Just following orders

 The end of the previous post reminded me of something recently that bugged me when I ran across it.

If you've read this blog for a while you've probably run into some maunderings about Star Wars in general (from my kid's former addiction) and the "clone trooper" characters in particular (because, well, soldiers and soldiering. And my affection for the Karen Traviss Republic Commando series).

Way back in 2011 I wrote about one of the "Clone War" arcs that I watched with the Kiddo. I was actually impressed with the potential for depth of the story...

"You might think that this could have been a story fraught with brilliant opportunities to examine the relationship between these men - slave soldiers bred to die for a Republic that gave and owed them nothing - and the leaders placed over them. To look inside a man like "Captain Rex"; a veteran professional, a created-man bred and trained to obey, but already a survivor of dozens of Lucas-battles where he and his friends and fellow-troopers are taught to stand without cover and shoot or move until killed, and scores of them are, and get to understand how he thinks and feels about beings like his new general.

And, in particular, you'd suspect that he'd have figured out by this time that his Jedi "officers" have none of the tactical training he's received. They have certain psychic skills but even those are not by nature useful in battle. So there's no real reason for a man like that to trust another being whose primary qualification for combat leadership is some sort of participation in a woo-woo Force religion and the ability to twirl a laser-sword.

You might also think that this would be a terrific opportunity to look at the relationship from the other side; from a member of a semimonastic Order instructed to avoid "relationships" suddenly placed in the most intimate of relationships - of deciding who lives and who dies. Of being a being gifted with mental powers who is thrust into war and told to command soldiers whose skills are merely physical to overcome physical fear and death in order to win sordid, gross political objectives."

...while being frustrated and disappointed by the resolution: 

"...basically, after a ton of time spent on relatively aimless (but visually cool) thud and blunder, the clone soldiers in the television story finally turned on their Jedi master

- the near-impossibility they found the task of subduing him made a subtle point about the mechanics of "Order 66", though I'm not sure that was Lucas' intent - but it turned out that he was neither a sadistic fool nor a misunderstood genius but that weakest of cinematic conventions, the Hidden Enemy. He was a "Sith", not a "Jedi" at all, not a bad officer, not a clueless but insecure fucktard, not an incompetent promoted above his abilities and furious at the innocent soldiers that forced him to demonstrate just how incapable he was...but a simple Black Hat, a cartoon baddie, a cardboard villain who has been murdering his troops because he can and because he likes it.

And the soldiers didn't have to confront the questions they raised about their commander, about what they would have done if he HAD been an incompetent commander, a brute, a fool, or a power-mad rogue. He was just Evil. So they killed him.

The Boy was fine with that; they're surprisingly callous at eight. But I wasn't, and I found myself regretting again that the creator of this facile universe was not a better father to his creation that I was to my own. I just wish that ol' George had a little more Karen Traviss in him."

Well, not too long ago I found out that Lucas had retconned his prequels yet again.

This time it was to insert - literally - an Elmo-style brain implant into his clone soldiers. This gimmick is supposed to have taken control of them when "Order 66" is issued and turns all the guys into ruthless killers. 

In one of the story arcs at one point some of our heros manage to yank this thing (whut? how? without killing the guy, I mean...) which makes the troopers Good Guys again.

That...bugs the living shit out of me, and I finally figured out why.

Because it steals the soldiers' humanity.

Way too many people as it is already think of soldiers as robots, trained like seals, meat puppets, unable to think or choose rationally, slaves to the rules and their orders.

Now, here, it's even more explicit; these men aren't "men". They're just like robots, with an electronic device that enslaves them, that forces them to act on another's will.

One of the most troubling, and troubled, questions a soldier - a person - will ever face is whether to do something that is morally fraught. Whether it's on their own or at the insistence of another, to do something that's perilously close to - or even over the line into - outright wrong.

This was one of those and while the television episode 12 years ago missed a great opportunity to tell a real story about that crisis this is, if anything, worse.

Think of the fictional setting.

Here are soldiers and their officers who have, many of them, gone through years and long, hard miles together, fought alongside each other, suffered together, grieved their dead and maimed friends together.

Suddenly events take place that suggest that those officers may be part of a deadly conspiracy.

And those officers are, most of them, powerful magic users while the soldiers are just men, muggles in the Potteresque sense, as helpless before their officers' magic as a child before an adult.

They can "arrest" their officers only if the officers let them. And the whole point is that the officers are supposed to have already begun to act in what has been a secret takeover using that magic. So the government, the legal authority, can't take chances - it orders the soldiers to execute their own officers.

That's a horrific situation, and it should have been. It should have forced the soldiers - and their officers - to confront the ties that bound them and the difference in the balance of power that separated them.

It should have given us some drama with a crushing moral weight, including agony and conflict between those soldiers who followed what they believed to be lawful orders with those who refused, believing that no such order could be lawful. And the aftermath; those men who killed other men who might have been leader they loved like brothers.

Instead it had all been retconned into not a moral dilemma...just a technical problem, a hardware glitch, that can be solved with a hammer and chisel and some pliers.

Yeah, yeah...it's schlock, just junk fiction. But who says that junk fiction has to be schlock? Some writers have done damn good work in this fictional world, and if ever there was an opportunity, this was one.

 Buy'ce olar, kar'ta ogir.

What a waste.

I'm one with the Force, and the Force is with me.

The Bride and I went to see the latest installment of the Star Wars franchise the other night.

Be warned; there are spoilers ahead.

So, anyway, it was...a Star Wars flick. Things blow up. There are lightsabers. Plot holes big enough to drive a dreadnaught through (after one part of the climactic starship-chase scene my Bride asked "Why did Laura Dern have to stay on the ship? Did I miss something?"). She wasn't okay with my explanation that it was so that Dern's sacrifice could be moving and poetic and tragic. She wanted to know why the hell Laura Dern had to stay on the cruiser? After all, all it was doing was going in one direction, and kinda slowly.

What, it's the Twenty-jillionth Century, they got starships and man-made moons and they don't have cruise control?

Hell, my work truck has fucking cruise control.

But, hey. Star Wars. The tech works around the plot, not the other way around.

Overall it was fun, good popcorn entertainment. There's some genuinely clever bits, like this wonderful exchange within minutes of the opening credits. The scene is set with the Imperials in their big-ass starships facing off against the rebels in their little fighters and light bombers, just like always. But in this case before doing the Trench Run one of the rebel pilots - Poe Dameron, our "Han Solo" scoundrel character - opens hailing frequencies to the Imperial flagship:

Poe Dameron: This is Commander Poe Dameron of the Republic fleet, I have an urgent communique for General Hugs.
General Hux: This is General Hux of the First Order. The Republic is no more. Your fleet are Rebel scum and war criminals. Tell your precious princess there will be no terms, there will be no surrender...
Poe Dameron: Hi, I'm holding for General Hux.
General Hux: This is Hux. You and your friends are doomed. We will wipe your filth from the galaxy.
Poe Dameron: Okay. I'll hold.

General Hux: Hello?
Poe Dameron: Hello? Yup, I'm still here.
General Hux: (to his flag captain) Can he hear me?
Poe Dameron: Hux?
Captain Canady: He can.
Poe Dameron: With an 'H'? Skinny guy. Kinda pasty.
General Hux: I can hear you. Can you hear me?
Poe Dameron: Look, I can't hold forever. If you reach him, tell him Leia has an urgent message for him...
Captain Canady: I believe he's...tooling with you, sir.
Poe Dameron: ...about his mother.

That's perfect. That's the sort of thing a fighter jock who's a bit of a dick and scared shitless would come up with to take his mind off the fact that in about thirty seconds he's going to do a Trench Run suicide mission.

It's Star Wars, so, yeah, he does, and things blow up, and improbably he gets away with it. But somebody on the screenplay team thought a little about the situation and came up with a nifty little piece of dialogue to make a point about it, and it tickled the hell out of me.

Here's the thing about this post, though; it's really not about The Last Jedi, but a bit of Lucas' universe that came out earlier this year; Rogue One.

Because a fair piece of what I really enjoyed about the latest outing started there.

The Last Jedi continued the exploration begun in Rogue One, that of the idea of the "force religion" as, well, an actual religion.

Remember, in one of the earliest lines spoken in the original Star Wars (sorry, I can't call it A New Hope; it's Star Wars, that's what it was when I went to the Lancaster Mall to see it in '77 and so what it always will be for me.) we're introduced to Darth Vader as the avatar of this "Force" power, a fearful aspect of an ancient rite shrouded in the mystic past.

Peter Cushing as Moff Tarkin tells Vader: "You, my friend, are all that's left of their religion."

But after that, well...there's not a lot of "religion". The Force, as we see it in the original and the next six flicks seems to be just an excuse for magic tricks, and for Frank Oz and Alec Guiness to get all sententious and aphoristic. There's an occasional detour into what it is - some sort of universal connector, a sort of Internet for the universe only with less porn (one supposes, probably erroneously) - and some sort of vague connection between clearing one's mind and having psychokinetic powers. But it's not really a "religion". Not to Vader, and not really to anyone else in the first bunch of flicks.

Until Rogue One and Chirrut Îmwe.

Îmwe is played by Donnie Yen as a sort of leaner Master Po or a less homicidal Zatoichi. He is a kind of riff on the "blind monk" trope but done with some care and affection for the character. Other than that there's nothing particularly special about him...other than he's a Force monk.

Seriously. We meet him as our plucky band of rebel heroes are gypsying through the galaxy and he helps them fight their Imperial enemies. He's a sort of itinerant preacher and an out-of-the-monastery-work-brother, but I thought that the importance of the character is not that he's a mad monk with crazy bo-staff skills. It's that he actually believes. That's his little mantra in the title. He believes that the "Force" really IS with him. It's an inspiration, not a series of magician's tricks or choking people out when they piss you off.

Chirrut is one of the first SW characters that actually treats "their religion" as an actual religion and, in so doing, makes the point so typically elided in Lucas' canon that this "Force religion" thing IS an actual religion, and as such that inspires people to acts of faith.

And, of course, those acts don't have to be noble. Just like Buddhism can throw up the 14th Dalai Lama and at the same time the murderous monk U Wirathu, just like Christianity can inspire Francis of Assisi and Arnaud Amalric, like Islam can mold the peaceful kindness of Sofyan al-Thauri, the gentle Sufi saint, and the murderous anger of a bin Laden, the "Force" can inspire Îmwe to sacrifice, and Vader to cruelty.

Îmwe can't choke people with his mind, or toss heavy object across the room. But he can choose the hopes and lives of others over his own because he does, indeed, believe that he and they are all one with the Force, and the Force is with them.

Chirrut. He's a true believer, and that's a pretty deep dive for somebody as addicted to pure visual effects as George Lucas.

But he's only one reason why I think I enjoy Rogue One more than any of the other outings in the Star Wars franchise.

For another, it's a straight-up tragedy. Our heroes "win", but in so doing pay an unbearable price. That's war. That's all wars, "good" wars, evil wars...it doesn't matter. For someone, for lots of someones, even victory in war comes at a horrible cost, a cost that is more than some can bear. It was good to see, in the Lucas world where carnage is usually so casually thrown about, the unbearably intimate agony of that cost.

But the last reason, and the most immediate, is that it's Star Wars told from the grunt's POV.

Rogue One is not a "hero" story, at least, not in the classic sense of the Hero Story, no King Arthur going from Wart to the Once and Future King. There's no Luke, no Vader

(well, except at the end, where we revisit the "rebel ship corridor" scene from the original. Remember that? Vader wades into about a platoon of rebel troops blasting the hell out of him and just kills everyone. Thing is, by this time we're so used to Vader stalking around choking people and dueling only with his peers that it was easy to forget why he was so damn scary to the good guys.

To a peer foe like Obi-Wan or (eventually) Luke he was mad, bad, and dangerous to know, sure. But to a regular grunt he was like a goddamn human wrecking ball; trying to fight him was like trying to fight a tank with a wiffle-ball bat. That scene reminded you why he was such a frightening enemy and why having Luke as the Rebel Arthur was so important...)

Lance Mannion saw that and it made him think that Rogue One was a "pointless" story because it was a hero story without the hero.

And, yes, the whole Star Wars magilla is Luke's King Arthur story. Okay, well, with the prequels the Othello story with Anakin/Vader as Othello, but that's a whole 'nother thing and poorly handled, at that.

The piece of worthwhile art at the center of Lucas' tale is Luke and his coming-of-age, his ascent to the hallow kingship. That's the important, central portion of that story, and all the stories, in Lucas' universe. It's the Hero's Quest, and as such the Hero is in the center.

But...those stories are also war stories. I mean, goddamn, the word is right in the title. And wars, whilst they may be led by the Hero are fought by Joe and Molly, whether they're carrying a spear or a sword or a crossbow or a blaster or a thermal detonator. But from all the other SW tales you'd never know it.

(As an aside...don't get me started on the Lucas version of combat; the fact that his land battles were staged purely for visual effect always makes the old drill sergeant in me come up out of my seat roaring "Cover? Concealment? Fire and movement, you stupid $#%!#!@!!??? What the hell is your malfunction? Lemme see your squad leaders right this goddam minute..!")

But this time, for the first time, we get to see how hard those mob-handed battles would have been on the rebel grunts. No wonder the Rebellion was so demoralized; the Imperial troops were good at being bad guys (and another thing I appreciated about Rogue One was that for the first time the stormies in particular and the Imps in general came off as genuinely dangerous as individual troops; like American troops in Iraq, they have all the high-tech goodies and all the firepower and all the logistical support in the galaxy.)

Demoralized? Like an amateur boxer trying to go ten rounds with the heavyweight champ; even when you land one you know it's gonna suck.

So I appreciated this one as an individual GI's version of all those other Star Wars battles. Pointless? Sure. Pointless because to the person behind the blaster-rifle it's all pointless. When you're fighting for your life there's no heroes, no kings or jedis, no glory and no glamor. You do your best to accomplish your mission and you do or don't, you live, or you die.

And, if even in dying, you do your duty and accomplish the mission...well, that's the point, and was the point here; the rebels do their jobs, do their duty and, even in dying to do so, they end up giving the rebellion "hope"...at that horrible cost.

Was that hope worth the cost? That's for each and every one of us, and them, to decide.

But, for the first time in a Lucas-universe flick, Rogue One actually forced us to stop and think about it.

Well done, troopers.

Princess Unchained

A couple of years back I wrote a post about the character Princess Leia in George Lucas' Star Wars epic. Specifically, the bizarre incongruity of putting the character in a metal bikini for no real reason other to, well, frankly, ogle Carrie Fisher's pretty figure in a skimpy outfit.

In the post I wrote that;

"...Slave Leias are troublesome...because they have the effect of (making the Leia character valued because of) sexual display, and, in turn, devaluing (the female characters) based on a sort of juvenile smuttiness about seeing their bodies."

The whole macguffin of Star Wars, women, their bodies, and how they come together seems to have returned with the new Lucas flick, The Force Awakens with Ms. Fisher, again, in the middle of it.

Fisher isn't happy that she has been slammed by viewers for "not aging well", and is pretty pissed off that - unlike her co-stars Hamil and Ford - her value relative to the new film is often being weighed based on her looks.

(It's worth noting that a hell of a lot of this goes back to the ridiculous but bog-bro-standard of a woman's sexual desuetude increasing with age, a stupid idea I've discussed here before...)

Why bring this up? Because the Boy and I went to see her new film last week.

I could go all Siskel and Ebert on you here, but why? You know what it was; a Star Wars flick. X-wings and blasters, "I have a bad feeling...", droids, alien critters, good Jedi and bad Sith.

Overall we both enjoyed it. It was good popcorn entertainment and a fun diversion, which is all I'd ask from a popcorn film.

The plot rolled along nicely with the minimal required fanservice, the two young leads were well written and well acted, and even though you'd think that after the first TWO times the Empire would have learned about the whole...ah, but I won't spoiler that part in case you want to go see it.

Here's the thing, though. The most challenging and intriguing thing about it - two words I'd never have thought I'd ever say about a Lucas film - was watching Fisher and Harrison Ford, the two of the oldest actors on screen. They've been mailing it in for so long that I'd almost forgotten what made them stars back in the day. But together they provide what modest throw-weight there is to the tale and, as such, do the best work they've done in a long time.

Ford's Han Solo was spot-on; trying to be the same "scoundrel" that makes him feel like he's still got some remnant of his youth and the sort of swagger that captivated the Princess when they met.

But...he's also smart enough to know he's kidding himself. Years and sorrows have slowed him down. He knows that he's slowing down and that the things he's running from are catching up to him. He knows that while he can't stop running that he can't run fast enough to escape his past and his grief, and that's as grievous as what he's fleeing.

All the while Ford doesn't lose the essential core of the guy. It's an older Solo but still Solo. Good work...but Fisher's older Leia was as good or even better.

I've read reviews that called Fisher's performance "perfunctory" or "embarrassed" but I disagree completely; her restrained work is perfect for the part. Leia is scarred as her lover is scarred, but her way of dealing with that is to lock down. She withdraws inside the austere senior officer and faction leader, all too aware of her responsibilities, just as her ex retreats into his feckless bad boy all too heedless of his.

Fisher conveys this by using her older looks and body to great effect. She wears the strained face of someone who lives with the constant fear of agony, a veteran trooper who has taken the big wound. She moves slowly and cautiously as someone who expects at any moment to be spitted on the spear of old pain that she knows from experience will stagger her and drive her to her knees.

She's damaged, just as he's damaged, but her scar tissue is formed in stillness as his is in motion.

As a couple they're terrific.

(Selfishly, I wish that there had been a little more sexual desire, some sexual tension, but expecting adult sexuality from a Star Wars flick is like expecting grand opera from friggin' Care Bears; you know it ain't gonna happen.)

Together their work shows the viewer that all their emotions are still there but that both have wrapped those emotions away in deep storage because they hurt too much to be exposed. They hate the baggage each of them carries while loving the person almost - but not quite completely - buried under the baggage. They're still in love but given their griefs and, more particularly, their disparate reactions to their griefs they can't stand to live with each other.

I was amazed...until I remembered that George Lucas had nothing to do with writing this thing. Anyway, this was perhaps the first time I've ever seen one of these SW flicks where the characters 1) felt like actual people and 2) drove the story along. It felt like an actual movie instead of a toy commercial written by a 12-year old. I think a huge part of that was the age of Ford and Fisher, and the knowledge of the actual pain and suffering that the blasting and slashing were inflicting.

The characters they played in the earlier films were young people having "an adventure" for other young people to enjoy.

In this one they're still "adventuring"...but at the heart of the adventure, like a hidden knife inlayed with old blood, is mortality. Age and pain have taught them that "adventuring" has a deep and sorrowful cost.

The two young actors in the piece are their yesterday and our today, strong and brave and striving for today's bright crown of honor and glory.

The two older actors are tomorrow; the slave standing behind us holding above our heads that crown and whispering into our ears alone the reminder that beyond today is the inescapable nightfall of age and death.

And as important as the quest for, and the brightness of, that light is how we face the darkness.

Damned dirty apes

So I've been using this morning - since my work here in Medford is shut down by the Northwest Rainpocalypse (film at 11...) - to ponder what exactly it is that has me so grimly uneasy about this year in U.S. politics.

And, no, I don't think I have anything to add to the bleak assessment I have already so often written down here; this isn't really an essay about "U.S. politics".

Rather, it's a distillation of what I finally realized so worries me about U.S. politics, and it links back to a post over at the Penguin's place about Obama Derangement Syndrome. In it the Tuxedoed One notes that:

"I can’t think of any time in this nation’s history where the rhetoric surrounding the President is so divorced from reality...this hatred towards Obama is divorced from anything the man has actually done...It’s as if a significant portion of the white population of the United States has gone completely insane. And I don’t know if the nation is going to be able to survive that."

THAT's my concern.

When I look around at the looney-tunes Mirror Universe that the GOP has constructed, as typified by this Obama-derangement and the hysterical pants-pissing terror and range evoked by Obama's mildly rational speech the other day, what I see is the cumulative effect of thirty-five years of selective breeding and nurturing of a sort of subspecies of higher primate; let's call it homo wingnuttiens.

It sort of looks like homo sapiens with 100% less sapience.

It looks, in fact, a lot like the intelligent apes of the old Charleton Heston flick or, rather, the artifact in the plot of the film's source material, a novel titled La Planète des Singes. Same basic story; astronaut finds ape civilization and uncovers the history that humans effectively created their own downfall and the rise of their anthropoid masters. The moral of the story is that human intelligence is not a fixed quality and could atrophy if taken for granted.

Or if deliberately destroyed.

By, for instance, creating a race of demi-humans who have been carefully taught to believe only what they are told by certain sources, to automatically refuse to accept anything that doesn't fit what those sources tell them, that base their actions on automatic acceptance of certain ideas (war, strength/force, "Western culture", patriarchy/authoritarianism, "market economy"/rapacity, Christian theocracy/primacy, xenophobia) and rejection of others associated with what they see as despised and illegitimate enemies.

This isn't exactly new. I pretty much had the wingnuts figured out back in the Clinton years – the default position of the GOP has simply become complete rejection of the legitimacy of ANYthing Democratic, or, more precisely, anything not endorsed by their own echo chamber.

And this wasn't exactly an accident. The GOP mad scientists have created these creatures for their own power. But I think, like the researchers in La Planète they are being willfully blind to their own madness.

Several studies of the wingnut-third has established fairly thoroughly that the cumulative effect of the right-wing echo chamber, eliminationist rhetoric, and apocalyptic propaganda has developed a “country within a country” populated by people who see the world through wingnut beer goggles.

So, for them, the actual corporatist Eisenhower-Republican Obama isn’t an actual thing. It’s the secret-Muslim communist traitor welfare daddy Obama that exists.

The complexity of the modern Middle East isn't an actual thing; it's the seething cauldron populated by nothing but beheading Muslims who live to kill white men and rape white women that exists.

Or something.

And so on down the line. "Markets" aren't something established and run by societies and governments, they are magical fucking invisible-hand unicorns dancing on rainbows. Oligarchies aren't bad for the non-oligarchs, they're just how life is and if you aren't rich it's because you're a lazy loser. Taxes are theft. Peace is surrender. War is victory.

And my problem with all that is that I’m not sure that you can run a functioning representative democracy when about a quarter to a third of your “citizens” are effectively living in a fantasy world of their own devising.

The potential for a critical mass of these nutjobs blowing the doors off of the polity seems WAY too high not to happen at some point.

So while I'm not going to predict a Trump presidency or some sort of immediate disaster in the immediate future, my consistent low-grade concern is that my country is a long way to developing a strain of this homo wingnuttiens into a force that has the potential, if and when the plague that kills all the dogs and cats, to break down the country of my birth in such a way that it will be nearly impossible to rebuild.

I'm not really sure how much I fear this, or how realistic my fear of this is. But I can feel it like the hum of distant high-voltage wires that begins to crackle in the rain whenever I read of the latest trumpism and the wingnut baying that it produces.

I feel distantly angry and at the same time bereft, as if I have already lost something that has not been taken from me yet.

In a strange way, I feel like I am already mourning the loss of my country.

Navel Proceedings

Watched the Disney John Carter again with the Boy last night.



My online pal and commenter mike luuuurves this film, and I have to admit that mostly because of that I really wanted to love it, too. Instead I liked it well enough but not with the same fervor.

I found a lot of the same problems that many of the reviewers had; a fair amount of draggy exposition mixed in with the slam-bang action sequences, and an overall sameness to the general feel of it. Lots of it is fun, there's some gorgeous spectacle, but it's hard to avoid the feeling that you've seen it done elsewhere before.

As this Globe and Mail review pointed out, that isn't really a John Carter problem, it's a Burroughs problem. The stuff that seemed so awesome in 1917; flying machines, ray guns, dying empires on lost planets...by 2013 they've been done to death. We've been there and done that so often that the liveliness just kind of leaches out.

It's not a bad film, though, not at all. It's a good popcorn actioner and both the Boy and I enjoyed it.

The Boy liked the fighting, we both love the Tharks, but I think one of the reasons I enjoy it is Lynn Collins' Dejah Thoris.



And let's face it, why not? Dejah is a fanboy's wet dream. A nubile and gorgeous alien babe dressed in a couple of bits of jewelry and...well, a couple of bits of jewelry

(Here's how ERB describes her costume: "She was as destitute of clothes as the green Martians who accompanied her; indeed, save for her highly wrought ornaments she was entirely naked, nor could any apparel have enhanced the beauty of her perfect and symmetrical figure."

Here's cartoonist Frank Cho's version per the ERB description:

Good luck with your PG rating with THAT one, Disney. Sheesh.)

This is pure Slave-Leia-dom; the slavering fanboy inventing his perfect naked dreamgirl.

I'm shocked, shocked.



Getting away from Dejah for a moment her creator ERB was kind of a piece of work, a 20th Century writer with deep roots in the 19th Century, a wanna-be soldier and a vicarious adventurer. After I watched John Carter the first time through I went out and picked up Princess of Mars from our fine Multnomah County Library and tried to read the original story.

I gave up about halfway through.

A big part of the reason is ERB's prose style. It's hopelessly 19th Century, full of the sorts of romantic and heroic conventions that 20th Century wars knocked the stuffing out of. At the time it was written the notion of the hero wearing a "fighting smile" while dueling furiously probably seemed rakish and admirable; with a better understanding of how frightening and stressful fighting for your life really is it seems ludicrous, almost parodic. All the description is florid to a Baroque degree and the way the people interact just seems ridiculous; you can't imagine people, any people, even imaginary people in an invented world, acting like that.

The other is that ERB's values were straight out of his times, and those times are so gone that they might as well be the Paleolithic. His good men are all parfit gentile knights and his good women all chaste and gentile ladies - who are kidnapped again and again and threatened again and again with rape - including our gal Dejah. Not that anybody actually gets raped; it's all good fun and our hero always wins. So the whole notion of making the rape of your heroine a plot device kind of slides by, and that kind of squicks me out; I got the feeling that ERB kinda liked the idea of rape.



He also has a rock-solid certainty that Race is Destiny, and there's no confusing who the White Men are. Even the backstory of the protagonist as a Confederate veteran of the Lost Cause seems kind of skeevy in retrospect; ERB obviously intended it to help establish John Carter as a cavalier, a kind of American aristocrat but the effect is, instead, to loop back to the nasty racism that saturated his timeperiod. You can almost hear the happy darkies crooning spirituals down in the slave shacks in the background.

Gah.

So the original book is kind of a wash.

But Collin's movie Dejah isn't; she's fiery and smart and tough. And funny. And, of course, a total babe; this isn't real life, fergawrshsakes.

Her costume, while more voluminous than a Burroughs original, is skimpy enough that a genuine fighting princess of Helium would have spent most of her time worrying that one of her opponents was liable to snip off a dangly bit or two.



But, here's the thing I kept thinking about watching the film again.

The film stays fairly close to the ERB canon, from the radium pistols to the Thark jezails to the nefarious Therns and so on and so on. So the assumption is that the other aspects of the original story are in there. We see the Thark egg-incubator in the opening Barsoom sequence; the Tharks hatch from eggs, K? That's important.

Because on Burrough's Mars everyone and everything hatches from eggs.

Martian women, regardless of species, are oviparous.

So why the hell does Dejah have one of these;



Nothing that hatches from eggs has a navel.

(Update 5/15: In the comments section Jack Saint raises a good point; some of the non-mammals of Jasoom DO have navels, specifically, some birds have a sort of small scar from the chorio allantoic duct that connects the yolk sac to the embryo. This at least gives our gal Dejah a shot at having a navel, though (as I discuss in the comments as well) the chance of her sporting anything like Lynn Collins' cute little innie is fairly low. Still - at least the possibility's there. Proof, if we needed it, of the awesomesauce of Nature in all Its Works...)

But regardless of the biology of navels, there you have it; the fanboy in me comes out not drooling over naked space babes but niggling over ridiculous petty plot details like who has or hasn't got a bellybutton.

But, damn, Disney...how hard would it have been - how tiny an amount would it have cost amid the ginormous CGI budget - to spackle over Lynn's bellybutton? Nobody but us fanboys would have even noticed it but we'd have nodded knowingly and appreciated the gesture.

Silly? Sure, but then so's making a multimillion dollar picture of a sort of ragtime-era sci-fi version of the Prisoner of Zenda.

Call me nitpicky. But there you go; I can't be other than I am. I'm the sort of person who looks at a gorgeous woman playing an alien princess in a sci-fi action movie and notices Dejah Thoris' navel

Decisive Battles: Hoth 3ABY

Oh. My. Fucking. God.

Have you ever come across something that you recognize immediately as It, The Shizzle, the Sweet Spot, that spookily perfect fit for your brain housing assembly that somehow manages to hit every refractory nerve ending dead smack center?

Well for me this one touches 'em all: Military history. Science fiction (or, to be exact, space opera) High Nerdism. Star Wars. Academia.

Oooh. Yes. Ya got me, Ackerman; right in the ten ring.

I can die a happy man now.

And - once you've read through Inside the Battle of Hoth at first link, then it's over to here for a CMA-style symposium on the original monograph and discussion of critical analysis of the battle itself:

"We do not speak of the sources of failure, but they should be well known. The first was the commitment of extensive resources to the construction of strategic weapons which could, by their very nature, make no tactical contribution. The second was the decision to abandon the tactics and procedures which had won the Clone Wars; well equipped clone armies honed to razor sharp conventional military effectiveness. We have little space here to revisit the destructive “Clones can’t do Counterinsurgency” debates that helped lead to a shift in personnel policies, but it is clear that these misguided efforts to defuse the rebellion by co-opting individual insurgents inevitably produced a force unready to fight high intensity, conventional battles against dedicated, well-equipped, and well-trained foes." (Farley, 2013)

Yes! Beyond awesome; awesomesauce! This is taking George Lucas and running with his incapable-of-writing-normal-human-dialogue ass at it's finest!

Enjoy.

Princess in Chains

Bear with me. This one is a little complicated, and self-indulgent. It's something that's been floating around in the back of my mind for a bit and will take a little exposition. Okay? Here goes.

It started with this post at Geek With Curves where Amy Ratcliffe talked about

"...the "fake geek girl" joke isn't funny anymore. This ad sends the message that girls aren't wanted. I feel it also perpetuates the belief that we must question geek girls. If you want to be really extreme, you could say this comic encourages people to stop girls who are wearing Star Wars shirts and quiz them about the movies to ensure they've earned the right to wear it.

This shouldn't be a thing. But it is. This very discussion comes up semi-regularly, and it's disheartening. It seems that there are still enough people whose knee jerk reaction to meeting a geek girl is to question her "cred."

And that actually took me back to a related post that John Scalzi (whose typeface I am unworthy to set) put up at his blog Whatever back in July:

"Because here’s a funny fact: Her geekdom is not about you. At all. It’s about her.

Geekdom is personal. Geekdom varies from person to person. There are as many ways to be a geek as there are people who love a thing and love sharing that thing with others. You don’t get to define their geekdom. They don’t get to define yours. What you can do is share your expression of geekdom with others. Maybe they will get you, and maybe they won’t. If they do, great. If they don’t, that’s their problem and not yours.

Be your own geek. Love what you love. Share it with anyone who will listen."

Why all this geek love?

Well, because at heart I'm still the same sci-fi and wargame nerd (or geek, call the thing what you want to) I was in high school. An older, more confident, fatter-and-slower geek, but I still get a kick out of building models, playing wargames, and reading and watching everything from fantasy to sci-fi and beyond.

And, being someone who loves women, I love that there are women who love those things, like Amy, and hope that they can get the same love back from them that I did and do.

And so it ticks me the hell off when I read about the sorts of people that Ratcliffe and Scalzi talked about - or run into them, which is worse and, fortunately, something that hasn't happened lately.

And this, in turn, got me thinking about my son's turn away from George Lucas' Star Wars universe and how its left me as the only geek in the family who actually cares that the new Clone Wars episode is coming along tomorrow.

And that, in turn - remember, I told you to bear with me - led me to thinking about how women are portrayed in science fiction/fantasy and, specifically, in Lucas' universe, and from there to one of what I consider the real problematic images in the canon:

Slave Leia.

Let me preface my next section with this; I'm a het guy. I like women, and as part of that I think women are lovely to look at and I enjoy looking at them. Pretty, shapely women are, well, pretty and shapely. And a pretty, shapely woman in a skimpy, form-fitting outfit tends to reveal more of that shapely prettiness. And I had when the first trilogy was filmed and still have a bit of a crush on Carrie Fischer, a strong, smart woman who has toughed her way through some tough days.

So on those criteria, Carrie Fischer...in a metal bikini?

Success. TOTAL success.

But.

If I stop being all testosterony and starting thinking with my large head it's not hard to recognize several problems with the entire idea of Slave Leia and especially the image of Leia/Carrie in her alloy undergarments.

First, in a created universe notable for its prudity, how come Carrie was the only one prancing around Tatooine in her beach wear? I mean; desert, sand, sun(s)...but no Luke in speedos? Leia is the only one who gets to show some skin?

WTF?

Well, you and I both know why TF; it's because the boy-geeks wanted to see Princess Leia in her undies and George was catering to them. Like a LOT of other tropes in fantasy and science fiction, this one is pitched directly at The Boys.

Which would be fine...except in doing so it tells the Girls that they are supposed to be eye-candy.

Sure, Leia is an action heroine; she shoots and swings from a rope and rescues her lover (okay, well, love, then, since we never get to see the couple exchange more than a chaste kiss or two). But so is Harrison Ford and he never strips down to his jockeys or whatever the hell the guys in the Star Wars universe wear for skivvies. He's supposed to be female eye-candy fully clothed.

Leia gets to strip.

It's not hard to see a message there.

But in context the message is even cruder.

That's the second point; in the context of the movie Leia's near-nudity makes no sense.

Let me run quickly through the two main reasons I think this.

2. The critter who is making all these wardrobe decisions is a ginormous space slug. Presumably Jabba's notions of sexual attractiveness do not encompass female primates, so the point of shoving the last Princess of Alderaan into a bronze Brazilian tanga probably isn't to inflame Hutty lust.

2. And nowhere in the story do we get any idea that the natives of Alderaan have a particular nudity taboo, so if the point is to humiliate the proud Princess we have no way to get that. In fact, if that WAS the idea - and the censor wasn't an issue - why not just chain Leia up in her skin? But since the censor clearly IS an issue, why not put her in ostentatiously Victorian rags? Or a clown suit? Or half a suit of stormtrooper armor?

My point is that given all the above Slave Leia isn't really sensible as a plot point in the context of that portion of the story of The Empire Strikes Back. There's no reason for her to be in the metal bikini as opposed to the bounty-hunter outfit she's captured in, or rags, or a chador.

She's in that bikini purely as eye candy for us boy-geeks and the lack of context makes that crystal clear.

So...

To get back to the original point of this post; the Slave Leias are troublesome, to me at least, just because they have the effect of dividing Star Wars/geek fandom into camps based on sexual display, and, in turn, devaluing one camp based on a sort of juvenile smuttiness about seeing their bodies.

They make a woman-fan's life more difficult because - all the way back to the original image - they are based on that fan-boy snigger at "that girl showing her titties!"

And that - to me - is a problem because, frankly, it makes it about the guys watching rather than what should be her choice whether to emphasize or downplay her sexuality.

Our job is to simply be smart and civil, and enjoy the fun with her, or not, and to STFU if not. Yes, her "titties" are pretty, but they're hers and not ours. We're grownups, guys, and we really need to get over our 8th-grade selves and start treating the gals with some respect.

I know that this seems like some trivial shit at a time when a real woman can be brutally raped, and what's worse raped in such a way that the rape tool tears out her guts and she dies.

This is just silly and trivial.

But it occurs to me that this woman-sneering, fanboy-leering shit is part of a spectrum, and the kind of guy who gets a dirty snigger out of a woman in a metal bikini - whose idea of his take on Star Wars is that woman should be in that metal bikini for his pleasure and not hers - is sharing a teensy bit of the sort of disrespect for her with the kind of guy that sees her as just a body to be used for his enjoyment.

For me it turns what should be an enjoyable bit of silly fandom into another damn part of the whole business of turning women into objects and meat for men's delectation.

That's a goddamn shame.

I don't think there's much I can do about Slave Leia, or should; it's really just ridiculous pop culture when you get down to it.

But here's what I can do; I can raise my own son so that when he sees the Slave Leia image he thinks not of women in chains, of himself, not of her body as a thing to leer at but as a person, as a woman, and as heroine in her own right who lives in that body. And to respect her AND that body.

For his own good as well as hers; because the other thing about Slave Leia is that if you fuck with her she will strangle you with her own chains and it'll serve you goddamn right.

And I can also raise my daughter to expect that men will treat her with respect, regardless of whether she's wearing a bathing suit or a spacesuit, and do the best I can to give her the means and methods to be the woman she can best be. If she still wants to be a princess, why not be a princess that can kick ass?

Are you getting all this, kids? Sorry it took so long to get here, but you both need to quit fooling around and brush your teeth. It's almost bedtime.