I'm not Dr. Schlewitz. I'm Luna Lovegood.

Luna Lovegood
http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Luna_Lovegood

According to the Myers Briggs personality survey, I am an INFP, that is, Introverted-Intuitive-Feeling-Perceiving (you can find out what you are here).  According to some Harry Potter super-fan folks, that makes me most like Luna Lovegood, which I find pretty funny.  The blonde who wanders around dreamily blurting out incoherent things.  Must be why my students don't understand me.

But the Harry Potter site has a much more positive spin, describing INFP folks as

Idealistic, loyal to their values and to the people who are important to them. Curious, quick to see possibilities, can be catalysts for implementing ideas. Seek to understand people and help them fulfill their potential. Adaptable, flexible, and accepting.

I'm okay, and so are you, pineapple.

Yeah, well, these kinds of surveys are designed to make people feel good about who they are, as is.  It is a reincarnation of the 1950s The Power of Positive Thinking, or the 1960s I'm Okay, You're Okay, or the 1970s Passages.  I'm not sure why I'm so resistant to being told good things about myself.  Sure, I have streaks of idealism, and have paid now and then for sticking to my principles.  But I have current of cynicism, and there are times when I have abandoned my principles.  I have tried to understand my students and help them, when requested, to fulfill their potential, but one uncomfortable lesson I've learned about myself over the past few decades is my capacity for disdain.  "Adaptable, flexible, and accepting?"  Like my body, increasingly limited.

I'm listening now to my internal Lutheran voice, the one Garrison Keillor has mimicked so well on Prairie Home Companion.  Introverted?  Just means I'm a snob who can't deal with the masses.  Intuitive?  I guess a lot.  Feeling?  I worry far too much about what others think of me.  Perceptive?  About others, but not myself.

Sorry.  In a poor mood.  A gray, rainy day.  Watched the Giants lose big time to the Broncos, interspersed with depressingly stupid ads of Pepsi, Call of Duty, and various beers.  In the basement, by myself.  Guess I really am INFP.

Movie Reviews: Too Bad The Spring Breakers Didn't Face The Impossible

WARNING: All sorts of spoilers.

The other day I jumped the gamut of cinematic art--from film as a slap in the face to one intended to inspire.  Spring Breakers and The Impossible.

I started the first, knowing I was entering this movie with predispositions and baggage.  I already have a class conscious-cum-stern Lutheran knee-jerk reaction to the very idea of college kids rushing south to enact some banal version of bacchanalia.  In my undergrad days (hrumph), in Reagan's "morning in America," I worked full time during spring breaks to make ends meet (plus, you know, I biked miles through perpetually flooded streets while at Oregon State, always uphill).  And my introverted sensibility could not have born partying with hundreds or more of unknown people in various states of drunkenness and dress.


The Beatles, Baby You're a Rich Man (Magical Mystery Tour, 1967)

The closest I came to this was a night of bar-hopping soon after my 21st birthday--and I will forever associate partying in a human herd with desultory dancing to a Beatle's medley mashed together with an ear-bashing 4/4 techno beat (BOMP bomp bomp BOMP, and repeat), vaguely pretty women trying not to look bored or disappointed (they had good reason, no doubt), an air of sexual tension suffused with competing, clogging colognes, smoke, and alcohol, and the second worst hangover in my life (the worst was after a night of rum and cusha at a going-away party in Guatemala).

Scene from Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, Writer/Director)
Source: Salon.com

But I had heard about Harmony Korine's previous controversial movies (Kids, Gummo), and decided to finally give this cult-status moviemaker a try.  The story centers on four college girls, bored, and desperate to join others heading to Florida for spring break.  Apparently, they've known each other since kindergarten, are very close, though one is an evangelical Christian (her name, Faith, has me immediately smelling clumsy allegory) and the others (Candy, Brit, and Cotty) spend class time doodling penises and partying hard the rest of the time.  The poor girls don't have enough money for the trip, though somehow the three baddies with cutesy names have enough to score coke.

But this movie isn't about plausibility, it's about polemic, and parody.  The scenes of spring break partying on the beach or in cheap hotel rooms are idealized.  Impossibly, all the young partiers have beautiful sculpted bodies as they dance ecstatically, guzzle beer, snort lines, with guys taking pics of girls baring magnificent breasts, and the girls just delighting in being little more than objects of sexual desire.  Debauchery is just non-stop fun!  Korine makes it clear, though, with dreamy color schemes, slow-motion moments, and jarring editing, that this is a fantasy.  He does give us a few dark moments: a girl collapsed head-down by a toilet, a near rape scene, and the creepy ATL Twins doing lines on a comatose girl's naked body.  But the party rocks on.

Sadly, I suspect some viewers won't get the joke.  It will be party porn, similar to what Anthony Swoffard described in Jarhead, young marines watching anti-Vietnam movies like Apocalypse Now or Platoon, not for the critique of war, but for the "magic brutality" of the combat scenes.

There's brutality in Spring Breakers, too.  The girls find a way to reach spring break nirvana after the three more nihilistic ones--Candy, Brit, and Cotty--rob a restaurant and its patrons, wielding squirt guns and hammers, which they use with abandon, clearly loving the mayhem and fear they provoke.  Once down in St. Petersburg, they are in paradise.  Faith never wants to leave, never wants the moment to end, uttering fatuous lines to her friends, her mother, her grandmother, about how perfect it all is, how she's found herself.  But it does end, she does leave, lost again.

First, they get busted at a party for drug use, and spend the night in jail.  A rising local drug lord named Alien had noticed them before and shows up to bail them out.  But his scene scares Faith, and she's on the bus back to boring college, weeping.  Later, in one of the more nightmarish scenes in the movie, a prelude to a stint of violent crime, the three girls are in swimsuits and pink ski masks, dancing around with guns, while Alien plays a Brittany Spears song on a white piano, as a garish sun sets on the sea around them.  They look like a vivisectionist experiment grafting feral skinned mole heads onto nubile teen bodies.  Predictably, I suppose, this image has become something to emulate in pop culture rather than an occasion to think critically about pop culture (I don't want to promote the websites by naming them here--but if you just google "spring breakers scenes pink ski masks...").

Soon things get too rough for Cotty.  After she's shot in the arm during a showdown with Alien's competitor, Archie, she's also on the most unmagic bus, glumly headed home.  "Spring break forever," is a repeated in the latter part of the film, but it isn't.  The remaining two girls shame Alien into avenging Cotty and his manly honor.  It's enough to screw him and then call him "scaredy pants," thus giving him the choice of their bodies or their contempt.  A no-brainer (literally and metaphorically), and they're off to do in Archie and gang, Candy and Brit in day-glo yellow bikinis and those pink ski masks, their beautiful bottoms swinging in time with the guns in their arms.  Alien is downed immediately (the pathetic Alien, who not long before had repeated "Look at all my shit" to the girls while showing them his money, guns, hat and shoe collections, and his Calvin Klein cologne).  The girls massacre the entire Archie entourage, briefly stop to caress Alien's dead face on the way back, and then drive back to Anywhere University in his car.

The point of the parody?  Not surprisingly, the Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney didn't think there was much of one, just an interesting experiment in pop-art that is "bound to acquire at least minor cult status."  But according to Boston Globe's edgier Ty Burr:

Korine delivers a teenage apocalypse that’s shocking and stupid and exhilarating and tender in equal measure. “Spring Breakers” fuses our worst nightmares and most reckless dreams of freedom until the two become indistinguishable.

Well, I'm neither as dismissive as Rooney or excited as Burr.  I was, believe it or not, once in my late teens and early twenties, and remember the yearning for freedom to do just whatever I wanted to do, to hell with consequences.  But I'm sure that yearning does not disappear in later decades for most people, who go to lesser and greater lengths to ignore it, or keep a lid on it (for the record, I've tried both lesser and greater).  Adults hardly have a monopoly on virtue.

Also, having taught college students for the past twenty years--and hearing variations of "kids these days" ad nauseum--I can't buy the notion that the current cohort of youth is any more rife with self-indulgence or nihilism than the previous cohorts, including my own.  And who raised all those awful kids, anyway, or taught them?  On top of that, over the years I've known many students who have been anything but self-indulgent and nihilist.  In other words, I think the parody in Spring Breakers is too harsh, too generalized.

At the same time, I think the film's most important critique has been missed by most.  It's the ending.  The two middle class students, who have gone to the marginalized poor white and black populations for their highs, who have fed on their cultural fodder, get them all killed, and get away with nary a scratch.  Korine's allegory is in part about class, and it made me think of young grads going into Enron at the end of the last millennium, living large while helping trash California's energy economy (for examples, see the documentary The Smartest Guys in the Room), or more recently, young grads making mounds of money off of mounds of toxic debt that drove us into "The Great Recession" (listen to This American Life's Giant Pool of Money or Another Frightening Show About the Economy).

But that message about class, unfortunately, is likely lost in the question of gender.  Why does Korine make four young women (three of them, as many have noted, from the relatively innocent world of Disney) the fulcrum of his ironic catapulting launch against youth pop culture?  Women can be as badass as men?  A hipster cool point that the masses (especially straight guys) will like the Spring Breaker fantasy, thereby confirming their idiocy (and justifying the condescension)?  I am still a bit mystified, but maybe that was Korine's intention--unsettle the viewer.

So, time for something far more conventional.  Incredibly conventional.  Talking about The Impossible after Spring Breakers is like wolfing down a McDonald's combo meal on the road after a gluten-free free range entree at a restaurant with distressed furniture, and artfully pierced and tattooed servers who in their off-time ride with a biker gang.

But some times a quarter-pounder and fries ain't all bad.

Scene from The Impossible (J.A. Bayona, Director)
Source: aceshowbiz.com

The narrative in Spring Breakers was anything but straightforward, full of sudden cuts, flashbacks, repetitions, foreshadowing and backshadowing.  The Impossible story moved chronologically from an opening that fleshed out the main characters, to a horrific tsunami that separates them, a harrowing aftermath as they look for each other, and a soothing denouement where the main characters are reunited, hurt, but not broken.  All based on a true story (the 2004 tsunami that swept through countries abutting the Indian Ocean).  Humans can survive grave disasters.  Families can remain intact despite awful calamities.  Those are assurances most of us like to hear, even if we know that not all humans survive, not all families remain intact (the movie makes that clear, too).

The movie delivers that assurance with good direction and storyline, great effects, and marvelous acting.  I was so taken in that I didn't think about the craft involved, except for one moment of wondering, "How did they make this all so believable?"  So different from watching Spring Breakers, where every other moment I'm thinking about the moviemaker's flourishes, as if Korine were muttering in my ear, "Hey, look what I do next..."

The story follows a British family--mother, father, and three young boys--living in Japan, which decides to spend Christmas at a lush resort in Thailand.  Naomi Watts plays the mother, playing her so well that she received her second Academy Award nomination (the first was for the 2003 21 Grams).  I'm not sure why.  She was great in The Impossible, but being thrown around by a flood or lying in bed on death's door was not as complex or compelling as her roles in 21 Grams, Mulholland Drive, Eastern Promises, or even I Heart Huckabees.  I thought the notable star was the boy playing her oldest son, Tom Holland.  Really, all three boys were eminently believable.

I checked in again with Rooney and Burr and their takes on this film, and they again took opposite sides.  Rooney gushed over it, calling it "one of the most emotionally realistic disaster movies in recent memory." Burr, though appreciating the moviemaking, in the end deemed it "frustratingly myopic." I suppose I agree more with cynical Boston than starry-eyed Hollywood on this one.

A problem I have with the movie is, again, connected to class--this habit of framing horrible events that disproportionately affect the poor and people of color through the eyes of relatively wealthy whites.  I mean, give me a break.  The moviemakers couldn't even handle giving the audience the family from Spain on whom the screenplay was based?  Granted, there are understandable commercial reasons for anglicizing the characters.  It's easier to give us dumb Americans a way to avoid sub-titles.  It's easier to avoid the awkwardness of having a Spanish family indicated by actors speaking with a Spanish accent (oh, and then the hassle of picking one of Spain's vernaculars).  As well, white audiences who make up the more lucrative cinema market will more readily identify with white characters.  And, after all, thousands of white tourists were injured, died, or went missing as a result of the tsunami.  One need only glance at the BBC's partial list of the 149 missing and confirmed British dead to get a sense of all the heartrending pain for survivors and their families and friends back home.

2004 Asian Tsunami
Source: tsunami.com

Still, according to Wikipedia, in total there were over 148,000 confirmed deaths, close to 46,000 missing, 125,00 injured and 1.69 million displaced.  Most of these casualties occurred in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand.  The Impossible ignores the global scope of the disaster and its victims, and the fact that the tourism trade for wealthier white folks exists because of poorer countries with ample supplies of very cheap labor and a need for hard currency.  It also avoids the plausible observation that natural disasters are so much more disastrous in places like Thailand, in part because national governments that expend resources on facilitating vacations for the wealthy have less to direct toward disaster prevention and relief.  Sure, all that context could make a movie screenplay unwieldily.  But it would be something if fewer movies depended on universalizing the experience of the rich and beautiful, while excising the misery of the rest of the people.

Okay, I'm grousing.  I enjoyed the movie, was moved by this story of the human will to survive, of the capacity for humans to put others before themselves in a crisis, and of the love in a family that pulls its members back together in spite of great odds.

But as with many things in my life--film, books, sports, teaching, politics, etc.--I can enjoy something, but still be unhappy with aspects of it (and vice versa in the case of Spring Breakers).

Some Mild Adventures at the OAS General Assembly

I'm on the board of the Institute for Democratic Dialogue in the Americas (IDDA), a non-profit that runs the annual Model OAS in Washington DC, a simulation for college students from across the Americas.  The IDDA executive committee agreed to subsidize my travel in June to Antigua, Guatemala, to attend the Organization of American States (OAS) General Assembly.  The OAS, a kind of UN for the Western Hemisphere, recognizes IDDA as a "civil society organization," and has been encouraging more input into its deliberations from these organizations.  So that's how I ended up in Antigua, attending the 43rd OAS General Assembly, convened  to produce a "Comprehensive Policy against the World Drug Problem in the Americas."

As happens every time I return to Guatemala, I felt like I was just picking up where I left off, as if the months (or years) away had been a brief timeout from a life that is a fusion of Peace Corps volunteer, archival historian and quasi anthropologist, and gringo tourist.  And as usual, the typical patterns of my Guatemalan life unfolded in different ways.

Calle del Arco, Antigua, Guatemala

1) The General Assembly was held at the Hotel Santo Domingo, a lujo place way beyond my means.  Instead, I stayed at the Casa Cristina, a modest but comfortable pensión, about a fifteen minute walk away.  That walk took me through the Calle del Arco, an oft-painted and photographed scene in Antigua.  As I passed under the arch, I saw three Mayan girls sitting on the sidewalk, chatting away. They're vendors; I could see bags of wares between theirs legs.  It was early morning, so maybe they weren't expecting a gringito to pass by at this hour.  Or maybe it's just that they were kids, taking their time to get what was, no doubt, a trying workday started.  They didn't notice me until I began to curve around their outstretched legs, and then they sang out "Hola, amigo, comprame unos manteles...muy bonitos.  When I didn't pause they lamented "Ay, favor, no compra algo?" As I continued I said "Ay, no, pero gracias."  As I passed the last girl she let out a hard sigh of frustration and swatted the back of my leg with her shawl.  I kept walking but looked back and smiled.  They were frozen, but suddenly burst out in laughter--they couldn't believe their precociousness, I'm guessing.  I took it as a good omen for their sales.

Mayan women celebrating Semana Santa
Antigua, Guatemala

2) Near the entrance of Santo Domingo, a few Mayan women and men hung around selling the standard tourist wares.  One young woman tried a number of times to sell me jewelry, trotting out some stock English phrases in a nasal, flat, almost robotic tone.  When "Good price" or "Very pretty" didn't get me to stop, she would call out, "Okay, maybe later." The last time I saw her, I did finally reply.  I said "Tal vez," and then, wryly, "Si Dios quiere"  (Perhaps, if God wills it).  She looked at me, as if she were trying to read me, and then laughed, and practically skipped away saying "Si, si, si Dios quiere." I decided my irreverent diplomacy was worth hearing her own voice.

3) One late afternoon I was again at the entrance, waiting for a bus to take me to another hotel where they would celebrate the formal inauguration of the OAS General Assembly.  While standing there, trying to ignore a warm light drizzle, I saw a change of the guard--Guatemalan special forces.  Two men, with impressive builds, berets rakishly askew, climbed out of a truck.  Automatics slung over their shoulders, pistols on their hips, they angled my way.  One began almost to swagger when he caught my eye on him.  And I would have accepted his macho superiority were his finger not jammed up his nose.

4) So I finally got a bus to the inauguration--at the Hotel Finca Filadelfia just outside of town, another luxurious resort that I could only visit as an itinerate, obscure diplomat.  Some young women--I guessed student interns, with blue blazers and yellow scarves emblazoned with the OAS logo, orchestrated our way onto the bus.  One intern who got on last, upon seeing a senior diplomat standing in the aisle, glared at a fellow intern sitting near him.  She told her, in a pleasant voice with an undertone of outrage, to get up and let "el señor" have the seat.  The diplomat was now equally upset.  "No, miss, never!  I'm fine.  I would NEVER force a lady to stand while I sit!"  "I would die if I did that," he added in a loud mutter.  There were some affirming noises, some laughter, and I was thinking "The man doth protest too much..."

K'iché Mayan Women at a clinic
San Francisco La Union, Xela

5) All the understandable security checkpoints and re-routed traffic slowed our bus.  What should have taken 15 minutes took three times as long.  But the mood remained light on the bus--lots of happy chatter around me to keep my mood up (I'm not one for crowded social occasions where I know nobody, and sometimes even those where I do).  My mood dropped when we reached the entrance to the session hall.  Someone--probably a tourism official a Guatemalan friend later told me--had the bright idea of placing a human statue at the doorway.  She was a beautiful, if slightly emaciated, white woman dressed in full Mayan traje, surrounded by stalks of corn, baskets of breads and multi-colored beans, and giving us a frozen smile.  After a couple of days of wandering among real Mayan women, attending an international forum dedicated to the rights and dignity of indigenous peoples, I was mystified by the thoughtlessness.  I know I shouldn't have been surprised.  This kind of elite appropriation of the heritage of marginalized indigenous peoples has been, is, common, not just in Guatemala.

Anyway, this living statue was the set up for "el show" we were to see after what turned out to be stultifying inaugural speeches.  I didn't stay to see the show, nor did many others, who probably had partying on their minds.  Our bus turned out to be trapped in the Finca's byzantine parking lot.  After pulling forward and backing up several times on one access road, the bus driver tried another, but after more forward and reverse, still no success.  We were in purgatory, our punishment for leaving early.  But someone must have prayed for us because, after 40 minutes of this, we finally found a way out, everyone cheering, the driver laughing.  Another 40 minutes later I was back in my room, with two ultimately inedible slices of Al Macarone pizza, and a very drinkable Chilean red.  I was indeed in Guatemala.

An example of the Guatemalan Ministry of Tourism's branding

6) I attended two three-hour "diálogos," sessions in which civil society organization observers gathered to have an informal meeting with Secretary General Miguel Insulza.  These sessions were a combination of panel presentations featuring representatives of different constituencies (e.g., organized labor, human rights NGOs, business councils), mild and fiery soapbox critiques of the "war on drugs" , Q & A moments with the Secretary General, and opportunities for delegates to raise their voices about matters not on the agenda (even though Insulza urged us to stay to the topics on hand).

To me these sessions were remarkable displays of international diplomacy--the effort of people from a wide range of origins, with sometimes radically different agendas and interests, trying to have a useful conversation (and debate) about how to resolve collective problems.  And I think the OAS made a good move in opening up this distinctive kind of venue at the General Assembly.  Alongside the formal, protocol-laden deliberations between the nation-states of the western hemisphere, there is now an inclusive space for more free-wheeling debate among transnational organizations--a recognition of the shifting character of global relations.

Occasionally, it could get wild.  At the first session a group of anti-Chavez men stood up and, amid applauses and boos, presented a list of complaints to the Secretary General regarding Venezuela's recent presidential election.  Evidently, the Venezuelan government's OAS head delegate was on hand, because he was all of the sudden at the podium denouncing this group, while the young men tried to yell over his amplified voice.  They ended up storming out of the session, followed by sympathizers, with others taking pictures or video of the near-relajo with their phones and iPads.  Eventually the Secretary General got the session back in order (there are Spanish-language news report about this here and here).

At the next session, the Venezuelan head delegate apologized for intervening in a forum where all voices should be heard, but later, when a Guatemalan woman spoke out against family planning and same-sex marriage, a majority of the audience stood with backs to her while others cheered and clapped in support.  But as soon as the woman finished her speech, the session was back on track, and again I was getting schooled in the multiple issues that complicate the creation of a comprehensive drug policy--from the standard debates over incarceration versus treatment, to the impact of illicit drugs on worker-management relations, and on to the ways current policies contribute to the "muerto civil" of social groups that already suffer discrimination (women, racial and ethnic minorities, the mentally ill).

I'm so glad for the opportunity to attend this event.  I learned a great deal, and realized there's a great deal more to learn, not just about the drug issue, but about the incredible diversity in our hemisphere.  And I'm grateful for the serendipitous surprises, mentioned above, that greeted me in Guatemala, whether amusing or trying.  While my body is no longer as flexible as it once was when I first went there in 1984, hopefully they will keep my mind and heart that way.

An afterthought.  Here's some Spanish-language TV coverage of the first civil society organization session (in repeated footage of the session about to end, I think that's me up a few rows on the right, with one leg out in the aisle, wearing light-colored khakis).  The report sums up pretty well the principle bones of contention about drug policy but unfortunately doesn't get into what representatives of different civil society organizations had to say.

Game of Bones and the Fraternity of the Ring

SPOILER ALERT for Game of Thrones

I was surprised when a number of women, from 20 to 50-somethings, told me they liked Game of Thrones.  Guess I had stereotyped them, thinking all the seemingly gratuitous female nudity and sex scenes (prompting one blogger, Jane Dough, to suggest renaming the show "Game of Bones"), would be a turn-off.  And I had assumed that this sword and sorcery fantasy would be far more appealing to males than females.

This may be true for the books.  According to Barna, just 3% of Americans have read one or more of the GoT novels, and males account for 2/3 of the readership.  This balance is quite different for those watching the HBO series.  15% have watched it, again according to Barna, and Wired reports that women make up 42% of viewers, and 1/2 of social media activity.

Data from the 3rd season.
From http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/06/women-game-of-thrones/

Why shouldn't this be surprising?  Writing for the Persephone Magazine, Elfity ("Shocker (Not): Women Like Game of Thrones") recognizes the patriarchy and misogyny in the stories, but says, with a tad of condescension, that

those of us with higher-level thinking skills can see it for what it is. The payoff, of course, is that we get to see amazing feminist characters like Daenerys Targaryen, Arya Stark, and Brienne of Tarth do amazing feminist things.

Arya Stark

Women can watch the show just because it's good story-telling, but they can also use the show as an occasion to talk about feminist issues, and to appreciate GoT's "nuances of gender relations."

Elizabeth Muhall at Literati.com doesn't buy this argument ("The fans doth protest too much, methinks: Is Game of Thrones Really Feminist?").  Sure, the female characters are complex, nuanced, but that on its own doesn't give the show a feminist bent.  And, she notes, "[f]or every female character demonstrating power there seems to be an accompanying weakness."  Arya's a "badass," but still has to pass herself as a boy for a time, and is a child, limiting her power. Brienne can beat up men, but joined Renly's guard because she had a massive crush on him (and, ironically, he's gay).  As for Daenerys,

Her demonstrations of power are almost always balanced out by observations about her nubile body and general boob-havingness.  Cracked writer David Wong notes how Martin, writing from Daenerys’ perspective, somehow manages to bring her breasts into the scenario...

Catelyn Stark

The HBO series does the same, though we could guess that there are women who don't mind seeing all the beautiful bodies in GoT and the steamy sex.  I think a problem here, or a question, is what do fans and critics of GoT mean when they say feminist?  Jane Dough gave higher marks on her "Feminist Leadership Board"(based on the 3rd season)  to Catelyn Stark for consulting with her son on military matters, for keeping him check, though then adds points for how well Michelle Fairley played her role (?).  She knocks Daenerys for her obvious attraction to a new military ally, Daario, and Ygritte for getting dumped by Jon Snow.

Catelyn's final (?) scene was incredible.  But it was a confirmation of her son's military plans that ends up in a horrific trap.  And what was she reduced to?  A final, awful scream, and killing Waldor Frey's wife--another error.  She thought misogynistic Lord Frey would actually care enough about her to stop the massacre? (and we could note that her mother instinct produced another huge error--letting Jaime go back to King's Landing with Brienne, without telling her son, in order to get her daughters back...).

So what's a feminist?  Smart, capable mothers?  Women who don't fall for beautiful men who are likely to betray them?  But for others the feminist point in GoT, particularly the HBO series, is that women can play the "game of thrones" just as well as men , and other examples of women doing what is usually reserved for men--mainly warrior stuff (see, for example, Kate Arthur's "9 Ways 'Game of Thrones' Is Actually Feminist" who adds that the HBO version gets points for having far fewer rapes than the novels--high praise...).

Brienne of Tarth

So GoT is feminist because women can be as politically devious and deadly at arms as men?  I don't know.  I'm thinking that rather than mine GoT for feminist gems--especially when there's confusion about those gems look like--we can appreciate the show for provoking a useful discussion of gender roles (as Elfity suggests)--though there's been far more talk of women than men.  There's not been much gender-bending among male characters, except for perhaps the short-lived King Renly and his boyfriend, Loras Tyrell--one of the best fighters in Westoros (though Brienne defeats him).  Robb Stark perhaps is another.  He appreciates the strong women around, like his mother, Catelyn, and his wife, Talisa Maeger.  Maybe Sam Tarney's another--but he's an old trope, the ungainly coward who proves himself by living off his wits rather than non-existent brawn.  Tyrion might be another, but he's actually just channeling the fantasy of geeks everywhere (including, I suspect, George R.R. Martin) that unlovely boys who grow up suffering pranks, name-calling, and worse, turn out to get the beautiful women, out-smart everyone, and even save the city.

There are far more prominent female characters in GoT than LOTR of course, but the latter has far less objectification of and violence against women.  There are few memorable women, though, such as Éowyn, the warrior niece of the king of Rohan, and Galadriel, one of the most powerful elves in Middle Earth and leader of the Galadrim along with her mate, Celeborn.  For Cath Eliot

"...Éowyn is up there with all the best kick-ass feminist heroes.  She's brave, she's rebellious, and most importantly of all, she's gender non-conformist. In fact, it's her refusal to bow to patriarchal conditioning and accept her designated gender role that ultimately saves the day."

Éowyn Takes on the Lord of the Nazgul
By Craig J. Spearing

Well, this is true to a point.  She does kill the Nazgul king, but she gets into that battle by disguising herself as a man (which Tolkien needs as set-up for the surprise).  And how does Tolkien end her part of the story?  She gives up the sword and shield, and her huge crush on the unattainable Aragorn, and marries herself off to Faramir.  Pretty conventional.

Galadriel is a remarkable character, but except for the time the Fellowship hangs out in Lothlorien, she just doesn't get to make many appearances.  LOTR is a thoroughly "man's world, woman's place" universe, to use Elizabeth Janeway's phrase.  Overwhelmingly, men are the politicians, the business owners, the intellectuals, the artists, the workers, the killers (except for Shelob, a female spider--there's gender equality for you!).  And there are a lot of absent females--the Ents lost their Entwives, and who in the world is reproducing the dwarves, or the constantly "multiplying orcs?"

Peter Jackson seemed to flirt with the idea of making Aragorn's love interest, the elven Arwen, a notable female character.  The screenwriters put in her place of a male, Glorfindel, and we get one of the best scenes in the movie, her flight to the ford of Bruinen with Frodo, where she takes on all nine of the Nazgul.  But over the next two movies, she's turned into a simpering, sad woman who has a difficult time standing up to dad (though she's an adult several times over), and who can only envision her life married to Aragorn and having his baby.  Again, pretty conventional.

But male characters in LOTR, mainly the hobbits, whom Tolkien clearly loves, show us something that GoT does not do with its men (except for maybe, just maybe, the Stark men)--the ability to show affection toward one another, to weep, to do stereotypically unmanly things without worrying about losing their manliness.  Jackson doesn't mess with that in his version of LOTR.

George Zimmerman. Plucky Hobbit, Awful Troll, or Wannabe Knight?

SPOILER ALERT for Game of Thrones

I've been thinking about how Lord of the Rings (LOTR) and Game of Thrones (GoT) compare in terms of race, but the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin controversy seems to render that comparison trite.  But maybe not.


J. R. R. Tolkien grew up in an era when both physical and social scientists ascribed characteristics to people based on their national and racial origins (that kind of ascription has hardly disappeared).  Thus Middle Earth is thoroughly racialized, not just in the sense of different races of sentient beings (humans, elves, dwarves, etc.), but in how Tolkien defined the enemies of all the good "free folk."  Who sided with the Dark Lord?  Dark people--the "Southerners," the "Easterlings," the "swarthy" and the "slant-eyed."  The "black-skinned" orcs are irredeemably evil.  And on and on (you can see a debate about this at Tolkien Gateway).

As New York Times writer, Elvis Mitchell, hilariously suggested, Peter Jackson dealt with races in LOTR by turning them into yesteryear's rock bands:

Mr. Jackson apparently feels that the way to keep each of the fighting groups separate in the audience's minds is to provide them with hairstyles reminiscent of 1970's bands. The hobbits all have heads of tossled curls -- they're like members of Peter Frampton's group. Aragorn and Boromir have the long, unwashed bushes of Aerosmith, and the flaxen-maned Legolas has the fallen-angel look of one of the Allman Brothers. (The tubby, bilious and bearded Gimli could be a roadie for any of them.) ''Fellowship'' plays like a sword-and-sorcery epic produced by VH-1.

Mitchell doesn't apply this to the LOTR's bad guys, but orcs wouldn't have been out of place as back-up bands for Kiss or Alice Cooper.  Racial cues remain, though.  The "fighting Uruk-Hai," with their dreads, are a black rasta band, the elves are over-the-top Aryans, and the movies are replete with the old equations of white and light with goodness, black and dark with evil.

So one could imagine that if Trayvon Martin had wandered into Tolkien's Shire, some hobbit might justifiably mistake him for an "evil creature," follow and confront him, get in over his head, and escape by killing him.  That's Tolkien's social world, but in his moral universe, if we eliminate the connections between race and character, then this hobbit would be clearly be in the wrong (indeed, it's near impossible to imagine this scenario even unfolding in Hobbiton).

But Trayvon Martin died in Tolkien's social world rather than his moral universe.  Despite having evidence on hand of manslaughter, the Sanford police department didn't arrest Zimmerman until forced to do so.  People like Juror B37 can think George Zimmerman is guilty of nothing more than poor judgment, or that Trayvon is just as responsible for his own death, or that can dismiss the credibility of the prosecution's witness, Rachal Jeantel--a young black woman--because she didn't talk good American.

Does GoT move beyond Tolkien's racialized Middle Earth?  Hmm, sort of.  Accept for a one kingdom, the Starks of Winterfell, and maybe Tyrion Lannister and Daenerys Targaryon, everyone's pretty awful in GoT, no matter their color--though all the principle characters are white, as are most of the minor ones, except for Daenerys' growing multi-racial retinue of followers.  But the HBO series, like the books, gets around racialized characters by avoiding race-talk.  While there is plenty of derisive class and gender talk, this fantasy is grimly realistic in everything but race.  Interestingly, the nightmarish white walkers are, well, white, with blue eyes even.  But none of the trash-talking invokes racial differences--surprising for a story that pretends to be brutally frank.  Queen Cersei openly disses the poor and creeps like the Lord Walder Frey treat women as nothing more than something to screw and get pregnant.  But no racial aspersions.  Westeros is apparently post-racial.

Hardly.

As others have pointed out (e.g., Saladid Ahmed and Raffit Sani), what characters do people of color play in GoT?  Prostitutes, pirates, duplicitous merchants, or Dothroki savages.  And who saves all the dark-skinned slaves in HBO's season three?  The whitest of the white, Daenerys.  An old trope, and an old debate.  As if white people led the Birmingham boycott, resistance in South Africa to apartheid, indigenous resistance to Ladino oppression in Guatemala, among other examples (tons of criticism of stories To Kill a Mockingbird and Mississippi Burning on these grounds).

Does that mean GoT should be unwatchable?  No.  It should be occasion for what US Attorney General, Eric Holder, called for, and honest discussion about race, though he was reflecting on the George Zimmerman acquittal and not GoT.  As for GoT, had Trayvon Martin blundered into Westoros, he would have likely been one of the numerous casual casualties, though in his case, there would have been no tumultuous outcry about his death, or the legal wrangles around it.  Just another minor extra gone.  George Zimmerman the hapless knight who kills him only because he's armed with something more than concrete.

Only the powerful get to start conflict in the GoT universe, and get away with it--apparently in both Westoros and Sanford.

Those Scary Three Rs

Blog Song for the Moment

Don McLean, Everybody Loves Me, Baby (American Pie, 1971).

Heard Jack Lessenberry's commentary last week about opposition in the Michigan State Legislature to adopting the Common Core.  He called this opposition, to my surprise, the "lunatic fringe."  Lessenberry's a pretty moderate guy, so for him to label it this way was strong stuff.

What's the Common Core?  Basically, it's what they, way back when, used to call the "Three Rs." Reading, 'riting, and 'rithametic.  According to the Common Core website,

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a state-led effort that established a single set of clear educational standards for kindergarten through 12th grade in English language arts and mathematics that states voluntarily adopt. The standards are designed to ensure that students graduating from high school are prepared to enter credit bearing entry courses in two or four year college programs or enter the workforce. The standards are clear and concise to ensure that parents, teachers, and students have a clear understanding of the expectations in reading, writing, speaking and listening, language and mathematics in school.

In other words, this is a pretty conventional attempt to assure that high school students are better prepared to enter the workforce or higher education.  The standards try to ensure, given the now wild mobility of Americans, and that some states were cheating on their report cards, that college admission officers and employers across the country can have some sort of solid expectation of what a high school diploma actually means.  It's also an effort to make the US education system more competitive in the global arena.

But this Common Core has run into the localism that has long prevailed in US education.  Michigan adopted it back in 2010, but renewal of its funding comes up in August.  A Republican faction in Michigan opposes that, and a Tea Party Republican on the Michigan House Education Committee, Tom McMillin, took the lead, slipping some lines into the budget bill that erase funding for Common Core initiatives.

In an op-ed, McMillin presents the Core--what some right-wing wits are calling "obamacore"--as a federal takeover of education, an opportunity for the Feds to steal student data, but what really has pissed him off was the lack of transparency around the development of the Core.  At the Statehouse hearings, he badgered  Department of Education officials, repeatedly asking about the process by which the Common Core was adopted, to such an extent that a chair, a fellow Republican Tim Kelly, cut him off.

After the hearing, Kelly said it was "unfortunate when you have some members that aren't listening to the answers that are beingprovided. You may not like the answer, but that doesn't mean you keep repeating the question."

Other legislators (both Republican and Democrat) wondered whether the federal government would use Common Core implementation to gather data on individual students.  There are more hysterical critiques out there, too.  Predictably,  Glenn Beck has labeled it "an extreme leftist ideology," connecting the dots of Obama, Common Core, and a retinal scan kerfuffle in a Florida school district.

It's odd that McMillin focuses on the process rather than the content of the Common Core.  No questions about whether the Core will improve educational outcomes, just veiled unsupported accusations that the Michigan officials lied about public input in the development of the standards, and that they represent a massive federal intrusion in local governance.  He bases his argument on two members of the Common Core Validation Committee who refused to sign off on the final version, neglecting to mention that there were 27 other members who did sign off, along with a bipartisan executive committee of six governors and four state superintendents.  This is a very centrist, technocratic policy proposal that only in feverish minds constitutes a left-wing conspiracy.

But there are good reasons to question the Common Core.  It is a top-down effort, orchestrated by governors, top education officials, academics, and funded by an array of organizations, from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the NEA to the Aspen Institute and the New American Foundation.  So I suppose one could dismiss the Core as yet another elitist effort that is not in touch with the daily grind of education.  In other words, how capable are school districts of implementing the Core, and will it ameliorate or exacerbate the growing inequality in our country's educational system?  Also, The No Child Left Behind Act has already incentivized 'teaching to the test,' and will the Common Core standards turn into goals that teachers end up mechanistically trying to realize?

As well, the Obama administration made a political mistake, I believe, in contributing funds to the Common Core initiative, and in compelling states bidding for "Race to the Top" education grants.

But, heck, I'm just sniping here.  There is faction of Americans that will criticize the Obama administration for whatever it does, and I'm glad some people with expertise and money have tried to do what so many local school boards have failed to do--raise the bar on education outcomes.

American Tolkien? How about American Hobbes: a comparison of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones

Blog Song for the Moment

Marian McPartland, Willow Creek, Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz Fest (2002)

(WARNING!  Some spoilers for those who haven't moved beyond the first season of HBO's Game of Thrones)

A couple of years ago I wandered through the five (soon to be seven I gather) Game of Thrones volumes, and found intriguing the characters, the story-line, and the grim political realism.  I also watched HBO's adaptation, and enjoyed them more since the screen-writers pared away George R. R. Martin's often turgid prose and sometimes tedious dialogue.

Lev Grossman at Time dubbed Martin the "American Tolkien" when reviewing the first book of the series--A Feast for Crows--back in 2005, and said

Martin has produced--is producing, since the series isn't over--the great fantasy epic of our era. It's an epic for a more profane, more jaded, more ambivalent age than the one Tolkien lived in.

The "great fantasy epic of our era?"  That's rather overblown and, really, later generations will have to determine that.  Will Game of Thrones be as widely read and appreciated sixty years from now, as is the case of Lord of the Rings trilogy today?  Doubt it.  Martin's writing is not in the same ball park as Tolkien's.

That said, Martin does give us a fully-realized fantasy world, as did Tolkien (both highly derivative).  And his characters are more multi-dimensional than those in LOTR--capable of right and wrong and everything in between, along with making whopping mistakes that are inevitably fatal for them, or those close to them.

And in contrast to Tolkien's rather static characters (good ones generally stayed good, the bad, bad) the Game of Thrones characters sometimes change in surprising ways--those that live long enough to do so, that is.  There's Tyrion Lannister, a remarkable character in the book--full of witty repartee and whose brain and heart are bigger than those of most anyone around him.

The Hound

There's the Hound, Sandar Clegane--no one can accuse Martin of coming up with boring names--one of my favorite characters, an intriguingly confusing mix of selfish brutality and nobility.

Jaime Lannister

Or there's Jaime Lannister, who seems to be growing a heart once he lost his hand.  You know, "It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell..." (Matthew 5:30).

Melisandre, the
Lord of Light's
high priestess

Despite efforts to create a totally "pagan" world, Martin can't escape his Western Christian heritage. Actually, he sort of trashes religion in general.  There's the bland "Faith of the Seven"--a state religion full of regalia, but of little substance apart from sanctioning royal marriages, and providing priestly fodder for raging urban mobs.  There are the "Gods of the Forest," who don't do much more than offer quiet solace to the various Stark family members who are wondering why their author is picking them off like flies.  The "Drowned God" in the Iron Islands is really just a set of rituals designed to confirm over-the-top macho violence.  The one religion that so far demonstrates tangible power is the "Lord of Light," who gives the dead life and provides demons to kill the living, a twisted version of the Jesus myth ("Light of the World"), and I doubt it's an accident that the one clearly nasty religion is monotheistic.

Tyrion Lannister

George Schmidt, over at Religion Dispatches, caught this difference in a thoughtful discussion of the "moral universe of the Game of Thrones."  Though there is no overt religion in LOTR, it is, as Schmidt notes, suffused with early Cold War Christian idealism.  Holding onto one's principles, whatever the cost, does matter.  The good guys win because they are good.  The evil-doers pay--even the good who momentarily lapse into evil (poor Boromir, for example, and even Frodo loses a finger when he briefly lets the temptation of the ring get to him at the end).  Drawing on the Protestant realist, Reinhold Niebuhr, Schmidt suggests that Game of Thrones is all about the tragedy of trying to do good in an evil world.  Hence anyone with a lick of idealism in the land of seven kingdoms finds out that virtue at times can be a vice, and vice-versa.  Thus the awful end of the "Hand of the King," Eddard Stark, the idealist.  His replacement in contrast, the diminutive and brilliant Tyrion, cunningly manipulates those around him on behalf of the royal household, but also himself. But are these the choices, blind idealism or cold-hearted realism?  Schmidt muses that Christian realism would be some sort of blend of both, and wonders if Daenerys Targaryen might be that blend.  She's a "liberationist" who frees women and slaves, yet is not above subterfuge and violence to achieve her ends.

I don't know.  Perhaps Schmidt, currently working on his Master's degree at Union Theological Seminary, is so immersed in his theological studies that he sees it everywhere (I remember doing the same in my grad school days).

Queen Cersei, who tried to school
Lord Stark in the Game of Thrones

For me, Martin's take on religion is just too relentlessly cynical.  It is not much more than an instrument of politics.  That is a rather simple way to view an aspect of human life that has been around since the ancients took time out from surviving to wonder about the meaning of things.  But then, everything in Game of Thrones is just a playing piece, even those trying to avoid that role.  As fervent fans like to quote, "When you play the game of thrones, you win, or you die."

Wow.  Like, deep, man...pass me the pipe, and are you up for some DnD, or what, man?

And that's sort of how I read Game of Thrones.  A really smart Dungeons and Dragons player with enough writing ability to get some adventures down in print, drawn from a DnD world where it's all about winning.  Rather than being reminded of Niebuhr, the story makes me think of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (1651) in which he argues that in a state of nature, there is no power (no "Leviathan") to restrain people from constant "quarrel" due to their ambitions, self-interest, and mutual suspicion.  In this state of nature

No arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm enjoying the HBO series based on Martin's story-telling.  As with previous HBO series (e.g. The Wire, Deadwood), these are well-crafted shows with great acting.  And its array of distinctive, fascinating characters, and all the political intrigue, have me hooked.  But watching the story on the screen makes Game of Thrones seem more epic than it does on the page, and the story does not (so far anyway) leave us much to dream about or for--which is what I suspect caused LOTR to become such a phenomenon in the US starting back in the Age of Aquarius.

That said, LOTR has its own problems, namely in the areas of race and gender.  Game of Thrones does, too, but I'll leave these matters for another day...