Monday, August 28, 2017

"Read Another Book"

One of the most common refrains in left-of-center twitter has been people making jokes about the current political situation via Harry Potter or Game of Thrones (often but not always, liberals with a focus on identity politics) and leftists looking for a fight responding with “read another book!” and denunciations of this sort of pop-culture focused political analysis. (Freddie deBoer was an obsessive of this particular contrarianism.)
My blog started as a 30 part series analyzing the political implications of the Star Wars Prequels, so I’m not exactly neutral in this fight.
But it’s also true that these tweets trying to serve as a rallying cry equating voters for Hillary Clinton with Dumbledore’s Army are repetitive and banal. They seem to be failing in a particular way, over and over again, that does invite some generalization.
And the distinction you want to make is between Immersion vs Analysis.
SMG:
The longer answer is that the memes reflect an extremely pervasive nerd ideology.
Nerdism places incredible emphasis on continuity, so a film that eschews this is incomprehensible. Note how, despite the film being incredibly stylized, the conversation over Fury Road is dominated by plot synopses and descriptions of the worldbuilding. Things like Max’s ability to predict the future are ignored. When the ultimate objective is to catalog plot points on wookiepedia, the fact that Optimus Prime disappears between shots is a threat.
There are also elaborate fantasies of Bay as a despotic sexual harasser, which overwhelm and terrify the Tumbler subset of nerds. In this view, Bay is responsible for the theft of society and we can have a pure liberal multiculture if we simply eliminate people like him through advanced twitter shame-campaigns. Reddit MRAs call meme-repetition ‘signal boosting’. In Fury Road, Immortan Joe is exactly such a Michael Bay figure: he loves big cars, explosions, and literally holds Rosie Huntington-Whiteley captive. So Fury Road provides a variant on 'Joss Whedon’ liberal feminism, where we enjoy Joe’s evil - but only so long as he’s badly beaten up at the end. Have your cake and eat it.
This is part-and-parcel with the above. Nerds demand an immersive franchise universe (e.g. the 'MCU’, the Star Wars EU, the Alien 'Quadrillogy’.) and ideological purity. Oppression cannot be presented as systemic. It must always be a moral threat from 'outside the universe’. Luke Skywalker is 'natural’, and Jar Jar Binks is an artificial imposition by Lucas, the degenerate.
(The same phenomenon occurs when a superhero is recast as black, or female. The normal crass commercialism of comic films is suddenly unacceptable, suddenly perceived as an artificial imposition by 'SJWs’.)
It is immoral for Bay to depict a woman as powerless. Megan Fox’s character 'dresses like a slut’, but not in an 'empowering’ way. Even though, in the films, this character trait stands for her misguided attempt to escape poverty by selling herself, class-ignorant nerds vacillate between slut-shaming Fox and demonizing Bay. The skimpy clothes in Fury Road are acceptable because they are imposed by Joe.
As I noted much earlier in the thread, Fury Road’s narrative structure is identical to the entire 6-film Star Wars series - but condensed into a single film, scrubbed of objectionable/satirical content, and presented in chronological order so that it ends with the triumph of the liberal rebellion. The meme-elevation of George Miller to greatest living filmmaker is likewise a condensed, inverted version of the ridiculous meme-demonization of figures like George Lucas and Shyamalan.
People who literally do not know what cinematography is now write book-length fantasies about how 'lazy’ JJ Abrams is, or devote entire webseries to debating whether Matthew Vaughn is racist. It’s a false progressivism based around punishing celebrities’ perceived sins - lust, greed, sloth, etc. - via endless twitter campaign.
No nerd has ever gotten insanely mad at (say) Wim Wenders or Jane Campion, and nobody gave a thought about Miller when he made Babe and Happy Feet. But once someone makes a film in a science fiction/superhero franchise universe… God help us all.
And most of these “rallying cry” tweets and macros can be read as the same desire for immersion into the franchise universe. What Hogwarts House are you? Or more politically, don’t you want to be there when Harry defeats Voldemort? Because your fight is just like the fight of the good guys vs bad guys in that franchise.
This is usually bad and I agree with the dismissal of it.
But if you’re using the art for actual analysis, that’s great. That’s what art is for. It presents a subjective truth about the world, that we can use to understand our own circumstance.
For instance, in Harry Potter, you could write about how Slytherin represents a fantasy of the reactionary elite who want membership to be determined mostly by birth, whereas Gryffindor represents a meritocratic elite, that definitely posits some people as better, more important, and worthy of special treatment above others, but instead of merely being based around birth, allow in special exceptions for people smart enough, hard working enough, or charismatic enough.
(There’s exceptions to these, like Slugworth or Diggory, but these are broadly the camps the people from those houses stand for – with Ravenclaw being the weirdo-uselessly-smart-people, and Hufflepuff being everyone-else-who-has-nothing-but-eachother.)
This makes Gryffindor of course, analogous to Western capitalism. Most people are oppressed, but there is hope for the Hermione’s of the world, etc.
See, I wrote a bunch about Harry Potter, but none of which is about a desire to be in that world. In fact it’s a resignation that we are already in that world.
Do that, and you can write as much about Harry Potter as you like. Hell write a 10 page tumblr post on the way movie Dumbledore says one line, that’s can still be interesting and insightful.
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(This doesn’t mean immersion is a guilt-inducing sin. Fan fic and RPGs are often about immersion. That’s great as entertainment. Just don’t try to sell it as political activism too, unless you’re critically engaging with the work.)

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