Liminal Spaces In Film

What are examples of liminal spaces?

A physical liminal space is something tangible that you can recognize as a pathway, passageway or portal. These places are transitory, meaning you’re supposed to pass through them on your way to something else.

I talked here before about liminal spaces which are places where people transition from one place to another and where no one actually lives. Liminal Spaces are often defined as places where people once were, as they have left their constructs behind, but now are not. These are also places where people normally spend time but may be empty at a given moment. Liminal space is the opposite of a permanent residence like your apartment or your hotel room. It is any portal, door, or corridor between places or any place where people stop for a brief period of time, or travel from one place to another, like a highway or rest stop. Even people can have liminal qualities. Travelers, for example, have such qualities, as they are moving between one space and another and have no fixed position or state of being. Teenagers and those nearing death are people who are also on the threshold of being or entering another state, of being a child or an adult, or alive or dead.

The Overlook Hotel – The Shining (1980)

Here we have a classic liminal space. Hotels are by their very nature places where there can be no real permanent residence, and are often a transitional space between one place and another. Here is a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining where Danny is rolling quickly down the empty halls of a deserted hotel, a liminal space that exists within a liminal space. Liminal spaces are often portals or doorways between the living and the dead because the walls of reality are thinner where they are not shored up by the mental strength of a permanent resident. This allows spirits, ghosts, revenants, demons, and other beings to enter or inhabit such places. In the case of the Overlook, the hotel itself is a liminal entity that has taken on a life of its own and regularly consumes the travelers who pass through or temporarily inhabit it, like Danny and his parents.

The Open Road – Duel (1976)

America’s highways (and any points along them, like gas stations, and rest stops) are also places of transition from one place to another. The road is not a fixed or permanent residence. Just like many cars, buses, trains, and many public places, it is a place people travel on, or pass through. All kinds of inexplicable occurrences can happen and there are countless unknown dangers on the road, not just from the road itself, but the people, and vehicles that travel along it. This is a scene from Steven Spielberg’s 1976 movie Duel, where a man is pursued by a dangerous truck driver along various highways. This kind of thing happens in road trip horror movies like Jeepers Creepers, and Joy Ride.

The Nostromo – Alien (1979)

Outer Space is itself the definition of a liminal space because of its life-inhibiting nature and because it is, once again, something people pass through rather than truly live in. In the 1979 movie Alien, the crew of the space freighter Nostromo encounter a dangerous life form while traveling through this space. The ship, Nostromo, is full of plenty of transitional spaces where the creature can hide and then leap out at the ship’s inhabitants who are hunted and killed while traveling through the ship’s empty halls and backrooms. In that sense, the Nostromo is reminiscent of a hotel environment. it seems like a more permanent residence except there is too much empty space for it to be considered a home. At its foundation, it’s just a vehicle in which people are moved from one place to another.

The Parking Lot – Fargo (1996)

Fargo is shot in such a way that even the permanent residences of its characters feel like liminal spaces. The feeling of the movie is cold and emotionless. just like its villains. It doesn’t help that the environment in which the story takes place is bleak and wintry Minnesota. Many of the plot developments take place in moving vehicles, places of work, diners, hotels, and parking lots, and the relationships between the characters often feel just as cold and disconnected as the places through which they travel.

The Incursion – Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness (2022)

The entire movie is about portals, doorways, and traveling the in-between spaces. The film is full of liminal moments of ghosts and demons, and even universes, possessing the living, the dead, and other universes, causing disruption to the natural order. These liminal spaces are places where the normal rules of physics seem to have been completely overturned. Since the little girl in the movie, America Chavez, has the power to travel between universes, it means she has no fixed permanent residence of her own, which makes her a liminal person, a doorway through which others can pass, which is also the ability that makes her so powerful and coveted by the movie’s villain. Here, the Doctor and his friend Christine walk through a world that has been invaded by another world through one such portal.

The Closet – Poltergeist (1982)

Closets are classic portals, doorways to other dimensions, through which other beings can enter this world, or in the case of Poltergeist, the 1982 film by Steven Spielberg, spaces through which people can be abducted. The little girl in the movie, Carol Ann, is abducted into the afterlife through this doorway, and much of the plot hinges on her family successfully navigating the outer fringes of liminal space to rescue her. In this scene, there are several doors through which her family can or cannot pass.

The Swimming Pool – It Follows (2014)

Water possesses liminal qualities since its surface is a barrier that separates the realm of earth from the aquatic realm. In the movie It Follows, swimming pools are set up as liminal spaces in time as well as space, places where childhood innocence and the literal avoidance of death can be maintained. I wrote about this film in another post, about the symbolism of all the bodies of water in the film, and how whenever the film’s monster gets too close in its pursuit of Jay, the film’s lead character, she retreats to places of innocence, symbolized by bodies of water. At the end of the movie, she and her friends hope to lure the monster to its destruction by using her as bait in an abandoned swimming pool, which itself takes place in the liminal space of an abandoned building after the crowds of students have gone home.

The Mist – The Mist (2007)

Based on a book by Stephen King, The Mist is part of the Stephen King multiverse, where different versions of Earth exist. In the Stephen King universe, the various earths are separated from each other by what King refers to as Todash Space, which is something like outer space, a largely empty and dark space between the worlds. Only Todash Space isn’t entirely empty. It’s full of horrifying monsters such as the ones seen in this movie after a military experiment opens a portal between it and this particular earth, very much like the Incursion seen in Doctor Strange’s movie.

The City and People of – Dark City (1998)

I don’t want to give away any spoilers but the entire movie is about trying to live in a space that isn’t really a space of its own. The Dark City of the title is a liminal space where the rules of physics do not apply, and even the people and their relationships are impermanent, including that of its lead character, John Doe, who must navigate his way from the center of the city to its outer edges, while being pursued by mysterious figures, in search of…himself. His journey is represented by the Fibonacci Spiral seen in the title sequence and throughout the film itself.

My Movie Hot List

Antman: QuantumMania

I’m gonna be honest, while I’m “mildly” excited to watch this, I don’t know that I’d shell out the money to go see this movie in a theater. Due to family issues beyond my control, I would have to watch this alone. Some movies are good for watching alone, but this one isn’t. It looks like a lot of weird fun that you share with your buddies.

I’m mostly interested in seeing Jonathan Majors’ giant screen breakthrough because I really really like him, I’ve heard that the character he’s portraying, Kang the Conqueror, is a huge Billy Bad Ass in the Marvel Universe, and because this movie kicks off one of the multiple plot threads of this new phase of the MCU, The MultiversalWar. Each movie after this one will be a piece of that story introducing us to alternate universes and other realms of consciousness and existence, like the Quantum universe in this movie.

Guardians of the Galaxy 2.5: Christmas Special

This movie looks like so much fun. Unlike the many fanboys who insist on complaining about the direction of the MCU, it seems that I actually do have a sense of humor. I love the MCU comedies, and I do not understand why all the MCU movies must be dark and deadly serious all the time in order to be taken seriously. I love the direction in which Thor was taken. I thought it was great fun and definitely better than the emotional slog that was Thor 2. Sometimes you don’t need or want great cinema, you just want the creators to lean into the craziness of whatever you’re watching.

Guardians of the Galaxy has been something of a comedy from the beginning, mostly because of the nature of the characters, and that last movie and this new one just sort of lean into it a little bit more. I’m looking forward to this one more than the Antman sequel because I really like spending time with all these deeply funny goofy people, and I’m glad that the creators and writers are just fearlessly leaning into the sheer batshittery of this part of the universe, because C’mon! Really!

Chevalier

I’m just coming off the finale of the Interview With the Vampire series which I’m going to have to talk about at some point because Wow! so, I’m really in a good place mentally to feel excited about seeing more Black men in wigs and stockings! It’s one thing to see Black and Indian women doing the whole ballgown movie thing, but we don’t often get to see Black men in these roles unless it involves Shakespeare or playing a servant.

I love the look of this film, and there’s the added attraction of it being based on a true story, that of a French Caribbean composer named Chevalier de Saint-Georges, Joseph Bologne. I’m a sucker for beautiful costumes, beautiful music, and sword fighting, and you throw in some Black people and I’m in, I guess!

John Wick 4

I just had the most interesting discussion about this movie with my co-worker, who said she had a real problem suspending her disbelief while watching these movies and kept getting pulled out of the film. I told her I didn’t have that problem because it never even occurred to me what I saw as taking place in a world like this one with the same political and systemic setup. I had always viewed this franchise as taking place in some kind of fantasy alternate universe, where you can just be riding through the streets of downtown New York with swords and guns and not one person would blink an eye at it.

This is what I mean when I say that whatever your mindset is when you start to watch a movie will probably determine how you’ll feel after having seen it. Anyway, this looks great and I’m eager to sit down in a theater with some popcorn and enjoy two hours of sheer Keanu Reeves, Donnie Yen, and Hiroyuki Sanada mayhem!

Violent Night

This looks like such wild and crazy fun that I just have to see this. This is definitely one of those movies that you can go see by yourself at the theater. I don’t know that I’ll do that but it’s an option. It looks like a Christmas version of a John Wick movie except it’s Santa Claus using magic and probably some guns which I know all of you must be excited about as well.

Glass Onion

Still don’t know what to make of this but I will not have to go to the movie theater to see it. I can just watch this, whatever this is, at home on Netflix. I like most of the actors here and quite frankly I was going to watch any movie that starred Dave Bautista, Janelle Monae, and Daniel Craig because these are not actors’ names that one tends to think of as being together. This also looks to be more comedic than the first film, which I didn’t think was especially funny, but apparently, that’s just a me thing.

For some reason, I’ve been watching a lot of comedy mysteries this year. I just came off the Hercule Poirot movies, The Orient Express, and Death on the Nile, and I will probably be watching See How They Run this weekend. I don’t normally gravitate to period mysteries. I’m not opposed to them or dislike them or anything. They’re just not the sort of movies I tend to gravitate to, so when I get the urge to do so, I flow with it.

Maybe I’ll Watch These

Bones and All

I’m not sure I’m in the mood to watch anything dealing with cannibals but I’m willing to watch this if it’s streaming. If it’s in the theater then it’s out of luck. I’m not spending a bunch of money to see this, although it seems intriguing.

Shadow Master

Yeah, this is a movie that’s just going to be watched via streaming only. This is not the kind of movie I would ever watch in a theater. I mean, Kung Fu movies are meant to be watched in the house, with popcorn and a remote.

Warriors of the Future

Fortunately, this is a Netflix jam so I don’t have to spend money on my curiosity about it. Okay, it really doesn’t seem like it’s a lot of fun, in the sense that it’s intentionally funny, but it does look thrilling and action-packed, so I guess that’s a kind of fun.

And Movies I’m Not Watching

Avatar 2

I didn’t care too much for the White Saviorism of the first movie. In fact, I found that movie infuriating in a way that I didn’t for movies like The Last Samurai, or Dances with Wolves. I’m not arguing about how beautiful it is but I think I’m gonna wait to watch this next year on some streaming service. Since my niece and nephew aren’t going to be with me, and this is really the kind of movie one watches with a group of people, I’m unlikely to see it in a theater anyway.

The Whale

I do not have any particular need or desire to spend money to see this. Plus this looks like one of those movies where there’s going to be a lot of crying. I’m really glad Brendan Frasier has made this return to making movies. I missed him, and this actually looks alright, but I’ll catch this on streaming.

I Wanna Dance With Somebody

I’m not going to sully my memories of Whitney Houston with a biopic. I just can’t do it.

M3gan

This movie is probably going to blow up once it comes out becomes it looks unintentionally hilarious and there are already a bunch of memes about it! I’m not paying money to watch what is essentially a killer-doll movie, but I’ll go see it my sister pays for my ticket because this seems like the kind of thing she’d attach herself to.

I still do not understand after all these killer doll movies why anyone would ever build life-size killer robots that look virtually indistinguishable from an actual person. I don’t understand the plots of movies like Bladerunner and stuff where that kind of thing happens. Why would human beings still be doing that? Have we learned nothing?!!! On the other hand, this could just be an American thing because the Japanese build life-size robots all the time and they don’t ever seem to have this problem with the robots trying to merc people.

The Monster Files (Pt. 1): The Old School

I had a lot of fun making this list and classifying these monsters, although there are all types of classifications to be made and someone else’s list may be very different from this one.! This is just how my mind classifies certain Horror films.

I love monsters! I love watching the movies and talking about them, and I don’t need to wait for Halloween to do that if I don’t want to…

This isn’t a comprehensive or even academic list, btw. This is just a broad, general sort of list, and there were a few I had trouble assigning to a type, because some monsters simply defy description, and I guess that’s their point. Some of them I just threw in where I think they should show up. You’re probably going to have a different idea of where certain monsters go, for example, you may classify some of The Stalkers into another category.

You should argue about this among yourselves, and then let me know what consensus y’all reached.

Also, some of these monsters can fit into multiple categories anyway, because most of them do eat people, many of them lurk in isolated areas, and almost all of them can certainly be classified as animals of some kind, but I chose to put certain ones wherever, for reasons. For example, zombies can go under both Devourers and Classic Monsters, and I chose to put them under both.

The Classics: The Old School

Y’all know these guys. They’ve been around forever, and there are about five bajillion movies and television shows that are all about their prehistory, history, present, and future. That’s right, we’re talking about vampires, werewolves, and zombies, although the modern versions of zombies are relatively new, compared to say, Frankenstein’s monster. Some of the earliest films in the horror genre were made during the silent film era, like Nosferatu from 1922, which bears little resemblance to the vampires we see today, and Dracula, which was released in 1931, starring Bela Lugosi, in which some of the vampire tropes were simply made up for that film, (but that is a fairly common occurrence). There is also the silent-era movie, The Vampire, from 1913, which starred one of the first female vampires and was taken from a poem by Rudyard Kipling.

Vampires can be used as a stand-in for a wide variety of issues. The original Dracula was a stand-in for sex, disease, and anti-immigrant hysteria of East Europeans into England. Since then, vampires have been a euphemism for sexually transmitted diseases, unmitigated consumption, wealthy patriarchy feeding on the proletariat, and elites fighting against extinction.

And then there are the scientific and natural vampires, that have nothing to do with the supernatural, as their condition of vampirehood is scientifically explained, like the advanced vampires from Guillermo Del Toro’s Blade 2, and the TV series The Strain, and the species of vampires featured in 30 Days of Night. Vampires even managed to make their way into outer space in movies like the 1985 Lifeforce. And finally, there are the parodies of vampires like 1995’s Dracula: Dead and Loving It, and the brand new, What We Do in the Shadows, which can be seen on television and the big screen.

The next classic monster would be the Werewolf, with the first movie about a man becoming a wolf, released in 1941, and starring Lon Chaney. Although Chaney, and his monster, went on to star in a bunch of team-up movies and parodies with other classic monsters, the werewolf never seemed to gain quite the same amount of popularity as the vampire, even though it too can be successfully used for allegorical storytelling. Typical themes associated with the werewolf are the ancestral curse, dark legacy, or hereditary disease.

There are long stretches of time when we don’t get any movies about werewolves, and no one seems to miss them. There was a brief spate of them in the ’80s, which made for a good handful of modern movies, like American Werewolf in London, with its themes of personal displacement, The Howling, which addressed sexual assault trauma, Dog Soldiers, which involved military corruption, Ginger Snaps discussed sexuality and young womanhood, and the Underworld franchise addressed themes of class and slavery, through a long-standing war between vampires and werewolves.

And then there are Zombies. The ones we see today don’t have a lot of resemblance to the really old-school version. There are, at least, three types of them, and pretty much all they have in common is being dead. Some of the old-school classic zombies are based on the demonization of African pagan religions by Hollywood. In some of the Caribbean cultures, there is extensive folklore about bringing the dead back to life, to serve as slaves using magic. What a group of people consider horror is closely related to the culture, and the creation of zombie folklore in Caribbean cultures, served much the same purpose as the Japanese creation of Godzilla, in that it served to give voice to the cultural, and generational trauma of chattel slavery. Pre-Night of the Living Dead, most zombie movies had their basis in Hollywood’s racist depictions of African religions of the diaspora, with the exception of scientific zombies, like Frankenstein. Written by Mary Shelly in 1818, it’s about a scientist who resurrects a man from the pieced together bodies of the dead.

Today’s zombies are not based on religion and have a closer resemblance to scientific zombies, as they are sometimes caused by outside factors like viruses, meteors, or experimentation, and can be a stand-in for social issues, like consumerism or racism. Many modern zombies are the fast kind, that apparently do a lot of cardio, and there are now ironic, and self-referential, zombie parodies, starring people who’ve seen all the zombie movies that came before and mock the sub-genre.

There’s always a new zombie movie lurching about, and there are far too many to name, since the huge resurgence in zombie fiction that started in the late 90s and hasn’t let up yet, as people keep finding new twists, like the Historical zombies of 2016’s Pride Prejudice and Zombies, and Zack Snyder’s heist/zombie mashup, Army of the Dead. We now have several television series about them, and zombies have even moved onto the international stage, with some of the best stories produced in South Korea, like the historical zombie television epic, Kingdom, which was created by the writers of the movie Train to Busan, and movies like #Alive, and One Cut of the Dead.

https://asianmoviepulse.com/2019/03/30-asian-zombie-movies-that-are-worth-your-time/

The Classics/Slashers

The Slasher movie had its heyday in the ’80s, but the ball really got rolling in 1960, after Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was released to shocked audiences, and it set some of the conventions of the genre, like the spooky house, the surprised female victims, and the killer’s association with madness. Psycho spawned a slew of similar films about isolated houses, where crazed, knife welding, madmen lay in wait, although movies, like Don’t Look In the Basement, were usually called psychological thrillers.

After Psycho, other movies paved the way. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre used the same idea of the isolated, rural location that was seen in so many slasher movies of the 80s, and the 1978 Halloween, introduced the staple trope of The Final Girl, who fights the slasher and survives to the end of the movie, due to her sexual purity. All these movies led to what is now called The Golden Age of Slasher Movies, with Jason, Michael, And Freddy, slashing their way through nubile teenage girls, between 1978, and 1990. During the 80s, novel plot twists would be added, like the dream killings of Freddy Krueger, from the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. This Golden Age also sparked a Conservative backlash based on concerns about violence in movies, which eventually led to the decline of such films by the 90s. Not that such films weren’t still being made, because there were always the low budget and direct to video movies, but the larger commercial sellers mostly fell by the wayside, as the teenagers, of the early 80s, grew into adulthood, and mostly lost interest.

In the 90s though, a new crop of teenagers spurred the creation of a wave of Slasher movies with ironic, meta-textual, and self-referential themes, like Scream, Halloween :H2O, and I Saw What You Did Last Summer, which existed mostly to highlight the various murders of stars like Jada Pinkett, Brandy, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze, Drew Barrymore, and Courtney Cox, but this era was eventually supplanted by the genres next biggest darling, The Zombie film. This current era has produced the comedic version of the Slasher film, based on viewer’s knowledge of previous slasher movies, like Cabin in the Woods, Freaky, and the re-emergence of the Scream franchise.

The Classics/Kaiju

Contrary to popular belief, Kaiju are pretty old school, and did not actually start with Toho Studios 1953 Godzilla. It sort of began with the 1933 King Kong, which had some influence on the making of Godzilla. Later in 1953, The Beast from 20,00 Fathoms was released, about a newly awakened dinosaur rampaging its way through the streets of New York. The Kaiju movie is distinct from your typical giant monster movie, in that it takes place during the modern age, the monster is mostly a metaphor for another real-world problem, and at some point, the monster must menace a city, although that is negotiable. Godzilla was a metaphor for nuclear power and was Japan’s way of dealing with the trauma of the atomic bomb, and King Kong was a metaphor for the American enslavement of Africans, not because that was the intent of the creators, but because many of the movie’s viewers thought that allegory mapped neatly to the film’s plot.

Many of the American monsters of the 50s were nuclear metaphors, with regular animals, and insects becoming oversized because of atomic energy, like ants, locusts, rabbits, spiders, and in one spectacular case, an angry white woman, in Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman. And then there is The Blob, which wasn’t so much about the fear of radiation as it was about science in general, and a response to American fears about the US space program.

There is a good, long history of movies about giant monsters tearing up cities, and Hollywood continued this fine tradition, by substituting fictional monsters, like the Ymir from 20 Million Miles to Earth, and the monster from Cloverfield, and the scientific man-made monsters, like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park. We’ve even reached the stage of parody, in movies like Colossal, where a young woman finds out she is the avatar of a rampaging Kaiju and can control its actions, and we’ve also reached the “homage” stage, with a callback to the Japanese monster/robot battle movies of the 60s, with movies like Pacific Rim. I spoke about this in my Starring the Landscape series on cities, about how cities, mankind’s greatest artificial construction, and the theme of destruction by creatures that were irresponsibly created by mankind, or were a form of natural revenge.

There is room in the genre for all kinds of stories to be told, from Korea’s ecological horror movie, The Host, mysteries like the Cloverfield franchise, the old school science fiction of War of the Worlds, children’s comedies like Monsters Vs. Aliens, and the more contemplative, Monsters, from 2010, about an invasion of Earth by strange giant aliens, that much like the original War of the Worlds aliens, take no notice of humanity, at all.

The Classics: Animals

Outside of the gigantism suffered by regular animals, during the 1950s, which was usually caused by nuclear waste or bomb testing, there was the issue of their smaller cousins. In the 70s, a new type of horror arose, based on environmental fears, which spawned a great number of nature revenge films. In 1962, Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, which helped to launch the Environmental Movement in the US, which had so much influence, that it began to affect Pop-Cultural trends. Jaws was released in the Summer of 1975 and we were off to the races. What animal can kill human beings in the goriest fashion?!!

Hence the absolute glut of When Animals Attack films that were released between 1975, and 1984, like Food of the Gods, about rats grown to enormous size from eating a substance bubbling out of the ground, The Swarm, featuring Africanized killer bees, Squirm, about worms enraged by downed power lines. There were pirahna, sharks, frogs, spiders, dogs, bears, and every other animal got in on the action, in the 1977 film Day of the Animals, where hikers encounter hostile animals in a forest that had been poisoned by chemicals. I remember watching a lot of these movies when I was a kid, and while I did laugh at a lot of them, some of them were actually scary. I distinctly remember discussing the arrival of killer bees to America’s shores with my classmates and all of us were genuinely terrified at the thought. Well, they got here some time ago, and it hasn’t actually been as terrifying as the news media and the movies made it out to be.

And let’s not forget the prevalence of killer bear films, many of them clearly Jaws ripoffs, starting with Grizzly in 1976, and reaching the pinnacle in 1979, with the release of Prophecy, which checks off all the popular boxes for movies made in that interval, with a murderous bear-like creature, mutated by environmental waste from a logging company, tears apart random backpackers. We can still experience a little of this today, in the crop of grizzly horror films, like Into the Grizzly Maze, The Edge, The Revenant, Annihilation, BackCountry, and Grizzly Man.

Next up in Part 2: The New School!

I really enjoyed writing this but it was getting a bit long, so I decided to divide this list into pre-modern, and Modern. I said earlier that this isn’t a comprehensive list since there are some things that don’t make either list, like ghosts and haunted houses, a list of which is so massive, and so old, that it could go on The Classics list, or The New School list since those movies never stopped getting made. They simply kept updating themselves. I will talk about a few of them in part two.

Random Conversations on Tumblr

 Just some of the conversations I’ve been reading, and sometimes participating in, on Tumblr. Incidentally, you should check out my Tumblr page. It’s a bit different from this one, in that I post more about politics, and social issues, along with more casual things like goofy animals, and silly discussions.

Robots and Race

* The TV Series Humans has just finished its third season, and quite a number of fans are unhappy. I watched the second season and noticed that race wasn’t much talked about, although since many of the robots featured depict different races, it should have.

The star character for some of the major plotlines was Gemma Chan’s, Mia. She was killed in the season finale, and fans felt some type of way about that. I didn’t watch the third season because I had gotten bored with the show.

But something in EAWS’s essay, about how Mia was treated on the show, and the third season’s approach to racial issues, prompted thoughts from me about how the subject of racism is depicted in science fiction/fantasy shows, especially when the writers are White. I’ve noticed that they are often not honest about White culpability in the invention of modern racism.

I’ve been noticing this trend, and I had some things to say about.

eastasiansonwesternscreen

 

Humans is one of those shows that is racially diverse on the surface, but in reality is very safe, very white-centric (yes, even with having Mia and Max in the main cast).

“Äkta människor”, the original Swedish show had its own problems with writing the characters of color,  but it was always very clear that the in-universe “Real Humans” (”We are People”) movement was a direct parallel to the white supremacist, anti-immigrant alt right groups / political parties, and all their members were portrayed by the white actors.

Humans, however, while also pretending to be a sci fi allegory of real life racism and xenophobia, makes sure that for each bigoted white character there’s always a Bigoted Character of Color. Just a few examples –

• a random Black man, a member of alt-right “We Are People” movement, in s1 holding an anti-synth banner and shouting anti-synth propaganda;
• Thusitha Jayasundera’s Neha in s2 was leading a case against Niska, yes, she went through massive character development in s3, and became an active synth rights supporter, but in her own words, she changed her views mainly because of Laura (a white woman);
• a xenophobic anti-synth cameo character played by Naoko Mori in s2;
• Ed’s bigoted Black friend, who persuaded Ed to sell Mia (which in turn made it easier for the writers to redeem Ed in s3 – “Ed wasn’t a racist who dehumanized his girlfriend of color, he was just a weak man, who followed an advice from his Black friend, it’s the Black friend, who is the /real/ racist” – that’s the writers’ message here);
• a Black woman police officer, who profiled Mia in s3;
• a random Angry Black Woman on the street, that attacked Mia in s3;
• a Brown Muslim politician on the Synth commission, that was presented more anti-synth, than a white guy, who lead the commission (s3);
• an anti-synth Brown Head of the Police, member of the commission;
• an unnamed Black man leading the human supremacist group against the synth compound, targeting Max and Mia (3×08).

Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, third time is a pattern, as they say.

  Keep reading

lkeke35

What was the point in changing what was basically a white nationalist into a Black xenophobe? Intersectional bigotry exists, yes. But white writers of Äkta människor managed to show intersectional bigotry through white characters – they had xenophobic white gay character and a homophobic white hubot/synth, they even had a weeb. Brown writers of Cleverman showed intersectional bigotry through Koen (in s1) and Waruu West in s2. But when white writers prefer to show Black and Brown characters as the “real” racists (like Sense8) the only reason for that is that the writers don’t want to touch the subject of white supremacy because it makes them uncomfortable. *

I love this, and I just want to piggyback a little bit off this post for a minute:

This is one of the major reasons why I dislike racism allegories written by White writers. They often, and very deliberately, get these allegories wrong by trying to equate racism and white nationalism, with “reverse racism” (which is not a thing, btw). They often do this by casting PoC as virulent racists against whatever out-group is the stand-in for a marginalized group in the narrative, whether its robots, supernatural creatures, or aliens.

I’ve seen this happen in a lot of fantasy, and sci-fi narratives written by White writers, who are attempting to lecture their audience on how bad racism is, all while trying never to acknowledge the elephant in the room: That our current model of racism, they are riffing on, was invented by White people.

They often make these virulently racist characters Black as well. In Heroes, the nasty racist, who wanted to kill all heroes, was a Black woman, who actually killed children. In District 9, the African characters were racist against the aliens, monetarily prostituting them, exploiting them, and even cannibalizing them, (which is a whole other nastily racist trope about people from the African continent, that I simply cannot believe no one caught.) In the X-Men/New Mutants TV Series, The Gifted, you have a Black man, as a member of the government, hunting down the mutants, to put them in concentration camps, and in Teen Wolf, you have a Black woman who wants to destroy all supernatural creatures, and yet again, advocates killing children to accomplish her goal.

It’s even worse when sometimes these are the only Black characters in the entire narrative, or worse yet, Black women.

There is already a dearth of Black women in fantasy and sci-fi media, so Black women being cast in these roles (of killing children) is an especially nasty trope, that needs to fucking die, especially when you consider that it is real life Black women, who know, above all else, what it is like to lose their children to violence, and are working hard right now to protect their children from things like gang violence and police brutality. Real life Black women work damn hard to counter the very narratives these characters are advocating in these shows. To then cast these (always dark-skinned, with natural hair, because its simply not enough that they be Black) women as the advocates and killers of children, in these shows, is an especially insulting slap in the face to Black fans, as Black women are some of the hardest fighters against racism and sexism, being so often on the receiving end of both, and to keep seeing them cast in these roles is more than a little enraging.

I know the point the writers are trying to make is that there’s racism on all sides and that anybody can be racist, but that message is more than a little self-serving, especially when you consider that it is only White writers who tout this message, in their allegories about bigotry. So, not only are they appropriating our stories of oppression (all things that have been done by Whites to everyone else) to use for non-human beings, but casting PoC in these roles as the oppressors, because they want to express the idea that that type of racism and bigotry is an equal opportunity position. By doing that, they thereby remove themselves from collusion with the issue and relieve their own guilt.

 

Source: eastasiansonwesternscreen

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*And then there’s this problem, which is seen in every scifi/ fantasy racial allegory from True Blood, to Zootopia, to Bladerunner, to Bright, to The X-Men……… 

http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-cringe-worthy-way-sci-fi-fantasy-deal-with-prejudice/

Yet it’s the kind of parable that turns up over and over again in science fiction and fantasy stories that are reportedly trying to convey a message of tolerance. “Look, we get that you’re having trouble seeing minorities as humans, so perhaps it would help if you imagined them as something that is A) objectively not human and B) inherently dangerous.”…

…What makes it worse — and weirder — is that writers can’t resist giving these marginalized groups some kind of superpowers, which in turn actually gives the fictional society a legitimate reason to fear them.

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Science Fiction Genre and Race

 *White writers also have a tendency to be lacking when it comes to imagining futuristic depictions of race, often simply reproducing the same racial issues (and many of the same stereotypes) that exist right now. The situations of various PoC simply never changed. We’re still sassy sidekicks, living in poverty, model minorities, or just erased.

https://psmag.com/social-justice/welcome-to-the-post-racial-future-its-still-pretty-racist

Altered Carbon presents a world that looks post-racial, and in which humanity has escaped from identity, and identity politics, once and for all. But even when bodies are interchangeable commodities, certain bodies are treated as having more value than others. for the greater profit of rich people and white people, and especially of rich white people.

 

http://colorwebmag.com/2018/03/27/the-racial-flaws-of-blade-runner-2049/

I’m surprised a film of this magnitude and of this scale decided to show one of the most regressive and most racially-charged images I’d seen in a while; replicant Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), the replicant assistant to Niander Wallace (Jared Leto)  is shown getting her nails electronically altered by a small Asian man, whose hunched over, deep in his work.

The stereotype of the Asian nail salon tech has made its way into the future.

 

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/03/-em-star-wars-em-and-the-4-ways-science-fiction-handles-race/359507/

 Sci-fi likes to believe it can imagine anything, but, especially in its mainstream incarnations, it’s clearly a lot more comfortable imagining race in contexts where the topic is dealt with obliquely or simply not mentioned or foregrounded. In this area, Hollywood adventures are strikingly timid. 

 

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Black Feminism

*Discussion of Black women as love interests. By saying that Thor is only interested in Valkyrie, as a heroic figure, it  is akin to saying she’s a strong, independent, Black woman, who don’t need no man, and how this does not take into account intersectional femininity:

The Problem with Valkyrie Being Simply a “Hero” to Thor

So…I get not everyone is going to understand this, especially if someone is not a Black woman and doesn’t have our experiences, so I’m going to try to lay this out as nicely as possible and try not to come off too harsh.

I’m going to start off with a quote from Alice Walker:

“Black women are called, in the folklore that so aptly indentifies one’s status in society, ‘the mule of the world,’ because we have been handed the burdens that everyone else–everyone else–refused to carry. We have also been called ‘Matriarchs,’ ‘Superwomen,’ and ‘Mean and Evil Bitches.’ Not to mention ‘Castraters’ and ‘Sapphire’s Mama.’“

You see, Black women are expected to be the “hero” of someone else’s story. We’re expected to be “the help.” The “mystical hero.” The “sassy friend.” We’re always there to help out the lead, but we’re never the love interest.

Chris Hemsworth has said himself that Thor is “smitten” by Valkyrie…when you disregard that and say she’s simply his hero and that it’s refreshing that he’s not admiring her in a romantic way, you are confusing your experience as a non-Black woman with ours.

Black women have historically been masculinized and fetishized. We’re either seen as too unattractive for love or too sexual to be romanticized. So, when we are put on a pedestal as a hero, it’s not at all refreshing. It’s the same ol’ same ol’. Now, being adored and loved? That’s something Black women never get to see for themselves.

It’s something that has slowly been changing, but the more it changes, the more pushback is given in response. CW’s Iris West is nitpicked as a character for the silliest things while the fandom constantly ships Barry with Caitlin, a white character who has shown no interest in him or vice versa. Even the actress cannot escape the anger from fans who prefer the lead be paired with a white woman. She faces constant harassment on her social media on a regular basis.

So, while it might be revolutionary for white female leads and other non-Black female leads to be looked at like heroes rather than love interests, it’s not so much for Black women. So rarely are we given the message that we too can be worthy of love. Please tread carefully when you suggest that a Black woman being seen as a man’s hero rather than love interest is “refreshing.”

 

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Humorous Interlude

 

 

*The discussion, on the adoption and care of the Roomba, continues: 

 gaymilesedgeworth

after i move i really wanna get a used roomba

 

gaymilesedgeworth

biggest-gaudiest-patronuses

just remember they’re social animals and should always be kept in pairs, don’t get a roomba if you aren’t prepared for that responsibility

 

fireheartedkaratepup

That’s a common misconception. Roombas do perfectly fine on their own if you spend quality time with them! They group together in the wild for protection, but when they have no natural predators in the area they often choose to live alone.

 

biggest-gaudiest-patronuses

i didn’t know that! do you have any advice on roomba breeding and the problem with parent roombas’ tendency towards eating their young?

 

ironbite4

……..I’m nuking this entire hell planet from orbit.

 

biggest-gaudiest-patronuses

even the roombas?

 

ironbite4

The roombas are coming with me.  Can’t let them stay with you crazy people.

 

Source: gaymilesedgeworth

 

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Representation

*I loved this speech about the importance of representation and inclusion:

Rick Riordan won a Stonewall for 2017

rosetintmyworld84

 

Rick Riordan was awarded the Stonewall Book Award for his second Magnus Chase book, due to the inclusion of the character Alex Fierro who is gender fluid. This was the speech he gave, and it really distills why I love this author and his works so much, and why I will always recommend his works to anyone and everyone.

“Thank you for inviting me here today. As I told the Stonewall Award Committee, this is an honor both humbling and unexpected.

So, what is an old cis straight white male doing up here? Where did I get the nerve to write Alex Fierro, a transgender, gender fluid child of Loki in The Hammer of Thor, and why should I get cookies for that?

These are all fair and valid questions, which I have been asking myself a lot.

I think, to support young LGBTQ readers, the most important thing publishing can do is to publish and promote more stories by LGBTQ authors, authentic experiences by authentic voices. We have to keep pushing for this. The Stonewall committee’s work is a critical part of that effort. I can only accept the Stonewall Award in the sense that I accept a call to action – firstly, to do more myself to read and promote books by LGBTQ authors.

But also, it’s a call to do better in my own writing. As one of my genderqueer readers told me recently, “Hey, thanks for Alex. You didn’t do a terrible job!” I thought: Yes! Not doing a terrible job was my goal!

As important as it is to offer authentic voices and empower authors and role models from within LGBTQ community, it’s is also important that LGBTQ kids see themselves reflected and valued in the larger world of mass media, including my books. I know this because my non-heteronormative readers tell me so. They actively lobby to see characters like themselves in my books. They like the universe I’ve created. They want to be part of it. They deserve that opportunity. It’s important that I, as a mainstream author, say, “I see you. You matter. Your life experience may not be like mine, but it is no less valid and no less real. I will do whatever I can to understand and accurately include you in my stories, in my world. I will not erase you.”

People all over the political spectrum often ask me, “Why can’t you just stay silent on these issues? Just don’t include LGBTQ material and everybody will be happy.” This assumes that silence is the natural neutral position. But silence is not neutral. It’s an active choice. Silence is great when you are listening. Silence is not so great when you are using it to ignore or exclude.

But that’s all macro, ‘big picture’ stuff. Yes, I think the principles are important. Yes, in the abstract, I feel an obligation to write the world as I see it: beautiful because of its variations. Where I can’t draw on personal experience, I listen, I read a lot – in particular I want to credit Beyond Magenta and Gender Outlaws for helping me understand more about the perspective of my character Alex Fierro – and I trust that much of the human experience is universal. You can’t go too far wrong if you use empathy as your lens. But the reason I wrote Alex Fierro, or Nico di Angelo, or any of my characters, is much more personal.

I was a teacher for many years, in public and private school, California and Texas. During those years, I taught all kinds of kids. I want them all to know that I see them. They matter. I write characters to honor my students, and to make up for what I wished I could have done for them in the classroom.

I think about my former student Adrian (a pseudonym), back in the 90s in San Francisco. Adrian used the pronouns he and him, so I will call him that, but I suspect Adrian might have had more freedom and more options as to how he self-identified in school were he growing up today. His peers, his teachers, his family all understood that Adrian was female, despite his birth designation. Since kindergarten, he had self-selected to be among the girls – socially, athletically, academically. He was one of our girls. And although he got support and acceptance at the school, I don’t know that I helped him as much as I could, or that I tried to understand his needs and his journey. At that time in my life, I didn’t have the experience, the vocabulary, or frankly the emotional capacity to have that conversation. When we broke into social skills groups, for instance, boys apart from girls, he came into my group with the boys, I think because he felt it was required, but I feel like I missed the opportunity to sit with him and ask him what he wanted. And to assure him it was okay, whichever choice he made. I learned more from Adrian than I taught him. Twenty years later, Alex Fierro is for Adrian.

I think about Jane (pseudonym), another one of my students who was a straight cis-female with two fantastic moms. Again, for LGBTQ families, San Francisco was a pretty good place to live in the 90s, but as we know, prejudice has no geographical border. You cannot build a wall high enough to keep it out. I know Jane got flack about her family. I did what I could to support her, but I don’t think I did enough. I remember the day Jane’s drama class was happening in my classroom. The teacher was new – our first African American male teacher, which we were all really excited about – and this was only his third week. I was sitting at my desk, grading papers, while the teacher did a free association exercise. One of his examples was ‘fruit – gay.’ I think he did it because he thought it would be funny to middle schoolers. After the class, I asked to see the teacher one on one. I asked him to be aware of what he was saying and how that might be hurtful. I know. Me, a white guy, lecturing this Black teacher about hurtful words. He got defensive and quit because he said he could not promise to not use that language again. At the time, I felt like I needed to do something, to stand up especially for Jane and her family. But did I make things better handling it as I did? I think I missed an opportunity to open a dialogue about how different people experience hurtful labels. Emmie and Josephine and their daughter Georgina, the family I introduced in The Dark Prophecy, are for Jane.

I think about Amy, and Mark, and Nicholas … All former students who have come out as gay since I taught them in middle school. All have gone on to have successful careers and happy families. When I taught them, I knew they were different. Their struggles were greater, their perspectives more divergent than some of my other students. I tried to provide a safe space for them, to model respect, but in retrospect, I don’t think I supported them as well as I could have, or reached out as much as they might have needed. I was too busy preparing lessons on Shakespeare or adjectives, and not focusing enough on my students’ emotional health. Adjectives were a lot easier for me to reconcile than feelings. Would they have felt comfortable coming out earlier than college or high school if they had found more support in middle school? Would they have wanted to? I don’t know. But I don’t think they felt it was a safe option, which leaves me thinking that I did not do enough for them at that critical middle school time. I do not want any kid to feel alone, invisible, misunderstood. Nico di Angelo is for Amy, and Mark and Nicholas.

I am trying to do more. Percy Jackson started as a way to empower kids, in particular, my son, who had learning differences. As my platform grew, I felt obliged to use it to empower all kids who are struggling through middle school for whatever reason. I don’t always do enough. I don’t always get it right. Good intentions are wonderful things, but at the end of a manuscript, the text has to stand on its own. What I meant ceases to matter. Kids just see what I wrote. But I have to keep trying. My kids are counting on me.

So thank you, above all, to my former students who taught me. Alex Fierro is for you.

To you, I pledge myself to do better – to apologize when I screw up, to learn from my mistakes, to be there for LGBTQ youth and make sure they know that in my books, they are included. They matter. I am going to stop talking now, but I promise you I won’t stop listening.”

 

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Dinosaurs

*This entire review is basically the only reason people got to see these films. We’re certainly not watching them for the people in them.

Now, I’ve told you guys how much my Mom loves movies about people being eaten by things, so if she says something was a bad movie, take what she says as the truth. This woman will watch almost anything with giant creatures chasing and eating people, and she hated this movie!

I’m probably one of the few people that didn’t actually hate this movie, although I hated most of the people in it, and spent some amount of time rooting for my three favorite dinosaurs: the T-Rex(which I have named Sue), the velociraptor named Blue, and the mosasaur from the last movie, which I have, henceforth, named Molly.

https://allthefilmsiveseenforfree.tumblr.com/post/175238468895/jurassic-world-fallen-kingdom

 

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The Apocalypse

*I had to leave a response to this because the whole idea of the zombie apocalypse has now become nothing more than power a fantasy for White men, who all imagine they’re gonna be Negan, from The Walking Dead. 

I’m not watching any more shows, or reading any more zombie apocalypse novels, with White men in the center of the story. Most zombie novels and movies only feature White, middle-class people, and focus on their reactions to the loss of electricity, I guess.  Despite the existence of most of the world’s infrastructure, and the clear examples of what human beings would actually do when encountering catastrophe, in places like Puerto Rico and  Katrina, apparently one’s immediate reaction is to run amok in the streets, trying to kill each other for food.

I’m ready for some stories featuring unconventional heroes, in diverse environments. This is why I enjoyed World War Z (the book). How does the zombie apocalypse affect the plains of Africa or the mountains of Tibet? The slums of India? Or the favelas of Brazil?

Its also interesting to note that none of the pop culture we know, exists in any of these universe created by the zombie apocalypse. It’s always a surprise to the inhabitants of these stories as if they’d never heard of zombies. They always have to start from scratch. What if we just didn’t? I want to read a story (or watch a show) where all the Black, and Latinx people, in the ‘hood,  lived, because we’ve all been watching movies about the zombie apocalypse for decades, and we know all the rules and the tropes.

why is there no electricity after the apocalypse?

jumpingjacktrash

 

something people writing post-apocalyptic fiction always seem to forget is how extremely easy basic 20th century technology is to achieve if you have a high school education (or the equivalent books from an abandoned library), a few tools (of the type that take 20 years to rust away even if left out in the elements), and the kind of metal scrap you can strip out of a trashed building.

if you want an 18th century tech level, you really need to somehow explain the total failure of humanity as a whole to rebuild their basic tech infrastructure in the decade after your apocalypse event.

i am not a scientist or an engineer, i’m just a house husband with about the level of tech know-how it takes to troubleshoot a lawn mower engine, but i could set up a series of wind turbines and storage batteries for a survivor compound with a few weeks of trial and error out of the stuff my neighbors could loot from the wreckage of the menards out on highway 3. hell, chances are the menards has a couple roof turbines in stock right now. or you could retrofit some from ceiling fans; electric motors and electric generators are the same thing, basically.

radio is garage-tinkering level tech too. so are electric/mechanical medical devices like ventilators and blood pressure cuffs. internal combustion’s trickiest engineering challenge is maintaining your seals without a good source of replacement parts, so after a few years you’re going to be experimenting with o-rings cut out of hot water bottles, but fuel is nbd. you can use alcohol. you can make bio diesel in your back yard. you can use left-over cooking oil, ffs.

what i’m saying is, we really have to stop doing the thing where after the meteor/zombies/alien invasion/whatever everyone is suddenly doing ‘little house on the prairie’ cosplay. unless every bit of metal or every bit of knowlege is somehow erased, folks are going to get set back to 1950 at the most. and you need to account somehow for stopping them from rebuilding the modern world, because that’s going to be a lot of people’s main life goal from the moment the apocalypse lets them have a minute to breathe.

nobody who remembers flush toilets will ever be content with living the medieval life, is what i’m saying. let’s stop writing the No Tech World scenario.

 

lkeke35

As a corollary to the above:

I’ve been saying this about the Zombie apocalypse for years. What city dwellers do you know are gonna immediately drop everything, run out to the woods, and live at a subsistence level, just because dead people are walking around? People with disabilities, allergies, or elderly parents to care for, ain’t going to be doing any such thing. Why is the advice given to people, that they need a “bug out” plan just because the dead are walking? I’m not buying it.

I live in the hood. Do you know how many handymen we have in the hood? How many military personnel? Or even homebody engineers? Do you have any clue how resourceful and cooperative poor people are, and have to be, to survive even with electricity? And how many of us have been trained to expect the best, but plan for the worst case scenario. No, you don’t, because that idea of poverty is never represented in popular culture. Shit! A zombie apocalypse won’t even ruffle our fucking hair. We’ll come up with ways to kill the zombies while keeping it moving. Hell, my brother, all by himself, could have the electricity up and running, a defensive tower, a moat, schooling, and gardening, all in the space of two weeks, and entirely organized by my mother.

It’s also interesting to me that all zombie apocalypse narratives only seem to consist of middle-class, white, suburbanites trying to survive, with a handful of PoC thrown in like confetti. The most that White writers can imagine, for PoC, even during the apocalypse, is that we all die? Really! That seems to be their only scenario. They don’t take into account that poor Black people have been taking care of each other since the invention of poor people. The poor have never believed in an isolationist, go it alone, ruggedly individual attitude, when it comes to surviving, because we couldn’t afford that! That’s the kind of attitude that only people, with all of their basic needs met, could adopt as a life strategy. Poor people are not lazy, and of everyone, they would be the most likely to survive the apocalypse, because we have experience with surviving hardship and insecurity!

On the other hand, the middle-class white guys who invent these types of stories are obsessed with that attitude. They really think that as soon as the electricity stops, people are gonna lose their gotdamn minds, and start trying to kill their neighbors for fun and food, or planning a long journey to go find their wife, son, daughter, lost somewhere in the pre-tech Badlands! Not even taking into account that we have real-life scenarios right here, right now, that we can look at and figure out that most people aren’t gonna act like that. (*cough, ahem! Puerto Rico! Cough*).

I have long come to understand that apocalypse scenario are just wish fulfillment fantasies for middle-class white guys who think that the end of the world will make them the heroes they always wanted to be. As a result, I’m no longer interested in apocalypse scenarios with white men in the center of them as the heroes, and yes, I’m also talking about a certain TV show, too.

 

Source: jumpingjacktrash

Actually, I’ve noticed one staple of almost all apocalyptic fiction written by White people: In everything, from those Purge movies, to alien invasion, and zombie apocalypse movies, the White Western reaction seems to be “go out and kill each other”.

I’m mostly talking about the Purge films, where the premise is that all crime is free for 12 or 24 hours, but all people can think of to do is kill each other. Are you kidding me? Can we get an Oceans 11 version of The Purge, where someone has been planning the perfect heist, all year long? Actually,  I hate the Purge movies because the movies create more questions than they answer, and my super-villain brain keeps trying to organize the cultural, social, and legal implications of such an arrangement.

In a lot of American apocalyptic fiction, we never get any idea how the rest of the world is handling the destruction of the “civilized” world, or even if the rest of the world is experiencing it at all. For all we know, it’s only the Americans and Europeans who have lost their damn minds, and the Canadians are doing just fine! How do we know the Aussies haven’t just all gone punchy from the heat,  put on some fetish gear,  and decide to ride around in the desert?

When White men write about the apocalypse, they often seem to write about destroying whatever, and whoever is left.  Now contrast all that with how Women and PoC write about the apocalypse:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/olivia-cole/people-of-color-do-surviv_b_5126206.html

https://www.indiewire.com/2016/03/women-and-poc-survive-the-apocalypse-march-2016s-vod-and-web-series-picks-202649/

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Fandom

*Advice on how to NOT be a shitty fanfiction writer:

There IS such a thing as a bad premise. A story that relies on accepting racism, sexism, homophobia etc as valid or justifiable or not something that needs to be contested, like any story that can not exist or function as is if you take those elements out…is a fundamentally bad fucking premise.

Nobody questions the existence of good ideas. Why do some people fight so damn hard to deny that there is such a thing as a bad idea?

Every idea a person has ever had does not NEED to be put out there. Not every idea leads somewhere good.

And each and everyone of us is capable of evaluating whether an idea we have is good or not. If it’ll do harm or not. We each have the capacity to look at an idea we have and say…yeah that’s not really workable. And just….not share it.

This isn’t an imposition. This isn’t censorship. This is basic human awareness of the fact that ideas in our brain impact us and us alone. Ideas we make the choice to enact in the world in some fashion impact others as well as us.

So fucking many of you resort to crying censorship when all that’s being asked of you is applying some scrutiny to what ideas you decide to share, because you can’t seem to wrap your heads around the idea that someone else telling you what you can and can’t write isn’t the only conclusion to be made from conversations about creative responsibility.

Because you just can’t seem to fathom the concept that you could just decide for yourself…oh, huh, I don’t actually HAVE to do this thing I’m digging my heels in about. It’s not a binary equation. It’s not either I do this or I do nothing at all and I might as well just have no rights or freedoms whatsoever gawd.

It’s almost like it’s actually….hmmm when examining the endless array of possibilities that go into crafting ideas and honing them and all the variables that act as search filters to narrow down my selection process of what areas to focus on, what elements to include….what if ‘hey is this idea one that appropriates shit that’s outside my lane or perpetuates harmful and toxic tropes’ was just an added search filter used in that process?

 

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 Post-lude

moami

if you find bones in the forest, sit a bit and listen. they are old and have some good stories to tell. maybe they’ll teach you a spell or two, or explain where the water on our planet came from.

if you find bones by the ocean, run. don’t look back. run, faster, faster. the sea may love you but there are nights where she knows neither mercy nor science, and the bones warn you only once.

deseng

boi if you find bones call the police i hate this website so much

moami

this is a piece of creative writing, in case you couldn’t tell from the fact that real bones don’t usually go hey lil’ mama lemme whisper bony secrets in your ear or warn you of the incoming tides like a calcified weather frog.

Source: moami

Books That need To Be Brought To A Screen Near Somebody

Octavia Butler –

 Actually just about anything by Octavia Butler could and should be filmed. I think  Clay’s Ark would make a wonderful television series about humanity in decline and being supplanted by a better, stronger race. Fledgling would be problematic to film. One of  its main themes is racism, and one of the greatest hurdles to film would be the youth of the protagonist and her social and feeding  arrangements.

 

The Cal Leandros Series By Rob Thurman

A series of books about the NY adventures of two brothers living among the city’s monsters, one of them a half human, half monster and the other a blond American Samurai, who are totally devoted to each other. This series has a lot of similarities to Supernatural but with slightly less angst and more ass kicking. The themes of child abuse and c0-dependent relationships could easily be explored here.

I would give my left nut to see Cal Leandros cussing and shooting his way across my TV. As for Robin Goodfellow, I simply cannot think of anyone who could do himcorrectly, but, as one of the oldest beings on Earth, I do like the idea of racebending the character to Asian or African.

 

The Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch

Peter Grant is a cop who stumbles onto a magical London during one of his cases. One of the standouts of this book is that the protagonist is a black man and many of the characters he meets, including the Queens of the various rivers of London are PoC, too. I picture Peter Capaldi as Nightingale. The first book would make an excellent mini-series or movie. I wouldn’t mind seeing this in animated form either.

 

Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey

I’ve always pictured Vin Diesel in the role of Sandman Slim. Of course I’m open to anyone who can play a bad ass, modern day, magic user who loves obscure horror movies and dates a spider-girl.

 

Elvis Cole/Joe Pike Series by Robert Crais

Like the series Justified, this would be great on TV. I have no idea who would portray Elvis Cole, but more importantly, you’d need someone who can play Joe Pike correctly. Joe is a fairly deep character and a man of few words. A lot of televisions creators wouldn’t be able to depict those two qualities very well, so it would largely depend on the talents of the actor.

 

The Hexslinger Series by Gemma Files

 

This is a real long shot and  would make a great movie but I can’t see this ever getting made by Hollywood. For one thing it features a non-tragic, gay character who starts off as a villain and becomes a hero by the end of the series. It would make a much better television show but I don’t see that getting made either as its a western  full of upended stereotypes.

 

 Territory by Emma Bull

This book is probably much easier to make a movie from. It features a magic slinging Wyatt Earp and other classic Western characters. Think Hell on Wheels, crossed with a Jim Butcher novel.

 

The Midnight Mayor Series by Kate Griffith

 

This is another book whose magic would be a little difficult to convey on screen as it does not allow for pretty lights coming  out of people’s hands. In this series, its the city itself, London,  that holds the magic, and practitioners can access it to do incredible things, like create monsters made of garbage, talk to the dragon that lives under the Thames or travel through  electrical wiring and neon signs..

 

The Sonja Blue Series by Nancy  Collins

This would make a great series on HBO. This is pretty dark and gritty series. The only comparison I could make, would be Blade as a young adult woman, only without all the martial skills he possesses. Since she doesn’t have any of those skills, her fighting would be a lot dirtier. Hey, they managed to make The Crow into a movie, why not this book?

 

Swan Song by Robert McCammon

If they can bring The Stand to television as a miniseries, then this can also be filmed. Think McCarthy’s The Road, with magic, bigger and crazier gangs of people, and shapeshifting demons.

 

The Bridge by John Skipp and Craig Spector

This is a horror  movie waiting to happen. It does not have a happy ending, however, so that is likely to be rewritten or scrapped altogether. Its got plenty of action and monsters, so there’d be lots of great reasons to have special effects.

 

 

The Light at the End by John Skipp and Craig Spector

This is quite possibly one of the most awesome vampire novels ever. So why will nobody film this? Instead we keep getting endless damn retreads of Insidious ripoffs. This book was written thirty  years ago, still holds up to scrutiny, and Hollywood has completely ignored it, in favor of giving us shit like the Transformers movies. Really?!!

Ahh well, there’s a metric buttload of books Hollywood could be making into movies and television shows, that we will never get to see. I guess we have no choice but to dream about them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Geeking Out About : Visually Stunning Films

As an Illustrator, vision is how I understand everything I’ve learned about the world, and  everything I remember and feel has visuals attached. It’s how I can do a mental walk through of every place I’ve ever lived, remember all of my most vivid dreams from childhood and remember every book I’ve ever read.

So when I say movies are like food, then you know what I mean. I need movies like I need books. Some movies are like junk food. They’re not very stimulating intellectually, but rich with detail and  some movies are a smorgesbord. Theyre satisfying in every manner.

These are some of the movies I’ve found the most satisfying both visually and intellectually, in no particular order:

Paprika

Directed by Satoshi Kon 2006

Apparently this film is just a little too deep for me. I couldn’t make heads or tails out of its philosophy, or it only has dream logic.  Well, whatever is going on, this is still the very best eye candy.

Inception

Directed by Christopher Nolan  2010

This movie satisfies on every level. Intellectually, visually and emotionally, it”s a feast.

The Fall

Directed by Tarsem  Singh 2008

I would’ve nominated this director’s first film, The Cell but this is the movie I enjoyed more. Its a lovely fairy tail, with an emotional resonance that sticks with you, long after the movie ends.

Baraka

Directed by Ron Fricke  1992

This is a film meant to be enjoyed on a visceral level. It has no dialogue, but its rich visuals more than make up for this lack.

The Watchmen

Directed by Zack Snyder  2009

This is one of the best looking superhero movies ever made. The plot is pretty horrifying , but it’s visual movement and detail are exquisite. If you can stomach some of the gore and the nihilistic philosophies of the characters, it’s worth your time.

The Tree of Life

Directed by Terence Malick    2011

The plot is a  fairly standard coming of age story, about a young boys rocky  relationship with his overbearing father, but its themes of how small human relationships are in the scheme of the cosmos, yet are the end all and be all of our short lives, lends itself to some truly stunning, and occasionally, perplexing imagery.

The House of Flying Daggers

Directed by Zhang Yimou   2004

Okay, I’m not Asian, so maybe this movie really resonates with someone directly from one of the cultures depicted in the movie, but I don’t care, I just like the way it looks and sounds. Its absolutely gorgeous.

Hero

Directed by Zhang Yimou   2002

The first WuXia movie by the director of House of flying Daggers, this movie is Good practice. The story, characters, action and colors are all breathtaking. If you were impressed by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you will love this movie.

Spirited Away

Directed by Hiyao Miyazaki   2001

I’ve introduced this movie to two generations of little WoC, and for every single one of them, the story resonates so wonderfully and so deeply, that it quickly becomes one of their absolute favorite films. My niece, The Potato, is always up for a rewatch of any film by the legendary Miyzaki, but it is this film in particular, that seems to truly speak to her.

Okay! Me too.

Bladerunner

Directed by Ridley Scott  1982

I knew I was going to love this movie from the moment I saw the first trailer, back in 1982.  C’mon people! Robots, flying cars, detectives in trenchcoats and lots and lots of rain and neon. The style that every SciFi movie, for the next 20 years, attempted to copy.

The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford

Directed by Andrew Dominik   2007

I only need to say one thing: Brad Pitt.

Dark City

Directed by Alex Proyas   1998

This is another movie, I knew I was going to fall in love with when I saw the trailer. Its dark and broody and stars William Hurt, and that would’ve been enough, but the story is intellectually compelling, as well. This was one of Roger Ebert’s favorite Science Fiction movies, such that he did two different audio commentaries for the two DVD releases.

300

Directed by Zack Snyder   2006

Many male critics professed not to understand why this movie seemed to captivate so many female fans.  They seemed to be under the impression that we were fascinated by the presence of Lena Heady. This is why you shouldn’tlisten to critics.

Here’s why we loved this movie:

There are about a bajillion more movies that I could add to this list, but these are the ones I’ll watch over and over.