superheroes

Superheroes, topic

VOTE!

/ Rick Ellrod / 5 Comments

Representation

In America, we have a presidential and congressional election coming up in November.  I want to take a moment out to incite every American to vote.

Every now and then, it’s helpful to remind ourselves of first principles.  In a democratic polity—a “republic” in the sense used in American law and political theory—the people of the polity govern themselves.  (Please note that these terms are “small d” democracy and “small r” republic.)  The way we do this, in a representative government, is to elect representatives.  Since those representatives make most decisions as to law and government, voting in elections is the primary way in which we govern ourselves.  It’s kind of a big deal.

The Crucial Hero(es)

In America, voter turnouts, even in presidential elections, tend to be relatively low.  Why would people skip their key chance to take charge of their government?  I suspect much of this failure to take part in governing ourselves stems from a combination of things:  inertia (it takes some little trouble to register and vote), plus a pervasive sense that my one vote doesn’t affect the outcome.  Why make the effort if it doesn’t matter?

The logical flaw in this understandable attitude is that things can matter in the aggregate, even if any one item is not the sole decisive element that changes the outcome.

Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum deliver the virus in Independence Day (the movie)The stories that inspire us, and help form our attitudes, tend to undermine this recognition and subliminally support our reluctance to participate.  A story is more dramatic if everything comes down to the actions of one, or a few, people.  If James Bond doesn’t pull off this next stunt, the World Will Come To An End.  Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum, alone, deliver the computer virus that takes down the mother ship in Independence Day, which conveniently disables all the rest; the entire tension of the plot is funneled through that one bottleneck, as it were.  A few superheroes save the universe—well, half of it—in the Avengers movies.  In Netflix’s just-released Enola Holmes movie (mild spoiler), the heroine’s actions save the one person who casts the deciding vote on a British reform act.  We love this trope.

The desire to make everything come down to a few people’s desperate actions can even warp the adaptation of a story.  A number of small, but annoying, changes in the plot of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies seem to stem from a tendency to have every crucial point depend on the actions of the nine members of the Fellowship.  For example, in the books, the Ents meet and decide the time has come to attack Isengard.  In the movies, the Ents decide not to act—until Pippin and Merry maneuver Treebeard to where he can see Saruman’s wanton destruction of the forests (on the absurd assumption that the Shepherd of the Trees didn’t know about that already).

Pippin lights the beaconIn the books, Denethor sensibly sends a messenger from Minas Tirith to Rohan to call for help.  But the movies leave it to Gandalf and Pippin to fire up a beacon that transmits the call to Rohan.  (The fact that the lighting of the beacons is one of the most terrific scenes in the whole series doesn’t entirely mitigate the plot diversion.)  When the Corsair ships sailing up the Great River to Minas Tirith turn out to contain relief for the city rather than further invaders, the movie makes this just Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, along with the faceless army of the Dead—rather than a whole array of human reinforcements from South Gondor, as in the books.

Aggregates and Bottlenecks

But when we return to the mundane world, we have to put aside this tempting way of telling a story.  We don’t often see this pattern of world-saving heroic acts.  We find instead that crucial changes depend on the combined actions of innumerable people, all doing the right (or wrong) things.

Milo Manara honors heroic women

Milo Manara honors heroic women

The present moment can provide us a heightened appreciation of these unnoticed individual actions.  The early days of the COVID-19 pandemic saw an outpouring of support rightly directed to the unsung heroes—doctors and nurses and medical technicians, grocery store clerks, people who make toilet paper—unsung because they are too many to spotlight individually.  (Although individual acts of appreciation are still a just way to honor those continuing acts of undemonstrative service.)  Indeed, everyone has to act in concert if the pandemic is to be contained.

Peter Jackson’s Gandalf gets the underlying point right in one of the Hobbit movies:

I have found it is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keeps [sic] the darkness at bay.  Simple acts of kindness and love.  (The Hobbit:  An Unexpected Journey (2012), at about 1:42)

We must all be heroes now.

Of course, going in and making some marks on a piece of paper doesn’t feel much like heroism—even less so than wearing a facemask.  Perhaps it feels a little more dramatic when we’re braving the chance of coronavirus infection to cast our ballots.  And if that way of viewing our action as a daring deed spurs us to act, by all means indulge!

But in this kind of case, the only way to achieve anything is by small actions, each of which contributes to a whole.  The entire set makes a difference; but there can’t be an entire set unless there are individual acts.  In voting, as in picking up one’s trash, or in the innumerable actions that make up a free market, we must carry out the individual actions to produce the aggregate effect.

Turning the Tide in Real Life

If we need further encouragement, we can look to the additional fact that even one vote, or a few, can sometimes make the crucial difference.

Virginia Board of Elections draws lots to decide tied electionRight here in Virginia, we had an election in 2017 that resulted in a literal tie:  an equal number of votes for each candidate.  A purely random action had to be used to break the tie.  “Each candidate’s name was placed in a film canister; those were then placed into a bowl and one name was drawn.”  (NPR, 1/4/2018)

Even a few votes, even one, can make the critical difference, as recounted here and here—notably including “the year 2000 U.S. presidential election, decided by a few hundred votes in the state of Florida”  (Jared Diamond, Collapse:  How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), “Further Readings” for ch. 16, p. 556)  Over and above my contribution to the whole, I cannot know in advance whether my vote might not be, in fact, the deciding factor in a hotly contested election.

Moreover, even if the outcome of an election might be clear without my vote, adding to the total is not pointless.  In today’s atmosphere of distrust and suspicion, the clearer and more decisive the result, the less opportunity there will be to cast doubt on the results.  Every vote added to the total reduces the number of people who will be convinced that the results are false, and thus directly supports the rule of law.

This concern also bears on the notion of voting for a third-party candidate.  In the upcoming election, many people may be sufficiently dissatisfied with both major parties to be motivated to cast their ballots for a third-party contender.  It might feel virtuous to spurn both parties and “vote one’s conscience” in favor of a candidate who cannot win.  But in practice, that action will only serve to make the results less clear, at a time when clarity is vitally needed.

L’Envoi

Voting is much trickier—even perhaps a heroic act, as noted above—in these pandemic times.  Nevertheless, there are avenues available by which all of us can safely exercise the franchise.

Drop box for ballotsFor my own locality in Virginia, here’s a guide to voting early, voting by mail, and voting on Election Day.  The local paper has a Web site on How to Vote, by state; I haven’t researched that reference in detail, but it may be useful.  Here are three articles on drop boxes for ballots.

I urge every eligible voter to take part in this crucial action of self-government.  Unless you’re actually in the hospital in a coma (or the like), there’s no excuse not to participate.

Tell Me What You’re Doing

/ Rick Ellrod / 4 Comments

Shakespearean Description

A few years ago my kids gave me a copy of The Jedi Doth Return—or, in full, William Shakespeare’s The Jedi Doth Return:  Star Wars Part the Sixth, by Ian Doescher (2014).  This little book is a retelling of the movie Return of the Jedi in the form of a Shakespeare play, with the entire text in iambic pentameter.

The Jedi Doth Return, cover

It’s great fun to see the swashbuckling space epic transformed into sixteenth-century poetry.  And the reading is surprisingly good as well, with some memorable phrases bringing out nuances not necessarily detectable in the movie; at least one passage was striking enough to make it onto my Quote of the Week page back in 2017.

But one thing in particular caught my attention, perhaps because of the contrast between SF subject matter and Shakespearean technique:  how frequently the characters describe in words what’s happening.  For example, in Act I, Scene 3 (p. 25), Leia sneaks into Jabba’s palace to rescue Han Solo:

In stealth I move throughout the palace dark,
That no one shall bear witness to my acts.
Now cross the court, with footsteps nimbly plac’d.
Ne’er did a matter of such weight depend
Upon a gentle footfall in the night.
Put out the light, and then relume his light—
Aye, now I spy my goal:  the frozen Han.
Thy work is finish’d, feet.  Now ’tis the hands
That shall a more profound task undertake.
Quick to the panel, press the needed code.
O swiftly fly, good hands, and free this man
From his most cold and undeservéd cell.
O true decryptionist, thy codes are quick!
The scheme hath work’d, the carbonite doth melt.

Han & Leia illustration from The Jedi Doth Return

She’s narrating what’s happening, in just the fashion of a true Shakespeare character (“What light through yonder window breaks?”).  Of course, if she were actually saying this aloud, she’d have roused the whole palace; but of course the Shakespearean convention of the inaudible (except to the audience) soliloquy is also in effect.

This self-description seems to be even more necessary in an action sequence.  When Luke peels off from Leia to pursue Imperial scouts in the landspeeder chase through the forest (Act III, Scene 1, p. 77), along with stage directions, we get a similar blow-by-blow account:

LEIA:  ‘Tis well. Be safe, and I shall see thee soon.
LUKE:  [aside]  O sister, all my thanks for tender words.

[Luke falls behind, alongside
Imperial Scouts 5 and 6.

Now shall this bike’s keen blaster find its mark!
I shoot, and one is dead; the other next.

[Luke shoots and kills Imperial Scout 6.

LEIA:  I shall fly high o’er this one’s bike, that he
May think that I have fled.  Then shall I from
Above make my attack.  Ha!  Now beside
His bike, surprise is my sure strategy.

[Imperial Scout 4 shoots at Leia.

Alas!  My bike is hit, and off I fall!

Reading this as a book, the narration helps me figure out what’s going on (and helps me visualize the appropriate scenes from the movie I know so well).  Of course, if I could see the play actually performed, some things would be clearer.  Still, a stage play can’t provide all the visual background we’d get in a movie.  I have no idea how they’d depict the land-speeder chase on stage—though I’d like to see them try!  Maybe it’s the shortage of visual imagery that requires the dialogue.

But it’s not quite that simple.

The Comic-Book Monologue

In an old-style comic book, we also see characters providing a lot of description.  The villain doesn’t just whip out his infernal device and fire it at the good guys; he’s also likely to announce something like, “Now, tremble before the power of my unstoppable Meson Beam, as it suppresses the strong nuclear force and disintegrates your very molecules!” Here’s an example from Fantastic Four #52, the first appearance of the Black Panther (1966):

3-panel action scene from Fantastic Four number 52

Sometimes a quantity of prose is expended on a mere landscape scene, as with this magnificent Kirbyesque high-tech jungle shot.

Fantastic Four enters Black Panther's high-tech jungle

Why all the verbiage?  The trouble is, the special effects alone doesn’t tell us much.  In primarily visual media, we don’t get internals or narrator comments.  A genius like Reed Richards may be able to figure out instantly what an exotic weapon is doing, but we poor readers can’t.  Even in a non-action scene, the implications of the Panther’s “jungle” might not be obvious without having someone to explain.

Of course, as the first panels above illustrate, wedging all this dialogue into an action sequence requires another convention, as arbitrary as the Shakespearean soliloquy:  “talking is a free action.”  We are simply to accept the notion that a character can deliver a lengthy speech while taking split-second actions.  The expository lecture is more plausible when cruising through a landscape, as in the second image.

Thor's instantaneous declaration, From Beyond This UniverseWhen my brother Matt and I were working on our great unfinished comic-book epic back in grade school, we faithfully replicated this convention, allowing a hero to get off an appropriately heroic declaration while a roof is falling on his head.  (Apologies for the black-and-white shot; I don’t have the full-color original ready to hand.)

 

Sailor Moon manga attack sceneNot all graphic novels use this convention.  It may not be as common in manga, for example, where there’s a lot more action without explanation—and where, as a consequence, I sometimes have trouble figuring out what’s going on.  This discrepancy may reflect a cultural difference; I didn’t grow up with Japanese comic culture and may be missing some clues.  Still, I think it’s harder to make out events  without the occasional verbal aside.  In the Sailor Moon manga and anime, for example, if there’s any dialogue at all that relates to a superpower, it’s likely to consist in calling out an attack name like “Moon Princess Halation,” which by itself communicates even less than “magnetic anti-polarity.”  I’ve encountered some similar problems reading contemporary American graphic novels like Monstress.

On-Screen Obscurity

Visual media have some advantages in being able to show directly what people are doing, depending on the medium.  However, the audience for a stage play is likely to be at some distance from the performers, which means that very small actions may be hard to make out.  If a character on stage is, say, picking a lock, there will probably have to be some setup to make clear what they’re going to do (especially if the locked door is invisible and not actually part of the stage set).  In a movie, on the other hand, the director is free to show the character crouching next to the door with her tools, then cut to a close-up shot of her hands working the tools in the lock, then back out to the door opening.  Comic books can do the same thing.

This assumes we already understand what picking a lock is.  The need for explanatory narration is accentuated in science fiction and fantasy stories, where the things that are happening may be extraordinary.  When the action is more mundane, we can get by with less explanation.  If the villain fires a pistol at the good guys, we don’t need to be told how a pistol works.  But if the action uses superhuman powers or advanced technology that we haven’t seen before, an explanation may still be necessary.

Consider Marvel Comics’ Scarlet Witch (Wanda Maximoff).  Her powers originally consisted rather vaguely in casting a “hex,” which caused things to go wrong (in unspecified ways) for the target of the hex.  Later retcons and expansions introduced a number of different power sets.  But in the Marvel Cineverse movie versions, her powers are hardly explained at all.  We may see her blasting Thanos, but we don’t actually understand (even in the lenient comic-book-movie sense of “understand”) what her powers are supposed to be.  For all practical purposes, she might as well be Sailor Moon.  (Now there’s an idea for a crossover . . .)

As always, there are good and bad ways to supply the necessary explanations.  As I’ve mentioned before, the original Star Wars is good at this:  Han can snap out the line “. . . while I make the calculations for the jump to lightspeed,” and that’s all we need to know.  On the other hand, there’s what Shamus Young describes as “Super Exposition” in a 7/6/17 blog post:  “The villains blabbed their plans for no reason. Heroes narrated their own actions to themselves, out loud, during a fight. Characters would stop and explain why something was good or bad right in the middle of it happening, because the writers didn’t set anything up ahead of time.”  Overdone, the practice falls into condescending overexplanation.

On the whole, the different media seem to require different types and levels of exposition.  In a purely verbal medium like a book, when we have only the words to work with, every action must be described.  On stage, at least some forms of presentation describe the action verbally as well.  And even in a movie, where we can see what’s happening in detail, we may still need to have the events analyzed.

The Select Society of Protectors

/ Rick Ellrod / 4 Comments

Sorry about the delay between posts—I’ve been under the weather lately.

 

I was recently reading a new “Sharing Knife” story by Lois McMaster Bujold, and it suddenly occurred to me that the relationship of Bujold’s Lakewalkers to Farmers is exactly that of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders to Holders.

But let me back up a bit.

The Sharing Knife

The world of Bujold’s Sharing Knife series is a difficult and dangerous one.  Most people live in a basically agrarian culture, a sort of cross between the traditional medieval fantasy world and the Wild West.  They fear the enigmatic “Lakewalkers,” men and women who wander about the countryside in “patrol” groups and are rumored to have magical powers.  The Lakewalkers claim to be searching for what ordinary people call “blight bogles,” but some consider these to be a mere myth.

They’re not a myth, of course.  In reality the Lakewalkers, who have the ability to use a kind of magic they call “groundwork” (an extremely interesting and well-developed idea in itself), are constantly on the watch to destroy “malices” as they arise.  These malices are truly nasty beings that can mentally enthrall normal humans and mutate animals into humanoid minions.  If the Lakewalkers weren’t killing them off (via the grim “sharing knife” methd of the title), the malices would overrun the whole world.

Many Lakewalkers tend to look down on the people they are defending, whom they refer to generally as “farmers.”  Much of the interest of the story has to do with the prickly relationship between these two interdependent groups, explored through the romance between a farm girl, Fawn, and a Lakewalker patroller, Dag.

The Dragonriders of Pern

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern is a science fiction series that reads like fantasy.  The planet Pern is protected by men and women riding flying dragons.  The dragons breathe fire to destroy an alien organic “Thread” that falls from the sky and, if allowed to spread, would multiply to consume the planet.  To qualify as a full-fledged dragonrider, one must have the potential for a certain kind of telepathy that allows rider and dragon to bond at the dragons’ birth.

Dragonflight coverOne of the things that makes the Pern stories sound like fantasy is the quasi-medieval political structure.  A “Lord Holder” resembles a feudal monarch ruling over a sizable population of farmer/serfs, crafters, and minor nobility.  But here the dragonriders form a separate hierarchy.  The riders’ internal pecking order is a combination of aristocracy and meritocracy:  the rider of the senior gold (female) dragon is a kind of queen; the rider whose bronze dragon mates with the gold becomes leader of the entire group that constitutes a Weyr; and those who lack the telepathic talent are servitors (at the lowest level, “drudges”).

While the depiction of Pernese society mellowed a good bit over the course of the series—both holders and riders were pretty high-handed and violent at the beginning, less so later—one consistent theme is the uneasy relationship between the dragonriders and the common folk.  Everyone knows (though they may forget in the generations between periodic Thread attacks) that the riders are essential to preserve the planet:  “Worlds are lost or worlds are saved / From those dangers dragon-braved.”  But the holders often resent the taxes imposed to support the Weyrs and the “searches” in which the dragonriders carry off likely young people to see if they can “impress” a dragon.  Managing this tension consumes a good deal of the main characters’ time in the early books.

The Protectors and the Protected

Now I can make clear the analogy I noticed.  In each case we have a relatively small society of people set apart from ordinary folks, in a good cause:  they are dedicated to protecting the larger population.  The select group of protectors are genuine heroes who possess special talents that fit them for the role.  But the protectors are not stainless; they can abuse their powers.  And the grateful population they defend aren’t always grateful; they may resent the special powers and privileges of the defenders, even aside from the possible abuse of those advantages.

It seems to be a fruitful trope for storytelling.

Rangers and Protectors

Strider with pipe at the Prancing PonyWe can find a similar structure, though not so dominant, back in The Lord of the Rings.  You’ll recall that Strider—Aragorn—is one of a mysterious group of wanderers who travel the countryside, the Dúnedain or Rangers.  They are regarded with suspicion by the ordinary folks in Bree; Barliman Butterbur the innkeeper warns Frodo about the suspicious-looking stranger sitting in the corner.  Yet all the time the Rangers are patrolling the borders of the peaceful lands of Bree and the Shire, fending off possible threats.  Aragorn says at the Council of Elrond:

‘Strider’ I am to one fat man who lives within a day’s march of foes that would freeze his heart, or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly.  Yet we would not have it otherwise.  If simple folk are free from care and fear, simple they will be, and we must be secret to keep them so.  (Fellowship of the Ring, II.2, p. 261)

Aragorn’s fond, if slightly aggrieved, remark brings out a difference.  Pern’s dragonriders are a public society of defenders; everyone knows of their special role.  But Tolkien’s Dúnedain, like the Lakewalkers in Bujold’s more recent fantasy, play a less public role.  They are set apart, but because their heroism is unrecognized, they are objects more of suspicion than of admiration.

Pak protector (by Christopher Bretz)

Pak protector – illustration courtesy of Christopher Bretz (bretz@bretz.ca)

For a more science-fictional take, consider Larry Niven’s Protectors, which figure in the novel Protector (naturally) and in the Ringworld stories.  Niven imagines that humanity is descended from a species called the Pak, which matures through three life stages:  child, breeder, and protector.  The transition from the not-very-bright breeder stage to the highly intelligent and formidable protector stage is triggered by eating a root the characters call “tree-of-life.”  When a Pak colony arrived on Earth ages ago, however, the soil lacked a chemical necessary for the tree-of-life root to function.  The “breeders” could not change into protectors; instead, they evolved on their own into modern-day humans.  Niven’s intriguing conceit is what we see as symptoms of old age actually represent the incomplete transition to the gaunt, tough, hairless protector stage.

Niven depicts the protectors as genetically compelled to protect the members of their own family or clan—the ones who “smell right.”  A functioning Pak colony wouldn’t be as much like a human society as on Pern or Middle-Earth or Bujold’s imaginary world:  it would consist of carefree, barely-sentient breeders watched over by creatures ruthlessly dedicated to their preservation.  Think of it as an extreme case of the separation of defenders from defended.

Counter-Examples

On the other hand, a number of stories depict defenders who are much more thoroughly integrated into their broader societies.

Nita and Kit ascend over New York, from Young Wizards

Young Wizards

In Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series, youngsters with the potential for wizardry are called, not by receiving a letter from Hogwarts, but in more obscure ways—for example, running across a library book called So You Want To Be A Wizard.  There are more wizards around than one might think, because on our planet they don’t advertise their powers:  young wizards still go to school, grown-up wizards might be writers or sell advertising.  (And not all of them are human; there are some very entertaining books about feline wizards.)  But all of them are dedicated to the preservation and fostering of Life, by way of the Wizard’s Oath each must take.  In this setup, there’s no resentment of the society of protectors because no one knows they exist; and abuse of wizardly powers is almost unheard-of, since violating the Oath tends to result in forgetting that wizardry even exists.

Lensman image

Kim Kinnison, Gray Lensman

By contrast, the elite corps of Lensmen in E.E. Smith’s famous series are publicly known and highly respected.  They play the role of galactic policemen and secret agents, with particular attention to the mysterious pirates and drug-runners called “Boskone.”  Like the Young Wizards, the Lensmen are (conveniently) incorruptible, being screened at the outset by the equally mysterious but benevolent Arisians.  (This whole business of incorruptibility is something we need to examine more closely on another occasion.)  But they don’t mind mixing in ordinary society—Gray Lensman includes a scene set at a formal ball—although their grave responsibilities often make them feel set apart in their lonely dedication.

Superheroes, as a class, may occupy the same position.  They live as part of the general public, though their identities are usually secret.  They tend to act as individuals rather than as a whole society, though they do come in small groups (and may occasionally take part in mega-battles that engage the whole range of heroes).  But the modern superhero does show the ambivalence that often characterizes the select defender (Mr. Incredible’s remark that he sometimes wishes the world would just stay saved for a while).  And some graphic novels take up the question of what it’s like for the ordinary person to live in a world full of superheroes—notably Kurt Busiek’s thoughtful Marvels (1994).

Narrative Tensions

The select society of protectors is a fine place for heroes.  But it’s also dangerous.  What if the protectors aren’t incorruptible, and turn bad?  What if they become contemptuous of the people they protect, and come to think of themselves as better than the “rabble”?  In many of the scenarios above, it takes special talents to qualify as one of the defenders.  How likely is it that those who see themselves as specially qualified will end up thinking of themselves as superior?  These questions form fertile ground for various plotlines.

The notion of the select (if not superior) set of defenders may even be seen as applying to a military organization, whose purpose is to protect the general public.  “Citizen soldiers,” or draftees, may see themselves as primarily part of the overall society, temporarily detailed to do their civic duty; but a professional military, which can form its own tightly-knit society with its families and dependents, may be more easily tempted to think of itself as a group apart, with its own loyalties and camaraderie.  In fiction, the entire genre of military SF borders the trope we’re examining here.  In real life, the American military, at least, seems to have avoided that trap; we have not yet seen anything like a military coup.

Everyone Is a Tuvela

It’s interesting to contemplate the opposite trope:  the citizen soldier model taken to its limit.

The Demon Breed, coverIn James Schmitz’s 1968 novel The Demon Breed, a biochemist named Nile Etland on the human colony world Nandy-Cline discovers that independent researcher Ticos Cay has been captured by cruel and formidable aliens called the Parahuans.  Ticos has played on the Parahuans’ own near-superstitious fears to convince them that Nile is a Tuvela, a member of a secret society of superhumans that are the real rulers of human civilization.  All Nile has to do is convince the invaders that she is, in fact, a superior being it would be death to tangle with.  And, with the help of Ticos, two mutant otters, and her own encyclopedic knowledge of the unique biology of Nandy-Cline, she does a marvelous job of pulling the wool over the Parahuans’ eyes and sending them fleeing back to their own worlds.

But there are no Tuvelas.  Nile is a brilliantly resourceful and competent woman, but she’s not superhuman.  Neither is Ticos, nor any of the other inhabitants who are involved at the end in dispersing the Parahuans.  They’re simply ordinary humans.  And there is no secret organization.  Rather, Schmitz’s hypothesis is that a significant fraction of ordinary people (Ticos calls them “antipredators”) can take on that defensive role when extraordinary circumstances require them to do so.  As one character remarks, the Parahuans would have run into “Tuvela” behavior no matter where they sought to attack.

The title The Demon Breed doesn’t refer to the Parahuans.  It refers, from the unfortunate Parahuans’ point of view, to the uncannily resilient humans.  Like the sturdy hobbits of the Shire, human beings are capable of rising to the occasion.  At the end of the story, when the local Nandy-Cline military forces have mobilized to make sure the fleeing Parahuans don’t escape, Nile reflects:  “The human demon was awake and snarling on Nandy-Cline” (ch. 9).

The select society of defenders is a potent storytelling trope; but so is the distributed resourcefulness of the ordinary person.  And both may be useful to keep in mind as we act where we are needed.

An Incredible Sequel

/ Rick Ellrod / 3 Comments

The Incredibles 2 movie posterSome quick, spoiler-free comments on The Incredibles 2, which I had a chance to see this weekend.

The First Incredibles

The original Pixar film The Incredibles (2004) is a great favorite of mine.  My fondness for superhero stories goes way back, and The Incredibles does an irresistible job of both exemplifying and spoofing the genre.  Moreover, it’s a character-driven story, little as one might expect that from a superhero flick.  It’s got a gallery of memorable characters—not just the family, but distinctive supporting cast members like Frozone and Edna.  And they change over the course of the tale in ways that are plausible, illuminating, and heartwarming.

The Incredibles is genre-savvy enough to be both worldly-wise and innocent.  It starts with a premise that borders on the cynical:  these costumed brawlers cause so much damage that a public outcry forces them to go underground and live normal lives, in a sort of witness protection program.  There’s a note of realism there that contrasts with the usual comic-book conventions.  We see it again when the business of creating the colorful costumes itself turns out to require expertise worthy of James Bond’s Q—giving us Edna Mode as an independent contractor (and style maven).

This issue of collateral damage seems to have preoccupied superhero movies a lot in recent years.  It’s a primary plot driver in both Captain America:  Civil War (2016) and Batman v. Superman (2016).  But The Incredibles was there first, twelve years earlier.  What that says about contemporary attitudes is something at which we may want to take a closer look, another time.

The New Incredibles

Incredibles 2, family in force fieldThe first question that arose when a sequel was announced was, where do they go from here?  Of course, superheroes are almost by definition open to continuing adventures.  And The Incredibles ended with an obvious starting point for another story:  the appearance of a new villain, the Underminer.  But at the end of the first movie, the character arcs, the development of the main characters, had all been neatly completed.  Could the director and screenwriters come up with something equally good from that starting point?

The answer was always:  if anyone could pull that off, it’d be Pixar.

I enjoyed The Incredibles 2 immensely.  I’ll have to let it settle for a while to evaluate how it stands with respect to its classic predecessor.  But the movie is a lot of fun, and it manages to carry forward a story that’s consistent with the first movie, yet departs from it enough to avoid simply repeating the original.  As we’ve seen, this a tricky business.

Despite the fourteen-year gap in realtime between the first and the second movie, the latter picks up exactly where the former leaves off, with the appearance of the Underminer.  This tunnel-drilling villain is an obvious shout-out to Marvel’s Mole Man, who was introduced in the very first issue of The Fantastic Four.

Since the Incredibles have always been a kind of retake of the F.F., the Mole Man connection has a pleasing nostalgia aspect for the long-time comic-book fan.  There’s a similar homage to the F.F. in Kurt Busiek’s Astro City comics—a superhero group called the “First Family.”  (Their last name is actually “Furst,” making them another instance of the proverb that the last shall be Furst, and the Furst shall be last.)  Busiek, incidentally, may have been the first graphic novelist to highlight the collateral damage question; the matter of “everyday life in a superhero universe” is treated not only in Astro City (which started in 1995), but also in his revisiting of the Marvel universe, the limited series Marvels (1994).

Time and Tide

The time lapse (realtime) between Incredibles 1 and 2 is less disruptive than one might imagine, because both movies are set in an alternate past, not in our present.  One article concludes that the main action of The Incredibles takes place in 1962, based on a newspaper date.  This fits with the fact that Brad Bird’s inspiration for the film came from the comic books of the 1960s.  The time period is visible in the charmingly retro designs of the homes and cars in the original movie, not to mention the big rocket used by the villain.

So we’re not disturbed by the fact that the characters in The Incredibles (1 or 2) don’t carry around cell phones or use personal computers.  There are, of course, computers and other high-tech devices in both movies.  But this is consistent with the standard comic-book depiction of advanced technology in the hands of certain individuals or groups, as opposed to the society as a whole.  (This convention also applied in other adventure stories, like the Saturday morning cartoon Jonny Quest, one of my childhood favorites, which makes a brief appearance onscreen in The Incredibles 2.)  We might see high-powered computers and such in the Batcave, or a villain’s lair—or even in some hidden country, like Marvel’s Wakanda (which first appeared in 1966).  But these were always “islands” of high technology, having no effect on the technological level of the overall culture.

Mr Incredible with Mirage's tablet messageThere is a subtle difference between the 1960s depictions of advanced technology and what we see in the Incredibles movies, which may throw us off a bit.  A 1960s-era imaginary supercomputer looked like an extrapolated version of 1960s-era mainframe computers.  One thinks of old James Bond movies showing computers ornamented with slowly rotating tape drives, which now look ludicrously anachronistic.  But this nostalgic re-creation of 1960s-era high-tech has the advantage of knowing how the future actually turned out.  Thus, in an early scene from the first movie, Mr. Incredible is tracking a car chase in his Incredimobile—and the electronic tracker looks not unlike a GPS, albeit one with primitive graphics.  When Mirage sends a “This message will self-destruct” recording to Bob, it’s on a tablet strangely reminiscent of a modern iPad.  In effect, the movie designers are reimagining the imagined future of the 1960s, by reference to the actual future (our present).  The mind boggles a bit.

All in all, The Incredibles 2 does a very good job of resuming the story fourteen years later with a minimum of retcon.  Compare Back to the Future II, which required a distinct revision of the closing scene from the first movie, only four years after episode 1 was released.

Managing the Handoff

There were a couple of things I didn’t quite expect in the transition from the end of episode 1 to the beginning of episode 2.  But they weren’t really retcons—more like things I’d assumed at the end of The Incredibles that turned out not to be quite so simple.  These aren’t really spoilers, since they become apparent almost at once in the new movie.

Incredibles 2, family chargingThe Parr family and Frozone are publicly acclaimed for defeating Syndrome in episode 1, but that doesn’t mean they’re out of the woods yet.  The anti-supers law still hasn’t been reversed.  When the story was wrapped up in a single movie, we would reasonably assume that such things would automatically be resolved after the movie ended, just as we assume that the main characters’ romance will proceed swimmingly when a movie fades out on a kiss.  But there’s still work to be done on society’s acceptance of supers in The Incredibles 2.

Then there’s baby Jack.  We saw Jack exhibit a variety of assorted superpowers in the first movie and the associated short subject (“Jack-Jack Attack”).  But his family didn’t quite see that; they don’t yet know he has superpowers.  Of course, as the trailers make clear, they find out pretty soon . . .

Conclusion

I heartily recommend the sequel; most fans of The Incredibles should enjoy this follow-up.

And one bit of practical advice for the moviegoer:  the closing credit graphics are entertaining, but there’s no need to wait around for the very end.  Our 1960s-ish superhero family has not yet adopted the modern practice of putting a “stinger” scene at the conclusion of the credits.

Recklessness

/ Rick Ellrod / 2 Comments

The name of the title song from Martina McBride’s album “Reckless” (released April 29, 2016) matches that of another favorite of mine, Alabama’s “Reckless” (1993).  What strikes me most is the difference in what the songs say.

Martina McBride - Reckless (album cover)Here are the links:

Martina McBride’s “Reckless”:  music video; lyrics; Wikipedia entry (album)

Alabama’s “Reckless”:  fan video with lyrics; just lyrics; Wikipedia entry

I’ll refer to the songs by their performers, but since I’m talking about the words, it’s really the lyricists at work (though the music, as in any good song, reinforces the lyric—and vice versa).  For McBride’s song, the writers are Sarah Buxton, Zach Crowell, and Heather Morgan; for Alabama’s, Michael Clark and Jeff Stevens.

 

Alabama’s song is an ode to spontaneity, with its overtones of rebelliousness and adventure.  The singer and his girlfriend are dissatisfied with life in their Texas small town.  He wants them to take off somewhere else, anywhere else.

The refrain begins with “Let’s roll the windows down…”  Since this song came out, I can’t count the number of country singers I’ve heard rolling their windows down for exactly the same reason.  It works, too.  “[L]et the wind blow through our hair” – what suggests excitement more than air streaming past our faces?  The refrain ends with the inevitably suggestive line, “Let’s get reckless tonight.”

But the overall message is clear in the bridge:  “When you’re crazy in love you gotta take a chance, / Burn the bridge and don’t look back.”  Love, in other words, requires recklessness.  (Despite being burned, however, the bridge remains intact in the song.)

This trope is firmly rooted in classic American tradition.  It lines up with a long tradition of such anthems.  Wilson Phillips’ “Impulsive” comes to mind, where “reckless” is the second adjective the singer applies to herself (to her own surprise) in the refrain.

Love of spontaneity has a much broader reach than love songs alone.  Our fascination with the impulsive, boundary-breaking individual includes, for example, the recurrent trope of the “loose-cannon cop who doesn’t play by the rules” (TV Tropes calls it Cowboy Cop).  The attitude is canonized in the “chaotic good” alignment featured as one of the options in Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games (you can find descriptions on Wikipedia, TV Tropes, or elsewhere).

 

Twenty-three years later, McBride’s take doesn’t quite follow the trope—or does it?  Clearly, we are supposed to be attracted by the singer’s portrait of a wild and impulsive woman.  But the narrator’s actual description of herself isn’t favorable.  The song opens:

For stumbling through a mess of dances
For squandering my second chances
For wrecking every dream
And breaking everything I ever had . . .

The singer seems to be sorry about her ungoverned behavior, or ashamed of it.  She even calls it “criminal” in the refrain.  She feels her beloved cares for her despite this chaotic quality, not because of it.

Originally I wondered whether this new song represented a change in attitudes over time.  We are highly sensitive today to unintended consequences, including “collateral damage”—in everything from environmentalism to superhero movies (the damage caused by epic battles is a major plot driver in this year’s Captain America: Civil War and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice).  One might suspect we’re becoming less enthusiastic about recklessness than we used to be.

On the other hand, we’re still getting just as many images in which operating outside the law is seen as a good thing.  The screenwriters’ sympathies seem to lie more with the “chaotic” side in both those films.  It would be rash to imagine a reversal of so pervasive an attitude based on one song.

 

But there’s more to it:  McBride’s song has another layer.  Her lover’s willingness to cope with her erratic nature also represents daring or courage.  The last lines of the refrain are:  “For loving me the way you do—I know I’m reckless—but you must be reckless too.”  Loving someone who is so uncontrolled is its own form of recklessness.

This kind of risk-taking appears in the song as a good thing.  She—and we, the listeners—want him to take that chance.  Only when he does so can he prize who she really is, and see her lovableness:  “For looking in my eyes and seeing the soul inside . . .”  It’s the difference between acting unthinkingly or destructively, and taking a desperate risk in a good cause.

McBride’s “Reckless,” in other words, draws our attention to the fact that there is a certain kinship between the kind of recklessness that represents pure spontaneity (and can go drastically wrong), and the kind that dares to take the necessary risks to love someone.  And, yes, can also go drastically wrong.

This truth holds to some extent for everybody.  None of us is ideal and unexceptionable.  We’ve all squandered opportunities and stumbled through life.  Committing ourselves to any of us flawed human beings means taking chances.  Love always requires courage.

What McBride’s song tells us, then, is that there are some risks that must be taken; and love is one of them.  On this, the two songs come back together—Alabama also told us we had to take chances to be “crazy in love.”

It’s one reason we might say, with that well-known sage Rich Burlew, “Love is an Epic-level challenge.”