“Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider.”
–Pauline Kael, I Lost It At The Movies
An epigraph beginning with the word ‘sex’ might not be an auspicious start for a piece about education, but Kael’s words have much to say to teachers. Beyond concepts, equations, and writing mechanics, teachers teach taste, whether they intend to or not.
Think back to your time in school. Can you remember the warmth and security of having your interests affirmed by your teacher? Can you remember the quick spin of doubt when your preferences fell short of his or her esteem? I remember feeling stomach sick when my seventh grade teacher implied that New York Times Bestsellers List did not mean the book was “good.” I wondered what my choice of The Dragonriders of Pern said about me. A student’s taste might be personal, but its expression is a public performance, and a form of mass communication. Carried books, branded t-shirts, and the music leaking from ear buds invariably broadcast a person’s taste to the people around them.
As teachers, we witness our student’s passions and refuges on a daily basis, with varying levels of sympathy and comprehension. Our authority complicates things. I remember how a boy’s eyes popped open wide when I admitted to playing Diablo 3. I relish students’ trust and delight when I talk about Pokémon with them. Is it for this connection that I converse enthusiastically about Marvel Comics and Harry Potter, even though I don’t actually enjoy these properties? (How often do their iconicity, film adaptations, merchandising, and release parties account for more of their popularity than the books themselves?) There are few things I enjoy more than great conversation. Better put by Hannah Arendt, “Gladness, not sadness, is talkative, and truly human dialogue differs from mere talk or even discussion in that it is entirely permeated by pleasure in the other person and what he says. It is tuned to the key of gladness, we might say” (Men in Dark Times, 15). When I share and respect the things my students love, I earn the privilege of being in class with them.
So what happens when the façade drops, and my students learn what I actually think about Guardians of the Galaxy or Diary of a Wimpy Kid? That Pauline Kael is my personal hero and favorite snark, not Iron Man? That I believe superhero comics embody America’s worst power-fantasies? That while I was a passionate Pokémon player up through college, I pale at Nintendo’s sorry attempts to justify the exploitation of its dog-fighting monster pets? Deep down inside me, I don’t like some of the things that adolescents like—including things I loved as a teenager. Everyone is allowed to have his or her personal taste, but I sometimes cringe that these stories could be counted as valid options. I sometimes see them as depressing manifestations of systems that tear people apart. At other times they seem like developmental stepping-stones, or an ice floe that thinkers eventually pass across and see through. I have become the no-fun schoolmarm pushing Nathaniel Hawthorne on the one hand, Ratatouille’s Anton Ego on the other, and maybe a faint echo of James Baldwin on a very good day.
Trying to protect this “key of gladness,” I resist sharing my killjoy opinions about a wide assortment of stories, united chiefly by their phenomenal popularity and marketing rollouts. There’s a time for soapboxing, for criticizing, and for bemoaning, and while these kinds of talk are necessary for survival, they don’t make me happy to be alive. They lack the ring of joy. I came to teaching because I associate school with this thrill of recognition, of “Yes! I see that too!” I have no affection for converting and being converted. I did not return to school to be a missionary of taste, or have my tastes disapproved of and changed.
I save my breath for niche blogs, and blissfully, for the company of my critic friends, ideally huddled around a few beers on a Saturday night. I support others in their resistance: “Harry Potter makes me feel weird too!” I am at home in our sardonic distance from these things—in the communal wondering what life is like for a creature trapped inside a tiny Pokéball. Or whether a student wearing a Slytherin Quidditch jersey is akin to her sporting the confederate flag of the Harry Potter world, in light of how the seventh book goes down.
As a teacher, I keep this thought to myself, and modulate my voice to bob and float with a student’s excitement about the work of J. K. Rowling. Yet I want my students to dig deeply into Slytherin House. Does it make sense for all the cruel and cunning children to be sorted together? Why aren’t there consistent resisters in Slytherin? Why does Hogwarts support a cabal of violent blood purists? As students dig, won’t they expose my preferences and prejudices against these books, so shallowly buried?
If I could change one thing about young adult novels, superhero movies, and video games, it would be to make their villains relevant. I suspect that the more popular a story-world is, the less its evil mastermind, empire, or force corresponds to our present-day equivalents. Players spend the Pokémon games fighting incompetent mafia groups bent on igniting an apocalypse and ruling over the remains of society. We know they are evil because they treat their Pokémon cruelly, but the games never address how the player’s relationship with Pokémon is substantially different. In Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, totalitarian authorities herd huge groups of dispossessed and hungry people into public squares to watch their district’s children murder each other, which is part of a national strategy to subdue revolt. How does this square with the reality that apartheid governments violently restrict the public congregation of oppressed people, who have a better ability to revolt when gathered together?
These fictions make mockeries of their villains, but they become fiercely popular ‘escapist routes’ for a reason. They are poignant metaphors for the experience of youth, even if they obscure how real boarding schools, criminal organizations, patriarchs, and dictatorships work—how power works. To students, bullies are a kind of dependable taxonomy, and they are institutionally supported. Students resonate with the experience of being pitted against each other for the entertainment of adults, and that this competition coheres a dystopic, divided nation. And everyone knows that superpowered people are too busy fighting each other to do anything about systemic injustice.
These are truths worth honoring, and can organically raise questions about what the villains mean. A friend pointed out that the Harry Potter books examine the paradoxical existence of Slytherin in the text, (but blink, and you might miss it.) The world of The Hunger Games descends into revolutionary chaos by the third book. Pokémon White & Black featured a compelling villain who wished to free Pokémon from slavery, and released his monsters after using them in fights. I wish these factors changed my mind and heart, but I also wish that these factors changed their stories. The Hunger Games sells itself upon the appeal of the tortuous games it pretends to decry. The Pokémon villain turns coat in the end, and celebrates the capture and keeping of sentient creatures. The villain always ends up being someone else—someone vanquishable. Why does our culture spends so much time hiding the hero’s complicity with evil, or tokenizing the struggle with inner darkness as one obligatory step in the ritualistic triumph over an external “Big Bad?”
If these stories are archetypal, so are the people who oppose them on the grounds of taste—and especially on the grounds of good taste. Consider the “Wicked Witch of West Harlem” in Walter Dean Myer’s Bad Boy, where “educated” Mrs. Dodson horrifies the young narrator when she condemns comic books as “a road map to the jailhouse.” Mrs. Dodson is evermore referred to as The Wicked Witch. Her complaints presage the words of Frederick Wertham, a psychiatrist and social justice crusader still demonized for his hatred of the violence in popular culture. You can’t spend an hour inside a comics convention without overhearing some fan or creator still trotting out insults at Wertham and his legion of church lady minions. We forget Wertham’s actual life mission to establish an affordable psychiatric clinic for black youth in Harlem, tucked away on a street that Myers likely dashed down, a Lone Ranger cap pistol in hand.
While I, with the best of intentions, complain about the villains and plot mechanics of my student’s favorite stories, about the banality of fighting Voldemort, I’m busy becoming a villain myself. A villain, at the end of the day, is someone who doesn’t see, and so profanes what is most meaningful in life. And if adolescents could ever be defined, they could be called people who have freshly seen truth. They might not feel passionate about every song they listen to, every book they read, or every stretch of road they drive, but some small collection of things has sung the song of their lives to them. Not every student will part their clasped hands to show their truth to their teacher, but when I’m lucky enough to be shared with, I want to be a good holding vessel. I don’t want to be locked out.
While not the same as what you describe, I just recently had my yearly experience of using clips from films by Wes Anderson to teach my writing students about identifying preoccupations of form and style in the work of a creator. The gorgeous symmetrical framing of so many shots in his movies becomes unnerving as you see them in quick succession. But anyway, what inevitably comes up is that I hate Anderson’s twee white bullshit films (well, I do like Fantastic Mr. Fox, though it is a bit overlong), which I use as an example of how my enjoyment/general appreciation or lack thereof can’t be my primary mode of approach for criticism – that I can separate my feelings from examining particular aspects of an artist’s work, even if when I put it all back together I still can’t stand it.
When one my students objected, “But his films are beautiful.” I replied, “Beauty is both dangerous and not enough.”
Of course, I am teaching college freshman for the most part, so they need their assumptions exploded, and to learn to avoid the mistake I so frequently see in their own work, having their criteria of choice be love or hate and then never being able to move past that for any productive period of time.
“[T]he struggle with inner darkness” should be subordinate to the “triumph over an external “‘Big Bad'”. Killing the Koch brothers is more important than becoming a better person. In this respect, mediocre children’s and young adult pulp is arguably morally superior to great art. The former does tend to be vague or outright wrong about who exactly is the external force that has got to go, but so does the latter, and at least the former has its priorities in order.
On the other hand, great art makes you smarter, so I share the general anxiety that kids are reading and watching the wrong things,
On the other other hand, the snark of Tony-Stark-as-incarnated-by-Robert-Downey-Jr. is better than the snark of Pauline Kael.
I think that the obsessive generation of Big Bads is more likely to lead to invading Iraq than killing the Koch brothers. That seems to be the case in America anyway.
I guess you could argue that folks killed the Koch brothers a while back in Russia, but that didn’t go so great either in the long run (though you could argue that that’s in part because the Koch brothers over here interfered, I suppose.)
I like Robert Downey Jr more than Pauline Kael too, though, I think. I”m not much of a fan of Kael’s, though I’ve come to terms with the fact that everyone loves her but me.
– Maybe, maybe not, but likewise you could say struggling with inner darkness is more likely (or as likely or whatever) to produce a David Horowitz as a John Newton.
– You have to kill Lenin too, of course, but the Kochs are on top here right now. Again, order of priorities.
– A good take down (more or less) of Kael (albeit from somebody who is pretty much your antithesis on the subject of Tarantino): http://hubreview.blogspot.com/2007/08/kael-bonnie-and-clyde.html
Oh, and that one mentions the author of the mother of all Kael take downs, Renata Adler, but I assume you’ve already read hers.
My Kael skeptic piec is here.
@Graham
“great art makes you smarter”
This statement doesn’t make much sense to me. Perhaps it would make sense if you clarified what “smarter” means and how great art “makes you” so.
“mediocre children’s and young adult pulp is arguably morally superior to great art. The former does tend to be vague or outright wrong about who exactly is the external force that has got to go, but so does the latter, and at least the former has its priorities in order.”
Maybe on the first count. But on the second count, “vagueness” is the best you can really hope for out of any manichean construction. Complaints about corruption and how the game is “rigged” by elites can easily be used to attack the poor and the marginalized (the Tea Party being exhibit A). Of course, complaints about corruption and the “rigging” of the political process are well-founded, and should be respected. But when you are already using the term “Big Bad” to begin with, you’ve already obliterated the room for nuance that would allow you to solve the problem and avoid hurting people you didn’t intend to hurt. I agree with Kael Salad that kids should generally avoid such manichaeism whenever possible, because those constructions are actively hostile to the kinds of nuance that needs to be recognized to solve actual problems.
@Kael/Osvaldo
Thanks for sharing, to both of you! I know that my own personal growth and my arrival at my current worldview (which I will claim without proof is a desirable one) happened largely by having my assumptions routinely and often aggressively detonated. Constantly being challenged, especially in an educational setting, has been extremely important to my own growth, so this piece and Osvaldo’s response both resonate with me a lot.
Ha! You had me at the first line, and it got better after that. (“To read Pauline Kael, therefore, is to be confronted with a capitalism whose worst sin is making mediocre movies” – ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow.)
The comments make your “In the Shadow of No Towers” review sound promising. I’ve bookmarked it for later reading. I wish I’d been around at the time to explode on the commenter who cited George Orwell as an example of a critic being “wary of himself.”
“I think that the obsessive generation of Big Bads is more likely to lead to invading Iraq than killing the Koch brothers. That seems to be the case in America anyway.”
Yet again, I have failed to deploy basic literacy and have simply restated someone else’s point.
“I guess you could argue that folks killed the Koch brothers a while back in Russia.”
Well, it went a lot better the second time around, about 15 years ago. Granted, they didn’t get all the “Koch brothers” necessarily, but most of them, and certainly the worst actors I know of, all at least left the country. Now they run think tanks in America dedicated to Putin-bashing agitating for war in Ukraine.
@Petar
Sometimes you need more nuance. And then sometimes “nuance” is an excuse for not solving the problem. This sentence, for example – “Of course, complaints about [x] are well-founded, and should be respected” – always means “Don’t do anything about x.”
The Tea Party has plenty of nuance. They hate the rich. But their hatred is nuanced, so instead of taking the away the rich’s money, they put that off indefinitely, and focus on trying to deport immigrants. And there’s no nuance at all to the Koch brothers. They’re evil. The rest is a distraction.
@Graham
“And then sometimes “nuance” is an excuse for not solving the problem. This sentence, for example – “Of course, complaints about [x] are well-founded, and should be respected” – always means “Don’t do anything about x.””
Odd, I was completely expecting this argument, but not that you would use that quote to support it. I felt like you would have used this one instead, “Complaints about corruption and how the game is “rigged” by elites can easily be used to attack the poor and the marginalized (the Tea Party being exhibit A).” The statement you quoted is actually agreeing with your point. “Respecting” those complaints means (and I didn’t make this clear, my b) that you have to act on those complaints somehow (with “those complaints” being the ones about corruption and rigging, not about the process of punishing it). So really, the opposite of doing nothing about [x].
“The Tea Party has plenty of nuance. They hate the rich. But their hatred is nuanced, so instead of taking the away the rich’s money, they put that off indefinitely, and focus on trying to deport immigrants.”
Touche.
“And there’s no nuance at all to the Koch brothers. They’re evil. The rest is a distraction.”
Eh, maybe. I personally don’t believe a person can be existentially evil. Their actions certainly can be, no doubt (in my mind anyway). But I guess the more salient point is, what about Gates and Soros and Adelson. Are they, “the rest,” and if so, are they “a distraction.”? Adelson is particularly relevant here since he pooled his money with the Koch brothers, earlier this year.
No, “the rest” is the news that Charles Koch really likes puppies or whatever. Does Gates do as much harm with his money as the Kochs do with theirs? Probably not, but he does a lot, and in any case the solution is the same: Take most of it away.
The weird thing about Slytherin is that certain people are openly labeled as evil as children in order that people can compete against the evil in sports games, but not actually challenge it in any institutional ways.
Harry Potter’s world building is pretty thoroughly incoherent, is the problem. Rowling is trying to turn Roald Dahl into LOTR, and it’s just not possible.
@Noah
“Harry Potter’s world building is pretty thoroughly incoherent, is the problem. Rowling is trying to turn Roald Dahl into LOTR, and it’s just not possible.”
Shhhhhhhhh, don’t tell anybody until their done frothing over Fantastic Beasts!!
As to your point about Slytherin, I don’t think they are necessarily labeled as evil. The biggest critique I’ve ever heard of the house system in Hogwarts is that it’s a patently terrible idea to divide students into largely homogeneous groups, regardless of whether one is labeled as “evil” or not. Slytherin’s defining personality trait is supposed to be ambition, and so you can see why they might be the ones seen as evil, or the ones who do the most evil things, at least in Rowling’s manichean boarding school. Although the fact that the entire institution is intensely wary of them all the time is still worrying in exactly the way you describe…
@Graham
“Does Gates do as much harm with his money as the Kochs do with theirs? Probably not, but he does a lot”
There is a pretty strong case to be made that he (and Soros) does more harm through his globalized patrician paternalism than Koch does through his in-country poor-bashing; http://www.thenation.com/article/philanthrocapitalism-a-self-love-story/
“Take most of it away.”
And then what…
(to clarify, I agree with you that the Koch brothers must be stopped. I just don’t think stopping them is at all helped by positioning them as the modern-day Sauron, nor does calling them evil give us any insight into what must be done to stop them. In fact, it might hinder the process of stopping them, and make it harder to figure out what to actually do about them)
Pokémon is one thing, but I don’t think you can say Harry Potter’s villains lack relevance – they’re pretty clearly connected not only to the Nazis, but to the contemporary anti-immigrant far right. I’d say the problem in Harry Potter is rather that, first, the villains represents something that’s unanimously despised by the respectable part of society that Rowling is writing for and to – no risk, no self critique – and second, (ugh, here comes the nuance), the villains are just the way they are because they’re mean and irrational; there’s no attempt to investigate how real people might come to think the way they do.
By the way, we all know that eventually we’re going to have a best selling Harry Potter retelling from the point of view of somebody in Slytherin, right?
(And then they’ll make it a musical.)
@Noah
Oddly enough, Rowling’s books, and their failings of construction seem to speak pretty directly to the debate Kael Salad’s piece brought up here. Namely, the way Rowling sets up a world (encapsulated by Hogwarts) where children are thrusted into vast battles of good versus evil mirrors how children in actual schools are socialized into manichean value systems. In Hogwarts, students are socialized by the house system to buy into moral rivalries with Gryffindor and Slytherin (arbitrarily) positioned as “heroic” and “villainous”. These groups are taught by the institutional design itself to see each other as epic rivals in some cosmic moral war…much like modern students are socialized by much more complicated systems to see other students as threats or as social/political/moral rivals from birth.
@Petar
I’m not trying to make Gates and Soros any less horrible than they are, but I’m also putting the environmental damage done by the Kochs’ companies and clients on the scale.
Calling the Kochs Satan (Sauron is a niche character) doesn’t make it harder to figure out what to do with them. It’s the first step to figuring out what to with them. (Second step: Note that their weapon is money. Third step: Take it away.)
@me
“the respectable part of society that Rowling is writing for and to” – This should have been: “from and to”
@Graham
“I’m not trying to make Gates and Soros any less horrible than they are, but I’m also putting the environmental damage done by the Kochs’ companies and clients on the scale.”
Fair.
“Calling the Kochs Satan (Sauron is a niche character) doesn’t make it harder to figure out what to do with them. It’s the first step to figuring out what to with them. (Second step: Note that their weapon is money. Third step: Take it away.)”
A niche blog comment section is probably not the place for the all-but-inevitable debate about particulars I was hinting at, so…agree to disagree (or disagree to disagree, whatever you feel like).
I’d settle for an explicit statement of the particulars you were hinting at.
@Graham
This should suffice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNLPO2j9RQ0
Consider yourself in the camp of John Rawls for these purposes. Or don’t, doesn’t really matter. Rawls also espoused the “take it away” approach quite avidly.
The point is, just to keep in mind when you watch the video, that “take it away” isn’t a solution or a policy. It’s an attitude, and an attitude is all manichaeism provides you as a solution to many problems. The process matters. So I guess “particulars” wasn’t the right word. The right word was “process.”
No, take it away is exactly the solution. Concentration of wealth entails concentration of political power. Dispersal of wealth is a necessary (though of course not sufficient) prerequisite for functional democracy.
Deploring “manichaeism” and then saying “process matters” is a non sequitur. It looks like talking about “process” is simply a way for you to obscure a basic objection to redistribution – which of course has absolutely nothing to do with John Rawls per se, on which note, dude, don’t compare me to John Rawls.
(I haven’t watched the video yet, but am almost certain I’ll agree more with Varoufakis than with whatever he’s critiquing in Piketty.)
“Deploring “manichaeism” and then saying “process matters” is a non sequitur. It looks like talking about “process” is simply a way for you to obscure a basic objection to redistribution…”
I don’t think it’s a non sequitur, and I don’t think I’m obscuring an objection to redistribution (I would vote in favor of a graduated income tax, for example). Again, too much to talk about here and we’ve hijacked the thread with this side note for way too long.
I’m not convinced all these stories break down so cleanly. The Sorting Hat almost put Harry Potter in Slytherin, after all. His deep connection with Voldemort was a major theme across the books. And many of the characters heroism/villainy was complicated…Harry’s father, Snape, even Draco Malfoy. Same goes for Hunger Games, where the “good guys” were the ones who murdered Katniss’s sister.
Defining people as heroes or villains is human nature. Fiction seeks to complicate that. Not for nothing the term “Big Bad” comes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The Big Bad for season 2 was Angel, who started out with (and eventually regained) hero status.
Kim, I don’t know if defining people as heroes or villains is human nature. It’s hard to know what’s human nature. I think the most human naturey thing is probably language and stories, and those do define people as heroes and villains…though I don’t know that they have to.
You’re right that most of these stories try to create some level of complexity. I find the result in both HP and Buffy more incoherent than insightful…but still, you’re right that incoherent manicheanism isn’t exactly manicheanism.
Also, incoherence allows for interpretive wiggle room. I’m a prof at a large university, and I teach a media literacy course. I always tell students that it’s less important what they watch and more important how they watch it. Passively reading Shakespeare is a waste of time, actively picking apart an episode of Buffy isn’t.
A lot of active readings are really stupid. I suppose you could say there’s still value in the mere act of actively reading, but then, you could say there’s value in the act of passively reading too (in the same way that there’s value in rote memorization).
The value of active reading is not necessarily the quality of the product at the end, it’s the fact that it forces you to exercise analytical and critical thinking skills that you don’t use when you read/memorize passively. The value is in the fact that you are forced to form, scrutinize, and justify an argument, not that that argument will necessarily be a masterpiece of critical argumentation. The same way doing rudimentary algebraic proofs is a good way for a student to exercise the necessary analytical and creative skills for creating more powerful, elegant, and insightful proofs. So I guess, given your earlier statement, that you might scoff at the, “it’s for personal growth” argument, but that’s what I (and I think Nate) am sticking with.
Thanks for that comment, Petar. More diplomatic than my initial response to Graham’s comment. ;)
@Petar Hey, you know what makes doing rudimentary algebraic proofs less than useless? When you do them wrong and don’t correct them. Bad analysis doesn’t “exercise analytical and critical thinking skills,” it reinforces the lack thereof.
@Osvaldo “More diplomatic than my” Hey, it’s like you get to attack without taking responsibility for it! ;)
What does active reading mean? Questioning the text, or doing a reading of your own? Or is it something more than that, Nate?
To me active reading means (and this is what I try to teach my students) reading that is grounded in understanding writing as a social act. It means considering the significance and implications of what is being read in varying relevant contexts, and considering that not all relevant contexts will be immediately obvious(consider, Edward Said’s reading of Austen for example). Furthermore, paying close attention to language, form and style, cultural and historical references, ideas, assumptions, etc. .. and considering the conversation that the text is part of both explicitly and implicitly.
I’m pretty much in tune w/Osvaldo on active reading/watching/whatever. As for the correction, I’d be remiss as a teacher and an interlocutor if I didn’t correct or challenge these readings.
@Graham
“Hey, you know what makes doing rudimentary algebraic proofs less than useless? When you do them wrong and don’t correct them. Bad analysis doesn’t “exercise analytical and critical thinking skills,” it reinforces the lack thereof.”
As a computer science student, I can tell you this is abjectly false, for several reasons:
1) The process of constructing a proof includes exposing your work to (often outright hostile) scrutiny. This virtually guarantees that your techniques must weather a strong challenge founded on intelligence/experience equal to or greater than your own, which means your techniques and critical skills (in either math or writing) will be tested and, potentially, proven correct. The point being that math (and cultural criticism) is inherently collaborative, because for it to be accepted as correct/meaningful/worthwhile, it HAS to be presented to and scrutinized by a broader community. So, perhaps if you were doing math/critical writing that you never, ever showed to anybody else and never once-over’ed afterwards, then it could be “less than useless”. But then the situation is a trivial and useless example.
2) I think you profoundly misunderstand the meaning of the term “correctness” in a mathematical context. When a mathematician scrutinizes/blows up another mathematician’s work, the only avenue open to them is to scrutinize the process that other mathematician went through to reach his conclusion. You cannot declare the conclusion of a proof wrong without showing a fallacy in the work itself. Which means, yet again, that the final conclusion is irrelevant without an analysis of process. And again, this analysis of process NEEDS to happen for their to be any “proof” of anything.
3) Verification is built into the formal/functional definition of the process. I cannot tell if you acknowledge this, or whether you think the only thing that matters is that somebody reaches a “correct” conclusion…which is nonsense, and I’m fairly certain most mathematicians would say so.
4) The mere act of exercising axiomatic construction (which, you know, is an inexorable element of discursive/critical writing), even if your logical progression is not technically infallible, forces you to exercise the cognitive capacities that enable critical thinking and creativity. It’s the basic process of learning.
5) This is somewhat of an addendum/side note, but all of the above rant implies that both math AND critical writing MUST INCLUDE as part of its process, a rigorous and “open-sourced” attempt to eviscerate the “final” product. Without that verification/scrutiny step (which seems to only happen for most cultural critics after they post something on the “Web”, when they/the audience misconstrue the product as “final”). And as we stated above, this includes having your assumptions challenged and/or detonated, which we (I believe?) already established was inherently worthwhile.
***Without that verification/scrutiny step , the process is no longer a proof/critical examination.***
So much for diplomacy…
Noah, the ~entire point~ of the Harry Potter books is that good and evil are latent within all of us, and the only thing that differentiates Harry Potter and Voldemort is personal choice. I get that you don’t think the quality is there in general, but how is that incoherent?
Buffy was a story about how quickly characters–Angel and Willow are the big ones, but there are tons of examples–can flip the switch between heroism/villainy. It seems fair to say the story became incoherent around the character of Spike, but in general it explored that theme in a consistent and cogent, even methodical, way.
The author critiques the idea of Big Bads and talks about how stories don’t spend enough time exploring “the hero’s complicity with evil.” But at least one of the stories cited took that topic as its central theme, and the very concept of “Big Bad” is much more complicated than the author suggests. Taste itself can lead to overly simplistic readings, is my point.
@Petar
Which is not what you were talking about before.
Man, putting those scare quotes around “open-sourced” almost takes the Silicon Valley utopian stink off that sentence.
Well, that’s at least some progress, then.
@Kim I think part of Noah’s point is that Buffy presents some actions as heroic, others as villainous, but doesn’t really have a clear idea of (or seriously try to figure out) why the supposedly heroic actions are actually good.
“Man, putting those scare quotes around “open-sourced” almost takes the Silicon Valley utopian stink off that sentence.”
They aren’t scare quotes. I am using technical (to me) vernacular out of its original place, so the quotes serve to say, “I mean something very similar to this other process that conveniently blueprints what I mean to say here,” namely, rigorous verification by peers and/or betters.
Side note; As for the utopian stink of Silicon Valley…it disgusts me more than you can possibly know.
Kim, Buffy is incoherent (IMO) because of its treatment of souls, vampires, and violence. Basically, vampires are presented as bad people—they have personalities, quirks, desires, idiosyncracies, loves. They are just like us—except, supposedly, they have no souls, which means killing them has no moral consequence, or, rather, is actually a good thing.
Buffy doesn’t actually ahve much religious feeling; “souls” are just a get out of jail free card to allow the main character to be a mass murderer without really engaging with what that means, or thinking about the moral issues involved. It’s in that sense that I think its treatment of good and evil is incoherent. It can’t deal with, or even really think about, the central moral problem it raises.
I’m not as familiar with Harry Potter…but I think it’s treatment of good and evil is fatally undermined by its half-assed world-building. voldemort is supposed to be evil because he hates muggles and wants to kill them. But the “good” guys treat the muggles with systematic contempt and condescension. The world is endangered, but no one even bothers to tell the non-magic folk that they’re in danger. They erase people’s memories without consent; that’s really violent and not okay in any even vaguely coherent moral system. But the books don’t ever (that I’ve seen) articulate the fact that *all* the wizards treat muggles like crap. The “oh he could be voldemort” is about contingency and dark-side gobbledygook, not because Harry and Dumbledore actually *do* treat Muggles as nonhuman precisely as Voldemort does.
Hope that makes sense. This is why I like Twilight better than HP or Buffy, fwiw. It’s moral vision isn’t incoherent. Vampires have souls; killing them is wrong. They keep knowledge of vampires from humans not out of condescension, but because the evil vampires will kill anyone they tell. It’s somewhat complicated and there are issues there (and the world is incoherent; you couldn’t hide that many killer vampires) but Meyer actually cares about moral questions in a way that (imo) Rowling and Whedon don’t.
@Noah
Well, that’s no more incoherent than, say, preferring the Union to the Confederacy, or – in terms of the treatment of Jews – the USSR to Nazi Germany.
But certainly Rowling doesn’t investigate the subjugation of the muggles to her Randian superpeople, or even seem to much notice it, as far as I can remember (let’s face it, Ayn Rand is a much more thoughtful writer than Rowling; probably a better storyteller too).
Well…IMO “souls” isn’t the central moral problem raised by Buffy. Maybe you wish it had been, or think it should have been, which is fine and fair. But just because a show features vampires doesn’t mean it has to be about vampire morality or whatever. Buffy was more focused on telling stories that were about (or that apply to) people, not creating a consistent alternative reality.
Not all wizards treat muggles like crap in HP. The Minister of Magic work with the muggle prime minister. Hermione’s parents are muggles. Ron’s dad fetishizes muggles. You’re right that the good guys treat muggles with condescension sometimes, but contempt? I don’t see it. Also the few muggles that are actual characters, the Dursleys, treat Harry with huge amounts of condescension and contempt, precisely because he’s different from them.
It sounds to me like Meyer just appeals to your sensibilities and the parts of stories that you care about most. I’d read about glitter vampires all day long, but Twilight’s moral vision is super simplistic (and maybe a better example of what the author meant to talk about).
“Well, that’s no more incoherent than, say, preferring the Union to the Confederacy,”
Right; it’s not incoherent because the good guys are prejudiced; it’s incoherent because Rowling doesn’t notice.
Twilight’s moral vision is really complex and weird, imo. Meyer’s a pacifist who recognizes and engages with the reality of violence. That’s pretty rare in pop culture.
The Dursleys are Roald Dahl evil adult characters in a world that wants to be lord of the rings. They don’t even make minimal sense. She has to back and fill to explain why the magical overlords left him with these jerks in the first place.
Anyway, the fact that muggles can be mean isn’t any more relevant to the institutional discimrination against muggles than the fact that black people sometimes treat white people badly because of the color of their skin. (That is, it’s not completely irrevelevent, but doesn’t negate the overall institutional oppression.)
Fetishizing a despised group is treating them with contempt. The fact that the lines between marginalized and unmarginalized aren’t completely solid (i.e. Herminoe’s parents) doesn’t change the general fact of marginalization, any more than the fact that some black people have white skin means that black people don’t exist. Condescension and contempt are only really distinguishable by the people who are doing the condescension; when you’re being screwed over, it’s all much of a muchness.
Your arguments to me seem to pretty much illustrate the point. Harry Potter sees Voldemort’s muggle genocide as bad, but the books aren’t aware that the muggles, right now, in Harry Potter’s world, are essentially second class citizens. That seems incoherent to me.
Buffy isn’t about consistency, but if you want to tell stories about people, the fact that certain people aren’t accorded moral standing seems pretty important to me. Buffy condones genocide then has its characters quibble over metaphorical drug addiction. That doesn’t mean the show is worthless, but it does mean it’s morally incoherent.
@Noah
You’re approach has to be the single most charitable and complex reading of Twilight, by leagues, that I have ever heard of. I don’t know whether I can ever agree with you, but I certainly respect it.
Oh fuck…your*
re: Harry Potter
This is brilliant —> “The Dursleys are Roald Dahl evil adult characters in a world that wants to be lord of the rings” —> but I feel like the fantasy half of the equation is mostly coming from somewhere other than LotR. Maybe Narnia to some extent? But that doesn’t feel entirely right either.
re: Twilight
The fact that Noah’s analysis of Twilight seems so counterintuitive is, I submit, a consequence of cultural prejudice. If Edward were scared of his male gaze as opposed to his sex drive; if Bella got some speeches about how she’s a strong, independent woman who doesn’t need a man; if the Volturi were racists and/or sexists, then nobody would be surprised. But because it’s a Mormon morality tale, everybody assumes it must be stupid.
@Graham
As per Twilight, that analysis explains most of the vitriol I’ve seen aimed at it, I think. But a lot of it was also explicitly aimed at the nature of Bella/Edward’s relationship, namely, that his behavior toward her seemed creepy, stalker-ish, and abusive. I know I’ve floated this by Noah on some other thread, and you disputed the claim. But that’s where the most passionate and sincere hate of Twilight I’ve seen comes from. But again, this is, perhaps, incidental to the main discussion about the relative coherence/lack thereof between different franchises.
Accidental shift from “Noah” to “you”, there. My bad.
@Petar Yeah, but as Noah pointed out there, Bella either doesn’t seem to mind, or, when she does, she tells him to stop and he does. Again, I think it’s less a case of Twilight endorsing abuse than of Twilight carrying signifiers of a culture that secular liberals assume endorses abuse, ipso facto.
Meyer just released a revision/new version of twilight in which all the genders are switched. So, instead of Edward sitting over Bella while she sleeps, its’ Edythe sitting over Beau while he sleeps. Instead of Bella constantly being in need of rescue, it’s Beau who’s constantly in need of rescue.
It’s brilliant and weird; both a kind of refutation of the criticism and an acknowledgement of it and effort to deal with it.
Meyer’s prose is crap; her characters are shallow; the romance at the center of the novel isn’t believable at all. But Twilight is still great.
_____
Graham, I agree that LoTR isn’t quite right. Narnia is closer, but it’s weird without the Christian content. Maybe it’s just sort of third generation LoTR? All those three volume fantasies where there’s some relatively poorly developed evil that needs to be defeated…
Yeah, that interpretation of all this vitriol makes quite a bit of sense to me.
Didn’t think I would say this on this thread, but…thanks for explaining things to me, Graham!
@Noah
That…actually sounds really cool. I feel like plenty of other titles in the mainstream would become much more interesting and worthwhile with that treatment. I mean to say, if the original and the gender-bended version existed simultaneously and you could see them side by side. Can you imagine a universally gender-negated Breaking Bad? Not sure how worthwhile it would be, but it would sure be interesting.
It’s amazing. In part because if you know the original (and who doesn’t know the original) you frequently end up forgetting which gender is which. It’s deeply disorienting and weird, and makes you really aware of your own gender preconceptions. She uses fan fiction to get some of the same results that people like Delany and Joanna Russ and Le Guin get through heading towards highbrow gender theory.
I couldn’t get any mainstream site to let me review it. All the editors basically said, “oh, we don’t care about Twilight. That’s not interesting to us.” The most popular series of the last decade releases an incredibly ambitious, bizarre, exciting new project, and no one will cover it because it’s not an approved tween girl empowerment fantasy.
I’m still bitter. (though I do have a review of it coming out on a little site someday…)
Noah, obviously fetishizing a marginalized or despised group is bad. But muggles are not marginalized in the world of Harry Potter. They are an oblivious majority that lives in a sort of parallel world (a common device in fantasy, as you surely know). The muggle world is not, to my recollection, institutionally oppressed. (Where are you getting that?) Leaders of both groups work together. Muggles are respected by wizards in general, and when their memories are erased by the heroes (which is not cool, I agree), it’s out of an instinct to protect, not to subjugate.
Also? I don’t know how many of these books you’ve read, but Voldemort isn’t trying to exterminate muggles. He’s leading a mudblood genocide within the wizarding world. Muggles are occasionally collateral damage in that quest, but they barely figure into the story. Mudbloods, on the other hand, do–and they’re treated with deep respect by the “good guys.”
As for Meyer, I’m deeply skeptical of the switching genders exercise. A big part of the gender politics of the series is its pro-life agenda, and I don’t see how switching genders speaks to that at all. But anyway I love Twilight too.
Jesus Christ.
It’s pro-life agenda mostly means pacifism. Reproductive issues don’t come in until the later books, at which point it’s all about Bella’s choice, I think.
A lot of the hate of the first book (which is what she gender flips) is about stalking and who gets to be the protector, and switching genders on that messes with the tropes in a huge way.
It’s been a while since I read HP, and I didn’t make it all the way through; I don’t like the series very much (though I did see some other movies with my son.)
“Muggles are respected by wizards in general, and when their memories are erased by the heroes (which is not cool, I agree), it’s out of an instinct to protect, not to subjugate. ”
Yep, that’s what the people in power always say.
The Muggles are off to the side. Nobody really cares about them. It’s like they’re servants in a Jane Austen novel, or black Africans in a Taylor Swift video.
Mudbloods are hated because they’re from non wizarding muggle families, right? And there are scenes of Voldemort and company zapping muggles. Muggles are seen as inferior; that’s why the Mudbloods are hated. And that’s supposed to be bad…but the series itself generally treats Muggles as inferior too—uninteresting, in need of protection without their consent, kept away from the most important decisions (or at least that’s my memory.)
The parallel world trope is often used in fantasy. It’s in Twilight. I think Harry Potter handles it with unusual clumsiness.
That aside – so, Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined is just a retelling of the first book, right? Does anybody know if she intends to rewrite the others? Because obviously Beau can’t get pregnant, so it’ll be interesting to see how she gender swaps that!
She’s not rewriting the others; the ending of Life and Death is quite different than the ending of Twilight, and basically changes the entire direction of the series.
It is kind of a shame…because why couldn’t Beau get pregnant? It’s vampires; the biology is different, you could really do whatever you wanted. But it’s not to be…
Well, Graham Clark, if I were talking about black people–who Noah, for reasons that still remain entirely unclear to me, seems to think are analogous to the non-magical majority in Harry Potter??–I agree the protecting and subjugating distinction would be dumb. But in fact I am talking about muggles. And so far as I can see, they are not a systemically oppressed minority in any way.
Wizards have magical powers, but they are not institutionally empowered. There’s a difference. In the instances I recall in the books where wizards are erasing muggles’ memories, they’re acting as individuals trying to protect family members, not as officers empowered by the law. Like, what are we talking about?? Serious question! Show me how the system is rigged against muggles, fellas. I’m 95 percent confident you can’t.
Anyway. Noah, I’m not sure it’s fair to say that Bella makes a choice. To do so, she’d have to conceptualize it as a choice. And like, okay, Beau could have a baby, I guess? But that’s not going to resonate in the same way, at least until old white men start legislating against male vampires’ bodily autonomy.
Twilight’s not really about parallel worlds. It’s about when parallel worlds come into conflict.
@Kim O
“I’m not sure it’s fair to say that Bella makes a choice. To do so, she’d have to conceptualize it as a choice.”
This makes no sense (at least, I can’t make sense of it).
…I tried following that up with something not incredulous and irked, but instead I will just ask;
what exactly do you mean when you say this?
“And like, okay, Beau could have a baby, I guess? But that’s not going to resonate in the same way”
Also, that’s kinda the whole point. If it resonated the same way or to the same extent, even, the whole exercise would be pointless. The exercise exposes how a relatively superficial change in the narrative actually has explosive consequences for the meaning of the work, and how most of that comes from audience interpretations of gender.
@Kim It doesn’t matter who you’re talking about, that phrase is always going to be appalling.
That aside, I’m starting to suspect that you remember the books and movies even less well than I do. The Ministry of Magic erases muggles’ memories to keep the existence of the wizard world secret.
That aside, “not institutionally empowered” – as if institutional power were the only kind of oppressive power – what, are we conducting this conversation inside Rand Paul’s brain now? (Or maybe it’s just that his brain and Tumblr’s brain have more in common than either would like to admit.)
As for what the muggles are analogous to: different things from the point of view of different characters. To the Death Eaters, wizards with partial or total muggle ancestry are an amalgam of immigrants as seen by the contemporary far right and Jews as seen by the Nazis. To the good wizards, muggles are, basically, the non-university educated class (that is, the class who didn’t go to university and whose kids won’t be going to university).
So, Bella in Twilight wants to have the baby. Edward and Carlyle want her to abort. There’s absolutely a choice offered there…and in fact Edward and Carlyle are hoping to essentially force her to abort to save her life. She outmaneuvers them by allying with another of the women vampires (who’s name escapes me). So…I don’t get how she doesn’t see it as a choice? She’s specifically offered other options, rejects them, and then takes concrete steps to make sure she has control over her own body. It’s absolutely about women’s right to bodily autonomy — and in fact about women’s right to bodily autonomy achieved through sisterhood.
“And like, okay, Beau could have a baby, I guess? But that’s not going to resonate in the same way”
It would resonate in a different way. Trans men have babies; that is a thing that happens, and which has been a contentious issue in abortion debates.
Meyer isn’t doing that, but I think a woman writing about a man having a baby could be meaningful in a lot of ways.
As Graham says, my memory is that wizards erase Muggle memories in order to hide the wizarding world; it’s supposed to be protocol. Perhaps I’m not remembering correctly, but I’m pretty sure that happens numerous times in the books.
I don’t think muggle marginalization maps onto any real world marginalization precisely. As Graham says, there’s some elements of racial discrimination, and some elements of class discrimination. The book absolutely doesn’t see them as a discriminated class, that’s correct. But I think that’s a failure of the book, is what I’m saying. Muggles aren’t treated as fully human. They don’t get consulted on world shaking decisions; they get studied by wizards, but aren’t allowed to be the ones doing the studying (no research projects on wizarding ways, right?) they are always narratively marginal. They’re treated as second class people, by the wizards and by Rowling.
Muggles aren’t real, so it’s not like it’s some sort of ethical failure in itself to treat them as second class citizens, just as the house elves aren’t real, so their desire for servitude isn’t offensive to anyone in particular. But both cases I think show that Rowling doesn’t really understand, or care about, the egalitarian principles she claims are at the center of her work. The bad guys are eugenicists…and then the good guys are really eugenicists too, just not as mean about it.
as a side note, the Native Americans in Twilight are hugely offensive stereotypes, and her handling of them is a disaster.
Oh, and in fan fiction circles (not twilight fan fiction specifically, but all kinds) there’s actually lots and lots of male pregnancy stories, now that I think of it. It’s a fetish (this is mostly for women, who are the ones reading these stories) and a way to talk about gender and queerness and other issues which folks (again mostly women) seem to be interested in. Vom Marlowe shared one such story for my gay utopia project from a while back (I think the mechanics here are that the guy is turned into a woman and then has a baby…but I think it still fits what we’re talking about.)
I asked a Harry Potter expert to weigh in…though she may well have other things to do. But I’m hopeful…
maybe I’ll ask my son about the muggle mind erase thing…he was obsessed with Harry potter for a while there and I’m sure remembers better than I do…
“Harry Potter expert.” I’m putting that on my resume!
I think I’ll respond to this comment because it seems central to your overall crtique (please correct me if I’m summarizing you uncharitably.)
“I don’t think muggle marginalization maps onto any real world marginalization precisely. As Graham says, there’s some elements of racial discrimination, and some elements of class discrimination. The book absolutely doesn’t see them as a discriminated class, that’s correct. But I think that’s a failure of the book, is what I’m saying. Muggles aren’t treated as fully human. They don’t get consulted on world shaking decisions; they get studied by wizards, but aren’t allowed to be the ones doing the studying (no research projects on wizarding ways, right?) they are always narratively marginal. They’re treated as second class people, by the wizards and by Rowling.”
So, I agree with you largely, Noah (though I actually think the worldbuilding is better than you might give credit for). There are varying levels of contempt directed towards Muggles in the series, but the overall effect is that the Wizarding world systematically infantilizes them. Memory charms, for example, often use the same kind of rhetoric employed in national security discussions. “For their own good; Done for our protection because population x has been hostile in the past.”
Even when viewed affectionately, Muggles are often presented as quirky outsiders with strange, nonsensical habits. This much is acknowledge within the text itself. The muggle Prime Minister is informed by Cornelius Fudge that Voldemort has returned. He’s not consulted. He’s told.
I do think there’s a failure in writing here—there’s not much question to whether or not wizards are superior to muggles. Dumbledore and co. may verbally argue that muggles are not inferior, but the overall effect of the story is to lionize magic. Part of this lionization is due to the story’s structure: Harry discovers a previously hidden world that saves him from the awful Durlseys. Magic is presented with awe and wonder because it’s novel, and readers see this magic through Harry, who previously had no knowledge of its existence.
BUUUUUT. I don’t think that’s the whole story.
Now, what I find compelling is that Voldemort explicitly believes in the superiority of magic. Except, his prowess with magic can’t defeat love. Love is the “power which the Dark Lord knows not” (I’m paraphrasing the prophecy.) This power exists also in the muggle world, so even though muggles are often infantilized, they also have access to something which is superior to magic.
As a result, I think Rowling follows a pretty standard fantasy world-building rule: Magic can’t be used to get characters out of their problems– magic can only create problems.
Love and self-sacrifice link Harry back to the material world when he “dies.” He offers himself freely to Voldemort, unarmed without a wand. It is when he reliquishes the magical means to defend himself that he becomes “The Chosen One.” The fact that he refuses to use magic and willingly sacrifices himself for everyone at Hogwarts is, I think, telling. Rowling has a moral system that puts love at the top of her hierarchy…magic comes afterwards.
Noah, your point about choice in Twilight is interesting. It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but what stayed with me was Bella, from the day of conception (literally), was absolutely adamant that she had to die horribly, violently, to bring her child into the world. This struck me as a bit much, couched as it is in a book with the gender stuff others have mentioned…and a whole Virginity Thing…and a girl getting married at the age 18…not to mention a society that tells these kinds of stories with alarming regularity (cf. Lori on the Walking Dead).
The context I don’t have is this imaginary universe in which Bella is a trans man giving birth. Obviously, I know that trans men can and do give birth. But what that has to do with anything is beyond my powers to track your argument.
Sarah makes a lot of good points. I agree with a lot of them and I think her read of the end seems right. But I don’t think that Rowling leaving the muggles at the fringes was a failure to perceive the power dynamics of her own story, as Noah does. I don’t really think Rowling casts wizards as superior, even inadvertently. I think it’s a matter of storytelling priorities…a technical device she uses to make the magic seem more plausible, especially to young readers. In that, she was inarguably successful.
Thanks Sarah! That’s very helpful.
I think what I’d dispute is that devaluing magic ends up valuing Muggles. I think those are kind of separate issues. Obviously, Muggles are associated with non-magic. But there are many instances where you can have characteristics associated with a marginalized group valued without necessarily changing the status or prejudice against marginalized groups.
Like Last of the Mohicans, for example. Native American skill/wisdom is extolled, but the extolling is in the context of the white guy using Native American knowledge to be better/more skilled/more wise than Native Americans themselves. Similarly, muggle non-magic isn’t enough, right, even if in some sense non-magic is associated with muggles.
Love in Harry Potter may conquer magic, but it has to be love deployed by someone who could use magic in the first place, right? the fact that magic isn’t the thing to use doesn’t mean that the chosen one is some muggle.
Kim, I think storytelling devices are completely wrapped up in issues of marginalization and inequity. Harry Potter picks up storytelling conventions around fantasy heroes and I’d argue around superheroes, and those tropes are very much about making one person the most important chosen one and about noble blood; they’re hierarchical. Rowling is somewhat uncomfortable with that, and tries to push against it in some ways—but she’s ultimately too committed to the tropes, and ends up (I’d say) reinscribing them perhaps even more thoroughly because she pretends to disavow them.
“But what that has to do with anything is beyond my powers to track your argument. ”
I mentioned Beau giving birth off hand, and you wanted to argue about it! But we can stop if it’s no longer interesting.
Ack! Almost forgot about choice and Bella.
Kim, Bella is super impulsive and stubborn throughout the books. She falls in love at first sight, she dives off cliffs, she decides pretty quickly that she wants to be a vampire come hell or high water, in the first book she decides to sacrifice herself to save her friends kind of right off, and then she figures out a way to do it. This isn’t that unusual for heroes — Jim Kirk comes to mind as decisive impulsive dude hero. You don’t exactly see it as much with women in fiction, and especially not with women who are embracing feminine roles (like self-sacrifice and having children.)
Whatever you think about that…I don’t think indecision is a necessary component of having choices, necessarily. Bella knows her own mind, but she also knows all the options, and the book goes out of its way to show that her decision about her own body is incredibly important, and that she’s heroic for insisting upon it.
Also…she uses the pregnancy to get what she wants in other respects. Bella wants to be a vampire; Edward doesn’t want to turn her. By carrying the baby to term Bella can force him to make her a vampire. So it’s not only about self-sacrifice for the child; it’s about her own desire for her own future.
This post resonated with me on so many levels, and I wanted to thank “Kael Salad” for writing it. I’m a former teacher, ex-academic, book critic, compulsive pop culture scold, AND, in a categorical overlap that will surprise no one, aspiring novelist. I don’t just have a dog in this fight, I have an army of dogs permanently enmeshed in a ground war with no exit strategy and this piece resonated with me like whoa.
I particularly love the writing–you accomplish so much in so little space, and weave together so many true and humane things about our personal relationships with culture, and with each other around culture. I think you’re completely right, and very wise, about the role these stepping-stone stories play in the lives of adolescents, but of course it doesn’t end there–I feel like I spend all my time these days calibrating who gets to hear what level of what I *really* think about things like Kimmy Schmidt or the new Aziz Ansari show or Linklater’s Boyhood or whatever damn thing it is this week, not to mention being honest about the flaws of aspirational books in a print publication whose main function is to convince people that maybe they should try buying a book *at all*, now and then. A huge part of being a cultural critic is threading the needle between fan service on one side and an infatuation with pointing out the true but ugly thing that can be, in practice, inhumane–not only because of hubris but because at its most “successful” it can actually quash the desire to make art at all. Sometimes the most productive way to critique a thing is to let people have it and hold it for a while, let it kindle what it’s meant to kindle in them, and pull out your scalpel only when it’s useful–or, if they’re students, when they’re clearly ready to go to the next level.
At the same time, some people will never be ready. Our hesitance to embrace ambiguity in our relationship to pop culture mirrors perfectly our hesitance to embrace complexity in our relationships to villains–our horror at the possibility that maybe there are no villains–or maybe we are villains–or that the word villain is a huge red herring.
So many of these stories play with that dark side, as you observe, by flipping the script temporarily for mind-bending one-offs and interview-with-a-villain threads, but ultimately everyone has to be yanked back into line: Buffy wakes up from her drug-induced hallucination to realize that, no, this whole show *isn’t* just a pseudo-empowering escapist fantasy in which she gets to put a human-but-other face on her patriarchal demons before impaling them, and the meta-danger of a real critique is dismissed. (Joss Whedon has of course been super vocal about what he thinks of critics in general.) Sorry I’m digressing, your article is making me have thoughts.
I do think that Hunger Games, by its third book, has waded far deeper into meta-critique than any of the others mentioned here. Collins is not afraid to put her own plot devices under the microscope, or dismantle her heroes’ self-regard without rehabilitating it; her happily ever after is a traumatized veteran in a loveless co-dependent marriage. People’s lives get shattered and stay shattered. It’s not Star Wars, where you can just blow up a woman’s home planet and expect her comfort-relationship to be a good one.
So, in a nutshell: please write more, anonymous Kael Salad, or point me to other places where I can find your writing! You’re terrific, you make me have thoughts, and I bet your students freaking *adore* you.
whoa sorry that last comment turned into an essay. I don’t comment on blogs ever, this is why.
That’s a great comment! Thanks Amy.
I did talk to my son about Harry Potter; he felt that of course the muggles are discriminated against and treated badly. He says McGonnagil (sp?) and others often talk about how stupid the muggles are for not noticing magic (a cruel double bind since of course when they do notice their memories are erased) and he even thinks Dumbledore at one point comments on the way that Muggles smell (!) He also pointed out that Hermione erases the memories of her own parents, and that this is supposed to be heroic and necessary, since they were preventing her from helping Harry, and muggles are stupid and timid.
I think the Hunger Games is kind of a mess too…as Kael says, there’s never exactly a grappling with the fact that the readers are in the position of the people being entertained by watching kids murder each other. It does grapple with PTSD, and the end is a downer—but the 2nd and 3rd books seem so gratuitous anyway, more along the lines of, well, that sold really well, let’s do it again with the kiddie torture. The last book in particular where they have to cook up some hunger games type obstacles even though it doesn’t really make any sense…I don’t know. I like HG more than HP, but not a whole lot more.
“twee white bullshit films”
Opposed to what, Osvaldo? twee black films?