The Mix : What are people talking about today?

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Ed Catto’s Person of the Year

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It’s that time of year to pause and look back at the best of and the coolest stuff of the year. It’s always fascinating to compare and contrast what you feel was more important with what everyone else feels what was important. It doesn’t really matter what the topic or industry is – there’s bound to be disagreements. I was especially amused when the roundtable on MSNBC’s Morning Joe show was criticizing Time magazine’s choice for Person of the Year. So naturally, I started thinking about who should be the Person of the Year in Geek Culture. And the more I thought about it – the more I was convinced this was the time for one of those high concept pronunciations. So for Geek Culture Person of the Year – I choose The Cosplayer.

The Cosplayer embraces and exemplifies so much of pop culture. Its almost as if cosplayer collectively are playing another role – the proxy hero for Geek Culture.

bombshell-ww-1-4001858Convention Growth

Cosplayers, by definition, dress in costumes at comic conventions. Oh, sure, we saw a lot of cosplay during Star Wars’ opening weekend, recently on Back to the Future Day and a slightly different flavor of it all at the various Santa Con pub crawls. But by and large, cosplayers cosplay at comic cons. And that’s where so many of the big stories have been this year. In 2016, there were more comic conventions than ever before. And there were more high quality conventions. And there were more fun small conventions. And more international conventions. Attendance records were routinely shattered and the convention season now stretches to cover the entire calendar from January to December.

But with this growth has also come some growing pains. The mix of attendees, and their reasons for attending conventions, is changing dramatically. Geek Culture at comic conventions now means so many things beyond comics. At some conventions, some dealers of old comics struggle to find their place in the new order. New, often unexpected, exhibitors are always jumping into the fray. Even the traffic patterns of convention aisles is changing, especially as taking photos is now a much bigger part of the experience than it once was.

And the Cosplayers aren’t the only reason for these changes – but they are a big part of it. Their goals at a convention might not include shopping, treasure hunting or snagging artwork from a favorite artist. On the other hand they bring a level of enthusiasm and creativity that’s not seen in any other gathering. So many gatherings of super-passionate fans, everything from the US Open Tennis Championships to the National Dog Show, encourage fans to be there as spectators – not participants.

Diversity and Acceptance

Baked into the idea of today’s cosplay is a wonderful non-judgmentalism. If you cosplay as Superman, you don’t have to be tall and muscular. You don’t have to be a man or white. You’re even applauded for stretching the original character’s concepts into something new and different. And that’s whey we may see a steampunk Superman or a Stormtrooper Superman.

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So you don’t need a super-physique to cosplay super-characters. Sure, there’s some shallow, judgmental lunkheads out there, but the wonderful overwhelming mindset that cosplay brings is a celebration of all different body types. And in today’s hypercritical social media atmosphere, so often based on passing judgments via “likes”, it’s an important cultural counterbalance.

ca_batman-5721208On-Ramp for New Fans

Back in the day, there were always a few blowhard know-it-all-fans (cough, cough) who took great pride in their knowledge of trivia and backstory about certain comic characters. New fans often felt condescension when these fans, the industry’s culture version of Wine Snobs, looked down their noses at the rest of fandom.

But Cosplaying has worked to change that. If someone wants to cosplay as a certain character, but doesn’t know all-there-is-to-know about a character, it’s fine! There have been reports of the old guard shaming new fans when they cosplayed “incorrectly” (i.e., not getting their characters’ details correct.) But lately, it seems that this unfortunate paradigm is flipped on its head, and now cosplayers are applauded for trying new things and celebrating them in the costumes.

green-arrow-new-delhi-6633664It’s a Family Affair

How wonderful it is to see the way that Geek Culture now embraces families. I’m a second-generation comic fan. Both my mom and dad read and traded them back in the way. And my dad would flip through my new comics stack and enjoy the latest Jonah Hex or Master of Kung Fu.
At conventions today, it’s wonderfully common to see families cosplaying together. Usually, it’s a dad who’s introducing the kids to his favorite hobby. But at the recent New Jersey Comic Expo (it was a great show), I was thrilled to see two brilliant cosplayers dressed as Captain America and a female Red Skull bring their parents, portraying a Peggy Carter and Steve Rogers. 

Cosplay Knows No Borders

Like Geek Culture, it’s a worldwide phenomenon. Cosplay is now a part of every major Comic Convention. In fact, this morning I was sent a Buzzfeed link showcasing “27 Cosplayers from Comic Con who are Absolutely Nailing this Costume Thing”.

mike-gold-and-blackhawk-cosplay-bcc-2765067* * *

So here’s a holiday toast to the creativity and passion of all 2015’s cosplayers. Congratulations on being voted as my “Geek Culture Person of the Year”. Now start planning for next year.

(Note: The Editor is profoundly embarrassed to note that it is he who is standing to our right of Blackhawk, in a photo taken at the ComicMix booth at this year’s Baltimore Comic Con.)

Monsieur Jean: The SIngles Theory

monsieurjean-13singlestheory-1995454Monsieur Jean is the semi-autobiographical — a novelist rather than a cartoonist, and somewhat Everyman-ized — central character in a series of slice-of-life comics stories by the French creators Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian. Much of that series has been collected in English as From Bachelor to Father, after about half of it originally appeared over here as Get a Life. [1] (French albums are short, we must remember: to them, a full-length book-format comic is often just 48 pages. So American reprint projects typically stick at least two books together, and sometimes much more than that.)

The Singles Theory, as far as I can tell, came out of sequence and out of size: it’s a 120-plus-page epic of mundanity, set between two of the earlier books, in a popular period of Jean’s life. It’s the story of how he got inspired to write his second novel — which anyone involved with the literary world know is the really tough one. (Anyone can write one novel, but for it to be a career and a life, a novelist has to be able to write number two — three and the rest will then follow.) I suspect this is a popular book in the series, since the US edition is a translation of a special duotone edition that came out in France in 2011.

All of the Monsieur Jean stories have love affairs — dating, meeting new people, sex, relationship troubles, and break-ups — as central to their plots, but Singles Theory uses that as the central conceit: Jean’s friend Felix, in the middle of a divorce, has moved in with him and has understandably soured on the entire idea of romance and love. At the same time, Jean is having recurring nightmares of armed men who claim they are about to kill him, but always get distracted long enough for Jean to wake up. His friends insist this is all about sex…probably because, in a book like this, everything is all about sex.

Those are some of the loose threads that wind through a series of discrete, individual stories about Jean and his friends — they go to a birthday party for a friend far our in the countryside, Jean is interviewed badly about his work, Felix gets trapped in an elevator, and so forth. It’s not for readers who want gigantic moments and lots of punching in their comics, but they’re very unlikely to pick up something called Monsieur Jean in the first place. For people who like movies and books that are about characters and dialogue rather than plot — who appreciate that things don’t always have to move at a breakneck pace — this is a wonderful story about real people in a real world.

[1] I’ve read Get a Life twice — most recently just a couple of months ago — and reviewed it in a quick, desultory fashion here each time. I won’t bother to link; you’re not missing anything. Slice-of-life stories are difficult to criticize/analyze.

John Ostrander: Origins

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As I mentioned in a previous column, I’ve been on a Rex Stout/Nero Wolfe reading/re-reading jag as of late and have been enjoying it greatly. As other commentators have noted, the pleasure in the Nero Wolfe novels is not so much the plots, which have been noted as serviceable, but in the characters, especially the rotund and eccentric genius, Nero Wolfe, and his wise cracking legman and assistant, Archie Goodwin.

(Sidenote: when I first met the late and great comic book writer/editor, Also Archie Goodwin, I meant to ask him about Wolfe but decidedly, I think prudently, that he had probably gotten enough of that in his life. End digression.)

Stout had written 33 novels and 39 short stories on the pair between 1934 and his death in 1975. After his death, his estate authorized further Wolfe and Goodwin adventures by Robert Goldsborough who has written ten books, one of which was Archie Meets Nero Wolfe, a prequel to the Nero Wolfe stories telling the tale of how the two first met.

That’s a story Rex Stout had never told and I’m enough of a fan to have wondered in the past about it so, of course, I ordered the book.

Pastiches can be hit and miss; the author is trying not only for the style of the original author but for the voice of the characters. There’s been a lot of different pastiches over the years for different literary creations; Sherlock Holmes has them, there are Conan the Barbarian pastiches, and more recently Robert B. Parker’s characters have come back to life with various writers of different abilities.

I read Archie Meets Nero Wolfe and it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t Stout but it wasn’t bad. It hit all the clues about the characters’ backgrounds that Stout had sprinkled through the Wolfe canon. Goldsborough has caught Wolfe’s “voice” pretty well although I felt his Archie was a bit spotty. However, my biggest reaction after reading the book was “Why?”

Rex Stout never gave a full “origin” of the Wolfe/Goodwin partnership. Do we really need one? Yes, I bought the book because I was curious but I didn’t learn anything new about the characters. It got me to thinking: do we always need an origin?

When I started writing my GrimJack series, we joined John (GrimJack) Gaunt in the middle of his doing something. Sometime later, we did an “origin” which the late columnist and critic Don Thompson said was his second favorite origin story of all time, next to Superman’s. In it, Gordon, the bartender of Munden’s Bar which Gaunt owns and is his hang-out, offers to share Gaunt’s “secret origin” with a patron. It goes like this: Papa Gaunt. Mama Gaunt. A bottle of hootch. Wucka wucka wucka. Nine months later – Baby Gaunt.

The point of it was that Gaunt was born and everything that had happened to him since then is what makes him into GrimJack. I differentiate between “origins” and “backstory”.

An origin is the starting point from which everything else flows. Backstory fills in and explains different aspects of a given character. Sometimes there may not be any single starting point.

I wrote some stories with Del Close, the legend who directed and taught at Chicago’s Second City for many many years and then went to form the ImprovOlympics (now simply called “I/O”). I took some of his improv classes at Second City myself; they were extremely valuable to me as a writer and very liberating. One of Del’s rule was to start in the middle of the story and go on past the end. He used to say, “I get bored with all that exposition shit. Get on with it.” If it was a fairy tale, he wanted to know what happened beyond the “happily ever after”. For him, that was what was really interesting in the story.

One of the big questions Del made me ask myself was “Just how necessary – really necessary – was all that exposition?” What was the minimum that reader had to know in order to follow the story? The answer usually is: a lot less than you think. A writer may want to be clear about everything so s/he may overexplain.

I remember one of the first Spider-Man stories I ever read began with Spidey in the middle of a pitched battle on a New York street with the Rhino. I didn’t know anything about either character but the writer, Stan Lee, assured us in a narrative caption: “Don’t worry, effendi. We’ll catch you up as we go.” And damned if he didn’t. That also taught me a lot.

One of the rules that has been devised for comics is that Every Comic Is Someone’s First Issue. Therefore, it was obligatory to be absolutely clear about it all. Someone’s rule was that within the first five pages, the main character’s name had to be said, the powers demonstrated, and what’s at stake made clear. That’s important for the writer to know, certainly, but how much does the reader need to know? Usually, less than you think.

With GrimJack, Timothy Truman (the book’s first artist and designated co-creator) and I knew a lot about John Gaunt’s backstory but we decided to only tell it when it was pertinent to a given story. The reader sensed that there was more story than we were telling and that created some mystery about him but, at the same time, there was trust that we knew what we were doing.

The writer also has to trust the reader and to assume they are intelligent enough to fill in some blanks. It doesn’t all need to be spelled out. You can imply a lot and trust the reader to get it. That trust creates a bond between creator and reader and that’s when magic happens.

For me, that was the main problem with Archie Meets Nero Wolfe. It gave me the incidents of how the two met, the what, but not the why. How did that relationship start? Was there a chemistry from the start? The book was very prosaic but it needed a touch of poetry; there needed to be something between the lines. There needed to be a touch of mystery because in all the Rex Stout stories about the pair, that was there. The biggest mystery in every Nero Wolfe story, the one that is never solved but always there, is the relationship between Wolfe and Archie. That’s what keeps me coming back. Over and over.

Marc Alan Fishman: Thank You, Star Wars

Force Awakens

I’m not writing a lot this week, and what I am writing may be slightly spoiler-ish. So, if by chance you haven’t seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens yet and you intend to, read my title, nod ever so slightly, and come back next week. For the whole lot of you otherwise… ahem.

Thank you, Star Wars.

Thank you for taking nearly everything great about A New Hope and using it to create something both post-modern and inherently original in its own right.

Thank you for giving us villains who act as villains; not in service to pure chaos alone, but to greed, hatred, and layers of inner conflict.

Thank you for giving us heroes who earn their heroism; not in service to the plot, but in service to their (and our) conscience.

Thank you for committing to the use of practical effects as much as possible. You gave the franchise the dirt under the fingernails I’d assumed we lost with the old VHS tapes.

Thank you for lightsaber fights that felt real. No kung-fu wire acts. No bushido stoicism. Just people wailing on each other with laser swords. That hurt. A lot.

Thank you for that one counter-lightsaber Storm Trooper. And actually, thank you for showing that they can in fact shoot things and hit them.

Thank you for making only one CGI alien feel like a terrible ethnic stereotype. Seriously: I expected way more, so, just the one was barely noticeable at all.

Thank you for introducing us to new characters living in a universe still populated by the old ones. Thank you for hinting at their connection to one another without feeling the need to hit us over the heads with it.

Thank you for making General Hux a capable leader who could stand next to Kylo Ren and not feel like a set dressing.

Thank you for making BB-8 adorable… and for knowing when to turn it off. Cute has a line, and you took us right to the edge.

Thank you to the First Order’s weapon architect… who really dug into his personal aesthetic.

Thank you for Finn’s wit, charm, and innocence. Thank you for Rey’s vulnerability, immense skill, and curiosity. Thank you for making Poe… Hal Jordan.

Thank you for helping your original creator learn to let go, when he finally found the artisans capable of bridging the gap from what was once great to what is great again.

And lastly…

Thank you, Star Wars, for reminding me why I really did love your universe when I was 12. And while I will never (ever) forgive you for Episode I, II, and III… I can now look beyond it. I can look up at the sky again…

And wonder again… with pure appreciation.

The Law Is A Ass

Bob Ingersoll The Law Is A Ass #377

MINDING OTHER PEOPLE’S BUSINESS

Now if you or I had said what Detective Erickson said of a previously non-violent person who suddenly snapped and committed a vicious assault in Scarlet Witch #1; “He claims to have no recollection of his actions, which is the first step to an insanity plea;” we would have been correct. But unlike Detective Erickson, you or I don’t live in the Marvel Universe. Or the DC Universe, we don’t even live in the slightly more mundane Dark Circle Universe. We live in the completely mundane Life As We Know It Universe.

The Life As We Know It Universe is a universe where there aren’t mutants, aliens, freaks, supernatural beings, master hypnotists, and Stan knows what else out there that are all capable of mind control. We don’t live in a world where any one of those beings could take over our minds or bodies and force us to things we wouldn’t ordinarily do. (At least, I don’t think there are but I did watch Here Comes Honey Boo Boo once.)

Seriously, if you do a search on the term mind control in the Marvel Comics Wiki, you’ll find eight pages each with sixteen entries and then ninth page with another thirteen entries of characters who exhibit the ability to control minds. And those entries didn’t even include Maynard Tiboldt, who just uses good old-fashioned hypnosis to force others to do his bidding. Or demonic possession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonic_possession, walk ins such as Deadman, or other plot devices.

The point being, in the Marvel Universe, where mind control is as prevalent as halitosis in a garlic festival, how does a simple prosecutor ever get a conviction? Even when a perp was caught red-handed, said perp could claim that he or she didn’t want to do it, someone like Kilgrave or Puppet Master took over his or her mind and forced him or her to commit the crime. Would even one hundred eyewitnesses all of whom saw the defendant commit the crime and positively identified the defendant in court be enough to get past the reasonable doubt raised by a literal “The Devil Made Me Do It” defense?

The problem wouldn’t be any better in the DC Universe. The same mind control search in the DC Comics Wiki yields eleven pages of sixteen entries, plus a twelfth page with one entry of mind controllers. If anything, the problem would be even worse there.

And it’s not just mind control. What about shape shifters? Again, you could have one hundred eyewitnesses all say, “We saw D. Fendant kill Mr. Boddy in the Library with the wrench,” and Mr. Fendant could argue it wasn’t him the eyewitnesses saw, it was Mystique or Clayface or a Skrull  or a Durlan who changed their appearance to look like Mr. Fendant for their own nefarious reasons. Or going back one step, maybe one of those 198 mind controllers, one hypnotist, assorted demonic possessors, other assorted walkers in, or abundant plot devices we were talking about earlier used their powers to make the eye witnesses think they saw Mr. Fendant, when he had nothing to do with the crime.

Either way, it could shove so much reasonable doubt into the case that it would turn what was once a slam dunk into a hard-to-swallow turducken.

What’s a prosecutor to do?

I don’t know.

Maybe the prosecutor could convince a jury that none of those very possible possibilities had happened. After all, juries in our Life As We Know It Universe are extremely reluctant to accept the insanity defense. The Not Guilty By Reason of Insanity plea is only used in about one percent of all felony trials and fact finders return a verdict of N.G.R.I. in only one-quarter of the cases where the defense is even raised. Maybe juries in the Marvel or DC Universes would be equally reluctant to find a defendant not guilty by reason of mind control, shape shifting, possession, walk in, or other plot device.

Maybe. Or maybe not.

Again, I don’t know.

I do know this: the prevalence of mind controllers and shape shifters in our comic-book universes would make life for the Harvey Dents and Blake Towers of those worlds interesting. But interesting in the “May you live in interesting times” is a curse kind of way.

Oh, I also know something else: I haven’t finished wrapping my Christmas presents yet. Hell, I haven’t finished my Christmas shopping yet. So, while I can to raise the questions and point out the problems, I don’t have enough time to analyze them more fully.

In fact, all I do have time for is to say, “Merry Christmas, everyone.”

Martha Thomases: A Yuletide Call To Action

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Merry Christmas!

I don’t celebrate, of course. Well, I do, sort of. I volunteer at the hospital, helping Santa deliver gifts to the kids who are in-patient. My Santa is Jewish. His wife (and elf) is Jewish. So am I. We are the Shabbos goys of Christmas.

Just because it’s not my holiday doesn’t mean that I ignore the season of comfort and joy. Coming so close to the New Year, it makes me think of how to improve myself and the planet for the next twelve months.

It is possible for me to get discouraged when I think about these things. There are so many important problems to be solved – climate change, income inequality, terrorism, racism, sexism etc. etc. I don’t have any ideas that are big enough to solve these. I can’t do it all by myself.

(Aside: Thinking I have to do it all by myself is a form of grandiosity.)

So, the challenge, as I see it, is to find a finite problem and a community that might be able to solve it. I think I’ve found the problem, and I think we, as the comics community, are up to the task.

A while ago, I read this story about the growing and unmet demand for story-hours for children, especially pre-school children. Research shows that the single most important thing contributing to a person’s success is having access to books as a child.

We are comics-lovers. We love to read. We should find a way to connect with under-served communities and read to their kids.

Here are some of the challenges:

  1. We will need to find locations that are open to the public and safe for children under the age of five.
  2. We will need to find a stash of appropriate books.
  3. We will need to learn what laws cover activities like this, and take steps to be in compliance with them.

Here are some of my first thoughts, by number.

  1. Some of the bigger and better comic book stores have reading areas. Perhaps they would donate an hour or two each week for this purpose.
  2. There are excellent books for children in this age group in our medium. We might be able to raise money to purchase them, or contact the publishers for donations.
  3. Perhaps there are lawyers who are comic book fans who could advise us.

These aren’t all the problems we would face, nor are my suggestions necessarily useful. It’s not a way to reach every child in need. If anything, the kids who need it most are the hardest to involve, since they are most likely to have parents who work several jobs, don’t speak English, or are just plain apathetic.

Still, it’s a start.

What do you think? Is this something we could do? Should we start in one space, and see if it works? Do you have other ideas?

Let me know in the comments. If you really want to get involved, send me an e-mail Martha@comicmix.com

REVIEW: Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials

maze-runner-2-scorch-trials-blu-ray-cover-24-e1450975347406-8000966Young Adult novels tend to work best when they are metaphors for their readers’ lives. James Dashner’s Maze Runner trilogy certainly applied the zigs and zags of an adolescent’s development to that of a maze where the wrong turn can have devastating consequences. The books sold well and in the wake of The Hunger Games’ success, they were naturals for screen adaptation.

The first, 2014’s Maze Runner, was nowhere near as engaging with flat characters and a dumb, unsustainable society of teens. We were left with the gaggle of teens getting out from the maze and into its inner workings.

The Scorch Trials, out now oi Combo Pack from 20th Century Home Entertainment, immediately picks up from that moment as we trace the Gladers: Thomas (Dylan O’Brien), Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), Minho (Ki Hong Lee), Teresa Agnes (Kaya Scodelario), Frypan (Dexter Darden) and Winston (Alexander Flores) as they go exploring unchartered territory.

Once they find Mr. Janson (Aidan Gillen), they are told their safe so we know long before they do that the gang is anything but safe. Right there is the film’s problem as the worldbuilding is flabby, the character development is nil but the action quotient is high, trying to mask weak storytelling. It’s a shame screenwriter T.S. Nowlin and director Wes Ball, returning for a second trip to dystopia, didn’t take the time to deepen the players and make the audience care. Instead, they do a fine job with the running, jumping, and exploding but that reduces the cast and Dashner’s story to the plot of a video game.

We learn the Flare virus remains a threat as does Ava Paige (Patricia Clarkson), representing the evil WCKD (get it?) but we are also introduced to The Right Arm, the resistance movement led by Vince (Barry Pepper) and a gaggle of others who will work with Thomas and Teresa to overthrow the bad guys in the third installment, The Death Cure, due in 2017.

At 131 minutes, the film could have used some tightening that would have allowed the characters to feel like people like chess pieces. The bloated production needed some nipping and tucking to help with a slow first half and better second.

Still, the high definition transfer at AVC encoded 1080p in 2.40:1 looks just swell so you can watch things blow up just fine, paired well with the DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 mix.

The combo comes with Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital HD so they have you covered. The Blu-ray comes with a nice assortment of extras starting with Audio Commentary from Ball, Nowlin, producer Joe Hartwick, Jr. and editor Dan Zimmerman; Janson’s Report (Classified) (4:57) , an assortment of “confessionals”; Deleted and Extended Scenes (17:58) with optional commentary by Ball, Nowlin, Hartwick, Jr. and Zimmerman; Secrets of The Scorch (52:15) , a compilation of featurettes with the standard behind the scenes footage and cast and crew interviews; Gag Reel (15:02); and Visual Effects Breakdown (1:06) with commentary by Ball; Visual Effects Reel (29:55).

One unique touch is a Maze Runner comic book being included.

Box Office Democracy: Star Wars: The Force Awakens

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The first movie I ever reviewed was Attack of the Clones and I gave it a rave review, the kind of review I would never give it now that I consider it to be arguably the worst movie in the entire franchise. In my defense, I was 17 years old and mostly just didn’t know better when it came to dialogue, character arcs, or any facets of compelling filmmaking that weren’t balls-to-the-wall lightsaber fights. I walked out of every one of the prequels happy and only turned on them with time and perspective, and that’s why I’m afraid now to write about how thoroughly I enjoyed The Force Awakens because now these words might actually stick around.

From here on out I’m going to talk about the plot so if that’s not what you’re interested in, now is the time to head somewhere else.

There aren’t a lot of new story beats in The Force Awakens, in fact it seems like it follows the road map from A New Hope faithfully, but after hearing George Lucas go on and on for years about how the prequels were supposed to “rhyme” with the original trilogy this is hardly surprising. We don’t come to Star Wars for original or complex plots, we come for the skillful implementation of iconic moments. This is a franchise that started by ripping off Hidden Fortress and hasn’t had a great many original ideas since that weren’t about selling toys in fun new ways. The Force Awakens is a story I’ve heard many times before in a more dynamic wrapping.

J.J. Abrams is a better director than George Lucas in every way that counts, and it is almost cruel how they show that off. The original trilogy understandably looks a little dated at this point three decades in the future but fancy visual effects aside the prequel trilogy has aged terribly, they simply don’t share a visual vocabulary with their peers. The shots are largely static and the compositions boring; there seem to be more variety in the transitory wipes than in the set-ups. Abrams has a lot of flaws but he know how to move a camera and he knows how to shoot a good action scene and that’s more than enough to knock this movie out of the park. There’s one sequence that feels like a lumpy, out of place, mashup of Firefly and Men in Black full of just-too-cutsey cameos, but other than that I was suitably riveted to my seat for the entire film and that’s becoming more and more rare for me.

I love all of the new principal characters without reservation. John Boyega is utterly fantastic as Finn. He’s able to display such a depth of turmoil, he instantly becomes one of the most kinetic characters in the entire mythos. I’ve been a huge fan of his since Attack the Block and I’m thrilled to see him live up to all that promise and more here. Daisy Ridley is the new face of the franchise, and the way she shows the scars of her abandonment while similarly embodying the Luke Skywalker role for a new trilogy is most impressive. She doesn’t get a striking hero shot gazing in to a binary sunset, but she nails everything else about being a Star Wars protagonist. Her facial expression work in the climactic battle is worth the price of admission alone. Oscar Isaac is underused but his charisma is so strong he looms large over the movie and is just so alarmingly good looking, I’m not sure it’s safe to photograph him much more anyway. I liked Adam Driver more in his turn as Kylo Ren than I’ve liked him in anything else I’ve seen him in. He does about half the work in the biggest, most impactful scene in the movie and he feels right in that spot. He’s everything that Alec Guinness, Harrison Ford, or Ewan McGregor brought to this franchise and those names are good company.

The Force Awakens is a good action movie, it builds off of and feeds the endless churn of mythos needed to keep Star Wars afloat as an intellectual property, it creates new and interesting characters, and it gives them compelling places to do exciting things in. I don’t know what to want besides this. It isn’t exactly the same as seeing A New Hope for the first time when I was five years old… but nothing ever will be. This is the modernization the franchise needed, and it’s as good or better than every sequel I ever chased through mediocre novels throughout the years.

Star Wars is back and better than ever.

Dennis O’Neil: Descartes, Plato & The Matrix

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Okay, wait a minute. You think you’re stacking gifts under the tree, but are you really? How do you know? Maybe you’re not the stacker but the stackee. Not the giver but the given. And about that tree: maybe it doesn’t really look like a tree. Or maybe it isn’t there. Maybe you’re not there.

Pause and take a breath.

Some savants tell us that there’s about a twenty percent chance that we are constructs, like avatars in computer games. Everything we are and believe to be real… isn’t. All just an illusion, and maybe a pretty shabby one at that.

The idea is older than you might guess. Way back in the Seventeenth Century, a brainy mathematician and philosopher named Rene Descartes suggested that a prankster of a demon kept you in a vat and not necessarily a big vat, either, because maybe you are no more than a brain. Maybe the only brain. Everything else is an illusion created by that snarky demon for reasons only snarky demons are privy to.

The idea was updated by the Wachowski siblings in their movie The Matrix. In that story, we humans are the captives of sentient machines who use our bodies as energy sources. We aren’t aware of our plight because the “reality” we experience is a humdinger of a simulation, courtesy of the machines. We languish in storage somewhere, enjoying or maybe loathing the show that we don’t know is a show.

The idea has sprouts elsewhere. Plato, the ancient Grecian savant, thought that everything we encounter is just a copy of an original that exists some non-terrestrial somewhere. Plato, in turn, inspired a group that became known as the neo-Platonists and some notions of a “heaven” are close to Plato’s hypothesis. (I could mention St. Augustine but I won’t because some of you, if you exist, might think I’m showing-off, and even if you don’t exist, I wouldn’t want you thinking ill of me.)

The notion that we’re make-believe creatures in a make-believe world has its attractions. It would explain why, for example, I have no memory of acts I must have committed hundreds of times and why, conversely, I have memory snatches of things that occurred when I was quite little. It also might relieve us of any responsibility for our actions. (Hey, it wasn’t me that broke your window, it was my programmer.) Of course, my lack of certain memories would have to be part of my programming. But wait. Could my lack of memories, and other anomalies, merely demonstrate a lack of competence in who or whatever is running the operation? Could our programmer be mentally challenged? Or a toddler paying with his equivalent of a pacifier? Maybe he’s named Junior and the adults have given him this stupid game to keep him quiet and you and I are part of the game.

Do we care? Is anything changed?

Well, ixpageoratsym. In Junior’s language that’s “happy holidays.” Go ahead – prove me wrong.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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