The Physics of Fiction

Posted on July 30, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

I grew up in a universe in which electrons were like planets orbiting double nuclei “suns” in tiny solar systems. It was a metaphor, a useful one at the time. Then new data required a figurative upheaval. Now the electrons of my children’s universe mingle in clouds. Electrons always have—chemistry teachers of my youth just didn’t know better. Any change in metaphor is also a change in reality. That’s why the in-between state, when the old system is collapsing but no new figurative principle has risen to organize the chaos, is so scary. Metaphors are how we think.

During the second half of the 20th century, the literary universe was a simple binary: good/bad, highbrow/lowbrow, serious/escapist, literature/pulp. Like Bohr’s atomic solar system, that model has lost its descriptive accuracy. We’ve hit a critical mass of literary data that don’t fit the old dichotomies. Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, and Jonathan Lethem are among the most obvious paradigm disruptors, but the list of literary/genre writers keeps expanding. A New Yorker editor, Joshua Rothman, recently added Emily St. John Mandel to the list: Her postapocalyptic novel Station Eleven is a National Book Award finalist—further evidence, Rothman writes, of the “genre apocalypse.”

Rothman resurrects Northrop Frye to fill the vacuum left by the collapsing genre system, but the Frye model’s four-part structure (novel, romance, anatomy, confession) is more likely to spread chaos (“novel” is a kind of novel?). Another suggestion comes from a holdout of the 20th-century model: The critic Arthur Krystal believes an indisputable boundary separates “guilty pleasures” from serious writing. Perhaps more disorienting, Chabon would strip bookstores of all signage and shelve all fiction together. Ursula Le Guin, probably the most celebrated speculative-fiction author alive, agrees: “Literature is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.”

I applaud the egalitarian spirit, but the Chabon-Le Guin nonmodel, while accurate, offers no conceptual comforts. The Bohr model survived even after physicists knew it was wrong because it was so eloquent. Even this former high-school-chemistry student could steer his B-average brain through it. A vast expanse of free-floating books is unnavigable. A good metaphor needs gravity.

To explain the lowly lowbrow world of comic books, Peter Coogan, director of the Institute for Comics Studies, spins superheroes around a “genre sun”—the closer a text orbits the sun, the more rigid the text’s generic conventions. It’s a good metaphor, which is why most models use some version of it, including all those old binaries: The further a text travels from the bad-lowbrow-genre-escapist sun, the more good-highbrow-literary-serious it is. But because metaphors control how we think, solar models are preventing us from understanding changes in our literary/genre universe. It looks like an apocalypse only because we don’t know how to measure it yet.

Chabon is often credited for starting the genre debate with “Thrilling Tales,” the first genre-themed issue of McSweeney’s, published in 2003—though the Peter Straub-edited “New Wave Fabulists” issue of Conjunctions beat it to press by months, and surely Francis Ford Coppola deserves credit for rebooting the classic pulp magazine All-Story in 1997. Coppola has since published luminaries like Rushdie and Murakami, even if, according to the old model, those literary gas giants should exude far too much gravitas to be attracted to a lowly pulp star. And what becomes of second-class planets when their own creators declare them subliterary? According to S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 writing rules, detective fiction shouldn’t include any “long descriptive passages” or “literary dallying with side-issues,” not even “subtly worked-out character analyses.” For Krystal, if a “bad” novel becomes “good,” it exits its neighborhood and ascends into Literature. The Krystal universe of fiction resolves around the collapsed sun of a black genre hole, and his literary event horizon separates which novels are sucked in and which escape into the expansive beauty of literary fiction.

Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians, calls that argument “bollocks, of the most bollocky kind.”

“As soon as a novel becomes moving or important or great,” he retorted in Time, “critics try to surgically extract it from its genre, lest our carefully constructed hierarchies collapse in the presence of such a taxonomical anomaly.” The problem is nomenclature. Grossman defines genre by tropes: A story about a detective is a detective story—it may or may not also be a formulaic detective story. Krystal defines genre exclusively by formula. Substitute out the ambiguous term, and his logic is self-evident: When a formula novel ceases to be primarily about its formula it is no longer a formula novel. Well, duh.

Grossman’s trope approach makes more sense, but Krystal is nostalgic for more than generic categorization. The old dichotomy was seductive because it was (as Grossman points out) hierarchical, performing the double organizing duty of describing and evaluating. By opposing “literary” to “genre” and then conflating “literary” with “quality,” Krystal is forced to make some ineloquent claims: “All the Pretty Horses is no more a western than 1984 is science fiction.” While technically true (Cormac McCarthy’s and Orwell’s novels are genre to the same degree), such assertions are forgivable as long as they are exceptions. But when those free-floating planets represent the expanding norm (in what possible sense are Atwood’s, McCarthy’s, and Colson Whitehead’s most recent novels not apocalyptic?), Krystal’s model collapses.

At least the good/bad dichotomy has collapsed. It never made categorical sense, since a “bad good book”—a poorly written work of literary fiction—had no category. Literary fiction is another problematic term. It traditionally denotes narrative realism, fiction that appears to take place here on Earth, but it’s also been used as shorthand for works of artistic worth. With the second half of the definition provisionally struck, we’re left with realism. Its solar center is mimesis, the mirror that works of literature are held against to test their ability to reflect our world. Northrop Frye declared mimesis one of the two defining poles of literature, though he had trouble naming its opposite. Frye located romance—a category that includes romance as well as all other popular genres (and so another conceptual strike against the Frye model)—in the idealized world, so Harlequin romances are part fantasy too (real guys just aren’t that gorgeous and wonderful).

But any overt authorial agenda can rile mimesis fans. Agni editor Sven Birkerts panned Margaret Atwood’s first MaddAddam novel because “its characters all lack the chromosome that confers deeper human credibility,” and so, he concluded of the larger premise-driven genre, “science fiction will never be Literature with a capital ‘L.’” Atwood was writing in a subliterary mode because she had an overt social and political intention. So her greatest literary sins, for Birkerts, aren’t her genetically engineered humans, but her Godlike and so nonmimetic use of them.

Others have tried to balance the seesaw with poetic style or formula or sincerity, suggesting that literature is a wheel of spectra with mimesis at its revolving center. In the old model, mimesis was also the definition of “literary quality”: The closer a work of fiction orbited its mimetic sun, the brighter and better it was. Like the Bohr model, that’s comprehensively simple, and so little wonder Krystal is still grasping it: Literature is the lone throbbing speck of Universal Goodness surrounded by an abyss of quality-sucking black genre space. Remove “quality” from the equation and posit a spectrum of mimetic to nonmimetic categorizations bearing no innate relationship to artistic worth, and the system still collapses.

Quality could rest in that fuzzy middle zone, a literary sweet spot combining the event horizons of two stars: mimesis and genre. That middle way is tempting—and perhaps even accurate when studying “21st Century North American Literary Genre Fiction,” the clumsily titled course I taught last semester. I am requiring my current advanced fiction workshop students to write in that two-star mode, applying psychological realism to a genre of their choice. But it’s a lie. If quality is mobile, and it is, then no position on the spectrum—any spectrum—is inherently “good.”

Perhaps novels, like the electrons of my youth, orbit double-star nuclei, zigzagging around convention neutrons and invention protons in states of qualitative flux. It’s not just the text—it’s the reader. That’s a central paradox of physics too. “We are faced with a new kind of difficulty,” wrote Albert Einstein. “We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do.” Light, depending on how you measure it, is made either of particles or of waves—and so somehow is both. That seemingly impossible wave-particle duality applies to all quantic elements, including works of fiction.

The cognitive psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, in their 2013 study, “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,”dragged the genre debate onto the pages of Science. Literary fiction, they reason, makes readers infer the thoughts and feelings of characters with complex inner lives. Psychologists call that Theory of Mind. I call it psychological realism, another form of mimesis. The researchers place popular fiction at the other, nonmimetic pole, because popular fiction, they argue, is populated by simple and predictable characters, and so reading about them doesn’t involve “ToM.”

Kidd and Castano are recycling Krystal’s “genre” definition, only using “popular” for “formulaic.” Their results support their hypothesis—volunteers who read literary fiction scored better on ToM tests afterward—because their literary reading included “Corrie,” a recent O. Henry Prize-winning story by Alice Munro, and the genre reading included Robert Heinlein’s “Space Jockey,” a detailed speculation on the nuts and bolts of space travel populated by appallingly two-dimensional characters. The science is as circular as Krystal’s: Stories that don’t use readers’ ToM skills don’t improve readers’ ToM skills.

If psychological realism is taxonomically useful for defining “literary” (and I believe it is), then here’s a better question: What results would a ToM-focused genre story yield? My colleague in Washington and Lee University’s psychology department, Dan Johnson, and I are exploring that right now. For a pilot study, we created two versions of the same ToM-focused scene. One takes place in a diner, the other on a spaceship. Aside from word substitutions (“door” and “airlock,” “waitress” and “android”), it’s the same story, the same inference-rich exploration of characters’ inner experiences. When asked how much effort was needed to understand the characters, the readers of the narrative-realist scene reported expending 45 percent more effort than the sci-fi readers. The narrative realists also scored 22 percent higher on a comprehension quiz. When asked to rate the scene’s quality on a five-point scale, the diner landed 45 percent higher than the spaceship. The inclusion of sci-fi tropes flipped a switch in our readers’ heads, reducing the amount of effort they exerted and so also their understanding and appreciation. Genre made them stupid. “Literariness” is at least partially a product of a reader’s expectations, whether you lean in or kick back. Fiction, like light, can be two things at once.

This wave-particle model may or may not emerge as the organizing metaphor of contemporary literature, but follow-up experiments are under way. We will survive the genre apocalypse. In fact, I predict we’ll find ourselves still orbiting the mimetic sun of psychological realism. The good/bad, literary/genre binary has collapsed, but the center still holds.

[This article originally appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education in January 2015.]

Under the Gun

Posted on July 23, 2015 by Kate Polak

After a year in New York City, where the claustrophobia was so oppressive that I sometimes snuck out into the hallway to beat on the plywood screwed onto the roof hatch, my husband and I moved to a small village in Ohio. Yellow Springs is a town you may have heard of, in spite of its population of only a few thousand; the hometown of Dave Chappelle, a liberal enclave filled with older radicals and young free-spirit entrepreneurs, it is bounded by farms and parks. The Tecumseh Land Trust, a sort of demilitarized zone whose maintenance keeps strip malls and chain stores at bay, insures a level of charm annihilated by an influx of big box stores in neighboring towns. It is bounded on another side by Glen Helen, a small nature preserve with winding trails leading over a waterfall and a modest center for the rehabilitation of injured birds of prey. Our downtown consists of a few restaurants, a few coffee joints, a number of shops devoted to the functional and ornamental artwork of locals, a movie theater, and a local grocery. On Saturdays, much of the town turns out for the farmer’s market, populated by piles of organic peppers and tomatoes, small-batch fermented vegetables, and cheese from the cows I walk past on foggy mornings.

A year after our move, the pavement was still hot against the soles of our feet as my husband and I stood, arms around one another’s shoulders, looking far down the street. This was an awkward posture for us—neither a cold nor an overly affectionate couple—and after a while, we ended up standing apart but close, as the rattle of gun shots down the block shuddered through the air.

I came from a neighborhood where SWAT raids, random gunfire, and despair were not uncommon. I was in eighth grade when a girl in my class was gunned down in a nearby parking lot—I didn’t know it was her, but I had seen a body lying in a parking lot on a walk. One morning, I woke to the train whistle, more insistent than usual. A block away, a man had simply sat down on the tracks and waited. The rails were awash in blood by the time I was going to school, a fine spray over the rocks in the cess. A stray bullet fired by a neighbor in a fury of celebration one July 4^th afternoon lodged itself in the wall above my parents’ bed. If it had been the evening, it would have penetrated my father’s abdomen. He dug it out of the wall and displayed it next to the pennies he and my mother crush on the train tracks.

On this night, however, violence was out of place.

The gun battle was raging at 11pm on a Tuesday. After picking Ian up from work when the sirens began wheeling around our neighborhood, we padded back and forth between the porch and the intersection between our street and a major road. For two blocks beyond the intersection, police cars lined either side of the street, and the main road was rapidly filling with news cameras, giant lights casting a surreal glow on the corner I normally turned to walk past a friend’s wild flower-strewn front garden. She sometimes punctuates the arboreal splendor with artfully curated holiday decorations. The pavement was still hot against the soles of our feet as Ian and I stood, arms around one another’s shoulders, looking far down the street. This was an awkward posture for us—neither a cold nor an overly affectionate couple—and after a while, we stood apart but close, as the rattle of gun shots down the block shuddered through the air.

Facebook had exploded with rumors two hours before, but by 11pm, we know that the shooter was Ian’s friend Paul, that he was barricaded in his house a few blocks north on our street, and that he would not be coming over for dinner on Wednesday.

We had been trying to find time for a cookout for a year, in part because I had never met him in person. Online, Paul’s regular posts on Ian’s Facebook wall, while littered with extraneous ellipses, were well-reasoned, and emotionally raw—a mockery of form that nonetheless commanded respect for their naked subjective engagement. In spite of this, however, he was not known for his delicacy of approach. Debates about guns were particularly vituperative. Paul had, several years before, been the subject of a raid, which turned up hundreds of guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition. All of it was legally purchased, and all of it was returned. Several other friends had already blocked him, and his rambling responses were occasionally aggressive. Unlike those on most internet commenting threads, however, the longer Paul interacted, the sweeter he became—after what began as a particularly vicious battle, the thread would eventually devolve into Paul’s declarations of love and appreciation, grateful for the debate.

Ian had seen him the day before, Monday, at Kroger, and was a bit sad and distant after watching Paul limp to the plastic pharmacy counter to collect his blood pressure medication. He had picked me up from mucking out stalls, I was flush with the new strength in my arms, and reeked of dirt and manure, my spine singing from the muscles knitting and thickening across my shoulders and back, and easily gamboled over Ian’s ache for Paul’s reduction.

Tuesday morning was spent pulling meat out of the freezer to defrost and marinate.

My fingers closed on Ian’s arm as we counted seventeen shots in rapid succession. We walked back to the corner, looked down at the army surrounding Paul’s small house, briefly embraced, walked back.

On Wednesday morning, I started to weep.

A week before, the day after I defended my dissertation, my friend Jeremy was gunned down in a local bar after what can only be described as a psychotic break. During high school, Jeremy’s parents’ porch was a safe space; conveniently placed alongside of a main drag, but tucked just away off on a side street, the wide, concrete steps could accommodate more than a dozen milling youth, while the solid stone paling shielded us from passersby. Teenaged girlfriends and I loitered while he and his friends joked around, but the unusual element in this scene was that Jeremy and his friend Phil policed the discourse; it was a misogyny-free zone, the only anodyne social space in my adolescence.

Jeremy and I had been in irregular but enthusiastic contact since we were in high school, using the innovations of digital correspondence to manufacture political debates every few months. Looking back on a long conversation on hate crimes, I’m struck more by the pleasantness of the exchange than by our stark disagreement. Jeremy thought that the existence of the legal designation of hate crimes amounted to criminalizing thought, while I see them as a classification of a crime committed against an individual but intended to terrorize a larger group. Jeremy thought profiling could be useful, while I think that profiling is an act of racism. These are wide gulfs in thought and approach, but his respect for my views was apparent in his phrasing. He wasn’t seeking to convert me—merely to show me that his point-of-view was reasonable. I often explain to my students that this is the only truly honorable approach in a debate.

On the day of his death, according to reports, he argued with his mother before departing her home. When confronted by police he removed his gun from its holster and waved it around in a threatening manner, at which point he was repeatedly tased and then shot to death in a bar around the corner from his parents’ house, the only bar in crawling distance from my apartment of half a decade. He had apparently tried to raise his gun as officers struggled him to the ground.

It has been nearly two years since their deaths, and I have fought with myself over how to say something meaningful about them. Mass shootings are in the news more often than not, and each time another young man murders, I think back to Paul and Jeremy. Their stories are not unfamiliar: both had issues with mental illness, both had easy access to firearms, and both had a deep and abiding suspicion that gun regulation was the first step down the road towards fascism. But both were also deeply compassionate, vulnerable, had families they loved and large social circles. They were friendly and warm, and when they talked about the issues they cared about, they spoke clearly and calmly, and they listened respectfully to other views. It won’t do to memorialize them with another call to fund mental health services, to regulate the sale of firearms, or to expand government oversight. They had good access to mental healthcare, they purchased firearms within the bounds of the law, and they would have been appalled if I leveraged their memories for more regulation. It won’t do to call on neighbors and friends, or to point towards a particular viewpoint or conspiracy theory. They had friends and family who cared deeply, and they weren’t rigid ideologues. They were nuanced.

In both cases, the authorities tasked with handling Jeremy and Paul’s respective outbursts were in danger, but also were both heavy-handed, which led to discussions in Cincinnati and Yellow Springs about the increasing militarization of the police force. It’s a discussion that should continue, but it is not the only discussion worth having in relation to outbreaks of gun violence (if their perpetuity can even be captured by the term “outbreak” anymore).

These deaths recall for me a darker aspect of our culture. As I mentioned at the opening of this essay, I’m not a stranger to violence. The neighborhood I grew up in goes through regular cycles, the ebb and flow of blood that is a fact of life in poverty. As a teenager, I had guns trained on me by both criminals and officers, and never in the context of a “drug deal gone wrong” or during an arrest. Instead, it was during activities remarkable in this context only for their dailiness; walking home from getting a cone of shaved ice, walking into my parents’ back yard. When the ATF raided the house two doors down and pulled 147 illegal guns out of one side of the duplex, kids had been playing in the front yard an hour before. The girl in my 8^th grade class who was shot to death in a parking lot two blocks away. Shots fired were nothing irregular. These were not the experiences of the vast majority of my white classmates, whose houses were nestled in quiet cul-de-sacs in different neighborhoods that seemed very, very far away.

But now, the boundaries are failing. It isn’t that mass shootings are becoming more frequent. It’s that they’re becoming more frequent in ways middle-class white people can see. At 33, now a middle-class white person myself, it is eerie to watch the type of violence I grew up understanding to be common follow me into areas where the police brutality, the S.W.A.T. raids, the tanks, the guns, and all of the other attendant material hallmarks are clearly perceived as something new.

One of the things that always bothered me in discussions about gun violence and violence in general is that those who have not grown up in the shadow of its threat often assume that we acclimate ourselves to it. Environments of violence don’t breed an adjustment period that is capped with a reconciliation with one’s surroundings. It doesn’t get less traumatic just because it happens every day.

I’m a professor of English now. My work is concerned with the representation of violence in literature and the study of empathy. The longer I consider the questions that have guided my life and career, the less I believe that empathy exists beyond a very narrow engagement with the people around me who are like me. Who are around you, who are like you. I worry sometimes that my academic interests are turning me into a sort of voyeur sociopath, who has feelings but suspects that they are considerably more limited and less useful than most would assume. As I read over the essays written by smart, caring people attempting to grapple with this suddenly more unsafe world, I think back to the neighborhood of my youth, where if you chalked the outline of every body that had lain on those streets, you couldn’t take a step without toeing the outline of another tragedy.

The last discussion I had with Jeremy centered on gun control, gun rights, and intent versus contemporary usage in Constitutional rights. While he advocated for gun rights, he was nonetheless disturbed when I sent him information about the connection between the ratification of the Second Amendment and Virginia’s slave-hunting militias. He had a conceal-and-carry license, and frequently encouraged me to buy a gun and take classes in order to better protect myself. In one of our last exchanges, he told me that he wanted to be “the good guy with a gun,” and that he hoped, in spite of my views, I would thank him. Winky face.

I can’t help but wonder, as I re-read those messages, whether a relentless consciousness of the chaos at the gates was what compelled him to have that gun, and if a more immersive vision of it—as I had in my old neighborhood—would have made him feel any differently. But I don’t get to ask him, which is itself a tragedy, because he would have had some interesting thoughts to share.

Biting the Hand That Feeds: Hannibal, Rihanna, and Sexual Harassment

Posted on July 13, 2015 by Kate Polak

I had somehow missed The Silence of the Lambs, viewing it only a few years ago, well into my adulthood. After years of making jokes about how “it rubs the lotion on its skin,” my husband got frustrated with my blank looks of incomprehension and queued it up on Netflix. As Buffalo Bill grows increasingly irate with his captive, screaming at her “or else it gets the hose again!”, I burst into tears. A 30 year old woman frantically crying over an often-mocked scene in a 20 year old film.

My husband was unnerved to say the least—he had seen the film when it came out, and since it circulated in popular culture in a recognizable way for him, the line had lost its teeth. It was cheesy, and morphed into a joke. I, on the other hand, had no context for the line, and had heard it for years as a cutesy phrase that referenced a film I’d never watched. Having it replaced in its proper milieu was jarring. Instead of a tacky scene worthy of ridicule, something about the pronoun—“it”—and the directive about lotion reached around the rational part of my mind and struck me directly in the amygdala.

I unintentionally overlooked the television series Hannibal until two seasons in, when I was looking to kick off last summer with some horror. The glorious cinematography, the powerfully reserved acting, and the beautifully rendered script combined to make a stunning and tense dance of intellect and gore.

The first and second seasons are fixated on the strain between knowledge and ignorance. Will Graham, a special investigator for the FBI, is capable—according to Dr. Lecter—of “pure empathy”; he can mentally reconstruct a murderer’s actions, playing the role of the criminal in his internal recreation of the drama. Special Agent Jack Crawford contacts Will to assist him on a case in which young women of the same physical description have been disappearing. Crawford’s initial role is less that of a capable investigator than a pushy delegator. Dr. Alana Bloom, a purportedly intelligent psychiatrist, has taken an interest in Will, and wants to protect him from what she sees as Crawford’s potentially disruptive pressure. To this end, she introduces Crawford to Dr. Hannibal Lecter, who is tasked with monitoring Will.

The show relies on the audience’s pre-existing knowledge of Dr. Lecter operating in the background. Assuming we have seen the unhinged Anthony Hopkins biting the cheek off of a prison guard and recounting eating a liver with “some fava beans and a nice Chianti,” we are faced instead with an eminently rational and restrained Lecter in the show.

Lecter’s self-possessed mien in Hannibal stands in stark contrast to Hopkins’ portrayal, and while the audience knows he is the “bad guy,” the show operates less on the shock value of the murders under investigation or Lecter’s own gastronomical vagaries, and more on how power and knowledge must be—as Michel Foucault insisted—thought together.

Foucault equated knowledge with power, something that those currently struggling under the auspices of austerity in the academe may find laughable, but it’s an equation that is nonetheless compelling for situating current debates about the role of those with knowledge, and what types of knowledge can (or should) be leveraged into power. In Hannibal, Lecter uses his intellect, as well as his privileged status as confidant and guide for Will, to conduct increasingly bizarre experiments on him while the latter is in a fugue state. Lecter manipulates those around him, relentlessly curious about the boundaries of goodness and empathy in those who have the capacity for them.

Foucault is careful to distinguish between knowledge that is laden with power and knowledge that is marginalized. He specifically notes the “disqualified knowledges” of the mentally ill, but broadens this to say that “We are concerned, rather, with the insurrection of knowledges that are opposed primarily not to the contents, methods, or concepts of science, but to the effects of the centralizing powers which are linked to the institution and functioning” of a discipline (Power/Knowledge 84). In regards to this, he parses the way in which power is only thought of as something that is exerted, rather than something that is naturalized and replicated without direct activity.

As shorthand, it can be thought of as the distinction between the power of having and the power of doing.

Hannibal’s ability to unnerve and disquiet rests not on the “reveal,” as with many crime thrillers. The audience already knows who the villain is, even as the team tries to sort out other cases of varying drama and terror. Instead, the appeal of Hannibal rests almost entirely with the tacit knowledge shared by the audience and Lecter: that he is the antagonist, but we still want to see precisely what he is capable of in relationships. In fact, the least interesting scenes in the show are those that depict him enjoying a meal of a person alone. The tension instead resides in watching Lecter use the knowledge he has of himself—as well as his developing theories about other characters—to his own ends.

I’ve been reflecting on Hannibal throughout the year because its peculiar blend of refinement, psychopathology, and epicureanism holds me in a strange thrall. It reminds me of other debates about power, both the having and the doing, because the show has crafted a world in which the rules of behavior and the exercise of power are nearly illegible to those in the best position to address the atrocities occurring within their midst.

In particular, as I watch the third (and possibly final) season of Hannibal, I’m also embroiled in the ongoing debate about campus sexual harassment, launched in part by Laura Kipnis in her now-famous Chronicle of Higher Education article “Sexual Paranoia Strikes the Academe.” This may seem an odd pairing—a show about a psychiatrist/cannibalistic serial killer and a turgid debate about whether or not professors should be permitted to have sex with students—but I can’t help but think that the same questions about power are at stake.

For those who haven’t followed the discussion, Kipnis’s argument rests on three major elements. The first is that administrators are overstepping their boundaries and are infringing on academic freedom. This is patently true, and doesn’t merit debate. Administrative overreach has been consistently critiqued over the past 30 years, and is getting worse as faculty are increasingly shifted to the status of contingent labor. Furthermore, because of this administrative overreach, it is increasingly clear that non-educators are determining educational policy, always to the detriment of students’ actual development.

Second, she contends that an obvious example of this is new policies prohibiting professor-student romantic relationships. These policies have been implemented at a variety of universities to quell the tide of demonstrations against campus sexual assault. While I personally agree with these policies, I can see the potential problems with them, and am willing to debate them.

Third, she argues that the supposed “sexual panic” on campuses is vastly overinflating a relatively benign problem, and that students’ own sense of exaggerated vulnerability is actually making professors the more vulnerable class. This is ridiculous. Professor-on-student sexual harassment and assault are still significant issues. While student-on-student sexual harassment accounts for 80% of reports on campus, that still leaves a sizable problem. Furthermore, many cases of both varieties go unreported. For example, Kipnis asserts that

For the record, I strongly believe that bona fide harassers should be chemically castrated, stripped of their property, and hung up by their thumbs in the nearest public square. Let no one think I’m soft on harassment. But I also believe that the myths and fantasies about power perpetuated in these new codes are leaving our students disabled when it comes to the ordinary interpersonal tangles and erotic confusions that pretty much everyone has to deal with at some point in life, because that’s simply part of the human condition.

Here, she is conflating normal misunderstandings with harassment.

My annoyance with the tenor of this discussion has increased with the tone-deafness of Kipnis’ understanding of power and its subtle manifestations.

In Hannibal, the audience is in reluctant collusion with Lecter as he manipulates and slaughters characters. There are—of course—the “ordinary interpersonal entanglements” of daily life. Will Graham and Alanna Bloom share an attraction, but because Alanna is concerned about Will’s mental state, she refuses to enter into a relationship with him. Jack Crawford’s pressure on Will to use his empathy can grow harsh. However, standing in stark contrast to these relatively benign interactions is the maneuvering of Lecter.

Interestingly, both Will and Lecter work from the point of curiosity about human emotions and motivation. While Will is able to adopt the perspective of others who have committed misdeeds in the past, Lecter is able to use his observations to predict future behavior. Both are talented, but only one begins the series with a sense of the way in which his knowledge brings him power. In the first season, Lecter experiments on Will after discovering that he has the symptoms of encephaly. Instead of seeking surgical treatment for his patient, Lecter devises a series of experiments in the clinical setting to encourage Will to lose time. In entrusting his mind to another, Will is violated at both the psychological and bodily levels because he fails to discern how this power can be leveraged against him.

After Will reconstructs a crime scene that includes a grisly totem pole of bodies, he loses time and appears at Lecter’s office door. Lecter tells him that this is the result of his psyche “enduring repeated abuse,” and Will frantically objects that “No, NO! I am NOT abused!” Lecter repeats that Will has an empathy disorder, and that disregarding his disordered psyche is “the abuse I’m referring to.” Here, abuse is relocated as being the act of the person suffering—abuse at his own hand—rather than being visited from the outside. This recalls Kipnis’s argument that it is students’ sense of vulnerability, rather than objective conditions in which they are disempowered, that is the problem.

Will wants to find a physical—objective—cause for his disorder. The viewer already knows that Lecter is hiding some aspect of this from Will, but it is not until the following episode that we see there is indeed a physical cause for Will’s rapidly fraying sanity, a cause that Lecter pressures the neurologist to conceal. Much like the objective problem of sexism within the academe, Will’s disordered brain matter has psychological effects that are erroneously attributed to more ethereal causes.

It is not that Will or Lecter stand in an easy allegorical relationship to students and professors in relation to Kipnis’s argument. Instead, Will and Lecter represent two distinct modes of knowledge, both of which are necessary to understand the real causes, circumstances, and consequences of sexual harassment in the academy and elsewhere. Lecter has power in his superior knowledge of the mind, and is not afraid to leverage it to his own ends. In this sense, we must remember that knowledge is not equivalent to ethics.

Will, on the other hand, has the capacity to understand others on an experiential level—to feel as they feel—but this very gift is also potentially disabling. Neither emotion nor reason are able to wholly grasp the diegetic world of Hannibal. Instead, there is a third term—power, and its subtle operation—with which all of the characters in both the on-screen and real-world dramas must contend.

It would be foolish, however, to equate Lecter’s power with his capacity to do violence on others. Violence is almost beside the point of the show, much like violence is frequently beside the point in terms of sexual violence. It remains popular to say that “rape isn’t about sex. It’s about power.” However, too often, those who remark on this conflate power with violence, as if violence is the only way in which power operates. Power in the world of Hannibal is not Lecter’s murders, or the murders by other various and sundry psychopaths populating the chorus of the show. It is the leveraging of psychological force.

One of the greatest myths that persists to today is that sexual harassment, and sexual violence, are invariably violent in the traditional sense of the word. The ham-handed training on sexual harassment provided by private companies making money off of universities trying to comply with Title IX do little to help this issue, as they have themselves a vested interest in concealing how subtly power circulates in a workplace, classroom, or clinic.

Perhaps this is less than legible for those who have acclimated themselves to shows of force. For example, Mads Mikkelsen, the actor who plays Lecter in Hannibal, was recently featured in Rihanna’s new video “Bitch Better Have My Money.” The video represents Rihanna as a kingpin of some sort whose accountant, Mikkelsen, has stolen her money. She kidnaps and tortures his wife, which doesn’t particularly phase him, so she goes on to torture him.

The video is an interesting contrast to Mikkelsen’s role on Hannibal. While he is still situated in relatively luxurious surroundings, he is ultimately at the whims of Rihanna. Furthermore, some critics have levelled the charge that the video is misogynistic because of the violence she visits on the woman who plays the wife of Mikkelsen. Speculations flew about whether or not this was a revenge fantasy about Rihanna’s real-life former accountant. Feminists of color have (rightly) pointed out that white feminism hasn’t always been welcoming to women of color.

Even the debates surrounding this video illustrate how fraught power is, particularly in relation to those who have been historically oppressed. Of course, the theft of money and sexual harassment or assault are not equivalent. Instead, this clearly illustrates how the public tends to react to obvious displays of violence—particularly from a disadvantaged woman, and in this case, particularly a woman of color—versus its critical acclaim of a white man with an advanced degree who eats people.

Hannibal is more than a show about a dude with “refined tastes,” however. It’s a series that best hits its stride when the audience is gazing on the beautifully plated delectables we know for a fact are composed predominantly of the minor character killed off in the previous scene. It’s a series that does more with an eyebrow raise, a small hand gesture, or a mild remark, than most shows are capable of doing with an ample explosives budget.

And it is loved—and found disturbing—precisely because we recognize that the power wielded by Lecter is at its most insidious when it is least obvious.

Obvious displays of power are few and far between. It would be delightful if tomorrow I could wake up in a world where power had shifted so far from the hands of professors and administrators that students weren’t threatened in a variety of ways by their moods and their decisions. Lecter remarks late in the second season that “Whenever feasible, one should always try to eat the rude,” but even at this point, Lecter still knows much that Will does not.

After all, Hannibal kills both for pleasure and for necessity. He only eats those he considers equivalent to the animals most humans ingest. As he remarks to a character he’s keeping captive, “This isn’t cannibalism, Abel. It’s only cannibalism if we’re equals.”

And so goes Kipnis’ argument. It is only sexual harassment if we pretend that we are equals, and that there are not small, subtle (or even obvious) power dynamics at play. It’s only violence if it looks like it to her.

Power isn’t merely in the exercise thereof. It is in the ability to assess whether or not it was exercised.

A Punch Line, A White Supremacist Contortion

Posted on July 10, 2015 by Jimmy Johnson

This article examines U.S. public awareness of mass incarceration of Black people through the stories told on police procedural television programs. Though not quoting directly when focusing on mass incarceration and White supremacy I am informed by lectures and writings on prisons and racism by Angela Davis, George Jackson, Michelle Alexander and Mariame Kaba. Please see their works for in depth analysis of prisons and White supremacy and Kaba’s Project NIA (or related efforts across the continent) for ways to take action to end the injustice described in this essay.
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The punch line is a common exercise in storytelling beyond comedy. Punch lines are occasionally educational but much more often they depend on what the audience already knows. For this reason they are at least as telling of the audience as they are of the storyteller. This essay examines a particular punch line common to cop shows, with a focus on a 1987 episode of Hunter — that of the comeuppance of neo-Nazis by the police when the neo-Nazis are to be incarcerated in the U.S. prison system and thus, alongside people of color. Further, this essay also looks at what this punch line says about public awareness of and support for the mass incarceration of Black people and how normative White supremacist discourse contorts it into a purported anti-racism.

The Hunter episode “Bad Company” (Season 3, Episode 11 – 10 January 1987) begins with a group of white men and women robbing a Los Angeles gun store and killing the store owner. Police arrive in short order and a shoot-out between the cops and robbers ensues. Two of the robbers are injured, one killed and the other slightly wounded. The wounded party is Angela (Lar Park-Lincoln) who is transferred into the custody of Detective Sergeants McCall (Stepfanie Kramer) and Hunter (Fred Dryer) upon release from the hospital. We soon find out Angela is the daughter of Brother Hobarts (Dean Stockwell), the head of the National Aryan Order, a White nationalist militia on the outskirts of Los Angeles.

Hunter and McCall transport Angela to another location. En route they engage her on her ideology, telling her she is off base as they attempt to turn her snitch. She replies, accurately but against normative liberal White supremacist discourse, that White nationalism is “what America is all about.” She continues while elucidating a fairly mainstream – if a little cartoonish so as to indicate viewers shouldn’t identify with with Angela too strongly – racist narrative “The right of decent Americans to defend their way of life against freeloaders and subversives and the mud races. I mean it’s nothing personal guys, but you’re on the wrong side.”

Angela explains to McCall and Hunter why her version of White supremacy is better than theirs..

Hunter and McCall are captured by the National Aryan Order during the trip when the group rescues Angela from police custody. Up to this point Angela is still loyal to the Aryan National Order. McCall and Hunter do not manage to recruit her until one group member murders her love interest (who is also a neo-Nazi). Now betrayed, albeit not ideologically, Angela helps the cops escape and the group is eventually joined by other police who proceed to stop Brother Hobarts and crew from carrying out a planned attack. Hunter confronts Brother Hobarts, who is by this time in bracelets, and delivers the punchline “you Brother Hobarts are going to prison. Half the men you meet there belong to those mud races you were talking about. They’re gonna like you.”

Hunter gives Brother Hobarts his comeuppance by using racism to fight racism. Wait, what?

This is a somewhat common punch line in cop shows. The Law & Order episode “Prejudice” (Season 12, Episode 10 – 12 December 2001) ends with the incarceration of a racist white man. As the prosecutors prepare leave the office at the episode’s end, District Attorney Nora Lewin (Diane West) says, “Wonder if Burroughs will still have a problem with minorities when he gets to prison and finds out he is one.” In the CSIepisode “World’s End” (Season 10, Episode 19 – 22 April 2010), Nick Stokes (George Eads) says to a white supremacist suspect he is interrogating, “But you know what, I’m gonna do you a favor, since you like to whoop so much ass. I’m gonna have the warden put you in with some African-Americans, so they can give you an up close and personal lesson on race relations.” There are several other examples.

The Racial Caste System As Anti-Racism

These punch lines mean to show the police and the mass incarceration of Black and other people of color as possible tools against racism rather than as baselines of systemic White supremacy. These punch lines are only given meaning by an audience who will understand them as the comeuppance of racists rather than as an affirmation of the racist order of things. For this to work without souring an audience that largely believes it isn’t racist or, at least, not about prisons and crime, Black criminality must be understood as a matter of fact rather than as a matter of racial caste formation. Or, in other words, Black folk must be understood as criminals rather than mass incarceration being understood as the criminalization of Black people. Were it the other way around the shows would be (probably) canceled as the audience would (probably) receive the punch line as cruel cynicism rather than anti-racist comeuppance. (I use “probably” because with White supremacy you never know.)

For example the pilot episode of 21 Jump Street aired four months after the Hunterepisode discussed above. It’s opening scene features a wealthy white family of four seated around the dining room table for a meal when two young Black men with shotguns break through the glass of the patio doors and lay siege to the family. This introductory scene of one of the most successful cops shows is anchored with Black criminality. The 21 Jump Street pilot offered nothing novel but affirmed what was already common knowledge; that Black people were dangerous criminals. The logical consequence is that prisons must be full of such criminals.

21 Jump Street kickstarts its franchise with Black criminality

The crudest neo-Nazi articulations fall far enough outside of White supremacist normativity for the mainstream public, especially though not quite exclusively the mainstream white public, to reject them. So long as mass incarceration of Black and other people of color is not understood as a racial caste system the public can comfortably agree with a punchline which suggests that Black criminality is desserts for incarcerated neo-Nazis.

An Inversion Version

What this essay describes is one example of White supremacy’s incredible discursive flexibility.The Hunter, Law & Order and CSI episodes described above contribute to normative discourse a perfect inversion of the racial caste system. Mass incarceration of people of color is a baseline of White supremacy. Yet the punch line to these stories is one where said systemic baseline is re-imagined as an anti-racist tool against individual white supremacists while the enforcers of the baseline (the police and prosecutors) relish in their enlightened anti-racism to a produce a feel good moment for the audience. The contortion is horrifyingly impressive.

These punch lines demonstrate another thing. This essay focused on the Hunterepisode for a reason; it aired in 1987. United States liberals – largely unfamiliar with the radical Black tradition that produced critical prison analysis decades ago – are ‘discovering’ mass incarceration as a phenomenon of a racial caste system since the 2010 publication of Michelle Alexander’s tome The New Jim Crow. But the Hunteraudience over two decades before that book had to understand that the United States fills its jails in a wildly disproportionate manner with Black folks, otherwise the punch line doesn’t work.

Point being, White America knows and been knowing, it’s just not considered a problem. Mass consciousness is not critical consciousness when embedded in normative oppression. That the broad contours of an oppressive system are common knowledge might, however, offer opportunities for organizing. The same knowledge in a framework rejecting Black criminality, mass incarceration and White supremacy produces a very different discourse. To assist with efforts to produce a liberatory discourse please visit the “Resources” page on the Project NIA website.
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This piece originally appeared on Jimmy Johnsons’s blog.

1998 in Indonesian Comics

Posted on June 30, 2015 by Philip Smith

‘And through the breach did march into the streets,
Where, meeting the rest, ‘Kill, kill’ they cried.
Frighted with this confused noise, I rose,
And, looking from a turret, might behold
Young infants swimming in their parent’s blood,
Headless carcasses piled up in heaps,
Virgins, half-dead, dragg’d by their golden hair,
And with main force flung on a ring of pikes,
Old men with swords thrust through their aged sides,
Kneeing for mercy to a Greekish lad,
Who, with steel pole-axes dash’d out their brains’
(Christopher Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage 2.1.189-200)

1998 is a significant year in Indonesia’s political history. After a 32 year rule characterised by economic prosperity and an authoritarian regime, the Asian financial crisis had weakened the rule of then-President Suharto. In May 1998 riots broke out in several Indonesian cities. The estimated death toll from the days that followed varies wildly. Jemma Purdey, perhaps one of the most reliable sources, suggests that around 1,000 people died, many of them beaten, shot, or burned alive. Women were raped and then thrown out of windows, shops were looted and then burned to the ground with their owner’s still inside. Calls to the police went unanswered. For some time the army stood by without intervening. Colleagues of mine who were in Jakarta at the time saw people stripped naked and left by the side of the road on the way to the airport. One described the bizarre scene of soldiers breaking away from a gunfight in order to ask her and the other expatriates she was with to pose for a photograph. People stayed in their homes and listened to screams and gunfire on the streets outside.

For many of the perpetrators of violence in 1998 the riots offered a fresh opportunity to target Chinese Indonesians. Historically, Chinese Indonesians acted as middle-men between the native Indonesian population and the Dutch. Both during and after Dutch rule they have been subject to periodic outbursts of wide-scale violence including not only massacres but mass-expulsions from Indonesian cities. During the decades under Suharto many Chinese Indonesians were killed under the guise of wiping out communist activity. During the 1998 riots, in many cases the violence toward Chinese Indonesians was misplaced – it was those Chinese Indonesians who were least wealthy who were most vulnerable to attacks. Chinese Indonesians were not the only victims of violence during the riots, but they were certainly singled out as targets.

On May 21 1998 Suharto was removed from power. The era which has followed has been characterised by a movement from dictatorship to democracy, with greater recognition of Indonesia’s multi-racial and multi-religious status. While these changes have largely been beneficial for Indonesia as a whole they have also, as several commentators have argued, been accompanied by an unwillingness to examine what took place during the May riots. This is true in a legal sense – attempts to bring suspects to court were unsuccessful, and those rape victims who did come forward have failed to have their rapists identified or convicted. It is also true in a cultural sense. As Abidin Kusno persuasively demonstrates, the building of the Glodok Plaza Mall at the site of one of the major massacres is emblematic of the cultural work which took place after the riots; it prioritises progress over commemoration in the hope that the spectacle of the new will distract people from the violence of the past. Despite its pervasiveness in Indonesian consciousness, literary and artistic responses to what went on seem, surprisingly, to be few and far between. I have written elsewhere on the work of artist FX Harsono, but in what follows I want to look at some of the comic books created in the aftermath of the violence.

In Tita Larasati’s comic Bloemen Blij, Plukken Wij which appears in the volume Liquid City: Volume 3, the protagonist learns that she has Chinese Indonesian ancestors. The riots, in contrast to the predominantly green and yellow pastel panels elsewhere in the comic, are represented as a blood-red band cutting across one page.

This image, I feel, comes close to representing what 1998 meant, or has come to mean, for Chinese Indonesian communities. Buildings are burning, busses are being pushed over, bodies are lying in the street. Each figure is captured in just a few lines. The image focuses less on the individual acts of violence than the scale of the event. Indonesia is ablaze.

Muhammad Mice Misrad (Mice Cartoon)’s Indonesia 1998 offers a very different vision of what occurred. It is a collection of single-page comics drawn between 1998 and 1999. The collection was published last year. They document the conditions which led up to the May riots, most significantly the crippling effects of inflation during the late 1990s. One series of panels shows people trying to buy basic necessities only to discover that prices have increased dramatically in just a few days. The author reports that publishers are closing down, he attempts to buy paper to document the problems himself, only to discover that paper, too, has rocketed in price. He is only able to draw because his brother can steal paper for him from his workplace. In the panel below he tightens his belt while a child warns ‘Don’t pull to hard, sir, or you’ll sever it! Belts are expensive now too!’

The May riots are, in this context, presented as the inevitable result of a starved and impoverished population trying to feed themselves. In comparison to the several pages describing the economic conditions which anticipated the violence, the riots themselves occupy just one page. In the image below one looter is excited to have stolen a gift for his mother, who then scolds him for bringing illegally-acquired goods into her home. Another family is excited at having acquired a two-month supply of Indomie instant noodles. One remarks, ironically, how lucky they are in such a crisis. In the final panel a woman, presumably a maid for a Chinese Indonesian household talks to a friend on the phone – her boss has fled the country and so the domestic staff (Muchilis – most likely the family’s driver) is watching soccer on television. The absent family’s portrait, characterised by round cheeks and squinty eyes, hangs on the wall.

What strikes me about these images is the absence of any reference to the acts of murder and sexual assault which sit at the heart of Chinese Indonesian and other victims’ accounts of 1998. The goofy characters and cartoon violence belie the very real bloodshed which occurred. The Chinese Indonesian family we see in the picture, we are assured, have left town.

Mice Cartoon’s comics are cheeky, iconoclastic, and witty. This charm, in this case, disguises the wilful marginalisation of the victim’s experience. This is far from trivial – the unwillingness to recognise the suffering of Chinese Indonesians and other victims in Indonesian discourse after 1998 is a necessary prerequisite to the lack of public recognition of what occurred. Chinese Indonesians are rich, popular discourse seems to declare. They can take it.

One image from the comic which I find captivating is the visualisation of the new era of free speech. A government minister tentatively removes the padlock which has closed the mouth of Indonesia’s press, revealing a sharp-toothed monster ready to bite into politicians.

I find the image less interesting for the way in which it attests to the status of the modern Indonesian press – it simplifies a movement away from the prohibition of the Suharto era to modern Indonesia. In reality, as the wildly varying 2014 election result announcements demonstrated, Indonesia’s press continues to be controlled by those in power (even if that power is now primarily financial rather than political). The internet is censored and Indonesia currently boasts an unimpressive rank of 138 out of 180 countries in the Press Freedom Index. What I find captivating about the image is its representation of violence unleashed. This gleeful creature with a giant mouth and razor-sharp teeth, set to chew all in its path, I think, approximates what 1998 must have looked like for those who lived during and after the violence.

The Eternal Frontier

Posted on June 23, 2015 by Megan Purdy

The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
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The 2002 space Western Firefly is part of a long and grand tradition of Hollywood whitewashing. Although set in the distant future, with no mention of Earth, the show is an almost wholesale transplant of post Civil War American politics, and post WW2, Cold War fantasies about the “Cowboy Era.” The show debuted between waves of renewed enthusiasm for Westerns and doesn’t quite belong to either one: it displays neither Dances With Wolves or Unforgiven’s interest in the politics of justice, nor No Country for Old Men’s interest in the continued relevance of Western themes, tropes, and the genre’s long influence. Instead, Firefly wants to be a grand, apolitical adventure centering on the eternal struggle between authority and rebellion, with the political used for colour; a true throwback. But buried history doesn’t stay buried, and Firefly’s attempt to neutralize American history and reuse it as space history only makes its problematic racial politics the more obvious.

Firefly is set in a future star empire whose ruling class is culturally descended from white America and a still Han-dominated China. As the empire stretched across solar systems, pioneers set out into the stars, ahead of the empire’s armed forces and commercial powers, to settle in new systems and go their own way. The powerful Core worlds thrive on surveillance and control and settlers hoped to escape this. But naturally, as they proved their settlements, representatives of the Core followed, chasing tax revenue, valuable exports, and the expansion of their influence. Taxation without representation, economic domination by distant powers, and finally, rebellion by new non-Core powers, including a new merchant class and farmers alike. This is the recent past of Firefly: the show focuses on former Alliance rebels, now turned grifters, and their attempts to carve out a life in a period of post-war reconstruction.

They face ne’er do wells, Core military and police forces, vexatious local authorities, constantly failing equipment, and Reavers, the wild frontier cannibals who roam deep space and less-monitored shipping lanes in search of victims. The meta story of Firefly, both its core cast and the universe as a whole, is based on American Reconstruction literature and Westerns; the story of Alliance rebels is the story of Southern “rebels,” and the show’s creators have gone on record saying that the goal of Firefly was to write a Reconstruction Western absent the racism. The Chinese ancestry of this empire is used only for colour: there are no Asian characters in the core cast and non-black people of colour appear only sparingly as supporting characters. And although there are two black people in the core cast — second in command Zoe and mysterious Preacher Book — black people too are seldom seen in the backgrounds of daily life in the Core and Rebel worlds. The evidence of Firefly’s origin — as post-racial Western fantasy about race — lingers and its attempts at distance only emphasize the political: what does it mean to take race out of racist history and offer it up as neutral entertainment built around timeless values of freedom and exploration?

Westerns are primarily concerned with a tight cluster of themes: the frontier, the march of civilization, whiteness and otherness, manliness, self-reliance, and survival. The genre is diverse but these themes are common to most forms. Conservative Westerns pit underdog colonizers against the expansion of industrial civilization and against the native peoples they must wipe out. So-called dirty Westerns often pit misfits, cowboys, and criminals against placid colonizers, and often feature people of colour as sidekicks, co-travellers, or even heroes. Latter days critical Westerns more readily acknowledge the complicated and interconnected relationships of oppression that built The West, and more naturally bring women and people of colour to the fore. But even the Westerns of 2015 can’t sidestep race or racist history–of America and of the genre itself. Firefly, though, tries to do just that.

As a Reconstruction, conservative Western, Firefly draws on those early stories of colonizers fleeing technocratic civilization and meeting mysterious villains, deep in unmapped territory: namely, Native Americans. On Firefly, those “frontier” raiders are the Reavers, intended to be racially neutral. The show wants to use the racist trope of savage, Indian raiders, harassing wagon trains, and burning homesteads, while ejecting the racial element. “De-racialization” is achieved through blind casting and not calling the Reavers “natives.” Reavers are an ever-present threat to this new, more free civilization, who mutilate themselves and their victims – whom they also consume – an act that recalls fears of being “scalped” by Apaches. They are mindlessly violent, speak only in grunts and growls, and are beyond the reach of civilizing forces, Core and Rebel alike. They are the other who lurks in the dark spaces beyond the horizon, who can’t be reasoned with. In short, racism is denied, but not eliminated.

It’s eventually revealed in Serenity that Reavers aren’t natural to deep space, but manufactured: a product of pharmaceutical experimentation and institutional violence. Finding their authority threatened, Core powers ordered dissent on distant colony world Miranda to be put down. The solution of local representatives was to attempt to write out aggression and independence through some science fiction chemical treatment. The result was near genocidal, with 99% of the population wiped out and 1%, the most aggressive, weaponized in a permanent, cannibalistic psychosis. Vast swathes of valuable space and planets have since been written off as Reaver territory, space where they can run wild without threatening the good people of the Core worlds, and Rebel worlds that have been brought back into the fold. This is, effectively, a reservation for monsters. Reavers venture out of their territory sometimes in search of all-Rebel victims, and this serves as evidence of the importance of Core authorities, the only group powerful enough to meaningfully resist them. The Core, of course, has no interest in a permanent solution: Reaver rage, a symptom of Core violence, is expended on innocent homesteaders, who just happened to be in their way. Reavers are convenient for Core power, a deterrent to future rebellion that requires no upkeep or compensation, an ever-present argument for the expansion of Core control.

Side by side with obvious frontier themes are Firefly‘s debts to the American War of Independence and Civil War. Slavery is absent and economics is only shallowly depicted, so it’s difficult to tease out the political differences between Core and pioneer powers; freedom and representation are the key issues cited for why the rebellion began, but both camps have an essentially colonizing ideology – they seek to find new world-territories to “settle” and “civilize” and exploit as they wish. The theme song explains that “Earth was used up so we lit on out,” which recalls Huck Finn’s decision to head for the territories and avoid the cruel rules of “civilized” society.

In Firefly this rejection of society isn’t political, but a vague distaste for the fancy folk of the Core. Neither camp expresses a clear political philosophy outside of “domination” and “freedom” and “expansion.” It is in the interests of both that as their power and territory expands, the Reavers are pushed ever outwards. Rebels desire freedom, but for whom? In constructing the Rebels greatest challenge in taming the space frontier, the Reavers, Firefly’s showrunners neatly sidestepped the issue of colonialism. Because they are “monsters” there is no need for the crew of the Serenity to regret killing Reavers by the bushel; there is no need for settlers to regret moving into Reaver territory and “civilizing” it. With no clear political or cultural distinction between the two camps, the settlers act as unknowing vanguard of the technocratic Core worlds — it’s all of a piece, this unchallenged white, settler-colonial expansion into the stars. Manifest space destiny.

This is a wholesale transplantation of Spaghetti Western politics, with Native American myth-ghosts — rarely fully embodied and realized in Westerns; more often appearing as representations of the savage Other — made into monstrous space cannibals. Consider: conservative Westerns don’t deal with the obvious politics of slavery, indentured Asian workers, or the ecological consequences of frontierism. They engage political questions solely through the rubric of simple, personal freedom: here is a man, going his own way.

Captain Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), Firefly’s lead character and captain of the show’s ragtag band of pirates and misfits, is quite a typical Western hero. He is by turns sullen and snarky, he has a dark, traumatizing past, he has an enduring grudge against those who would tell him what to do, and while he prefers to work alone, he has heart to spare for women in distress and trusted comrades. But he offers no alternative ideology or principle around which to build a community, and is an authority unto himself thanks to his military prowess and force of personality.

Mal’s authority is challenged through moments of buffoonery and moral failing, but ultimately left unthreatened, and in super-waif River Tam, a Core refugee, he finds a purpose. The close of Serenity, Firefly’s big screen wrap up, sees Mal vowing a kind of permanent rebellion alongside River, revealed to be, like the Reavers, a victim of Core experimentation. Mal and River are meant to be destabilizing, unconquerable figures – an ever-present challenge to settled authority. Their charm is mainly in their independent thought; their need to go their own way. But their challenge is insubstantial; their rallying cry merely, don’t go too far.

This indulgence in the tropes and visual signifiers of the Western genre was common to early, more conservative Westerns and to children’s Westerns; while Dirty Westerns and the films of the contemporary Western resurgence pack in the visual signifiers just as heavily, they problematize tropes like the mysterious wandering gunfighter and the grizzled sheriff. The aims of these films are varied but what they have in common is discomfort and unrest; the sense of things not being settled or sure. The archetypal Dirty Western anti-hero, Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, isn’t a good man, but he’s generally a just one, and he moves through the West with purpose.

The Man isn’t Eastwood’s only Western role — he started out in simpler, cheerier fare. Like Eastwood, John Wayne’s career followed the development of the genre that made him popular. Though he started out playing untroubled (and sometimes singing) cowboys, his roles, like the films he starred in, got more complex with time. In The Searchers he played a complicated Confederate veteran searching for his kidnapped niece. Like Mal, Ethan’s antagonists are authority and “savages,” in his case Comanche warriors. He resists them with equal fervour, no mercy for either.

To be frank, Ethan is a terrible person. He kills people who get in his way, mutilates the bodies of his enemies, and would rather see his niece die than live with the Comanches. Mal’s character and Nathan Fillion’s performance borrow liberally from the Man With No Name and Ethan: Mal’s famous clothing, even down to colouring, bears striking resemblance to Ethan’s; the physicality of Fillion’s performance, posture, gesture and expression, combines the Man With No Name’s untouchability with Ethan’s intensity. To say that Mal is a melting pot of Western archetypes and tropes is too much: Wayne and Eastwood are two of the most famous Western stars. Ethan and the Man are still studied and talked about and, dare I say it, iconic. This is, in miniature, how Firefly borrows from and neutralizes Westerns of the past. Clothe Mal in Ethan’s shirt and give him the Man’s stance, let him share Ethan’s background and so many of the Man’s mannerisms — but do so without Ethan’s monstrosity or the Man’s coldness.

But this is not necessary for contemporary Westerns. Is a Western just a collection of funny clothes and tropes? The genre is inseparable from the time it aims to portray. Transplants of the Western genre into different times, places, and modes work best when they recreate some of the political tensions that drove Westward expansion and the national interest that still fuels fantasies of the frontier. Updates to the genre work best when they acknowledge and critically engage with the subject matter

The 2012 Western revenge fantasy, Django Unchained, centres on a similarly charismatic rebel, but unlike Mal, Django (Jamie Foxx) has clear purpose to match the power of his personality. Narrowly speaking, freed slave turned bounty hunter Django’s purpose is to find and rescue his wife Broomhilda, but broadly speaking, his goal is more radical: freedom for him and his people and the complete destruction of settler colonialism. Like Mal and most other Western leads, Django isn’t an ideologue or political activist; this broader goal isn’t expressed to us through speeches or organizing. Rather, it’s written into the very fabric of the character: from his posture, to his actions, to his speech. His existence and his humanity in and of themselves are challenges to American settler-colonialism; his continued and disruptive participation in polite, Southern society, though a ruse, is discomfitting too. Workers in the slave economy are disturbed by his confidence, self-possession, and competence. This is the shaky illogic on which the slave economy is built: complete denial of the humanity of slaves and all black people in America is necessary and must constantly be renewed and reified. Evidence of black humanity is disturbing. Evidence of black competence must be explained or absorbed into the slave economy. But here is Django, gun in hand, ready for anything. This is an image that cannot be absorbed; it must be destroyed.

Like Mal, Django lives on the fringes of society (as all black people did in the slave-holding South). Also like Mal, much of Django’s dress and character are informed by Westerns that came before. But for Django, the consequences of rebellions minor and major are quite different. He’s clothed like any number of cowboy rebels and he stands like the Man, but Django isn’t a settler or an ex-Confederate. He’s not a rebel in search of a purpose, but is a man born to rebel against the racist logic of his society.

At the end of the film, he rides off into the sunset with Broomhilda. But we know that Django and Broomhilda will never be safe so long as the settler-colonial regime remains. It’s not only Django’s actions through the course of the film — freeing his wife and killing a major slave-owner and his employees — or his personality that make him a target, it’s his very existence as a free black man. Not even in the North, where slavery is no longer the engine of the American economy, would he and Broomhilda be safe: they will never have white privilege.

Let’s consider another modern Western, one where the lead has more purely personal motive, and is on more even stakes with Mal. The moral imperative in 1992’s Unforgiven is not on William Munny’s side. Or at least it’s not on the side of making your living off of violence. Munny (Clint Eastwood again) is a retired bandit. He made his stake off of violence and theft, then retired to marry and raise children and farm. He’s drawn back into a life of violence by old friend Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), who seeks his help in pursuing a large bounty. Two cowboys cheated and then disfigured a sex worker, and now her co-workers have put together a large pot for their heads. Complicating things is the local sheriff, who doesn’t allow vigilantism (or banditry) and is himself an imperfect embodiment of the law — but he tries. Munny and Logan need the money — Munny’s family is sick — and the sex workers deserve justice, but the sheriff is right that vigilantism and the breakdown of social order results in widespread and indiscriminate suffering. Munny and Logan’s rebellion, their unwillingness to bow to coercive settler authority, though, has merit too. That authority does not bring justice, whether economic, social, or legal; it too often protects the status quo even when that status quo requires great suffering. It’s the sheriff who gets the plot moving: his inadequate, unsatisfying judgement against the cowboys leaves the brothel workers feeling scorned.

Like Django, the brothel workers have some moral authority behind their demands for revenge. They have been done wrong and the status quo can only continue to do them wrong. And while Munny’s more or less comfortable retirement was a privilege of his whiteness and maleness, Ned Logan doesn’t have the same luck. As a black man, his retirement can only be more precarious; his freedoms to own property, love, move, and participate in society (polite or otherwise) are limited. Ned Logan will never be truly safe in this world — he cannot simply put down stakes and join the settler class. Glad submission to the sheriff’s justice is not possible for the brothel workers or for Ned, only submission by necessity, for safety.

Also important in Unforgiven are age and time. Munny, Logan and the sheriff are old. They’ve been doing this for some time, either rebelling against or maintaining the social order. The film is set in 1881, near the close of the frontier/settlement era, and the start of our time, the hyper-industrialized, globalized now. They are all aging out of their roles and out of their purposes — they are watching the end of their relevance to the world and the establishment of a new social order. Munny, of course, is played by Clint Eastwood, whose career was built on an older breed of Western. It’s interesting and ironic to see him come to this. Ultimately, Unforgiven is about consequences and endings — the collapse of the Western fantasy. Django Unchained’s ending, Django flirtatiously showing of his horsemanship for Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), the couple escaping into an unbounded future, is of a more fantastical mode, but Django leaves the Western reconstituted; the Western hero reborn. Perhaps Munny is what happens when a Man With No Name takes one on and settles down, but he is not what happens when a Mal Reynolds finds his purpose: Firefly aims for the Western fantasy unquestioned and eternal.

Firefly and Serenity come down not on the side of revolution or transformation, but on the side of mischief. What is the fundamental challenge of the rebels or of the crew of the Serenity? That remains unclear. “I aim to misbehave,” is Mal’s best known catchphrase and the underlying drive of the crew — they are misfits and so they cannot conform; they are misfits and so they must rebel. And although this rebellion results in losses, both during the Rebellion proper and during the course of Serenity, there is no best before date set on their travels. It’s space, after all; there will always be a further frontier to flee to.

Firefly revels in this, seeking an adventure marked by timelessness; a Western romp without modernization to contend with; without thorny questions of displacement, racial exploitation, and nation building. What does Firefly have to say about power and authority? About the ethics of settlement? Mainly: that individual freedom should be maximized and that while the formal power of government is vast and usually corrupt, it’s not institutionalized in culture. That is, Firefly does not in any meaningful way engage with systems of power and inequality; rather, it obscures their existence in favour of a neutralized and eternal frontier. The darkness at the heart of this universe is not cultural, it’s merely government overreach and abuse; the Rebels are in no way complicit and their push for freedom is pure-hearted.

While other contemporary Westerns touch on the complex network of violence, power, and injustice that lies at the root of nation-building and frontier-settling — with varying levels of engagement and success — Firefly boils this down to one relationship: rebellion and authority. What is a frontier in Firefly? Merely space to breathe, to put down roots, to take whole worlds and make them your own. Destiny. What is oppression? Merely taxation without representation.

But Firefly’s attempt at sidestepping racial politics of Westerns and American history only make them more apparent: societies manufacture internal Others and underclasses — are Rebel and pirate really as low as it goes? The very absence of the dispossessed in so many Westerns, the wholesale erasure of Black and Chinese workers, of Native Americans either pushed onto reserves or protecting what land they have left, makes their propagandistic motives more apparent. Warm-hearted, adventurous Westerns work to reinforce the fiction of an America won by grit and gumption, not colonization, enslavement, and genocide. Firefly’s discomfort with these truths, its awkward reach toward post-racial fantasy, only serves to reinvigorate these racist fantasies: in the future American melting pot of Firefly, all cultural disjunctures, all power imbalances and dirty history have been melted away. But the melting is inexpert and ultimately unsuccessful: Firefly’s attempt at de-racialization and de-contextualization cannot succeed. The context and the history remain, never fully buried.

Choosing the Dollhouse

Posted on June 19, 2015 by Jade Degrio and Desirae Embree

The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
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“We make choices. I’m well aware there are forces beyond our control, even in the face of those forces we make choices.” – Adele, Dollhouse

Given the recent contention surrounding Joss Whedon’s brand of feminism, we immediately wanted to revisit Dollhouse for this roundtable because of how far it takes some of feminism’s central concerns (and also because of how much feminists seem to hate it). We decided to structure our analysis of the show as a dialogue for two reasons. The first was simply to approximate the feeling of an informal roundtable, and the second was to side-step the is-or-isn’t-this-show-feminist quagmire by modeling the ways in which feminism, like popular culture, is dynamic. All it can offer us a place from which to start—not settle—discussion.

Desirae: I suppose I’ll address the is-or-isn’t-Dollhouse-feminist thing by saying that there are many different types of feminisms, and they are all going to have a different take on the show. Dollhouse is fundamentally concerned with philosophical questions relating to freedom, choice, and the self, and different feminisms relate differently to these things. So when people say Dollhouse is a rape fantasy or glorifies sex work, my thing is that perspective specifically comes from liberal feminism, which has to believe in (and so wants to see reflected) this idea that women can be free and empowered with choice. This is why consent is such a huge part of liberal feminist rhetoric. But if you’re dealing with a system of complete control that sort of consent (Yes, I choose my choice) doesn’t make sense anymore because there’s no choice that isn’t coerced in some way. I think that’s the main premise of the show, and it’s exemplified by the Dollhouse itself… but it’s also meant to be a reflection of the world in which we live.

Jade: Yeah, which is why it’s such a cool premise. The fact that in S1 E6, in the beginning stages of developing her own awareness and while imprinted with another consciousness, Echo chooses to complete her engagement after it had been interrupted by Paul’s white-knighting. Echo seems aware that her imprint didn’t experience resolution, and that the romantic engagement hadn’t been executed to completion. Does her choice not matter because Caroline (or her “soul”) isn’t present? I guess that’s a metaphor for intoxication or other forms of out-of-body-ness that liberal feminism would argue cannot be consent. Caroline consented to being a doll; she signed the papers…but liberal feminism wants Caroline’s consent in the moment. S1 E6 is the first moment where Echo asserts her will which forces us to ask, what the threshold that has to be crossed in order for something to count an authentic choice.

In another scene, Paul argues that you can’t erase a person’s soul. He later doubles down on that when he refuses to sleep with Echo because all her actions, desires, and sexuality are programmed. As a result, he thinks she cannot consent. This idea that we are only able to TRULY make a choice if there is a connection between our mind, our body, and our soul speaks to the “ghost of Christianity” that lurks in all Joss’s meditations on “the soul.” It fuels the critiques of Dollhouse as rape fantasy and completely ignores that we are all products of coercion. The systems we live within are deeply ingrained in the very nature of our bodies, minds, and souls, and taken to its most extreme conclusion: all sexuality is rooted in coercion, especially unexamined heterosexuality.

D: Right, and one way of looking at it is, how is our daily reality different from the dolls’? I think I can genuinely choose or consent to certain actions/relationships, but there is a larger structure of systemic coercion that doesn’t allow me the choice to not engage, you know. Adrienne Rich called it “compulsory heterosexuality,” where choosing to opt out isn’t really an available choice. Even if you’re a lesbian, you’re still acting within a system of compulsory heterosexuality. In this scenario, I feel like a doll.

J: I do too. We agreed to keep this focused on S1, but the fact that the first episode of S2 is about a long-term engagement where Echo gets MARRIED could be discussed at length. It’s just wonderful.

D: My body is coerced in various environments and ways, and there’s no way I can consent to some of what I choose to do. Like that is the literal definition of oppression.

J: Right. All the people in the Dollhouse were coerced, even those that chose it. Caroline, Madeline, and others are seen signing contracts and while they do, we hear Adele’s well-crafted explanation of the Dollhouse’s purpose (and its benefits). We’re to believe they understood the terms and accepted them. They’ll wake up in 5 years with a clean slate—selective memories removed, PTSD treated, and free of the guilt that they had before their residency. It isn’t until the S1 E8-where they are allowed to live out their “needs” as a way to correct the glitches each doll is experiencing that we discover that there’s an element of coercion to everyone’s decision to enter the Dollhouse. This exercise relies on the same idea Paul sells later, that you can’t completely remove the fundamental need of the original personality’s soul.

D: Which was itself a thing they were allowed to do by Dr. Saunders and the Dollhouse. There’s no real consent in the Dollhouse, but there’s no real consent anywhere else either. And that’s what the show problematizes, and I also think it’s a thing that a lot of mainstream feminism does not want to have to confront politically. No, your desire isn’t authentic. No, you are not free. But that’s just what it means to be a person in the world.

J: Well, and Priya is really the only character who didn’t consent to entering the Dollhouse. She’s the only one who was trafficked in. Her residency in the Dollhouse is painted very differently than Caroline, Madeline, and Anthony. While you can argue that Adele emotionally manipulated the others into joining, with Priya, it was Adele that was manipulated. Priya is drugged into an altered state and misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, which Topher thinks he could treat through the active architecture.

D: That’s interesting. There are a lot of instance in which people step on the autonomy of others, even if they have good intentions in doing so.

J: Yeah, Echo and Paul are trying to “save” everyone. In S1 E8 in the midst of Caroline’s rebellion against the Dollhouse Adele says to her, “You are free to leave. Who are you to decide for the others?” It’s like liberal feminists or white knights that try to save women from whatever “bad decisions” we make, whether it’s wearing make-up or engaging in sex work… And Adele, Caroline, and Paul are representative of different savior scenarios. Paul takes the patriarchal approach and asserts that there is only one way to be authentic. Adele is the champion of individual choice. She believes in a world where empowered choices can be made freely and she asserts and protects people’s ability to do so. Caroline is an animal rights activist who has good intentions but often can’t see how her actions hurt the people around her. Dollhouse stages these different types of problematic commitments to social justice and challenges us to question the idea that there is One Best Way to address oppression.

D: They all choose for other people; that’s what saviorism is. It’s also what rape is. Back in 2009, i09 ran an article that drew a direct line between rape and the dystopic future the Dollhouse’s technology creates. It’s not an accident that it all started with some savior impulse…

J: Though, we do see instances of authentic and real decisions, like Victor/Anthony and Sierra/Priya. They develop a relationship in the doll state that isn’t consented to, but later Priya falls in love with Anthony. We’re meant to trust in and support their relationship.

D: Yes, but even that one is weird. Doll-state Sierra (who is Not Sierra) doesn’t consent to her relationship with Victor, but that love is cast as being the only authentic one in the show. It’s as though the Truth of their connection transcends the doll state and carries into their original personalities. I think that goes back to the idea of the soul that you keep bringing up. We want to think there are these hard kernels of the self that can survive all the coercion and the ideological programming that structure our daily lives; Victor and Sierra, apparently, have that kind of love. But is it really that different than the relationship between, for example, Adele and Roger (an Active)? Paul and Mellie (an Active)? Paul and Echo (an Active), and then later Echo (who has become a self) and Paul (who becomes an Active)?

J: So here’s a question: once Echo becomes self-aware, does Caroline have the right to essentially kill her by taking her body back? What about active imprints within Echo? What happens to consent then? We are to believe Caroline has that right as the “true owner” of her body. Toward the end of S1 and into S2 as each character becomes self-aware, we see another set of circumstances that pit informed consent against coerced choice, and the ways that the system forces everyone’s hand. This is most clear in Madeline’s case. She is released from her contract because Paul agrees to become Echo’s handler in order to play out his fantasy of “saving” Caroline. (Which is eerily similar to some of the Dollhouse’s clients’ paid engagements.) Later, when Madeline’s freedom is tested, she tells Paul that freedom means the ability to make choices even if they’re the wrong ones, and she asks if she is really free. Paul, who so desperately wants to believe in freedom beyond the Dollhouse, (again!) grants that freedom to her (which speaks to his patriarchal saviorism, he allows the “bad choices” to happen). And of course it’s the “wrong” choice and Madeline ends up back in the Dollhouse, this time as a prisoner—no consent. And then of course, Echo, who is being driven by Caroline’s savior soul, stays to fight. So you’re right, at the end of the day there is no choice that proves to be correct or any less coerced. Whether any of them chooses to stay or go, fight or comply, it’s all equally a matter of acting out what they are programed to do—whether literally by the Dollhouse or figuratively by an inborn sense of ethics, duty, or whatever.

D: One of the ideas we’re touching on too is, what are the limits of capitalism? Can you, for example, sell yourself into slavery? That’s one of the show’s major questions. Is the self a thing that can be bought and sold? If so, who owns it? We were talking the other day about how saying that all choice is coerced can be deployed in super racist ways (see: Meghan Murphy’s take on Laverne Cox’s babely photo spread in Allure). So there is a way in which the conversation needs to be attuned to contemporary and historical differences in raced experience… because there is a difference between “selling oneself,” which is the term liberal feminists often use for sex work, and being sold as chattel by another. Think the difference between Dominatrix Echo and Priya being trafficked into the Dollhouse. In liberal feminist rhetoric, these are the same thing. But in Dollhouse, we are meant to see the difference between Caroline’s choice to become an Active, which was an abdication of responsibility, and Priya’s being trafficked into the Dollhouse, which was a violation of sovereignty. So all of this is to say, in my mind at least, that if all choice is coerced then no one choice can be better or worse than another. But at the same time, just because all choice is coerced doesn’t make all coercion equal. These are distinctions that I think are missing from feminist critiques like Meghan Murphy’s or those that reduce Dollhouse to a rape fantasy.

JD: So, I like the idea of ending this with a quote from Boyd. I feel like it kinda brings everything home.

D: Yes, I agree, especially because of the role that he plays in the show, going from handler to arch villain.

J: If we had more time I’d go into detail about that ep because it’s a mirror of the Dollhouse, but it comes from S1 E5, “True Believer,” which I think is a self-contained examination of the entire premise. “No one asked to be saved—not by you.”

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Jade Degrio works in the fashion industry and is a freelance writer for various online and print publications. She specializes in yelling about things on the internet

Desirae Embree is a PhD student in English at Texas A&M University, where she has figured out how to make watching too much television a (somewhat) respectable profession.

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