This Saturday, one of my friends wanted to see Joker with me, my roommate and another friend. And after we saw it, I said, “remember Gary, this was YOUR idea.”
Professional critics have pointed out
that director Todd Phillips (The Hangover) has taken some
pretty obvious inspiration from two of the classics Robert DeNiro
made with director Martin Scorsese: Taxi Driver, in which a
complete loser succumbs to his dark side and achieves a kind of
ascension, and The King of Comedy, in which an even bigger
loser becomes a supervillain because he completely fails at standup
comedy. These elements are actually linked in the character played
by Robert DeNiro in this movie, a local late-night talk show host in
Gotham City who is an inspiration to the main character, Arthur Fleck
(Joaquin Phoenix) who struggles with mental illness and poverty even
as he writes standup comedy and works as a hired clown, because he
sees his life’s mission as “spreading joy and laughter to
everyone.” So already you know this isn’t going to work out.
The reputation of this film has far
preceded it, with said professional critics bagging on Joker
not so much for its quality as a movie as for the message they think
it’s sending. Gotham is clearly a stand-in for the failed
administration of New York in the 1970s, prior to Rudy Guiliani (MY,
how times have changed). In this age of disturbed “incel”
gunmen, an unpopular and mentally disturbed person who turns to
violence to make an impact seems to be too close to home. And as
Bill Maher said months before, in regard to the remake of It,
“if you’re trying to make a movie about a badly-painted clown
who terrorizes the neighborhood – you’re a bit late.”
Reviews frequently use phrases like “numbing” and “empty.” Kevin Fallon at The Daily Beast called Joker “meaningless.” One review went into political analysis, describing the pivotal event that turns Arthur into a murderer (like that’s spoiling anything), getting on the subway in costume after getting fired from his clown job and being harassed and beaten by three drunks. He shoots them all in a scene that the critic describes as evoking the 1984 subway shooting by Bernhard Goetz of non-white teenagers. At the same time, critic Richard Brody admits that the drunks in Joker are white, but doesn’t point out that the men turn out to be connected to a certain millionaire’s company. He presents Joker as “an intensely racialized movie” in which the overt aspects of racism are “whitewashed” (as in the subway scene), but if anyone seems “racialized,” it’s Brody himself, who sees Joker as being a parody not of a Scorsese film, but of none other than Black Panther.
A lot of the backlash seems to be less
the film as it actually is than the perception that critics brought
to it in advance. So why is Joker such a threat to the
culture? Why is this Todd Phillips/Joaquin Phoenix Joker somehow
more offensive or dangerous than the Christopher Nolan/Heath Ledger
Joker? Well, for one thing, Joaquin Phoenix makes the Heath Ledger
Joker look like Mr. Spock.
For another thing, the Heath Ledger
Joker was never intended to be a character study. The whole point was
that he was a character without a past. (Or as the Alan Moore Joker
put it, ‘I prefer (my past) to be multiple choice.’) He is somehow
easier to accept as a character who came into being ex nihilo
as an Agent of Chaos.
Arthur Fleck, on the other hand, is presented as a product (if not a victim) of circumstances: child abuse, class struggle, an unfeeling or hard-pressed government that cuts social services, the works. The fact that there are violent losers in the real world who could claim such circumstances (and do use them to justify anti-social acts) makes the stakes seem that much more real to some people. Indeed, this movie goes so far into “realism” that it makes Christopher Nolan’s unrelentingly grim take on the Batman mythos look as wacky and family-friendly as Batman ’66.
Moreover, The Dark Knight is a movie where Good wins. Batman (and Lucius Fox) bet that the people of Gotham will not do the evil thing to save themselves under pressure, and because they do not, the Joker’s scheme is foiled. Joker is not nearly so optimistic. Arthur/Joker is simultaneously leader and follower of a stochastic wave of violence, in which an aristocratic class that thinks it knows better than the common rabble are pitted against a “kill the rich” mob determined to prove them right.
The Dark Knight was in 2008, only 11 years ago. I wonder what changed since then?
Joker is a good movie, in the sense that it is a unique personal vision that is perfectly executed. It’s just not a very uplifting one. Joker does NOT put the “fun” in “funeral.” As my friend Don said, “It was deeply disturbing, and then it was deeply disturbing over and over again.” We also agreed that it was more disturbing than the before-the-movie trailer forDoctor Sleep, which is the sequel to The Shining.
Still, Joker isn’t as disturbing as the trailer to Cats.
At the last Star Trek convention in Las Vegas (where William Shatner was a featured guest) my sister and I went to one of the sales booths and bought the DVD that Shatner did on the production of Star Trek: The Next Generation, entitled “Chaos on the Bridge.” Shatner both wrote and directed this documentary, which runs an hour long, so one may wish to take it with some grains of salt. For the most part, he lets his subjects, the producers, writers and stars of TNG, do the talking. But Shatner, as he does, comes up with his own arc on a subject, and he sees the development of The Next Generation under original series creator Gene Roddenberry as a study in “the struggle for power.”
Paramount Studios, which owns Star Trek, had wanted to do a new series in that universe, while Roddenberry was in many respects out in the wilderness, not just because of the failure of his post-Trek projects in the early ’70s, but because of the “epic disaster” of Star Trek: The Motion Picture with the original cast. As original series writer David Gerrold puts it, “they gave him this Emeritus status, and he was a has-been.” At the same time, the various executives at Paramount who wanted the new series were simultaneously at odds with Roddenberry and convinced that they needed him to guide the new project. There are a lot of poker metaphors around this process of gamesmanship, which is also a recurring element in Next Generation.
While Shatner doesn’t really go into
his Captain Kirk persona, fans of the first series will know that
Roddenberry often placed Kirk as a symbol for himself, doing scripts
where Kirk was split into his good and evil selves, artificially aged
and otherwise forced to deal with internal challenges to his power
and command. (Ironic, given that Trek fandom also gave us the phrase
‘Mary Sue.’) There’s a brief bit where someone points out that in
his prime, Roddenberry saw himself as a womanizing, man-of-action
type, and so made Kirk out to be that figure, but in the late 80s,
when Next Generation was made, he saw himself more as the wise guide
to his staff, and so made Captain Picard more in that role, the
traditional executive who dispatched orders to the away team. This
less active tone was a huge challenge to the writing staff in TNG’s
first two seasons, as numerous people have pointed out, because
without character tensions between flawed human beings (which were a
huge feature of the Original Series) there wasn’t much to go on,
especially since the violence of the original series was also
de-emphasized. Maurice Hurley was brought in from the action-TV
genre as a de facto showrunner, and he found Roddenberry’s utopian
concept of the new Federation “wackadoodle” but
nevertheless saw his job as trying to maintain the show’s loyalty to
that vision. It was only when the show started to lean against that
formula, and take up character-focused episodes under Rick Berman and
Michael Piller, that the quality really started to pick up.
To simply make TNG in the first place,
Paramount had to produce it in first-run syndication, which prior to
cable and Netflix was the best option for a series independent of the
networks. As a result it didn’t get a lot of respect, and a lot of
things, and people, fell by the wayside. Denise Crosby has talked
about how she ended up quitting the show out of frustration (after
negotiations that Patrick Stewart likens to the Israeli-Palestinian
talks), but she also amusingly points out that the support staff was
so meager that “I used to go steal food off the set of Cheers.”
What I didn’t know was that similar conflicts had led to the
temporary removal of Gates McFadden as the ship’s doctor and her
one-season replacement by Diana Muldaur. But producers pointed out
that things didn’t gell with her on the set, and Muldaur, who had
been on the original show, tells Shatner, “when I worked with
you, we had scenes, it was all actors… by the time you got to Star
Trek: The Next Generation, it was a vast technical world that had
some characters placed in it.”
Such observations make this a fascinating piece to watch. However, while Shatner confines his study to the first three years of Next Generation, he doesn’t always do so in the most organized manner, and while the one-hour length means that there isn’t too much to process, it also may not be enough in some cases. For instance, Shatner really seems to hit it off with Jonathan Frakes, but he doesn’t appear in the documentary that much. Moreover, the theme of internal power struggle is often suggested but never really elaborated, perhaps because a lot of the participants are alive and agreed to talk. However while they are not explicit, the writers and other collaborators of Gene Roddenberry are quite clear that he was suffering both physical and mental decline in his final years, and prior to Next Generation needed to kick alcohol and other recreational drugs. In this respect, it’s sort of like Shatner’s opinions of other people that he’s worked with in the past and who are no longer here to tell their side of the story.
However, most of the principals of Star Trek: The Next Generation are still here, and their story is still well worth telling. Chaos on the Bridge presents a second act for both Gene Roddenberry and the universe he created, and the drama of the piece is that, with all the things that could have happened differently, it’s amazing that it happened at all.
Spider-Man: Far From Home is the second movie in a trilogy starting with Spider-Man: Homecoming, to be concluded with Spider-Man: Home Alone. It is also the first Marvel Cinematic Universe movie after Avengers: Endgame, and it actually does address the question I had after seeing that movie, namely, if Peter Parker was destroyed by Thanos but was brought back five years later, why are he and his friends all still in the same high school? (Not that the answer is any less awkward.)
An underlying theme of the movie is that appearances are deceptive. While Peter Parker and his friends are on a school tour of Europe, he is recruited in Venice by Nick Fury to assist the hero Quentin Beck, referred to by the Venetians as “Mysterio”, to fight a cross-dimensional threat from beings resembling the four elements. It is not much of a spoiler to anyone who knows Spider-Man comics that Beck isn’t really a hero, but the script does a pretty good job of presenting Mysterio’s character concept, using special effects and trickery to threaten and manipulate Spider-Man, at one point going into a nightmare scenario that may not reach the psychedelic visual heights of Into the Spider-Verse but comes close.
This movie also has a pretty strong
“rom-com” element, which one of my friends who saw the
movie didn’t care for. But if you like the obvious chemistry between
Tom Holland as Peter and Zendaya as MJ, it’s another feature. And
while Spider-Man: Far From Home isn’t the heaviest or best
Marvel movie, I think overall it’s just straightforward fun that
doesn’t need to be much else, even though it isn’t too hard to look
for a current-events subtext in Mysterio’s agenda.
The movie also brings back the Marvel
mid-credits scene, which is important because the first (of two)
foreshadows the return of Spider-Man’s greatest enemy.
No, not Mysterio.
I’ll give you a hint, he looks like the
guy in the Farmers Insurance commercials.
Across the field you see the sky ripped open See the rain through a gaping wound Pelting the women and children
Pelting the women and children Who run Into the arms Of America
-U2, “Bullet the Blue Sky”
Plus, that includes the tanks. Can’t forget the tanks. Even
though anybody who’s ever been to Washington knows the roads can’t
handle Abrams tanks. (All the liberals ask libertarians, ‘without
government, who would build the roads?’ We have a government. Who’s
building the roads now?)
And I see people asking why a supposedly non-partisan affair did
not include ticket invitations for Democrats and independents, and
catered to the donor class, and why an event that is supposedly for
all Americans is being turned into a Trump re-election rally. Well,
because as far as the Banana Republican Party is concerned, the donor
class and the redcaps who go to Trump rallies are the only real
America, and everyone else can hang.
Just this week I had a liberal Facebook friend post that the
political situation is such that he doesn’t feel like celebrating the
Fourth of July.
I’m sorry, but fuck that.
He’s hardly alone. Megan Rapinoe, whose US Women’s Soccer Team is
winning victory after victory to reach the World Cup championship,
has made it clear she refuses to sing the national anthem. And the
latest controversy occured when exiled football star Colin Kapernick
used his status with the Nike corporation to cancel a line of
sneakers with the 13 Colonies “Betsy Ross flag” because
it’s been co-opted by the alt-right.
You got that right: The Betsy Ross flag is evil and racist.
Yeah, fuck that too.
Supposedly the issue is that that flag is a legacy of slavery
days. Well, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution
were written in slavery days too. You want to disavow those?
Y’all see where this is going right? Apparently not. So let me
explain it to you.
You, the enlightened people, have made it clear that all the Trumpniks have to do is embrace some previously innocuous thing – like a US flag, or an “OK” sign and it becomes theirs, cause as far as you’re concerned that thing has Trump cooties on it. If that’s all it takes, then “cancel culture” is going to cancel its participants right out of the culture, including the culture of other people who don’t agree with Trump.
This is what bullies do. They push you around, and they push some
more. “Just let me do this one little thing, and I’ll leave you
alone.” “Just lemme borrow the car for three hours- no
sorry, three days – and I’ll never do it again.” “Just
bend over and spread your cheeks, and I’ll give you a cookie.”
These people are counting on liberals to do what liberals always
do: Knuckle under and give up.
Adam Serwer, no Ayn Rand fan he, said on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/AdamSerwer/status/1146018661142093831 “To
be clear: I don’t think it’s wise to cede national or civic
symbols to racists because they want them to be able to publicly
present their ideology as ‘patriotic,’ and what America should be,
which is exactly what is being contested. Let them have the stars and
bars.”
Exactly.
I am not giving up the Gadsden Flag. I am not giving up the Betsy
Ross flag. The Stars and Stripes is MY flag. You can HAVE
the Stars and Bars, Trumpniks. THAT’s a flag for racists and losers.
You don’t let these people monopolize the public square. That’s
what they WANT. And my advice to anybody who wants to cede the forum
to anybody who makes a scene is: Grow a pair. And if you think that
phrase is too “gendered” or offensive… grow a pair.
You might say, “this isn’t how an ally should behave.”
Well who cares? I’m NOT an ally. I probably have more in common
with the “deplorables” than the lefties. I just don’t
think that people should be disenfranchised and dehumanized just for
being who they are. Unlike Stephen Miller, I never forget. And I
don’t want my country to be destroyed by bullies, morons and Russian
stooges, which in Trump’s case is all three.
So if you political robots are right and God/Jesus and the Laws of
Physics all dictate that you can only vote for one of TWO political
parties, and one of them is Trumpnik, if you expect me to vote with
Democrats and leftists, it would really help if youquit
fucking it up.
All that matters is that one less Republican in office is one less
Republican trying to destroy the country. I can at least work to do
that much.
But to anybody who really does hate the flag, because the other
side claimed it before you did, I ask: Do you seriously hate this
country? What country are you living in?
What other country are you going to fight for, if not this one?
China? Russia, North Korea? I hate to tell you, but those are the
guys supporting Trump. Everything you hate about America is this
country is becoming more like them, not more like America.
Do you really think you’re going to escape racism, xenophobia and the encroaching state if you move to Canada, Britain or Germany? Think again.
Where will you go that is immune to American influence, if this
country becomes a literal empire?
Where will the refugees go, if this is the country they have to
escape FROM?
What other country are you going to fight for, if not this one? It
all stops HERE, or it does not stop at all.
Today I was on social media, and followed a link to the speech of the great orator, Frederick Douglass – I hear he’s doing great things these days – entitled “What to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?” And among many other great things he said in that speech, I was struck by the following:
“For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome
atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as
preached by those Divines! They convert the very name of
religion into an engine of tyranny, and barbarous cruelty, and serve
to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings
of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke, put together, have done!
These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having
neither principles of right action, nor bowels of compassion. They
strip the love of God of its beauty, and leave the throng of religion
a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors,
tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that “pure
and undefiled religion” which is from above, and which is
“first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of
mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without
hypocrisy.” But a religion which favors the rich against the
poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind
into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in
chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress
on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all
the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of
persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust
the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be
true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and
nation — a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the
authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in
the sight of God. In the language of Isaiah, the American church
might be well addressed, “Bring no more vain ablations; incense is
an abomination unto me: the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of
assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity even the solemn
meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth.
They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread
forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea! when ye make
many prayers, I will not hear. YOUR HANDS ARE FULL OF BLOOD; cease to
do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed;
judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow.”
‘Twas ever thus.
In Douglass’ day, the forces of oppression had even more institutional support. But as Justin Amash just said, the Founders created a “political system so ordered around liberty that, in succeeding generations, the Constitution itself would strike back against the biases and blind spots of its authors. “
And at length, a thing which could not last forever… did not.
It’s quite possible that Trump might
become a dictator, because unless he gets stomped on Election Day –
and I mean, Walter Mondale in 1984 stomped – he’s gonna come up
with some weasely bullshit excuse for why the election was “unfair”
or “rigged” and why it shouldn’t count, and all the
Republicans will go along with him because half of them truly want a
dictator and the other half just don’t want the responsibility of
doing their jobs. And from what I see, most of the Democrats
will go along with it, because their leaders are a combination of
plain cowardice and learned helplessness, and most of the veterans
just don’t want the responsibility of doing their jobs.
But do you seriously think Trump is
some immortal, invincible God-Emperor? He can’t live forever. When
he’s gone, what will Republicans replace him with? Mike Pence?
Mike Pence is so boring that his Secret
Service codename is “Mike Pence.”
Mike Pence is so holier-than-thou that
his family Bible is autographed.
If Republicans had any asset other than
Trump, they would’ve cut bait a long time ago. The cold fact of the
matter is that he really is the most popular and competent politician
they have. What does that say for the rest of them?
No matter how bad it looks now, you
have to consider what you’re going to do when Trump is gone. Maybe
sooner than you think.
When he’s gone, are you still going to
say that this country is too ugly and racist to feel good about
celebrating a holiday? It’s the SAME COUNTRY that it was before
Trump. Trump just made it obvious. Show the same consciousness when
Republicans aren’t in charge.
America: My country, right or wrong. If
right, to be kept right, if wrong, to be set right.
The best thing you can do to celebrate
the holiday is to do exactly what you did the year before, and the
years when Obama was president. Have fun. And also, ponder what
“independence” means and why this country was founded.
What you do NOT do is concede the
field. What you do not do is let these people put a trademark on
“America” the way they put a trademark on Christianity.
After all, the difference between America and Jesus is that we can
prove that America exists. Some of us live here, even.
If you’re going to give up, you’ve
already lost. If you’re going to mourn, this country is already
dead.
So until Election Day, remember the words of the politically incorrect Tim Allen:
Game of Thrones ended May 19, in a
fashion that most people expected: After Queen Daenerys destroyed
Kings’ Landing and further demonstrated her danger to the world in a
speech to her troops, Tyrion publicly quit as her advisor and, in
prison, advised Jon Snow to kill her off. Which Jon did. And as a
compromise to the Unsullied (who took Dany’s death personally for
some reason) Jon was exiled and the new King became Bran Stark, which
a few people did expect. I’m not sure how many people expected
Drogon to respond to Dany’s death by melting the Iron Throne, but
there was certainly a point to it, as with the destruction of the One
Ring: Power corrupts, and for the world to be healthy, the object of
that power should be destroyed.
In that regard, there’s a whole lot of
meta-text in the final episode. With the kings’ throne gone, Samwell
Tarly observes that the aristocracy has brought things to this point,
and actually proposes that decisions which affect everyone should be
made by “everyone.” And the other nobles just laugh him
down. I guess democracy is above the Social axiom of this cosm.
Tyrion then says that if nations are to
have leadership, people are most motivated by stories, and tells the
noble council that to create a leader that people will follow, the
most compelling story is that of Bran “the Broken.” And
again, this is agreed to because he’s actually a better alternative
than Jon Snow or war with the Unsullied. And then as more meta-text,
Ser Brienne actually gets to write the final chronicle of Jaime
Lannister’s life, and the whole set of accounts is presented to the
royal council as “A Song of Ice and Fire,” establishing
that in some imaginary universe, the whole thing actually was
completed in print.
And when it was all said and done, most of us in the audience thought it was … Odd? Dull? Anticlimactic?
Well, of course. The story is over because the conflict is over. And the conflict is over because the thoughtful, responsible people, like Sansa and Davos, got together and hammered out a system where they could work together. Arya doesn’t want to be involved in Westeros anymore, so she left it. Jon was never really cut out to be king, he certainly can’t be now, so he’s back up North with Ghost and the wildlings, where he’s- well, I wouldn’t call Jon Snow “happy,” but at least at home. Sansa always wanted to keep the North free, and she, once the most useless character in the series, used her will and negotiation to make it truly independent. And Bran is content to be a symbolic monarch for Westeros while Tyrion does the hands-on work. If people like this had been in charge in the first place, you wouldn’t have had all these wars and death.
People get addicted to drama. And by
“drama” I don’t just mean a fantasy of castles and dragons.
I mean the spectacle of watching emotional, dysfunctional people act
out their issues, screw up their lives, and make the world more
complicated than it has to be while making everybody else suffer in
the process. A spectacle sometimes known as politics.
I get the impression that if the real
world’s current crop of drama queens, inbred aristocrats and
religious cultists kills itself off with its own stupidity, some
people just won’t know what to do with themselves.
So… just as every other Game of Thrones this season has inspired a lot of bitching and gnashing of teeth from armchair critics and online pundits, “The Bells”, which aired May 12 – Mother’s Day – caused intense shock in people who saw Daenerys Targaryen, the last rightful heir of her dynasty (sorta) face the usurper queen Cersei Lannister in the capital city of Kings’ Landing, after Cersei captured and executed Dany’s oldest and dearest friend, Missandei. And while cooler heads conspired to negotiate the surrender of the city, Daenerys responded by having her dragon breathe fire at everyone in the city between her and Cersei, potentially around a million people. The shock was that Daenerys, who was up to a certain point being presented as an enlightened monarch and legitimate protagonist, was “suddenly” being made out to be horrible, even though most of the reason that her dynasty was overthrown was that her forebears were about as psycho. The surprise to me is that anyone else was surprised.
Especially given how many of the
left-wing media types who loved Dany’s portrayal as a feminist
survivor of trauma had also pointed out that she is also a “White
Savior” archetype who presented herself as a liberator of
dark-skinned slave peoples (‘Breaker of Chains’) and has
swarthy-skinned warriors as her cannon fodder despite coming from a
pale family line that is so purebred it often resorted to incest.
(The ‘White Savior’ critique is of course a PC/Social Justice
complaint, but that doesn’t automatically make it invalid.)
The fact is that Game of Thrones has a
repeated pattern. Every time Cersei or another central character does
something rotten, some other character (like Ramsay Bolton) comes
along to make Cersei look tolerable.
What this demonstrates is that one consistent premise of Game of Thrones is that there are no good guys, or more precisely that the less dickishness one possesses the less competent one is to survive in that setting, arguably in any other setting. The best you can hope for in a government is a sort of Machiavellian pragmatism where the ruler is just foresighted enough to govern in the common interest, if only to stop public revolt, but also ruthless enough to survive all the power-gaming. The problem is that anybody who does know what it takes to survive the cutthroat environment, like Cersei, is the kind of person who risks public revolt, while the people who one would think have that pragmatic medium (like Tyrion and Daenerys) either become moral and ineffectual (like Jon Snow) or catastrophically sadistic (like Ramsay).
But given the grand fantasy elements, the real-world implications of such an outlook weren’t made obvious until 30 minutes after the episode, when HBO showed the season (and series) finale of Veep, the Julia-Louis Dreyfus vehicle in which she plays Vice-President briefly turned President Selina Meyer. The characters in Veep are if possible even more vicious and cynical than the ones on GoT, although the dialogue is brightened by lines such as “your proposal is as welcome as a Sriracha enema.” In this season, Meyer is trying to get elected president (after losing the last election from a tie-breaker vote in the Senate) against the popular female incumbent who succeeded her, going through a series of increasingly ugly deals to win primaries, until the show, like Game of Thrones, runs the clock on itself and crams all the craziness in before the deadline. In the finale, the primary race gets to the party convention, where once again everything is hopelessly deadlocked between competitors and everyone has to engage in old-style backroom deals to pledge voters. In less than 29 minutes real time, Selina maneuvers herself into getting the nomination through a set of compromises, up to drafting as her running mate Jonah Ryan, whom everyone hates (except possibly his wife) and who hates math because it was “invented by Muslims.” The show then forwards many years to Selina’s death “at the age of 77, 78, or possibly 79.” Her funeral coverage goes over her limited but substantial achievements, like permanently banning gay marriage (at the behest of a fundamentalist, homophobic Christian who’s ‘so gay, he’s like Sam Rayburn gay’) and temporarily securing independence for Tibet (reversed by China as a deal where they gave Meyer campaign support and election interference). As the coverage winds down, the news anchor has to end his planned eulogy for Selina to announce that Tom Hanks has also died.
This is simply a more absurd, prosaic restatement of the theme it took “The Bells” 80 minutes to get across. Veep deliberately avoids commenting on the real political parties of the United States (to the point that they never mention what Selina’s party is) but it’s made clear that one doesn’t have to be a male conservative to be a raging asshole. Nor is it necessary to have supernatural powers. Although I’m pretty fucking sure that if Selina Meyer had had her own pet dragon, the entire DC Beltway area would be a smoking mountain of rubble and ash, and it would deserve it a lot more than Kings’ Landing.
“I have often said that if knowing what happens actually spoils a movie, that movie probably sucks.”
-Robert Bridson
The only real spoiler I got from
Avengers: Endgame before seeing it was a very minor but very
telling one: There are no after-credits scenes.
Quite a few non-Marvel movies had
scenes during or after the credits, including of course Ferris
Bueller’s Day Off. But it wasn’t until Nick Fury showed up at
Tony Stark’s house at the very end of Iron Man to discuss “the
Avengers Initiative” that the idea became a running premise,
linking together the various movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe
and teasing the next one in the series. The fact that such a scene
doesn’t happen this time only emphasizes that while there will of
course be other Marvel projects, for the Avengers story arc, this is
it.
Finality is the main theme of this
movie. More than once, Thanos says, “I am inevitable.”
Thanos, of course, is taken from Thanatos, the Greek word for death.
In the original Marvel Comics, Jim Starlin’s Thanos was romantically
obsessed with Death (since Death is a personality in Marvel Comics).
In the more “realistic” movies, this obsession was turned
into a Malthusian sociology. In Infinity War, Thanos told
everyone that the populations he decimated (or rather, bisected)
before getting the Infinity Gauntlet were happier and better off for
his work. That is clearly not the case after the “snap.” On
Earth, world governments have collapsed and cities are hollowed out,
with sullen, scattered survivors. The cosmic hero Captain Marvel has
her hands full dealing with similar crises on other worlds. But then
Scott Lang (Ant-Man) returns from the Quantum Realm and discusses a
way to reverse the events, in what he calls a “time heist.”
And while some deaths are unavoidable, there are a lot of appearances
from almost every other Marvel movie up to this point (although in
some cases these characters appear VERY briefly) and this leads to
some happy reunions, demonstrating to Scott’s surprise, time travel
doesn’t work like in Back To The Future, Bill & Ted, or
any other examples of time travel, which, like in this movie, are
entirely fictional and speculative, because time travel isn’t real.
After the movie, my best friend and I
briefly discussed it and he said that the premise created plot holes
big enough to drive a truck through. And I start to think about them
more and more.
Like….
…..
…..
If Endgame was five years after Infinity War, and the Avengers brought back all the people who got ‘snapped’ without going backwards in time, why is Peter Parker still in high school with Ned?
And….
We all know who guards the Soul Stone, right? So what happened when Steve had to give it back?
But again, the result creates a true
narrative finality- as with The Long Night at Winterfell, the
casualty count of principal characters was very light, though the
losses were a lot more substantial. But most characters had at least
a satisfying ending, and one in particular had the happy ending that
should have happened all along. And instead of an after-credits scene
we got a big production ending with each of the original Avengers
actors pictured with their autographs on the screen.
I can’t help but think that the
producers were inspired by the final scene of Star Trek VI: The
Undiscovered Country, where the senior crew of the Enterprise
have just returned to the ship after stopping a military conspiracy
and saving the galaxy from a general war – only to be given orders
to turn the Enterprise in to be decommissioned. And Captain Kirk-
like Tony Stark, an example of Peter Pan masculinity if ever there
was one- just said “second star to the right, and straight on
til morning.” And the Enterprise sailed toward the nearest star
and disappeared into the light. And the screen showed the autographs
of the seven principals of the original cast, one by one.
And that was indeed the last time that
all seven members of the original cast appeared in the same movie
together.
There has been a certain backlash to
the whole premise of Marvel Studios’ Captain Marvel movie,
mostly from “men’s rights activists” and other anti-PC
types, including some people I’ve talked to on social media. (Yes,
Jack, I do mean you.) Some of it is because of the character concept
of Carol Danvers, the titular Captain, as a feminist hero, especially
in the wake of her punked-up reboot in 2012. But some of it has to
do with the character herself more than feminism per se. For
one thing, in Marvel Comics, Carol was presented as having an
alcohol problem at least on par with Tony Stark’s. She was also one
of Stark’s more heavy-handed enforcers during the 2006 comic arc
CIVIL WAR.
There’s also the point that Danvers was
created as a feminist hero during the 1970s, ironically as a
“Supergirl” counterpart to the existing Captain Marvel,
named Ms. Marvel. And while DC’s Wonder Woman has always been
presented as an Athenian “peaceful warrior” personality,
Carol has always been much more in-your-face. So when Captain
Marvel’s lead actress Brie Larson made a point of asking why most of
the reporters in her press tours were male and white, it seemed that
Larson was even better casting than previously thought.
The other issue is that the history of
the character in Marvel Comics is such a broken kaleidoscope – even
more so than other superheroes – that even though Marvel is
generally not prone to “retcon” prior history, the best
thing to do would have been to take the basic character premise and
start over from scratch, which is basically what writer Kelly Sue
DeConnick did when she had Carol officially become Captain Marvel in
2012. And re-starting established characters is basically what the
Marvel Cinematic Universe is for.
So: in the movie, Carol Danvers is an Air Force test pilot in the years before women were allowed to do combat missions. Her “wingman” is Maria Rambeau, who is kind of the Black Best Friend of the movie but is also a nod to the point that there are multiple characters named Captain Marvel. The thing is, the narrative is not that linear. If it resembles the Marvel Comics character in any way, it’s that. In fact, the story is kind of the reverse of a superhero origin in that Carol starts off superpowered and has to discover the normal person she originally was.
Otherwise, in terms of retelling the Hero’s Journey, Captain Marvel is no more innovative than Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. But that also means that there is not much unusual about a cocky, wisecracking protagonist discovering their full potential other than the fact that the protagonist is female. But that in turn means that there is really nothing to object to in this movie other than that fact. This also means that there doesn’t really need to be any other feminist subtext to the movie other than that very premise, and apart from deliberate placement of female artists on the soundtrack, there isn’t any. I mean guys, I’ve seen The Newsroom on HBO. I know what heavy-handed liberal propaganda looks like.
Besides that, the movie is worth
watching for three points:
The presentation of the Kree-Skrull
conflict, which is central to the Marvel Universe but was not
depicted in the MCU before (even though Kree characters are in
Guardians of the Galaxy);
The fact that this movie is sort of a
“Year One” origin for Nick Fury, played as always by Samuel
L. (‘The L Stands for ‘Motherfucker’) Jackson;
Overall, Captain Marvel is a movie with an active, heroic tone that deliberately stands in contrast to the shocking ending of Avengers: Infinity War and sets the stage for Avengers: Endgame, given that Captain Marvel is presented here as being the Marvel Universe’s equivalent to Superman. (The blue jumpsuit with red-and-gold trim doesn’t hurt.)
As an aside, this movie is set to make over $153 million in its opening weekend, and it was all my friends and I could do to get reserved tickets for a Saturday show. So I guess the MRA campaign isn’t working.
If nothing else, it’s worth seeing for
the opening production crawl.
This is of course the weekend when we “spring forward” with a mandated time change an hour ahead, requiring people to set their clocks and effectively lose an hour of sleep (unless you work grave shift, and effectively leave work an hour early). And this inspires a lot of bitching and memes like:
Not bad, actually.
There is an article in Vox about this, with a lot of miscellaneous trivia, such as: “No, it’s definitely called ‘daylight saving time.’ Not plural. Be sure to point out this common mistake to friends and acquaintances. You’ll be really popular. “
Why do we need Daylight Saving Time, and what exactly is it saving? Historically, it was made a national rule during World War I as a means of both saving energy (as opposed to using fuel in the night time hours for heating and light) and expanding the workday (for war purposes). But the reason we then switch back to Standard Time is that as the daylight decreases, farmers who have to work earlier will be more likely to start their day in the dark. So, much like only voting on Tuesday, daylight saving time is a legal custom that has nothing to do with the Constitution or sacred principles and is intended to cater to a small farmers’ community (that part which has not been swallowed up by megacorps) which now has the same modern technology and transportation as everybody else.
The thing is that while most of the people who complain about Daylight Saving Time want to get rid of it altogether, I’m of the group that would rather get rid of Standard Time and make DST year round.
I have several reasons for this.
It’s Arbitrary. The very premise
of the government setting time when the daylight hours naturally
change with the season means that we’re setting a limit that is not
directly related to nature. The reasons for changing in the first
place had to do with energy conservation, and since the 1910s the
rule has been changed more than once, usually for energy reasons.
DST was actually year-round during the last three years of World War
II. The fuel shortages of the 1970s led to another mandate of
year-round DST from 1973 to 1975. Once that ended, the “standard”
for Standard Time was the last weekend of October to the first Sunday
in April. In 2005, President Bush signed another one of those
“energy saving” measures to extend Daylight Saving by a
full month, which means Standard Time is now a month less. The
period of Standard Time is now starting the first Sunday in November
and ending the second Sunday in March, roughly four and a half months
(depending on the calendar). And what that means really, is that
Standard Time isn’t actually the standard.
The irony being that various studies
(like the ones cited in Wikipedia and the Vox articles) have not
shown a meaningful difference in the amount of energy comparing each
time zone. Which means that there are more intangible considerations
as to whether to keep Standard Time, such as:
It’s Becoming Obsolete. Much of the reason that people continue to use energy in both the “light” and “dark” mornings is that more people, not just farmers, are working other than a 9-to-5 schedule. One of the reasons cited for keeping Standard Time – the prospect that school kids could get in accidents during dark mornings – is less relevant as school days are made longer and in many cases are started later. This also means that they end later, just as a lot of adults’ work days end later, which means that Standard Time means they have less daylight hours of outdoor activity, which touches on my last point.
SAD. Seasonal Affective Disorder is a real thing, in some cases physiological and related to the production of Vitamin D (which is naturally produced in high sunlight) or melatonin (which is regulated by Vitamin D and more likely to be produced in darker conditions). Again, the yearly cycle naturally leads to a loss of sunlight in any event towards the winter solstice, and arbitrarily hastening the natural dark period may be affecting the likelihood of people developing SAD.
Traffic. It just so happens
that at the time of year when we artificially shift the hour back, it
gets dark at just before 5 pm – that is, rush hour. And the last
thing we need in Las Vegas is to give people an actual excuse for not
knowing how to drive. Because people who were able to get out of
work on rush hour Friday at 5 pm and drive home then get out the next
Monday at 5 pm and drag ass on the freeway at 20 miles under the
speed limit going, “Oh No! It’s dark outside! I CAN’T SEE!!!”
Well yeah, dingus. That’s what
headlights are for. Try using them. AND your turn signal.
So I say, let’s just throw out Standard
Time and make Daylight Saving the year-round standard. You would
have to give up an hour of life – this time for good – but at
least you wouldn’t have to go through the same rigamarole again next
year.
The main difference between DC and Marvel comics used to be that DC was a lot more invested in parallel universes. That started all the way back in 1956 when DC brought back The Flash but as a new character with a new costume and then sometime afterward re-introduced the Golden Age Flash as a separate character still living in a parallel universe from the main (Silver Age) Flash. They also used this to explain the vast power discrepancy between the Golden Age Superman and the contemporary Superman who could survive atomic bombs. This in turn led to a whole bunch of parallel universes until DC finally destroyed them with Crisis on Infinite Earths. For a while.
Marvel really didn’t go for that sort of thing; for the most part, before the creation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the use of other properties (like Spider-Man) by Sony and other producers, everything including the World War II history was in a single timeline. But for a few years, Marvel Comics came up with an “Ultimate” line of comics where their main heroes were re-imagined as different people (this is where they came up with the idea of casting Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury). The Ultimate universe eventually got re-absorbed into the main (‘616’) Marvel Universe, but the Ultimate Spider-Man, a black Puerto Rican teenager named Miles Morales, was popular enough to where they kept him in the main universe. All of this matters in that the premise of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse has to deal with the merging of parallel universes, and the appearance of various other alternates like Spider-Gwen (Gwen Stacy in a universe where she got the spider-powers instead of Peter Parker), a 1930s Spider-Man, an anime Spider-Man and of course, Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham.
So while the movie will do a good run-through of character backgrounds, it really helps if you’re already familiar with the comicbook source material, but then most of the people already wanting to see this probably will be. As the story goes, I am not sure why the villain they chose, as much wealth as he has, would be the one funding a dimension-crossing supercollider, but his motivation is at least plausible. Otherwise Miles experiences a not atypical hero’s story where once he finds his own spark, he realizes that “anyone can wear the mask.” Which when you think about it, is also the message of V for Vendetta. But that’s another discussion.
The important thing about this movie is that if you’re going to see it, do it soon because it NEEDS to be seen in a theater. The level of detail on the animation for this movie is just phenomenal. At least as good as the Lego movies. I’d heard that based on its win at the Golden Globes, it might be eligible not only for Best Animated Film Oscar but even Best Picture. I’m not sure about Best Picture, but Into the Spider-Verse definitely needs to be recognized as an innovation in film.
I’m sure you have at least had peripheral contact with this year’s campaign of the annual War on Christmas, where at least one radio station took “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” off their annual list of “holiday” songs because it suggests a woman being pressured into sex because it’s too cold outside to go home. And while the current regard to unequal power relationships means that people are more sensitive to this sort of thing, the song was written at a time when people were expected to be coy about their romantic desires, and just as the standard of political correctness has changed, in the future, the context of the song may change even more. For example, in previous generations, it used to get cold outside.
About the only area where I agree with my more cynical leftist friends is that we could use “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” as a means of purging all the other stupid “Christmas” songs that really have nothing to do with Christmas as a religious festival and much more to do with a bygone time where “traditional” Christmas characters were literally created by department stores to sell stuff. Not that I can stand most modern music, but it’s not quite so obvious on the PA systems of every store and gas station I go into the way Christmas music is. “White Christmas,” “Last Christmas,” the entire Mannheim Steamroller catalog… truly, Christmas is the whitest holiday of the year.
So it requires a certain exercise of
intellect and taste for me to think of the Christmas songs that I
actually like. And there are quite a few. Some of these are just as
well exposed as the other classics, and a few are more obscure.
Here in no particular order:
Nat King Cole, “The Christmas
Song”
What is my all time favorite Christmas
song? “The Christmas Song” (‘Chestnuts Roasting on an Open
Fire’) as sung by Nat King Cole.
What is my least favorite
Christmas song? ‘Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire’ as sung by
ANYBODY ELSE.
“Peace on Earth/Little Drummer
Boy”, David Bowie and Bing Crosby
Quite possibly the strangest premise
for a duet in pop music history. This scene was recorded for a Bing
Crosby Christmas special just months before Bing died of a sudden
heart attack, and the show featured several celebrity guests
including Bowie. Bing Crosby was a traditional (as in, conservative)
American music icon. Bowie was… Bowie. At the time, Bowie had an
ambivalent relationship to Christianity (much like his relationship
to heteronormativity) and he didn’t want to do a traditional
Christmas song. So the show’s writers created an original tune on
the set and rehearsed it for Bowie to sing in counterpoint with Bing.
This is the result.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9kfdEyV3RQ
The Pogues, “Fairytale of New
York”
Featuring guest singer Kristy MacColl
and lead singer Shane MacGowan (‘like Tom Waits, only less
articulate’), this latter-day classic is less about Christmas than
about the Irish experience in America, and less about a love-hate
romance with a person than the Irish romantic relationship with New
York City. Other aspects of the Irish experience in this video
include: allusions to ‘Galway Bay,’ substance abuse, jail and slurred
obscenities.
King Diamond, “No Presents for
Christmas”
Because, really.
“Have Yourself A Merry Little
Christmas”
Several friends have pointed out to me that while the version popularized by Frank Sinatra and other singers was re-written to be more universal and tuneful, it was originally written for the 1944 musical Meet Me In St. Louis, in the context of a hard-luck story where one of the main characters gets a marriage proposal on Christmas Eve but is told on the same day that her father is moving the family and she may never see her fiance again. This was also in the context of a country where many young men were at war and did not know if they would ever come back. The song as originally done had the bridge in the past tense as “Once again as in olden days/Happy golden days of yore/Faithful friends who were dear to us/Will be near to us once more”. And the last verse was “Someday soon, we all will be together/if the fates allow/Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow”. In fact, this was not even the draft version, as Judy Garland and the producers asked the songwriter to make the lyrics less depressing. Most of the time, it’s delivered with the same sort of cool gaiety as “The Christmas Song,” but many purists insist that if you’re not singing “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” as a tragic ballad, you’re missing the point.
Anyway, here’s the original Judy
Garland version. Just to make it extra sad.
Cheech & Chong, “Santa Claus
and His Old Lady”
This is much more of a sketch than a
song, but it illustrates in a silly way how various communities have,
throughout history, made up their own Christmas myths, some of which
are now taken more seriously than others.
“A Charlie Brown Christmas”
Soundtrack Album
The whole thing. It’s that good. It
actually has a sort of raw, spontaneous feeling compared to modern
production, like with the children’s choir on “Christmas Time is
Here.” A modern version of the same thing would end up much
more polished. An example of how music can be “quiet” and
still have complexity and energy.
Bob and Doug McKenzie, “The Twelve
Days of Christmas” I like how the choir just breaks in with
“TWELVE!” so they can get the whole thing over with.
The Kinks, “Father Christmas”
Silly premise. Serious message.
Serious rock.
Greg Lake, “I Believe in Father
Christmas”
Greg Lake was lead singer of Emerson,
Lake and Palmer (and original singer of King Crimson). Like David
Bowie, Lake was ambivalent toward religion (at least at the time he
wrote this song) and the song addresses the matter of how one can
believe in the Christmas holiday when one has been disillusioned by
both religion and “the holiday season.” In the end the
singer finds a greater meaning in the event. “Hallelujah, Noel,
be it Heaven or Hell/At Christmas, we get we deserve.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXCEdrnaFlY
Sacred Music (ex. Silent Night, O Holy
Night)
As John Podhoretz points out, the Anglosphere’s greatest Christmas story, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, never mentions the name Jesus and barely mentions church. But it’s largely because of that one story that Christmas has such a high priority in the secular calendar when in the Christian calendar it is necessarily secondary to Easter.
In 1976, Ayn Rand said: “A national holiday, in this country, cannot have an exclusively religious meaning. The secular meaning of the Christmas holiday is wider than the tenets of any particular religion: it is good will toward men—a frame of mind which is not the exclusive property (though it is supposed to be part, but is a largely unobserved part) of the Christian religion.
“The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it
expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial
way. One says: “Merry Christmas”—not “Weep and Repent.”
And the well documented fact that so many composers of the Great American Songbook were Jewish, and did so much to create the American Christmas with songs like Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” just points up the fact that in this country, where we have both the First Amendment and an official holiday on December 25, Christmas Day represents the various community traditions that celebrate a holiday on or near the Winter Solstice.
Artists pulled away from Christianity
and emphasized only the happy, humanist stuff that anyone could agree
with, as opposed to the deep theological conflicts that led to
Byzantine Empire politics, Church schisms and the Thirty Years War.
In this way, our generic Christmas does a lot more to promote “Peace
on Earth, and good will toward men” than a religion that
frequently delivers the exact opposite.
But if American Christmas delivers an
ecumenical, (small c) catholic message of hope, the flip side is that
our commercial “holiday season” isn’t really about anything
other than itself. Which is why, despite being atheist, I often find
myself liking the specifically religious music more than the Tin Pan
Alley stuff, which almost seems intended to be insipid. Which has
nothing to do with its religious content or lack thereof. When I say
“insipid” I mean that such music lacks character or
complexity. (There is a category of explicitly faith-based music
that still qualifies as insipid: Christian rock.)
So when done right, such music can be
genuinely inspirational. Such as:
Or:
Or even:
I mean, there was one point where
Cartman got hit with the cattle prod and he almost sounded like Jim
Nabors.
At one point in the star-crossed production of the Queen movie, which would eventually become Bohemian Rhapsody, producers had cast Sacha Baron Cohen, the provocateur behind Borat and other characters, to play Queen’s lead singer Freddie Mercury, but he has told more than one interviewer that the project fell apart when “someone” in the band told him that the middle of the story would be the point of Freddie’s death, and the remainder would be the rest of the band preserving their legacy. And Cohen told that person that no one would pay to see that. Which is too bad, because Cohen would have had some advantages in the role: he is at least as tall as Freddie Mercury, has a natural overbite, can actually sing, and shares Mercury’s fondness for disturbingly tight underwear.
Instead, the role went to Mr. Robot star Rami Malek, and the movie did indeed become focused around the life and death of Freddie Mercury. It works because Malek almost single-handedly carries the movie, projecting not only soulfulness and vulnerability but the cheeky, ambitious personality of Freddie Mercury the rock star. I say “almost” because Malek plays off a great cast including Gwilym Lee as a dead ringer for guitarist Brian May and Lucy Boynton as Mercury’s longtime girlfriend Mary Austin.
The overall problem at the core of this movie is that it’s very obviously “Hollywood biography” and is too obvious in linking the accidents of history into a dramatic theme. For instance, it explains Mercury’s signature stage trick of wielding a half mic stand by saying that at his first gig with the band, the microphone stand was adjusted for the height of the previous lead singer, and Mercury broke the stand trying to shorten it. (In truth, Mercury was somewhat taller than Rami Malek.) Mercury’s relationship with his dad is a stereotype of Conservative Immigrant Father versus Westernized Son, and the fact that the family dynamic is resolved when, on the day of the Live Aid concert, Freddie finally looks up Jim Hutton (whom he hasn’t seen in years) and then takes him to meet his parents (whom he also hasn’t seen in years) to introduce him as his boyfriend, just before putting on the greatest rock concert in history, is a bit too pat.
This didactic approach also extends to the necessary matter of Mercury’s final illness and its causes. I have no problem with saying that Mercury’s lifestyle led to him getting AIDS, just as most people get lung cancer or type II diabetes from their lifestyle choices. (Indeed, given what the ’70s were like, it’s amazing that David Bowie and Lou Reed lived as long as they did, or that Iggy Pop is still ALIVE.) Bohemian Rhapsody depicts a certain tragedy in Mercury’s life in that he was very much in love with Mary, but she realized probably before he did that he was truly gay, not bisexual. And while the movie makes clear that Mercury didn’t need any encouragement to pursue men on the road, the central conflict is set up with the introduction of Queen’s assistant manager and Freddie’s eventual boyfriend, Paul Prenter (the unfortunately named Allen Leech) who pushes Mary out of Freddie’s life and manipulates him into firing Queen’s first manager and eventually leaving the band. (This is another rewrite of history, since Mercury did do two solo albums but did not leave Queen either officially or behind the scenes.) And the disco-influenced “Another One Bites The Dust” (which was actually written by John Deacon) is turned into the backdrop for a montage where Mercury and Prenter tour London’s gay leather underworld, and when the song abruptly ends, Mercury has started to develop a cough.
The thing is, this didactic approach is also what makes this movie work, when it works. There are several scenes where characters are trying to make a pitch to other characters and in the process they involve the audience. Like when Brian May is telling the other band members how he wants to write a song – “We Will Rock You” – that turns the crowd into part of the band. Or how the band is trying to explain to a record executive how their use of opera will expand the horizons of rock music. Or how they tell their first manager that what makes Queen special is “four misfits who don’t belong together playing for other misfits who don’t belong anywhere.” Even Prenter gets a sympathetic moment when he confesses to Freddie that growing up in Belfast as both gay and Catholic, he never felt like he belonged anywhere. Almost as if gay people and straight rock fans had that much in common.
But that again gets to the matter of presenting Mercury’s decline, which is unnecessarily confused by making the Live Aid concert the framing device for the story. Historically, Live Aid was an event held in July 1985, but Freddie Mercury didn’t get tested for HIV until April 1987. But in the movie, Freddie gets his diagnosis just after hearing that the Live Aid/Ethiopian famine relief project was a thing, and it sets up the premise that the whole thing is an attempt to make his life right by patching up the rift with his bandmates (which again, is either simply exaggerated or just bullshit) and then confessing to them during rehearsal that he’s dying of AIDS. Now given that Roger Taylor and Brian May were consultants on this movie (John Deacon has refused to be involved with the ongoing Queen projects), and given that there are facts on record that can be looked up, I am disappointed that the band would allow Mercury’s story to be presented in such a manner. Even in the script, Freddie tells his bandmates that he doesn’t want to be “a poster boy or a cautionary tale.”
So when gay journalist Kevin Fallon referred to Bohemian Rhapsody as an “insult” that “borders on character assassination” I may not share his anger, but I can understand it.
And yet: The acting is great. The script shows the camaraderie within the band. And it’s QUEEN. Bohemian Rhapsody shows what was so great about this music in the first place and the winning performances show why anyone would care about these people, all leading up to the Live Aid sequence where the larger-than-life presentation is finally in accordance with history.
So my otherwise wholehearted endorsement of this movie is tempered by the point that as a biography of Freddie Mercury, it’s simplistic and misleading. But it’s an awesome show.
I suspect that to Freddie, that’s all that would have mattered.
