I suppose their plan was to make us fall so utterly in love with the new characters that maybe we would overlook some glaring problems in the movie's own mythology.

Just off the top of my head: What happened to the New Republic? How could they allow yet another super weapon to be built? Were they or were they not the ones in power, thus making the First Order the underdogs in this fight? And if they were the underdogs, how did they get the resources to build a super-gigantic, even-more-deadly version of the Death Star?

The Force Awakens gave us no sense of scale and scope--something that the OT and PT never failed to provide. We knew that the Empire was obscenely large, and that the Rebel Alliance was so very small (see opening scene of A New Hope). In Episode VII, we do not know how big the Resistance is or how big the First Order is. I don't need statistics or anything--I just need to see some juxtaposition, like when the Star Destroyer pursued the tiny Corellian Corvette.

It makes me feel like J.J. Abrams himself didn't have these answers, and therefore ignored them as he made the film, deciding instead to focus on our lovable new characters. Maybe it was a sleight of hand. And maybe it would have been forgivable, if the central conflict of the movie wasn't between these two very ill-defined forces.

Or it should have been central. Maybe that's the problem right there--the conflict between the First Order and the Resistance was tangential to arcs of our adorable cast. The story emphasized the personal, and failed to balance it with larger events. I cared about Rey, Finn, and BB-8. I did not care about the First Order and the Resistance. In Episode IV, the conflict felt important. In Episode VII, it felt like an afterthought. Even Kylo Ren's story, which should be the story of leading the First Order to victory, is ultimately a personal story about the weight of legacy and the pull of family. Perhaps for him the First Order is also an afterthought.

As a result, I left the theater feeling like I'd just seen some very entertaining fan fiction. For me, the NT is not canon. It takes place in an alternate reality. Mind you, I have read some excellent, emotional fan fiction over the years, but in my mind there was always a separation between the original product and these other stories. For me, The Force Awakens will always be separate from the OT, the PT, and even the EU (the last of which Episode VII most closely resembles in my mind). Maybe if Star Wars was still my Bible, I would be looking for ways to defend or apologize for it--like all those people who insist that Rey did not, in fact, learn the ways of the Force far too quickly. (She did. Anakin was off-the-charts Force sensitive as a child, and he still had to go to school. Maybe something in Rey's backstory will clarify this, but until these questions are answered, it is a glaring omission.)

I don't want to take anything away from the devoted fans, and I'm glad they love it so much--but please allow me my opinions. If you truly love something, then you should not feel threatened by someone's conflicting opinion of it.

I fully expect I will enjoy these new installments. They will be fun popcorn flicks for me. But I am not interested in speculation. I am not interested in doing Disney's own marketing for them. And, much as I hate to admit it, I guess I don't believe in the Bible anymore.

Legend of Korra (Spoilers)

The pairing of Korra and Asami was a bold move for a children's show. Less bold when you consider that the creators only made their relationship explicit in a blog after the series finale, rather than on the show itself. (Yes, there were hints, but I wouldn't call "hints" explicit, no matter how obvious they are to older viewers.)

But it's kind of refreshing that, story-wise, all of this unfolded off camera, between the scenes, and without dramatic declarations. (It's probably for the best, because the romances explicitly portrayed on this show were awkward and clunky.)

I'm sure some were unhappy with pairing Korra and Asami--either it was too little, too much, or shouldn't have happened at all. And for some, it was just right. Here's the important part: It wasn't nothing. It wasn't playing it safe.

Playing it safe would have been pairing Korra off with Mako, a.k.a. the bland dude (think Riley from Buffy). Also playing it safe: Korra isn't paired off with anybody (some might consider the absence of romance a bold move, and a statement about Korra being able to stand on her own as a character without defining herself as being in a relationship, but removing romantic elements from a children's show doesn't seem very groundbreaking to me). Some might argue that not making the relationship explicit on the show was also a way to play it safe. Well, I happen to disagree in this instance. You can't please everybody.

When you see stories playing it safe, it makes you think the creators are treating their fiction as something fragile. It hints that the story is lacking something in its foundation, perhaps in character, plot, setting, or the core idea (i.e., the four basic elements). Everyone has an idea of how a pleasing story is shaped. Hollywood has had that formula for years (exploding buildings, kiss the girl, car chases, blah blah blah). But a story that only pleases is a forgettable one. It takes more than that for a story to stay with you.

The people behind Korra are master storytellers. The stakes are real, the characters (including villains) are complex, and they face real trials in a colorful, imaginative world.

I mean, I could do with less references to peeing and farting, but it's a Nickelodeon show for crying out loud.

SMed #9: Rings

Cole and Amber are watching wrestling.

Cole: I still don't get the appeal. Think about it--there's no real advancement. Wrestlers compete for the belt, and they either win it or they don't. And even if they win, they'll eventually lose and go to the back of the line.

Amber: What's your point?

Cole: This is essentially the entirety of the story. Don't you find this repetitive?

Amber: Right. Explain the past few years of Captain America again?

Cole: Well, he died and came back to life, then he turned old and got young again, and now he's evil and...

Amber: And...?

Cole: I retract my earlier criticism.

Ultimate Marvel, Part 1

I've been binge reading Marvel's Ultimate books recently, and I am about to enter the Miles Morales era. I thought this would be a good time to take a break and reflect on the characters and events of the Ultimate Universe. Spoilers ensue.

First, I feel like the writers of this line have been trying to see just how much they can get away with. They put themselves in our shoes, and they figure out what lines we think they would never cross, and then they cross them. Ultimatum is a prime example of that, though perhaps not the best one. The best example is probably the death of Spider-Man and the rebirth of Spider-Man.

The earliest examples of lines being crossed, however, involved the Ultimates and Ultimate X-Men. The Ultimates featured characters that were not very likable. Their shortcomings were very much front-and-center. But these were the guys who were needed to solve our problems, so that's the kind of hero we wound up with. Captain America and Hulk probably suffered the most for this. They made the abusive and unstable Hank Pym look sympathetic in comparison. Cap said a number of things that I just didn't like, a lot of it coming from judgmental attitude of patriotism. Hulk ate people. This was pretty jarring. This was superheroes without the purity and virtue. These were superheroes who didn't always feel like they were the good guys. But there were signs of the Ultimate Universe leaning in this direction since Ultimate X-Men, in which Wolverine left Cyclops for dead at one point.

Despite all this, the Ultimate Universe was still building something. At least, they were until Jeph Loeb got his hands on it. With Ultimatum, Jeph Loeb crossed almost every other line we thought Marvel would never cross. Iconic characters died. Mutants were revealed to be manmade rather than a product of evolution (as revealed earlier in Ultimate Origins by Bendis). The living were thrust into unfamiliar territory. Reed Richards turned villain. Young troubled heroes moved in with Spider-Man. Mutants were labeled as terrorists. In short, the writers were truly freed up to take the books in new directions that could not happen in the mainstream Marvel Universe.

I have many problems with Ultimatum. I think it crossed too many lines at once, and it wasn't as subtle as previous lines. Even the Hulk eating people was subtle in comparison. When so many lines are being crossed all at once, it feels more like the events are being played for shock value than for organic storytelling. The deaths of Professor X, Wolverine, and Magneto did not feel like earned moments. It felt like their stories came to an abrupt and unceremonious end. This might reflect the harshness of the real world, but it's not something I want in a story. It doesn't make sense for a story. In short, Ultimatum was a huge table-flip to the status quo. Some good things came out of this new status quo, but I'm convinced there had to be a better way to reach this point, even if it meant doing it gradually over several more months or a year.

Several of the Ultimate books are like strange footnotes. Orson Scott Card's Ultimate Iron Man didn't seem to fit in anywhere--until another writer decided that his books were a "Saturday Morning Cartoon" version of that world's Iron Man. Then it all made sense. The Ultimate Avengers books were hit or miss, and I strongly dislike the role they played in the death of Spider-Man, mostly because it didn't feel (there's that word again) organic. It also pissed me off that Spidey took a fatal gunshot wound from a shot that was only intended to take out Cap's kneecaps. It makes his death seem senseless. But, well, there's a lot of senselessness in the Ultimate books. This is not a safe comic book world where everything turns out okay. But I wonder if it could have been done better.

Spidey has proven to be the heart, soul, and conscience of the Ultimate Universe. As far as I'm concerned, this is Bendis's world. He was the one who made it work. It was other writers who decided to let character flaws overtake heroism. (And as I type this, I recall that he was the one who made Reed turn villain.) Specifically, his work on Ultimate Spider-Man is what made reading these books worthwhile, even the ones knee-deep in blood and compromise. His books had characters who loved each other and tried to do right by one another. These elements were so very necessary, and yet so very lacking in the Ultimates and Ultimate Avengers. These characters feel deadened by the amount of death they deal with. If Ultimatum had been truer to Spidey's spirit, it would have worked in at least a few moments like the ones in Spidey's book. The Ultimates need a hug or something.

This has taught me something about telling a story. If you want a character's decisions to have stakes (real stakes, not fabricated end-of-the-world stakes), then they need people in their lives that they love. It's like the old gag, where some random character shows us a picture of his family before being unceremoniously killed. It's a cheap way to make us care a little bit, though savvy audiences will recognize it as a death flag. But there was some truth to it. A character's world has to be populated with people and things that he cares about and wants to protect. For Spidey, this has been made clear numerous times. But for the Ultimates, as near as I can tell, all they want in life is to kill bad people. True heroes.

I'm kind of glad that the Ultimate Universe eventually came to an end. That world was too cruel for a gem like Spider-Man.

Thought Twists: Watchmen

Spoilers for a 30+ year old story.

I can't remember when I read Watchmen for the first time. Over a decade ago, easily. I might have been in college, which makes it over 15 years ago. Regardless, I thought it was time to reread it since a move came out a little while back, since DC's next event hinges on these characters, and since sensibilities change.

You see, I didn't like it very much. I found it largely boring back then. And my knowledge of comics wasn't developed enough to even appreciate it on a technical level. So I was curious what I would think of it after all these years.

Turns out it's a better book than I remember, but I still didn't like it.

Story

Watchmen is more about the world they inhabit than about the characters. A kind of foreboding tone permeates almost every element of the book. There are some moments of wonder, but they are brief. Characters that I found most intriguing sometimes disappeared for a few issues at a time. There are also many detours from the plot, as the story takes time to show us "lesser" characters. One character in particular is reading a pirate comic (a comic within a comic, before it was cool to be meta), and we actually do manage to meet the writer and are treated to some faux-print media that spills details about the history of the aforementioned pirate comic. Another character has a transformative experience after attempting to psychoanalyze the fiercely willful Rorschach. 

This is not a superhero story. Perhaps it was misleading in that regard. There are costumed adventurers in various states of either retirement or denial. They turn out to be easily manipulated or dysfunctional in some way. They are also largely ineffectual. By the end of the journey, you're not entirely sure what it was all for. The story gave us a tour of a world on the brink, and the extreme lengths a certain character employed to bring us back from it. Or, if not to bring us back from it, then to carry us through the baptism by fire to other side.

Largely, it was not an exciting story. It was interesting, though. It had many different points of view, many motivations. In certain ways, it reminds me of Lord of the Rings, for which the author had more interest in describing landscapes and sharing poetry than in crafting a pulse-pounding action sequence. Tolkien wanted to teach us about the world he created, while Alan Moore wanted to teach us something about the world we created. And from that, we can only conclude that no superhero following in the noble footsteps of DC and Marvel characters really has a role to play. In our world, the only one who can save us is Lex Luthor.

Tone

The inhabitants of this world live from day to day with the possibility of nuclear war. This is a world struggling to keep hope alive, and it's not looking good. Ozymandias sacrifices half the population of New York in order to prevent war with Russia. Does the fact that it actually works mean it was the right thing to do?

When I think about the issues affecting the regular people of the story, I think about the day-to-day issues that affect us. Racism. Sexism. Guns. A joke of a political campaign that stopped being funny very quickly. You can't even talk about comic books or video games without some kind of controversy errupting. Escapism is no longer fun; it's just another issue that needs to be fixed. It's just another thing that oppresses the less privileged.

Seeing conversations unfold on Twitter, in which nobody is really communicating anything to the other party, makes me feel just as helpless as the people of Watchmen must have felt. To have so many mass shootings, yet to be unable to make any progress in the conversation about guns... It makes me feel like we are getting nowhere. It makes me feel like this is where the train stops, and this is where we wait for the end.

There are no endings, of course. There is always an "after" after. When humanity reaches a wall, they usually find a way to knock it down. But it's never bloodless. There is always a price. Ozymandias saw that we needed change, and he decided that violence and death were necessary to make it happen. When change truly happens in this country, it will have to be more unstoppable than the forces maintaining the status quo are immovable. And it's not going to be pretty. But then, the world is already not a pretty place. What exactly would we be destroying as we move forward to a (hopefully) better world? Would it be worth it? Does it even matter what we destroy, as long as we can build something a little bit better? Was this country not built on a mountain of corpses?

I wonder if there wasn't some Buddhist influence in the conclusion of the book. Dr. Manhattan's peculiar sense of scale contributed to this, and so did Nite Owl's and Silk Spectre's reaction to the atrocity committed by Ozymandias. Certain events are too large, above our pay grade. We can only accept them and move on.

Like I said, this is not a superhero story. About the only thing this has in common with such a story is that it is ultimately about hope. Your typical superhero story is about the abundance of hope, and Watchmen is about the absence of it. How do you save a world that is on the verge of giving up?

Design

Though I didn't find the book very enjoyable either time I read it, I did appreciate its technical qualities this time around. I like how there was typically more than one action being performed in a single panel. I like that when a character says, "I noticed your calendar earlier," you can actually flip back a page and see him noticing it, even though it is not obvious. I like that references to print media given casual mention in the midst of the story are fleshed out in the back matter, even though I loathed reading the back matter. This story and its world were incredibly well thought out.

However, some of these design elements really wreaked havoc on the flow of the story. Nothing slows you down more than having to keep two parallel, simultaneous stories in your head while you're reading. There's some real intense overlapping going on throughout, with the pirate comic and with narrative captions that originate from moments that are separate from the one you're witnessing. It was a terrific experiment, though I'm almost positive someone must have improved upon this format in the decades since it was published. Perhaps the wordiness was the issue for me.

Themes

I've already talked a bit about themes, but luckily there is no shortage of them in Watchmen. One particularly interesting moment was when Ozymandias was studying his hall of monitors and drawing conclusions about our collective mindset. For instance, since people were anxious about war with the Russians, escapism (including both lighthearted adventure and eroticism) grew more popular. I can't help but to turn the lens onto us. We grow enraged when Captain America is revealed to be a Hydra agent. We send death threats to the writer. Meanwhile, people are dying--real people. Unjustly. Is this where our priorities lie? People will fight to protect their escapism, but they won't fight for true justice. True heroes.

They'll scream about justice. But once they've vented, they'll go back to blogging about Watchm--I mean, they'll go back to watching TV or whatever, convinced that they've done something. Convinced that they've contributed. I honestly don't know how important it is to merely participate in the conversation without following it up with action. My own sense of scale is off balance. I can retweet as many feminist articles as I like, but that doesn't make me an ally. You're not an ally until you help someone. Until you do something. And talking? That's just talk. I can't think of a single person whose mind I changed by the power of Words. That's because most people have already made up their mind. When they are ready to be more receptive, they'll be able to find the answers they need just about anywhere. They don't need me. Nobody needs to hear me talk. (hashtag: "selfpity")

What the world needs is more people who will do something. Someone who is willing to bleed to do the right thing. There's your ally. But I'm not that. I'm not that good. All I have are powerless, impotent words, and only just enough knowledge to hide my unfathomable ignorance--without success.

When I am done here, lamenting the state of the world and its snail's pace toward progress, I won't be helping anyone. I will instead be escaping into a story that allows me to pretend that good triumphs over evil. Because good is better. Because hope is powerful. Because someone will save us. Because someone is fighting for Tomorrow.

You know. Kid stuff.

The Magicians (Spoilers)

I started reading The Magician King a few days ago and, in a rare show of enthusiasm I usually reserve for comic books and binge-watching Netflix shows, I feverishly devoured it. I am also about halfway through the first season of the Syfy, for which I've been pacing myself as I read through the series.

Some thoughts (with spoilers):

The Magicians (Book 1)

This book gets away with certain things that I doubt it could have gotten away with in a sequel. The characters, fresh off the high of learning magic, are sarcastic know-it-alls who get in too deep. Quentin especially makes some very bad choices and pays a heavy price.

I'm not sure why Quentin decided to become a king of Fillory at the end. Fillory wasn't even the land he'd thought it was. I guess he just had nothing else to do with his life, and at least he'd be with friends.

The Magician King (Book 2)

This felt like a more self-aware installment of the Narnia series. After refusing the call to action once or twice, Quentin finally fulfills his role and achieves some real heroism. He felt more like a main character in this book than in the previous one. After all, in the previous installment, he'd had everything handed to him--his education and his ticket to Fillory. He doesn't even get to kill the Beast. That's not to say he wasn't faced with challenges, but the two major story beats were presented to him, not necessarily his own achievements.

In the first book, Quentin and company were drunk on power (sometimes literally). In this book, they are somewhat wiser and hoping to live out their days as quasi-retired royalty in Fillory. However, this time Fillory has a quest for Quentin and it is very insistent about it. Why Quentin would trust Fillory after having been betrayed by it in the past is a question whose answer could fill another book. I guess Fillory reverted back to its more innocent state after the evil was vanquished in the previous book. At any rate, Quentin steps up.

But it seems even when Quentin wins, even when he does everything he's supposed to, he loses. But unlike the pessimism and defeatism that permeated the previous book even as it showed us wonder and marvels, Quentin actually feels like he gained something from this experience. He is stronger and better for his losses than he is for his rewards. Without this growth, I would consider this series a failure. Now I'm excited to read book 3.

The Magicians (Syfy)

It's pretty good.

SMed #8: Happy

Amber is playing video games. Cole walks in.

Cole: I’m gonna be home late tonight. My office is doing happy hour.

Amber: You go to those?

Cole: Yeah. My therapist says I need to embrace opportunities to engage.

LATER

Cole is at happy hour, sitting alone, sipping a beer, and playing Candy Crush.