L.J. Writes

Choosing to be kind is not choosing to be passive. It’s choosing to end the cycle of abuse . . . It’s a courageous act in itself.

-Melissa Grey on Cinderella

It’s amazing to me how some parts of the Star Wars fandom have no sense of nuance when it comes to Finn’s character, seeing him as either a naive child who can hardly function in the real world or a ruthless killer who showed no regrets or conflicts whatsoever about killing his former comrades.

Both extremes are fairly dehumanizing and distorted portrayals of the actual character, because the core of Finn’s character is that he is innocent when he has no business being so. He’s a character whose innocence and purity are not oblivious naïvete but qualities he had to fight to keep and attain. His morality is not based on an ignorance of life’s harsh realities, but rather on an intimate knowledge of brutality and the will to break free of it.

( I love this character a lot, okay? )

(This essay was originally posted to Tumblr on January 2, 2017.)

I'm not a fan of Sherlock. The show has clever references and is visually well-crafted, but Watson's Throwing Off the Disability in the first episode turned me off big time and I have seen little from subsequent, passing views that there is anything there to interest me.

Nevertheless, when my visiting mother-in-law wanted us to watch The Abominable Bride special I went along with it. Well actually I was like, "Wait, how about Suffragette?" at the last minute but my husband had paid the VOD system by then, so The Abominable Bride it was. Besides, it turned out that our subscription doesn't carry Sufragette anyway.

( Spoilers for The Abominable Bride )

The Abominable Bride left me fairly confirmed in my opinions. (Which is what experience usually does to opinions anyway.) Sherlock is a slick, smart show that draws a lot of drama from the relationships between its well-defined principal characters. It doesn't go much deeper than that, though. This holiday special, like the show itself, doesn't have much in the way of self-awareness or moral authority, and that in a nutshell is why Sherlock doesn't interest me.

I have been meaning to do a Mad Max: Fury Road post approximately forever since I've seen it (and you won't convince me there was a whole world, history, and civilization before it came out), but everything kept coming out as FTBRRLT MUST MARRY IT AND HAVE ITS BABIEZZZ. The only halfway coherent thoughts I got down were in a discussion with overlithe, so I decided to repurpose my comments into a blog post.

My thoughts on Fury Road are many and tangled, but one aspect among many is that it took and demolished common sexist tropes. Here are three major ones I can think of:

( Spoilers, of course )

These three, Plucky Girl, Damsel in Distress, and Women in the Fridge are the major tropes that Mad Max: Fury Road did an excellent job of dissecting along with a whole host of toxic assumptions about women and men. The best part is, as Charlize Theron (Furiosa) said, the movie didn't even have a feminist agenda; the story is feminist by way of being honest and truthful, simply by presenting women as people. I've read stories with feminist agendas and they tend to be dreary and moralizing as agenda-driven fiction tends to be. (Legend of the Last Princess, though a concept, is representative of the type.) The latest installment of Mad Max is driven not by agenda but by truth, and that's why it is among the best feminist films of all time.

It used to be that when I thought of Brigham Young University, the first words that came to mind were not "the future of computer animation." (The first words that actually came to mind were "Provo, UT Girls," but never mind that for now.) So the article When Hollywood Wants Good, Clean Fun, It Goes to Mormon Country came as a bit of a surprise. I liked the balanced look at what made graduates of BYU's animation program desirable for major employers like Pixar and Dreamworks--work ethic, maturity, pragmatism--and also the parts of Mormon culture could work against artistic honesty and growth--the relentlessly upbeat sensibility, a cultural resistance to taking up art as a full-time job. My favorite line from the article talks about another potential problem for the BYU animators: “One of the horrible things about Mormons is that we’re so polite.”

Reading this article got me thinking about how much of modern media is a collaborative, or rather mass, effort. It may very well be that the bulk of creative jobs are more suited to craftspeople willing to do repetitive, detailed work rather than solo visionary auteurs. When the employers in the article talked about how the BYU students might be less artistically talented but are better technical workers than some of the more conventional art-school graduates, I definitely got the vibe that artistic talent was only a small part of the equation. But then again, that's always been true of the arts--from Rembrandt's workshop to the factory productions of Thomas Kinkaid (and please don't kill me for putting the two in the same sentence), solid dependable workers have always been the backbone of art production.

More troubling may be what happens when BYU graduates go from rendering textures to creative positions. Will they sanitize the hell out of animation with their family values and upbeat courtesy? I doubt it--children's animation is so clean already, it can't be sanitized so much as sterilized. Besides, rumors of a Mormon takeover of the animation studios are likely highly exaggerated. Mormons have been in the film industry for a long time, so if they were going to brainwash us with their religious values they'd have done it a long time ago. The students in the article may have a bit of problem giving honest critique and dealing with the darker aspects of creativity, but they're students. Give them some time in the entertainment industry--the rest of us will corrupt them yet.

Every now and then I go on a Daily Show with Jon Stewart kick and watch a month or two's worth of videos at a time. I was tickled to see this one reference The Last Airbender movie with Aasif Mandvi (Zhao because OBVIOUSLY the bad dudes have to be dark-skinned even if that's the opposite of the original show) reporting from the 2012 Republican National Convention. The movie reference is about a minute in:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
RNC 2012 - The Road to Jeb Bush 2016 - Aasif Mandvi & Convention Themes
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Stewart: You set up a rain machine inside the convention center.
Mandvi: Nah, it's mostly spit and beer. These people really don't like The Daily Show. Or The Last Airbender. (Starts shouting) It was M. Night Shyamalan! It was a good script!

You keep telling yourself that, Aasif. Whatever helps my Indian dreamboat sleep at night.