Thursday, April 23, 2015

-250

I cannot say how much I hated this trailer. I do not understand how dearly beloved characters — or, as I suppose we must learn to say, "franchises" — get into the hands of people who don't understand them. In some cases who actively dislike them.

Who is this stuff for? I have complained before that children are aware of funny pirates that go "arrrr!" long before they have had a chance to be scared of Long John Silver; that people's first exposure to Dracula is in the form of Vampires Love Underpants. Yes, I have admitted that, for me, the Real Star Wars, the Primary Star Wars is Roy Thomas's comic; but we are raising up a generation for whom Star Wars (and Harry Potter, and Spider-Man, and Doctor Who, and the Lord of the Rings) were Lego figurines first and everything else afterwards.

Apart from anything else, this stuff is out of date. Thirty years of of date, and frankly it was already a bit old hat in 1986. But it is very nearly 50 years since the live-action Batman first appeared on TV, and we still, with a terrible, tedious reflexology begin every, single essay on comic books with the words "KAPOW! SMASH!" usually followed by "COMICS AREN'T JUST FOR KIDS".

Well, no; they are not. But it would be nice if there were comics that kids were actually able, or indeed legally permitted, to read. It has been said by cleverer people than me that Stan Lee raised the target demographic of super-hero comics from aged 10 to about aged 14. I encountered Spider-Man when I was 8. Yes, there was stuff which went over my head. There is stuff in Winnie-the-Pooh which went over my head. But there was no doubt that I was reading about a kid who was slightly older than me, who got bullied at school, with a fussy "mum" and amazing powers and scary baddies and cliffhanger endings.

Alan Moore to some extent forswore "darkness" in the years after Watchmen, and tried out things like 1963 and Tom Strong and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen — re-embracing his inner KAPOW! Frank Miller, admittedly, continued to embrace his inner spartan. But the movies have never moved on. It's as if Tim Burton expected Michael Keaton to ask the chicks if they wouldn't mine jiving a cup of java juice before laying down some hep grooves and burning their draft cards because dammit, that how Spider-Man spoke and that's obviously the last word in revisionist realism. (And yes, things really have become so predictable that we are looking back on the '89 Batman movie — which was little more than a collection of scenery for Jack Nicholson to chew — if not exactly with nostalgia, then at any rate with a sense of relief.) 

So yes, by all means, the Batman - Superman team. Batman "vee" Superman if you absolutely must. The Famous Batman used to stand in for Superman in weeks when Bud Collyer needed time off to recover from all the breakfast cereal he'd been eating. It was never very interesting. They were too nice, too similar. If you absolutely have to have groups of good guys, they need to be good guys who basically don't agree with each other. And a very long time ago someone spotted that Superman and Batman could be played as good guys who didn't agree about what being a good guy meant. Who maybe didn't even agree about what was "good". 

Superman: bright, shiny, noble, law-abiding, Boy Scout, almost to the point of being naive.

Batman, dark, dark urban, dark vigilante, the dark Dark Knight, the Dark Knight Darkens. 

Dark Batman is more interesting than the silly Batman (who never quite existed outside of the KAPOW! television series). Dark Batman is more in keeping with the basic premise of a character built of rage. But just because Dark Batman is cool is does not follow that Dark Superman and Dark Spider-Man and Dark Paddington Bear would be equally cool. The darker the dark character is the more he needs a bright character character to stand next to. And the brighter the bright character is the darker and cooler the dark, cool one will look. (This is the point of Robin.)

This is one of the things the X-Men movies fumbled very badly: they were so in love with Wolverine that they allowed Cyclops to be a wimp. And Cylcops cannot be a wimp. Cyclops must be tall and moral and impressive and heroic precisely because that makes Wolverine darker and scarier in comparison. 

Superman has a very simple narrative core. And yes, I know that this narrative core did not drop fully formed from the brow of Siegel and Schuster. There was a time when Superman was not yet Superman; when he couldn't fly and dropped wife-beaters out of windows and worked for a guy called George at a paper called the Star. The myth of Superman didn't arrive in a single blinding revelation; it grew. (And yes, it continues to grow. Pa and Ma Kent used to have always been dead, but now they have always been still alive.) But if there is one thing that has been consistent in every incarnation from cornflake packet to movie serial, it has been Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and Perry White. Not in any great big structuralist sense ("aha, of course, there must always be a Hero and a Hero's Love and a Hero's Friend and a Hero's Irrascible Boss Who Keeps Saying Don't Call Me Chief.") Just in the sense that that's how it has always been. That's the Tradition. There's this geeky little newspaperman, rather shy, very old fashioned; and there is this hot young newspaperlady, especially at a time when hot young newspaperladies weren't all that common, and the geeky little reporter is crazy about the lady reporter but he is outclassed, outshone, literally eclipsed by the BLOODY AMAZING GODLIKE SUPERHERO who keeps rescuing her and she doesn't suspect, not even for a moment, well, maybe she does, sometimes, just a little bit, that the geeky little man she hardly notices and the BLOODY AMAZING HERO are, get this, THE SAME PERSON.

Superman isn't about what would happen if an alien landed on earth. Superman isn't about how the human race would react to a god/God/ in their midst. Superman is about a perfectly ordinary little man who is also a god.

(And yes, once you have spotted that and told stories about bald headed supercriminals and little men in funny hats who disappear if you say their name backwards then of course you can squint your eyes and say "but in the 'language of the night' isn't the perfectly ordinary little man who no one pays much account to who is also God quite a lot like a much bigger and more special story?" Although I don't think that anything very interesting often follows from that observation.) 

So: I cannot say how much I hated this trailer.

FIRST we have dark, dark series of logos, and dark dark musical chords, and someone's voice speaking over a black screen and a dark, dark view of a New York / Metropolis skyline because all superhero trailers have to begin with a view of the New York / Metropolis skyline, because that says to people "it's okay, this is in the real world, it's not skiffy". (Nerd-trailers begin with a picture of stars or planets for the same reason.)

THEN we have dark pretentious voice-overs asking the sorts of DEEP PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTIONS that no-one would ever ask about a comic-strip character who wears blue tights. The main claim appears to be that being powerful is a Bad Thing in itself, because if you are powerful, people will want to follow you, and Lord Acton said that thing about absolute power corrupting absolutely.

I think that the thing about absolute power corrupting absolutely had to do with giving absolute political power to an individual. I think the idea is that if you or I or David Cameron were given the kind of political that Sadamm Hussien or Kim Jong-Un has, we would be tempted to use it and inevitably become as cruel and erratic as they are. The theory is not, I think, that weight-lifters are more immoral than biologists, and that Olympic weight-lifters are more immoral than those who compete at a club level and that therefore a man who could life a Soviet Space Capsule with one hand is likely to be completely immoral.

People who are better at recognizing voices than me think that it's Lex Luther speaking, so it maybe that we are supposed to listen to the pretentious voice-overs and think "what a load of obvious nonsense, I sure hope no-one falls for any of that" as opposed to "those are really interesting questions about the myth of Superman that have never occurred to anyone before, I am sure interested about how the film is going to Explore them." 

THEN we have scenes of people seeming to worship Superman in a way that no-one has ever done in the comic.

THEN we get a close up a statue of Superman, in an empty space (probably intended to recall Ground Zero) over which someone has scrawled "false god".

And we have dark shots of Batman, looking dark, thinking dark thoughts in square boxes.

And then we have lots of explosions.

And then we get him darkly confronting Superman in the dark.

(Has Batman been taken in by obviously silly propaganda by Lex Luthor? In which case is the rebooted Batman is a fool and a villains stooge? Or does Batman agree with the Big Philosophical Questions and think that the existence of Superman is a Bad Thing? In which case is the rebooted Batman a superhero who doesn't agree with the idea of superheroes?)

But anyway: that's very much where we are the moment. Big philosophical questions that no-one should ever have asked with explosions in the place where answers ought to be.  

Doctor Who fans talk about "my Doctor". My Doctor is the one with the scarf; your Doctor is the one with the stick of celery; his Doctor is the one with the plimsoles and the awful scripts. So, yes, just because my Superman is Christopher Reeve's doesn't mean that your Superman can't be Grant Morrison's or Smallville or the DC Animated Universe.

But are there really really really going to be kids for whom "my Superman" is a dark statue of dark darkness in a dark city with "false god" scrawled darkly across the darkness?


Sunday, April 12, 2015

Epiphany experienced while drinking coffee and muffins in a hipster cafe in the trendiest street in England.

I do not especially like comic books,
and never have.

I have always liked superheroes,
and still do.

I am pretty sure
this makes me
a bad person

Wednesday, April 08, 2015

-255

“I'm really very sorry for you all, but it's an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances.” -- The Mikado




1:

Can you have a "sequel" to a "fairy tale"?

If a fairy tale is a story which ends "and they all lived happily ever after" then the answer is "no", you cannot have a sequel to a fairy tale. Because we have just defined "fairy tale" as "a story which cannot have a sequel".

This is not to say that Cinderella and the Prince did nothing for the rest of their lives. Doubtless they held elegant balls and launched ships and made speeches to the nation at Christmas. It is even possible (let us hope) that Princess Ella used her new-found power to improve the lot of abused scullery maids up and down the country. I suppose they became King and Queen eventually; and I suppose the Prince must have been sad when the King died. But to live happily ever after means to live as happily as anyone can, not to never have a single bad day.

Eventually, Queen Ella and King Charming must have got old. We don't want to see that. We can take it for granted. I think the King probably dies first. The Queen is sad for a bit, of course, but she is a pious lady and believes that they'll be together again in Heaven. She lives on for a few years as a very contented widow, taking the title Queen Mother, and dies at a very advanced age surrounded by children and grandchildren and one very small great grandchild. Which is as happy an ending as anybody gets.

That's why we use the term "fairy tale ending" to mean "everything came out fine in the end". Because everything doesn't usually come out fine in the end in real life.

Because stories lie to us and we shouldn't read them, particularly not to children.

Because stories arbitrarily stop before Prince Charming contracts typhoid fever and Cinderella crashes her golden coach in a tunnel in Paris.

Because a story is a thing made of words, and a fairy tale is a particularly beautiful but particularly artificial creation precisely because it is closed off, finished, complete in itself.

As a matter of fact, the Cinderella story doesn't begin with the words "once upon a time". It begins "There was once a rich man whose wife lay sick..."  But that's still a beginning.

Stuff must have happened before Cinderella's mother got sick and her father married a nasty widow with two beautiful but wicked daughters. (It is only in the most vulgar versions of the story that Cinderella's sisters are ugly). But that's where the story starts. You could say things about Cinderalla's life with Baron Hardup before the Baroness got consumption (I assume it was consumption) but they wouldn't be part of the story. They might be part of a different story, but that story wouldn't be worth telling, because right up until her mum died, Cinderella was a perfectly ordinary little girl. (Grown ups sometimes read books about perfectly ordinary little girls to whom nothing interesting ever happens, but that's because they are too old to know any better.) Unless, I suppose, you think that Cinderella was a special little girl from the beginning. That the very moment she was born, a chorus of Fairy Godparents sang to the world that this was the Chosen One whose destiny was to marry the Prince, establish an alliance between House Hardup and House Charming, establish a dynasty, bring peace to the land...

But that's a different story. And it's turned "Cinderella" into a different story, and not such a good one. "Cinderella" is the story of an ordinary little girl who falls in love with a Prince.

(Cinderella was different from other little girls because she was lucky enough to have a fairy godmother. So I suppose you could tell the story of how her godmother came to be a fairy, and if she remembered to send a card for her confirmation, and whether the Vicar minded. But so far as I can see it was normal to invite fairies to Christenings in those days. Things only went wrong if you forgot. And anyway, in the Grimm tale it's the spirit of Cinderella's mother in Heaven who arranges the miracle. That's a much better story.)

So that's the answer to my question. Yes, you can continue telling a fairy story after you have said "and they all lived happily ever after." And yes, you can extend the fairy story backwards and say what happened before you said "once upon a time". But what you would be left with would no longer be fairy tale.

2:

If you are briefed to write a new story about an already existing character, there are two questions you could ask.

a: What was fun about this character to start with? So Let's create more stuff which is fun in just that way!

So if you are creating new Spider-Man stories, it is your job to think of better wisecracks than ever before; ways for Jameson to be meaner than every before; and an animal themed bad-guy who is more ridiculous and more scary than anything Steve Ditko and his assistant ever dreamed up.

If you take this approach, the audience will say "What the hell was the point of that? We already have loads of good Spider-Man stories!"

b: Let's suppose this character and their situation is perfectly real -- what would follow logically and realistically from that?

If you take this approach, it is your job to pretend that no-one apart from you has ever written about Spider-Man before. And to suspend your disbelief and assume that there really was a 15 year old boy with insect-like powers in 1960s New York, and that he really did decide to become an urban vigilante in his pyjamas. What would really have happened?

If you take this approach, the audience will say "What was the point of that? It had absolutely nothing to do with Spider-Man."

Star Trek: Wrath of Kahn was the product of the First Approach. It does all the stuff that Star Trek does on the TV, only more so. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was arguably the product of the second approach: granted that there were such a person as Batman, it asks, what affect would he have on the world? What would the authorities think about him? What would happen when he's too old to carry on?

There are, of course, other approaches as well. Maybe the existing stories were told by unreliable narrators and you are going to reveal that the "real" Conan was a wimp and a braggart and the "real" Sherlock Holmes was a fool. Maybe you are going to tell an origin story in which some unrecognizable character gradually turns into the famous one. (This appears to be the only approach Hollywood now permits. An origin myth for Paddington Bear, forsooth?) And, of course, you might very well decide to slap the character's name on some entirely unrelated property and affect incredulity that anyone ever thought that your Tarzan character would have anything to do with some book by Edgar Rice Borroughs.


3:

In 2001, Marvel Comics did a thing called Ultimate Spider-Man which may have been the last comic I unreservedly loved. (*) The idea, in case you have forgotten, was to do create a new comic, unconnected to the Marvel Universe and 40 years of Spider-Man continuity which would sort-of kind-of retell Spider-Man from scratch, as if it were happening right now, and sort-of kind-of make sense. Spider-Man was no longer a thirty year old college lecturer and photo-journalist married to a supermodel who had experienced the tragic deaths of his entire family, several fiances, and defeated the Mad God of Titan. He was Peter Parker, a 15 year old school kid who was just about to have an unfortunate mishap involving a spider.

The cool thing about this was that it didn't matter if you hadn't read Spider-Man for a decade and didn't know that Peter had sold his soul to Satan in return for the clone of his second dead girlfriend not having been sleeping with the resurrected clone of his worst enemy. You could go back to reading about the young kid whose got superpowers and hasn't figured out how to use them. Which is what was cool about Spider-Man to begin with.

But within within a year — within five years — this new Ultimate Spider-Man was not really recognizable as Spider-Man. He was a pretty much an unrelated character in a similar costume some of whose villains had some of the same names.

Not because the writers hadn't been true to the original brief. They had been. "Let's suppose that Spider-Man is a real kid, in the real world...what would happen?" they asked.

And the answer, of course, was Stuff. And if you a trying to tell a realistic story once Stuff has happened, it can't un-happen. The character grows and mutates and evolves and become a different character.

In the end they killed him off, which I suspect was the plan from the beginning.


4:

Opera-buddy sometimes refers to the Great Underpants Question.

How is it, she asks, that the Famous Five can go on camping holidays that seem to last the whole summer long and never once change their underwear? If we assume that the underpants washing happens off stage, who does the laundry?

This matters more in some universes than in others. It doesn't break genre too much to assume that, from time to time, Frodo and Sam find a bit of water to bath in; and when that happens Sam takes the opportunity to do a bit of laundry as well. (I am not sure if people even wore underwear in Middle-earth. We are all a lot more sensitive to bodily smells than people were in the days when the Queen had a bath once a month whether she needed it or not.) And there are lots of stories in which underwear and laundry and other boring smelly things simply don't exist. Winnie-the-Pooh would be one example. Hamlet would be another.

I think that the the point of the Underpants Question is that it is perfectly okay not to ask it. But once you have asked it, you can't unask it. If, on just one occasion, we decide that we can't go and ask questions about the mysterious foreign gentlemen in the big house because we’ve been sleeping in tents for four days without a change of clothes and smell to high heaven; then we can’t say in the next chapter "oh, everyone was locked in the mysterious foreign gentleman's cellar for three days without needing to go to the loo, but that’s fine, because it’s not that kind of story."

5:

I read the first couple of Timothy Zahn books with enthusiasm, and kept reading the old Marvel comics out of bloody minded loyalty. But I never properly bought into the Star Wars "extended universe".

Of course we want more Star Wars stories; but of course novelisations and sequels are only ever going to be novelisations and sequels. There is no Aristotelean mean between "All you have done is told the exact same story as A New Hope all over again only less well" and "What the hell did that even have to do with Star Wars?"

George seemed to have recognized this in the early days, when he was still talking in terms of a IX or XII part history of the Skywalker clan. Star Wars 2 is not a sequel, he kept saying, it's a different story set in the same universe.

Dispatches came to me from the extruded universe from time to time — Han and Leia were married, with twin children; Chewbacca had died. Luke had got married: to a lady named Mara. Later on it turned out that Jedi were celibate, and always had been. I assume this was covered. Although there were occasional smiles of recognition, this was not a setting I recognized or had much desire to visit. Shadows of the Empire was quite interesting, if a little preoccupied with underpants. Too much Stuff had happened. Each book added a Clone of the Emperor, a New Empire, an Invasion of Cybernetic Cockroaches or a Galactic Civil War. Each book made Star Wars, my Star Wars, my Journey of the Hero to save the Universe from the Emperor's Ultimate Weapon smaller and smaller.

An on-line Star Wars resource tells me that Mrs Skywalker was an agent of Palpatine and "a Force Using operative in her own right". That Anyone can type the words "Force using operative" and still believe that you are talking about Star Wars eplains why I never bought into the Extended Universe. (And now it has been decanonised.)

6:

I suppose this is why the great poets invented Tragedy.

The story of Cinderella and Prince Charming is over because the story teller has declared that it is over: he can't stop someone else from writing, or everyone else from imagining, a story in which they feud and quarrel and then decide it's fairest on the kids if they have as amicable a separation as possible. But the story of Romeo and Juliet is much more satisfactorily over because they are perfectly and irrevocably deaded.


(*) Nova. I positively like Nova. But it's only doing Ultimate Spider-Man again, in the "official" Marvel Universe which seems now to be distinguishable from the Ultimate universe only by checking Nick Fury's skin colour. The point of the the Ultimate Universe was that it was more realistic and less comic-booky than the Marvel Universe, but in the last decade the Marvel Universe has stopped trying to be comic booky. So Nova is a pretty good run on "what if a young lad got crazy superpowers in an otherwise realistic universe." So is Ms Marvel. So, obviously, was the original 1960s Spider-Man. 







If you are interested in fairy tales, you should totally buy my game.





Saturday, April 04, 2015

How to Make the Bible Mean Whatever You Want It To Mean - A Very Boring Note

It has been suggested to me that I should have quoted the eucharistic passages from the Gospels more fully. 

It may be that the "revolutionary Christ" theory involves rejecting the "bread and wine" section wholesale (since it seems to come from Paul) and retain the other material as more "authentic".  You could certainly make out a case that Luke's version is a composite of two different versions (note that the wine is passed round twice.) 

This would leave us with something like this. 

MATTHEW

When evening came Jesus was reclining at the table with the twelve...While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying: "Take and eat, this is my body. Then he too the cup, gave thank and offered it to them, saying "Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it answer with you in my father's kingdom. When they had sun a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

MARK

When evening came Jesus arrived with the twelve...While they were eating, Jesus took the bread, gave thank and broke it, and gave it to his disciples say, "Take it: this is my body." Then he took the cup, gave thank and offered it to them, and they all drank from it. "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many" he said to them. "I tell you the truth, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it anew in the kingdom of God"

LUKE

When the hour came, Jesus and his apostles reclined at the table. And he said to them. "I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you the truth, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the Kingdom of God. After taking the cup he gave thanks and said "Take this and divide it among you. For I tell you I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes." And he took bread, gave thank, and broke it, and gave it to them saying: "This is my body given for you: do this in remembrance of me." In the same way after the supper he took the cup, saying "This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you."

Leaving us with: 

FRASER:  

When evening came, Jesus reclined at table with his twelve disciples. And he said to them. "I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you the truth, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the Kingdom of God. I tell you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it anew with you in my father's kingdom. Do this in remembrance of me." When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

If still don't get why he rejects 1 Corinthians as a Paulist invention by holds on to "do this in remembrance of me" as coming from the original left-wing Jesus.

Thursday, April 02, 2015

How To Make The Bible Mean Whatever You Want It To Mean (2)

I promise this will be my last post about Giles Fraser. He writes substantially the same column every week, so I could continue writing substantially the same rebuttal indefinitely. And writing about this kind of thing forces me to adopt an attitude of piety which must be hysterically funny to anyone who knows me personally. I sure you would all rather be ignoring another Star Wars piece. 

But I did think his last one was a good example of the total intellectual bankruptcy of the liberal position, so I am going to have one last go at showing what my problem is with the guy.

There are a number of different ways of reading the New Testament. But I think it would be quite a good idea for anyone setting themselves up as an Expositor to pick one, say what it is, and more or less stick to it. At one time, I attended a Charismatic "house" church. They had a pretty clear approach. The Gospels, they believed, were accurate written accounts of stuff that really happened. They were also the inspired and infallible word of God, but what God had mainly inspired the writers to do infallibly was to accurately record what had really happened. Any honest writer would have written much the same. Thus: “Many learned people have used human wisdom to invent some reason why St John tells us that the miraculous drought consisted of 153 fishes. But in fact, God’s word tells us this because it is the number they actually caught.”

At almost the other extreme, I expect that by now we have all read Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic. He thinks that the Gospels are stories — stories which Christians have instead of answers to hard questions about God and suffering. He says that he thinks that the story is true; but doesn't think that's really the point.

And obviously, people in olden times thought it was all allegorical. Five levels of allegory, only one of which was suitable for the Common People. And scholars have applied various criteria to try to construct (they admit that it's a construct) a figure called "the Historical Jesus". 

So: what is Giles Fraser's approach?

His latest piece is about Easter and Passover and Holy Communion. He thinks it is nice that Jews can be flexible about how they celebrate Passover, and that it's a shame that Christians are bound by strict liturgical rules when they celebrate the Eucharist. I get that. But when he starts talking about God and Jesus and the Bible and stuff, my head starts to spin, slightly. 

This year, in an unusual quirk of the calendar, Passover and Easter overlap, with the Jewish celebrations beginning on the day Christians call Good Friday. Though this is rare, it is unsurprising....


This is an odd way of putting it. For centuries Christians celebrated Easter on the date of the Jewish Passover, which ever day of the week it fell on. The decision that Easter Sunday should always fall on a Sunday, and that Good Friday should always fall on a Friday was made at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD. Fraser believes that for the last sixteen hundred and ninety years, the thing calling itself "the church" has not being following Jesus but a "death cult" largely invented by Constantine and promulgated at Nicea. So it's mighty interesting that he is so keen on Easter being at Passover and a bit suspicious of the Nicean “first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox” formula. 

– not least because the last supper that Jesus ate with his friends the night before he died was a Passover seder. “Do this in remembrance of me,” he told them.


Allow me to improve the above: 

"...not least because three of the Gospels say that the Last Supper was a Passover seder. The other one very definitely says that it wasn't.  'Do this in remembrance of me' he told them, according to one of the four."

It's not Giles' fault that the four evangelists don't agree. Most academics and many clergy would counsel against harmonization. But if you are going to merge four different stories into one composite version, sheer honesty requires that you signal to your audience that this is what you are doing. "We have four stories about the Last Supper. They don't agree on every point. But what seems to have happened is something like this..."


“Remember: Jesus wasn’t a Christian. But for the Christians that followed, he was re-described as the lamb sacrificed at Passover. “Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed for us,” says St Paul, taking his own Jewish theology of temple sacrifice and boldly, even offensively, applying it to a man who was strung up by the Romans as an enemy of the state."


This says a bundle. 

If Fraser is right here, John the Baptist never said "Behold the lamb of God..."; Jesus never said "the Son of man came to lay down his life as a ransom for many". If Fraser is right Jesus saw no connection between his own death and the Passover sacrifice. That was a wholly original idea, thought up by Paul. If Fraser is right, all the bits of the Gospels that talk about the Priests conspiring with Pilate to have Jesus killed — Judas and the arrest in the garden and the trial, pretty much our whole Easter narrative is fiction. This is not a matter of interpretation: Fraser is rejecting the story in the Gospels and offering us an alternative one. 

What does it mean to say that Jesus death was "re-imagined" as a sacrifice? If it means "Christians realized that the true, objective significance of Jesus' death could best be understood in terms of Jewish temple sacrifice (even though Jesus may never had said so in quite those words)" then Fraser and us Evil Constantianian Death Worshipers are pretty much in agreement. But if he means "Christians thought up the idea out of their heads, and its a pretty idea, even though obviously it isn't true, whatever 'true' means" then I think Fraser is... Well.... Not Christian. Something else. A heretic, and quite a boring one at that. Unless I am and he isn't. Or we both are. 

But let's not worry about orthodoxy. The point is that Fraser's arguments do not work on their own terms. The liberal case never does. 

Pay attention, please. This next bit is quite boring. 

There are four Gospels. One of them doesn't really have a "last supper" and if it does, it definitely isn't a Passover. So we can put that one on one side. Let's compare the three which are left. The bits which envisage Jesus death as a sacrifice and were therefore made up by St Paul I have deleted: 

Mathew: And as they were eating, Jesus took bread and blessed it, and break it, and gave it to the disciples, and said Take, eat, this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them saying, Drink ye all of it, for this is my blood of the new testament which is shed for many for the remissions of sins."

Mark: And as they did eat, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave to them saying: eat, this is my body. And he took the cup and when he had given thank he gave it to them: and they all drank of it. And he said unto them: This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many.

Luke: And he took bread, and gave thank and brake it, and gave unto them saying this my body which is give for you, this do in remembrance of me. Likewise also the cup, after supper, saying "This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you."

The highlighted section "this do in remembrance of me", which Fraser thinks is the real deal, only appears in one version of the story: Luke's Gospel. If Fraser is correct that this is the important bit, then Matthew and Mark totally missed the point of what was going on. And, in fairness, Luke says, more or less in so many words, that he doesn't like the other Gospels and is offering his as an improvement on them. 

So: stripped of the Pauline additions you are left with something like: 


And as they did eat, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave to them saying: This do in remembrance of me. And he took the cup and when he had given thanks he gave it to them: and they all drank of it. 

That's what "really happened".

Except...except...except...

The oldest account of the Last Supper doesn't come from the Gospels. It comes from Paul. (Luke was a mate of Paul's — at any rate he wants us to think he was.) And what does Paul say that Jesus said?  

For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus in the same night in which he was betrayed, took bread: And when he had given thanks he break it, and said, Take: eat, this is my body, which is broken for you. This do in remembrance of me. After the same manner also he took the cup, when had supped, saying This cup is the new testament in my blood, this do ye, as oft as ye drink it in remembrance of me. For as often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup ye do shew the Lords death til he comes

How does Paul know about the Last Supper? He wasn't there. He did meet some of the disciples who were there, but he doesn't say that they mentioned it. He says he knows about the Supper because God told him. It's very hard for us to get our heads round the fact that for Paul the fact that he didn't hear about Jesus from eye-witnesses but from the resurrected Jesus makes things more reliable, not less. But he does. God told Paul that Jesus said that his death was a sacrifice and the wine and bread were in some way his blood and body. And God also told Paul that Jesus said "do this in remembrance of me". Presumably, Paul told his mate Luke and Luke put it in his Gospel. Very possibly the other writers knew Paul's version of the story as well. On what basis should we treat one part of Paul's version as simply what happened; and another part as something which Paul made up?

Fraser talks as if you can strip away layers of Christian theology about Mass and Sacrifice and symbolically eating Jesus’ body; and get to the Original Last Supper, which was just Jesus sharing Passover with his friends. But you can’t. If you scratch the surface of Matthew, Mark and Luke what you get to is Paul. If Paul was wrong about Jesus being the Saviour then everyone is wrong about everything and always has been. 

And then, further down, Fraser lays the cards which he has been palming very firmly on the table: 

For it remains the central task of the church to channel a story of massive emotional power, a story in which the freedom meal of Passover inspires an extraordinary act of non-violent resistance against the brutality of Roman occupation.


I think that the reason that Matthew, Mark and Luke place the Last Supper specifically at Passover is to underline the theological point that Jesus was the Lamb of God. Fraser thinks that it was historically factually a Passover meal. It may have been that as well. I'm more inclined to think that John is the one who sticks to the original historical sequence of events. He, Fraser, then invents off the top of his head something which isn't remotely hinted at in the Gospels or Paul or any Christian source: the idea that this meal “inspired an act of resistance against the Roman empire”? 

What happens in the story is that Jesus is arrested; tried for blasphemy by the religious authorities; and his death warrant is reluctantly rubber stamped by the secular governor. Yes, the story says that the religious authorities say “oh, didn’t we mention, he’s calling himself a King, sounds pretty anti-Roman to me” and that Pilate snarlingly hangs a sign saying “Jewish King” on the gallows, but the story says that Pilate didn’t know who Jesus was, didn’t think that he’d done anything wrong and wanted to let him off.

In what way can Jesus be said to have engaged in "non-violent resistance"? What revolution is the Last Supper meant to have inspired? How did it mitigate Roman brutality? Please don't tell me that Fraser believes in that old conspiracy theory about Jesus arranging his own crucifixion with the idea that the sight of a crucified messiah would cause all the Jews to rise up in rebellion against the Romans, but that the whole thing backfired horribly and the survivors had to come up with a story to make a macabre cock-up look like a great victory. Bigger men than him have made asses of themselves over that one.

Into this story is folded a dramatic re-imagining of God not as some alien force hovering above us, but as a human being fully alive, yet prepared to give of his life in the battle against inhumanity and darkness.


The Creed says For us men and our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made man. I agree we could lose the “men” part; and apparently biologists still get confused by the “down” part; but I think most of us understand what this is saying whether we believe it or not. Is "God is re-imagined as a human being" a Guardian-friendly way of saying the same thing, or does it mean something different? 

Fraser’s words could be understood to mean that he does not believe in the incarnation as a thing which happened (God became a man) but thinks of it in terms of a change in the way people decided to think about God. But if what happened was that humans said “Let’s stop using the word God to refer to the unseen force that made the universe and use it instead to refer to exceptionally good human beings, such as, you know, that chap who tried to start a revolution and got crucified, what was his name?” then I struggle to see why we are even bothering to talk about Jesus. 

Again. It is possible that "prepared to give his life in the battle against inhumanity and darkness" is just a less vivid and less dramatic way of saying that there was none other good enough to pay the price of sin, he only could unlock the gate of heaven and let us in. But I very much fear that the "inhumanity and darkness" that Jesus gave his life for are merely the “inhumanity and darkness” of the nasty Roman empire — and by extension, whatever nasty political entity Fraser is worried about this week --  the City of London, fracking, the Internet etc etc etc. 

That would be my guess. I would guess that he believes that Jesus was a radical political thinker; that the Last Supper was in some sense a revolutionary call to arms; that the Crucifixion was in some obscure way an act of defiance against the political evil of the Roman empire; and that when Christians call Jesus "God" they are not saying that he is "God" — that would be ridiculous. They are merely saying something like "a radical lefty being tortured by a fascist state is in some sense the most admirable and praise-worthy thing it is possible to imagine."

Many years ago I attended a lecture by Don Cupitt at the University of York. Cupitt said nothing very interesting. When he had finished saying it, a friend of mine named Matt, who would have been leader of the Student Anarchist Society if the Student Anarchist Society believed in having leaders, raised his hand and said the following words. 

"I agree with nearly everything you have said this evening, but I do not understand why you put in terms of all this reactionary Christian bullshit."


I agree that you should respect and revere prisoners of conscience and people being killed for their beliefs. Many people think that in Mandela or MLK we find the best of the human race. Looking back at a story about how your community escaped from tyrants in the past is a very good way of inspiring them to escape from tyrants in the future. And I suppose it is just possible that letting a tyrant kill you in the most horrible way possible is a powerful way of winning the moral argument. (Me, I'm with Salman Rushdie on this one. I don't think letting the authorities torture you is the best form of revolution. I do think that that may be just what the authorities would like revolutionaries to believe.)

But all of that could be said in plain English. In a very real sense, what  do people like Fraser think is gained by putting it in terms of all that reactionary Christian bullshit?

A prolegomena to all future essays

when you write articles and journalism rather than scholarly papers sometimes you resort to short lively phrases to indicate the types of things you have in mind which in a more formal piece of writing might need qualifications for example if i wrote the man on the clapham omnibus i think you would know what i meant and wouldn't need to say ah but what about the woman and and hasn't the clapham omnibus been replaced by a tram and anyway who the hell calls them omnibusses any more

omnibum? omnipodes?

ergo

when I say church of england i probably mean mainstream unthreatening religious belief even though i know there are some nasty extreme wings of the church of england as well.

when I say radio 4 listener i prolly mean a sort of comfortable well educated middle class liberal english person EVEN THOUGH i know that some of the late night talk shows are quite racy and i once knew a poor person who liked nicholas parsons (there was a lady who liked nicholas parsons and also a parson who liked nicholas ladies)

when I say sun reader i mean a certain sort of tory voting working class ... oh god you know what i mean by sun reader

when I say mail reader i mean a racist

when I say guardian reader i mean a certain kind of academic theoretical left winger who worries a bit about ideological purity, say, checking up on whether his fruit comes from a country which traders with israel even though they print a variety of different opinions

by guardian writer i mean a person who writes in the guardian

similarly for middle class public schoolboy oxbridge type sussex university graduate hipster folkie comprehensive schoolboy tory lib dem hipie

i hop that i have not offended any one in any of those groups three of which i am included in myself

Monday, March 30, 2015

-262

Star Wars #2 #3
Darth Vader #1 #2
Princes Leia #1 #2 #3


These comics represent the first phase of a Derridean deconstruction of the Star Wars saga. They also have a lot of very cool fight scenes.


  • Han Solo tries to stomp Darth Vader with a Walker.
  • Darth Vader encounters Jabba the Hutt.
  • Artoo and some Jawas try to fix the Millennium Falcon.
  • Luke Skywalker intercepts Princess Leia's shuttle in an X-Wing.
  • Leia is inexplicably moved by a painting of Amidala on Naboo.
  • Luke confronts Vader with his lightsaber (and gets creamed).
So, yeah: all the kinds of things that a Star Wars fan would want to happen in a Star Wars comic keep on happening. Everything rattles along at a space operatic pace. The art in "Star Wars" and "Darth Vader" looks beautifully like stills from movies that never were.

The movies were always convincing us that there was stuff going on, just outside the frame, that we couldn't quite see. These comics almost — almost — convince us that that is the stuff we are seeing. Princess Leia, moments after she hung the medals round Han and Luke's necks. Darth Vader, seconds after apparently killing Ben Kenobi on the Death Star.

But on a bigger scale, the comics have to convince us that we are seeing the stuff that happened, not merely out of shot, but in the three year silence between A New Hope (as I suppose we have to call it) and The Empire Strikes Back. And that is quite a — courageous — thing to attempt. Listening to Leia's speech at the Triumph of the Will medal ceremony doesn't in itself change our perception of what happened. But as more and more stories are piled into the blank spaces they are inevitably going to construct a theory...build up a structure...say something about Episode IV and subtly change the meaning of Episode V.

So far, they are weaving interesting structures around each other and inside that space. In "Star Wars" # 2, Darth Vader looks at Luke's lightsaber and says "This lightsaber belonged to..." — just as Han's AT-AT crashes through the ceiling. So, for the time being, Luke can happily carry on thinking that Vader was going to say "...Obi-Wan's friend, who I killed all those years ago" even though we know he was going to say "me". (That's dramatic irony, that is.) In "Darth Vader" #1 the Dark Lord has a jolly good flashback — to the Death Star Trench, to the duel with Ben — before having an Epiphany that the boy he had the fight with in the other comic and the Force-is-strong-in-this-one X-Wing pilot are the same fella.

Which doesn't change anything. Not really. No yet. We have already been told that Darth Vader spent the years between Yavin and Hoth "obsessed with finding young Skywalker". We are just being shown how it happens. Aren't all writers told to show not tell?  

There is always a danger that this kind of spinoffery will feel as if the Luke Skywalker Action Figure is being placed alongside the Darth Vader Action Figure, just because it's a cool thing to do. (And it is cool. Star Wars: Rebels pleased me precisely because it was basically Ezra and his big bucket o' stormtrooper action figures.) These comics are making a serious attempt to treat the Luke and Vader as characters and spin a story around them, while allowing them to retain some of the aura that made us love the our action figures in the first place. We've already seen Darth Vader with an AT-AT, Darth Vader with Jabba the Hutt, Darth Vader with Bobba Fett and Darth Vader knocking over loads and loads and loads of Sandpeople action figures, and we've barely started yet.

But the more we read, the more Movie Luke will turn into Comic Book Luke, and the more we will be left with something like the Star Wars Extended Universe or Ultimate Spider-Man: quite good in places, but far, far removed from the beloved franchise it was meant to be breathing new life into. 


What would you expect from a Han Solo comic book? (There isn't a Han Solo comic book so far, but I assume there is going to be?) This is quite an easy question. We know who Han Solo is and what Han Solo does. Han Solo is a pirate with an alien berserker companion. He has gunfights in saloons and dogfights in space and makes sarcastic remarks while trying to conceal his heart of gold. "Pirate with a heart of gold" (and an alien berserker companion) would be a perfectly good brief for a comic book even if no such movie as Star Wars had ever been filmed.

And for that reason, it would hardly be worth doing: Han Solo is amazingly cool in Star Wars because he arguably wandered in from the wrong story. Showing us the story he wandered in from is a lot less cool.

So, then: what would you expect from a Darth Vader comic book? This is a much harder question. Vader's a villain: a lot of the time her's a pantomime, comic-opera villain who the audience want to boo and hiss. Stories about villains aren't impossible, but they are hard to pull off. The Joker had his own comic, but it didn't last very long. The prevailing morality said he had to go back to jail at the end of every episode. There was a very good Dalek comic strip, but that was presented as "the history of an alien race called the Daleks", not "a story where the psychotic alien fascists are the good guys." There is interwebs fan fiction about Moriarty and Draco Malfoy and Guy of Gisbon,, but the idea is generally that they turn out to be much nicer guys once you've looked at things from their point of view. Not evil, just misunderstood. And, obviously, sexy. 2000AD would sometimes show villains like Torquemada humorously out of context -- on their days off. But Darth Vader misunderstood isn't Darth Vader. Darth Vader turning out to be quite a nice guy once you get to know him isn't Darth Vader. Darth Vader at home, kicking off his shoes and feeding the cat isn't Darth Vader. Darth Vader has to be evil personified all the bloody time.

Darth Vader is evil and we boo him; but Darth Vader is also amazingly cool. So what we need from a Darth Vader comic is Darth Vader being DARTH VADER. Sweeping down corridors; throttling enemies; delivering cold merciless one liners. Putting off the day when he takes his mask off and goes back to being a rather pathetic Anakin Skywalker.

And the comic delivers on this pretty well.

The pictures do a first class job of looking like Movie-Darth (the cover of issue 2 is particularly fine) and the speech bubbles do as good a job as possible of sounding like him. He faces down Jabba the Hutt with no difficulty. He is smart enough to avoid stepping on the trap door in front of the throne, fun though it would have been to see the Darth Vader action figure having a fight with the Rancor action figure. But even showing Vader and Jabba in one scene together seems problematic, a clash of register. It makes Darth Vader seem smaller.

"I do not haggle" says Vader. "Perhaps you should learn" says the Emperor.

And there's a story. The Empire is in a bad way, having just lost its Ultimate Weapon. The Emperor is very cross with Darth: he is, after all, the one who deliberately let the rebels escape with the Death Star Plans and therefore is arguably responsible for breaking the Emperor's new toy on the morning it was finished. And some people are openly wondering if the Death Star wasn't a pretty silly idea to begin with. ("I look at the state of the empire and wonder how many super Star Destroyers we could have made with the resources we threw into Tarkin's folly" asks Tagge.) So Vader is going to have to spend at least the next few issues wheedling his way back into the Emperor's good books while secretly trying to track down mysterious-rebel-pilot-with-lighsaber.

At one level, this feels right: if we are going to have a comic which takes us into the Villains camp, well, villains are supposed to quarrel and dislike each other and back stab. At another level...well it risks reducing Vader to an idiot. A comic henchmen, even. Do we need to see the Freudian Dark Father getting chewed out by his boss? Tolkien never let us see Morgoth giving Sauron a formal written warning.


And what would we expect from a Princess Leia comic? This is the hardest question of all to answer. In one sense, the Princess Leia of A New Hope is hardly a character at all. In another sense, she is the best thing in the movie. If the point of Han Solo is that he's in the wrong story; the point of Princess Leia is that she's in the right story but totally refuses to the play the right role in it.

Leia's job is to be the damsel in distress: the maiden imprisoned in the castle so the hero can rescue her. I tend to the opinion that there is nothing wrong with heroes rescuing maidens from castles. The whole reason that Luke has to rescue a princess and not, for example, some old guy named Starkiller is precisely to signal to us that we're in the kind of story where princesses get imprisoned in castles and heroes rescue them. Let's call them "fairy tales" for the sake of argument. Saying that it is okay to sometimes tell fairy tales is not the same as saying that you should never tell anything else. Girls can be things apart from princesses, and princesses can do things other than get captured. But not, perhaps, in a tale of this kind. There is a certain kind of right-on picture-book for the children of Guardian-reading parents in which a PRINCE is imprisoned in a castle and a HEROINE rescues him. That's very dull and subverts a tradition before the kids have the chance to properly encounter it.

Lucas gave us a much more interesting piece of role-reversal. He let's Luke take on the classic rescuer-hero role and Leia take the classic princess-victim role. He allows his fairy tale to be a fairy tale. But then he swaps the personalities. The Hero is weak and inexperienced and makes the audience shout "oh, shut up you wet blanket" on more than one occasion. The Princess is clever and funny and brave and has a far better idea of what she is doing than either the Hero or the Hero's Helper. Almost the most enjoyable thing about the middle third of Star Wars is the watching Han and Leia entirely failing to get on.

Han's "do you think a princess and a guy like me...?" is a bit of a cop out. Empire Strikes Back turns them into a much less interesting odd-couple romance.

In short: what we want from a Princess Leia comic is Carrie Fisher, specifically, a nineteen year old Carrie Fisher. But she is sadly unavailable.

So Mark Waid in this comic does something actually in my opinion genuinely interesting. He does not attempt to channel Princess Leia of Episode IV. He doesn't do anything at all interesting with the Princess Leia action figure. He pretends that Princess Leia is a real person, and asks what is interesting or unusual about that person. And back comes the answer: Princess Leia is a person who has had her planet blown up. Furthermore, she is a person who has had her planet blown up and doesn't seem overly bothered by it. 

So.

It is after the medal ceremony. People are using words like "ice princess" to describe Leia and asking "what sort of ammonia runs through that woman's veins?" Darth Vader only blew up your planet this morning; why aren't you traumatized, or at least blubbing a bit? She has a big scene with a made up pilot in an orange jump suit who originally came from Alderaan. Mr Waid reasons, sensibly enough, that in a universe where travel between stars is as normal as hopping on a bus, there must be quite a lot of people from Alderaan scattered around the universe. So Leia and the made-up pilot take a space ship and go and look for them. The Rebels don't approve and Luke tries to stop her, but she gets away.

This is all very well and good and fairly interesting, but by the time Leia is involved in an intrigue on the planet Naboo, any connection with any character in any movie you might have seen is getting pretty stretched. Anyone expecting the Princess Leia action figure to be put alongside the Jar-Jar Binks action figure will be sorely relieved.

If you take the destruction of Alderaan remotely seriously, Leia ought to be a psychological wreck: she's been through something ten times worse than any holocaust survivor. The idea that you could say "we have no time for our sorrows" when everyone you have ever known has just been wiped out is obviously ridiculous.

Which is presumably why George Lucas chose not to take the destruction of Alderaan seriously. When Tarkin says that he's going to blow up Alderaan just to show he can Leia almost stifles a laugh.  Luke is much more noticeably upset by the death of his uncle and aunt, though he gets over it in the next scene. The whole point of space opera is that you turn the volume all the way up to 11. This isn't a story about a country or a continent, but about "a boy, a girl and a galaxy". The galaxy has a president and a senate to which all the planets in the galaxy send representatives. So maybe having your planet blown up is more like hearing that your village has been burned down by the Nazis -- while you are fighting thousands of miles away on the Western Front. A definite bummer, of course, but you maintain a stiff upper lip and carry on. It's the sort of shit which happens in war. But even that is taking it much too seriously. Star Wars is about actual war, it's about playing at war. As Alec Guinness said all those years ago: there is no violence in Star Wars. People say "bang" and other people fall over.

There are Guardian-readers who think that you should only be allowed to play with toy soldiers if you also play with toy widows and toy orphans and have toy funerals and toy PTSD survivors meetings. They are probably not Star Wars fans. 

Luke Skywalker has just been in a battle in which nine out of twelve members of his squadron got blown up. How can he possibly be laughing with Han and worrying about his robot when his bestest friend has just bought the big one? (Biggs may have been cut out of the movie, but since the Special Edition, he's definitely Canon.) Come to that, it's only a matter of hours since Luke's beloved mentor, was cut down; and at most only a few days since the only parents he ever knew were killed. Why is no-one calling him an unfeeling monster?

Please tell me the answer isn't "because he's a boy". 


Of course Leia doesn't react to the destruction of Alderaan as real person would to a real planet: it's not that kind of story.

Of course someone as clever as Darth Vader wouldn't have done anything so stupid as to deliberately let the rebels escape. It's a silly bit of plot cement to get us from the Death Star escape to the Attack on Yavin with the least possible waffle. (Is it even possible to watch Luke and Leia swinging across the chasm or Han Solo shouting "we're not out of this yet" if you honestly believe that the Empire is not trying?)

Of course the Death Star is a silly idea if you are thinking actual tactics. It's a plot device Lucas dreamed up to enable Luke Skywalker to save the universe single handedly.

And the only possible answer to the question "Why doesn't Vader know that Luke is his son?" is "Because at that point neither did George Lucas."

We are staring at gaps which George Lucas deliberately left in the Star Wars saga for dramatic effect and filling them in. And in order to fill in those gaps, we are zeroing in on precisely those parts of the saga which don't make sense, and pretending that they are what the story is all about.

And so begins a process which will leave us with a Darth Vader and a Luke Skywalker who are no longer recognizable as the action figures we were hoping to play with. 



Tuesday, March 24, 2015

(-268)


I sometimes wonder if cultural historians have paid enough attention to breakfast cereal. [1]

We have already talked about Kellogs Pep which sponsored the Superman Radio Show about 30 years before I was born. There was nothing especially super about them: so far as I can tell, they were just fortified bran flakes. And that's why they needed a strange visitor from the planet Krypton and a wrist-mounted sun-dial to make them seem exciting. All breakfast cereal is exactly the same so it's a blank slate on which advertising men can inscribe anything they feel like inscribing. This box of toasted rice will make ladies thin, but that identical box of toasted rice will make young men leap over fences. And because it’s all the same, Mum (it is, after all, she who buys the groceries) can afford to delegate the decision about whether to have toasted rice or frosted toasted rice or chocolate frosted toasted rice to her offspring. So the advertising people shamelessly direct their patter at children, or rather KIDS. We were all brought up to believe that HEY KIDS rice and corn going soggy in milk is FUN and GOOD FOR YOU and also the HIGHLIGHT OF YOUR DAY. And being a WEETABIX PERSON as opposed to a FROSTIES PERSON defined you tribally. Possibly. 

It also comes in big flat boxes. There is a space to draw a Tiger or three little Elves on a packet of cornflakes. There really isn't on a tube of toothpaste. 

There were Magic Roundabout figurines in Ricicles (which were, it will be remembered, twicicles as nicicles). I remember getting a box with NO GIFT IN IT and writing to Kellogs and receiving a letter of apology and THREE figures to make it up to me. But not the Dougal figure I needed to finish the set. I was three years old. It taught me an important lesson about life.

There were cut out "code wheels" and badges on the backs of Shreddies packets that initiated you as a member of a Tom and Jerry fan club. Do they still make Shreddies? It is the only one I would want to eat. Mini ("spoon sized") Shredded Wheat came in the same livery, and they were disgusting. 

There were indescribable little plastic animals with scissor action middles called "Stretch O Pets" in Rice Krispies, which were the same as Ricicles only without the sugar or the elves. 

Wetabix did picture cards. Everyone remembers the two sets of Doctor Who cards, but there were also Robin Hood cards and Superman cards and Star Trek cards. 

And the Honey Monster, obviously. 

Grandad must had more conservative tastes in breakfast than us; because he sometimes collected the gifts that came in plain old common or garden Kellogs Cornflakes and presented them to me. There was a set of circus animals and a set of self assembly fair ground rides that never worked and I assume a set of vintage cars. There was always a set of vintage cars. 

One Saturday afternoon he presented me with two cardboard masks, cut from the back of the  box itself. One represented An Android. (Androids look like bald Boris Karloffs, apparently.) The other represented a comically sinister figure with huge ears. His name was Mr Spock From Star Trek. I would have been six.


There was a moment in my life when I first discovered who Spider-Man was. (Feb 1973: "The Menace of Mysterio.") There was a moment when I first heard the name "Luke Skywalker". (On page 3 or 4 of the Marvel Comics Treasury Edition.) We can divide the pre-Dungeons & Dragons Andrew from the post-Dungeons & Dragons Andrew with a fair degree of historical confidence. But there never was a point in my life when I didn’t know who Mr Spock was. I can hazard a guess as to when I first watched Star Trek: the BBC showed a series of daily repeats over the Christmas holidays in 1974; which was also the year the decanonized cartoon series occurred. But I also had one of those Viewmaster stereoscopic slide viewers (which I thought was the most fantastic toy ever – a rare example of a 3D effect that actually works) and that came with a Star Trek disc: "The Omega Glory" retold in 21 frames. I remember them going over to the other ship and finding the crew reduced to dust in their uniforms. It frightened me and unnerved me in a way that Doctor Who monsters didn't. And I remember sitting on the coach to school camp reading one of the James Blish adaptations. And when I was very small indeed I had a set of light blue PJs with a design featuring pictures of the Enterprise. I think that was also ordered off the back of a Cornflakes packet. You could also order a torch in the shape of a phaser but I never had one of those because guns are not toys.   

When did you first know about Mr Spock? You might as well ask "When did you first know about Father Christmas?" or "When did you first know about Jesus."

If you never watched Star Trek, then Spock represent the idea of aliens—the thing you fall back on if you want to show that sci-fi is silly but don't want to use little green men with antennae sticking out of their heads. When people wanted to take the piss out of ludicrous Tory wannabe John Redwood, they called him Spock. (His campaign manager said that he understood that Dr Spock said "Live a long time and be prosperous" which was a pretty could summation of Conservative Party values, but he couldn't do the salute.) Rowan Atkinson's alien is not sending up Spock but he is, I think, riffing on an idea of aliens that wouldn't have existed without him. So, obviously, was Mork From Ork. The BBC made a big deal out of Trek, putting it in prime time shot right after the Moon landings, but everyone else clearly thought that space men with funny ears were the kind of things that belonged on the backs of cereal packets. Grown ups don't wear Star Trek masks on. (At least, I assume they don't. Maybe it was different in the 70s. The Beatles had just broken up and the Internet hadn’t been invented.) 

Notice how big and exaggerated Spock’s ears are in the drawing. They were never like that on TV. Nimoy always claimed that Special Effects wanted them to be huge and exaggerated and reptilian and the unobtrusive prosthetic ones were a last minute alternative cooked up between him and Make Up. There was an advertisement which imagined the ears drooping, in order to demonstrate that a particular brand of lager refreshed the parts that other brands of lager failed to refresh. They didn’t get Nimoy’s permission; he was reportedly not amused when he came to England claiming that he was Not Spock and discovering that his face was plastered on every billboard in the country. I think the advertising standards people stomped on the adverts in the end; forced them to become cleverer and sillier but to remove any suggestion that consuming alcohol could make floppy parts of your body stand up straight. 

I once said that there are Star Trek people and there are Doctor Who people, in the way that there are cat people and dog people. It has since been pointed out to me that by no means all dog owners spend their time luring cats into cages and turning them into fur coats and sausages; and that Aunty Jemima doted equally on her poodle and her Siamese. I think that my view still sounds: Doctor Who is silly and Star Trek is sensible; Star Trek is slick (for it’s time) and Doctor Who is, er, charmingly amateurish (ever for it’s time). Star Trek is American and Doctor Who is British. (One of the characteristic things about being British is not going on and on about it, of course. You couldn’t imagine Doctor Who waxing lyrical about Magna Carter in the way that Kirk does about the Constitution.) Star Trek episodes are called How Sharper Than A Serpents Tooth and For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky; Doctor Who episodes are called Invasion of the Dinosaurs.

I am a Doctor Who person, not a Star Trek person. But I watched Star Trek. Everyone watched Star Trek. My Mum watched Star Trek. (She correctly spotted that it was basically just a cowboy story. "Trek" is a vary cowboys and Indians kind of word. As everyone knows, it was going to be called Wagon Train To The Stars.)

There has always been Star Trek. This is why the abomination offended us so much. Abrams stole Star Trek from us and pasted on a thing which had nothing to do with Star Trek, and this means that for ten years at least, there won't be Star Trek any more. (But he is totally going to get Star Wars right, okay?) People become vehement about this stuff, as they do about all religions, but it seems to me that while more than one point of view might exist about whether or not Voyager and Enterprise were good Star Trek or bad Star Trek, they were unquestionably Star Trek.

Proper serious science fiction fans don't quite approve of Star Trek. One reason is that it was (like most cowboy stories) almost always a morality play and the solution to the moral dilemma almost always involved paying attention to both Dr McCoy and Mr Spock -- finding some kind of balance between Heart and Head. If it were proper science fiction then Spock (representing brains and intellect and science and, well, logic) would always be right and McCoy (representing emotion and feeling and intuition) would be chucked out of the nearest airlock. I'm not even sure that proper serious SF ought to admit the idea of morality in the first place. If you can't solve the problem with logic and express the answer to three significant figures then it was a silly question.

On the other hand, Asimov rather approved of it.

The main reason serious science fiction fans didn't like Star Trek was that Star Trek came to be what people who weren't really science fiction fans thought science fiction was like. It was never true that Space: 1999 and Blakes 7 were copying Trek or trying to do Trek all over again: it's just that they were "science fiction" and that’s what science fiction had become. On TV, at any rate. Three or four characters on a "bridge", with a big TV screen, travelling to a new planet each week and trying to figure out what's going on down there. And to be honest, and once all the sectarian strife calms down, that’s closer to science fiction than your Flash Gordons and your Buck Rogerses and even your Doctor Whos. It was at least to some extent most of the time quite often about ideas.

And it did have a scientist in it. 

If Star Trek was science fiction, Spock was science. Spock was logic. Spock was intelligence. Spock was sometimes incredibly irritating, but Spock was smart and superior and confident very much in the way a clever person ought to be. Particularly when surrounded by people far below our own intellectual level, as most of us feel we are. I wasn't the only kid to drive his parents crazy by using big words where a small one would have done perfectly well and trying to be all calm and condescending and being told that, no, as a matter of fact, having tea half an hour early tonight couldn’t be described as "illogical".

Spock the supporting character; Spock the science officer; Spock with his eye in a microscope: he was more fun than Spock the Alien, Spock the Mystic, Spock the Agonized Sex Symbol, Spock Messiah, of all the souls I have met in my travels his was the most (sob) human. 

If you took Hardy out of Laurel and Hardy you wouldn’t even have Laurel any more. Shatner and Nimoy were a double act. Nimoy is in the pilot episode / flashback where Shatner is still being played by an unrecognisable bit-part actor called Pike, but he’s not Spock, only Nimoy in a jumper. It was only when you put the two of them together, Shatner over acting, Nimoy rather under-doing it, that the sparks started to fly.

-- It has to do with...biology.

-- Biology as in reproduction? Dammit, Spock, that’s nothing to be embarrassed about. It happens to the birds and the bees...

-- The birds and the bees, Captain, are not Vulcans. If any creature were as proudly logical as us and then had their logic ripped from them....

Spock has always been there, is what I’m trying to say. And now he isn’t any more. 


(1) Yes, they have.





Tuesday, March 03, 2015

-291

Star Wars: Rebels 
Spark of Rebellion



Clone Wars always felt like an apology for the Prequels. It's a cartoon, but it's a cartoon in a cinematic style. Jedi swing their lightsabers against a background of galactic diplomancy and politics. Everyone knows what is going to happen to Anakin in the next movie; and everyone knows that it can't happen until then; so we mercifully don't have to worry about story arcs. We can just have adventures. The worst episodes feel like RPG cut scenes or episodes of Thundercats. But the best ones make me exclaim "Now, that's how the prequels should have been done."

There were one or two episodes of the Star Trek animated series that made me say "I wish that had been a real episode, done with actors and special effects." Which is a different way of saying that it was a failure as a cartoon.

Now, Star Wars: Rebels. Star Wars: Rebels is a cartoon that knows it's a cartoon. 

About 20 minutes into the pilot, Ezra the street-smart artful-dodger uses his lock picking powers to get into the Kanan's cabin. Kanan is the leader of the group of rebels who Ezra has temporarily fallen in with. We're in the sort of world where stealing stuff — stealing stuff from friends — shows that you have an endearing disregard for authority, not that you are an ungrateful little toad. He finds a secret compartment under the bed, and takes out what appears to be a silver puzzle box. The audience is meant to know that it is a Holocron — a rare Jedi artifact. It is an interesting fact about the transition of Star Wars from movie to mythos to franchise that something which was only referenced in computer games and derivative novels can still be regarded as something which "everybody" knows about. But it's definitely something Really Important because the Binary Sunset leitmotif is playing in the background. The episode has been playing — not very subtly — with the fact that Ezra presents as a cool street-rat but is actually just an innocent kid. His eyes spend a lot of time literally widening; his jaw spends a lot of time literally dropping. He says "wow!" and "cool!" a lot, which is a marked improvement over "yippee". So while he is still trying to be cynical and worldly about the holocron ("it might be worth something") he discovers that Kanan also has a LIGHTSABER and all pretense drops. "Wow, cool!" 

If lightsabers were real weapons and Ezra was a real boy, then finding one in his host's bedroom would either be like finding a loaded kalashnikov, or else like finding a bona fide holy relic, the Grail or a fragment of the True Cross. But they aren't and he isn't. He reacts to the lightsaber, not as person of a particular age in a particular possible world, but as a Star Wars fan. I said last time that when Obi-Wan hands Luke the lightsaber, we all want to reach out and grab it — not only the lightsaber, but that moment. And that's what Ezra is quite clearly doing: not handling a weapon or an artefact, but playing with the best toy in the universe. Wow. Cool. (Yippee.) But just as he takes up a proper Jedi pose, "reality" intervenes. The R2 Unit has snitched on him. But Kanan is not some Wise Old Man archetype, vaguely representing The Name of the Father in Campbellian terms. He's more like your actual Dad. "Careful, you'll have your arm off.". Kanan doesn't put the lightsaber back in the box, but hangs it on his belt. This is the first time that we know that Kanan is a Jedi Knight. (Not that it's a huge surprise or anything.) Ezra reverts to his "streetwise" persono, jiggling the holocron in his hand as if to say "fooled you!". But Kanan murmurs "Now we will see..." under his breath. Aha. It's a test. 

This kind of thing either appeals to you or it doesn't. There are fans who are biting their hands in disgust: they have taken our sacred trilogy and turned it into a something for kids. It's the most blatant kind of fan-boy wish-fulfillment. By the end of the first episode, Ezra has used his latent force powers to open the Holcron, listen to secret message from Ewan McGreggor, and sign on has Kanan's padawan. Dad says you only get to play with a lightsaber if you take it seriously. But you do get to play with it.

The Phantom Menace had Anakin: but even if you could swallow the premise of a nine year old racing driver and fighter pilot who says "yippee" a lot, you still spend most of the film saying "No way does that little munchkin grow up to be Darth Vader". The Clone Wars had Ahsoka ("Snips"). But she's already a Jedi, and even though she starts out being even more reckless and irresponsible than Anakin, Clone Wars takes itself Seriously. Before long she is a sensible member of the team, teaching homesteaders to fight bandits on a weekly basis. And before any of that, there was the stroppy, sulky, farm kid. ("It's just not fair!") Even without the Toshi station sequence (chopped out of Star Wars at the very, very last moment) it's clear that Luke's job was to be a teenaged rebel who eventually acquires a cause. Which is why Star Wars succeeds and the other movies, to a greater or lessor extent, fail. They don't have an Everyman figure who is looking out at the sunset on our behalf, wishing he could get off this rock. That is why the Binary Sun theme is sometimes referred to as the Romantic Longing theme, at any rate by me..

Anakin was three years too young. Star Wars: Rebels has the sense to make it's viewpoint character a couple of years older than the target audience -- an inappropriate kid with a lightsaber, no parents, and a vein full of midichlorians. The rest of the cast are just about as generic as they could be — the sort of people you'd expect to meet in any Star Wars RPG or computer game. The strong, cynical one. The spunky, agile one. The sensible one. The Jedi one. (They are twists on Star Wars archetypes, but only in the most trivial way. Zeb is basically Han and Chewie rolled into one. Kanan is actually described by the writers as a Cowboy Jedi. Sabine is a girl who wearing Boba Fett bounty hunter armour, only she's painted flowers on it.) But this works in it's favour. If we're seeing the Star Wars universe from Ezra's point of view (wide eyes, jaw drop, wow!) we don't want any complicated dark twists. We want it to look like we expect the Star Wars universe to look. 

Which it does. I am sure the Clone Wars artists worked real hard to give Clone Wars the look and feel of the prequels. But no-one is ever going to look at an episode of Clone Wars and say "Oh wow (wide eyes, jaw drops) that spaceship which appeared for a few seconds half way through Attack of the Clones." No-one has ever loved the prequels like some of us love A New Hope. (No-one has ever loved anything like some of us love A New Hope.) The first thing we see in Rebels is a Star Destroyer. The second thing we see is a group of TIE Fighters whooshing through the sky — the first TIE Fighters we've seen in 30 years, unless you count computer games. And then we pan down into a street, that isn't Mos Eisley, but very well could be, with a Greedo-alien and one of the little dwarf people from Cloud City (okay, if you insist, a Rodian and an Ugnaught) going about their business. And within five minutes stormtroopers on speeder bikes are chasing rebels round an alien market. 

"But Andrew: a quite good kids cartoon doesn't become a major work of art just because it has stormtroopers in it."

No. No; it doesn't. And the actual story is a bit of fluff about rescuing wookie slaves; and wookie fur really doesn't work in this kind of texture based animation; and the spice mines of Kessel, which we've been building up to for forty years turns out to be a bit nothing. But, I mean: stormtroopers. Not characters which cleverly allude to stormtroopers, or new improved stormtroopers, but actual stormtroopers, with no sense of commentary, re-invention or ironical detatchment, chasing good guys down corridors which look suspiciously like the corridors of the Death Star because that's what stormtroopers do.

At a story-internal level, characters like Anakin and Ezra don't work. Ezra has been cast in the wrong movie. It is hard to imagine him in Clone Wars. Anakin would punch him. He gets away with things that no-one inexperienced street thief should be able to get away with, even in a fairy tale universe. His hair isn't Star Wars hair; it's manga hair. He's not a kid. He's specifically a cartoon kid. And he knows it. "I'm in SPACE!!!....and I'm gonna die." Yippee. 

Star Wars began, as everyone knows, with a twelve second tracking shot of a huge spaceship — what we would now call a Star Destroyer — passing over the audience's heads. Star Wars: Rebels begins with a close up reaction shot as a Star Destroyer passes over Ezra's head. Which is to say: Star Wars begins with us looking up at a Star Destroyer and collectively saying "wow!". Star Wars: Rebels begins with us looking at a cartoon kid looking up at a Star Destroyer and saying "wow!" 

And I am quite sure that the writers and artists knew exactly what they were doing. The cartoon kid is Everyfan. He's done what we wished we could do. He really is "on the inside". He really does get to play with all the cool toys. But he knows it's a movie. He's only playing. It's fun. 

That's a really cool present for all of us incredibly serious old fans. Whether it will mean anything to the actual kids remains to be seen.