Still Vigilant

I'm still playing that Vigilant mod for Skyrim. It's vast, it's like a whole other game. I'm amazed how many assets one modder made. The mod's plot is divided into acts, I'm now in the third which is a completely separate hellscape from the main game. It's Coldharbour, a realm that is part of the game lore. It's the realm of Molag Bal, the Elder Scrolls' version of Satan. Well, one of several as there's a pantheon of both good and evil gods. The creator of the Vigilant mod, Vicn, shows a lot of fidelity to the established lore of the series, though many reviewers say the Coldharbour section is strongly reminiscent of Dark Souls.

As I mentioned before, the modder is Japanese and I found myself thinking a lot of Final Fantasy games. It has a similar rambling plot with lots and lots of flashbacks. It occurs to me memory tends to be a more prominent topic in Japanese fantasy fiction than it tends to be in western fantasy. Much of Kimetsu no Yaiba is flashbacks, more than necessary to provide backstories and motivations for the characters. There's a clear pleasure taken in dwelling in memory for a long time. In Vigilant's Coldharbour, you encounter a series of damned knights whose memories of misdeeds you can enter and alter to absolve them. Though whether time is actually altered isn't clear.

The only area in which the modder seems not to have made everything himself is in animations. Many of the monsters reuse animations from vanilla Skyrim enemies--the giant scorpions are clearly using the animations of the vanilla game's giant spiders and so on. But otherwise, it's a herculean effort for one modder. There seems to be no end of the custom made armours and weapons I encounter, all of exceptional quality which is boosted by a texture upgrade mod from another modder. The dungeon maps are pretty good, too, though they tend to feature puzzles, which I tend not to like. Video game puzzles often seem more about trying to figure out the thought process of their creators than actually trying to overcome an obstacle in a realistic manner. For example, sometimes it takes some time for me to figure out that I'm suppose to find some special switch or key rather than simply going around a certain obstacle. I've found that by doing the latter I've gotten to areas of Coldharbour before I'm meant to, which makes things more confusing.

I'm basically using the same character I was using last time I wrote about this mod though technically she died at the end of an effectively creepy haunted house act. At the end of that plotline, you get the choice to either accept Molag Bal's assistance or martyr yourself. I chose martyrdom which sends you back to the Vigilant headquarters and opens the custom character menu--the implication being that you're now a different person following in the footsteps of your previous character. I thought this was a bold choice though the player really has to make an effort to go along with it because you still have all the same gear in your inventory, all the same quests. I decided to play along and left all my gear in a trunk and changed my character's face and name. Most of my followers are gone and I don't know if I'll ever get them back (except for two followers connected to vanilla quests, which highlights a flaw in the implementation of this idea).

If you want to see the mod in all its splendour without playing it yourself, there are several YouTubers with playthroughs. I recommend the one below though I haven't watched it all the way through myself because I don't want spoilers.

X Sonnet 1963

The rusty metal skins patrol the waste.
Undulled are blades they drag across the dust.
The skulls within now lack both smell and taste.
Above there looms a ghastly bovine bust.
A bull beholds a petty, pricking creep.
But one of many hordes who grind the stones.
They carry ore to fill the devil's keep.
Let none now envy gold that laces bones.
Arrayed about the wall are archers primed.
No respite halts their day and nightly watch.
A wayward mortal up the mountain climbed.
A withered sun becomes a bloody blotch.
The grinning guard await your errant sword.
The rotting ship departs with fools aboard.

Diane Keaton

Diane Keaton has died at 79 years of age. One of the most distinctive qualities of this great actress' performances was their vivacity, their sense of effortless nature. She and Laura Dern, I would say, are the two actresses in the history of cinema whose ability to deliver conversational dialogue best and consistently captures a sense of someone genuinely fumbling through words. Despite undoubtedly memorising and rehearsing her lines, Keaton always seemed fresh and real.

She's best known for her work in the Godfather movies as well as a string of Woody Allen's greatest films, most notably as the title character in what's regarded by many as his best film, Annie Hall. Keaton's personality and fashion sense are well known to have influenced the character we see on screen so she is in more than the usual ways (for an actress) responsible for making it a great film.

In her late career, she shifted to solid and appreciable supporting roles in family drama and comedy movies like the Father of the Bride films and The Family Stone. She was also occasionally a director and she directed an episode of my favourite TV series, Twin Peaks, a decent episode in the popularly disliked latter half of the second season.

It's hard to believe an actress of such natural vivacity could be dead. Her movies will certainly live as long as movies do.

The Motives of Our Attending Spirit

Well, here's some more concrete evidence AI isn't perfect. I was watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull again this week and I felt sure the John Milton quote used in the movie was from Comus, a masque Milton wrote in 1634. I decided to double check and googled "Milton Quote in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" and the AI gave me this response:

The AI incorrectly states that the quote comes from Paradise Lost. It does not, it comes from Comus, from a soliloquy by the "Attending Spirit", a mysterious omniscient being whose benevolence and identity are fodder for stimulating debate. As when I pointed out the interpretation Google's AI gave to Ian McShane's accent in Pirates of the Caribbean, I find this a strange mistake for an AI to make. I mean, it seems much more like something I'd expect from human error. Paradise Lost is Milton's most famous work so I can see your average human assuming that's where the quote came from. Why should an AI have such a prejudice? I can find the quote in Comus by going to Project Gutenberg and hitting "control F". Surely AI should be able to go through such a process even faster. Wouldn't it be more difficult for it to amalgamate the common assumptions about Milton, digest them, and regurgitate them to provide something that simulates a human error? I guess there is such a thing as trying too hard.

So it seems the AI is basically a pool of internet content with weak discernment for the relative integrity of its sources. Perhaps it's no more sinister than that, though that's plenty sinister.

One of the things that keep me coming back to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull despite its flaws is the interrogation scene where Cate Blanchett's Soviet character talks about her ambition to harness psychic power from the crystal skulls for mind control, "A mind weapon. A new frontier of psychic warfare. That was Stalin's dream." Apparently Stalin really was interested in psychic ability. Blanchett's lines about forcing Americans to believe the Soviet version of history reminds me of Putin's long history lecture in his infamous interview with Tucker Carlsen. With AI spreading misinformation, maybe it'll wind up to be a real crystal skull. If it hasn't already.

How They Cover Their Hands Now

I've been noticing a lot of sock puppet videos on YouTube lately, floating to the top of my particular algorithm soup. For those who don't know, in internet lingo a "sock puppet" is, according to Wikipedia, "a false online identity used for deceptive purposes . . . Sock puppets include online identities created to praise, defend, or support a person or organization, to manipulate public opinion, or to circumvent restrictions such as viewing a social media account that a user is blocked from." Mostly I've been seeing Japanese sock puppets aimed at foreigners, particularly pro-Sanseito sock puppets, like this guy called Shohei Kondo who has a lot of videos about video games and dating that casually slip in messages about how actually Sanseito isn't as crazy as its reputation suggests and they just want what's best for everyone, etc.

Yesterday I came across this guy called Evan Edinger whom I can't say for sure is a sock puppet but his videos somehow generate over a million views despite being extremely bland. The video I watched part of (and linked to) begins with him explaining how he, as an American, grew up in an environment where guns were a fundamental part of life and Britain introduced him to this novel idea that maybe the average person doesn't need to own a gun. His voice and cadence sound so fake (not A.I. fake just phony shill kind of fake) that I assumed he was a sock puppet before I saw his regular view counts. Could so many people really be interested in a sock puppet's content? Maybe he's just a really good sock puppet. So far I'm not seeing it but I never understood Dancing with the Stars either. Anyway, speaking as an American myself, I never experienced that feeling of having to own a gun and I don't know if anyone I knew did. Even people I knew who owned guns gave me the impression that it was their own particular predilection rather than an omnipresent need everyone in the social group feels to own a gun. I'm sure there are people like that but the YouTuber's description of it as just an every day fact of every American's life is ridiculous and feels like anti-American propaganda.

This is all, of course, why I've always said fiction is superior to non-fiction. Non-fiction, by its nature, asserts truth as its province and implicitly sets itself against that metric. Fiction is just ideas with no pretense at being otherwise.

Now that it's starting to feel like autumn I've been listening to more Elvis Costello lately. I don't know why exactly but Elvis Costello is associated with autumn for me.

Just Because X Doesn't Mark a Spot Doesn't Mean It's Irrelevant

Scully and Mulder find their investigation frustrated by lies and surveillance devices in a February 1994 episode of The X-Files called "E.B.E" ("extraterrestrial biological entity", which doesn't roll off the tongue like simply "E.T."). I like how this episode lays a groundwork of uncertainty for everything else.

For one thing, Mulder finds out there's a limit to how far he can trust his mysterious "Deep Throat" source, who in this episode lies and even deliberately gives Mulder false evidence of a U.F.O. in an effort to manipulate him. Meanwhile, Scully finds a listening device hidden in her pen. That's gotta be a small device to fit in a pen but not at all far fetched. Can you imagine how small cameras and listening devices can be now? Ask someone from a country like South Korea or Japan where voyeurism is at epidemic levels.

Back in the U.S. in the '90s, though, surveillance was something the government used against pesky FBI agents. Mulder tears apart his apartment looking for hidden bugs, finally finding one in a power outlet. He Scully then split up and carefully meet up at a convenience store in another state before embarking on their plan to follow a freight truck that may be carrying a crashed alien ship. But whoever's manipulating Mulder is using his own desire to find aliens against him, a plot device I really liked.

This is also the episode that introduces the Lone Gunmen, those lovable crackpots.

It occurs to me that there's been a massive shift in how Americans commonly regard conspiracy theories and exploring ideas of government deception. Now it's Trump's White House staging bogus inquiries into classified U.F.O. intelligence and it all seems like a sad pantomime. Or maybe they took a page from the shadowy characters who sought to use Mulder against himself. Scully has a nice line in the episode, "The truth is out there. But so are lies."

The X-Files is available on Disney+ in Japan.

Only Trophies in the Building

On last night's Only Murders in the Building, the team confronted the three billionaires in a wonderful faux-17th century manor house.

I want to live in this place so bad. It's better than Major Clive Wynne-Candy's house. All those creepy hunting trophies! The weird tusk table!

It was basically a funny episode, too. Oliver wanders off in the woods and Loretta (unseen in this episode) calls in a "silver alert". This paired well with all the lavender Oliver wears in this episode.

It was funny when Charles and Mabel had to answer Broadway trivia questions with Oliver absent. Do these kinds of life or death situations ever actually occur?

Only Murders in the Building is available on Disney+.

That Old Slasher Magic

A masked man goes around killing people and only one young woman seems to be taking the disappearances seriously. 2004's Toolbox Murders feels like a throwback to slasher movies from twenty to thirty years earlier so it's appropriate that it's directed by one of the masters of that period, Tobe Hooper. It's certainly refreshing.

I found myself thinking of Ginger Rogers' criticism of Saturday Night Fever, that the young people think "they can dance with their faces." Where she and Fred Astaire showed their dancing prowess with full frame long takes, musicals of the '70s and '80s preferred to conjure energy with editing and composition. Similarly, one of the most memorable parts of Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the first attack from Leatherface, when a shot that began of a woman standing at a door transforms when he rushes out to grab her. A typical modern slasher would feel compelled to cut quickly between Dutch angles. Somehow Hooper was better able to convey a sense of watching a real nutcase spring from the shadows and inflict gruesome injury.

Toobox Murders is a remake of a '70s movie not directed by Hooper though apparently it shares nothing much in common with its predecessor's plot. In this one, Angela Bettis plays Nell, a young, recently married woman who's moved into a haunted Hollywood apartment building with her husband. When odd absences start to occur, no-one believes her when she insists something weird is happening.

So it's a slasher film with elements of supernatural horror, though it may just be insanity believing it's supernatural. It's good and creepy anyway. Juliet Landau is also in the movie all too briefly.

Toolbox Murders is available on The Criterion Channel.

A May Dismember Romance

A young woman with a lazy eye has a horrific experience with first love in 2002's May. There's also a creepy doll and many references to Frankenstein but this film mostly put me in mind of Roman Polanski's Repulsion. Like that film, it's anchored by an exceptional performance from its lead actress, in this case Angela Bettis.

The doll works as a metaphor for the young woman, May's, sexual repression. Other kids won't talk to her, we see in flashbacks to May's childhood, so her mother gives her the doll, Susie, in compensation. However, she's instructed to keep the doll in its glass case and not to remove it under any circumstances. As May starts to crack up over the course of the film, cracks start to appear in the glass case.

She works as a veterinary assistant at an animal hospital where the secretary, Polly (Anna Faris), doesn't disguise her lusting for May. But May's fixated on her neighbour, Adam (Jeremy Sisto), whose hands she considers beautiful.

Like Repulsion, May does a good job blurring the line between what might be May's derangement and what might be her bad luck in meeting so many assholes. Adam's character is a slightly implausible form of jerk who makes gory, independent horror movies but completely backs out of a relationship with May when she bites his lip during foreplay.

Bettis' performance is a little more over the top than Catherine Deneuve's in Repulsion and I'd say Polanski's is undeniably a superior film. But May is certainly a pleasure.

May is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Road to Space

A young woman finds her deceased husband apparently back from the dead but with the personality of an alien in John Carpenter's 1984 film Starman. Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen give earnest, focused performances that compel similar focus from the viewer. It's a lovely romance, too.

This is one of Carpenter's lone, oddball man against the world movies, like They Live and Escape from New York. Bridges' alien visitor is certainly the most mild-mannered of the lot. Bridges plays the character with a mechanical, clicking cadence but his natural warmth can't help but come through, giving the character a nice nuance.

Karen Allen holds on tight to every line and Carpenter gives her copious closeups, making use of those massive, communicative eyes of hers. I like how she never for a moment believes the alien is her husband. Watching the two fumble their way through odd but undeniable chemistry is really charming. It's also a pleasant road movie as their journey from Denver to Arizona gives a nice context. Carpenter compared it to It Happened One Night, another romantic road movie, though Bridges and Allen aren't nearly as fractious as Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert.

Starman is available this month on The Criterion Channel as part of a playlist of John Carpenter movies.

X Sonnet 1963

A half a line was cut from cookie luck.
Remember spuds when singing songs of love.
Potatoes mashed or stewed could woo a buck.
A patron courts a waitress hand and glove.
Entire scrolls of jokes were rolling out.
The comic court was steps from stately elks.
The forest here is choked with faerie clout.
The instrument at hand was Lawrence Welk's.
The scent of garlic bread pervades the air.
Preserving such was past the ken of man.
The tasty bread would sate an angry bear.
But people still from local grizzlies ran.
The loss of leaves has marked the fall of grace.
Abandoned books have robbed the human space.

Robot Woes

I watched 1987's RoboCop over the course of the week. I kept falling asleep during it. Again, that's just a sign of what a sleepy fellow I've become in my 40s, not a reflection on the film's quality. I'd seen it before, of course, but when I was a kid. I found the two parts I remembered best remain my favourite parts of the film; ED-209 coming down the stairs, and one of the thugs falling apart when his body's exposed to some kind of toxic waste.

The animation on ED-209 was worthy of Ray Harryhausen (but it was actually Craig Davies). You can sense it thinking as it stands at the top of the stairs, weighing the wisdom of actually pursuing RoboCop down the stairs. One can't help but interpret it as hubris when it makes the fatal decision to go ahead.

The thug melting in the big action sequence at the end is one of those random details that effectively push an action sequence to another level. I remember on the Godfather Part II commentary or in an interview, Francis Ford Coppola remarking on the scene where Vito kills that crime boss and a light bulb just happens to break. Having some random but plausible surprise in your action sequence really breathes life into it. The melting man in RoboCop adds to a sense of an untethered nightmare symphony. I love it.

The RoboCop movies are currently available on Amazon Prime in Japan.

Dagon and Dagoth

On Wednesday, walking to and from work, I listened to The Shadow Over Innsmouth read by Dagoth Ur. It seemed an appropriate enough way to begin October. Dagoth Ur is the villain with a distinctive voice from the 2002 Elder Scrolls game Morrowind. Someone doing an impression of the voice has been uploading recordings of him saying or reading various things, including a number of HP Lovecraft texts in their entirety. It was funny at first but now I seem to be enjoying it unironically. Dagoth Ur, as a reader, hits a nice medium between performance and straightforward oratory. I like how he gives the colloquial speech of Zadok just a little bit of an accent instead of trying to extrapolate Lovecraft's theoretical, ancient New England dialect.

One of the obvious reasons The Shadow Over Innsmouth hasn't had a film adaptation that captures the novella's power is Lovecraft's ability to conjure mood through suggestion. The best example being the people of Innsmouth and their famous "Innsmouthian look".

He had a narrow head, bulging, watery blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long, thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm.

It would be difficult to show this in film without going too extreme or too subtle. The human mind has a powerful capacity to quickly rationalise the bizarre in real life but is less inclined to do so when watching a film. In prose, the reader can imagine the Innsmouthian look within his or her own conceptions of plausibility, within the realm in which one might reasonably expect a community of human/fish monster hybrids to live relatively undetected in a seaside American town for more than a century. That line is going to be different for everyone so it would be difficult to capture in film in a way that's as satisfying as Lovecraft captured it in prose.

Only Pop Stars in the Building

Meryl Streep returns in this week's new Only Murders in the Building. She and Martin Short continue to have great chemistry though I found her unexpected bonding with Dianne Wiest over an opera stage dagger a little more interesting.

Meanwhile, Mabel's conflict with her former friend and current pop star Althea comes to a head. Althea's fictional popular song sounds suspiciously similar to Sabrina Carpenter to me and I wonder if there's some real life cattiness at play from real life pop star Selena Gomez, who plays Mabel, aimed at Carpenter.

Charles's trouble in this episode revolves around a dating app. Mabel upbraids him for wearing an earring in a scene that really made them seem like a married couple.

Only Murders in the Building is available on Disney+ in Japan and on Hulu elsewhere.

Enjoy Something Fake

This seems to be the only official video on YouTube of the AI actress, Tilly Norwood. There are more short clips on her instagram. But Norwood isn't the only artificial feature of the above video; everyone you see in the video is AI generated. It's written by AI and I assume the voices are AI generated as well. I'm trying to pick out the patterns that indicate AI writing and one thing I can see is that it's very dreamlike. It's like a dream in which everything makes sense while you're in it but if think for a moment you realise things don't add up. For example, when Norwood, in the video, apparently on a red carpet, says, "Three seasons and a podcast." Three seasons of what? What podcast is she talking about? The company behind the video and Norwood have said nothing about a podcast or series.

Naturally, SAG-AFTRA is on its ear about Norwood. I don't foresee AI performers replacing real ones in the near future but I can imagine them becoming a phenomenon unto themselves. Virtual YouTubers are popular throughout Asia and those are real people using artificial images, essentially like puppets. I can easily imagine totally artificial YouTubers cornering a market.

Yet the writing feels disconnected. Like a lot of people, I've been wondering if Disney has been sneaking AI writing into their productions. I was watching Alien: Earth last night, the fourth episode, and there was a decent scene in which Wendy, the protagonist, is in an operating room and we find out she can hear and repeat the language of the aliens. It's basically a reworking of an idea from Alien: Resurrection but it's not so bad. But it's followed by a scene between her and her brother which strongly reminded me of Ahsoka. The performers spend an inordinate amount of time delivering peculiarly flat dialogue. Wendy asks her brother where he was while she was in the hospital and he assures her that he would have come if he'd known where she was. Is there a reason she'd suspect he wouldn't? Is there a reason we linger on him assuring her? It seems like no. Nothing here is to introduce character nuance or depth but to fill time in a sort of theoretical way, like something or someone is focused more on convincingly creating an actual television scene than on creating or expressing something interesting. I'm not sure if this is Disney employing AI or if the screenwriters actually wrote a few interesting scenes and then just had some software fill in the gaps. Or maybe it's just good old fashioned bad writing.

Let's imagine Tilly Norwood becomes a sensation. I think conversation will quickly become about ethical considerations. It would be possible to depict Norwood doing or saying things no human actress would do. The video above even already has a joke about ignoring consent. I certainly don't think Particle6 is going to be able to stop the creation of unauthorised Tilly Norwood porn. I wonder if the conversation will shift to focus on what people compulsively watch. To what new depths of depravity will AI take us?

The Implied Tormentor

The subjective and arbitrary nature of censorship becomes apparent when one looks at media from the past or other cultures that faced it. 1977's The Devil Probably (Le Diable probablement) was banned in France for viewers under eighteen years of age. This Robert Bresson film of beautiful cinematography and non-professional actors solemnly discussing environmental disaster, religious schism, and the nature of love in their moody love triangle was somehow seen as more threatening to youth than the many celebrated tragic and/or erotic melodramas of the country. People were evidently concerned the film would inspire young people to commit suicide.

It begins with a newspaper headline informing us the young protagonist, Charles (Antoine Monnier), committed suicide. This is followed by another newspaper that claims he was murdered. From there, the film cuts to a few months earlier and we find Charles among a group of attractive, disaffected youth with a penchant for wearing suede jackets while solemnly watching footage of baby seals being clubbed. I don't think the irony in the choice of wardrobe was intentional but it's worth noting the horrific reality in the environmental disasters Bresson depicts in the film.

With these screenings as a recurrent tangent throughout the film, the characters also gloomily discuss the dynamics of their non-traditional romantic relationships as well as the moral fibre of Catholicism versus Protestantism. Something seems to be going wrong everywhere, something fundamental, the characters muse on the bus. A man in a nearby seat overhears them and, when asked who or what is responsible for all this, he gives the film its title, "The Devil, probably." In this we get a figure of ultimate menace along with the perhaps more menacing observation that the truth is not and cannot be known.

Wikipedia has this quote from Bresson:

What impelled me to make this film is the mess we have made of everything. This mass civilisation in which the individual will soon no longer exist. This demented tampering with things. This immense demolition job in which we shall kill ourselves by trying to go on living. This incredible indifference shown by people, except for some of today’s youth who see things more clearly.

It's worth noting this statement seems as fitting to-day as it may have seemed in 1977 or would likely have seemed in 1877 or many other times in history.

Bresson's preference to cast non-professional actors, following in the Neorealist tradition, sometimes yields performances of uniquely raw emotion. Here, it gives us something cold and remote. The characters are more like subjects of paintings than of a film, rendered as they are often silent and still in the gorgeous lighting, particularly in the restored edition on the Criterion Channel (which, sorry, is leaving the service at the end of the month). The horror of this civilisation's decline is emphasised by the ephemeral beauty of humanity.

The Familiar Alien

I finally started watching Alien: Earth, the new series set in the universe of the Alien franchise. I'm kind of surprised by how bland the first couple episodes are, given the kind of talk I've heard about the show. I assume the show must improve later, at least I hope so.

Some have been calling it Andor for the Alien franchise. It does feature an actor from Andor, Alex Lawther, who played the tech guy who wrote a manifesto in the heist arc in Andor season one. I saw yesterday that Andor star Denise Gough got a role on the otherwise unpromising new Narnia movie from Greta Gerwig. So Andor seems to be having the Game of Thrones effect in which actors from the series steadily appear in other projects for years afterwards. We still live in a post-GoT world as far as casting goes. I just finished watching Sandman which had at least two GoT actors.

The primary protagonist of Alien: Earth seems to be Wendy (Sydney Chandler), who's a young woman implanted with the brain of a child who'd been dying. So we get some dialogue about how she thinks it's weird to have breasts now. How can we go back to TNG Lal when we've had Pretty Things' Emma Stone? Anyway, Wendy is among a group of "hybrids", the brains of kids with terminal illnesses transferred into adult bodies with super strength and reflexes. The child in adult body idea has been explored in many other science fiction and fantasy media, this example has yet to distinguish itself.

The other side of the show is a very faithful recreation of the Nostromo interiors, though the ship is not the Nostromo, just another of the same model. We get another crew eating a meal around a table after cryosleep. I know they were going for the nostalgia but mostly what it does is invite an unflattering (I know that word has fallen "spectacularly" out of favour but I'll use it anyway) comparison. It's like a thought experiment--what if Ridley Scott had been fired at some point in Alien's pre-production and a hack studio director had been brought in? It's Alien for ADHD. The pacing is faster, the dialogue doesn't overlap as much, there's no effort to make the crew especially realistic. The "space trucker" vibe is replaced by the usual "office worker" vibe. But maybe that's just a difference between something made in the 1970s versus something made in the 2020s.

So far, I'd say it's not so much the Andor of the Alien franchise but the Ahsoka. Okay, that's too harsh. Maybe the Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Alien: Earth is available on Disney+ in Japan.

Mouse Hand

I was just looking at the Japanese Wikipedia page for Mickey Mouse. I'm fascinated by the profile section which differs significantly from the English version. The makers of the Japanese version evidently felt compelled to describe Mickey's body parts and justify the discrepancy between Mickey's hands and the paws of mice.

A picture of a rat is used to illustrate--the Japanese don't generally distinguish between rats and mice. Both are called "nezumi" despite the fact that they are different species. Of course, English also makes distinctions that don't really exist between animals such as ravens and crows and doves and pigeons.

The Wikipedia entry goes on to explain that since the forepaws of mice are "grotesque" (the English loan word is used) Mickey's hands appear human.

I wonder if anyone had a nightmare about Mickey with true mouse hands.

X Sonnet 1962

Reviving brains renewed the mission goal.
Now many pumpkins pile over land.
A team of bats harass a tricking foal.
Some children rove and raise a rude demand.
You see the bodies playing cut and slice.
Betwixt the webs of mist are spider ghosts.
Your coffee drinks a season's famous spice.
Above the blaze, a captive slowly roasts.
A hill of beans could fill a giant cup.
A percolating thought contains a fish.
The time arrives for ghouls to roughly sup.
A tomb becomes a big communal dish.
The famous feast begins and ends with death.
A glowing face commenced to draw a breath.

Final Garments

This season of Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt concluded with two episodes this week. The first contained two stories, the second of them being the first part in a four part narrative that concluded in the subsequent episode. They dispensed with most of their movie references in the first story, which is primarily a Nightmare Before Christmas parody with throwaway references to Gremlins, Edward Scissorhands, and a mashup of Cast Away and Terminal. I know from experience, by the way, junior high school students in Japan generally don't know who Tom Hanks is. Nevertheless, I'm not sure I'd say Panty and Stocking is made exclusively with American audiences in mind. Nightmare Before Christmas and Gremlins, oddly enough, both have cultural currency in Japan.

In this parody, one of the demon sisters replaces Santa for the holiday as the jolly old elf claims to have worn out his hips having marathon sex with Panty. I wish the show had shown what the demon sister then gives to all the world's children but I suppose at that point it would be less of a parody and more of a remake of Nightmare Before Christmas.

The long four parter following this is framed as a Star Wars parody with its titles but there's nothing especially Star Wars about the stories. Panty and Stocking are unexpectedly recalled to heaven by God. Previously, God had been implied to be the live action legs of a woman in lingerie protruding from the clouds. This figure is revealed to be God's wife, Queen Silk, who wears a creepy metal mask, and God Himself is more properly known as Luniere, King of Gods. Oh, I loved it. Especially the design of God as a little old bald man with an enormous beard.

These episodes kind of reminded me of the end of Kill la Kill, another project masterminded by Imaishi Hiroyuki, and his most successful. I think Kill la Kill really evolved from Panty and Stocking in that both are stories are about girls who wear clothes that have or confer on them special powers. The conclusion of Kill la Kill is the most unsatisfying part of that series and Panty and Stocking's is similarly so. It's mainly characters screaming and things blowing up. It all feels a bit obligatory. But some of the action is good.

Panty and Stocking is available on Amazon Prime.

Five Years of the Murder Building

I finally got caught up on the new season of Only Murders in the Building. Every season seems to be a little better than the last. This one is focusing much more on comedy and less on pathos. The murder, this time, is of the doorman, Lester, who turns out to have been tied to an underground, mob-run, casino frequented by the three richest people in the world, played by Christoph Waltz, Renee Zellweger, and Logan Lerman. Each is pretty funny but I was surprised to find Zellweger's character the most effective, a thoroughly cold-hearted media guru named Camilla White.

It feels like Steve Martin has more to do this season. His character is having--I guess it wouldn't be a "mid-life crisis" since he's 80--I guess a late life crisis. This leads to him taking testosterone supplements. He has an amusing date with a mob widow played by Tea Leoni. I still feel like, deep down, the writers really want to pair him with Mabel, Selena Gomez's character. She's lost a lot of weight this season which kind of makes her seem older but I think the nearly fifty year age gap between the two of them is insurmountable. It's easy to forget when the three leads are written at the same maturity level.

Martin Short is good for a lot of gags this season. At least so far, there's no serious side to anyone's arc this time.

Only Murders in the Building is available on Hulu in the U.S. and on Disney+ elsewhere.

Claudia Cardinale

One of the most beautiful actresses in the history of cinema, Claudia Cardinale, is dead at 87. She began appearing in small roles in Italian films in the late '50s before rising to stardom in the '60s with the roles she's best remembered for to-day. She appeared in 8 1/2, The Leopard, and The Pink Panther all in 1963. Audiences were treated to her remarkable beauty and steely performances. There was always something tenacious about her.

These qualities served her well in the role she's most celebrated for these days, the lead in 1968's Once Upon a Time in the West. Sergio Leone's most operatic Spaghetti Western, it stars Cardinale as a prostitute from New Orleans who heads to the dusty western plains hoping for a new life with a new husband only to find her brittle dream shattered by the cruel hand of a villain. It's from the point of view of this profoundly stranded woman that we witness the battle between Leone's distilled extremes of good and bad men, Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda.

She continued to get work throughout the 70s and 80s and appeared in Werner Herzog's legendary Fitzcarraldo in 1982. She was always an indelible asset to any film.

His Hellboy and Yours

I was saying the other day that "self-inserts", as they've come to be called, used to be cool in fiction. It was a variation of "write what you know"; write the protagonist as someone with formative experiences and/or opinions similar to your own. I revisited an example of how that philosophy once held sway over the weekend, 2004's Hellboy.

The first film adaptation of Mike Mignola's great Dark Horse comic, it was directed by Guillermo del Toro. Mignola and Del Toro held discussions about the creative direction of the film adaptation and Mignola felt that, as director, Del Toro ought to be free to express his own creative vision. The biggest change to the story Del Toro made was to introduce a romantic relationship between Hellboy (Ron Perlman) and Liz (Selma Blair). It was a kind of Beauty and the Beast story that he would explore again in his Oscar winning film The Shape of Water. It's not hard to see how this might be a personal story for Del Toro. At the time he made Hellboy, he was married to Lorenza Newton, an attractive young woman beside Del Toro, who grew up a nerd without good looks.

So the film has a lot of angst that's not present in the comic. Hellboy is self-conscious about his looks in comparison to the human, attractive Liz. The satisfying emotional arc of the story is in how both characters come to terms with their respective monstrous qualities and see how they're united by them. Some would say Shape of Water is the more mature film because being monstrous doesn't come with really useful superpowers. Hellboy may be a monster, but he's also really cool and admired as a mysterious and strange hero. But, hey, Del Toro's pretty cool and admired among filmmakers, so maybe that's as valid an aspect of the character.

The modern dislike of "self-insert" characters seems, like the scorn for people believing themselves to be "the main character of their own story," to come from a weakening grasp of what fiction can be. It's almost as though modern armchair critics are jealous of anything gratifying that writers take from their own work.

Which is not to say I think it invariably works. I certainly don't commend Vincent Gallo's unabashedly narcissistic films. But as with many other aspects of fiction, I would say writing about oneself, or using oneself as fodder for character building, will vary in quality depending on the honesty and courage of the individual writer.

Hellboy is available on Netflix.

Skyrim's Multiplying Multitudes

Here's my latest Skyrim character with a couple of followers. I'd been playing as an evil, magic using vampire again and decided to go the opposite route with this one. She's basically a Lawful Good paladin, a crusader against undead and demons. She belongs to a group called the Vigil of Stendarr, Stendarr being an Elder Scrolls god who hates undead and daedra (daedra being the Elder Scrolls version of demons). I wanted to play a character like this because I wanted to try one of the more famous quest mods called Vigilant.

That's a trailer for a mod of the mod. The original mod was from a Japanese creator so another modder got some voice actors together to make an English version. I kind of wanted to play it in Japanese but to switch languages would basically require a complete reinstall of the game and many of the other mods I use wouldn't work afterwards.

Vigilant's famous for being exceptionally grim but it doesn't begin that way. Your first quests when you join the Vigilants are to kill daedra that have been harassing people at various inns. One you encounter is even passed out drunk on the floor.

I also have a follower from another mod called Celestine who is also a Vigilant of Stendarr. The mod author gave her dialogue to make her compatible with the Vigilant mod. This is one of the things that keeps me endlessly fascinated with Skyrim, this new kind of collaborative storytelling that blurs the lines of the authorial voice. There's the line between the different mod authors and the vanilla game and there's also the creativity exercised in choosing which mods to employ. Look at this screenshot from my current playthrough:

In this one screenshot, you're seeing the effects of at least seventeen different mods. My character has a modded head and skin, the armour comes from another mod, the sword from another mod. All the people and the wolf on the lower left are modded followers and all of them, except the wolf, have appearance alterations and/or armour from separate mods. There's a mod to create more natural lighting, to upgrade all the textures, and another mod that adds trees to make the forests denser. I think the only unmodded element in this picture is the horse and possibly the bone shield. And that's just what's in the screenshot. Another player with a modded Skyrim wouldn't have this particular collection of mods so everyone has a unique experience reflective of choices they've made outside the game. There are even different mods with the same intent, like the lighting and texture mods.

Another mod I've been getting a kick out of lately is Jesters of Skyrim which adds jesters to all the courts in the game. I actually find them genuinely funny but the best part is all the awkward laughter.

Death: The Gentrification

I watched the true final episode of The Sandman last night, which I figured ought to be discussed separately since it really is more of a short spin-off film. It's based on a spin-off comic, Death: The High Cost of Living, which focused on the personification of Death, who in the Sandman comic universe is a perky teenage goth girl. In the Netflix series, she's a nondescript, thirty something black woman who grins a lot. There's a lot of grinning in this episode. Even the suicidal protagonist, a man named Sexton Furnival, defaults to a smile.

In the whole series, this last episode, and the first episode of the first season, are the only two with teleplays actually written by Neil Gaiman (in this case, with showrunner Allan Heinberg). Maybe that explains why this episode makes so many deviations from the source, some deviations that feel kind of arbitrary. It's been more than twenty years since I read the Death spin-off comics but one of the few things that stuck with me was that Sexton liked honey in his coffee. In the Netflix episode, he prefers three sugars. Did they figure someone putting honey in coffee was too far-fetched?

Sexton is also aged up. Instead of a lonely teenager in New York, he's a Northern Irishman living in London, contemplating suicide after a breakup with his girlfriend, Sylvie. Gaiman and Heinberg also make him a journalist for The Guardian. It all feels like it was meant to vigorously assure the leftist viewer that he is not an Incel. Sometimes I think the real story behind Gaiman's cancellation was that certain people on the left had dirt on him for a long time that they held over his head so that he'd make increasingly pandering screenplays only for the right wing publication Tortoise Media to spoil everything. I suppose it's more likely Gaiman wanted to make Sexton more reflective of who he is now, as an author insert, which used to be considered a sign of good, honest writing. Sexton's dislike of his own oddly sexual name always seemed to me a reference to Gaiman's own name (which is pronounced "Gay Men").

A lot of Sexton's dialogue still seems slightly adolescent, coming oddly from 39 year old actor Colin Morgan, like when he innocently asks Death how long it will take for his lesbian roommate to have sex with her girlfriend (although he lived with his mother in the comic) or when he decides to use marbles to trip the man who holds Death and himself hostage.

It's not bad. I guess the comic seemed better because Sexton felt more genuinely suicidal. This Sexton is a little harder to get a grasp on. Kirby Howell-Baptiste continues to feel nothing at all like her comic counterpart but she's pleasant enough. I suppose she can't be goth now because there are no goths now. Are there? Can there be? Why does it feel like there can't be? Maybe because all the goths grew up, shed their black lipstick, and too few among the next generation took up the mantle. Oh, well. We'll always have the memories, even if we don't have the comic adaptations.

The Long History of Callowness versus Free Speech

The killing of Charlie Kirk had already put me in the mind of John Milton's famous defense of free speech, Areopagitica, but the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel for making a joke that inaccurately inferred the killer's political affiliation, and speculated on the Right's political exploitation of the assassination, touched on many points Milton addressed directly in his 1644 pamphlet. Areopagitica has been a very influential work on American lawmaking, including the pertinent Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan which interpreted the right to free speech to cover speaking falsehoods if the party claiming libel or slander can't show that the author knowingly and maliciously repeated the falsehood. Personally, I think Kimmel was just recklessly repeating what he'd heard.

Jimmy Kimmel is a comedian and Milton specifically mentions comedians in talking about how ancient Athens judged whether a text was libellous:

Therefore we do not read that either Epicurus, or that libertine school of Cyrene, or what the Cynic impudence uttered, was ever questioned by the laws. Neither is it recorded that the writings of those old comedians were suppressed, though the acting of them were forbid; and that Plato commended the reading of Aristophanes, the loosest of them all, to his royal scholar Dionysius, is commonly known, and may be excused, if holy Chrysostom, as is reported, nightly studied so much the same author and had the art to cleanse a scurrilous vehemence into the style of a rousing sermon.

Milton published Areopagitica in response to Parliament forcing books and pamphlets to submit to review and attain a license before publication. He draws comparisons to other countries where speech is more strictly regulated and does so to speak to the motives of rulers who compulsively censor those who openly criticise the authorities instead of constantly praising them:

For he who freely magnifies what hath been nobly done, and fears not to declare as freely what might be done better, gives ye the best covenant of his fidelity; and that his loyalest affection and his hope waits on your proceedings. His highest praising is not flattery, and his plainest advice is a kind of praising. For though I should affirm and hold by argument, that it would fare better with truth, with learning and the Commonwealth, if one of your published Orders, which I should name, were called in; yet at the same time it could not but much redound to the lustre of your mild and equal government, whenas private persons are hereby animated to think ye better pleased with public advice, than other statists have been delighted heretofore with public flattery. And men will then see what difference there is between the magnanimity of a triennial Parliament, and that jealous haughtiness of prelates and cabin counsellors that usurped of late, whenas they shall observe ye in the midst of your victories and successes more gently brooking written exceptions against a voted Order than other courts, which had produced nothing worth memory but the weak ostentation of wealth, would have endured the least signified dislike at any sudden proclamation.

He later talks about visiting Galileo when that great innovator was under house arrest. He mentions how in Italy he found it commonly believed that England was a comparative haven for free thought:

There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought. And though I knew that England then was groaning loudest under the prelatical yoke, nevertheless I took it as a pledge of future happiness, that other nations were so persuaded of her liberty. Yet was it beyond my hope that those worthies were then breathing in her air, who should be her leaders to such a deliverance, as shall never be forgotten by any revolution of time that this world hath to finish.

Something I don't think is generally appreciated about Areopagitica, though, is how much time Milton devotes to encouraging people to seek out challenging material to read. He references a vision Pope Dionysius of Alexandra claims to have had of God who told him, against the advice of those around him, to "read any books whatever come to thy hands, for thou art sufficient both to judge aright and to examine each matter." Milton argues that God intended for humans to exercise their own critical faculties, to determine for themselves whether a book is good or bad. He further argues that much may be learned from "bad" books; "that they to a discreet and judicious reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate."

The more famous quote (which I'm especially fond of) comes shortly thereafter:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

And this, I think, is the real tragedy in the death of the humanities in college. For a long time, students haven't been exposed to examples of challenging writing. The framework of critical theory was too often narrowly applied, I believe, and more and more reading has been used only to confirm belief than to challenge it. I think about the lack of cultivation to appreciate and recognise exceptional art and literature. You can see evidence in the common criticism that some people believe they are "the main characters in their own stories," a phrase I find grimly amusing. The people who utter it, I have to infer, generally think of main characters as super people, deserving of constant praise and attention. The scope of their exposure to art is shown in how narrowly they define "main character." Perhaps Charlie Kirk's assassin, believing he was the main character of his own story, believed also that main characters are invariably anointed for the purpose of beating a final boss.

Milton also addresses whether or not censorship is an aid to alleviating partisan thinking, an argument he swiftly dispenses with in a short paragraph.

If to prevent sects and schisms, who is so unread or so uncatechized in story, that hath not heard of many sects refusing books as a hindrance, and preserving their doctrine unmixed for many ages, only by unwritten traditions? The Christian faith, for that was once a schism, is not unknown to have spread all over Asia, ere any Gospel or Epistle was seen in writing. If the amendment of manners be aimed at, look into Italy and Spain, whether those places be one scruple the better, the honester, the wiser, the chaster, since all the inquisitional rigour that hath been executed upon books.

X Sonnet 1961 (by me)

Obsessive wakeful fellows flood the school.
No idle dreams could clog the drains of war.
The moral spray would melt the spider's rule.
Behind the web's a single fateful door.
The rebel girl would weave from webs a dress.
The parakeets denounce perverted use.
The soldiers breathe and watch and cheat at chess.
No day could pass without a cheap abuse.
As spirits once again revive the corn,
They build the maize to trap the killer's glare.
Abusers build a speech of constant scorn.
But quiet ghosts abide beneath the stair.
Some graves are marked and many others not.
Remember this and feed the witch's pot.

Referencing Movies in Underwear

This week's new Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt featured three stories, the first based on Being John Malkovich, the second on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and the third on the new Flash movie. It's hard to imagine a more disparate set of sources. Well, except they're all genre sources, of course.

The third one turned out to be the best. The title art shows it to be a parody of the Flash movie from last year, which was an international bomb, so I wonder how long ago this episode was animated. However, the plot of the segment is a mash-up of Terminator, Edge of Tomorrow, and Back to the Future. The connexion obviously is time travel. Stocking finds her beloved plushy cat, Honekoneko ("Bone Kitten"), has had the stuffing torn out of it. A time traveller called "Tom Croose Jr." appears to prevent her from repairing Honekoneko, something which would result in creating an army of Terminator Honekonekos. But a new side character, Gunsmith Bitch, takes her back in time where Stocking discovers it was a young Garterbelt who first created Honekoneko as a friend for one of the two little girls he's taking care of. In the middle of all the constant irony, it's refreshing to have one moment of sweetness. It doesn't last, of course, because a Terminator Honekoneko appears.

The other two stories were kind of forgettable. The Being John Malkovich segment couldn't hope to rival the weirdness of its source material. The Temple of Doom parody had a decent action sequence for the mine cart chase. Brief dresses as Indiana Jones, Panty dresses as Lara Croft, and Stocking dresses as presumably another famous adventuring character I didn't recognise.

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is available on Amazon Prime.

The Long Dream

I finally managed to finish watching Sandman season 2 last night (not including the Death special). Sadly, it got to be a slog after the Season of Mists portion. The decision not to adapt A Game of You and most of the short story anthologies doesn't seem to have corresponded with a shorter episode order. So there's padding. Piles of plodding, ponderous, padding. It's filled with Netflix's notorious excessive exposition designed for people who are looking at their phones with the show playing in the background.

Still, I'd say the primary flaw is that Dream is too humanised. It flattens the story out into a more conventional drama. That was the great thing about A Game of You and the shorts in which Dream barely appeared. It augmented the sense of him as a force of nature who could appear at any time, whose ways and motives were a little mysterious. A few other changes I suspect were due to corporate feminism, like the idea to make Despair just a normal lady instead of a naked wreck clawing at her face constantly with a little fish hook. Or the decision to make Nuala's glamour just a different hair style, a little more makeup, and received pronunciation. I often complain about people seeming to be against beauty, but there seems to be an equally fervent effort to deny the existence of ugliness. But I guess if you have to eliminate one, you have to eliminate the other. Like one of the good lines in the last episode suggests, one opposite defines the other.

The last episode was pretty good, once I settled into its mournful pace. I think this is the first time I truly appreciated Jacob Anderson who places Daniel, the second Dream. His performance somehow conveyed the strange experience of somehow being simultaneously filled with knowledge and being slightly bewildered. The return of Boyd Halbrook as a new version of the Corinthian was also nice but the show's attempt to build chemistry between him and Joanna Constantine was a little lopsided. As much as I like Jenna Coleman, something about her performance wasn't giving enough in their interactions. Even when they were plainly in the same room, it felt a little like she recorded everything remotely.

I wonder if the season would've been better if Neil Gaiman hadn't been cancelled. The story being about the death of the title character, whom many people take as an avatar of the author, couldn't help but resonate slightly with the real life story of Gaiman's disappearance from public discourse following allegations and lawsuits. I felt a bit like I was watching the final death throes of '90s indie comics fantasy and community making way for a new kind of communal dream. Watching a reel of tiktokers gloating over the death of Charlie Kirk this morning, I can't say I'm feeling optimistic for the new one.

The Sandman is available on Netflix.

Robert Redford

Robert Redford passed away a couple days ago. He was 89. The first Robert Redford movie I saw was 1972's Jeremiah Johnson, the story of a young man who decides to take up residence alone up a mountain. I saw that in high school and my envy for the character's lifestyle has only increased. It was one of Redford's first successes though he's better known for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men. The former inspired the name of the famous Sundance Film Festival he started in Utah, one which has been among the most instrumental organisations for promoting independent film in the world. That alone would make him worth honouring in my book.

He was certainly the model of a movie star with perfect symmetrical looks. And he was a good actor. I admired his decision to forgo any kind of cosmetic surgery as he aged. Even with a face lined with wrinkles, he appeared in what I continue to consider the best MCU movie to date, Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

The Bad Magic Builds

One of the most underrated films of all time has been getting its due, gradually over the past fifteen years or so. This year, Criterion is releasing its own blu-ray of 1977's Sorcerer. I'd say it's a tough call whether this or Michael Mann's Thief is the manliest procedural film of all time. I first reviewed Sorcerer back in 2015. I liked it then but I love it now.

There are different ways a movie can benefit from multiple viewings. With Vertigo, the second viewing shifts your perspective because you know more about a character's motives. Sorcerer is different because it's a film that takes a while to really tell you what it's about. The original trailer (seen above) doesn't really tell you, either, so a lot of people would've gone in more or less blind. That creates a kind of tension that's absent on subsequent viewings and I found I was better able to appreciate the backstories director William Friedkin gave to his disparate and desperate four men. Four bad men--an American gangster, an Italian hitman, an Arab terrorist, and a crooked French banker--wind up together in the jungle with the job of transporting volatile explosives. Without any moral centre, you go in knowing all the characters are working without a net. There's no reason for any god or angel to look out for these bastards.

I love the misdirection of the title. There may be no literal magic in the story but Friedkin conjures it with editing and Tangerine Dream's eerie score. The sense of these guys caught in a horrible spell is perfectly counterbalanced by the uncompromising realism of the shooting locations and set pieces. And man, that fucking bridge sequence has to be among the most masterful pieces of cinema ever committed to film. The tension is just unparalleled as you watch these massive trucks going over that impossibly rickety old bridge in pouring rain and wind. Every snap of a wooden plank, every extreme sway of the bridge that threatens to dump one of these decrepit monsters into the drink, is absolutely captivating.

Sorcerer is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Politics Outside Your Body

I was reading Gulliver's Travels again over the weekend. My life has changed a lot since the first time I read the book, enabling me to appreciate it better as a political satire. A lot of people may wonder at all the time Swift spends on details of his protagonist passing waste in the land of Lilliput, inspiring the crude humour of the Jack Black adaptation. This can be better appreciated by those who have spent a significant amount of time in a foreign culture in which one is suddenly confronted by different attitudes towards hygiene and the appropriate times and places for certain bodily functions. One may suddenly find one's own body grotesquely large in the imagination as things which one's native society has compartmentalised into cognitive non-existence are suddenly things that must be confronted on a regular basis. Likewise, the things which distinguish human from animal may differ from country to country and explorers from the 16th through the 18th century found themselves among civilisations that seemed to them closer to animals or in civilisations that regarded the explorers as closer to animals.

The political parties of Lilliput are a more obvious point of satire. The idea that a faction of Lilliputians are exiled to a neighbouring country because they believed in breaking eggs at the fatter end, the so called "Big-Endians", recall religious exiles like the Huguenots or the exiled Royalists after the English Civil Wars. From a distance, one wonders how such bitter differences can arise from such arbitrary details. But I've come to thinking that they're not so different from LGBTQ, specifically trans, issues in America now, particularly after two high profile killings, the transwoman who killed the Catholic school children and the man, Tyler Robinson, who shot Charlie Kirk. Robinson has been revealed to have been in a relationship with a transwoman.

A lot of people are talking about a new civil war in the U.S. but I was thinking it would be an odd sort of civil war. Thinking about the beginnings of the English or first American civil wars, I remember primarily reading about disputes regarding the rights of rulers and governed and then formations of militias, funding, pamphlets, etc. To-day's talk of civil war comes from lone gunmen acting without particular encouragement for the deed itself which is hotly debated in aftermath. There's so far no talk of taking territory by force on the left.

It does seem to me, though, very like a religious war. Religious groups do have lone fanatics who sometimes act unilaterally. I should preface by saying I fully support and believe in the rights of trans people to have their self-perceived identities respected. Though I think the fundamental philosophical difference here is between people who believe in the primacy of self-perception and people who believe in the primacy of society's perception of the individual. This could all boil down to whether you consider Satan the true protagonist of Paradise Lost, I suppose. Years ago, when I was first encountering the ideas around trans issues, I wondered why it mattered so much whether you believed trans people were born in the wrong body or trans people were people who decided to change gender at some point in their lives for one reason or another. I also didn't understand why both sorts of people couldn't exist simultaneously. I gradually read between the lines and realised it was because if it was an issue of fundamental, even genetic, identity, it was easier to argue against the kinds of social and institutional bullying trans-people are often subjected to. But this is essentially a matter of faith, which is a statement many trans-people may take issue with as much as a Protestant or Catholic might have in the 16th century. To them, it was a matter of truth versus delusion.

At issue in both cases is a system of morality. JK Rowling's horror at transwomen in public restrooms comes from a fundamental belief that if society can't dictate to individuals a certain set of boundaries of behaviour, then we are on a dangerous road. It's less about sex specifically than it is about the belief that social order follows from a certain flow of conditioned reality perception. And that's exactly like a religious war. Protestants could point to plenary indulgences as granting license for corrupt behaviour while Catholics might say denying such grace is a too severe and fundamentally non-Christian point of view. Catholics would point to the desecration of churches by Protestants as sacrilege that threatens the fabric of society while Protestants would argue that worshiping icons directly contradicts the prescribed set of rules delineated for society by the bible. It's a fundamentally different view of reality and the two sides each found the other as odious as trans rights individuals and conservatives in the U.S. find one another to-day.

I guess we can take some comfort in the fact that Catholics and Protestants haven't been killing each other very much lately.

Digging About the Roots

MGM has a bunch of episodes of The Addams Family series from the 60s up on YouTube. The other day, I watched an episode called "The Addams Family Tree" which has racked up over two million views since it was uploaded in 2019.

In this one, Pugsley and Wednesday go to a neighbour kid's birthday party but, as usual, the Addams Family clash with the normies and barely seem to notice. It's so nice to see John Astin as Gomez. He and Raul Julia had that mad intensity the character requires and Luis Guzman utterly lacks. It's so sad everyone has to pretend Guzman was great casting.

The family is unambiguously wealthy in the old series and a number of gags depend upon their wealth. One moment I found interesting is at 2:30 in the video, when Gomez and Morticia are sending the kids off to the birthday party.

GOMEZ: "Remember children, not every family is as fortunate as we are. Not everyone has a beautiful old house like ours. A car with all the right sounds and smells."

MORTICIA: "You must be modest about our advantages."

The joke is that no normal person would envy the Addams Family home or lifestyle but the dialogue is based on a then standard morality. I read the 1911 edition of The Boy Scouts Handbook recently which cautioned Scouts against resenting the wealthy. I'm reminded, too, of the scene from Kurosawa's Stray Dog of the girl complaining about how expensive dresses are flaunted in front of people like her, with little or no money. At one time, managing resentment for the advantages of others was part of the work ethic and civility in general. I guess it was easier to maintain these principles when a tall drip coffee at Starbucks only cost a dollar.

At the Close of the Day

Finishing the disappointing second season of Wednesday last night, I got to thinking what a rare and ephemeral thing genuine creative achievement can be. I suspect Wednesday collapsed under too much polish and too many cooks in the kitchen.

I maintain that the fourth episode is good. Uncle Fester is unquestionably the high point of the season and it's a shame he didn't hang around for the succeeding episodes. After the lame body swap episode, I expected things to pick up in the final two episodes directed by Tim Burton. However, it was no longer '90s Burton but dull, corporate treadmill Disney Burton. The new dance sequence perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with this season.

There's nothing bad about the dance. Two pretty girls dance in a creatively choreographed sequence tied into the plot with a competent new song from Lady Gaga. It's a well made dance scene. Much like the writing this season, which lacks the glaring logistical flaws of season one. Some things may not make sense, like the way the characters behave in the body swap episode, or the fact that Agnes runs to Enid for help in the final episode despite Enid needing to stay in a cage due to a critical problem with her werewolf transformation. One subliminally understands that the characters have to interact because they're the main characters, that it's a limitation of the writers' imaginations or possibly the show's budget rather than the fever dream ridiculousness of the character actions and disjointed timelines of season one.

Perhaps it was the atmosphere of accident and haste that produced the good qualities of season one as well as the bad. The great thing about season one, as Grace Randolph put it, was seeing Wednesday "out of her comfort zone" dealing with romance. In a word, the character exhibited vulnerability. In season two, Jenna Ortega put her foot down and insisted that Wednesday would never, ever engage in a romantic plot. This is despite Wednesday's romantic subplot in Addams Family Values, the piece of Addams Family media arguably most influential on Wednesday.

The tension in Wednesday season one was between Wednesday's tightly controlled demeanour and the ever lingering possibility of her losing control. There's no sense of a loss of control anywhere in season two. The awkwardly inserted reaction shots of Jenna Ortega in the dance scene have much the tone of her appearance in the whole season. It's somehow as though Wednesday the character isn't truly there, as though she were added in post-production. The dance sequence in season one was captivatingly messy. There was the unexpected use of "The Goo Goo Muck", a much more arrestingly strange song than the bland new piece from Lady Gaga. There was the surprise in the very fact that Wednesday was capable of or willing to dance at all and the further unexpected fact of her odd and awkward grace.

Season 2 has fewer mistakes and it took fewer risks. The thing is, if an artist doesn't take risks or allow herself to be vulnerable, it's rare she'll ever produce anything interesting. Partly this is because, and certainly in a teen drama, the viewer is watching the characters to see how they deal with their own vulnerabilities. We all have vulnerabilities in life and art is useful when it reflects that.

Wednesday is available on Netflix.

Our Heroines in New Contexts

This week's new Panty and Stocking was kind of brilliantly weird. It featured only two stories, presented by Garterbelt, wearing a suit and somberly addressing the viewer like Rod Serling.

The first story is ostensibly a parody of John Carpenter's The Thing, with a nod to The Thing from Another World in its title, "The Sex from Another World", but the title image is a clear reference to the Carpenter version.

The story itself, however, bears much more resemblance to Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce or even 2013's Under the Skin (with several visual nods to Aliens). In this story, Panty is a succubus alien who drains the men she has sex with of their lifeforce, leaving them withered husks. Once again, the makers of the show make a point of portraying nudity, even pubic hair, again reminiscent of Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce. It wasn't necessarily funny but kind of fascinating, like a real weird tale in its own right.

The second story, though, was just a pure, bizarre delight. The title is "Lord of the Kokan the Great" which seems to be a mashup of Lord of the Rings and Conan the Barbarian (which is known as Konan the Great in Japan). But it seems less like a parody of either one but more like the artist's dim memory of watching an incomprehensible foreign sword and sorcery film late at night some time in the 80s.

The whole thing is shown with scan lines and slightly blurry low resolution, emulating a crappy VHS. All the characters speak in an unintelligible gibberish while subtitles helpfully supply us with only another bizarre, incomprehensible string of symbols. In this one, Panty is a child in a mediaeval fantasy world who, after witnessing the death of someone important to her, grows up to be a massive, hulking hermaphrodite bent on revenge and perhaps world domination. I guess their purple and pink dinosaur steed is meant to be Stocking.

It really captures that feeling of stumbling across some late night import on an obscure cable channel and marvelling at what you see even as you strain to decipher just what the hell could be going on.

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is available on Amazon Prime.

Times of Death and Destruction

I was just listening to a bit of Bill Maher's interview with Charlie Kirk from four months ago. Of course the views on it have skyrocketed. I hadn't listened to it before because I wasn't interested in Kirk. He didn't seem like a particularly big fish. Well, his killer has made sure he is now and will be for a long time. I've already been hearing soundbites from his speeches and talk show appearances being spread around. So martyrdom accomplished.

By the way, the guy I saw in footage yesterday ended up not being the killer, who's still at large. So I guess the cops just humiliated an old guy for no good reason. But shit happens. The cops could've been a little gentler with him but I know they had a job to do in a hectic situation. In the Maher interview, he and Kirk discuss how the Left has demonised cops, which is something I agree with the two of them on. We need cops and they're often painted with too broad a brush. As an artist, I guess, I'm more interested in inevitable human complexity than subscribing to the political convenience of conceptualising whole segments of humanity as soulless blobs.

That said, Kirk comes across as an honest but dopey guy. He kind of reminds me of one of the kids my age who lived on my block when I was a kid. He was a nice guy but he was Mormon and held a lot of opinions I thought were fundamentally daft. But I still played with him. That's just how life was before the internet sorted everyone's social life into vacuum sealed echo chambers, You had to make friends with the people who were in proximity because you had no other options.

I was reading about the riots in Nepal this morning, too. It's not the first time I've heard about the class conflicts tearing apart that country. Before I came to Japan, there was a wealthy Chinese student I was tutoring who went to Nepal and came back telling me how astonished he was at the visible wealth disparity, how he saw garbage and starving people next to expensive cars. I met a wealthy girl from Nepal a few years ago through a mutual friend. We went hiking together and she listened to me ramble about the English Civil Wars. No wonder she found the topic so interesting.

Reading about Japanese history lately, I've been fascinated by how many riots and attempted revolutions there have been in this country famous for its conformity. A man named Oshio Heihachiro led an attempted revolt in Osaka that ultimately failed. Born into wealth and privilege, he was nonetheless angered by the disparity he saw between the lives of the rich and the lives of the poor. He seems admirable in retrospect but I find myself reflecting more on the inefficacy of violence. It's a snake that seems, more often than not, to turn on and bite its master. It's a poor substitute for intellectual development and cultivated compassion.

Another Shooting

The alleged shooter of Charlie Kirk appears to be an elderly white man in footage being dragged away by police with his fallen pants around his ankles. The impression I have of his repeated attempts to stop and kneel is that he's trying to pull his pants up but the cops just keep moving. I'm reminded of the now commonly repeated story about the English army at Agincourt shitting themselves in the midst of a battle that was later immortalised as a great and glorious triumph. I wonder how this guy's pants falling down will be used or will it be edited out, either to show him as more heroic or a less pathetic threat.

I saw the footage on an X account of a Jewish woman who admires Charlie Kirk, whose Wikipedia entry calls him a believer in "the antisemitic Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory." I'd heard conservatives use the term before though I never would have thought it an antisemitic theory considering that Marx himself was unmistakably an antisemite. I've been looking for something this morning that would explain to me how the belief in Cultural Marxism is antisemitic but have been so far unsuccessful. Many sites and articles just seem to reiterate the claim in multiple ways without supplying evidence.

The shooting of Kirk follows a couple weeks after the shooting of two Catholic school children by a shooter who left behind several disturbed statements including the unmistakably antisemitic "Six million was not enough."

Trump himself was shot before the election. Left and Right live in different realities concerning the January 6th event when a crowd of Trump supporters entered the U.S. Capitol Building. One of the people, an unarmed young woman named Ashli Babbitt, was shot and killed, an incident that also differs in the apparent reality experienced by the different political factions.

It doesn't surprise me that people on the Left are committing so much violence against those on the Right. Leftwing rhetoric in the U.S. has become increasingly violent towards the Right for twenty years. I've spoken against it again and again and rarely received encouraging responses. Trump's crimes and corruption are clear yet they're obscured when people are doing shit like this.

X Sonnet 1960

The boiling bubbles pop above the pot.
Below, the flame forbore the need for gas.
The sun's obscured behind a human spot.
A deadly game began about an ass.
The iron grid was fast and barely seen.
A cross of fire carried blood and lead.
What strangled thoughts would prod the jumping bean?
Who seeks a spark among the ghastly dead?
As smoke dispersed, the room was tattered drapes.
The chairs were broke and people crawled away.
Beyond the door, the creatures hid in capes.
A street was filled with glass and strange dismay.
Like shivered shades are human lives at dawn.
The movie veil has dropped and hearts were gone.

Sparkle Spackle

The difference in quality between Tim Burton episodes and all the others is really stark in Wednesday season 2. After Burton's episode 4, I was primed for more and proceeded to the next two, which were directed by Angela Robinson. Both were equally braindead. Maybe episode six was a little worse.

Six has a body swap plot in which Wednesday trades bodies with her peppy, polar opposite roommate, Enid. It's a predicament that would be so much easier for the two if they explained it to their friends and family, which seems like it would be the obvious thing to do in a school filled with gorgons, werewolves, and sirens. There's not rational reason for them to go to any great lengths to keep it secret except that it's an allegory for teenage anxieties, which reveals once again the fundamental flaw of allegory that Tolkien famously disliked (and I mean famously, a lot of people seem to point to Tolkien's dislike of allegory these days). The two actresses do such a great job mimicking each other anyway that everyone else seems like moron for not figuring out what's going on.

I noticed episodes five and six have a fairly self-contained plot involving Wednesday trying to track down and neutralise the Hydes. It's more or less resolved by the end of episode six, as though they were clearing the decks to make way for Lord Tim Burton's final two episodes. There's definitely an impression of a firmer hand at the rudder this season.

Alice Shrinks and Expands

Over a hundred and fifty years after it was written, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland continues to influence people all over the world, including here in Japan. This year brings us a Japanese anime adaptation called Fushigi no Kuni de Alice to: Dive in Wonderland. The Japanese title of Alice in Wonderland is Fushigi no Kuni no Alice (不思議の国のアリス), which translates to "Alice's Mysterious Country". This new movie's title is slightly different, translating to something like "With Alice in the Mysterious Country". The central protagonist is not Alice but a young woman called Rise (Hara Nanoka) whose adventure is a virtual reality exploration in a film I found to be surprisingly progressive with a pro-A.I. message. And not a bad film.

It's the political angle that may have made the film unpopular in Japan. It's playing at the movie theatre a few blocks from me, which is where I saw it on Sunday, but none of the students I've mentioned it to so far have even heard of it. Japan, like seemingly all first world countries, has been leaning increasingly to the right.

Rise has the usual preoccupations of a young woman of her age in Japan. She worries about interviews and her professional future. When she can't sleep, she kills zombies in a first person shooter game on her phone.

She's summoned to her deceased grandmother's lavish manor with enormous gardens modelled on Alice in Wonderland. Rise's fondest memories from childhood involve reading the Alice books with her grandmother. Upon entering the manor, she's escorted to a waiting room and given a virtual reality helmet. She puts it on and her phone is transformed into an apple which is immediately stolen by an angry White Rabbit whom Rise then chases throughout the film. The Fall of Man allegory here is intentional. When Rise finally catches up with the apple, she starts eating it and is transformed into the Jabberwock, a transformation which begins with her turning black and sprouting bat wings, an obvious visual reference to Satan. But the film doesn't go in the direction you might think and in general has a message very much in support of smart phones, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. Alice (Maika Pugh) is an A.I. character, perpetually cheerful and always supportive of Rise, lacking the petulance the girl occasionally exhibits in the books and in other film adaptations.

Ultimately, the film's message is one of self-creation in which the distractions Rise's been encouraged to feel ashamed of are revealed to be expressions of her true wants and needs. I don't agree with the film's whole-hearted embrace of technology which has already shown a capacity for manipulating its users to sinister ends but I do admire self-creation and this was certainly a more interesting film than I was expecting. I was disappointed the chess pieces in the film were black and white instead of red and white as they are in Through the Looking Glass.

Fushigi no Kuni de Alice to: Dive in Wonderland is in theatres in Japan.

Addams Continued

Last night I had Laura Palmer's favourite dinner, potato pancakes and cream corn, while I properly watched Wednesday season 2, episode 4. I said yesterday I'd gotten to episode 4 but only a brief part of it when I woke up after sleeping through episode 3. I'm glad I went back and watched it properly because it's an amazing episode.

It has a lot to praise. Joanna Lumley is amazing, sharp and funny, and Christina Ricci is going full steam as a wacko, being much more captivating than she ever was in season one. Generally, the impression I get is of everyone saying, "Oh, shit, people are actually watching this!"

The winner, though, has gotta be Fred Armisen's Uncle Fester who seemed like an afterthought in season one. Here, he's integral. The makers of the show realised what made the character so good in Addams Family Values, that he's basically indestructible and loves pain.

Oh, and there's that adorable new stalker character. Wednesday choosing to exploit her instead of fight her actually feels genuinely Wednesday Addams-ish. There seems to be a genuine attempt to make the protagonists immoral, which I appreciate.

I loved the action scenes in the asylum which Burton put together really well--episode 4 is the second to be directed by Burton this season, after the first episode. The makers of the show (I'm careful not to say the writers because the jump in quality makes me question who's creatively responsible) are good at considering how the superpowers of the different "Outcasts" play off each other, getting me to think this team would be perfect for creating an iteration of X-Men before I realised, "Oh, this is X-Men." A boarding school for people born with special abilities, shunned and misunderstood by normal society. No wonder it doesn't feel like The Addams Family. I'm sure I'm not the first to point it out.

The episode uses a bit of music from the Vertigo soundtrack. I guess whoever chose to do so doesn't remember Kim Novak taking out a full page ad to accuse The Artist of rape when that film used a bit of the Bernard Herrmann score. Or maybe they just didn't care. As for me, it didn't bother me as much as its use in The Artist, maybe just because Wednesday is a better product altogether. I will say it's confusing. It's a very short excerpt, when Fester kisses Louise at the end of the episode. Not everyone would recognise the music--I'm sure most viewers don't. But they went to the trouble of securing the rights to the music (presumably) so it must have had some meaning. I really don't know what it could be, though.

Wednesday is available on Netflix.