Category Archives: Opinion

Pros and Conflict

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Despite all of the press being focused on Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the fact is, Marvel is the dominant force in the entertainment industry, as they just proved with WandaVision. Some people (I can name several Facebook friends off the top of my head) absolutely loathe them. Some people can take them or leave them. Me, I love them. I’ve seen all 247 of them in the theater, and I will gladly shell out the $20.00 rental price on future movies until this whole pandemic is behind us, and I feel like going back into a theater. But, I don’t know if this is a result of me growing up or just me seeing something a lot and getting tired of it, I’m starting to get kind of bored with the usual conflict resolution in these movies.  

The whole point of a superhero fight is the annihilation of your opponent through violence. Even in Captain America: Winter Soldier, when Cap defeats his brainwashed best friend by refusing to fight and telling him he loved him, there was still a pretty huge battle scene before he took the path of peace. In The Avengers, Iron Man saves the world by sacrificing himself, but not before a full half-hour of the Avengers slaughtering aliens by the dozens. Avengers Endgame also involves a sacrifice by Iron Man, but not before every superhero in the world murders every alien in the galaxy. In WandaVision, a show about how to process grief and loss that ends in the heroine giving up that which she wanted most, the run-up to this is two witches throwing magical laser blasts at each other and two androids throwing each other through walls.  

I suppose I can get behind fights, as long as they end in non-violence of some sort, but what kind of world do we live in when the winner of moral battles is the one who can punch harder? That’s why I hated Zack Snyder’s Superman movies so much—Superman is an aspirational figure of hope, but he breaks a guy’s neck in Man of Steel to save the day. What is the point of taking a man we’ve been raised to believe uses his powers to help people and making him murder someone with his bare hands.  

I suppose I’m as guilty of this as anyone else. In my novel A Fae at the Race (available now at Amazon for $3.99 or free with Kindle Unlimited), the heroes win by casting a spell that releases the world from the glamor of a powerful, magical foe, but to get there, I do include a scene where one of the heroes has to physically battle one of these foes to the death. In Family Business (also available now on Amazon for $3.99 or free with Kindle Unlimited), the secret weapon is extortion, so that’s a step up. The thing is, I’m trying. Now, whenever I write a fantasy book, even one as action-heavy as mine tend to be, I actively try to come up with solutions that don’t involve violence.  

As far as media I consume, I’m not sure where this leaves me. Yes, I will watch The Falcon and the Winter Soldier this weekend, even though it seems to consist mostly of punching. I’ll watch Black Widow when it comes out in May, even though it is also mostly punching, but with Russian accents. I don’t hate violence, I just don’t like that it’s regarded as the only solution. I like fast-paced plots, and I like plucky protagonists who outsmart their foes. I don’t like a lot of comedies, and character-driven dramas don’t really interest me. This leaves me with not a lot of choice. I guess I’ll just keep looking.  

A Shining City on a Hill

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I have lately been baffled by the eighties. I’m not baffled by the fact that they exist, or by shoulder pads. I’m baffled by the sheer reverence of that decade, and how it’s not going away. I remember people being nostalgic for the eighties in the nineties, and that was almost thirty years ago. The eighties are to the nineties, aughts, teens, and twenties what the fifties were to the sixties, seventies, and eighties.

Everything is the eighties now. Joker was set in the eighties for no real reason, Punky Brewster just came back, and let’s not forget Stranger Things and IT: Chapter One. We had a new She-Ra a couple of years ago, and a new He-Man is on its way. So is Beetlejuice 2. And those are just the examples I could think of off of the top of my head. Name an eighties band, and I’ll bet you a dollar they’re still touring. The eighties even gets all the credit for Saved by the Bell (which also just returned) when that show mostly aired in the nineties.

Like the fifties, they were far from idyllic. The Cold War, which had become less of a priority in the late seventies, got cranked up by a president so insane that we weren’t sure if we were all going to die in a nuclear war. AIDS and homophobia were pretty big back then. The hatred of government that Reagan fostered led to a lot of government services shutting down, especially mental health, leading to a lot of the visible homelessness we’ve seen since. Deregulation turned our beloved children’s entertainment into commercials for toys that my parents couldn’t afford to buy.

I don’t really get the fondness for the eighties because I missed that decade while it was going on. While my peers were watching John Hughes movies and listening to Duran Duran, I was watching Airplane and the Marx Brothers and listening to “Weird Al” Yankovic and the Beatles. I discovered culture in the nineties, so that’s my decade, a decade that gets no love whatsoever. My warm fuzzies come not from leg-warmers and big hair but from heavy layers, chokers, and Doc Martins. Imagine my delight when Captain Marvel took place in the nineties, and her secret identity was a NIN T-shirt.

I know why the eighties were so popular: they were a colorful time with catchy music, easily identifiable fashion, and memorable tropes that are easy to replicate. The nineties are really hard to sum up in an easy image. There was grunge and gangster rap, but there was also the rise of boy bands and Brittany Spears. There was the Real World—that was uniquely nineties. It was kind of a weird decade. If you tried to pinpoint something that was the aughts, for example, you have what? Low-rise jeans? A long series of economic recessions? I guess the eighties really was the last decade you could draw a caricature of and have it be on-the-nose.

Nostalgia just is. I’m not going to talk about the dark side of it because that’s not what this post is about. If neon leotards and “Tainted Love” are what make you happy, then enjoy it. There’s so much in the world that makes us feel awful that you should stick to the thing that causes you joy. For me, that means pulling on my flannel and listening to Nirvana. Just be happy.

This Is Where I Live

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Please indulge me while I make it about me for a second:

This is my home. I live in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, along with thousands upon thousands of other people. I don’t keep a home here and go back to my constituency every summer and winter. I don’t intern here and go back to where I came from. And I sure as hell don’t go to places where other people live and try to overthrow the government.

I live close to the National Guard Armory, and during our nightly walks, my roommate and I stroll by it. We have never seen people there before this month. Dozens of buses filled with camouflage-wearing men and women have been pulling up. The streets are full of soldiers, and armored vehicles drive past my block constantly.

The Capitol is close to my apartment. It’s far enough that a walk home from there while having to go to the bathroom is agony, but it’s close enough that it dominates the skyline if I walk a couple of blocks. It’s close enough that, if some entitled psychopaths decided to start torching residences, it wouldn’t take them long to reach me.

There is a park six blocks from my apartment where I go every weekend to have a latte and write. It’s full of young couples with their babies and children punching while their mothers tell them to “CUT THAT OUT!” Older people (who are, to my horror, not much older than I) go to the café on the outskirts there for meetups. There is a dog park there I’m not sure is actually a dog park, but put enough affluent people in a place with dogs, and it becomes one. Right-wing groups have been posting that they are using it as a gathering ground before they start their upcoming insurrections.

Restaurants in my neighborhood are not allowed to have outdoor seating until the end of the month. My doctor’s office closed because no one can get to the building through the barricades. There is an eight-foot fence surrounding the Capitol, previously one of the most accessible government buildings.

They don’t care. The people who are coming to town over the coming week to disrupt the legitimate swearing in of a new president couldn’t give a shit about the lives they’re disturbing, about the fact that they’re putting a city under martial law. It doesn’t matter to them because they are RIGHT. They are on a CRUSADE. The president they voted for, who isn’t all that popular in the first place, is the TRUE LEADER, and they don’t care whose lives they have to disrupt to make this TRUE.

This is my home. I’m so tired.

Deconstruction Zone

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Superhero deconstruction is big business. From Watchmen to The Boys and including the odious Man of Steel, creators are thinking seriously about what superheroes are, and they’ve concluded that they’re assholes.  

The genre was created to be one of hope for the little guy. When Superman was created, he didn’t take his power and use it to take over the country. He took on corrupt politicians and their goons. When The Bat-Man was created, he wasn’t beating economically disadvantaged muggers into hamburger on the streets, he was taking on evil capitalists like the kind who’d caused the Great Depression. They quickly fell into fighting costumed villains who wanted to overturn the status quo, but Superman’s optimism and Batman’s good-natured two-fisted justice brought the kids back for more.   

But deconstruction took a dark turn in the eighties. Thanks to The Dark Knight Returns, the fun-loving, straight-laced Batman of the fifties and sixties (and the globetrotting adventurer of the seventies) was turned into a fascist, sadistic psychopath, and he’s pretty much remained this way ever since. The image of Superman was forever tarnished because Frank Miller couldn’t imagine the US government not turning the Man of Steel into a mindless weapon for Reagan-era politics. DC’s top two heroes were turned into the worst versions of themselves.  

Now we have Zack Snyder’s Superman destroying a trucker’s entire livelihood because he hurt his feelings, and the audience cheers. We have Batman turned into a middle-aged, murderous fogey. Snyder was inspired by The Dark Knight Returns, and it shows. Superman v. Batman took away all of the heroism of their characters and turned them into empty punching machines.  

Meanwhile, in The Boys, we have Homelander, the Superman analog, and he is the answer to the question, “What does a 900-pound gorilla do?” Specifically, an indestructible 900-pound with laser vision and a great publicist. Garth Ennis, creator of The Boys, hates superheroes. He loathes them. He wants to do everything in his power to destroy them, so he turned the Justice League into murderous, drug-addled, Nazi rapists. (Ironically, in an issue of Hitman, Mr. Ennis told a Superman story with warmth and heart and positivity not seen in the character in some time.) 

Even Quentin Tarantino got in on the action. He’ll never lower himself to make a comic book movie because he makes Art(tm), but in a monologue in Kill Bill: Volume 2, the titular Bill breaks down the meaning behind Superman in a way that makes his whole character pretty unsavory.  

It seems like every time a creator wants to look under the hood of what makes a costumed hero run, and all they can find is grit and grime. Why? Because these creators look at all of that power, and they try to imagine what they’d do with it, and this is what they come up with. It seems like the modern concept of deconstructionism is basically: Superhero, but with nasty character flaw. It doesn’t have to be this way.  

In the sixties, Marvel came along with their own version of deconstruction. Stan Lee asked questions like, “What does a superhero do when their costume gets dirty?” The answer, you take it to the laundromat, where the bright red and blue colors turn your underwear purple. This is the kind of thing I love. The Flash has a super-high metabolism, so he needs to eat all the time. Spider-Man tries to make money as a superhero, which is the logical thing for a broke college student to do, but the checks are made out to Spider-Man, and he has no way of proving who he is when he goes to cash them. This kind of thing still goes on (see Ms. Marvel), but it’s eclipsed by the horrific violence and perversion that these dark deconstructionists want to inflict. 

As someone who owns a leather-bound copy of The Dark Knight Returns and prizes his twenty-two-year-old paperback of Watchmen (and who enjoys The Boys whenever it comes out), I certainly don’t dismiss deconstruction out of hand. But it would be nice if our heroes were heroes, you know? Instead of making them out to be inhuman monsters, make them human beings. Wouldn’t a little positivity be nice? 

Are Women From Venus, Though?

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So, there is this cliché in culture where men find it cute and hot when women eat a lot. They don’t like it when she puts on extra pounds, though. It’s a lot like the way that men will brag about how they love a woman without makeup, but they are pretty horrified by what women do look like without makeup. Men want their women to look beautiful, but they don’t want their women to go through the work of looking beautiful. It’s inconceivable to us, the gender that can look conventionally attractive being kind of out of shape and taking a ten-minute shower that it might take a carefully monitored diet and up to an hour in the bathroom to be conventionally attractive.

Some of it might also be because we’re, as men, taught to devalue the girly, and what could be more girly than caring about the way you look?

So I’m making a female superhero a main character in my next novel (which won’t be a superhero novel per se, but will have superheroes in it), and I’m trying to think of the practicalities of her powers, and I briefly flirted with her having to eat 6,000 calories a day to function, so she was always shoving food in her face. But then I thought, do I want to be that cliché? So I’m going to pass on that. It would have made for a fun gag, but it’s also really misogynistic. I can give her a personality that’s not just a male wish-fulfillment quirk.

I know I’m not going to be a bestselling author, and my impact on the cultural zeitgeist will be that of a light cough, but it’s still important that I do the right thing.

Blinded with Science

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I’m a skeptic. I don’t really believe anything unless it’s been peer-reviewed and analyzed to death. I don’t have a lot of faith. A lot of people look down on me for this. They say I’m closeminded, that I’m disconnected from the wonders of the universe. To the latter, I say, the universe, as science sees it, is incredible. I don’t need ghosts, which can be explained through hundreds of possibilities that don’t involve dead people, when I have fire—the fundamental deconstruction and rearranging of matter, and it’s pretty; or water, which has a molecular composition so unusual that our entire planet is built around it.

As far as being closeminded, I can assure you that just about every skeptic I’ve met or read would like nothing more than to find Bigfoot. A primitive hominid wandering around the Pacific Northwest for hundreds of years, just out of sight of civilization? How cool would that be? But it’s 2020, and everyone has a camera in their pockets, and the best we can come up with is blurry images and inconclusive footprints? No scat? No carcasses? When we meet Bigfoot, we want to meet him, not just anecdotes and conjecture, and we are lining up around the block for it.

Skeptics and science-based thinkers love ideas that challenge their own—provided those ideas are credible. The Theory of Evolution is one of those scientific principles that faith-based thinkers believe that we’re so married to that we won’t accept alternatives. What they don’t understand is that Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is almost unrecognizable from the Theory of Evolution as it exists today. The theories have been challenged, and they have been amended. That’s why the story of how COVID-19 and coronavirus works has changed so much in the past ten months. We keep getting new information, and the doctors incorporate it into what they know. They’re learning. If you govern from unyielding faith, you get our current government, and is that really what you want to aspire to?

I’m afraid to bring this up because most everyone I know is a believer in something I don’t believe in. Mostly God, but ghosts and other supernatural phenomena, as well. The fact that I say I don’t believe as they do is considered an attack, like maybe I think I’m better than them or something. Trust me, I’ve Facebook unfriended all the people I think I’m better than. And I get it, most public atheists are arrogant assholes, and they don’t make it easy to be me. Or my friends will try to talk me out of my skepticism, which has been honed for years and won’t go easily, or explain to me that I can be faithful and scientific. It was easier to tell the world that I’m not into sex, even though that’s weird and unnatural, than it was to tell people that I’m a non-believer.

Why am I taking a chance with alienating you? Because of TV. I have been watching this Netflix show (I won’t say the title because spoilers), and it has blown my mind. It’s about three investigators, a skeptic, a believer, and someone on the fence. What we’ve learned from pop culture so far is that, in these cases, the skeptic is due for a very hard lesson in the power of the supernatural. The non-believers are always taught that they need to believe. Not in this show, though. Four episodes in, and the miracles and demon possessions have all been roundly debunked. Science wins! (It’s obvious that this show has a supernatural undercurrent that is going to show its face in the metanarrative, but on an episode-by-episode, the skeptic is right!) Science never wins over the supernatural, unless it’s the Ghostbusters. I think the show is a one-season wonder, so it didn’t make it, but for a little while, at least, I can cheer as the scientific method conquers evil.

And honestly, in day of QAnon and cries of fake news, a little skepticism is probably a good thing.

Holy Crap, Batman!

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I’ve decided what I really want to see. I really want to see the technicolor wackiness and goofy characters of the 1966 Batman TV series, but instead of Adam West, I want to see the Ben Affleck/Frank Miller sociopathic sadist Batman running roughshod over Groovy Gotham.

***

ROBIN: Holy street pizza, Batman, you’re dangling him over the roof by his foot!

***

GORDON: You can’t torture that man, Batman! He has rights, and as a duly deputized officer of the law, you have to respect them!

BATMAN: Sure he has rights. He has the right to ride in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. *CRACK! Henchman screams* He has the right never to hold a pencil again. *CRACK! Henchman screams again* Enjoying your rights, scum? WHERE IS THE JOKER!

***

POISON IVY: You wouldn’t hit a lady, would you, Batman?

BATMAN: *PUNCH*


***

I think I’m onto something here.

Oh, Mercy, Mercy Me

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Here we are, six months into the pandemic, and a whole lot of people are acting like idiots. This spring, armed men invaded state capitals because they literally wanted to get a haircut. I was talking to someone about how this was the way life was now, and something occurred to me.

The last time that a major upheaval happened in our lives was nineteen years ago today. The whole country shut down under the weight of this horrible act of aggression. The peace and prosperity of the nineties was over (the prosperity had already ended pretty much as soon as Bush was sworn in, but that’s not how we remember it), and we were all going to make sacrifices of our old lives in the face of this new reality.

But in actuality, we didn’t. Life returned to normal pretty much instantly, and I’m not talking about extra airport security or Islamophobia or the incredibly unpopular president becoming a superhero to most of the country. I’m talking about day-to-day life. We could go to restaurants, go to movies, get the oh-so-important haircut. The words of comfort and aid from our president were not “Ask not what your country can do for you,” but rather, “Go shopping.” The MTA had an updated subway map out in about a week. We lost some of our freedoms, but we didn’t really miss them. The only people who gave anything up were those that rushed headlong into the recruiter’s office and found themselves in Afghanistan and Iraq, but, in general, those were the kinds of people who were going to join the military anyway, so no real difference.

Eighteen and a half years later, an invader came to our shores again to rob us of our way of life, and Americans, remembering how this kind of thing goes, were expecting a quick return to normalcy. We don’t like change.

But the fact of the matter is, everything changed, and it will be forever different. One day, in a year, maybe more, the stores may open up all the way again, and schools may be taking students in without having to go online again after a rash of infections pop up, but things won’t be the same. Many Mom and Pop stores will be forever shut down, to be replaced by a centralized, corporate structure. The kinds of people who are freaking out about masks will wield even more political power. We’re already seeing America’s billionaires getting exponentially richer over the past six months, and they’ll do anything not to lose their money. This is how life is now. We won’t be wearing masks forever, but the changes to the way we live our lives are fundamental. It is never going to be the way it was before.

And we, as Americans, can’t deal with that.

The Sanctity of Fictional Life

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The Sanctity of Fictional Life

It’s no secret that I like the Urban Fantasy, whether in books or in TV. This doesn’t apply only to Urban Fantasy, but to all genre-style books, movies, and TV shows (excluding romance). These works of fiction tend to have a high body count. Whether it’s the victim before the opening credits of a TV show, or the innocent bystander being killed in the carnage of the two heroes duking it out above the city in a movie, or the person who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the sexy rogue vampire is walking through the pages of a novel, genre fiction is a bloodbath, and life (except for the main characters) is cheap.

With that much death, it’s hard to comprehend how we’re supposed to feel about it. It should be shock value when the villain just lashes out and kills another hostage, is it? We’ve lost almost 200,000 people to a virus, and most of that was due to negligence and political infighting. Each of those lives means something, but the number is so staggering, we can’t comprehend it. It’s why people don’t wear masks anymore. They don’t see the lives, they see a number.

I write primarily in Urban Fantasy, and I’m really squeamish about killing people. I mean, I have. My nostalgia novel Infinity has a pretty shocking death toll, and the vampire in my vampire novel’s gotta eat. But usually I let people live.

Partly it’s because of logistics. For example, the population of Sunnydale, California, could have, in no way, supported the amount of people who died there on a weekly basis. And who would want to be a Gotham City cop or a guard at Arkham Asylum when anytime one of them appears on panel, they get their throats slit?

But mostly it’s empathy. Even fictional characters have a family who will miss them. They had favorite movies and food, and statistically, some of them have got to have pets. They may be made up by me, but they’re more than just a statistic to make the bad guy seem extra bad and for the heroine or heroine vow to avenge and then forget later.

Also, I found a lot of storytelling possibilities. In one case, a character who should be another dead victim is turned into a trauma survivor who becomes friends with the heroine. And when I do decide to kill someone, the loss of a life means something to their family, to their friends, and to the heroine who witnessed it. I’ve just made the on-the-cuff decision to kill a minor character in my current book, and it’s really allowed me to think about who he was when he was alive, and to get to know him, not just through his funeral trope where everybody stands around a hole while a priest drones on, but through the wake, a celebration of his life and his potential.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, I don’t really have the stomach for the way non-main characters are treated in genre fiction, and the only solution to that is to do it better.

Swallow This

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My first horror movie was Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn. Prior to that, I’d spent fifteen years squeamish around gore and sensitive to people in pain. Horror movies in the eighties and early nineties were primarily slasher flicks, and I had no interest in seeing people get murdered, and I certainly didn’t want to see any guts. I liked my violence clean and sanitized and without any real consequence, as in superhero comics and Star Wars.

And then came the sleepover where I woke up early in the morning, and my friend was watching one of his favorite movies. I poured some coffee and joined him, catching the beginning, before the insanity started (and this was early in the movie, because the insanity starts pretty much right away), and I watched, through dismemberment and torture, and I wasn’t at all queasy like I’d expected myself to be. I was transfixed by the sheer spectacle of it. It was just around the time that the hero’s demon-possessed hand dragged himself into the kitchen to hit himself in the head with every single plate in the tri-county area that I turned to my friend and asked, “Is this supposed to be funny?” He told me that it was.

Evil Dead 2 is not so much a horror movie as it is a demented cartoon. Director and writer Sam Raimi throws subtlety and nuance down the garbage chute while invoking terror and tension, never giving the audience the chance to relax. Leading man Bruce Campbell has to carry a large portion of the movie by himself, and he is over the top while convincingly being horrified, terrified, grief-stricken, and angry. This movie sucks you right in and doesn’t let you go, no matter how ridiculous it gets.

In the hour and a half that I spent in my friend’s living room, I became desensitized to violence and gore on the screen, and suddenly I could watch any movie without fear. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become less blasé about onscreen death, and now I find myself wondering after the families of the people who are getting killed in my fiction.

I guess the whole point of this post is that I just finished a rewatch of Evil Dead 2 after decades of it existing only in my memory, and I have to say, it still holds up. Groovy.