The final essay brought up from the archives… a personal piece, written in the immediate aftermath of late January 2010, edited later that year, still felt in 2016.
I am on the BART back to Oakland and the music pulses in my purloined headphones, hijacked from the seat-back pocket and emblazoned with the United Airlines logo.They’re cheap headphones but the sound quality is better than earbuds, rich with depth and clarity that I haven’t encountered yet from my iPod.
The BART is packed for a Thursday afternoon and I focus on the music, the slippery sounds that I have never quite been able to comprehend; it is entrancing, this brilliant noise, and I am ensnared by its rising and its falling, forever enigmatic.I’ve read books on music theory, sonic cognition, and still it refuses to reveal itself to me.
Words: that is how I order the world.Language I can marshal and understand but music is sublime and mysterious, and no matter how I chase it no illumination arrives.I want to escape into the music now but neuronal firings won’t allow it, insistent upon conscious thought, and these words won’t go away even though I wish they would, coursing through my gray matter as they’ve done all week:
David, I wonder; David, where did you go?
Where did you go?
*
My flight into Cleveland is delayed by an hour and a half — bad weather in Chicago — and when my mother and I walk through the back door it is nearly two a.m.My father is still awake, in the living room with my uncle and three aunts and a cousin, more arriving in the coming days.Most of us are still on California time but all of us are hesitant to go to sleep.
I am camping out in the basement, my own private cave in the zoo of so many people.It’s a spacious basement with room for more but something is wrong with the water pipes and whenever the toilet is flushed they bleat a ridiculous song, something in between a siren and a gong, loud and reverberating.No one else is willing to put up with the noise but I don’t mind it, my head too stuffy to sleep.
I take advantage of the privacy to stay up late, later even than everyone else is staying up, and in the quietude of dead hours I lean on language to make sense of all this.I don’t know that it can but my aunt and uncle have asked me to speak at the funeral and by five in the morning I think I have beat the words into a shape something like my cousin.
*
This family, my family, our family, is a many-headed organism made of dozens of moving parts: one matriarch, twelve siblings and each one paired off, twenty-three cousins (only a few of those paired off yet), three great-grandchildren so far.Technically I suppose the number is now twenty-two but the official tally, the permanent record, will always say twenty-three, death certificates be damned.
We play Scrabble and put Scotch tape on my aunt’s cat, sleep on air mattresses and go through gallons of booze and don’t stop talking until we pass out from exhaustion.It’s so easy in this world to feel like an outsider but in this tribe I see myself reflected, in so much resistance to tragedy and so many reflexive jokes, and together at my uncle’s house and my parent’s kitchen and the funeral home we stave off despair with food and alcohol and laughter and each other, most of all, with each other.
*
I am in a NyQuil haze for the wake, my head pounding and congested and confused on so many levels.I don’t normally take much medicine but I needed some rest and NyQuil seemed the best way to sleep through the symphony of the pipes; I’ve been too sick to drink but at least I can achieve a chemical unreality with cough syrup.
It is an open casket and David doesn’t quite look like himself, made up and in a suit and more formal than he ever was in life.I want to touch him, to shake him awake, but instead I go through the line and hug my aunt and uncle and then my cousin, David’s little sister, collapses against me.She is a senior in high school, about to graduate from my alma mater, a middle child forever hassled by her older brother, and I stand firm and hold tight and say nothing.
Words may be all that I have to make sense of this world, but sometimes there are no words at all.
*
There’s an easy moral to be had from it all — drugs are bad, kids — but I’ve seen “Trainspotting” half a dozen times, and my cousin never looked like “Trainspotting.”The pastor gives the official eulogy, something long-winded and meandering that ends with an exhortation to come to Jesus.My father had employed David in countless home improvement projects and he sobs next to me, my mother on his other side clutching at his hand, and I wonder if his devout Catholicism is blunting this pain, making sense of the inexplicable.
There is a polished wooden casket at the front of the church.I had pushed past it moments earlier, to speak at the lectern, to read what I’d written, and it seemed then and it seems now oddly out of place: I know David’s body is inside, the same made-up thing I saw the day before, but that is not where my cousin is now, and I just want to figure out where he has gone.
*
We like to think of death as a point on a continuum: birth and youth, adulthood then old age then illness and then death, the period at the end of a long and complex sentence.It is a process to reach such triumphant punctuation and we imagine that it should happen peacefully, with family and friends present, time given for all the necessary goodbyes.
It happens this way for some, I suppose, but for others it is binary and sudden: they are alive and then they are not, young and vital and then — not.David didn’t even go to a hospital, beyond such intervention.My aunt found him in his room and of all the comforts this enfolding human blanket of family can offer, no one can ever erase that tormenting image for her.I’m told there was some blood but I can’t listen yet, can’t picture something that I can’t even believe to be real.
*
They tell me that I captured him well in my words, well-written and well-delivered, and I am asked for e-mailed copies.What I can proffer is so little but it is at least something, these meager words and whatever meager comfort they might inspire.
They were only memories, these words; they made sense of the person that was but offer no insight into what has happened to him now.David was a solid presence in life, the sort of guy you’d want on your side in a fight (the sort of guy who got into fights), but death has rendered him ethereal, here and then gone, given over to time and things I do not understand.
I could blame the NyQuil or the head cold or the lack of sleep, those screeching pipes, but deep down I know that no matter how lucid I am this will never make sense.
*
Within one thirty-six hour span I go to the airport four times, all of us dispersing back to the unceasing demands of a life that moves in only one direction.Chauffeuring is something to do, to keep me occupied as my parents’ house slowly empties.I am the last to leave, departing back to Oakland, leaving behind a mountain of sheets to be washed and the wailing of their plumbing for the distractions of work and stand-up comedy gigs and bills to be paid.It all feels even more unreal from thousands of miles away, and it is too easy to believe it never even happened.Days later I play Lady Gaga at absurd volume across the Bay Bridge and try to crowd out the tears in my head, but she is less effective than booze and family and the song ends too soon.
The tears never come, anyway, dammed up by unrelenting disbelief.
Memories peek into my life now from so many unexpected places.A Phil Collins song plays and I remember joking about it two Christmases ago; “Titanic” is on television at a friend’s house and with a jolt I recall seeing it in the theaters with David more than a decade ago, my grandmother taking us both in her maroon Oldsmobile.These have been unconsidered memories for so long, piling up in my brain without reflection, but now that their collection has been so abruptly foreshortened I cling to them; they have lain dormant in my gray matter for years, shuttered and unspectacular, and suddenly three time zones away from where I grew up with my cousin they are all that is left.
Six months later I am transferring numbers into a new phone, culling old friends — fallen away now — and I am blindsided at the letter “D”, tears welling up backstage at an open mic, and against all rational thought I put David’s number into my new phone because anything else would be a betrayal.
It would’ve been a fun trip home, under different circumstances, but under different circumstances we might not have all been so determined to have fun.
*
I am, like so many other members of my family, a terrible judge of time.If it can be held and touched I can measure and analyze and understand but when it comes to the fourth dimension I am strangely disabled, pathologically tardy, incapable of proper judgment or perception.Music lives in that incomprehensible space, transient, evanescent, and despite the best efforts of man to suspend time and hold onto these sounds still they fall forward into the ether.
It is like life in that way, music is, and just like life it cannot go on forever.There is much about music that is a mystery to me, but this much I can understand; these are impermanent things, fading from the earth in time, disappearing to unseen places, but when I close my eyes I can still recall the peculiar notes struck by water rushing through my parents’ pipes and the particular cadence of David’s voice, and these lush sounds are more than all the words I’ve ever put together.
His birthday is (was? is?) two weeks after the funeral.Twenty-three years old today, if only I knew where to send the card.
I was there last in August, on my most recent trip to the Bay Area. I stayed at my aunt and uncle’s house, just across the street from the high school and down the road from Santa Rosa Junior College; my aunt and I made our usual stop at the Santa Rosa fish market, a downtown hole-in-the-wall with seafood so fresh the air is thick with brine, and you walk out the door with the day’s catch and beach hair. We got oysters and scallops and mussels, the usual order for our regular bivalve nights, a tradition begun a few years’ back when amidst mussels and wine I drunkenly proclaimed my love for the bivalve and that little-used word became our inside joke, one so flavorful it retains the ritual capacity of the eternal present: my uncle shucks the oysters, fresh from Tomales Bay, while I slice the scallops into sashimi; they are sweet and butter-soft, luscious, melting on the tongue, the Platonic ideal of a scallop. My aunt cleans and steams the mussels, with white wine and lemon and garlic and backyard parsley, and some backyard purslane that I insist on adding. My uncle uncorks and pours the most hyperlocal of wines, grapes collected from nearby vineyards and brewed in my aunt and uncle’s garage. The next morning in the garden I collect a tote bag full of fallen green walnuts to make a nocino, steeping now in my cabinet, and my aunt and uncle gift me with apples from half-a-dozen varietals that they’ve grafted (now living in my brother and sister-in-law’s freezer, applesauce for my niece and nephew, jars and jars of it), pears, peppers, beets. We snack on prunes, ripe off the tree and sugar-sweet, and pause to drink more wine as the chickens cluck, content in their coop, all of us warm in the afternoon sun.
It takes time to build such a life, one that reads like an enviable magazine feature on the wine country.My aunt and uncle have been in their house for thirty years, and I’ve only been witness to the last twelve; I didn’t see the garden laid out or the studio built or those apple trees planted. By the time I moved to San Francisco, just out of college and craving the California sunshine, their home and their yard and their family were all well-established enough to become my escape, to feel — as I moved, as I couch-surfed, as I had no place to call my own — a little bit like a home to me, too.
And so last Monday, when I woke late, frustrated that a long sleep had done little against a persistent and vicious cold, when I checked Facebook and saw posts from friends in San Francisco about respirators and outdoor air quality, links from Bay Area friends about the mounting flames, panic rose until finally, fortunately, a post from Jake, my aunt and uncle’s upstairs tenant — he and I have bonded over the years, forcing my aunt and uncle to watch “South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut” on a Movie Monday and getting into a shouting match about Richard Sherman and racism in the NFL during one memorable Super Bowl — who was OK, who had packed up his guitars and gotten the hell out even though, he reassured his social network, he was not actually in an evacuation zone. As I waited for my aunt and uncle to respond to my frantic “ARE YOU OK?!?!??!!” I tried to look up maps of the damage, but the chaos of the moment was too great for such orderly reporting. Eventually I realized that the Santa Rosa Junior College Twitter feed was probably the best source of information I could find for their neighborhood, and refreshed it compulsively until my uncle emailed later that night. They hadn’t been evacuated, but half a mile away the entire Coffey Park neighborhood had disappeared into smoke and ash so they had spent the day packing their car and truck, preparing to flee to Marin, to another aunt’s house, but when the time came to go they couldn’t do it. Nor the next day, or the next, or the next — even as the lines of the evacuation zones crept closer and closer to their house they chose instead to stay, to volunteer at evacuation shelters, to go to work. My aunt is a county employee; she’s an official part of the recovery effort. The ash she had to wipe off her desk when she went back into her office, she wrote to us, was inches thick.
My home-away-from-home, my second home, the center of my California gravity — by whatever label it might be known as, its more important label is safe. It stands, still, in a city where hundreds of other houses do not, by nothing more than luck. There will be nocino and applesauce for years to come. My aunt and uncle are safe; we could have had bivalve nights under another roof, if it had come to that, but without them the tradition would have become tragedy; not only because they are family but because they are the kind of people who, faced with a city-destroying firestorm and the opportunity to flee, choose to stay and help others.
I spoke on the phone with my mom on Tuesday. She was certain that they’d gone down to Marin, no matter how many times I corrected her. I suspect she would have fled, and simply could not imagine someone making a different choice. I would have fled, too, and though I can acknowledge that my aunt and uncle stayed I am nonetheless astonished by it, although I don’t know why; I have been the direct beneficiary of their generosity for over a decade, and why should I be the boundary to it?
Nearly a week on, my Facebook feed is oddly bifurcated. From Northern California friends there are links to articles, links to GoFundMe pages, links to DIY air-filtration systems to keep the dense, choking, particulate-heavy smog out of one’s lungs. From Cleveland and East Coast friends there is nothing, no mention or acknowledgment of the devastation, no donations, no thoughts, no prayers. Dozens dead, thousands displaced, millions suffering from the heavy smoke — and yet it seems that the media response is to treat this as just another California fire, something typical and expected. But Katrina was not just another hurricane, and this is not just another fire. Some disasters are not so typical.
Our president and his acolytes at FOX News, of course, have political reasons for pretending California doesn’t exist — we are an inconveniently well-populated foil to his claims towards representing “America,” or to have been popularly elected — but the ignorance of the scale of the fires comes not only from conservatives. I blame hygge: in the last decade American ideas about “the good life” have rotated northward, borrowing not from the Mediterranean ideals of “Into the Tuscan Sun” but from Noma-inspired Nordic fantasias of coziness and Scandinavian seasonality, so much more applicable to the chilly Northeastern environs of our national tastemakers than the tired cliche of endless wine and sunshine available only to us lucky West Coasters. It is not today’s aspirations but yesterday’s dreams which disappeared in the flames, and isn’t it gauche to mourn something that we’re all supposed to be over already anyway?
That day in August, after we picked walnuts and apples and prunes, my aunt and I drove to three different grocery stores trying to hunt down more of a specialty product she’d bought and nearly run out of, a fermented sheep’s-milk butter from a small Petaluma dairy that she insisted I try. It was featherlight and funky, singular and transcendent, worth the effort to hunt down even if only to discover that it was a short-run seasonal product, and out of stock at the moment. That’s the beautiful thing about brewing wine and nocino, about eating fresh apples and ripe prunes and backyard purslane: it teaches you to wait, to understand that singular and transcendent gastronomic pleasures require patience, that the land cannot be hurried. It’s a pithy lesson amidst most food, mass-produced and shipped from a great distance, but in wine country the sheer unabashed sensuality of every flavor is its own argument and all it takes to convert a skeptic is one simple meal.
I don’t mean to shame those unaffected by the fires; from Hurricane Harvey to Harvey Weinstein, plus the omnipresent threat/spectacle of our own dear leader instigating nuclear war via Twitter (what a world), we are all a little wrung out on national disasters. Napa and Sonoma counties have money that Puerto Rico does not, and that matters. But the fact remains that this is not a local tragedy, or a regional disaster. The North Bay might be its own self-indulgent self-parody at times but it is also America’s culinary conscience, which seems like a rather niche morality until one considers exactly what food encompasses: agriculture and environment, transportation and labor, culture and pleasure.To live by a philosophy of food is to be embedded in ritual and tradition and principle, the ascendent theology of “clean eating” an ascetic dogma to which the North Bay can only shrug in bemusement at the idea that anyone might choose a chia pudding when creme brulee exists. Such flavorful impacts reach beyond the palate, as this beacon of localism and landedness has developed into an entire — and substantial — economy.There are independent food and wine producers all around the country, but where else in America do they constitute an internationally recognized identity? Losses in the North Bay are not only losses of wine and cheese and produce and fermented sheep’s-milk butter but losses of toasts and togetherness, hospitality and home; even if you don’t live there, even if you’ve never been there, the openness and ease of the wine country embodies an idea of home so fundamental that we all share it, that we all aspire to it, even if we’ve replaced the grapes with lichens and the sunshine with snowshowers and rebranded it as “hygge.”
The North Bay is not beyond critique. Racism and inequality are issues there as much as they are anywhere. The gentleness and gentility of wine country agricultural practice does not preclude exploitation, and the truth is that those who labor the most often savor the least, especially if they don’t have the right kind of papers. The sticker shock of housing in Santa Rosa is less than down the 101 in San Francisco, but that’s not saying much; my aunt and uncle have worked hard but they also got lucky, buying at a more affordable time, one unlikely to be revisited again soon.But no place is perfect, and if the humane vision proffered by the best of our gastronomic wonderland — of gathering, sharing, welcoming — is to be expanded, to be made more inclusive, it must first be rebuilt.
For that, we should all care, and thankfully, people have stayed for the effort.
Another tidbit from before this blog even existed: written in 2008. Edited in 2012, by which point the sentiment had already well passed, but oh well…
The biological clock is rumored to exist within all human females; it begins its supposed steady progression at menarche, the moment it is turned on, but the ticking doesn’t really start to thrum until one’s twenties, when the siren call of the ovaries becomes impossible to ignore.By the time a woman is in her thirties, the constant, metronomic hum of the unfulfilled biological clock drives her to the kind of madness chronicled on Sex and the City — compulsive preening, loss of sexual judgment, finding Carrie Bradshaw’s musings remotely interesting, etc.At least, that’s more or less what I’d always heard, what I’d absorbed and compiled from pop culture and my elders; though a human female myself, I’d never felt much of these strange uterine directives, and I was perfectly content to keep it that way.
Until…
It happened the week before my twenty-fifth birthday: a sudden, inexplicable, maddeningly inescapable baby-lust. I was helping my brother move into his new apartment and on trips to IKEA we were surrounded by small children, hordes of them shrieking and crying, and as I saw one and then another and then another I had to force myself to look away, to stop my goofy grin, to not reach out and pry someone else’s child from their arms and run off like a baby-snatching lunatic.
In short, the week before my twenty-fifth birthday I lost my goddamn mind.
In time this consuming obsession has faded into a steady background noise; it waxes and wanes depending on whether or not I’m living on food stamps or sleeping on somebody’s couch (the correlation isn’t what you might expect: in times of stability my lust is only for adventure, whereas the more my life is in shambles, the more my ovaries scream “You know what could fix this?!A BABY!!!!”Because, you guys, my ovaries are stupid, selfish bitches.)
I thought I could live out my days immune from such biological pressures. My parents have long been concerned about my willingness to spawn, a concern perhaps permanently engraved in their minds when, during my freshman year of high school, I walked around for two days with a sign on my back that read “DO NOT REPRODUCE WITH ME: I AM A CARRIER!” in response to a biology lesson discussing hereditary diseases. Among my high school nicknames was “asexual” (I wasn’t actually disinterested in sex, just more focused on getting into my dream college), and those who recall the Lauryn Hill song “Doo Wop (That Thing)” can hum along with the anthem my loving friends penned in my honor: “Hop, you know you better watch out/some asexuals are only about/bud-ding, bud-ding, bud-ding…”
It wasn’t that I never wanted kids, or that I hated kids. I’ve always liked kids a lot, actually, although my preference has generally run towards the more sentient, language-capable variety — you know, ones that have reached the age of reason. I grew up in a family of four but with a mountain of younger cousins, the bulk of whom I have gotten to know fairly well and all of whom I find to be totally rad little people.I dig kids, and kids have generally seemed to dig back, perhaps because my complete unwillingness to assume adult responsibilities ultimately renders me nothing more than an overgrown child myself. Whatever the reason, kids and I get along, and more than that, kids crack me up; when they’re still young enough to be youthfully unselfconscious every day is a dance party (with, yes, occasional tantrum-breaks), and then when they get older and completely, obsessively self-conscious about every minute detail of their lives they’re so easy to embarrass that every day is like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, except all the neuroses are actually developmentally appropriate.
None of these sentiments towards children or the eventual possibility of a family, however, prepared me for the baby-lust, the explosive announcement of my biological clock’s existence. It was immediate. It is visceral. And it will not go away. I have degenerated into an empty-headed cliche and although I am aware of this sudden transmogrification into a chick-lit heroine, it would seem that I am powerless to combat the forces of millions of years of evolutionary pressure. Suddenly some of my sexual fantasies are even ending in pregnancy, which up until this point has been among not only the least sexy but also simply the most horrifying scenarios imaginable. It is not okay, people!
I would probably be less weirded out if I did not feel so freakishly alone — not alone as a female (or a human being, really) suddenly desperate to reproduce, but as a thinking person so suddenly overwhelmed by biological impulse.(Seriously you guys, women who co-found their own feminist comedy nonprofits aren’t supposed to be so consumed by baby-lust… right?)It seems a cruel trick of nature, that it should pick me for this particular Darwinian gambit: congratulations on lasting a quarter-century, commitment-phobe — now get on with the baby-making! I was already bad at picking up guys when all I was interested in was no-strings-attached sex; now that I’ve lost my mind altogether how am I going to ever find a man crazy enough to want to mingle his DNA with my own (and then spend the next eighteen years being legally and financially responsible for the results)? I thought I could remain unbothered by the hookup culture until I was at least thirty, but now for the first time I’m having to contemplate the prospect of trying to land myself in a serious relationship. I don’t know much about those except that they seem to take a lot of effort, although to be fair even that is probably easier than raising a kid and suddenly that’s made its way to the top of my to-do list.
Of course, the sad truth is that I probably won’t be procreating for a good few years yet (actually, there is nothing sad about this truth — it is unequivocally a good thing, rationally speaking, although all my rationality seems to have recently absconded in the face of this newfound procreative urge). Practically, I am in a position absolutely untenable for having a kid, although if this new obsession drives me to be more pragmatic in getting together a career than I suppose it’s not entirely a bad thing. Also, humans are not yet a parthenogenetic species, which means finding at some point an XY-chromosomed partner for this particular venture. In fact, chances are pretty good that I’ll end up like Liz Lemon:ten years from now I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find myself accidentally stealing coworkers’ babies and suffering Mexican-cheese-curl-induced pregnancy scares, because even a healthy dose of professional success is apparently not enough to compensate for an unfulfilled baby-lust, a biological clock ticking away the moments until genetic irrelevance — which is what, in turn, drives a girl to off-brand Cheetos in the first place.
I can believe that. The brief span of my unfulfilled baby-lust has already been torturous enough; ten years from now I could probably be spitting Pulitzers and still crying into my cornflakes about precious little fingers and chubby cheeks and wispy hair and drool.
In the meantime, pass the off-brand Cheetos.
Maybe all I really needed to give birth to was this blog? A niece and nephew are doing me juuuust fine these days, y’all…
Written in September 2014. Not posted because WHY WOULD I INVITE THAT INTO MY LIFE eh fuck it though…
My life isn’t complicated enough. I think I’ll write about Israel.
Much ink has already been spilled about Israel, and Palestine; my purpose here isn’t to add to the cacophony but to clarify certain dimensions of Israel’s identity, to better understand the claims made about it (and about Palestine).
1.Israel is Jewish.
That Israel is a Jewish state is its primary identity; it was founded as such, explicitly, as a nation for the people without a homeland.I don’t have a great deal to say on this matter except to point to a masterful (and shockingly readable) essay by Judith Butler, explicating why those who claim that to criticize Israel is to be anti-semitic are, in fact, making the same error of conflation as the anti-semites who use Israeli actions as an excuse to, say, smash windows in French synagogues.The essay is beautifully reasoned and should be read by all.
2.Israel is colonialist.
This is, perhaps, the number-one complaint against Israel: that its actions against Palestine are those of a colonizer against an indigenous population, and while violent oppression of the indigenous certainly has had its supporters, its historical heyday seems to have largely passed.However, the colonial nature of Israel runs deeper than its actions, and even deeper than its founding.Zionism, as a movement, developed in Europe’s imperial age, and its entire philosophical context is predicated upon colonialism.That the Balfour Declaration was a British document owed not only to Britain’s comparatively liberal attitude towards the Jews, but also to the utter domination of the British empire, which had enough geopolitical credibility to resettle a global diaspora within a foreign land to which it held no legal title — a maneuver which takes both cojones and unequivocal international pre-eminence.Israel is not only a colonial project for its Jewish residents; Israel is a European colonialist project, an abdication of “the Jewish problem” to another continent and, as such, a projection of European imperialist power.
3.Israel is militarist.
Israel often claims that its partnership with the United States is necessary as a consequence of its geopolitical importance: that it is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.We’ll approach that claim next, but one important distinction between Israeli democracy and the other Western democracies to which it compares itself is that Israel is, fundamentally, a militarist state.In the post-WWII era, European democracies have demilitarized; Japan was forcibly demilitarized, to the same effect — the reduction of military power as a central pillar of national might.Even the United States, by far the largest military in the world, uses its armed forces less as a tool for national identity than Israel, where all citizens, regardless of gender or ability, must serve in the Israeli Defense Forces (Arab and Druze citizens, as well as ultra-Orthodox Jews, may be exempted; the exemption has been challenged for the ultra-Orthodox). As a practical result of this, every Israeli leader, in all sectors of the country, has been, at some point in their lives, a soldier.There is quite literally no other liberal democracy in the West where a similar statement can be made, because universal military conscription doesn’t existin any other liberal democracy in the West.Universal national service exists in other Western liberal democracies, but such programs also include options for non-military government work or even community service; if an Israeli version of AmeriCorps were available as an alternative to the IDF, the experience of youth would be radically different.Military service has often been a crucible for the formation of national values, generally patriotism, sacrifice, and adherence to authority.That the Israeli public opinion continues to shift rightward is the result of many factors, but one little-discussed is the values formation inherent to Israeli citizenship, which is militaristic.
When one holds a hammer, every problem looks like a nail; when every citizen is a soldier, war becomes an easy answer.
4.Israel is a liberal democracy.
Though this is a key dimension to Israel’s national and geopolitical identity, it is only a partial truth, mediated by point number one.If Israel is to be an explicitly Jewish state, then it is unlike any other Western liberal democracy in that it is not secular.If Israel is to be a truly liberal democracy, on the other hand, then a two-state solution with Palestine is actually less desirable than a fully integrated single state, with social and political equality between Palestinians and Jews.Any claim for both full democracy and full Jewishness must rest, then, on the total expulsion of the Palestinians — a realization which has been the central principle of Israeli strategy since its foundation, and which might have been morally and politically acceptable one hundred years ago, but in the era where wealthy governments are officially apologizing to indigenous groups is no longer.Intrinsic to contemporary notions of liberal democracy is pluralism.Israel can either be a pluralist democracy and therefore embody the word as it is now commonly understood, or a Jewish democracy and therefore distinct from every other Western liberal democracy to which it compares itself.
5.Hamas is a terrorist organization.
Yes, Hamas has used suicide bombers to terrorize the Israeli population.They are terrorists.But terrorism, by its very nature, implies just the asymmetry that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict typifies: terrorists do not engage in terrorism because they have the means to wage legitimate warfare, or to otherwise accrue power through peaceful, legitimate means.Terrorism is — without diminishing its horrific effects — a tool of the dispossessed.Moreover, terrorism does not necessarily delegitimize a cause.Numerous states have achieved independence through means which included terrorism, but the actions of, say, the Irish Republican Army did not negate the brutality of the English against the Irish.It is one thing to condemn violent actions which result in the loss of life; the loss of life is always tragic, whether in acts of terror or “legitimate” warfare.It is quite another, and logically insupportable, to claim that acts of terror invalidate a subject group’s claims to liberation.
A common statement made in support of Israel is that the nation has the right to defend its existence.But this is essentially meaningless: the Palestinians have the right to defend their own existence, too (as do all human beings).Moreover, it is not the fundamental claims of either group which are commonly subject to critique in Western media, but rather the methods invoked in creating those national identities.If Israel can object to the manner in which Palestinian leadership proceeds, then Israel must itself be open to similar critiques.Criticism of Israeli methodology is more important not because of any difference in identity or fundamental claims, but because of the asymmetry of power and resources; no matter how many tunnels are dug Israel is, indisputably, the stronger of the two combatants, and with great power comes great responsibility.
6.Israel exists because of the Holocaust.
This is true, but is nuanced by point number two in interesting ways.Before getting to that, though, it’s worth recalling the abhorrent history of violence against Jews in Europe — pogroms, expulsions, and genocide happened with regularity for some thousand-plus years before the Shoah.There is, to this day, a town in France whose name translates as “Death to Jews.”That Jewish idealogues saw in European colonialism a way out, a path to their own liberation, is utterly unsurprising, given the unceasing violence arrayed against them over the centuries.In many places, even in the twentieth century, even before the rise of the Nazis, even assimilated Jews were not full citizens of Europe.Zionism may have reached its apogee in 1948 but it developed over the nineteenth century, and the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917, well before anyone imagined six million dead in concentration camps.
Those concentration camps, however, were not a foregone conclusion. One of Hitler’s earlier ideas was not to murder every Jew he could get his hands on, but rather to export them all to Malaysia, an idea rejected because — in short — he thought it would outrage the British (that same nation which was the first to diplomatically support the export of Jews to Palestine). Against the brutality of the Holocaust, some may find this nothing more than a bit of historical trivia, but it reflects an uncomfortable truth about Zionism: that removing Jews from Europe was a goal shared by Zionists not with liberal, assimilated Jews, but with anti-semites who wanted them gone. Prior to the grotesquery of the Final Solution, where assimilation proved no guard against annihilation, the idea of moving to a hot, undeveloped, already-populated foreign land in the name of Jewishness was not exactly the most popular goal amongst the diaspora. That Israel now asserts centrality within the international Jewish identity (a notion rejected by many non-Israeli Jews, but shared by many others) is, therefore, a feat of historical re-engineering rather than an inevitability.
Let’s hope that in the two years since I first wrote this, that town in France has changed its name, eh?
-believing that there was anything I could do to “protect myself”
-knowing that there was nothing I could do to “protect myself”
*And many other people who believe that their good intentions are enough to justify the active harm they cause women and other-gendered victim of sexual predation and assault every day when they peddle this pile of unexamined garbage.
Any result that is not Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee is illegitimate and wrong! We must disregard the votes of millions of black women, who have overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton, to get what we want! Also identity politics is a stupid distraction from the *real* problems facing America, which can only be solved by class-based solidarity led by the white men writing Internet screeds saying so.
Berners, fall 2016:
DONNA BRAZILE EMAILED HILLARY CLINTON TO TELL HER THAT DURING THE DEBATE IN FLINT THERE WOULD BE A QUESTION ABOUT THE WATER CRISIS IN FLINT THIS IS PROOF OF COLLUSION AND VILLAINY AND DONNA BRAZILE IS AN UNTRUSTWORTHY INSIDER DEMOCRATIC PARTY/CLINTON HACK!
Also, Hillary Clinton is writing a book about her experiences with the campaign now? Geez, could she be any more of a cash-grabbing capitalist sellout?
Berners, fall 2017:
Donna Brazile is the only Democratic insider we can trust. Any critique or discussion of her insider claims, especially insinuations that writing a book about her experiences with the campaign might be motivating a sensationalism to move product like some kind of cash-grabbing capitalist sellout, are efforts to silence all black women, whom we should never disregard!
Berners, spring/summer 2020:
Wait — the vast majority of black women voted for a neoliberal stooge like Kamala Harris?! THIS IS ILLEGITIMATE AND WRONG! IDENTITY POLITICS ARE RUINING AMERICA!
It’s been a long few weeks for women (and men) who hold memories of assault and harassment as part of our lived landscapes. It’s been a good, surprising kind of pain, to see predation and abuse met with actual consequences, but those consequences nonetheless demand the excavation of our own scar tissue, all of those itches that so many of us have spent so much effort trying desperately not to scratch, and while satisfying it’s also really fucking exhausting. Trauma retriggered, emotional whiplash, crushing disappointment — it’s all there in every all-too-familiar headline, the story of Weinstein’s hired Mossad agents a caricature of the legal scuffle I endured as a naive nineteen-year-old assaulted by a family member who then hired a bloodhound lawyer who spent months sending me taunts and threats (he would expose the REAL reason I had left Caltech!, he promised, because one-third of college students transfer schools but it is only weaponized and discrediting when a young woman speaks against a prominent man); the pleasant shock of learning that the compact I’d assumed the world had made with Louis C.K., to overlook his sexual misconduct because “genius”, was a contract with limits, that what I’d heard about for years as a member of the comedy community was not as universally known as I’d thought; the less pleasant shock of seeing the photo of another prominent comedian, behaving just like a comedian, groping a sleeping woman on a plane, grinning at the camera.
I like Senator Al Franken — I’m not a Minnesotan so I have no call to vote for him, but if I were, then I would; not only because the near-extinction of the moderate Republican leaves essentially no non-abhorrent alternative to punching a ballot for (D), but because Senator Al Franken seems to take a balanced approach: serious about the issues, unserious about his own role, lacking the self-importance so easily found in politics and politicians.
Comedian Al Franken… I’m kind of meh about that guy. I know, I know, he shaped the glory days of “SNL,” but — well, were the glory days of “SNL” really that glorious, after all? When do we get to stop pretending that Chevy Chase is the peak of comedic brilliance? When do we admit that forcing collaborative efforts like sketch comedy into the white male worldview is creatively limiting and makes for a lot of shitty comedy?
When do we acknowledge that jokes can be cruel and oppressive as often as they can be funny and liberating?
To look at the photo of you groping Leeann Tweeden, Mr. Franken, is to see a picture of Comedian Al Franken, which you stated as much in your (second) apology — “clearly it was intended as a joke,” you said, and it is clear. “It’s just a joke” is the preferred hiding place of every comedian whose immaturity/thoughtlessness/malice/privilege/ignorance/hate — take your pick, there are plenty of examples for each — occluded their view of their own jokes and the hurt those jokes might cause, often recast as “offense” because that loaded term implies a certain thin-skinned sensitivity, rather than a genuine and justified injury. It’s all part of the game in a comedian’s non-apology, in which said comedian transforms a question of their own values and humaneness into a debate about free speech, because “free speech” is an easier banner to rally one’s self-importance than inclusive comedy, predicated as it is on empathy and humility.
But groping someone isn’t reducible to free speech; it crosses the boundary behind which comedians, and so many others, hide all their worst impulses. It’s not the worst of the recent assault and harassment allegations, not by a long shot, but it’s still gross and dehumanizing in the way that so many of the ways men treat women are gross and dehumanizing, ways that aren’t always — or ever — legally actionable but that nevertheless slowly chip away at female selfhood, that keep our eyes down and our voices low, that assert a hierarchy we can’t escape even asleep, even in a flak jacket, even at thirty thousand feet.
The photo was taken almost fifteen years ago, and people change. I have no doubt that Senator Al Franken is a different, and probably better, person than Comedian Al Franken — but that is precisely why Senator Al Franken should resign, rather than allow Comedian Al Franken to continue to write his apologies. Because Senator Al Franken seems to have an understanding of political optics, of the mechanisms of power and privilege, of what it means to stand for others — which can mean, sometimes, standing down.
Mr. Franken, your groping one woman is not as serious as Roy Moore assaulting and harassing multiple minors. It’s not as serious as Trump admitting to grabbing ’em by the pussy; it’s not as serious as anything Bill Clinton has been accused of, or, in the case of Monica Lewinsky, admitted to. But that’s just the point: as long as powerful men can act with impunity, they will, and until we as a society have a mechanism and a model for them to face consequences, they won’t. The question is not whether or not Senator Al Franken deserves to answer for the actions of Comedian Al Franken — the question is whether or not Senator Al Franken wants to set an example by which other powerful men, much worse, might be brought to account.
Because right now all we have is a group of powerful men pointing fingers at each other, each one trying to deflect attention from their own misdeeds by claiming someone else is worse, and somehow the only individual who seems to have paid any political consequence whatsoever is *Hillary* Clinton, because OF COURSE. I’ve been a woman my whole life, and unfairness ceased to surprise me a long time ago; when I was about nineteen, I think.
Given the partisanship of today’s Washington — and America — I don’t imagine that your stepping down, Mr. Franken, will immediately spur self-reflection on the right, that it might cause Roy Moore to drop out of his campaign or Donald Trump to resign his trophy presidency. I don’t even imagine it will do much to quell the right-wing outrage machine, which has proven itself adept over the decades at manufacturing anger and fear to suit its own needs regardless of reality. I’m not making an instrumentalist argument, at least not in the fashion being widely debated across the Internet, and certainly not in the fashion of the instrumentalist arguments offered in defense of Bill Clinton in the ’90s, recently and succinctly summarized — and deconstructed — by Matt Yglesias.
No, Mr. Franken. First read Rebecca Traister’s excellent essay, about the way sexual harassment and assault harms women along many axes, about how it not only exhausts us but dissuades us from our own ambitions, about how speaking up and finding justice is its own cost. And understand that I am asking not for your punishment, but simply for you to do the right thing. Because the argument I’m putting forth is not one of retribution, but restitution; of taking responsibility for causing harm, rather than making other people — women — responsible for the outcome of your actions.
It takes a lot of ego — a strong sense of self — to run for Congress. Asking to be a Senator is asking for moral responsibility, and to suggest that an ethics committee is suddenly necessary to determine culpability or consequence — at a moment when consequences have finally just materialized for sexual harassment and assault, for the rarest circumstance when there exists incontrovertible photographic proof of the incident, rather than the all-too-easily-disregarded words of a woman — is disingenuous, at the very least, an evasion of moral responsibility as obvious as so many comedians’ claims to free speech. Because just like those claims, that’s not the point: “free speech” and “I will cooperate with an investigation” both dodge the basic adult obligation not to hurt other people. Not, Mr. Franken, because what you did specifically to Leeann Tweeden was so hurtful — though it was — but because, in ceding your agency to rectify the situation, in forcing other people (women) to do the work of making things right, you are continuing to exact a price, continuing to benefit from women’s emotional labor, continuing to build an edifice on our scar tissue.
There’s another choice, and it’s a simple one: Be a goddamn grownup.
Bill Clinton maintained his own personal power by deploying the defenses of the right (“This is a private matter!”), rather than affirming the legitimacy of women’s experiences and participating in the sometimes-hard-and-personally-costly work of dismantling the patriarchy. Roy Moore and Donald Trump are pretty committed to their own irredeemability; they dismissed their own humaneness well before anyone else ever did. But you, Mr. Franken — you actually seem like a decent human being and a good progressive.
There are plenty of people — including women — arguing that that, in itself, is reason for you to remain in the Senate; that decent humans and good progressives are a rare enough breed that we can’t afford to lose a single one. But the notion of irreplaceability has been used persistently to keep women and people of color from accessing power, because the men wielding it are just too damn good to let go — it’s an idea that protected not only Louis C.K. but Weinstein and Wieseltier, and frankly, it’s a steaming pile of bullshit. There are plenty of people who can tell good jokes, and produce good movies, and nurture good writing without assaulting, harassing, or otherwise discriminating against at least half the world’s population (“at least half” because, let’s be honest, if that’s the way they treat women, they’re probably not super great on their interactions with gay men or non-white men). And the reality is, the world is full of decent human beings and good progressives.
Minnesota is full of decent human beings and good progressives.
So, if you really want to be a hero, then make a real sacrifice: find a few decent human beings and good progressives who would like to be a senator from Minnesota — especially women, especially women of color — and resign so that they can take your place. Mention them by name. Support their campaigns. Create a whole new template for responding to the failings of masculinity, one that’s generous and stands in genuine solidarity with women, rather than one that lives in defensiveness and self-justification. No, Roy Moore and Donald Trump probably won’t follow your example, but if they’ve become our ethical barometer then we’re all screwed, and the point is, somebody will probably follow your example, or learn from it, and women will be empowered by it, instead of exhausted by the endless demands of speaking out! that only compounds victimhood.
The first time I was assaulted, I reported it. I spoke out, and for that, I was hounded, taunted, and threatened for months.
The second time I was assaulted, I said nothing.
It can’t only be women’s responsibility to speak out, to arbitrate consequences, to manage this entire conversation. Maybe all men can’t get their shit together right away — but you, Mr. Franken? You’re a progressive. You’re a feminist. You believe women, and you believe in women. Prove it. Hold up your end of the bargain, because women have been holding up more than our share of it for years now, and we’re pretty damn tired.
Women have dragged sexual assault, harassment, and misogyny into the public consciousness once again, and men seem to be taking notice. Notice is nice. But what we need now to move things forward is the hard work of dismantling, of some real heavy lifting.
I hear men are supposed to be good at that kind of thing.
Disqus has apparently decided that I am a spammer. Because spammers always read posts like this and leave comments like this:
The structure of the US Senate is a very real problem. Relying on states’ rights as a solution is a terrible, terrible, terrible idea.
States’ rights are not a friend to progressivism. The political philosophy of states’ rights was used to uphold slavery and Jim Crow. It is the reason why, after Texas exercised its states’ rights and defunded/closed almost all women’s health centers in the state between 2010 and 2014, maternal mortality *doubled* there, in only a four-year period. States’ rights have literally hurt and killed millions of marginalized people throughout American history, not because it’s a value-neutral political philosophy that just so happens to be wielded by shitty people, but because the entire purpose of states’ rights is to concentrate existing power structures.
Relying on the political or moral wisdom of John C. Calhoun will never get us to anything like justice, because that guy was garbage, as absolute and irredeemable as the states’ rights philosophy he propagated.
What do we do instead? Lots of things. Lots of small, difficult things, that add up to a more representative, more just society. We can’t change the Senate without scrapping the Constitution altogether — it is written into the original document that the “two senators from every state” design cannot be altered by amendment (the only time such a distinction is made in the Constitution) — and, as appealing as a Constitutional convention might sound, it’s something that the right-wing has been preparing for for the last couple decades, so the likelihood that a new Constitution would do anything but take us substantially backwards is low. Instead, we’ve gotta work with what we’ve got.
We can’t change the principle of two senators from every state — but we can resolve our colonialist holdovers and incorporate the likes of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and of course DC as states. (Sure, it’ll only happen with a Democratic supermajority, but if we put in the work, that’s not impossible.)
The Senate might not be amendable, but other anti-democratic features of the federal government are. If we can’t end the racist, elitist legacy of the electoral college (which was created primarily as a mechanism to enact the 3/5 compromise) via Constitutional amendment, then we can continue the efforts of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to find a legislative workaround. We can support efforts to end gerrymandering, and advocate for a constitutional amendment (at both state and federal level) requiring all Congressional districts to be drawn by non-partisan commissions. We can expand the size of the House of Representatives, to eliminate the absurd disparity between representation in populous states versus low-population states.
And we must, absolutely, work to protect and expand voting rights, to extend the franchise to EVERYONE. Voter registration matters. Felon re-enfranchisement matters. Fighting against voter ID laws matters. Early voting matters. Voting by mail matters. Accessibility of voting — for the disabled, for non-English speakers, for everyone — matters. Combating the baseless and pernicious right-wing fantasy of voter fraud matters. Voter mobilization just elected a Democratic senator in frickin’ ALABAMA. It must, absolutely, be the heart of *every* progressive political strategy, because without it, we have no chance whatsoever.
The appeal of states’ rights is that we can do things better if we can just go it alone — but “going it alone” requires that those of us in places like California and New York abandon all those at-risk women in Texas, or the hundreds of thousands of committed voters — especially people, especially women, of color — who turned out to elect Doug Jones. It’s a strategy of sacrificing others to save ourselves, and that shit is neither just nor progressive; it’s the ideology of John C. Calhoun, and that guy can fuck himself.
The only way for America to ever live up to the ideals professed (but not embodied) at its founding is for those of us who believe in those ideals to stick together and fight together — because, to borrow a phrase, we’re stronger together, and because justice for some is no justice at all.
In the few moments the comment was live, it got multiple upvotes before getting flagged. Not sure if that’s a reassuring measure of the Internet commentariat, or if it makes Disqus’s ‘spam’ designation even more absurd… but if we’re having a national discussion about the mechanisms by which our various Internet/social media algorithms hinder our collective political discourse, well, I might have found another one.
Note: I use “MCU” here to refer strictly to the film franchise, not to any of the Marvel television properties.
Acknowledgments: thanks to all those who engaged in a fascinating and deep discussion of superheroes with me via Facebook. There are few analyses of the topic that center on women’s perspectives or include the voices of many women of color, and much of this essay grew out of a lengthy thread that featured both. Special shout-out to Robin, who in addition to contributing quite a bit to that conversation has also been reviewing the Marvel movies on her own blog, which served as another inspiration.
The United States, we are told — we see in headlines every day — can’t agree on much right now, and we can agree with the international community even less. Political turbulence is fracturing society, pitting brother against brother, but one cultural property has apparently managed to transcend (or at least navigate) such dramatic social rupture: I’m talking, of course, about the MCU, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the spectacular, superhero-addled, money-printing global juggernaut that has, over the last ten years and twenty movies, made billions upon billions upon billions of dollars for its parent company Disney and even bested their sibling franchise Star Wars to become the most profitable in Hollywood history.
The MCU is certainly popular. It’s often fun. But is it any good?
*
The shortest answer is that it can be. “Black Panther,” released earlier this year and the highest-grossing non-Avengers “one-off” film in the MCU pantheon, is an impeccable and daring version of a traditional origin story which directly engages with the United States’s colonialist history and suggests a radical, Afro-futurist redemption. That this is not your typical take on the hero’s journey is evident from one of the earliest scenes, a twist on “Hamlet” which subverts the core of the Western canon’s greatest classic: it is the good king who slays his brother here, and the dramatic arc of the movie reaches its climax when a ghostlike vision of T’Chaka confesses to his princely son that, in fact, he was wrong to do so. Take that, Claudius! Take that, centuries of Claudius knock-offs who have so thoroughly infested Western storytelling that we might say they have effectively colonized it! Another advantage of contemporary storytelling as compared to Elizabethan tales is that we are now — at least some of us, at least director Ryan Coogler — able to imagine a greater space for women, an outcome for Ophelia beyond her own collapse; indeed, it is the wisdom of T’Challa’s love interest, Nakia, which ultimately resolves the film’s central conflict (perhaps her concomitant empathy and anti-colonialism are the truest mechanisms for reviving Ophelia). It falls to the unapologetic blackness of “Black Panther” to repurpose an old saw, and the film succeeds so fully because it does so with extraordinary technical skill, political intelligence, and narrative care.
Neither is it the sole example of excellence within the MCU. 2017’s “Thor: Ragnarok,” the third one-off film to center the Norse god, was billed as a comedic refashioning of its previously overserious main character (first introduced to us in a plodding effort at Shakespeareanism directed by none other than the most famous living Hamlet himself, Kenneth Branagh), but it is much more than that: like its successor, “Ragnarok” is a remarkably coherent decolonialist delight, less ideologically overt than “Black Panther” but no less powerful for its allegory and abstraction — that is, if one can read it. Disturbingly, nearly every North American review of the film missed nearly all of its politics, embedded as they are in the visual language of Maori and Australian aboriginal designs which — though apparently rather obvious to antipodean viewers — drew blanks from everyone except the Village Voice and a website rooted in anti-colonialism and black liberation. One normally perceptive reviewer described the production design on Jeff Goldblum’s highly stylized planet of Sakaar — an aesthetic which Maori director Taika Waititi developed meticulously, to emulate aboriginal and Pasifika motifs without culturally appropriating them, which culminates in Thor escaping from Sakaar and returning to Asgard to confront his plunderous, imperialist sister in a plane painted like the goddamn Aboriginal flag — as “80s-arcade-inspired.”
Suffice it to say, the reviews of “Ragnarok” are not exactly an endorsement of the cultural curiosity of North American audiences.
There are a couple of baffling points about this, not least that we live in a digital world where it is enormously easy to discover other points of view, to educate oneself about a symbology that, once learned, is about as blatant as Captain America’s shield. That North American reviewers failed to look beyond their own assumptions when engaging with the work of an indigenous director is a deep indictment of North American indigenous erasure, of the way we still project a kind of “terra nullis” onto the cultural spaces inhabited by indigenous artists. That reviewers would fail to reconsider their perceptions when dealing with a film whose narrative is an explicitly anti-colonialist fable in which the son of fortune discovers that his inheritance is one built not on benevolent dictatorship but plunder and violent conquest, who attempts to confront an agent of that violence, is dispossessed, finds himself without status, property, or identity, builds solidarity with similarly dispossessed people, returns to confront the agent of plunder and violent conquest once more only to now recognize that the only way forward is to burn his inheritance to the fucking ground, to destroy it altogether and become not so much a king as a cosmic refugee — that this story can be read by anyone as lighthearted or apolitical or confused betrays the egregious vacuum at the heart of popular understandings of imperialism, oppression, and white allyship, to which “Ragnarok” offers a more revolutionary instruction than even “Black Panther” can muster: when it comes to the inheritances of colonialism, the only just response of the privileged is to blow that shit up.
Sure, each movie suffers from overlong fight scenes — an occupational hazard for our cinematic superheroes — but then again, excellence doesn’t mean the same thing as perfection.
*
To read the responses of (most) superhero fans to any critique or questioning of their beloved genre is a study in reflexive defensiveness, a refusal to entertain the idea that the stories, characters, and cultural properties into which they have invested so much of their time, money, and sense of self might be less than worthwhile. But now that the MCU has brought in more money than god and led to two movies whose excellence extended not only to their visuals, their humor, and their narrative but also to an incredible political coherence the likes of which is rarely found in even Oscar-winning or arthouse films — now that the possibility of not just goodness but greatness has been validated and replicated — can we admit that most of the MCU is not very good?
Some of the movies are fine, perfectly serviceable ways to spend one hundred and twenty minutes, maybe even worth spending fifteen bucks to see in theaters if you’re going with friends or looking to beat the heat. 2011’s “The Avengers” brings Our Heroes together for the first time in a series of spectacles that, despite their Manhattan (or Cleveland, where the film was shot)-destroying consequences, remain legible, where the sheer implausibility of the stakes doesn’t divorce them entirely from characters and story. It might sound like damnation by faint praise, but both the DC universe and so many action and disaster movies in the past demonstrate all too readily the challenge of using mass destruction as a plot point. Director Joss Whedon is generally overrated and the relentless quippiness of his dialogue in this film is, as in all of his projects, wearying — but the mechanics are there, and things mostly hang together. (His second outing, “The Avengers: Age of Ultron,” betrays the cool weirdness of its title and, in attempting to outdo the spectacle of its predecessor, ends up so incoherent that it manages to be simultaneously too-serious and too-cute, investing vastly more screen time and narrative space in an out-of-left-field, stilted, and unearned “romance” between Natasha Romanoff and Bruce Banner than in any consequences for the building-leveling urban destruction unleashed by the Hulk/Wanda and Iron Man in Johannesburg. The desperate desire to one-up past movies, and the willingness to ignore characterization in order to do so, has proven a consistent storytelling priority for the Marvel team-up movies, and it also explains why those team-up movies continue to get worse and worse.)
Complaining about quippiness in the MCU might seem ungenerous, as it is a series essentially founded on quippiness — the first film, the one on whose success the entire franchise was built, is 2008’s “Iron Man,” and Robert Downey Jr.’s titular character is nothing if not quippy, and who doesn’t love a wisecracking playboy billionaire, anyway? Well… I don’t, at least not when the character, despite repeated feints towards growth, essentially ends there. A lot of people enjoyed “Iron Man,” overlooking the misogyny which opened the film — in the first scene Tony Stark sexually harasses a US soldier, and moments later the movie deploys one of my least favorite misogynist tropes, that of the reporter who sleeps with her subject, only to dispose of said reporter (whose pointed questions to Tony Stark about war profiteering are painted as bitchy and self-serving when coming out of her mouth, but profound when Tony Stark asks himself the same thing later, in his non-shrill non-lady voice!) in an impossibly catty dialogue between Pepper Potts, Paragon of Stand-Quietly-By-Your-Man-Until-He-Deigns-To-Notice-You Virtue, and Slutty Overbearing-Reporterface-Who-Dares-To-Do-Her-Job-And-Ask-Relevant-Questions-Of-A-Public-Figure McSlutson, whom Pepper literally refers to as “trash.” The only trash is a system in which scenes like this are written, produced, and consumed without complaint, but hey, it’s not like denigrating journalists as whorish, self-interested enemies of the public good could ever have any real-life negative consequences, right?
If I’m harping a lot on the first five minutes of a long movie, it’s only because they are abhorrent enough to deserve it. Comics fans may be capable of projecting other stories onto Pepper Potts, but in the movies she’s nothing more than a Good Girl (and, once they are in a relationship, a Good Woman), a mechanism for Tony Stark to measure his self-improvement rather than her own independent character. I admit the bias that I bring to Iron Man — my childhood experiences have left me deeply resistant to tales of The Boy Genius, And Also The Non-Genius But Still Very Smart Ladies Who Help Make Him Great — but that bias serves mostly to refocus my gaze towards the female characters who are invariably badly served by this narrative type. Before he’s ever a garbage boyfriend Tony Stark is a garbage boss, one who forces his assistant to end relationships for him because he’s too busy Boy Geniusing to treat women like human beings; why would anyone be interested in watching Pepper Potts accept his abuse? What value is there in having a romantic relationship with such an asshole except to be The Special One, The One Girl In All The World Worth Treating Decently, which is itself an implicit validation of the idea that all the rest of the girls in the world are not?
If the gender politics of “Iron Man” and its sequels are actively terrible, it clears a somewhat higher bar in its critique of the military-industrial complex (the same critique that the shrill slutty lady reporter dared to make in the first moments of the first film, only to be punished by the narrative for it so that the Menfolk! could go on three movies’ worth of Important Personal Journeys to discover that she was right all along, for which she gets zero credit, because honestly who cares about that broad?) — unlike the films’ treatment of women there’s at least a glimmer of intention to engage seriously with the topic, to address the human consequences of weapons manufacturing. Of course the execution of this critique is not just muddled but mangled beyond any point of meaning or coherence, which is perhaps inevitable for a work that wanted to interrogate the post-9/11 state of permanent war without actually taking a political stance that might potentially alienate any of the young white men who comprised its target demographic; out of such an impossible paradox it’s not surprising that the movie’s conclusion is best summarized as “War is bad but also necessary but weapons of war can hurt innocent people, so instead of making those this one guy at the top of the military-industrial complex will stop making them and instead just make one superweapon, totally under his own non-democratic control, but you can trust him because he’s quippy and likable and has a Good Woman at his side.” Sure, the second and third “Iron Man” movies attempt to introduce some complexity into this formulation (shockingly, the military isn’t entirely comfortable with Tony Stark’s choices! Here’s another super-suit, which is literally called “War Machine,” but it’s OK because it’s ironic! But not really! Tony’s unhappy with what he’s doing, but, well, he’s just gonna keep on doing it! Here, have a tiresome volume of quips to distract you from the fact that none of this hangs together!) but they mostly proceed, as so many blockbusters do, on spectacle and charisma, cashing in on CGI and Robert Downey Jr.’s easy, misogyny-masking charm. Such adulation can bring its own unintended consequences, but thus far RDJ has avoided the pitfalls that have ensnared his peers or his younger self and dutifully maintained the bankability of the franchise.
Of course, he does not bear that burden alone, but rather shares his leadership with Chris Evans’s Captain America. Of the original six Avengers — Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, Hawkeye, and Black Widow — two have never had standalone features (Hawkeye, because why would you unless you’re Joss Whedon using “Age of Ultron” as a kind of beta-test for a Hawkeye backstory which is another reason why that film mostly sucked, and Black Widow, because why would audiences want to pay money to see a story centering a compelling female character when she could be repeatedly thrown into other, male-driven stories as a supportive best friend or sudden love interest instead?), while the Hulk’s limited emotional range as a character, coupled with his pre-“Avengers” recasting and the long box-office shadow of Ang Lee’s pre-MCU “Hulk,” has granted him nothing more than an origin story. The remaining threesome each have their own standalone (ish, in the case of the Cap) trilogy at their backs, the three episodes of “Iron Man” an indulgent celebration of rich white men of techno-capitalist ego, the first two “Thor” movies eminently forgettable bro-ish mediocrities which left their demigod hero the least-popular MCU leading man until the revelation that was “Ragnarok” — and then, there is the Captain.
“Captain America: The First Avenger,” the origin story of Steve Rogers, supersoldier, is — much like the first “The Avengers” — a perfectly serviceable and competently made film, if not a particularly memorable one (except for Steve’s final radio call with Agent Carter, the only scene in any MCU movie from Phase I or Phase II which actually manages to achieve the romance for which it is reaching). The story is helped by the fundamental likability of a main character whom every MCU script is very careful to avoid calling “Mr. Rogers,” an everyman underdog who believes in decency and punching Nazis, whose premise rests in the virtue of right action, rather than the cool-guy distraction of quippiness and shiny toys. Cap returns for a semi-solo outing in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” with Black Widow as his temporary sidekick, until Anthony Mackie’s delightful Sam Wilson/Falcon can be fully introduced over the course of the movie; for a long time “Winter Soldier” was widely regarded as the best of the MCU, and its success became the springboard for directing partnership Joe and Anthony Russo (Clevelanders, and Benedictine boys no less) to move onto more ambitious MCU projects, including the recent “Infinity War.”
“Winter Soldier” is, in most respects, a good and well-constructed movie, whose narrative and thematic shortcomings only become evident in their follow-up, although the most problematic of these is obvious even upon first viewing. The notion that HYDRA, the Nazi-adjacent apparatus of supervillainy which Captain America appeared to successfully defeat in “The First Avenger,” not only secretly flourished in his absence but has, in fact, engineered Every Bad Thing In Recent History is more than preposterous; it’s extraordinarily insulting to the majority of humans (who create history, bad and good together, by virtue of our own choices and agency, thankyouverymuch), and it also undermines the very point it attempts to make — such conspiracies appeal precisely because they collapse the incoherent chaos of human experience into a single, easily digestible narrative of power operating in a decipherable world. It’s been a common critique of the MCU that it has suffered from a “villain problem,” with Thor’s conniving and unpredictable brother Loki the only memorable antagonist until the belated arrival of the extraordinarily effective Killmonger. But Loki works for the exact reason that HYDRA doesn’t, crowd-surfing on the random maliciousness of whomever he encounters rather than attempting to engineer overcomplicated supervillainy at the outset, which seems like a fairly pedestrian observation until one recognizes that this is, in fact, how most actual human villainy operates, ad-hoc and improvisational, that this is both its greatest strength and greatest weakness, and that pretending a single, small cabal of Bad Guys bear sole responsibility for All The Bad Things is a cop-out at every possible level. (Do these Bad Guys infiltrate families, to enact domestic violence and child abuse? Are they priests, doctors, and coaches? Is Brock Turner part of HYDRA? Are the same Bad Guys responsible for both the KKK as well as anti-colonialist violence? Who the fuck mistakes “HYDRA did everything!” for good writing?!)
Such vociferous disagreement might seem like railing against a relatively minor point in an otherwise well-put-together film, but it is central to the (many) failings of the successor to “Winter Soldier.” To read about “Captain America: Civil War” is to be constantly reassured that, in spite of the reviewer’s myriad objections, it is a good movie, a bizarre kind of gaslighting explainable only by its comparison to the genuinely execrable “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” with which it shared certain traits, as well as a release year. But not being a terrible movie in nearly every conceivable way does not actually make “Civil War” a good movie, because it’s not. It has good moments — legible fight choreography (made interesting and fun by the introduction of Ant-Man’s scale effects and Spider-Man’s web-slinging into the melee), two new-ish characters (Ant-Man and Spider-Man, once again) whose quips are fresh and funny, and the very presence of T’Challa, the Black Panther, whose plotline is the only one in the movie that is not nauseating — but those moments are cladding around a fundamentally ugly armature, a structure derived from an attempt at moral and political argument so badly formed that it’s easier to believe it willfully bad than to imagine that educated adults might actually think so simplistically.
Why is the core conflict of “Civil War” so odious? Well, in large part, because it’s built on the worst element of “Winter Soldier,” the notion that HYDRA and its agents have infected and controlled so many levers of power that democratic institutions and, indeed, even the idea of democracy itself have become suspect. And this anti-democratic position is delivered by no less than Captain America, who imagines himself a lone wolf arrayed against the corruption of “agendas” — if that sounds so vague as to be essentially meaningless, it is, and it’s also directly from the film, the totality of Cap’s argument against any kind of international agreement to regulate superhero behavior. And here the worst impulses of “Winter Soldier” reach fruition, for nobody in “Civil War” bothers to suggest to the Cap that “agendas” are, in fact, a necessary precondition for democracy, that political self-interest is endemic to the human experience, and that it is through the labor of inclusive, representative institutions that democracy operates to determine which agendas are worth honoring for the betterment of all, and which to cast aside. No: with the wind of HYDRA infiltration at his back, Captain America’s distrust of democracy is understood by the movie to be not only justified but just, validated by a truly absurd eulogy offered by Sharon Carter at the funeral of her aunt, the Agent Carter with whom Cap shared romantic affection in “The First Avenger,” in which it is suggested that opposition to widely held beliefs is inherently morally correct, that iconoclasm can never be just an empty pose, that to be a dick in a sea of kindness is to be somehow noble or courageous so long as you are the lone dick, that rebellion, righteousness, and right are intrinsically intertwined.
This is political philosophy imagined by an angry, and not particularly bright, fourteen-year-old; it’s the self-indulgent self-assurance of a grounded teenager petulant about having their phone taken away. That anyone deigns to take Steve Rogers seriously — that the movie makes him out to be the hero — is frankly vile, and undermined by even a minute’s reflection on the film’s opening action sequence: who invited the Avengers to Lagos? On whose intelligence did they discern the bombing plot? Who provided transportation, who granted visas, who notified the Nigerian police and military? The MCU often likes to pretend that “Tony Stark’s money” and “only the United States has any meaningful government infrastructure” are enough to answer these questions, when it bothers to acknowledge that such infrastructure even exists — this is, after all, a franchise whose first moment of triumph featured Tony Stark cruising down the Pacific coastline in a super-suit, flying to 80,000 feet in a busy patch of airspace near the Santa Monica Pier easily recognizable to many Southern Californians as the LAX takeoff zone, a moment whose triumph rested less on Tony and more on the legions of pilots, air traffic controllers, NTSB investigators, and avionics engineers whose decades of labor in negotiating global safety standards and procedures for civil aviation prevented a major disaster, the very possibility of which the entitled and oblivious Iron Man never even considers, because bureaucracy that works well becomes invisible even when its clear necessity and benefit provide more-than-ample rejoinder to Steve Rogers’s preening confusion of conscience and ego — but if the central conflict of your story is about supranational regulation and you even take the time to throw in a “joke” about Wanda Maximoff probably being denied a visa, well, the absolute and complete lack of care in world-building devoted to these same issues is going to become pretty obvious pretty fast.
(Speaking of lack of care: this movie is so bad that it features two white, middle-aged, sandy-haired men employed by the United States government, both of whom are named Ross. It is damn near unbelievable that any point in the years-long development, making, and marketing of this product, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, nobody spoke up and said “Hey, fidelity to the comics is great and all, but this could be really confusing to most of our audience — there’s a reason that ‘Don’t give two separate characters the same name’ is a basic rule across pretty much all narrative forms — so what if we call this new guy Agent Everett, instead?” Though a minor point, the carelessness that it evinces is truly astonishing, and points towards similar carelessness throughout the MCU.)
And what of that Tony Stark money? Captain America’s egoism forms one-half of the titular Civil War, and so Iron Man’s must constitute its opposite. Willingness to sign the Sokovia Accords might be an admirable bit of growth for a character defined by his ostensible inability to play well with others, if not for the loathsome motivations ascribed to Tony’s newfound institutional inclinations (plus the obvious point that, as the scion of a massive multinational corporation with a long history of government contracts, Tony has spent the entirety of his cosseted life enveloped, supported, and cushioned by institutions, so this is hardly some kind of major turnaround). Rather than accept genuine responsibility — and concomitant consequences — for creating Ultron and nearly single-handedly unleashing a deadly AI on the world, Tony projects the possibility of his own absolution onto the Accords, even suggesting that his signature might win back his momentarily estranged girlfriend, the long-suffering Pepper Potts. The deep stupidity and selfishness of each position in this so-called “civil war” reaches its denouement in its final fight scene, where it’s revealed that Cap’s childhood friend Bucky Barnes — the Winter Soldier himself, framed for the bombing of the UN which killed T’Challa’s father, T’Chaka — assassinated Tony Stark’s parents while under HYDRA control. That the resulting fight is less between Iron Man and Captain America than it is Tony Stark and Steve Rogers is meant to be meaningful, but only comes off as laughable and pathetic when one considers that Tony Stark is a middle-aged billionaire throwing punches because, rather than processing his adolescent trauma, he makes patently ridiculous choices to perform that grief in Stark-designed AI environments in auditoria full of strangers before handing out money to all assembled, a desperate gamble to be liked — “Look at me, I’m smart, I’m sympathetic, and I’m rich! Here’s some cash PLEASE LIKE MEEEEEEE!” — so transparent that it would be unbelievable in someone with his public prominence except that our current US president is still clamoring for the approval of his long-dead father with all the bumbling, obvious insistence of a toddler and he’s seventy-two goddamn years old, so I suppose wealth and privilege can coddle one more than I’d previously thought possible.
The emptiness of both Steve and Tony’s positions is evident in the presence of so many secondary characters, the vast majority of whom have no discernible motivation in regards to the Sokovia Accords. Yes, military man War Machine sides with the government, and a scared Wanda backs Cap — but that nobody else has any real stake in this fight is evidenced most clearly by Tony’s recruitment of Spider-Man, a literal child, whose narrative involvement is basically nonsensical. This emptiness gives lie to the title — this conflict is less of a civil war than a showdown between two egotists — but then, “civil war” has always been something of a construct; the idea that brother fought against brother in the United States of the 1860s is viable only for a narrow range of “brother,” one predicated on whiteness, because for black Americans the US Civil War offered no moral complication and was, indeed, not a discrete event, but merely a brief moment during the centuries-long fight for full personhood and citizenship in which white-on-white violence notably convulsed. Such pat generalizations as “pitting brother against brother” and even “civil war” make for nice rhetorical shorthand (see: the second sentence of this essay), but they also occlude the narratives and experiences of those who fit less easily into such simplified formulations.
Such as: T’Challa. While Steve Rogers and Tony Stark descend into fisticuffs, Wakanda’s newest monarch — who has been pursuing Bucky Barnes out of vengeance for his father — instead confronts the actual villain of the film, a character whose presence is so inessential that I can’t quite remember his name (Zemo, I think?). The Bad Guy mumbles some generic Bad Guy speech and attempts to commit suicide; T’Challa stops him, and demands justice instead. It’s something of a premonition of “Black Panther,” a movie whose argument is rooted not in reluctant or justified violence but rather in genuine, MLK-inspired nonviolence — Wakanda might hold nearly all of the world’s vibranium but it’s only been made into weapons of mass destruction by the likes of Klaue and Howard Stark, colonialist interlopers who align with and enable the logic of Killmonger, the imperialist hegemony of the United States come to life in a single, deadly body (and yes, it is a damn shame that a coherent critique of US hegemony can only be mounted in pop culture when that hegemony is represented by a black body). But the fact remains that, across all of the MCU, T’Challa is unique in being the sole superhero to actively reject violence as a tool; it’s not a universal rejection — it wouldn’t be an MCU movie without an overlong fight scene, after all — but in seeking genuine alternatives to conflict resolution, T’Challa is the man Steve Rogers imagines himself to be.
*
Who does the United States imagine Steve Rogers to be? The cultural value of Captain America — whose captaincy extends only to a small portion of America, which is to say, the United States of America — illuminates not only how profoundly wrong Steve Rogers is throughout “Civil War,” but also the necessary value of politics itself. Because we don’t need to wonder about how the US would react to such a hero; we have a historical record, because we have a historical analog, and the answer is that we would first elect him president, and then shoot him in the face. A scrawny Irish Catholic from Brooklyn, a scrawny Irish Catholic from Boston — Cap-as-JFK is less of a reach than it might first appear. Steve Rogers repeatedly applied to join the fight in World War II, despite multiple medical deferments, until a doctor recruited him for the purpose of giving him superpowers via genetic manipulation. John F. Kennedy’s superpower was his father’s vast wealth and connections (the truest superpower of all in our world, and if it’s gauche — or Randian — to glorify any of the one percent as heroic it’s only in contrast to our current overlords of inherited oligarchy), which he used to gain medical certification impossible for a mere mortal in his physical condition (which is to say, chronically ill), a neat inversion of the all-too-typical story of money and power being deployed to refuse military service (coughBushcoughTrumpcough). In high school I was taught that Kennedy won the presidency due to his youth and good looks and Nixon’s penchant for televised flop-sweat, but the truth is that he was already a prominent war hero, whose efforts were at least as absurdly over-the-top as any Howlin’ Commando mission (Kennedy worship has dimmed over the decades, and an informal survey of politically engaged thirtysomethings found universal oblivion to that cultural touchstone of the baby boomers known as the PT-109). He even had his own Bucky Barnes, deconstructed into a pair: the how-homoerotic-is-this-though devotional friendship of Lem Billings, and the wartime loss of his older brother Joseph, who — jealous of his little brother’s heroic stature — volunteered for a mission that sounds closer to a comic-book plot than an actual military plan (not least because it was named — wait for it — Operation Anvil), an experimental form of proto-drone warfare which cost Joe Jr. his life and left the perennially sickly Jack to assume the mantle of their father’s overweening political ambition.
Captain America debuted, in comics, during the jingoistic era of World War II, and lasted until 1954, when the tempo of such wartime jingoism became unsustainable. His return was teased in a fortuitously timed issue released in November 1963, the same month that devoted Communist Lee Harvey Oswald fired from a window in the Texas Book Depository into Dealey Plaza, abruptly ending the life of the world’s most prominent Cold Warrior. Cap returned in full form the following spring, as the US struggled to manage its grief; resurrected into the burgeoning tumult of the sixties Cap quickly rejected his status as a patriotic symbol, just as the slain thirty-fifth president was converted by hagiography and conspiracy theory from flawed human to an all-purpose symbol, emptied of meaning by ubiquity, and the same desperate memorialization that sought to give meaning to the shocking brutality of the charming, handsome, obscenely wealthy, Most Powerful Man In The World having his brain exploded onto his beautiful wife for all the world to see informed the re-emergence of Captain America, equally powerful, equally symbolic, but able to hit back in the superhuman way that the world was so stunned to discover JFK could not. The Cap that emerged in the wake of the sixties assassinations turned his back on institutional power, it’s true, but in his cross-country motorcycle-tripping he developed his conscience in the context of encountering the marginalized, siding with student protestors and civil rights activists as he met them and saw them square off against the power of the police. The Cap of the MCU never encounters such otherness, living the entirety of his resurrection in a cocoon of narrow power and privilege — how can he possibly comprehend democracy as a tool of, by, and for the people if he so steadfastly refuses to meet any of those people?
I searched for “JFK Captain America” to see if this was old news. This was the only result, but it turns out Basquiat and I had the same idea. (Jean-Michael Basquiat, “JFK, Thor, Iron Man & Captain America,” 1978.)
But even comics-Cap offers a profoundly limited understanding of the moral responsibility of power, and to recognize as much we need only look towards that other inheritor of JFK’s public virtue: that is, Lyndon Johnson, who ascended to the presidency in the wake of Kennedy’s death. The value of throwing a few punches against cops, real though it may be, pales in comparison to the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, which LBJ accomplished not by turning his back on institutional power but by embracing it. Insofar as Captain America has a guiding precept, it is his oft-professed hatred of bullies; by most accounts LBJ was a bully, an old-school Texas Democrat who stood against the Dixiecrat consensus and twisted every arm he could to pass past-due civil rights legislation, trading on the symbolic currency of JFK’s death to enable an expansive vision of domestic politics that built, if not a genuinely great society, at least a better and fairer one than existed before. Concurrently he led us deeper into the Vietnam War, costing the lives of far too many US servicemen and Vietnamese civilians in an ultimately pointless conflict, and of course proper credit for the Civil Rights Act goes not to JFK or LBJ but to MLK, to the SNCC and the Freedom Riders and Rosa Parks and the thousands who Marched on Washington, to the mattering of so many black lives, who built a cultural moment that politics — at least the most remotely decent practice of it — could no longer ignore.
Politics: it’s complicated.
There’s a famous moment in the history of Captain America’s comics incarnation when he punches a post-Watergate Nixon. It’s built of the same naive triumphalism that expects the mechanisms operating in that scandal to work to the US’s benefit now, against the current occupant of the Oval Office, ignoring not only the power of FOX News — a network built by former Nixon aide Roger Ailes to serve the precise purpose of protecting future Nixonian figures from the slings and arrows of outrageous (self-created) criminal fortune — but also the dynamics of Watergate itself, that Deep Throat was motivated in his expose to Bernstein and Woodward not by a sense of public righteousness but rather personal grievance, that Mark Felt was J. Edgar Hoover’s protege at the FBI and his revelations of Nixon’s misdeeds were retribution to Nixon’s distaste for Hoover, a distaste which — however myriad Nixon’s personal and political failings may be — is eminently justified by the fact that Hoover was a terrible human being whose paranoia had a genuinely awful impact on American public life.
The story of Watergate, like the story of most whistleblowing, has been too readily collapsed into an easy story of heroes and villains, but the reality is that it came about largely because terrible people were sniping at each other, which is true of a fair bit of whistleblowing throughout the corridors of power. People make the right choices for the wrong reasons all the time. They have agendas. LBJ knew this; JFK knew this. Steve Rogers ignores this as a means to hold himself proudly outside of politics, but outside of politics is a place of acquiescence to injustice, to power as currently constituted, and so the ultimate failure of “Civil War” is that, in seeking to position Captain America as an iconoclastic hero, it ultimately deploys him as nothing more than a mouthpiece for the status quo.
*
I have written at length about the perils of the anti-democratic sentiment embodied by both Iron Man and the Cap, and it begs the question: is similar excoriation merited for “Thor: Ragnarok” and “Black Panther,” both of which center on dynastic struggles in monarchial systems? Is it not hypocrisy to critique the US-centric stories, while allowing those in other contexts to escape such examination?
The answer is that it’s not hypocritical at all, because that’s not what “Ragnarok” or “Black Panther” are about, thematically, while both the entire Iron Man and Captain America cinematic ouevres are very much making arguments about representation and power. “Ragnarok” and “Black Panther” engage with questions of power from an explicitly anti-colonialist perspective, seeking to overthrow the oppressor, and even the most cursory familiarity with history should be enough to remind any readers that democracy has been no check at all against colonialist violence. Both slavery and the white theft of Maori land occurred under representative regimes. The point isn’t that democracy is somehow wrong or useless, but rather that there are certain problems for which it is not a relevant answer — for which its function as an answer is, in fact, a false triumphalism, a way to obscure the injustice being fought against — and those are the problems confronted by “Ragnarok” and “Black Panther.”
The brutality of violence in “Ragnarok” has not entirely immunized it from this critique, but most of the calls for democratization have been directed at “Black Panther;” unlike the Asgardians the Wakandans end the film with an intact state and the resolution suggested is political, an outreach and community engagement program derided by even many who enjoyed the film as somewhat milquetoast. But this, too, fails to recognize the subversive political instruction offered by the movie. As much as Killmonger is a criticism of white American imperialism he is a reference, too, to black American masculinity, recalling the real-life Black Panthers with his militancy and militarism (and Oakland roots), and just like the real-life Black Panthers his greatest failing is his enclosure within the patriarchy, a narrow space which sees violence as the only viable solution and thereby renders itself vulnerable to co-option by power, black bodies piling up in inadvertent service to white supremacy — the plains of Wakanda are not the jungles of Guyana but Killmonger hid black loss in his rhetoric of black liberation as surely as Jim Jones, allied with the leadership of the Black Panthers, ever did. Peel away the mass homicide and Jonestown becomes a struggle for utopia imagined and labored over by black women, whose efforts are rendered futile in the face of patriarchal violence; on a vastly less deadly scale the same narrative played out amongst the (real-life, historical) Panthers themselves, their school lunches and day-care programs and community-building programs overwhelmed by the forcible militarization (and police response) demanded by male leadership. That T’Challa sees the futility of violent overthrow and invests Wakanda’s wealth and future in Nakia’s fugitive femininity of teaching the children well is a radical realignment of power indeed, and if it feels timid for the film’s narrative to end here — to not imagine the outcome of such efforts, the Jonestown might-have-beens — it is perhaps because the very notion of patriarchal power subjugating itself to community support and feminine fugitivity is so radical that even the most visionary artists can’t see past such an act to its outcome: we have been conditioned to expect inspiration and are offered instead a challenge, dared to fill in the blanks of our own futures. The film offers another answer, too, in the metatextual truth of its own existence, black liberation implicit in black creativity (with whites in fugitive solidarity, as with cinematographer Rachel Morrison), pushing against the narrative enclosures constructed by so much white supremacist patriarchy.
In the comics, Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a storyline about Wakanda’s transition to a constitutional monarchy, and I’d love to see that play out on the big screen but for it to do so effectively it must acknowledge that democracy is not an end-point, but rather, a beginning; not a pat resolution to anti-imperialism but only a step along the way, inclusive representation necessary but not sufficient for a genuinely just society. Given that one of the first events in “Infinity War” is the genocide of the Asgardian refugees, I don’t expect the MCU to explore the idea as it relates to Thor any further — though perhaps we can hope for sincere engagement on the topic in “Black Panther 2” — but it is the likes of “Infinity War,” and its willingness to not only ignore but actively destroy the character and thematic development of the one-off movies, which gives me pause. There are counter-examples, but on balance, this is a franchise that remains more devoted to spectacle and violence than to thoughtful political exploration.
Film is, as the obvious saying goes, a visual medium, and is thus prone to spectacle and violence. Most of us, in most of our lives, do not experience conflict as action movies portray it, but rather know it as words and feelings, perhaps harsh, perhaps passive-aggressive, perhaps public, perhaps private. Words and feelings are hard to render visually, and although film is also a temporal medium and an emotive medium and ultimately a narrative medium above all else, the reliance on concretized, well-visualized representations of conflict is a highly paid Hollywood habit. Sometimes it’s justified by the story. More often that not, it’s not. The tragic limitations of violence as a storytelling device are best represented in the MCU not only by the falseness of Killmonger’s righteous payback but by the relationship between Tony Stark and Peter Parker, which serves as a surrogate father/son relationship particularly for the aging, childless Tony. The tragedy is limned from their first meeting, when Tony recruits a painfully young Peter to join his personal fight with Cap; that Peter disintegrates in Tony’s arms at the end of “Infinity War” is less tragic than the realization that Tony has, over the course of their relationship, nothing to offer his surrogate son except indoctrination into the mindless menace of violence, posing as virtue. What cure does democracy offer here? Forced into the visual vocabulary and comic book logic of the MCU, Captain America’s Nixon-punching becomes somehow more valuable than the vital democratic process of investigation, reportage, and near-impeachment. With some exceptions — “Black Panther,” natch — this is an extraordinarily cynical conception of power, a near-total repudiation of Kennedyesque idealism in which the vast majority of humanity remains absent and silent, and only those who throw the most devastating blows are able negotiators. Hank Pym might be a brilliant scientist, but in the opening scenes of “Ant-Man,” it’s his ability to punch somebody that earns him the most credibility.
*
How do you solve a problem like “Ant-Man”? It’s the most purely fun of any MCU outing — some might argue for “Guardians of the Galaxy” but, true confessions time, I’ve fallen asleep each time I’ve tried to watch either of them, which is not to say that they are bad movies but simply that I find “Andy Dwyer Goes To Space” vastly harder to connect with than I would have ever predicted — but that fun obscures so many frustrating oversights that to call it good is far too generous. It’s effective at what it does, but that effectiveness is precisely what makes its goals — and all the things it chose not to do — so obvious and problematic. Scott Lang is lots of fun (and, because Paul Rudd might be immortal, looks identical to Mike Hannigan), and Hank Pym gets to be a hero; but why bother hiring Judy Greer only to so thoroughly waste her comedic talents, and as for Hope… watching her on-screen, participating so little in the story while the men around her got to do so much, I felt like a kid again, waiting and, yes, hoping for the female characters on my screens to help drive the story only to be disappointed, time and again, by the consolation prize of a kiss masquerading as empowerment. Yes, yes, I know she gets her own suit in “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” but to have to wait a whole movie for her to get second billing — for her to have to earn what is freely offered to white male characters — only proves my point: equal in the sequel in not equal at all.
Then there’s Luis, portrayed by the reliably luminous Michael Pena, who remains the only major Latinx character in the MCU. Writing that out feels wrong — in as many movies as they’ve made, surely there must be more Latinx representation than one Bay Area street criminal — but it’s correct, and if Hope functions best to highlight the unrelenting maleness of this franchise, Luis, despite his delightful monologues, serves the same depressing purpose for its whiteness.
Such whiteness reaches its peak in “Doctor Strange,” a movie which dedicates itself so wholly to film as a visual medium — and it is a very visually interesting experience — that it forgets to tell an interesting story, too. Stephen Strange’s journey is a bog-standard special-white-guy-goes-to-the-mystical-East-and-becomes-the-most-heroic-hero-who-ever-hero’ed; given that we’ve seen the likes of Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Matt Damon in essentially the same role, it was only a matter of time before it fell to Benedict Cumberbatch. As the anticipation for “Crazy Rich Asians” has hopefully articulated there is a deep well of interest in stories not only of Asians and Asian-Americans but also of return, of second-generation immigrants experiencing the conflict of visiting their families’ countries of origin, and the bald fact is that “Doctor Strange” would have been a much more compelling story if its titular character had been Asian-American himself. Instead, the filmmakers chose to render the ageless oracle of Eastern wisdom as Tilda Swinton.
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To discuss the identity politics of casting and characterization in a major franchise right now is to inevitably invoke thoughts of the MCU’s Disney sibling, Star Wars, the fandom of which has been riven since “The Last Jedi” about the wisdom of straying from the original trilogy’s Skywalker-centric storytelling. To say that the fandom has been riven might be overselling — as in so man matters, not least US politics, a small minority of loud white men have taken to preaching their complaints so doggedly and vociferously that they are easily mistaken for widespread sentiment — but that’s the narrative that has arisen in the wake of a new central trio composed of a girl, a black guy, and a brown guy, and to whom an Asian girl has recently been added. The only white guy left is the villain! Oh no! We are truly oppressed! say fans who can look to the entire original trilogy, any of the prequels, every MCU movie except “Black Panther,” and the vast majority of movies ever made to see protagonists who look just like them; I wouldn’t find their whining worth addressing except that I’ve heard echoes of it in other viewers who should know better, who say things like “Yeah but that whole plotline with Canto Bight was just silly” or “Rose didn’t really have a point, but I guess they wanted to put in an Asian chick” — comments which, much like the complainers themselves, miss the entire thematic argument of “The Last Jedi,” a statement about the power of political nobodies which is made quite plain by a lowly mechanic, who has suffered great personal loss in this fight, persuading a rebel hero who has nothing at stake beyond his own skin to stay and fight, rather than take the easy outs of escape or, later, martyrdom. Canto Bight is similarly necessary, demonstrating the galactic inequalities against which the rebels fight — a necessary corrective in a world where neoconservative Twitter makes sport of supporting the law-and-order regime of the Empire, claiming that the destruction of Alderaan was justified as a military target — grounding the story in broader stakes beyond Sharon Carter’s dumb notion that rebellion needs no justification (a position one encounters in the real world in the ongoing, ahistorical romanticization of the confederate cause) and showing the ultimately fruitless, but not at all pointless, efforts that our beleaguered heroes must make in order to gain even the slightest edge in their battle against imperial power. Imagine “The Last Jedi” without Rose Tyco or Canto Bight and you will imagine a profoundly stupid movie, incoherent politically and narratively, claustrophobically narrow in its perspective on a galaxy far, far away.
And Rey — oy, vey. The invective directed by fans against Rey for not being a Skywalker is puzzling, to put it mildly; it’s like an ostensible progressive being angry that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t a Kennedy (with JFK, RFK, and Teddy as the Leia, Luke, and Chewie, respectively), which is to say, sure, that dynasty was interesting and all, and I guess you’re entitled to your bereavement, but also… you’re kind of missing everything that makes her interesting and exciting, for either value of “her” under discussion. Go ahead and feel whatever complex feelings you have about the matter, but please stop making the rest of us responsible for those feelings, punishing us with your guns or your enormous social advantage. That inchoate sense of loss is named grief, and despite the lavish, escapist promises of capitalism it is foundational to the human condition — to join the rest of us in learning how to process such grief, to accept it rather than turning it outwards as rage, well, I guess this is growing up. I’ve seen “Mr. Rogers” (Fred, not Steve) and I know white dudes are just as capable of emotional maturity as anyone else.
“The Last Jedi” is not a perfect film; indeed, I question whether perfection is possible within the loose, baggy monsters that are contemporary franchise blockbusters. Unlike “Ragnarok” or “Black Panther,” it’s not an excellent film, either, though it is a good one. The difference is perhaps inevitable, for although writer/director Rian Johnson is a deeply well-intentioned white man he has lived his entire life with the soft bigotry of low expectations, whereas directors like Coogler and Waititi — and Patty Jenkins, whose “Wonder Woman” is the sole exception to the consistent terribleness of the films of the DC Universe — must be twice as good to get half as far; to land in the same place — directing franchise blockbusters for Disney — demands, as a simple matter of arithmetic, that women and people of color be at least four times as good, and it shows in their output. Such quantification is partly joking but the reality, for filmmakers attempting to walk the line between inclusion and unheard viewpoints and mass-market studios and predominantly white male audiences, is that women and people color will of course be more skilled at this negotiation, not by any inherent virtue but simply because it is what we practice every single day of our lives; it is the vulgar and exhausting dance by which we are constantly striving to secure our personhood in a world which has made it conditional and earned. We’re good at code-switching and subversion, because it’s how we survive. The most recent apogee of the form is Hannah Gadsby’s transcendent Netflix special “Nanette,” which white-dude comedy bros who happily defend and deconstruct the likes of Andy Kaufman have lined up to declare “not real comedy” on account of it not being comedy that they can access as performers, and of course, if white guys can’t do it then it doesn’t count.
“The Last Jedi” might be inelegant, at least in part, but just wait until Star Wars finds their Waititi or their Coogler or their Jenkins — or their Dee Rees, or their Ava DuVernay, or their Karyn Kusama or Gina Prince-Bythewood, who was supposed to be the first woman of color to direct a superhero movie until “Silver and Black” stalled out. There’s plenty of choices. Let’s see what they can do.
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Of course it’s always possible for a film to be misread, as with “Ragnarok,” rather than rapturously welcomed, as “Black Panther” and “Wonder Woman” were (and even they could be misread by the willful). The cause need not be the studied ignorance of indigenous art and thought; sometimes, it can be purely a matter of studied discomfort. If “Black Panther” recapitulates and subverts “Hamlet” in order to racebend the MCU then it is following a tradition from another Disney sibling, Pixar, whose “Brave” similarly subverted the Bard so as to genderbend their own narrowly imagined universe, where male rats and male cars and male monsters and male robots could all be heroes but a human female, ah, that might be a step too far!
Set in medieval Scotland, “Brave” is an obvious critique of The Scottish Play, but one in which the Queen’s political skill and ambition, as contrasted to her warrior husband, is presented not as cunning or evil but as necessary and intelligent diplomacy; if you must call her Lady M, let it stand for meritorious. “Brave” is often regarded as a mediocre movie, or at least the worst of Pixar, but in truth it tells a very similar story to the celebrated “Moana” with at least as much skill: a headstrong young princess in conflict with a parent over the role she must inherit and its concomitant duties, who goes on an impulsive journey that, though she risks her life, teaches important lessons about selfhood. Both movies reject romance as a resolution, and though only one has songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda, that’s not the distinction which made “Moana” the more legible offering — for that we must look at which parent our headstrong young princess found conflict with, for therein lies the crucial difference. “Moana” trades out a young man for a daughter to tell an otherwise conventional story about negotiating fraught paternal expectations; in “Brave,” Merida finds refuge in her father’s obliviousness and derives conflict from her relationship with her mother. Moana’s mother is barely a presence in her daughter’s story, silent and supportive. Merida’s mother is a complicated villain (…ish) who opens us to the complicated nature of motherhood, an interrogation towards which we, as a society, have repeatedly turned our backs. Mother/daughter conflict makes for a less satisfying vision of girl power, but the truth is — as so many women know all too well — mothers, and other female authority figures, can often be the most brutal enforcers of patriarchal values, knowing from their own hard personal experience that accommodating systems of power is often easier than resistance, if only one can cultivate the stomach for it.
“Brave” is an excellent movie, if one is up to the task.
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The truth is that I’m not particularly invested in the MCU, or Star Wars, or Pixar; I never dressed up as any of their characters for Halloween, never wrote their fanfic, never invested any of my identity in their stories. I have some fun memories of watching the original Star Wars trilogy on VHS tapes during high school slumber parties but ultimately it’s about as meaningful to me as the Kennedys — I had a friend who used to keep her weed in a bust of JFK, ha ha ha, aren’t random teenage memories fun? — which is to say, hardly at all. It’s not because I was opposed to any kind of fandom but merely because mine lay elsewhere, at X-Ville and Scullyfic and the Gossamer Project, in dressing up as Dana Scully or John Shiban, which is to say, in “The X-Files.” Such a love affair was an easier thing to admit to three years ago; in the wake of the monumentally disastrous revival of the show — six episodes in 2016, ten episodes in 2018 — I’m almost embarrassed to admit to the fandom which veritably defined my adolescence, and yes, it really was that bad. Star Wars fans can bitch all they like but until those movies decide to retcon Kylo Ren so that he’s not the son of Leia and Han but rather Leia and her rapist Emperor Palpatine, we are not even in the same universe of having our beloved and formative stories shit on by an uncaring narrative overlord. When such a reveal is conducted exclusively among male characters, with Leia’s reaction to the news happening belatedly and entirely off-screen — well, then perhaps I might accord their frustrations some legitimacy.
The sheer awfulness of the “X-Files” revival — its malice, its stupidity, its self-importance — made me question whether the show had ever been good at all, or if I’d wasted years of my younger life investing in something venal and profoundly dumb. The truth is that such interrogation was scary and difficult, and easier to replicate publicly with the MCU — to which I have no real attachment — than to document in its messy, overinvolved uncertainty and nostalgia, the endless stream of memories I can append to even the briefest glance between Mulder and Scully. But it was worth my time, and I’d recommend the exercise to anyone with a fandom of their own. Like what you like, but understand and recognize why you like it and where its faults might lie; nobody who has watched “Cougar Town” as many times as I have has any right to demand that art and entertainment should be entirely unproblematic but I know what it is that makes that series good — its big-hearted take on the relationships we build as we age, the serious consideration it gives to the obligations of physical proximity — and I’m only occasionally unwilling to admit to the small-minded sexism and homophobia that keeps it from being great.
There was one excellent episode in the sixteen hours of the revival, a singular feat which towered over all the rest: “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat,” by Darin Morgan, who penned four of the series’ finest episodes during its original nine years (the answer to whether or not “The X-Files” is any good is the answer to the same question about the Marvel Cinematic Universe: it can be, and when Darin Morgan (or Vince Gilligan) wrote the story, it invariably was). “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat” is a strange episode, one that argues against its own existence, against the very concept of a revival, against nostalgia altogether. It’s brilliant and funny and ends with the perennial wisdom of Dana Katherine Scully refusing to try to recapture the past, wanting instead to remember it all, just as it was.
We should all be so lucky.
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The truth may not be out there, but the truths are, so many untold stories and experiences waiting to be discovered, to be folded into our common understanding. We don’t find those truths in the same places we’ve explored so many times already and yet sometimes, in the right hands, we can: “Spider-Man: Homecoming” was the third reboot of the series in recent years but somehow the combination of the virtually unknown director Jon Watts, the precocious vulnerability of Tom Holland, and the confident surprise of Zendaya made a movie that was not only good in a narrative or visual sense, but one which was also startlingly honest about being a teenager, a feat unmanaged by any of its predecessors. “Ragnarok” was treading already well-churned waters when it managed to reinvent Thor with its deft decolonialism — of a paragon of far-right paganism, no less — and low-key Kiwi humor, trading a tired heroes’ journey for something simultaneously more fun and more impactful. “Black Panther,” “The Last Jedi, and “Brave” all traffic in new takes on the monomyth, which suggests that there are always new stories left to tell, as least if we’re willing to divorce ourselves from fealty to such insubstantial details as MJ being a redhead — and willing to let new voices tell those stories.
It’s easy to dismiss so much verbiage with the idea that it’s just a movie, that these things are somehow beneath serious consideration, but the combined box office of the MCU or Star Wars or Pixar is larger than the GDP of dozens of countries; these are built on an edifice of massive financial investment and the labor and artistry and livelihood of tens of thousands of individuals. They shape our cultural conversations and our political understandings, our interpretation of our world, and for that it is fair to demand not perfection or even excellence but at the very least a good-faith effort. Political prescription in pop culture is made out to be chorey and unentertaining but “Ragnarok” and “Black Panther” are far from either; further afield there’s stories which don’t rely on heroic archetype at all but yet manage hilarity, like “What We Do In the Shadows” (there’s Waititi again), and easy as it is to joke that we live in the darkest timeline let’s also remember that we’re in a world where “Hamilton” exists, where we can enjoy a musical or at least a soundtrack in which mind-bendingly good rhyme melds with more traditional Broadway standards to impart lessons about early American history while also deconstructing the heroic stature of at least a few of our Founding Fathers — and this is a thing that was not only made but became explosively, historically popular. It may get lost behind the scrim of so many revivals, behind the relentless longing of our nostalgia, but we are desperately thirsty for new stories and new perspectives, and we are learning — haphazardly, perhaps — how to embrace them.
If the hero does indeed have a thousand faces, then we have seen only the most miniscule proportion of them. Maybe it is the need for a hero that is the real mirage; Campbellism has held our culture in thrall for far too long, and perhaps the greatest popular myth of all is the lie that there is only kind of story worth telling.
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PS: If you or anyone you know want to buy my complete series of “X-Files” DVDs, plus an Official Fan Club copy of the pilot script, let me know.
