Kingsman: It's okay to be poor as long as you're rich

Every once in a while, the blogqueen or I will send the other a rant that begins with the phrase "So because I don't make good decisions, I'm watching..." and ends when we lose the ability to express ourselves in terms other than 'WTF' or 'nope-nope-nope-nope-nope-NOPETOPUS'.  In this case, the work was Kingsman: The Secret Service, a spy flick from earlier this year that could not possibly try harder to be a throwback to the days of James Bond films with moon lasers and razor hats.  For verisimilitude, it is also a throwback to the days when rich straight white men murdered their way to heroism while denigrating every other demographic.

(Content note: misogyny, racism, threat of animal harm, torture, ableism.  Fun content: Hari Potter.)

Now, I watch plenty of middling-to-bad movies and don't bother inflicting my thoughts about them on you all, partly because I like you and I want good things for you.  But what fascinated me about Kingsman wasn't that it was a bad movie.  It's that it was a bad movie in complex and subtle ways that were both ever-present and completely unnecessary.  One or two passes over the script could have salvaged it from its many, many racist, sexist, and intriguingly classist aspects and produced a campy spy flick for the modern day.  Instead, we basically got Microaggression: The Action Movie.

The first time I tried to watch Kingsman, I turned it off during the opening scene, just after a series of explosions in some ancient building in "The Middle East" (they could not be bothered to pick a specific country) cause exploding wreckage to bounce up and form the opening credits.  I don't know, maybe this building was just some old granary, but it looks like it's about five thousand years old, so I cannot help wondering if it might not have some historical or spiritual significance.  Dunno.  Credits gag!  Our first-generation heroes, who all have codenames from Arthurian myth, keep one generically brown terrorist to interrogate (with the whole "I'm going to count down from ten", plus shooting him in both knees on "three" because torture works, dammit) before said terrorist produces a hidden grenade and the newbie dies saving his bros.  Noble Galahad delivers the bad news to newbie's wife and tiny son, and promises to have the kid's back if ever he needs help.  Fast-forward to said kid's young-adulthood, when he goes by the nickname Eggsy and has discarded his excellent grades, athletic prowess, and several months of marine training in favour of being a drunken delinquent who picks fights in bars.  Nothing we haven't seen before in an origin story.  Basically the 2009 Captain Kirk with a working-class London accent.

I won't recap the whole movie that specifically, because I value our friendship (how are you), but in short there is some kind of terrible conspiracy going on and agent Lancelot has been killed tracking it down, so they need a new Lancelot, and Galahad nominates Eggsy for the job.

Here's where the movie caught my attention: it tries to be socially aware, at least in regards to classism.  Eggsy starts out dismissive of Galahad, specifically stating that anyone he knows would have done just as well in life if they'd started out with the privileges that an aristocrat does.  Galahad is of course a Good Dude and agrees, but the tension of rich/poor remains throughout the film--Eggsy's rivals in training are the posh kids who ask whether he went to Oxford or Cambridge, the villains are all the uber-rich who think the world would be better off if we just killed all the poor people, and the weaknesses of charity-driven societal change are a key plot point.  On the surface, the closest thing this movie has to a message is that being a classy gentleman has nothing to do with economic class and everything to do with attitude, and most rich people are scum who can't be trusted because they're so arrogant.

That's the surface message, I mean.  The problem here is that Kingsman also says a lot of stuff that we're not supposed to take as its message, and those things tend to be at extreme odds with the above.  It can be as subtle as their suits: not long after Galahad has told Eggsy that he doesn't need to change his accent or be rich to be a gentleman, he says the absolute first thing he must have is "a bespoke suit, never off the peg".  From a Savile Row shop.  I'm not sure about varying exchange rates and all that, but I'm pretty sure that's going to cost roughly all of the money you have ever touched in your life, so right off the bat we've pretty well scuttled the idea that gentlemanliness isn't tied right up tight with sleeping on top of a big pile of money.  Or we have the very origin of the Kingsman spy agency:

Since 1849, Kingsman Tailors have clothed the world's most powerful individuals. In 1919, a great number of them had lost their heirs to World War I. That meant a lot of money going uninherited. And a lot of powerful men with the desire to preserve peace and protect life. Our founders realized that they could channel that wealth and influence for the greater good. And so began our adventure. An independent international intelligence agency operating at the highest level of discretion. Without the politics and bureaucracy that undermine the intelligence of government-run spy organisations.

So, while rich snobs are terrible, this heroic organisation was also founded by a bunch of old rich dudes who didn't like the idea of being accountable to anyone while they shot and poisoned their way to world peace.  And that's when we run into the much more pervasive theme of the movie, which is that unaccountable power is only bad when it's in the hands of the wrong sort of people.

Let's talk about some other demographics.  I can think of only three notably characters who aren't white: the terrorist in the first scene, the main villain (Richmond Valentine, played by Samuel L Jackson making a bad decision), and his personal assassin/assistant, who goes by the name Gazelle and has prosthetic feet that are also swords.  So, Arab terrorist, Black megalomaniac, and Algerian femme fatale who does lots of gymnastic fighting.  Let's talk about women: in addition to Gazelle, we have Eggsy's mother (routinely beaten by her new husband), Roxy (another Kingsman candidate about whom I have so much to say), and a two-scene Swedish princess who first refuses to cooperate with the villain and then literally rewards Eggsy with sex immediately after he saves the world.  Let's talk about LGBT+ characters haaaahahaha as if.  But before we really dig into the terrible treatment of the women, there is a fascinating contrast in heroic masculinity and villainous femininity that is once again at odds with the movie's stated position.

Our Heroes are, whether male or female, Manly.  They wear suits and drink hard liquor and routinely handle giant guns.  In one of his defining scenes, father-figure Galahad rescues Eggsy from some street punks by locking the doors to the pub and solo brawling them to unconsciousness, then brushing the whole brutal scene as needing to 'blow off steam'.  (He prefaces this with his favourite phrase, 'manners maketh man', to emphasise that he is classy and only doing this because they were rude.)  Conversely, the villain Valentine is a flawless example of feminisation and queer-coding: he faints at the sight of blood, speaks with a pronounced lisp, and shows no attraction to his overtly sexualised assistant.  (That one's a question for the ages: is the lack of attraction because he's queer-coded, or because she's an amputee and therefore not a legitimate sex object?  There are so many flavours of terrible to choose from!)  Our rafts of white men, even the unpleasant ones, do masculinity right, while the black villain is at any moment one wrist-flutter away from spontaneously generating a feather boa.  I'm pretty sure that is not a coincidence!  On a fractionally-less-obvious note, the motivation for his villainy is ostensibly his deep-seated concerns about climate change and sustainability--he's not in it for power or money, but because he's a berserk tree-hugger.  Also a deeply unmanly motivation.  Everyone knows trees are for girls.

Because Valentine can't bear to directly inflict violence, he's decided to outsource that job to literally everyone: his master plan to save Earth is to "cull" the human population with a global broadcast that drives aggression instincts through the roof and suppresses all inhibitions, thus sparking a worldwide brawl.  Only the chosen few who agree with his plan--aristocrats, rich people, heads of state including the entire British Royal Family and President Obama--will be given special implants that protect them from the signal.  And can also be used to blow them up if they try to warn anyone.  It's a howlingly obvious spoiler that their tech dude hacks into the system and explosively decapitates all of Valentine's minions during the climactic sequence, which coincidentally also results in the colourful and classically-accompanied deaths of basically all our world leaders, explicitly including the entire British Royal Family and President Obama.  (Since he has lines, I guess Obama could be counted as a fourth non-white character, although we never see his face and, as noted, he is present mostly to be murdered in a funny way.)

But back to Roxy, who is fascinating to me: she's not the love interest.  At all!  She is introduced in a super typical way, being nice to Eggsy during their testing while the posh boys are jerks, and they have some close moments when they nearly die during the more brutal tests.  In most action movies, this would guarantee makeouts in the last thirty seconds, but not here.  In fact, Roxy passes the final test to become Lancelot when Eggsy washes out.  Oh--but I have distracted myself again, because I need to note that as soon as the candidates were given puppies to raise during training, I just knew they were going with the old 'your final test of loyalty is to kill your dog on command', which I know is a story that was often told about Nazi soldiers but I cannot find a reliable source for.  Point is, Eggsy refuses to shoot his pug while Roxy pulls the trigger and discovers it's a blank so the dogs are never harmed.  When Eggsy is told this later, the movie acts as if he has been taught an important lesson, but I'm not sure what that was supposed to be.  It would be evil to kill the dogs, but it's 100% morally upright to only accept agents who are willing to kill a dog on command for no stated reason?  We can trust Kingsman because they would only order you to do something that appears monstrous when it's actually harmless?  This is what I'm talking about when I say the movie supports giving total and unaccountable power to the Right People.

Roxy again: after the agency gets gutted in the third-act twist, she is one of the only remaining reliable agents, so she must overcome her Flaw (her fear of heights, which makes her character multidimensional and not just a sexy prop, obvs) and use a low-Earth-orbit balloon-chair to fly to the edge of space to blow up one of Valentine's mind-control satellites.  She does so in spite of various setbacks, thus expending an appreciable fraction of the movie's special effects budget.  This means that she can't be fighting alongside Eggsy as he invades the enemy compound on foot, obviously.  Now, at first I thought--nay, hoped--this was going to be another case like The Sorcerer's Apprentice, where the girl literally saves the world on her own while the camera is focused on the boy having an action scene.  My hopes were dashed, of course.  She destroys the satellite and plummets back to the ground, with the mind-control network broken, but it turns out Valentine is able to just make a phone call and borrow a friend's satellite in roughly the same place thirty seconds later, making her entire voyage moot.  Eggsy instead has to save the day by defeating Gazelle in single combat and then killing Valentine with one of Gazelle's sword-feet.

This works, because (I am not exaggerating, I would not do that with a detail this magnificently stupid) Valentine's mind-control system only works while he personally holds down the button.  Yeah.  It's a doomsday device that turns off if the big bad lifts his hand off the biometric scanner.  It's not even, like, click once to begin murder-riots, double-click to stop riots.  This device ends the world with the same interface that we use to fill drinks at a soda fountain.

The very last scene, after Eggsy has had his Reward Buttsex (they are super-specific about this, btdubs) with the imprisoned princess, shows him returning home in his expensive suit to invite his mother to leave her abusive new husband and come live with him.  She is of course too timid and asks him to leave, and he begins to, until the husband says something impolite and Eggsy just replicates the previous 'manners maketh man' schtick.  Because he can forgive abusing his mom, but if you call him a chicken, he's got to beat you senseless.  Azathoth preserve me.

So, final tally: all surviving characters are white, almost everyone is male, everyone is straight, the two competent women are respectively evil (and killed) or the narrative goes out of its way to make them irrelevant, and you don't have to be rich to be a gentleman but you do have to wear suits that only rich people can afford.

Back in the middle of the movie, we get a truly fascinating moment.  Valentine is about to test his berserker ray on a church full of horrible bigots, and Galahad is inside investigating, brimming with disgust at their hatefulness.  He moves to leave and a woman tries to stop him, so he responds thusly:

I'm a Catholic whore, currently enjoying congress out of wedlock with my black Jewish boyfriend who works at a military abortion clinic. So, hail Satan, and have a lovely afternoon, madam.

We are absolutely meant to think that Galahad is a stupendous badass in this moment.  Sure, he's claiming to be gay (among other things), but he's doing so in order to stick it to those awful people who think there's something wrong with The Gays, or The Blacks, or The Jews, or pro-choice people, et cetera.  Because those kinds of bigots are wretched and we should absolutely look down on them because we're so much better than them.  I mean, yes, we're also making a movie in which people of any of those demographics are either nonexistent or evil, but... that's because they're not relevant to the story, man.  Gay rights are something that you reference in order to prove you're better than other people, not something that would actually drive you to give LGBT+ people some representation in a genre that traditionally devalues them, in a movie that is explicitly about how good privileged people need to open themselves up and respect and give opportunities to the underprivileged.  What kind of social justice trash is that?

I don't know what it would take to make Kingsman a good movie, but I do know that a handful of fairly minor changes would have made it a much better movie.  Eggsy should not be white.  (Personally, given the makeup of London, I'd suggest he should be Indian, like Harry Potter.)  Roxy should be fighting alongside Eggsy during the climactic sequences, not sidelined into some special effects sequences with zero narrative impact.  Galahad should actually have a black Jewish boyfriend.  When Eggsy returns to rescue his mother in the end, he gets his own style that doesn't purely mimic Galahad, but expresses his own preferences and background, especially if that means, for example, incorporating traditional Indian dress.  They can, if absolutely necessary, keep the gun-and-dog test of character, except the correct answer is 'refuse to shoot, because a Kingsman will not do something unnecessarily evil without a good reason' and the guns are loaded with blanks in case the candidate is a terrible person.  Valentine needs much more drastic work as a character, but his best moment is when he trolls a billionaire dinner guest by serving McDonald's, so definitely run with that aspect of his persona.  Valentine throws a twist into the movie's whole privileged/commoner dynamic by being a guy who started with nothing and made himself incredibly wealthy, which puts him in a spectacular position to comment on economic class from multiple perspectives, especially pretensions of superiority.  My god, you've got Sam Jackson playing your villain, give the man something of substance to work with.

There are no reasons for any of the above things.  There is no plot-related necessity for Eggsy to be white.  There's no reason to specifically make Roxy useless.  There's no reason for the dog test, or for Galahad to insist gentlemen wear expensive suits, or for Valentine to be so extensively feminised.  You can drop all of those elements without changing the plot of the movie in the slightest.  They are there only because the writers liked them.  (I was so unsurprised during the credits to discover it was based on a work by Mark Millar.)

When this movie was new, some folks said it was a male wish-fulfillment epic in a comparable place to Jupiter Ascending and its nonsensical female fantasies.  Apart from finding it personally offensive that anyone would suggest Kingsman represents my wishes, I am now compelled to watch Jupiter Ascending to determine whether it has anything like the same kind of bloodlustful hatred in its heart for the Wrong Sort of People.  (I would bet a bulletproof bespoke Savile Row suit that it does not.  I have mostly seen it called 'confusing', to which I can only say 'if you want confusion, try to figure out what Kingsman is saying about hereditary wealth'.  But Kingsman has a sequel in the works and Jupiter Ascending does not.)  So, expect that soon, and because I'm now wondering how difficult it would be to write a not-bigoted spy story for the modern day, please do make further suggestions in the comments on how to improve on the classic spy tropes and their terrible implications.

Erika vs The Nightmare Before Christmas

I am a huge slut for stop-motion animation/claymation. I used to mess around with it as a kid and it will never stop being magical and amazing to me. I've also talked before about how much I love musicals at length. As such, Nightmare Before Christmas holds an extra-special place in my heart, but we all need to consider something for a moment here. And that is Nightmare Before Christmas, despite having been an icon of counter-culture wannabe goth/emo teenagers in my youth (is it still? I'm too old to know and I don't have any cousins in the right age range) is basically the story of a jock, who is loved by all, doing something stupid and realizing his nerd childhood friend is the right girl for him all along, with a heavy dash of cultural appropriation.

Jack Skellington, Pumpkin King, even though he is a skeleton who lives in a graveyard and doesn't have any discernible ties to pumpkins at all, is adored and admired by all of Halloween town. He is a leader in his community, The Best at The Thing everyone loves. He also has an excellent dog. I mean, all dogs are excellent, but Zero's a good ghost dog. He knows to bring back the bones they play fetch with, none of this having to hunt it down yourself nonsense. He also has a jack-o-lantern nose.

 Pictured: Happy ghost dog with jack-o-lantern nose who just wants to be your friend, Zero

So what sort of popular hero would he be if his shiny perfect life didn't have a flaw? That flaw being HORRIBLE ENNUI! To which his solution is the equivalent of going to India to do a bunch of yoga and getting a culturally insensitive Om tattoo on his ankle. The whole number of What's This? is him wandering around and marveling at how quaint everything is. Life here is so simple and exotic! Jack is totally a white tourist on a trip to try and "find himself". He spends a whole song there and "wants it for his own". He comes home and is now the expert on this other culture and gushes to everyone about it. No one quite gets it, but they love and worship Jack so they roll with it. Only Sally thinks something is wrong with him latching onto this other culture, but her concerns are ignored.

Jack knows he doesn't quite understand Christmas since it isn't his culture, and when he can't "crack the code", he decides the solution is simple! He gave it too much credit and depth to start with! He rewrites the bits he doesn't understand with his own culture and preference. With the confidence of a white guy, he barges in starts trying to take over, ignoring the one person (Sally) who is trying to tell him "No, nothing about this is a good idea". He forces out people native to the culture he's stealing (Santa) and takes over, harming others in the process. Most of those toys attack and have teeth; people are getting hurt. Sally, being the smart one, goes to try and free Santa from Oogie Boogie because shit is hitting the fan. Because Jack is the hero and not Sally, this ends with both of them in danger.

When the military is called and are actively trying to stop Jack,  his first response is to assume people are celebrating him, and he's confused and wounded that they don't like his take on their culture. Jack doesn't even think "Wow, I hurt people". He thinks "Well, I messed that up, but I had fun and everyone got a cool story out of it!" Then, after he reaffirms who and what he is, he thinks of getting Santa back so he can fix what he messed up. Better late than never, I suppose? This is the closest Jack comes to learning a lesson, realizing he's not good at a thing and should leave it to the people who are. He does not realize that he can't be good at this thing because it is not his culture, and he never grew up with it,of course.  Just that he has his own that he's better at so might as well stick with that one!

He rushes home, finds Sally and Santa being menaced by Oogie Boogie, saves the day, Santa goes off to save Christmas--and I want to note here that it is Santa, on his own, who saves Christmas. Jack doesn't get to help. Jack realizes, now that he is alone with Sally, "Oh, she's been helping me and being sensible and not just worshiping me this whole time. Maybe we should date." I have no idea how ragdoll/skeleton sex would work, but we know Sally is at least somewhat modular, so... I guess it would be kinky?

Let's talk about Sally for a moment. She and Jack are apparently good friends. We see her looking out for and taking care of Jack repeatedly, and yet he doesn't listen to her or notice her home life is incredibly abusive. She has to drug the Professor to ever get out of the house. This is played off as "haha typical teenagers" but the Professor scolds her for this. He wants her around to take care of him and gets emotionally abusive when she wants to have her own life. The thing is, she's happy to take care of him! She is, by her nature, a caring and nurturing person! She just wants to do her own thing too. Not content to let Sally do her own thing, and realizing it's not just a phase, he literally locks up Sally. Jack goes to see the Professor he doesn't think to try and say hi to Sally, which means he is ignorant to the fact she is literally locked up just down the hall. We see her rip off limbs to get away from the Professor, and eventually she runs away. Which leads to her living on the street as she tries to hide from the Professor. Again, Jack remains ignorant to, even while having her sew for him and hanging out in his home.

I don't know what about any of this is supposed to be counter-culture, or why so many kids latched onto it as such. Aesthetics, I guess? Which was certainly the depths of "counter-culture" for most of the people I knew who were latching onto it. I still love this movie, but let's be honest: Jack is a self-centered, self-absorbed dude whom everyone worships for reasons that aren't totally clear and faces no consequences for his actions because there is a whole system in place to continue worshiping him. All he has to do is be moderately friendly and score a touch down scare some children. Sounds awfully familiar.

The Cabin In The Woods: Joss Whedon doesn't know what deconstruction means

What's this?  Not a Dresden post?  Yes, dear readers, because it is October and tumblr's love of Halloween is sufficiently infectious that I was all "Hey, we should do a bunch of posts on Halloween movies this month" and the blogqueen was all "I like that idea but let's not go overboard" and I was all "CAN'T HEAR YOU, TOO BUSY BEING THE PUMPKIN KING" and she was all "FUCK YOU I'M ALREADY WRITING A POST ON NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS" and she is the blogqueen, so her word is law.  But I get open the gates, with a little more than two weeks to go before Halloween, with my unrelenting judgment of Joss Whedon and all sexist nerds who think satire means 'the same old rubbish with a wink and a funny voice'.

Something Short & Snappy Hallowthon 2015 presents:

The Cabin In The Woods

This movie is three years old now, so I imagine most of the people who actually cared about seeing it unspoiled have already done so, but just in case you're not aware, the actual premise is a spoiler, so if for some reason you want to see Joss Whedon writing self-satisfied horror in the manner that he originally intended, read no further in this post.  There's not much meaningful to say about the film without talking details.

Now, as soon as I said 'Joss Whedon writing', most of us could probably guess (with or without seeing the film) that this movie is incredibly proud of how clever it is.  Horror movies come with a lot of tropes and cliches--back in the 1990s, Scream revitalised the genre by making a slasher flick full of people discussing slasher flicks, a harbinger of the super-meta media that has rocketed to popularity in the last couple of decades.  I don't actually like Scream (not least because that mask fucking terrified me as a child), but I can't deny that it was a clever idea to make a film in which people actually tell each other to do the things that the audience normally has to shout, like 'don't run upstairs, there's no escape there'.

But that's been done now (on through three sequels and a Netflix series), so how can someone brim with satisfaction at their own cleverness now?  The same way bad parodies work: force everything to fit to the cliches of the genre at their most extreme, presented utterly without commentary or analysis.  TCITW is a movie about a world (spoilers begin here) where humanity managed to seal away some eldritch horrors thousands of years ago and can only keep them sealed by performing a sacrificial ritual every year, which must fit the format of an ultra-typical horror movie.  So the movie opens on an underground complex where people are going about what seems like an ordinary semi-industrial office job, which we slowly discover is actually the central control room where they bait a group of young adults into a sealed environment (the titular cabin and woods) and let loose monsters to slaughter them.  Real people don't fit the requisite cardboard-cutout characters, of course (the jock, the nerd, the comic relief, the sexpot, and the virgin), so the action of the movie is two-sided: Our Heroes trying to escape monsters in clever ways, and the showrunners manipulating and pushing them back onto the rails like a bad tabletop gamemaster.

Thus, the ordinary is presented as clever because it gets labelled: on their way to the cabin, the kids stop and ask directions from a gruff hillbilly who tells them to turn back, and the scene gets intercut with shots of the showrunners talking about how important it is to the ritual that the kids be warned "by the Harbinger" but continue anyway.  All the protagonists start out as intelligent college kids, but (for example) the girl who's supposed to fit the 'slutty' archetype was convinced to dye her hair blonde and dosed with cognition-slowing drugs so she would drag her boyfriend out into the woods to have sex and die.  At one point the jock says 'stick together while we search the house', gets a dose of gas from the nearest air vent, turns around again and says 'actually, let's split up to cover more ground'.

They have a gas that makes people think it's a good idea to split the party.

I try to take stories in on their own terms: I'm not criticising TCITW for not being deep, or for not explaining how one invents a gas that makes people think it's a good idea to split the party.  The premise is "What if you had to orchestrate a real-life horror movie in order to save the world?" and something like that is just a throwaway joke that everyone's supposed to nod at and move past.  (I do greatly prefer the parts where things are actually orchestrated and people break the stereotypes--in keeping with exploitation horror of the past, voyeurism is a big part of the ritual, so they put the nerd in a room next to the final girl where he discovers he's got a one-way mirror to watch her undress.  Villainwise, that's a smart move to ratchet up the sexual tension, but the nerd is also not a total skeeze, so he overcomes temptation, warns her about it, and they switch rooms.  Naturally, the girl then watches the nerd, who is played by Jesse Williams and therefore hot like fire and hella jacked, take his shirt and belt off before she covers the mirror up again.)

No, if TCITW was just kind of smug about all its tropes and references, I wouldn't take much issue with it: the dialogue is often fun and funny, the cast is excellent, and it raises some interesting moral dilemmas when the heroes find out the truth and have to choose between actively murdering each other or passively ending the world.  (I disagree strongly with their conclusion, but more about that in a bit.)

My core problem with the movie is, as you readers have probably guessed, is that it involves Joss Whedon trying to be clever about gendered roles and that is a recipe for disaster.  Horror movies in general and slasher flicks in particular have a history of misogyny, sex-shaming, objectification and voyeurism, and sexualised violence against women that hardly needs to be expounded upon here.  The bright points are those rare occasions when the tradition of the 'final girl' gets turned into something like an icon of strength, resilience, and courage in women.  (Take perhaps the most famous 'final girl', Ellen Ripley of Alien--Sigourney Weaver, of course, shows up in TCITW specifically to explain the trope.)  It's sufficiently common that even this movie's 'ritual' incorporates it: as long as everyone else dies and the 'Virgin' suffers, the ritual is complete and she might be allowed to survive and win.

This is too obvious for Joss Whedon's cleverness to abide.  No, while the protagonist  Dana is a woman, the actual hero of TCITW is Marty, the comic relief.  He's resistant to the mind-warping drugs and hypnotic suggestions because he's stoned all the time, he carries a collapsible steel bong that he uses to do battle with the monsters (and successfully takes down the one that tries to kill him personally), and constantly fills the audience surrogate role of 'Hey, maybe we shouldn't do this obviously dangerous thing'.  He also locates the secret entrance to the villains' complex, hacks into their equipment, rescues Dana from her monster (after killing his with a trowel), and leads her down to the lower levels to confront the big bads.  He gives us the moral of the story as well--society is fundamentally broken and deserves to be wiped out--and the final question of the story is whether Dana will murder him (and save the world) or break the cycle (and let the ancient death gods rise up to slaughter us all).

Except: Dana doesn't even get that moment of agency, because as she's quivering, gun in hand, choosing whether to kill one person by action or billions by inaction, Marty keeps her from noticing the werewolf creeping up behind her and the clock runs down while they're fighting.  Afterwards, as they wait for their doom, Dana says she probably wouldn't have done it anyway, but actually letting her make that choice wasn't dramatic enough, apparently.

Raise your hand if you're shocked that Joss Whedon looked at a genre where strong female protagonists occasionally win (while hordes of other women are slaughtered, usually after flashing the audience) and said "No, this will not do, I need to bring something fresh to the table by having a sarcastic scruffy man save the helpless girl and drive the plot."  It's not the muscular dude, or the smart dude, or the hot chicks (either flavour, sexy or virginal) who save the day, it's the pseudophilosophical guy with funny lines and weed and no luck with women.  Yeah, that's definitely not Whedon's author avatar.

The phrase 'deconstruction' has gotten popular in the recent years, but the meaning has kinda shifted.  It's common enough now to use it as we do on this blog, to just mean 'unsympathetic critical analysis', but the word itself is older and more nuanced than that, to the point where I can't even begin to parse the original source material by Derrida.  (Neither can a lot of scholars, leading to a bunch of people trying to create secondary explanations that actually make sense.)  I'm not going to pretend I understand it either, but I can tell the difference between a meaningful commentary and shouting "Society thinks sex is dirty so the blond slut always dies first!"  Like: thanks, Joss.  We know.  We know that's how it always goes.  Are you in fact clever enough to come up with a twist on that, or are you just going to have a lot of people point out that the girl got killed five minutes after going topless and call it groundbreaking?  "But what if she was manipulated into doing it?"  SHE IS ALWAYS MANIPULATED INTO DOING IT BECAUSE THESE SCRIPTS ARE ALL ARTIFICE.  There are no actual choices going on.  The only difference this time is that the people in the script are scripted to acknowledging that they're following a script but under no circumstances question it.

Without getting too far into a very different kind of essay, I also want to vent my frustration against the ending and the idea that Our Heroes made the right choice by dooming everyone: in order for someone to say 'society is corrupt and we all deserve to burn' they have to be either the ultimate supervillain or have an incredibly narrow and specific concept of what 'the whole world' means.  We're talking about more than seven billion people in the world, all living radically different lives in different circumstances, different choices, different values, different traditions.  The typical stoner-philosopher appears to mean "Capitalism is messed up, our government is ineffective, and I can't get laid, so the whole thing might as well burn", which to my mind just shows a lack of interest or creativity.  If it's about the atrocities humans have committed in the past, well, we've got almost two billion people under the age of 15 and I'm inclined to give them a chance to do better than us.  If it's about the stories we tell supposedly illustrating our inherent corruption, well, show me an Anishinaabe slasher flick or something, because I'm not sure our traditions are as universal as you're claiming.

But I'm getting all Doylist about this instead of interrogating it from within the framework of the movie, where the logic appears to be "Humanity is under constant threat of annihilation by malevolent gods unless we make bloody sacrifices, therefore we deserve to be annihilated by malevolent gods", which... does not flow for me.

The ultimate problem with TCITW, I think, is the nature of the big bad gods behind it.  They are meant to stand for us, the audience: one girl has to get naked and die because the gods demand it, people must suffer because the gods demand it, it all has to happen over and over again because if the showrunners don't give the gods what they want, they--that is, we the audience--will rise up and end the world, and frankly that is blatant buck-passing.  The closest thing you can get to a 'message' out of TCITW is that these same horror movies keep getting made because that's supposedly what we want, but let's look at the facts: Twilight features blood and monsters and decapitation, but it also features girls who get to live forever with their infinitely-loyal sexbot husbands, and the Twilight movies made more money than you could fit in a cabin in the woods.  Google searching suggests to me that the highest-grossing slasher flick of all time, the original Scream, in total grossed about $189 million internationally (adjusted for inflation), whereas the first Twilight laughed that off at an easy $225 million and New Moon hit $326 million.

I'm not saying Twilight is good--what kind of monster do you take me for--but I am saying that in the case of Auteur Joss Whedon vs. We The Demanding And Disgusting Public, the evidence speaks soundly in favour of these things not being how you pander to the plebes.  There are no all-powerful market gods demanding that these same exploitation-film cliches get repeated over and over again: these movies get made because filmmakers like to make them.  That's the twist TCITW needed: in the end, when they've forced Dana to kill Marty to save everyone else, and everyone agrees that the rituals must go on because that's just how the world works, we find out that the Director is actually just a power-hungry misanthrope who dangles the (false) threat of ancient gods over everyone else because they just really like watching young people die naked.

Guess that was a step of realism too far?

Ender's Shadow, chapters eighteen, nineteen, and twenty, in which Bean doesn't murder anyone

(Content: ableism, discussion of murder. Fun content: a slow loris, the return of the whatnapple, and the best part of this book, in the midst of some really impressively bad writing.)

Ender's Shadow: p. 276--315

Chapter Eighteen: Friend

Graff and his unnamed boss (General Levi?  The Polemarch? We don't know, and I suppose technically it doesn't matter) have a terrifying conversation about sending Ender or Bean to Command School.  Graff insists that Bonzo's death "was not foreseen", and the boss counters that "this is precisely the level of violence you anticipated. This is what you set up. You think that the experiment succeeded."  I think the evidence is pretty solidly against Graff here, given that he's basically recreating the Stilson fight.  'Murder twice, xenocide once', as the proverb goes.  But we knew that--the best addition here is this particular Total Logical Disconnect:

"Didn't he inform you that it was Bean who may have pushed Bonzo over the edge to violence by breaking security and informing him that Ender's army was composed of exceptional students? [....] Bean was acting to save his own life, and in so doing he shunted the danger onto Ender Wiggin's shoulders. [...] When Bean is under pressure, he turns traitor."

Not a word of this makes any sense.  First, what 'security' was breached by Bean telling Bonzo that Ender got assigned good soldiers?  Bean was commanded not to talk about his assignment to create Dragon Army, but just saying 'Dragon Army are all really smart and underappreciated' is the kind of assessment anyone could make, especially Bean.  Second, how is Bonzo supposed to be provoked by hearing that the game was stacked against him?  'Hey, you know your most hated foe who's getting all this credit as a genius for winning his battles?  Well, his subordinates are brilliant.'  That is the opposite of provocation--that's an opportunity to say that Ender is just skating on his advantages and actually has no personal skill.  The provocation would be 'Ender is so much better than you that he could win if Dragon Army were mops in wigs and flash suits'.

A rare portrait of C Toon with Bean's squad (not pictured: Ducheval, or dozens of naked children).

Lastly, it should be a matter of record that Bean made every attempt to call in the existing authorities--people whom, on paper, he's supposed to rely upon to solve these problems--to stop Bonzo, and was denied.  Bean got himself out of a dangerous situation and then immediately attempted to access overwhelming forces to prevent that danger from threatening anyone else.  A slow loris could see through Graff's argument here.

A rare interview with the rejected jurist for Graff's court-martial (she was removed after asking a question about jury nullification).

There's still the final laser tag match to go, Dragon versus Tiger and Griffin, with one more bit that technically isn't a retcon--Bean is pushing Ender through the whole way, reminding him to act, and as soon as Ender has his plan (the full-size armored transport made of soldiers) he slots himself into the formation and puts Bean in charge of the whole the-enemy's-gate-is-down plan.  Bean thinks about how they won this fight on Ender's reputation, which scared the other armies into inactivity, but that won't matter in the war to come, which is as close as we get to anyone acknowledging that laser tag is not meaningful campaign training.

Y'all will recall that last chapter Bean merrily hopscotched between a burning passion to be the very best like no was ever was and a humble conviction that only Ender's glorious mind matters.  He has finally located his sweet spot, as the fanatical self-effacing disciple:

If it could be done, Ender was the one who would have to do it. All those months when Bean refused to see Ender, hid from him, it was because he couldn't bear to face the fact that Ender was what Bean only wished to be--the kind of person on whom you could put all your hopes, who could carry all your fears, and he would not let you down, would not betray you. 

There's another layer of WTF to dig through, but let's just wallow in this one for a moment: ignoring the life-changing experience that was Ender's Game, what do we actually know about Ender in this book that justifies Bean's opinion of him?  Who has relied upon Ender so far?  When has he proven that he 'would not betray you'?  When has he had the opportunity to betray anyone?  All of his interactions with Bean have been hostile until he finally gave Bean the Meaningful Man Nod Of Approval and gave him his special ops team.  Apart from that, they've all had a fairly normal relationship with Ender as their teacher.  He puts his trust in them, which is nice, but what have we seen that would cause all the Dragons (specifically chosen by Bean for their lack of prior interaction with Ender) to adore him so?

I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don't want to go through what you've been through to get there.

...Bean remembered falling into line behind Poke or Sergeant or Achilles on the streets of Rotterdam, and he almost laughed as he thought, I don't want to have to go through what I've gone through to get here, either.

TOO LITTLE TOO LATE, CARD.  Bean is, by my estimate, not quite six yet, meaning that less than two years ago (a quarter of his life, granted) he was literally starving in the gutter, and his first thought upon seeing how tired Ender is after all this laser tag and murdering a dude in the showers is 'I wouldn't want to have had his life'.  Yes, Ender killed a kid a couple of hours ago and I imagine that weighs on a boy, but up until this day what terrible trials does Bean imagine he's had to endure in order to get here, apart from being very good at laser tag?  Bean knows nothing about Ender's life!  Bean doesn't know about Stilson.  Bean doesn't even know about Peter!

There's the rest of the super-dramatic scene with Ender declaring "The game is over" and practice is cancelled forever, and everyone goes back to their bunks, where Bean finds a transfer slip making him the new commander of Rabbit Army, and all the other toon leaders are commanders now as well.  They all want Bean to bring Ender the news, but Bean stops by Rabbit Army first, where the ranking toon leader tells him that a lot of commanders just graduated (Bean says precisely nine, to make room for the nine Dragons moving up), but he describes it like this:

"A lot of commanders," said Itú. "More than half."

Y'all.  Send help.  Nine commanders cannot possibly be more than half of Battle School, can it?  Fewer than eighteen armies?  Even the wiki lists twenty-one, and implicitly there are many more.  (The scenes in the commanders' mess hall become way more pointed if there are only two dozen people in there; how could Ender and Bonzo not have been constantly running into each other all month?)

Bean and Ender have their final face-to-face talk, which isn't all that different from the first go-round except that Bean has a lot of 'I already know that' monologue going inside his head when Ender says stuff that Retcon-Bean obviously figured out ages ago, or saying things like "He had it coming" about Bonzo and then flinching and mentally chastising himself for how terrible that is to say.  Eventually Anderson arrives to spare us any more of this scene, to tell Ender he's going to Command School.

He turned to Bean, took his hand. To Bean, it was like the touch of the finger of God. It sent light all through him. Maybe I am his friend. Maybe he feels toward me some small part of the... feeling I have for him.

Y'all know I strictly ship Ender/Alai, but we can all agree it's hard not to read that as hella gay, yes?  Not respect or admiration or fraternity or even just flatly and unabashedly calling it love, but "...feeling".  I'm having Fifty Shades flashbacks.

For some reason what came into Bean's mind was the moment when Poke handed him six peanuts. It was life that she handed to him then. 

Was it life that Ender gave to Bean? Was it the same thing? 

No. Poke gave him life. Ender gave it meaning.

YOU'RE ALL PLAYING LASER TAG.

Anyway, Bean resolves to keep being awesome at his studies and games in the hopes that one day he will impress the teachers so much that they'll bring him back to Ender's future army, and the chapter mercifully ends.

Chapter Nineteen: Rebel

Bean is immediately notified that, with half new commanders, they're all to start eating in the commanders' mess immediately (not wait for their first victory), and since Ender's Game doesn't discuss Battle School from this point on, Card finally gets around to observing how badly it's designed:

Standings and scores! Instead of fighting the battle at hand, those scores made soldiers and commander alike more cautious, less willing to experiment. That's why the ludicrous custom of fighting in formations had lasted so long--Ender can't have been the first commander to see a better way.

That's reasonable on the face of it, but that suggests that, rather than being super-brilliant, Ender is simply the first person stubborn enough to insist on trying something new, which... really?  Petra or Dink weren't daring enough?  Dink doesn't even like the fame and glory side, he just loves laser tag!

Bean does another tabletop speech calling them to shut down the boards and instead play purely on the basis of creativity and experimentation, learning from each other above all else.  (An idea he came up with now that he's part of the legendary and defunct Dragon Army that devastated the standings flawlessly for about a month.)  Eventually everyone gets on board, and Dink, most senior student in the whole school, agrees to take it to the teachers or they all boycott the games.  Then it's time for Bean to properly meet his new army, which he speechily does, saying he called them to back up Ender (when they thought he'd be ambushed in the halls) because he was sure they were honorable soldiers whether they liked Ender personally or not, and etc flattery gets you everywhere.

He's corrected on one point--he's not the only new Rabbit, because they just got a brand new transfer student: Achilles.  Bean wonders if the teachers imagine Bean will be able to help Achilles adjust to the school faster, but he's also fourth-wall-crackingly aware: "Maybe he's here to be my Bonzo Madrid."  Achilles starts telling street stories, but Bean shuts him down and demands his authority be respected, even though he can see Achilles renew his plans for murder.

For the first time, Bean understood the reason Ender had almost always acted as if he was oblivious to the danger from Bono. It was a simple choice, really. Either he could act to save himself or he could act to maintain control over his army.

I--what?  How exactly would it have undermined Ender's glorious aura of command if he had actually said 'Bonzo is a goddamn menace and he needs to stay the fuck away from me'?  Everyone's supposed to love Ender unconditionally.  Is Card telling us that the essence of command isn't actually the charismatic bond of trust, but James-Bond-esque cool necessary for snappy one-liners and slowly walking away from explosions?  Is this like "never let them see you sweat"?  Whatever.

Chapter Twenty: Trial and Error

Carlotta immediately gets on Graff's case about Achilles being removed from his school which was inexplicably in Cairo, I guess for exoticism points.  She lists more suspected kills: Achilles apparently took out Ulysses before he was removed from Rotterdam, a teacher he hated at his first school, and the surgeon who repaired his leg--anyone who mocked Achilles or saw him in a state of weakness.  Graff insists he'll send a message up to Battle School, despite having been removed himself.

"If you let Bean come to harm, God will have an accounting from you." 

"He'll have to get in line, Sister Carlotta. The I.F. court-martial takes precedence."

Oh, now he gets a court-martial.

Bean has a private bedroom now as commander, which means he can pry open the upper air intake vents rather than just the little outflow vents at floor level, which means he can get into ducts big enough for any child to fit inside.  I have no idea why the air intakes are larger than the outflow vents, but I am not a space architect.  The point is that he clambers in there and starts setting a trap.

There's an extended sequence from Achilles' point of view, which is undoubtedly edgy if you're into close-third-person scenes from the perspective of serial killers.  Not really my jam.  Achilles is very excited about laser tag, although his mentor Ambul made the 'mistake' of laughing at him while he was frozen.

People shouldn't do that. It was wrong, and it always gnawed at Achilles until he was able to set things right. There should be more kindness and respect in the world.

That's basically this whole section in a nutshell: Achilles of course doesn't think of himself as evil, he just thinks that failure to respect his glory is Wrong and it can only be made Right via murder.  It goes on like this for a while as he plots Bean's death.  He also disdains Bean's delegation tactics in battle, thinking to himself that it's all about authority and submission of soldiers to their commander's will.  Of course, in a massive swerve:

No one but Achilles seemed to understand that this was the great strength of the Buggers. They had no individual minds, only the mind of the hive. They submitted perfectly to the queen. We cannot defeat the Buggers until we learn from them, become like them.

No one but you understands that, Achilles, because the fact that the formics are a telepathic hive-mind with no thoughts or will save for that of the queen is Mazer Rackham's crackpot theory and a matter of inconceivable military secrecy so there is literally no way a street urchin like you knows it oh my god Card read your own book.   ...Where was I?  Achilles is going to kill Bean, somehow.

Bean calls Achilles into his private quarters and explains that Ender wasn't a genius at all--he just learned all the other commanders' plans and teachers' schemes in advance by spying on them through the ducts--and he needs someone he can trust to help him carry on this legacy of glorious cheating.  Achilles buys it completely, because the universe always bends to his will, and they scramble naked [drink!] into the vents.  Achilles internally monologues about memorising the path and looking for opportunities to get his hands on something lethal.

...When Achilles grieved for the child, his tears would be real. They always were, for there was a nobility to these tragic deaths. A grandeur as the great universe worked its will through Achilles' adept hands.

So basically Achilles is who Ender would be if Ender saw himself the way the book treats him.

They get to a downward shaft in a larger room (I don't know why a space like this would exist) and Bean lies about the deadline, saying they have to use it to safely rappel down to the teachers' level but it cuts the skin if it slides, so the only safe method to pull on it is by tying it tight around your torso.  (The slow loris was also not convinced by this plan.)  Achilles plans out how he'll get Bean trapped, hanging in mid-air by his waist, as he plays along with the plan, but of course Bean gives the order and as soon as Achilles has a tight loop on himself, he gets yanked up into the air himself by someone hiding on the shadows with their hands on the other end of his line.

And this is it, the best part of the whole damn book, because Bean neutralises Achilles, gets him hanging helplessly, and then beats him with words:

"First thing is, you forgot where you were. Back on Earth, you were used to being a lot smarter than everybody around you. But here in Battle School, everybody is as smart as you, and most of us are smarter. You think Ambul didn't see the way you looked at him? [....] And since we just had a case of one kid trying to kill another, nobody was going to put up with it again. Nobody was going to wait for you to strike. Because here's the thing--we don't give a shit about fairness here. We're soldiers. Soldiers do not give the other guy a sporting chance." 

[....] He had forgotten that when Bean said for Poke to kill him, he had not just been showing respect for Achilles. He had also been trying to get Achilles killed. 

[....] "Bring me a teacher, I'll confess." 

"Didn't you hear me explain how stupid we're not? You confess now. Before witnesses. With a recorder."

For once--for once--I buy it.  I am convinced by these characters: that Achilles would be this smart and still make these mistakes, that Bean would plan ahead like this and set this trap, that the other students would back him up.  One chapter and done.  This is the kind of solution that a genius soldier protege should finagle, not walking into a shower-arena for single combat and expecting the best.  This is for once rare moment a scene that gives me what I want from this story and not what I expect due to narrative tradition.

And it's Bean's crowning achievement, because he rejects killing.  He wants Achilles gone, and he could get away with murder here, he says as much (no one would ever find Achilles' body if they just left him there next to the air purifiers), but he is going for institutionalisation, and he's winning by creating a plan that relies on the help of his genius friends, instead of going solo like the wunderkind.  Graff's last act was to put someone in Battle School who would pose a threat to Bean, same as Bonzo to Ender, and Bean goes off the playbook.  If Ender were capable of this, the penitent formics would still be alive instead of dying in a cosmic catastrophe.

Achilles confesses to all seven murders and et cetera et cetera he's "insane", as if sanity is a meaningful predictor of violence (spoilers: no it fucking isn't), and Bean leaves Achilles hanging there as he and his four comrades leave without letting him see their faces.  Achilles is basically all 'I'll get you next time, Gadget' in his head, plotting how he'll have to one day kill every Battle School student to cement his control over the world, because Achilles is the villain of the next two Shadow books as well, but for now he's done with, because, as noted, Bean is better than Ender.

Next week: Petra makes a saving throw and Bean reads ahead in the script.