The Vapid Spectacle of Netflix's 'Avatar: The Last Airbender'

Image; Albert Kim Pictures, Rideback, & Nickelodeon Productions

The original Avatar: The Last Airbender is about a pan-Asian society where some genetically predestined individuals can learn a type of martial arts that allows them to manipulate the four elements (i.e., Earth, Fire, Air, Water). Each society specializes in an element-bending martial arts, and our series follows the Avatar, the only person who can master all four elements. The Avatar, who in the reincarnation is an airbender named Aang, is a cosmological figure who has been charged with the metaphysical task of keeping "balance" in the world.

The live-action Netflix series is retelling the exact plot beats of the original cartoon but in a hyper-condensed fashion. The original first season of the cartoon was twenty episodes long, while the live-action one only has eight. So, although the overall plot structure is the same, things have been understandably shuffled around. Most of the on-the-road aesthetic of season one has been abandoned for visiting some key locations, such as the Earth Kingdom fortress city of Omashu or the Northern Water Tribe's fantastical capital of Agna Qel'a.

The Netflix series isn't a good retelling. I honestly found it to be a struggle to get through. That's not a shocker to anyone following the critical reaction to the first season. While the original cartoon has a critical aggregate of nearly 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, the live-action reboot currently has one below 60%. It's just fine, the definition of 'mid,' 'meh,' or whatever your generational slang for mediocre may be. It's the perfect show to keep in the background while doing other things because it requires nothing of the viewer at all.

And yet, despite being critically panned, Avatar remains an intriguing spectacle. In fact, spectacle is at the heart of what makes this series so entertaining and such a disappointment.

Spectacle reigns supreme

For a pop culture commentator like myself who is interested in the political and philosophical messaging of media, we could spend a long time picking apart this series' supposed flaws. Maybe, like Jenna Scherer in AV Club, you find the pacing and dialogue to be off. Perhaps the defanging of the political content offends your sensibilities, as argued by Jessie Gender in her video essay The Avatar Remake Doesn't Understand Avatar.

Yet I hesitate to do so because I don't think the creators of the Netflix series put much effort into this show beyond ensuring it was bingeable. It's been a blatant cash grab from the start. The original creators of the animated series, Konietzko and DiMartino, left as showrunners of the live-action one in 2020 due to "creative differences" — Hollywoodspeak for not wanting your name attached to a bad project. And now that we've seen the final product, it's clear those concerns were valid.

For all its faults, the original show cared deeply about what it was trying to say, so much so that its creators had a sometimes hostile relationship with Nickelodeon executives. By the time the sequel series The Legend of Korra came around, the condensed last season didn't get an actual premiere on Nickelodeon but was dumped on their streaming service with little promotion.

However, the live-action show's number one focus has been on spectacle, by which I mean a product that is more concerned with being seen than about what it is. The point of a spectacle is not to think about what you are looking at but to be enraptured, transfixed, and almost taken over (see Society of the Spectacle).

Sometimes, these examples are small. For example, there is a slight pause with the introduction of Firelord Ozai, played by Daniel Dae Kim, a famous actor (see Hawaii Five-O) who long-term fans will recognize as voicing General Fong in the original Avatar cartoon. The pause is for the fans to comment on his appearance, and it's a common practice for modern blockbusters such as the MCU. Still, to those unfamiliar with who Firelord Ozai is, the scene lingers too long — a moment of spectacle that overtakes the filmmaking.

Overall, the text has a lot of similar exciting moments. It is very good at creating fantastic (though sometimes mixed) CGI and fight scenes, but there is no interest in the actual substance of what it says: it's just a vehicle for spectacle. The influencer Jessie Gender, in her commentary of the series, mentioned how this was reflected in one comment made by the actor who played Aang (Gordon Cormier), who had this to say on the Fire Nations genocide of the Air Nomads: "I think the Airbender genocide is really cool… Well, no! No! Not like that…I mean, yeah, my whole family's dead, of course. It's not a good thing, but watching it is going to be sick!"

Like Jessie Gender herself, I bring this up not to express how uniquely awful Cormier is (he's a teenager; don't harass him) but to point out that presenting the psychological horror of the Air Nomad genocide was not a priority. In the episode "The Southern Air Temple" of the cartoon, which deals most directly with the Air Nomad Genocide, Katara (Mae Whitman) and Sokka (Jack De Sena) spend a lot of the episode hiding the remnants of the genocide from Aang, so he can hold onto his childlike excitement of returning home after 100 years. This plan inevitably fails, and the viewer is left to see the horror on Aang's face as he stares at the sun-bleached bones of his massacred comrade, a "subtlety" described by its successor as tame.

But for all of showrunner Albert Kim's talk about wanting to show the horror of this genocide in real time, the emphasis of the Air Nomad genocide in the live-action series is clearly on the special effects and fight scenes — hence Cormier's reaction. We see charred corpses but also fantastic fire-bending and explosions that are a wonder to behold. The scene ends with an epic fight between an air-bending monk and a fire-bending warlord—fascistic violence that, from a cinematic perspective, feels more like we are supposed to be enraptured by than horrified.

That focus on spectacle impacts not only the subject matter but also how this show was made. There was an intense effort to manage old and potential new fan expectations. Sometimes, this care was immensely positive, such as making sure that this Asian and Indigenous-inspired show actually starred Asian and Indigenous actors (something both the "M. Night" Shyamalan movie and the original series were not always the best at).

And yet other times this emphasis on expectations was an active detriment to making good art, or even a good product. For all the talk of "actor fit," there appears to have been little attempt to connect actors to the actual material in the auditioning process. Showrunner Albert Kim talked in depth about how, like many current tentpoles, he had to write fake scenes for actors to audition because "this whole project was conducted under top secrecy." As Kim tells Hollywood Reporter:

“A lot of times they were reading off scenes about being in math class or playing basketball, stuff like that. I often joked with my producers that I wished we just compiled all of my fake scenes and we could create a whole new pilot by itself….A lot of times we weren’t, or at least I wasn’t, even listening to the lines being spoken, because they had nothing to do with Avatar. It was more about trying to envision these actors as the characters.”

When it comes to leads Aang (Gordon Cormier) and Katara (Kiawentiio), this approach painfully shows, as the acting is simply not there. They might have shined with different material, but in this show, their acting was often stale and lifeless. The decision to manage fan expectations (by building hype and preventing draft leaks to the public) was clearly more important than connecting with actors who were good fits. And no, it's not because there are not "good" Indigenous and Asian actors out there. I have seen enough works to know that justification to be a racist lie.

Everything about how this show was made feels backward. The series was created almost in a Frankenstein fashion, where the creators worked hard to ensure that Avatar's main plot remained unchanged and, from there, stitched together a story. As Albert Kim described to The Hollywood Reporter:

“Yes. The first thing I did was lay out all the episodes of the first season on a big whiteboard. We [the writer’s room] wrote them all out and what each was about, and then took a look at them, and sort of unraveled all of them. Then we looked at which of these threads go together where we find some thematic parallel between characters and storylines and scenarios, and how we could weave them back together to create something that felt more serialized.”

The focus was on keeping as many original plot beats intact as possible. And yet, while the plot elements remain more or less the same, the emotional arcs of the original series are distorted to the point of being virtually unrecognizable. In the cartoon, Aang spends seasons grappling with his role as Avatar, a plot point that is more or less resolved in a single episode. Sokka must overcome his sexism in the first season to become a better strategist, which in the live-action show is recast as not being a "good enough" warrior for his father, completely sidelining Kyoshi Warrior Suki in the process. The plot may be intact, but often, the soul of what made the cartoon so poignant does not make the transition.

However, you can be sure that all the nostalgic beats of the original series did make it. Fans will not miss characters like Jet or the Mechanist or renditions of the song Secret Tunnel. Even fan favorites such as Princess Azula and her friends are introduced a season early (cramming in more arcs in a series where, according to Albert Kim, one of the most significant constraints was time) so that OG fans could get excited about their introduction and say things like: "ooh, remember Azula? Remember Secret Tunnel? Remember this other series you loved?"

Again, what mattered more to this show's current creators was that this product was a spectacle to watch, and the show suffered (artistically, not commercially) as a result.

An unbalanced conclusion

We can spend all day bemoaning this show's mediocrity, but I hope you realize that this critique is about more than merely arguing "thing bad." If you take away anything, it's that the series' focus on spectacle above all else led to a frustrating product.

Yet, in the end, I don't know whether such criticisms even matter regarding this show's success. After all, the show's negative critical response has not dampened its prospects. Netflix's Avatar is allegedly the streamer's latest hit. According to Gizmodo: "the new series debuted on the streamer's English-language TV list with 21.2 million views and reached the top 10 in 92 countries." Although not officially announced by the time of writing, the greenlighting of a second season at this point is inevitable.

For all my complaints, this focus on spectacle exists for a reason. It's what our capitalist society runs on, a point you hopefully don't need the power of all four elements to understand.

The Brothers Sun & The Crisis of Conservative Motherhood

Image; Brad Falchuk Teley-Vision

The Brothers Sun is, in many ways, a vehicle for Michelle Yeoh to kick ass and look fabulous doing it. It’s about the matriarch of the Jade Dragons crime family, Mama Sun, who is fighting to protect her two sons from both internal and external threats. Yeoh is the star and highlight of the series, and there are definitely scenes where Mama Sun walks into a room with a stunning outfit, and the whole point is to go “damn, she is a boss."

Yet the show has more to say than merely showing off how amazing Michelle Yeoh can be. At its core is a text dissecting the misogyny that holds Mama Sun and her children back from a more fulfilling life. The "power" given to conservative mothers such as Mama Sun for maintaining patriarchy is cast aside for the illusion that it is, and we, as the viewers, are left questioning what remains in its place.

Mama bears, powerful or caged?

Michelle Yeoh's role as a mother comes front and center in this series. Mama Sun has sacrificed everything, including her entire life in Taipei, for the chance to protect her children. It's learned that she developed an elaborate contingency plan that involved her having to go into hiding in America with her son Bruce (Sam Li). She is the ultimate "Mama Bear" — the longstanding trope of typically passive women going into attack mode when their children are threatened that you can see everywhere from Demeter to "The Bride" in Kill Bill — and we are at least initially meant to see strength in that presentation.

Much of the initial thrill of The Brothers Sun comes from honoring the aspects of motherhood that our society normally devalues. For example, while her son, Charles (Justin Chien), briefly derides her regularly going to play mahjong with the aunties as mere "gossip," we learn that that gossip is partially the source of her power. Her triad name is "Rolodex," and those ladies hold essential information in her community, providing information that gives her an easy edge over her competitors.

In fact, there is one endearing scene where the aunties come to the rescue. A rogue group has captured Mamma Sun, and Bruce brings the aunties into a heavily armed warehouse, using them as human shields and, in effect, weaponizing how society undervalues oldness. Through this scene, we are meant to see the utility in this disregarded and "gossipy" group of conservative mothers.

However, the powerful institution Mama Sun is a part of is inherently conservative. The Triads are surrounded by arcane rituals tied to traditionalistic (and conservative) power structures. The triads depicted in the show take pride in having their roots allegedly in ancient monarchy. As her husband, Big Sun (Johnny Kou), says: "I'm reminded of our forefathers who stood against emperors," drawing on that perceived history in his bid to become a sort of Triad Emperor known as the "Dragon Head."

Yet, for all the alleged power Mama Sun has accrued, Triad society doesn't respect women that much. Her husband is the head of the Jade Dragons, even though she is the brains of his operation, and her son Charles, in episode four, expects to take over if her husband dies, despite her being very much alive. When the Jade Dragons try to meet face to face with another Triad group (an event referred to as a "square"), the head of said Triad insists that Mama Sun shouldn't come, saying: "…it would be an insult to have a woman at the center of such a historic meeting."

For most of the series, Mama Sun tries to claw her way to the top of the Jade Dragons and eventually the entire Triad hierarchy to lean in, if you will. And at least initially, no one believes in her, not even her son Bruce, who she has arguably sacrificed the most for. This complete disregard especially applies to her husband, who makes it abundantly clear how little he respects her, saying:

“You were a privileged, spoiled brat. And I convinced you that you were sacrificing for a larger purpose. But the only purpose you were serving was… me."

In this scene The Brother Sun beautifully illustrates how she was never serving herself. As with every patriarchal institution, Mamma Sun can only be seen as powerful in relation to the men above her. She can do incredible feats on behalf of these men, whether that be her husband or her children, but never for herself — and that's a shame because, as we shall soon see, conservative motherhood isn't even able to protect the very children it claims to protect.

Patriarchy hurts everyone

For all the talk of protecting her children, Mamma Sun can do nothing to stop the men she is bound to serve from harming those she loves. For example, despite it not being something she wanted, she is powerless to stop her husband from turning her eldest son, Charles, into an unrivaled killing machine for the Jade Dragons. This is because her desires are secondary to those of her husbands, who sees his family members as tools, extensions of himself to be used as he sees hit.

Charles goes through profound psychological trauma in becoming a killing machine — trauma that is not unusual for our patriarchal society. It was Bell Hooks, in her book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2004), who wrote:

“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead, patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”

At least initially, Charles deadens himself emotionally in order to enact violence. He is stoic and passive, clinging to concepts such as family to justify the horrors he perpetuates. And as Hooks suggests, this is not just an internal process but one continually reinforced by the male influences in his life. As Charles says of his father, Big Sun's, reaction to the first time he killed people en masse: "Ba said it was the emperor inside of me, the need to protect my family. [He] told me to embrace it."

As we can see, Charles's violence is not only reinforced by the male characters in his life, but men like his father link the violence of the Triads to their ancestral legacy. There is no separation between the violence these men wield and the "mantle of heaven" they claim to represent. Its legitimacy built on the domination of others, and we, as the viewer, are meant to be conflicted by it.

As the show starts to grapple with the f@cked-up nature of the Triad patriarchy, the coolness factor behind their violence starts to fade. After all, The Brothers Sun can only be considered cool and fun when it mostly separates the violence of what the Triads do — human trafficking, sexual exploitation, etc. (activities that are often backed by literal violence and slavery) — from the Sun family itself. It would be hard to find Charles as sexy and endearing if we saw him rounding up the enslaved people the family keeps in line for profit.

That edgy facade is ripped to shreds once the family's initial enemies are revealed to be young radicals called the Boxers, who resent these activities the Triads profit from. With the mantra "the riddance of evil must be thorough," the Boxers are a group that wants to tear down the triad system and replace it with something more ethical. As the Boxer member Grace (Madison Hu) tells Bruce Sun:

“The original Triads were rebels, organized to fight against corruption and oppression. Not anymore. Now they’re the oppressors. The Boxers were formed to push back against them. We’re a faceless collective fighting against the suppressors of our people. A mandate of heaven. And right now, protecting our people means destroying the Triads completely….”

Bruce knows that the Boxers are in the right, supplying them with information several times to aid in their efforts, but he understandably doesn't want to see his family die. The emotional pull of his fraternal relationship with Charles overrides his ideals as he tries, almost impossibly so, to find a way forward. Mama Sun, Bruce, and Charles spend the rest of the season being torn between these two poles of regressive patriarchy and radical revolution. We are left with a painful pulling away from the conservative ideal of family, even as the Suns must fend off from this new radical faction. Family members and friends are killed. Trust is broken. All to claw away from the Triad patriarchy and try to make something new.

We don't quite know what the Suns will settle on, but the deconstruction of the patriarchal system is at the forefront of it. The Triad system is depicted as something that actively hurts all those involved and whose principles are nothing more than padding meant to rationalize the violence it doles out. As Charles says to his father in the final episode of the first season: "We aren't an idea. We are just gangs of men fighting over property."

As the show comes to a close, the best thing we are told to do is to leave patriarchy and all the violence used to reinforce it behind, and nowhere is that more salient than the path set forward by Mama Sun.

When the yoke is broken

What happens when the conservative mother's submission is broken? What replaces it? In the final episode, Mama Sun appears to be taking over the Jade Dragons. Perhaps all The Brothers Sun will offer us next season is a neoliberal type of lean-in politics where the spurned mom gets the power she "deserves," ignoring the morally despicable reality of Triad politics: an institution that cannot be reformed and only abolished.

Yet, even if that is all we receive, the rebuke of the conservative mother in this first season has been a treat to watch. The crisis of conservative motherhood is something that has more far-reaching consequences than just the empowerment of one individual or even a group of individuals because, in many ways, a mother's silence is what keeps the entire conservative family together. Men are not the only ones to psychically mutilate themselves in support of patriarchy. Conservative women provide a vital service to this system, reinforcing it as much as they are oppressed by it. The men they support require their care, aid, and sometimes even violence to dominate at all.

There would be no Jade Dragons without Mama Sun, even if she was not directly acknowledged for all of her efforts, and there would be no patriarchy without the many women who conform to and oppress other women in the name of the men they serve.

I Will Never Forgive Vox for this One Abortion Article

Photo by Maria Oswalt on Unsplash

Let me set the scene. It's Apr 3, 2019, three years, two months, and twenty-one days before the federal right to abortion enshrined in Roe v. Wade is overturned by the Supreme Court ruling Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (or Dobbs for short). Some, especially in the abortion space, see this grim reality unfolding on the horizon. Others believe it's impossible.

The media company Vox has commissioned 15 writers for their "Hindsight 2070" series, all answering the question, "What do we do now that will be considered unthinkable in 50 years?" No methodology is posted for how these writers were selected, so it seems to be just a list of the most click-worthy topics about the future they thought would gain traction. In between condemnations of eating meat and kids playing tackle football, they produce one claiming that the right to an abortion will be unthinkable in 50 years, and it still makes me furious.

We are going to talk about this article, but more to the point, we will treat this text for the relic it is —the belief in a time that Roe could never end.

A brief look at liberal, anti-Roe articles

This abortion article was written by Karen Swallow Prior, who I would classify as a more "center-leaning" conservative. She may be pro-forced-birth and pro-religious "liberties," but she did have a scandal a couple of years ago where she was removed as a fellow from the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for effectively supporting same-sex relations. She has also been pretty transparent about abusive dynamics in this space. As Rick Pidcock writes in Baptist News of her perspective:

“One might wonder, based on her speaking truth to power through the years, if she is secretly a progressive Christian. But Prior remains committed to conservative theology and pro-life politics, despite the conservative men who have hurt her.”

She is a commentator adjacent to more liberal circles, even if she does not fully embrace them. Consequently, Karen Swallow Prior takes an interesting rhetorical stance on abortion. She doesn't provide a different argument for why abortion should be illegal. She, like many others, claims that fetuses should have a right to life and that right should not be infringed by the autonomy of the mother. I have talked about why this logic is dehumanizing before (see When It Comes To Abortion, Humanity Is Stripped Away Until Only A Womb Is Left), but what makes her unique is that she links the forced birther movement to the liberal condition, saying:

“As we enter late modernity and recognize the limits of the radical autonomy and individualism which have defined it, the pendulum will correct itself with a swing toward more communitarian and humane values that recognize the interdependency of all humans.”

Although this point is easily debunked by bringing up the counterpoint that such "humane values" rely on the subjugation of the mother to the fetus (and consequently the often conservative arbiters of said fetus' rights), it's an argument that has all the right talking points for the then-contemporary liberal audience to view it as clever. It is the sort of piece that "makes you think," despite itself being relatively short and doing nothing to summarize the existing literature in the field or thoroughly explain why this trend will happen other than just a vague appeal to humanism. As one "Go Blue" Twitter profile commented at the time:

“Vox did a fascinating series asking experts, “What do we do now that will be considered unthinkable in 50 years?” And the responses, on subjects ranging from sex work to abortion, were really, really interesting.”

The liberal consensus on debating Roe before its nullification was often one of amusement. Yes, the ruling was considered important, but it was also settled and safe to pick apart. It was not uncommon to see liberals and the "moderates" they loved to court in the name of fairness, to position their opposition to the ruling on purely academic lines, utterly detached from the real-world circumstances on the ground. "Let Roe go," went the title of an article Megan McArdle wrote in 2018 in the Washington Post, arguing that the decision was poorly reasoned and that if the ruling was nullified, we could somehow get something better, saying:

“Somewhat paradoxically, the way to make abortion less contentious is to throw the matter back to the states so that people can argue about it. Debating the difficult decisions regarding gestational age and circumstances would force people to confront the hard questions that abortion entails, which tends to have a moderating effect on extreme opinions.”

This reasoning (and McArdle was by no means unique in believing it) was a sort of topsy-turvy logic that pretended that Roe's would-be nullifiers were not conservative reactionaries intent on making it illegal across the entire country. Pro-forced-birth conservatives are not satisfied with constraining their activities to state lines. Although the right to abortion continues to be popular, that has not stopped conservatives from pushing through unpopular policies before (see also the partial repeal of the ACA, less taxes on the wealthy, etc.). Public opinion is wholly divorced from the passage and repeal of policy.

Despite there being mounting evidence that the ruling was in genuine danger and would be supplanted by a more reactionary status quo, the majority of the liberal establishment, including Democratic Party leadership, was not very motivated to preserve Roe. There were and continue to be a lot of forced birth Democrats (see Democrats For Life of America), and the Democratic Party has never been interested in enforcing a hardline on this issue. As recently as last year, the Democratic Party's House leadership endorsed the House's last forced-birth Democrat for the 2024 cycle.

Before Dobbs, there was largely indifference from all parts of the establishment to mobilize on this issue, and that's because many people thought it was impossible for the ruling to be overturned. "By the numbers, why Roe v. Wade will probably stand," Eric Zorn lectured to us in the Chicago Tribune in 2018, convinced that it would be "political suicide" for conservatives. "No, The Supreme Court Is Not About To Overrule Roe v. Wade," argued Evan Gerstmann in Forbes, literally commenting on the Dobbs case, one year, one month, and six days before it repealed Roe.

For some, it really did seem like the status quo would go on forever. It didn't matter if someone pushed for theoretical objections to abortion in liberal circles on legal or even moral grounds because Roe was a wall that could not be moved. That sense of invincibility probably caused all of these articles to get greenlit in the first place, including, I suspect, this Vox one.

Yet this invincibility was always a lie, one that then imploded, and like Roe v. Wade itself, the rest is history.

The path forward

Karen Swallow Prior was ecstatic when Roe was overturned. "Called it!" she posted, linking to her Vox article, the day Politico published a leaked draft of the Dobbs ruling. She has not been commissioned to write for Vox since this piece. I don't see any pro-forced-birth pieces when I comb through Vox's archives either. The air of how we talk about abortion is entirely different in a post-Roe world. The sense of invincibility that Roe gave some commentators was removed, forcing many to come to terms with the cold reality that their rights were not as solid as they once believed.

Yet some were screaming about this before it was repealed. Some people were not surprised by the Dobbs ruling because they could see it coming, forecasted for decades by the conservative movement's war on bodily autonomy. I remember reading Gabrielle Zevin's novel The Hole We're In (2010), which is about a family suffering from the fallout of the 2008 recession. In the final chapters, one of the main characters is trying to get an abortion for her daughter in 2020, and it's difficult because Roe has been overturned. Gabrielle Zevin was able to predict this fate over a decade ago, only off by about two years.

Activists were aware of this trend and tried to stop it for decades, but rather than listen to these valid concerns, many instead chose to publish (and greenlight) condescending think pieces. The reason I am still angry at this Vox article is because of the complacency of it all. The editorial staff at the time amused themselves imagining what the future could look like, oblivious that Roe was going to be dismantled much faster than I doubt they imagined. This article (and many like it) represents a dangerous amount of complacency, softening the American public during a time when they needed to be even more vigilant.

There is no shortage of things that need to be screamed about. Some are pointing even now at new lines conservatives, other reactionaries, and even liberals are trying to cross, and we (as a society) don't need to be caught unprepared next time. We can listen instead of sticking our heads in the sand and stop treating every warning as an overreaction simply because the forecasted problems are not immediate.

Now, on the precipice of so many wide-sweeping changes (not just with bodily autonomy but also the environment, the militarization of the police, and so much more), we cannot remain ignorant of such warnings and still be surprised when they come to pass.

The Beauty of Maestro's Unforgotten Wife

Image; Lea Pictures, Sikelia Productions, Amblin Entertainment, Fred Berner Films

The biopic Maestro is about famous queer composer Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) as he navigates his marriage to actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). Bernstein was a talented man who was probably most famous for his musical contributions to West Side Story, among others, but he was also a bisexual man in an age where that wasn't the most accepted of things. The biggest tension arguably revolves around the weight of that stigma on Bernstein's wife, his career, his family, and his sense of self.

Like Bernstein's music, Maestro is an acquired taste. The film matches his frantic energy. It moves from scene to scene in a way that is chaotic and, at times, unhinged. Bernstein will be talking about some sudden and vulnerable subject, and then in the next moment, he will pull back, rhetorically, commenting on his own abrasiveness. Almost every scene is filled with his high-speed, overbearing wit, which the viewer either acclimates to or doesn't.

Yet unlike in many texts where the wife of the rich gay man languishes in obscurity and neglect, Maestro gives us something that, although not new, is exceedingly rare in media — an actual partnership.

A brief summary of the wives ignored

When films recount gay men in the past, particularly white, rich gay men, the wife often suffers in the background. She is the person he, at best, lies to as he hooks up with other men on the side, clinging to his fabricated heterosexuality so that he doesn't lose his middle-to-upper-class privileges.

A good example of this is the graphic novel turned musical Fun Home, which is an autobiography of queer writer Alison Bechdel and her tumultuous (and abusive) relationship with her closeted father, Bruce. He does not have a harmonious relationship with his wife, neglecting her and giving her profound anxiety about the status of his queer entanglements. "And boys," his wife Helen sings in the song Days and Days, "My God, some of them underage." Later in the song, she laments why she resigned herself to this bad relationship, claiming that it was a gradual process of compromise over time: "That's how it happens. Days. Made of bargains, I made because I thought as a wife I was meant to. And now my life is shattered and laid bare."

We see this process of compromise also in Brokeback Mountain (2005), where the main characters, Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger), both enter into heterosexual relationships for most of the film's runtime, even though they both have deep affection for one another. Jack does not confide the secret of his sexuality to his wife, Lureen Newsome (Anne Hathaway), but it hangs in the background. She knows his lover, Ennis, as "the fishing buddy." As she informs Ennis of Jack's death on the phone in a heart-wrenching monologue, sparring him of the details of his gay bashing, you can see the acknowledgment of their relationship in her eyes, unstated. Ennis' relationship is even less stable. His wife Alma (Michelle Williams) inadvertently witnesses him kissing Jack, further straining the marriage until it breaks, though the kiss itself is not mentioned well after the two's divorce.

Sometimes the wife is not just neglected but abused. In Dance of the 41, which is a film about the son-in-law, Ignacio de la Torre y Mier (Alfonso Herrera), of Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz (Fernando Becerril), the main character is actively cruel to his wife Amada Díaz (Mabel Cadena). Ignacio ignores her calls for intimacy, gaslights her, and creates an entirely adversarial relationship. When the gay society and found family Ignacio is part of (i.e., The Dance of the 42) is violently shut down by the government, and its members are shamed in public and sent to prison, he is spared from this fate because of his marriage to Amada. She has no sympathy for him, telling Ignacio that his lover, Evaristo Rivas (Emiliano Zurita), is dead while indifferently sipping her coffee. She is now firmly in control of the relationship both of them are resigned to.

Dance of the 41 provides us with the most visceral reason why these men were distant and neglectful. The exposure of their secret could end them — their careers, their reputations, and in the case of this film, their freedom, and their lives. It's an understandable (if not still cruel) reason for such marital neglect, a trope repeated in film after film around the globe.

Yet in Maestro, Bernstein's wife Felicia is loved, accepted, and there —a type of representation that is rare in cinema.

The Maestro's open secret

Leonard Bernstein's bisexuality was an open secret during his marriage to Felicia Montealegre. He would flirt with men and women alike everywhere, from a large gathering at his apartment to a simple New York City street. "Can I tell you a secret? Do you know I've slept with both your parents," he says wryly to a baby being pushed along in a stroller.

His wife seems to accept his sexuality, as well as the larger-than-life spotlight he maintained. There is one scene where Felicia is talking to Leonard's sister, Shirley Bernstein (Sarah Silverman), who asserts that there is a "price" for being in her brother's orbit (i.e., that both his personality and his sexuality will never make it so he's just hers). Felicia claims to be unbothered by it, saying:

“I suppose I do understand what you mean. You know, it’s very strange, but I do believe there is that in everybody. One wishes to make adjustments to one’s self but having this imposition of a strong personality is like a way of death, really. Yet the moment I see that that is making him suffer, I realize that it’s not worth it. No, what for? It isn’t going to kill me, really, and if it’s going to give him pleasure or stop him from suffering and it’s in my power to do it, then what the hell, you know? But one has to do it completely without sacrifice. And if it is going to be a sacrifice, then I disappear.”

In other words, she wasn't going to make herself miserable for her husband's comfort and vice versa. Instead, she established boundaries and worked on her own career as well. As Carrie Mulligan says of her characterization to NPR:

“…she’s not going to do [the marriage] in a typical meek-woman-by-the-great-man manner. She’s not going to do it and begrudge him. She’s going to do it wholly because she refuses to be the kind of whingeing wife. And I think you see that in the film. And the moment that she actually can’t handle his narcissism or the focus on him or the way that he views the world, she jumps into a swimming pool.”

She doesn't sacrifice herself for her partner — at least not more than she can tolerate. They have, in other words, a partnership. There is both a frankness and a tenderness in how they talk with one another that is worlds away from Brokeback Mountain and Dance of the 41. When she doesn't like how Leonard is going about things, she tells him. "No, I just… nothing. I thought we were having a conversation," she says bluntly after Leonard tries to railroad through yet another important conversation.

This connection did not mean that their relationship was perfect — it was, of course, deeply flawed. Leonard had a habit of trying to "fix" (i.e., force) every conversation with his bombastic main character energy so that it went his way. Felicia was also mortified by Leonard's queerness getting out to the public. There is one heartbreaking scene where she insists on Leonard keeping his queerness a secret from their daughter, Jamie Bernstein (Maya Hawke), even though rumors about it abound. When he does lie to her about it, Jamie sounds relieved, the camera panning on the heartbreak on Leonard's face.

Yet the film also makes clear that, like Leonard, Felicia is navigating strict societal expectations. "And don't forget you are a man," she lectures Leonard on one of the reasons for his success, trying to bring the point home to the audience that the stakes are high for her, too. She also has a career in the entertainment world and does not want to be stigmatized by conservative America for her husband's sexuality.

However, even as this tension pushes against the foundation of their relationship, with them having long periods of separation and distancing, it does not fracture it. The two of them do reconcile eventually, and when Felicia's health starts to collapse from cancer, Leonard is there for her to the very end. There is no question whether the love is there, even if it's not always enough to keep them together for long, and that is a refreshing change from the "dead marriage" trope we see so often in queer cinema.

A ringing conclusion

With pop culture trends, it's intriguing to observe when a film comes along to highlight our collective gaps in representation. If mainstream cinema is to be believed, then the gay men of the past were confined to cold, loveless marriages that suffocated all parties involved. While these relationships did and do continue to happen (Fun Home was based on real events, after all), they have never been the only type to exist. There have always been partnerships where people manage to find happiness in less-than-ideal circumstances.

Maestro shows us an example of a queer man in a loving relationship with a heterosexual woman. It's a complicated and messy one, which makes for excellent cinema, but the tenderness is there, and that is sadly too rare in the media looking back on our queer past.

The Problem Was Never Burnout

Photo by Tangerine Newt on Unsplash

It's hard to talk about burnout because, in many ways, it's the conversation that will never die. I remember a viral article that was published in 2019 by then-Buzzfeed writer Anne Helen Petersen about Millennial burnout, titled How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation. At least in my small circle, it became the talk of the town. "Have you read this article," the refrain went. And to this day, many of my friends still reference it.

This conversation on burnout has been part of the backdrop for my entire adult life. "4 Steps to Beating Burnout," goes the title of an article in the Harvard Business Review that ultimately suggests prioritizing self-care, shifting your perspective, and so forth. "Burnout isn't just exhaustion. Here's how to deal with it," runs the title of an article that tells you to be mindful of the signs of burnout and for your managers to do better.

We are all tired, and the supposed remedies for it are everywhere. Therapy has started to move from the realm of stigma to acceptance — though its actual usage remains in the domain of a wealthier, more privileged minority. Meditation has moved past being a fad to a lifestyle for many people, with even some businesses recommending it to keep their employees sane. If the advice I see around me is to be believed, I can "solve" the problem of burnout for myself.

Yet the framing of burnout as a problem has always bothered me because I see it as a distraction from the more prominent concern at hand: a society that keeps us exhausted.

The definition of burnout

Something I want to stress is that burnout is not a mental diagnosis — something that may confuse people since it is often referenced side by side with other mental health problems such as depression or anxiety. The World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon, meaning it's specifically related to circumstances surrounding your work (note — the DSM-V does not have an official diagnosis for it at all).

According to the ICD-11, burnout has three stated dimensions:

• feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;

• increased mental distance from one's job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and

• reduced professional efficacy.

This framing is important because, definitionally, it is not about the individual but their environment within the workplace. It is all about "chronic workplace stresses" that are not being "managed." The definition is explicitly not geared toward "experiences in other areas of life." Anne Helen Petersen talked about not being able to do basic tasks such as filling out personal forms, which many people do when they refer to burnout, but that would not fall within this definition at all.

And so, we meet several hurdles when we start picking apart what burnout is. Even when we focus on this narrow definition, it's not an individual problem. A worker may meditate or go to therapy, but that will only change how they perceive and process a bad situation at work. If a worker is "burnt out" because their workload is too much, their boss is abusive, or some other terrible combination, then they aren't really in a position to change it, short of just leaving (and even then, financial realities do not always make that option practical).

I remember my first "real" job. I was an executive assistant at a major conglomerate. It was not a good job. It mainly involved explaining how to troubleshoot to old men who didn't seem to know what they were doing. My direct boss would call me late into the evening to complain about her divorce (something she would not stop doing even when I asked her to), and the company itself was actively trying to squash a union — a practice I considered unethical.

Yet I "stuck it out" because the logic of perseverance had been drilled into me since birth. You do not quit your first job — you stay there for a year and let it become the foundation for the rest of your career. The job worsened as I obtained even more responsibilities, and my health deteriorated. I remember having to work during New Year's Eve to help with a big audit and texting a friend to complain, and he told me I was burning out and that I should meditate and breathe. I would continue doing that throughout my time at this job. I also went to therapy, gratitude journaled, and a host of other "solutions" that did not work because the job itself was bad. What I needed the most was to reduce my workload and get a new boss (and maybe collective representation), but of course, those solutions were never brought up to the people I confided in.

In the end, I didn't have the reserves to "willpower" through an environment that was actively harmful to my mental health, so I quit, but that's not an option everyone can just do — sometimes, there isn't an individual solution. You have a terrible job, and the abuse doesn't go away no matter how you frame it within your mind.

This reality is what makes treating burnout as an individual issue so damaging to the working class because it completely ignores the solutions that would help — i.e., reducing workload, increasing pay (without increasing said workload), changing management, collectively organizing, etc. — and only focuses on the end result — i.e., the worker being unproductive. It's essentially reclassifying abusive situations as some unique problem to the individual when what needs to change fundamentally is the working relationship. Many “burnt-out” workers don't need therapy (though some still might); they need a union.

The things that allegedly aren't burnout

And with this conversation, there is everything outside the occupational definition—people overwhelmed by everyday tasks like filling out forms and folding their laundry. We can call this exhaustion "burnout" if we want. Language, after all, is fluid and doesn't get to be decided by an official body, but I think that ignores the central problem, which is that our society is toxic. When we only focus on the byproduct of something as the problem —i.e., that our emotional reserves are constantly being depleted — I think it sidesteps discussion on the things doing the depleting.

Recently, I "burnt out" of the volunteer nonprofit the DSA (see Being A Part of Metro DC DSA Broke Me), and the number one thing that frustrated me about this whole process was how people treated it as an issue of mental health. The way people talked about my dissatisfaction was that I had assumed too much work and should take a break. However, my biggest problem was with the leadership of my Chapter, some of whom I considered pretty mean. Dealing with these leaders was the biggest source of my frustration and exhaustion. And yet, the conversation of burnout was routinely used, albeit well-intentioned, to reframe an issue of imbalanced power dynamics into an individual problem.

And I see this happening a lot where issues of abuse get exclusively narrowed to the realm of mental health. For example, one of the contributing factors to why small tasks are so exhausting is not just perception but that, societally speaking, we don't have as much time to do things, so even simple tasks can feel Herculean. I mean this quite literally. Americans spend more time working, less time eating, don't take as many breaks, and take less vacation time than a lot of their European counterparts. There are just fewer hours in the day to do what needs to be done and not feel exhausted.

Part of this is again a labor issue predicated by America's lack of unions and other protections, which has led to ultra-precarity. The number of total union members has plummeted to just 10% of the workforce in 2023, and we don't have any indication that that is reversing. It's no coincidence that trends such as wage stagnation correlate with this decline.

Yet this exhaustion is also just a component of neoliberal capitalism itself, which locks people into more difficult systems to navigate so that firms can extract further profit. Cory Doctorow has referred to this problem on digital platforms as "enshittification," saying:

“Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.”

Yet, while he used this term to talk about how online platforms manipulate incentives to lock a critical mass of users into them, this process is far more wide-reaching than that. We are constantly being locked into systems that harm us for others' benefit. Everything from our tax system to the nature of the law itself has been made more difficult, so we must fork over money to predatory institutions to deal with the problems they helped create. Seriously, when you have a chance, look into the history of the tax system. The tax industry has lobbied the government to purposefully make the tax system more confusing, so Americans must pay for services such as H&R Block and TurboTax to navigate it (see Do NOT Use TurboTax to File Your Taxes).

And since the only solution many of us are taught is to deal with our problems by "hustling through them," to sacrifice our emotional and psychological well-being for a chance at success, we don't have any good options to deal with systemic abuse. We are constantly trying to optimize ourselves to overcome our own precarity, even when the reality is that many of the circumstances contributing to said precarity are simply outside of our individual control. So, all we are doing is setting ourselves up to settle for a bad situation longer in the pursuit of future success that may never come. As Anne Helen Petersen writes of Millenials, but I believe can be extrapolated more broadly:

“To describe millennial burnout accurately is to acknowledge the multiplicity of our lived reality — that we’re not just high school graduates, or parents, or knowledge workers, but all of the above — while recognizing our status quo. We’re deeply in debt, working more hours and more jobs for less pay and less security, struggling to achieve the same standards of living as our parents, operating in psychological and physical precariousness, all while being told that if we just work harder, meritocracy will prevail, and we’ll begin thriving. The carrot dangling in front of us is the dream that the to-do list will end, or at least become far more manageable.”

Navigating inadequate systems on low time with a "hustler's mindset" is exhausting. I understand why people are "burnt out." How could managing toxic systems with little time, all while trying to get ahead of your own precarity, not drain you?

But if that is the case, it's not burnout that is the problem — that's a natural response to circumstances that are draining. The problem is the structural issues that have eaten away at our time. This distinction is important because the solutions for dealing with, say, emotional depletion are entirely different from the ones needed to deal with abusive institutions and systems. One requires a meditation app, and the other a match.

Burning burnout down

I think it's perfectly fine to express exhaustion with a bad situation. We should be allowed to communicate our emotions, and I don't want people to walk away with the message that we need to bury our feelings in the name of "fighting the good fight." But for the stressors that are outside of our individual control, and that's a lot of them, it's essential to call out the reasons for that exhaustion. If you only focus on managing the byproducts of a terrible situation — i.e., your exhaustion, increased cynicism, and reduced productivity — and never the causes for said byproducts (i.e., the people and institutions f@cking you over), then that's a dynamic that calls for your permanent marginalization.

Even in our own minds, we must be clear about where the blame lies because burnout is not the problem. Burnout is a natural outgrowth of dysfunction. The problem is that a lot of people's institutional relationships are actively abusive. People have no bargaining power, shit pay, and very little time to do anything outside of work and familial obligations. That's what needs to be worked on — f@ck your therapy apps.

While the frequently suggested solutions to burnout are therapy, meditation, and, most importantly, toughing it out and working on yourself, the solutions to imbalanced power dynamics require the opposite: for you to cause problems. If a workplace or other institutional relationship is abusive, leave it. If you can't, start trading salary information and ask about unionization. Start asking questions about people who have left and where they have gone. Start asking questions, even if only at a whisper, when your boss or leader has left the room.

Because when an organization or system robs you of your time and leaves you so exhausted that life starts to lose its color, don't fret about burnout — leave, organize, or f@ck shit up.

There Sure Is A Lot of Ecofascism In the MCU Recently

Image; Captured on Disney+ for The Marvels

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) used to have a villain problem. Phases one and two were frequently characterized by bland villains such as Malekith (Christopher Eccleston) in Thor: The Dark World or Alexander Goodwin Pierce (Robert Redford) in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, who wanted to conquer or destroy the world (or the universe) for often poorly defined reasons that failed to resonate or even really make much sense.

Starting in phase three, we got more multi-dimensional villains such as Erik “Killmonger” Stevens (Michael B. Jordan) in Black Panther, who wanted to enact harm for emotionally poignant reasons that resonated with viewers. Stevens’ final line, “Just bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from the ships because they knew death was better than bondage,” still gets me when I think about it because there is a deep emotional core to his cruelty.

We are still in that age of emotionally resonant villains for the MCU, where the antagonist is often a fascist or disgruntled activist enacting violence for an understandable (if not still evil) reason. Recently, no other philosophical justification has taken center stage in the MCU as much as eco-fascism or the belief that you must preserve an environment for a narrow group’s benefit.

Fascists who love the environment (sort of)

The representation of fascism in media is something I have talked about quite extensively (see Andor Is One of the Few Disney Shows to Get Fascism Right). In a nutshell, it can be best described as a concentration of power, often by right-wing actors, using mythmaking and scapegoating to cement control over a population.

Eco-fascism is a subset of this dogma, where a supremacist group forms its identity around exclusive access to environmental resources. As Elaina Hancock writes for the University of Connecticut: “It is basically environmentalism that suggests that certain people are naturally and exclusively entitled to control and enjoy environmental resources. Some types of people, in other words, are ‘native species’ and others are ‘invasive.’”

This definition may have some viewers naturally go to Thanos (Josh Brolin), the space tyrant who used the Infinity Stones at the end of Phase Three to wipe out half of all sentient life in the galaxy. He held a neo-Maltheusian philosophy where all problems with our society (e.g., pollution, overconsumption, wealth inequality, etc.) were the direct result of overpopulation. And so by culling this “contagion,” he can save the rest of society — literally killing half the universe so it can be enjoyed by the other.

This viewpoint has been criticized frequently, not just Thanos's perspective, but the idea that overpopulation is responsible for our most pressing problems because, generally, it ignores the power dynamics at play. Some individuals are way more responsible for the decisions that lead to systemic problems such as wealth inequality and climate change, and randomization is unlikely to solve that problem because it ignores who is responsible for them. As Hancock further adds:

“These arguments about population are often implicitly about how the speaker doesn’t want to acknowledge the economic arrangements that benefit them while contributing to rapid ecological changes, leading them to demonize the people who do and will continue to suffer the most from those changes (and have also, generally speaking, contributed the least to the problem).”

However, even if this viewpoint held by Thanos is bogus, it's a logic that has resonated with many people (including Avatar Director James Cameron). The phrase “Thanos was Right” became a common rallying call on the Internet, with many writing annoying reviews trying to defend the claim.

Thanos is not the only example of eco-fascism within the MCU either. The movie The Eternals was also about an authoritarian and arguably ecofascist empire — though you do not learn this fact till the middle of the film. Our protagonists, the eponymous Eternals, are unknowingly preparing Earth to be a birthing ground for one of their overlord’s young, a celestial named Tiamut. The Eternals have been “conserving” and “protecting” Earth’s environment, but only so it can be used for their overlord's benefit. The people of Earth, who in this context are a necessary component of the celestial birth, are nothing more than crops that must be harvested so the more “superior” being, Tiamut, can survive.

We can also look at The Marvels, where the main villain, the Kree warlord Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), is literally tearing holes in space and time so she can steal resources from other planets. Following the film Captain Marvel, hero Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) destroyed the Kree’s authoritarian Supreme Intelligence, spurring a brutal Civil War that ruined the environment of their Homeworld, Hala. Dar-Benn is now stealing the atmosphere, oceans, and in one instance, the sun of former Kree colonies so that her people can benefit, literally protecting her people's environment at the expense of numerous others.

There is even a wonderful ecological metaphor where the explosion of jump points (the MCU’s name for FTL) is compared to the ecologically damaging practice of hydraulic fracking — where a compound of liquids is pumped underground to push out fossil fuels. More specifically, how fracking can result in earthquakes, or in this case, destabilization to space-time. The Marvels beautifully makes the case that while ecofascism may claim to be preserving one people's environment, it often does so at the expense of the entire system’s ecology.

If we want to expand our definition of ecology to include the stability of space-time, we can likewise look at the character Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), who has so far appeared in both the TV series Loki and the movie Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Kang is perhaps the most narcissistic ecofascist we have seen so far. Each Kang we have met is a highly advanced, militaristic genius who perceives the other Kangs as a threat, an invasive species that must be removed.

The Kang in Loki has built an entire organization (i.e., the TVA) devoted to eliminating other timelines in an effort to stop other versions of himself. Specifically, he has constructed a temporal Loom that deletes all other timelines as needed (see Loki Season 2 & The Dismantling of Fascism). The rest of sentient life doesn’t even factor into the equation. We are weeds that can and do get pruned in the process.

An eco conclusion

Starting with Thanos at the end of the Infinity Saga, we have seen the emergence of eco-fascists in the MCU, who are destroying people, environments, and, in some cases, entire timelines to preserve their preferred ecosystem. This type of theme makes sense when you consider just how impactful climate change has been on all of our collective psyches. It’s the problem we all know is coming (and truthfully has already arrived), and that anxiety has and will continue to inevitably make its way into pop culture.

If you recognize that the environment must be preserved, it makes sense to imagine how that impulse can be twisted to benefit authoritarians in power. It’s a fascinating idea for fiction and one that is quite relatable. The plans of these villains, while utterly fantastical, are motivated by a desire to protect a chosen people from harm at the expense of others, and that is something you don’t have to examine too hard to understand how it can emerge in the real world.

All in all, there sure have been a lot of eco-fascists in the MCU recently, and with ecological instability on the rise, it seems unlikely that this theme will be going away anytime soon.

Decoding Pop Culture Battles: Navigating the Clash Between Canon and Kayfabe

Source: Death Battle YouTube Channel; Rooster Teeth Network

There is an exciting phenomenon you see on the Internet: pop culture battles, where two fictional characters from different narrative universes, like Superman and Goku, are pitted against each other. Sometimes, they are more comedic, such as The Joker and Pennywise facing off in Epic Rap Battles of History. Other times, they are raw 1v1s like the channel Death Battle, where two characters fight to, well, the death.

These videos are fascinating because they are a very brand-centric way to tell a story. Rather than storytelling being an activity where anything can happen, in these videos, it is often depicted to be more like physics or history, where fictional narratives are treated as living records that one must simply decode — and in the case of death battles, where one winner is inevitable.

When canon is real-ish

I want to really highlight how peculiar this activity is — not because nerd stuff is weird or I dislike character-driven mashups (I love all of these things), but because of how these videos are often framed — i.e., with a "correct" answer. A channel like Death Battle will present its arguments and facts for why its character has triumphed, and it's usually a mini-thesis, where in their own cheeky words, "they've' run the data through all possibilities."

Yet, I want to step back and focus on what these channels' creators are doing here. They are telling a story where characters from one narrative universe suddenly exist within another. There is nothing wrong with this whatsoever. Fictional retellings and reimaginings are the bread and butter of many stories, and pretending to be documenting a "real" history is a solid storytelling conceit. However, we must still acknowledge that what is being done here is storytelling rather than an exact science. The creators of Death Battle can make any character "win" because stories are not confined to the rules that came before them. Superman beats Goku or vice versa because that's the reality these storytellers have decided upon.

However, often, these creators are still combing through comics, movies, books, video games, and more to make these arguments, measuring the accomplishments of these various characters like they are real people. Superman or Courage the Cowardly Dog does a feat in one of these mediums, and that is treated as a reference point to prove how fast and tough these characters really are.

Take the channel's death battle between Darth Vader and Obito Uchiha, characters from the properties Star Wars and Naruto, respectively. The creators reference how a droid in one book tries to kill Darth Vader with a laser gun firing just under three hundred thousand kilometers per second and how he easily blocks it. That feat of perception and reflexes becomes the upper limit for his ability simply because an earlier text claimed it was so.

There are limitations to this approach. One is that these brands are not the work of a single creator and often have inconsistencies as a result. Vader's perception varies dramatically from story to story and that's the case with nearly all fictional brands. As a Trekkie, I will frequently see lore content creators spend a lot of time stitching together disparate stories that were never really meant to be viewed together in that way. And so when you try to treat these works as "historical" references, you quickly come across the reality that they do not always mesh well. As the handle Andrew Plotkin writes in their article, Canon is kayfabe for writers:

“It’s kayfabe! It’s exactly kayfabe. The writers are selling us a meta-story that their story conforms to a great and glorious master plan, a beautiful aperiodic crystal of harmony. And we pretend to buy it — even though we know the writers are making it up as they go. They’ve been making it up as they go for sixty years. (For the DC and Marvel (multi-)verses(-es), even longer.) We know perfectly well that the story will change the next time someone has a better idea, and we’re fine with that. But we are united in the pretense.”

When we look at pop culture battles and, to an extent, all lore theorists, what we are really seeing is an exercise in Intellectual Property synthesis, where fans are engaging in that collective kayfabe (i.e., a wrestling term for the fake authenticity of a staged performance) trying to pretend that they can stitch all of these different works into one cohesive reality. While that can be a fun and entertaining exercise, it's still a performance — a type of storytelling constrained by Intellectual Property law itself because the only thing genuinely uniting all of these stories is that one entity owns them all and has decided they belong together. Often, there is no real intentionality connecting these stories other than, again, ownership.

The creators of Death Battle are not combing through fanfiction and other unauthorized stories to make these comparisons. They are looking at "canon" works that the holders of these brands, companies such as Disney, have deemed valid. There are millions of Star Wars stories, after all, but only a couple hundred of them are considered legitimate, and that's what the emphasis is on when creators such as Death Battle examine the feats of "fictional" characters. It's a fascinating practice that says a lot about how many of us now perceive stories in our society, not as a fluid collection of works that can be radically retold and reconceived, but at least, in theory, as rigid histories whose legitimacy is contingent on the entity that owns them.

This, of course, is not how storytelling truly works. You can't stop people from reimagining, recontextualizing, and retelling existing characters. I mentioned the millions of fanfiction stories out there, but we can also look at breaks in canon where companies try to delegitimize existing stories only for fans to reject such a move. A famous example is Star Wars, where a lot of stories set after the 1983 movie Return of the Jedi, collectively called the Expanded Universe (referred to now as Star Wars Legends), were suddenly decanonized following Disney's acquisition of LucasFilms in 2012. It was a move not well-liked by many fans then, and many are still bitter about it.

The video essayist Jared Bauer, using the framework of philosopher Jürgen Habermas, referred to this backlash as a "legitimization crisis" akin to the Protestant Reformation, where suddenly, fans of Star Wars were questioning the decisions of the brand's IP holder, when it came to how to best interpret it. It may seem strange to compare disagreements over a brand's direction to a schism in a religion, but I assure you that people can get quite devoted to the brands they follow. As one user responded to one of my pieces:

“I have no church. I worship no gods. Fiction is my religion. Stories are my scripture. Character development is my holy communion. It’s not just entertainment for me. It’s something sacred.”

However, instead of the printing press giving more adherents of Christianity access to the bible, Bauer argued, it was because modern technology like the Internet had collapsed the difference between consumers and producers, turning all of us into what philosophers Alvin & Heidi Hoffler called "prosumers." We are all now active makers of meaning with media, and so when a company tries to push against the common consensus, it can lead to a schism. As Bauer says:

“Star Wars fans are not just consumers of this canon. They have helped make the meaning of the Star Wars universe. Like the Catholic Church, Disney now faces the wrath of the educated masses. Except now the problem isn't just that people can read: they blog, tweet, make video essays, produce their own cartoons, and stream content to millions of viewers…the age of the prosumer allows people to criticize the few anointed successors of Lucas.”

To this day, when I see content creators making a "historical" analysis of Star Wars, many still draw upon Legends sources and, in the process, refute the official Disney "canon." In fact, we do not have to stray from the channel Death Battle to see this happen. That example we brought up early of Vader blocking a high-speed laser comes from the book Coruscant Nights II: Streets of Shadows, a Star Wars Legends book outside of the current canon.

Clearly, there is tension with this form of storytelling, as what is considered a "legitimate" source is not as stable as many believe. Even with a creator or "prosumer" like Death Battle, who generally tries to treat the canon of such brands as gospel, we see the kayfabe inevitability break.

A deadly conclusion

The phenomenon of pop culture battles unveils a fascinating intersection between storytelling, brand loyalty, and the fluidity of narrative interpretation. These battles, whether lighthearted or intense, reflect a deeply ingrained desire among fans to engage with beloved characters in novel ways.

However, beneath the surface, they also reveal a complex interplay between canon and kayfabe — i.e., the accepted truth of a fictional universe versus the staged authenticity perpetuated by its creators. While channels like Death Battle may present their matchups as definitive showdowns with a "correct" outcome, it's crucial to recognize that these narratives are not only constructed, but constructed within the constraints of intellectual property laws and the whims of corporate ownership.

Moreover, the tension between canon and kayfabe underscores a broader shift in storytelling dynamics, where fans no longer passively consume narratives but actively participate in their creation and interpretation. The democratization of media through modern technology has empowered individuals to challenge established canon, question the authority of brand owners, and assert their own interpretations of beloved stories.

Ultimately, pop culture battles serve as a microcosm of our evolving relationship with storytelling — a testament to the enduring power of fictional universes to inspire passion, spark debate, and unite communities. As fans continue to navigate the ever-shifting landscape of canon, they not only celebrate the characters they love but also contribute to the ongoing evolution of storytelling in the digital age — one death battle at a time.

When It Comes To Abortion, Humanity Is Stripped Away Until Only A Womb Is Left

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

In the forced-birth debate, by which I mean the argument over whether people must be mandated to give birth once they are pregnant, we spend a lot of time arguing over the humanity of the clump of cells that eventually become a baby. "At the moment of fertilization, an unborn baby possesses all the DNA-coded information it needs to be a totally separate person," lectures the forced-birth nonprofit Choices.

I find arguing this point tedious because trying to find the moment where a clump of cells becomes a person is an entirely arbitrary process with far more wide-reaching conclusions than the typical forced birther even cares about. This argument about DNA literally applies to all organisms with DNA. Suppose you think that we can pinpoint the exact nature of sentience in the gradation from zygote to embryo, to fetus, etc., and believe that such life deserves protection. In that case, I have bad news for you about the animals we eat, the plants we mow down, and the microbiome in your gut because, depending on the stage of development, a lot of that life is equally as complex.

While these philosophical conversations can be interesting, organizations like Choices don't give a flying f@ck about them. Their arguments are usually more teleological — i.e., that such life is destined to become sentient, or if we are being religious, it has a soul and, therefore, must be protected from harm.

It's an argument that values the idea of a child over a sentient person in the here and now. And even if we take this logic seriously and concede the argument of the zygote, embryo, fetus, etc., being considered a person, we still find that this rhetoric is fundamentally dehumanizing to the pregnant person involved. The starting assumption that the autonomy of a pregnant person must be sacrificed for another being goes against foundational principles of human liberty and freedom and ultimately conceives pregnant people as wombs, not people.

Let's concede the argument

The philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson highlighted this tension in her thought experiment about the unconscious violinist, where she literalized the argument by turning that dependent person into an adult (see her 1971 piece, A Defense of Abortion). You awake to find that you have been hooked up against your will by the Society of Music Lovers to an injured, unconscious violinist because you, and you alone, have the right blood type. You are now plugged into his circulatory system and cannot be unplugged for another nine months. As Thomson asks:

“Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says. “Tough luck. I agree. but now you’ve got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person’s right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him. I imagine you would regard this as outrageous.”

Pro forced-birth conservatives have struggled with this thought experiment. It's not that conservatives have not tried to refute the "unconscious violinist" argument. It is one of the most debated ethicist papers in the last fifty years, but their counters almost always rely on appeals to nature and authority that ignore the central claim in this thought experiment — i.e., that the right to life allows you to make unjust claims on other people.

For example, a typical counter is that the woman created the child (i.e., became pregnant), so she must take care of said child — i.e., that the person's "natural" function as an incubator means they owe the child said incubation. As forced-birth philosopher Trent Horn writes: "Since children are helpless, their well-being is possible only if adults — making sacrifices if necessary — ensure it. This should be no different for unborn children, created in a consensual act designed to bring about their existence, who have a right to live in the wombs of their mothers, which are naturally designed to accommodate them."

However, Horn's example about communal norms is almost a non sequitur. Parents aren't forced to raise the children they have, even if it's a great kindness to do so, and it can be gratifying. Parents give up their children all the time. That's what makes the act of adoption possible. Further, suppose a parent does a lousy job of childrearing. In that case, the community ultimately doesn't force said parent or parents to raise those children indefinitely, but rather, they take the children away and give them to another family unit. Horn's imposing a mandate that doesn't exist in most areas of our society: one that undervalues pregnant people as mere wombs because, according to him, nature and society say so.

Additionally, his argument doesn't deal with the autonomy point at all. Let's amend the unconscious violinist example and say that you initially agreed to the plan to hook yourself up to them but now want to back out. It doesn't change the fact that your body has been attached to the violinist for nine months. You may have agreed to such a thing out of kindness, but that is not something they are owed. If everything your past self committed to about your own body couldn't be challenged by your future self, then you would likewise not be able to back out of sexual intercourse, leave a job, or end a marriage. Autonomy means doing things to your body as you see fit, at any time.

The other main conservative counter to the unconscious violinist argument is equally unconvincing, believing there is some meaningful distinction in this case between killing someone through direct action or passivity. The argument is that there is somehow a difference between purposefully killing something (i.e., how forced birthers conceive abortion) and just passively "letting it die" (i.e., watching the violinist's organs fail). This is a philosophical distinction that is not settled. Whether letting someone die through inaction absolves someone of responsibility is hotly debated in philosophy.

It also ignores the issue at hand — i.e., the bodily autonomy of the person attached to the violinist. Let's say that you don't have to simply unhook the unconscious violinist but physically separate them from your body. You have to tear the stitching out in a way that causes them to bleed out, killing them in the same way that forced birthers claim abortionists are killing "children." Again, it doesn't change that it's your body the unconscious violinist is dependent on, even if this situation is now emotionally more difficult. Likewise, the experiment doesn't change if the unconscious violinist is now your spouse, mother, or child. In what way is that person owed your very flesh? As Thomson writes:

“…certainly the violinist has no right against you that you shall allow him to continue to use your kidneys. As I said, if you do allow him to use them, it is a kindness on your part, and not something you owe him.”

In claiming that a fetus is owed a womb, what forced-birthers are asking us to do, philosophically, is to create a hierarchy between a sentient person and a clump of cells inside said person, with the latter being positioned above the prior. And if we are engaging in this hierarchy, then it is my sincere belief that the pregnant person's life is higher within it. It's their body this other organism is reliant upon, and I don't believe we should subjugate an entire class of people (i.e., women and other pregnant persons) on the grounds of this other organism's theoretical prosperity.

The logic of forced birth leads to a situation where you are valuing the life of the pregnant person less (who is, again, the sentient organism in this equation). We are seeing this fact play out in real-time with these emerging forced-birth and anti-abortion laws across the country, where the health of pregnant people is increasingly compromised to preserve the future health of the child. In one chilling example in Texas, a woman's terminal fetus could not be aborted because it still had a heartbeat. The woman in question developed sepsis from having to bring the child to term. Her uterus was scarred from the infection, hindering her ability to give birth in the future, and she almost died.

As forced birth laws solidify across this country, these examples are increasingly more common. The heartbeat law we mentioned has been challenged in a lawsuit with over a dozen women who have been likewise denied similar care. Whether we are looking at a woman in Louisiana who was forced to give birth to a baby without a skull or, in Florida, where another woman was forced to go home to give birth to a fetus that would not survive, and she almost bled out from complications, these incidents show us the disposability of pregnant people under this hierarchy.

Even in the most charitable situations where you concede the "is it a baby or fetus” argument, we see how this logic devalues pregnant people on a fundamental level.

People, not wombs

Ultimately, I don't think a lot of pro-life or forced-birth conservatives want to acknowledge these arguments because they don't seem to care about the bodily autonomy of women and other pregnant people. The "child's" life, or at least the idea of a child, always seems to matter more — logic that is rooted in the subjugation of wombs. Politicians and philosophers alike have been pretty consistent in their stated beliefs that pregnant people must sacrifice their bodies for the development of the fetus.

However, if forced-birth conservatives respected pregnant people as people and not just wombs, they wouldn't constantly be asserting that they must sacrifice their bodies for others, but that would require empathy. It would require saying, "Hey, even if other people suffer, you shouldn't have to automatically give yourself over to another person because you are entitled to agency as a human being."

At the core of the forced-birthers belief system is rhetoric that dehumanizes pregnant people. A worldview that doesn't see them as people but as wombs that must carry the fetus through its development to the very end.

Red, White, & Royal Blue: A Beautiful, Hot, Delusional Fantasy

Captured on Amazon Prime, Amazon Studios; Berlanti-Schechter Films

I am a purveyor of trashy media. It may surprise people to know, but I love bad films. I am obsessed not only with indie titles but also with reality television, anime, and, of course, romantic comedies (Rom-coms). I grew up on a diet of Sleepless in Seattle and Moonstruck as a kid, and I have not stopped watching such titles now (shout out To All the Boys I've Loved Before).

Red, White, & Royal Blue is the quintessentially RomCom. Based on the book by Casey McQuiston of the same name, it is about the steamy love affair between a member of the British royal family (the second in line to the throne, or the "spare"), Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine), and the son of the American president Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez). It follows the typical enemies-to-lovers trope as these two gays who thoroughly dislike each other learn to like and finally love one another.

It's refreshing that we are finally at the stage in the pop culture landscape where a gay rom-com can come onto the scene and not create a vicious media cycle, but the movie, although a fantasy, had some frustrating politics that I believe are worth diving into. And so let's don our royal apparel and cut to the chase, shall we?

Leaning into the fantasy

Politics in RomComs are often the backdrop for the romance, and that's fine, expected even, but that doesn't mean that the texts themselves do not have political messages in them, and Red, White, & Royal Blue wears its messaging on its sleeve. One of the film's central ideas is that the political office of the presidency and American politics, more generally, can be an institution for good. As Alex Claremont-Diaz tells Henry of politics during a bit of pillow talk: "To devote your life to helping others? To know that what you do has a meaningful impact on people's lives? I know it's my life's work."

Alex believes that working in politics is a net good. This perspective may seem naive to some, and his mother, the president (Uma Thurman), tells Alex off for it, but it is never disproven by the text. Alex's idealism ends up being validated in the narrative. He idealistically pushes for a new strategy to win Texas for his mother and succeeds. The thrill of the movie is leaning into the fantasy that this institution can be a force for good (if we fight for it) and that idealism can be enough to push us through.

That is an interesting perspective, but is the presidency indeed a force for good, especially when, in the current era, the biggest argument for voting is not usually the institution's benevolence but "harm reduction" and voting for "the lesser of two evils? Just this year alone, President Biden's administration has actively supported over half a dozen military conflicts — not all of them possible to frame as "good."

It's not that people cannot be helped at the margins with a presidential win. You are reading the words of a trans person. I am painfully aware that my access to medication and other fundamental rights depends on the outcomes of elections, but I would never say that I see the office of the presidency as a whole as good. Regardless of who gets elected, many bad things will continue to happen on our border, with our environment, and in our markets, and that's just the reality.

I think texts like Red, White, & Royal Blue try to ignore that complicated reality so we can lean into the fantasy of young idealism being able to "change the system" from within, and I don't know if that's necessarily a good thing. Alex may be fighting for something, but because he is so confident of the goodness of his actions, he never really has time to assess if he is devoting his time to someone who deserves it. His mom is just so nice, after all. She's getting him pizza after he comes out and monologues passionately about how much she cares for the American public. Why would you not want to give Uma Thurman Texas? It's not like we see her in the War Room ordering air strikes on Middle Eastern civilians (something that the president does in our reality) — this president is all cuddles and no bite.

And this whitewashing applies not just to the presidency but to the British monarchy, which I view in even less charitable terms than the presidency. There is a large thread throughout the film about whether Prince Henry can ever come out because of his duties to the crown. He is implied to be tightly controlled by his Grandfather, King James III, a man described throughout the film as cold and alienating. However, when he comes on screen for a single scene, he is played by the warm Stephen Fry. He may be stern, but he's also affectionate, worried about Henry's relationship more out of practicality's sake than outright bigotry (though he is still very much a bigot). "Oh, Henry, no one is suggesting that you don't deserve to be happy," he cuts in, "…The nation simply will not accept a prince who is homosexual."

This turns out to be wrong, as the public in the film does come out to support Henry's relationship, but it also places the burden entirely on the public. While the monarchy is a hanger-on from a previous era, rightfully worried that one long-term dip in public opinion will end their existence, it's not true that they are a passive institution. They have chosen a more conservative stance because that is the institution's overall disposition. As anyone who followed Meghan Markle's marriage to Prince Harry can tell you, it was often the monarchy itself pushing against that union. Markle allegedly received a lot of racist remarks from her new royal family, and the couple soon bowed out from royal life altogether.

Watching this film feels like looking at our world through a funhouse mirror, where bad institutions are recast as stifling but redeemable, given the proper representation, that is.

Representation politics

Red, White, & Royal Blue does not view the monarchy favorably, as all the characters believe it to be an extravagant waste. Still, the power of celebrity it wields is seen as important. In fact, even more than the positive nature of liberal politics, an overarching theme is that representation politics is a net positive by itself.

If we return to that bedside cuddle, Alex went on about how representation was critical, saying: "My father was 12 when my abuela brought him and his sister over from Mexico. You may not understand this, but in America, if you're an immigrant with a Z in your last name, there's not a lot of people in positions of power that look like you or sound like you. I've been given a chance to be someone in the world that my father didn't see when he was growing up." We don't know anything about Alex's political positions, but his existence in politics is itself seen as a positive change.

We could also look at the child of the Vice President, Nora Holleran (Rachel Hilson), who runs a nonprofit akin to Emily's List with the goal of getting women and femme-presenting people elected. We don't know anything beyond that, although it's assumed they have some vaguely liberal-aligned goals, but uplifting this identity is what is seen as good.

And finally, when Prince Henry comes out, people around the country rally on his behalf. He becomes an instant symbol for queer people everywhere. "Apparently, there are crowds gathering in Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, and Liverpool," Princess Beatrice tells Henry excitedly.

Like the nature of the presidency, the existence of queer, brown, and femme people in levers of power alone is seen as a net good, and I really want to push back against this idea. Minority leaders are elected all the time who are detrimental to those same groups they come from. Eric Adams is a Black mayor, and his tough-on-crime approach has hardly been a boon for New York City. The same goes for Muriel Bowser and a host of other diverse (i.e., nonwhite, cis, and male) politicians.

We don't need to go far from the direct parallels in this film to further this point. Emily's List is a PAC devoted to electing Democratic pro-choice women into office (similar to character Nora Holleran's nonprofit). Its name comes from the phrase "Early Money Is Like Yeast," in reference to getting money to pro-choice women candidates early in their races so they can build momentum. However, Emily's List has become a de facto benchmark for high-spending donors, arguably defeating its entire purpose of getting money to many candidates early as by the time they "prove" themselves to be worthy of the endorsement, it is already well past the time it would act "like yeast." This leads to a political ecosystem where the women who secure Emily's List's endorsement tend to be better at raising money already and consequently more conservative (at least in the context of democratic politics).

Emily's List has also been criticized in recent years for its electoral strategy of valuing one issue over other intersecting ones that also affect women. For example, the organization only stopped supporting Kristen Sinema in 2022 for her refusal to overturn the filibuster, despite her rightward turn being obvious well before then. They supported her (and a lot of other more conservative Democrats) because she was outwardly pro-choice. Other groups, such as the Matriarch nonprofit, have emerged in response to such criticisms with the explicit goal of electing working-class women. There has been a general push to take a more holistic approach to who should be elected into office.

I bring this up because it’s the same perspective I see with Red, White, & Royal Blue. It’s a movie that has not challenged the structure of anything it’s talking about, either politically or narratively. It argues that you instead need to coopt the structures around you to change them. When director Matthew López sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to discuss this film, he pointed out this fact directly, saying:

“If we see romantic comedies that have people who are like Alex in it — and are like Henry — if we can really mess with the DNA of what Hollywood bread and butter looks like in terms of storytelling and take those things and turn them into something that looks exactly like it used to but also not at all what it used to? This film’s structure is such a classic structure. We haven’t done anything to the superstructure of the romantic comedy at all. It’s still built the same way, is still the same architectural design. But you’re making an entirely new building that looks different and that is used differently by different people….We have the opportunity, we have the right, and we have the ability to make people feel by taking those old architectural plans and making our own buildings from them.”

López is essentially making "the seat out the table argument." You get social minorities and other stigmatized groups into the halls of power, and positive change is bound to happen.

However, as we have already discussed, that is only half the battle. It's all well and good to be inspired by someone's identity (I know I am all the time), but politically, the ideologies and preferences these candidates hold still matter. I don't care if a person with my identity is representing an awful institution on behalf of an awful party. In a candidate, we should want more than a shared social identity; we also should want them to fight for our rights; otherwise, there is no point to them.

A Royal Conclusion

Red, White, & Royal Blue is undeniably a cute and heartwarming movie that captures the essence of a romantic comedy. The film features a cast of lovable characters, from the witty and passionate Alex Claremont-Diaz to the precocious yet sweet Prince Henry. Their on-screen chemistry, as well as the evolution of their relationship, was a delight to watch.

However, the film presents a romantic and idealized vision of politics that may be appealing but overlooks the complexities of real-world institutions in favor of a more saccharine ideal of representation. While the film celebrates the idea that politics can be a force for good and that representation matters, it fails to critically examine the inherent flaws within these perspectives when you don't also factor in power dynamics such as classicism.

While fantasies may be a treat, there is only so much sugar you can put on a cake with a bitter base.

As a Trans Person, I Don't Think Conservatives See Me As Human

Photo by Mercedes Mehling on Unsplash

I have spent a lot of time online defending my existence as a queer person. I have examined the history, biology, philosophy, and more of what it means to be a queer person: all in the hope that others realize that I and the other members of my community are humans deserving of empathy and respect.

While some people have come away with greater understanding, I have noticed a disturbing trend where none of the arguments I present sink in because many conservative critics don't see me as human. Where rights such as equality and freedom might appeal, in the context of another person, I find they don't work with many conservatives when it comes to me because there is a lack of an essential empathetic connection.

Moving the goalpost

I want to back up and explain what I mean here. It should be noted that my definition of conservatism is largely US-centric, where it has morphed into a proto-fascist (and increasingly an actual fascist) movement based on a desire not only to conserve the status quo but to return to a time that never existed. Conservatism has always been susceptible to authoritarianism and fascism, but things have exacerbated to the point where I don't think one can seriously claim that American conservatism is not actively fascist. As Thomas Palley writes for the Political Economy Research Institute Journal in their piece Proto-Fascism Unleashed: How the Republican Party Sold its Soul and Now Threatens Democracy:

“The driving force behind the U.S. drift to fascism has been a Faustian bargain made by the old guard Republican elite which is now being dismembered by Trump. That dismemberment is the payback which the old guard thought it would never have to make. The bargain had Republicans pandering to prejudice by pushing “red meat” politics that advocated nationalism, xenophobia, racism, abolition of abortion, and white conservative cultural values. In return, they got votes that enabled them to push their agenda of tax cuts plus a deregulated economy favorable to business and profits.

For almost forty years, beginning with the folksy charm of Ronald Reagan, the old guard persistently fed its political base that diet. And for forty years the formula worked, with Republicans setting the U.S. political agenda as evidenced in bi-partisan support for both the neoliberal economic policy regime and the neocon foreign policy regime.

As with Faust, the bargain eventually came due...The old guard only broke more substantively with Trump after the January 6, 2021 insurrection. However, by then it was too late as the old guard no longer controlled the Republican Party, whose base had been transformed by the forty year “red meat” diet. Instead, the base now swore allegiance to Trump, in whom they see an alter-ego with which they can wholly identify: a rich vulgar billionaire, a transgressor (e.g. p*ssy grabber and conman) who gets away with it, and a demagogic amoralist who is willing to deliver the punitive intolerant social and cultural agenda they want.”

The conservative movement-at-large wants to return to that mythical time of cultural perfection, back when America was supposedly great, and it's obvious my queer, trans, neurodivergent, depressed, left-leaning ass does not fit in that picture. The rise in anti-trans legislation across the country makes that point abundantly clear, even though I am sure there are some conservatives adrift from their party who are not anti-trans.

Yet, I think the rhetoric a lot of bigots use to dehumanize trans people is not always so straightforward. I will increasingly get into online conversations with people, and I rarely see a direct call to have me eradicated (although they do still occasionally happen). When I bring up that my rights are at risk from this rising trend of conservative fascism, these commentators will, at best, ignore the point. Take this one example where one user claimed that the trans issue in the current era is not worth being that stressed about, saying: "The civil rights situation for gay and trans people greatly improved in the 1990s. There are still some serious problems, but few of them are worth being all that militant about."

As anti-trans legislation builds, it is an opinion increasingly detached from present reality, and even when I take time to document that yes, there are serious problems worth being "militant about" (an exhaustive effort on my part), I don't get from conservatives an acknowledgment of that harm.

Instead, the natural counter I hear is a Motte and Bailey type of argument, where people say that they, of course, see me as a human being (i.e., as dehumanizing me would be the Bailey, the more difficult argument to make), they just disagree with my perspective (i.e., the Motte, the more defensible position). People are allowed to disagree, after all. Why am I being "fascist" about this? As one user commented on my article about JK Rowling: "Just because someone doesn't share your deeply-held beliefs doesn't make them phobic of you or of those you feel closely aligned to. It most certainly doesn't mean that they hate you."

However, when that "disagreement," which is a little more severe than people being mean online, is about something so fundamental to who I am (i.e., my rights), this comes off as a deflection. If this person respected my queer comrades as people, they wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the alarming problems we are pointing out. It makes it appear that these commentators do not care enough about our concerns, instead classifying them as "not serious" because they are not serious to them. We are just, at best, silly people with silly problems, and at worst, well, I am sure your brain can fill in the dots.

When trans people talk about our precarious position in society and that humanity instead gets likened to a differing perspective, "an ideology" that can be discarded, it is a type of dehumanization. The trans person isn't a person in this context but a worldview that can be challenged, and you don't have to look too far to see this argument stretched out to its natural conclusion. As Ryan T. Anderson argues hatefully in The Daily Signal of the alleged ideology of trans activists:

“At the core of the ideology is the radical claim that feelings determine reality. ….The movement has to keep patching and shoring up its beliefs, policing the faithful, coercing the heretics, and punishing apostates, because as soon as its furious efforts flag for a moment or someone successfully stands up to it, the whole charade is exposed. That’s what happens when your dogmas are so contrary to obvious, basic, everyday truths

A transgender future is not the “right side of history,” yet activists have convinced the most powerful sectors of our society to acquiesce to their demands. While the claims they make are manifestly false, it will take real work to prevent the spread of these harmful ideas.”

From the perspective of this far-right reactionary, an increasingly common opinion in the conservative movement, trans activists like me can control the levers of society to instill a tyrannical trans agenda but can also be easily defeated. This perspective is coincidentally one of the hallmark signs of fascism (see Umberto Eco's bullet point "the enemy is both strong and weak").

Men like Ryan move the goalpost with this rhetoric from trans identity being a mere "disagreement" to a sign of conservative victimization. Their work is reframed not as bigotry but as pushing back against "liberal coercion." This rhetorical strategy is like a funnel, where an attempt by trans people to document systemic discrimination (and call it out as such) moves from being labeled as a disagreement to then being classified as oppression caused by trans people — it is an argument that requires a basic removal of empathy to work, and it's not just here that it's used.

But the children

The classic counter-example to all of this is "but the children." Conservatives are always claiming to be protecting children in the trans debate (see the "groomer" discourse). Many conservatives have made the case that a child doesn't know the harm such an "ideology" poses. And so, they must remove trans people from the public sphere to prevent social contagion (a theory that has been thoroughly debunked).

This argument does not need much digging to realize how genocidal it is. The rhetoric of social contagion has been used by everyone from the Third Reich to the scientific racism movement of 1900 America. As commented by the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention:

“The ideological constructions of transgender women promoted by gender critical ideologues are particularly genocidal. They share many features in common with other, better known, genocidal ideologies. Transgender women are represented as stealth border crossers who seek to defile the purity of cisgender women, much as Tutsi women were viewed in Hutu Power ideology and Jewish men in Nazi antisemitism. Trans people in general are framed as figures that threaten the wholeness of the patriarchal nuclear family as well as the strength and vitality of national communities, much in the way that ethnic and national targets of genocide are viewed as cosmic enemies of the perpetrator group.”

In making this case, conservatives are asking us to remove our empathy for the scapegoat they are directing their ire toward (i.e., trans people) in the name of protecting children. It is an ideology that is genocidal as it requires force to implement because that is the only way to remove a group of people.

Most conservatives don't care when you point this out because we are being told that "children's" safety always matters more. Yet overwhelmingly, it's not actual children being defended but the concept of innocence that children represent. In the words of the then-Texas attorney general about his decision to prosecute gender-affirming care as child abuse: "In Texas, we cherish all of our children, and we must do everything in our power to keep them safe — free from the influence of a radical liberal sexual agenda they are too young to understand fully."

This politician's view here is that children are young, innocent, and pure — too immature to understand their needs and desires. An almost religious argument is being made. We must protect things that are pure from corruption as long as possible, the argument goes, a concept that sounds more like the theological notion of "original sin" than anything else.

Despite claiming to protect children, empathy has been removed from them even here. Conservatives are not claiming to care for what individual children want and feel, as that would require ceding agency and empathy to some children who are transgender and want to transition. It would mean trying to understand their desires and taking them seriously.

Instead, many parents are being encouraged not to see their children as people with independent wants and desires but to view their wants as coming from malicious outside influences. In the words of Matt Sharp from the Alliance Defending Freedom:

“State lawmakers can protect children and parents from being pressured into agreeing to these harmful, experimental “gender transition” procedures by enacting laws that prohibit the administration of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries on minors who experience discomfort with their biological sex.”

We can see how, in the conservative case of transgender ideology vs. children, empathy has been removed from the equation entirely in this debate — at least, for all the people being openly discussed. What we get is a paternalistic argument using the idea of children as a cudgel to hurt a social minority, and the only people being treated as humans in that situation are the ones with the weapons in their hands.

Conclusion

Genocidal aspirations start with refusing to acknowledge someone's humanity and then using that denial to transform them into the villain. That has been the playbook for as long as there has been fascism, and I see it now with how the conservative movement is treating transgender people in the US.

Some people got wrapped up in this movement out of the admirable desire to protect their kids. It's natural to want to protect the ones that you love, but we should not pretend that that impulse has not been manipulated across history to bolster support for fascist and authoritarian regimes. One's need for safety should not allow them to push for the systemic discrimination (and, let's be honest, elimination) of an entire social group.

Even if we can avert the fascism solidifying now around the Republican party, we still have to recognize when fascist rhetoric is being employed — in fact, to prevent the former, it's vital that we do so.

Eugenics in The Guardians of The Galaxy Vl 3

Image; Captured Disney+

The Guardian of the Galaxy series is about a ragtag group of scoundrels ranging from a super-intelligent, trigger-happy raccoon named Rocket (Bradley Cooper) to the smart-talking, rock-loving human Peter Quill (Chris Pratt). These beings face up against foes that threaten the stability of the galaxy — all while making nifty quips and doing everything to the beat of a great music playlist.

The series has always been one of the more fun parts of the MCU for me. Set apart from the shenanigans happening on Earth (mostly that is), it has given the series more breathing room to do its own thing while still being within the MCU. It's not strange to see Thanos, Howard the Duck, and other fantastic elements here because we are in space, and the realism of Earth can be set aside.

In the first movie, the Guardians faced off against an emissary of the tyrant Thanos called Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace), who wanted to destroy the space-faring civilization, Xander. In the second one, they defeated Quill's dad, Ego (Kurt Russell), a narcissistic space blob who wanted to remake all of creation into himself. The third movie, Volume 3, had a villain equally as destructive but with motivations far more “sensible,” albeit sickeningly so. Like Thanos's ecological Malthusian in the Infinity Saga, our antagonist's actions are rooted in a drive that is sadly all too real: the desire to make all organisms in the universe biologically "perfect."

In other words, our villain is a eugenist — i.e., he believes in the purposeful breeding of "desirable" traits — and that seems like a dastardly motivation worth sinking our teeth into.

MCU eugenics

We first meet The High Evolutionary (played by the exceptional and scene-stealing Chukwudi Iwuji), the movie's primary antagonist, when he is talking down to the High Priestess Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki) of a subordinate race he created called The Sovereign. He condescends to his creations, claiming he created them merely as an "aesthetic experiment" and sees no problems in culling their entire civilization.

The High Evolutionary's plan from the beginning to the end of this film is to create a perfect race of beings and place them in a new world called Counter-Earth. He believes he can biogenetically engineer perfection through the scientific method and has created countless "experiments," including one of our protagonists, Rocket, in the process. As he says later in the film to Rocket:

“It’s our sacred mission to take the cacophony of sounds around us and turn it into a song. To take an imperfect clump of biological matter such as you and transform it into something perfect.”

His perspective is not subtle, and — I need to stress this because this view about evolution has been repeated so often that some actually believe it — it's also utter nonsense. There is no such thing as evolutionary perfection. Natural selection — the vehicle that guides what we think of as evolution — is the process of an organism passing genes on to the next generation to adapt to its specific environment. If its genes are "good enough" to do that, they will be passed on — it has nothing to do with what traits are "objectively" better. The belief that certain traits are naturally and absolutely superior is not an objective assessment but a value judgment based on one's own morals.

It's also worth noting that this pursuit of "evolutionary perfection" has been historically used in the real world to justify horrible atrocities in the name of "progress." The Nazis are one such example, as they conceptualized their social problems as being the result of "hereditary factors," justifying the implementation of the holocaust, but we can also point to America's homegrown eugenics movement in the 1900s. White supremacists used the theory to advocate for a belief in scientific racism, likewise claiming that eugenics would "eliminate mental illness, physical disabilities, moral delinquency, crime, and even physical illnesses." It helped lead to the passage of things like miscegenation laws (i.e., banned marriages between white people and Black and Brown people) that had devastating consequences on social minorities in America. To this day, there are still people claiming that eugenics is practical, especially with the emergence of the ability to live-edit human DNA (see eugenics fears around Crispr).

However, it's important to remember that eugenics is only ever viewed as a positive by the individuals with some or all of the allegedly desirable traits — i.e., those at the top of the hierarchy. If something is "desirable," then conversely, something else must be classified as "undesirable." And for those who don't meet the criterion for such desirability, people who are often sick, disabled, or belong to a social minority, then eugenics has been quickly used as an excuse to discard them (as the histories we have already mentioned painfully tell us).

We see this callousness embodied in how the High Evolutionary views Rocket. He was one of the High Evolutionary's many experiments, and when Rocket was no longer deemed useful, he and his friends were discarded. "Look at you," the High Evolutionary mocks to Rocket shortly before giving the order to kill all of the talking raccoon's friends. "As if you were cobbled together by fat-fingered children. How could you be part of a perfect species? You're simply a medley of mistakes we could learn from and apply to creatures that truly mattered." It's a chilling line that you can imagine coming out of the lips of a Nazi eugenist as much as a mad space tyrant.

Yet Rocket, despite coming from the near-bottom of the High Evolutionary's pseudo-scientific hierarchy, has an exceptional brain. He is brilliant, even able to solve a crucial scientific problem that has stumped the High Evolutionary. This brilliance from someone whom our antagonist perceives as inferior further drives the High Evolutionary mad with resentment. He becomes determined to dissect Rocket's brain, convinced that it will allow his experiments (which, again, are sentient creatures) to be genuinely innovative, while, simultaneously being unable to realize that Rocket's existence invalidates his entire ideology of evolutionary perfection.

Despite what the High Evolutionary may claim, the narrative constantly shows us how value can come from anywhere and everywhere. Another example is the Guardian Drax, whom most people on his team undervalue for having "lower-than-normal" intelligence. However, he still has knowledge and skills to bring to the table, such as knowing the Orbose language, a language that the rest of the Guardians are ignorant of and need to know once they reach Counter-Earth. However, no one on his team initially realizes Drax has this skill because they don't bother asking him for his perspective. When you automatically discard people based on preconceived notions, you lose all the skills and insights they might possess.

The Sovereign creation Warlock also falls into this camp. He was meant to be the "apogee" of his people but came out of his cocoon early, a little stunted. The High Evolutionary and even the High Priestess (his mother figure) believe Warlock to be only valid as a blunt instrument, but he is the one to save Quill from certain death at the end of the film.

Simply because someone fails to meet a person's conception of usefulness doesn't mean they can't have value in other ways.

A heroic conclusion

The film ends with a solid refutation of the genetic superiority the High Evolutionary clings to. He is not able to create a perfect utopia with his experiments. There is still crime and poverty on Counter-Earth because his arbitrary traits for perfection are not enough to fix these social problems that are more the purview of politics than genetics. The High Evolutionary appears stuck in an endless cycle where the "perfect" worlds he creates always fail to meet his impossibly high standards. So he razes them to the ground, ignoring that he, as the architect of these "imperfect" places, might be wrong.

As the Guardians blow up his flagship, Rocket decides to rescue not only the sentient lifeforms aboard but also the "pre-evolved" animals. He does this because he was once one of them, a pre-evolved raccoon, and this realization causes him to expand his empathy for all the experiments aboard. Unlike the High Evolutionary's fascistic myth of racial perfection, Rocket decides not to draw lines in the sand over what sentient life is valuable, and what is more heroic than that?

Mega Garbage Rafts, AKA Yachts

Photo by Viktor Ritsvall on Unsplash

Why hello there, traveler, and welcome to the "Apocalypse Tour." This is the tour for the lovers of all things morbid. Those who want to see some things that are a little f@cked up (an expletive that is indeed universal). We note the problematic locations, tools, and, in this case, transportation vehicles that contributed to species 947 or humanity's end on an insignificant rock called Earth in the year 90,423 XE (what humans may know as 2XXX AD).

On this tour, we are looking at Mega Garbage Rafts, known to the primitives of Earth as "commercial yachts" [kuh·mur·shl yaats]. These were large buoyant structures used by members of 947 to traverse large liquid bodies of oxygen and hydrogen, sodium, and chloride that made up most of their planet's surface (see also the sugar oceans of Rhyzome for a more famous comparison).

With the exception of the glorious man-eating willows of Abba-B, sentient organisms within this dimension have typically used some device, whether mechanical, emotional, or biological, to get around. A vessel used to cross a liquid body only makes sense on such worlds where liquid surfaces are dominant. These have independently developed countless times across the histories of many species in our universe.

However, unlike more utilitarian vehicles used to transport items and people great distances for trade and travel, Mega Garbage Rafts were unique in the galaxy for primarily being used as a commodity for one single entity or procreative unit (note, for the gestalt consciousnesses on the tour today, human procreative units were often ten organisms or less). These commercial yachts could be pretty large — a minimum somewhere in the range of 30 to 50 feet — and the larger "super," "mega," or "giga" yachts could be anywhere from 120 to over 300 feet (note, one human foot is equivalent to 18 and a half quibbles).

These latter giga yachts could have dozens of crew members, not to mention all the fuel used to power them, and with that massive expense came waste. It should surprise none of our audience members, omnipotent or not, that these vehicles emitted many units of carbon dioxide, what we would classify as death chemicals, into species 947's atmosphere. As written by one insignificant human information outlet known as The Conversation:

“…a superyacht with a permanent crew, helicopter pad, submarines and pools emits about 7,020 tons of CO2 a year, according to our calculations, making it by the far worst asset to own from an environmental standpoint.”

It might seem strange that such a tremendous waste, both ecologically and materially, would be permitted for one individual's pleasure in a time of extraordinary ecological degradation, but you see, the extravagant waste of resources was the point. These vehicles were a status symbol for those in the upper caste of human society; individuals called the "rich," a type of entity very similar to the bone marrow leeches of Underburrow X because they, too, consumed the flesh of their hosts until nothing was left.

Rich people, whose social and political positions within 947's society allowed them to distort Earth's laws for personal benefit, had long stopped caring about their impact on the planet, believing they would be able to buy more oxygen when the environment was no longer habitable. Mega Garbage Rafts were the ultimate expression of this extreme selfishness. While yachts were often categorized as a waste of resources and many fragile humans from the lower castes increasingly came to resent the rich for these purchases (mainly because such opinions were grounded in material reality), most humans were loathed to destroy such vehicles.

For one, within polities such as the imperial United States of America [yoo·nai·tuhd stayts uhv uh·meh·ruh·kuh], many members of the lower caste suffered under the delusion that they, too, might be rich one day. Some even worshipped rich people, listening to their words like they were coming from the lips of a prophet. For example, economic parasite Jeff Bezos, who in the human-year 2023 owned the largest Garbage Raft in the world, had millions of humans follow him on species 947's worldwide communication system called the "Internet" [in·tr·net]. You don't destroy the garbage rafts of the beings you worship unless we are talking about the masochistic energy beings the next galaxy over (see the Xer).

Another reason people didn't destroy the Mega Garbage Rafts was because of 947's dominant economic system, capitalism [ka·puh·tuh·li·zm], which divvied up the land, as well as the materials made by the collective, into the hands of a few individuals. These individuals, the rich people we talked about earlier, often maintained their claim over such property through force, manipulating the legal system so those who violated their property claims were swiftly punished. The rich believed they had the right to use "their" property in whichever way they wanted — the social and environmental consequences of their actions be damned — and would make sure all members of the lower caste knew it.

And so most non-rich humans were often left with few options other than to guffaw at the absurdity. As fragile humans continued to experience the worsening effects of climate change, their harbors were clogged with more and more yachts of all kinds, which to this day are still rather pretty to look at in this dead world's toxic, green oceans.

A watery conclusion

For our trans-temporal visitors, when you go back to the 21st century, be sure to treat yourself to observing one of these pollutive beauties in the wild. We have provided some suggestions for Mega Garbage Raft manufacturers in the US so you can observe them at your leisure.

• Westport Yachts: 637 Marine Dr, Port Angeles, WA 98363

• Viking Yachts: 2713 Green Bank Rd, Egg Harbor City, NJ 08215

• Burger Boat Company: 1811 Spring St, Manitowoc, WI 54220

Remember that property laws were very contentious during this period, and many humans had primitive death canons on them to protect such property from harm (see A Brief Look at Death Cannons). It's advised that you navigate these situations with caution and set your defense systems to their highest possible levels.

Note — for the humans who have somehow bypassed our encryption protocols, take comfort in the fact that this is a joke from a normal human and not a retrospective on your species' imminent demise.

DO NOT use this information to stop this future because that would create a time paradox and go against your people's laws, as well as Medium's ToS, which I'm told are very important. I AM NOT encouraging you to take the law into your own hands, something I cannot do as an appendageless species.

Loki Season 2 & The Dismantling of Fascism

Captured on Disney+

Loki is a show about time and space, specifically, the cost that comes with trying to keep something as entropic as the fabric of the universe in place. A variant of the supervillain Loki finds himself serving the Time Variance Authority (TVA) — the entity meant to keep the status quo that is existence chugging along.

The story of an entity that, by its very essence, is conservative naturally pushes the show to deconstruct authoritarianism and fascism. The TVA, as it was presented in the first season, is a very regressive institution. While that was not challenged much in the first season (much to my chagrin), as the second season ended, I found myself pleasantly surprised by its handling on this topic.

Loki not only gives us a look into the inner workings of a fascist institution but also shows us the day after fascism dies (and the stumbles it takes to get there).

When fascism resists the truth

The definition of fascism has been debated for decades. From newspeak to hero worship, Umberto Eco famously lists fourteen points in his piece Ur-Fascism. Robert O. Paxton gave us nine in Anatomy of Fascism. Roger Griffin defines fascism in a single phrase: "palingenetic ultranationalism," or a uber authoritarian rebirth of a time that did not truly exist. These theorists' components may vary, but most talk about a group concentrating power in an authoritarian, anti-democratic fashion, using myth-making and scapegoating to justify the movement's existence.

The TVA in the first season of Loki follows this template. The organization has created a hierarchical culture governed by a mythical trio known as the Time Keepers. Every action members of the TVA make is allegedly in the name of preserving the "Sacred Timeline," which is the base timeline the Time Keepers claim will be destroyed if the other branches are allowed to grow.

The organization preserves "order" through the murdering of deviations in the timeline, which, left unchecked, the TVA believes will destroy all of existence. This makes the enemies of the TVA not only ever-present but somehow can be killed with little effort, fitting the fascist concept that your enemy is both strong and weak simultaneously.

There is a lot of simplistic terminology meant to dull the senses — what Orwell might call Doublespeak. When a person or branch is destroyed, this is euphemistically referred to as "pruning." People slated for execution are not people but "variants." And, of course, everyone is judged in a sham trial with only one conclusion: execution.

When we learn the truth in Season 1 that all the people working for the TVA are the very variants they were charged with pruning from the timeline — men and women pulled from the timeline and given false memories — I found myself frustrated that many of the TVAs adherent suddenly abandoned the ideology they had been indoctrinated in all their (false) lives. As I write in The TV Show 'Loki' Gets Fascism All Wrong:

“The revelation that TVA agents are variants in the show leads to a domino effect of dissent once members learn the truth. People like agent Mobius and Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) almost immediately defect, abandoning eons of propaganda in a very short period of time. ‘That’s not going to work out the way you think it is,’ Mobius tells TVA High Judge Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) when she tries to call guards to her office, indicating that the truth was enough to cause an open revolt among the rank-and-file of the organization.”

Yet the second season takes pains to make clear that indoctrination doesn't simply go away because "the truth" gets out. Braced with the possibility of a fraying timeline, a rogue general named Dax (Kate Dickie) takes soldiers to all the branches and "prunes" them, killing an incalculable number of people. General Dax does this because she is still operating under the logic of the TVA before the revelation, believing that the atrocities she commits are "protecting" the Sacred Timeline.

It was quite clever to show how organizations fracture when confronted with challenging information. Even when fascist people are exposed to the truth, it doesn't always do away with their brainwashing. The TVA is in the process of shedding its identity. However, that is a process more complex than simply flipping a switch.

The day after fascism dies

If the first season was a deconstruction of fascism, the second season is about how we move beyond it. The TVA is in the middle of an identity crisis as it debates how it should move forward in the absence of the mythology and leaders that once guided it.

We have three main perspectives on how to proceed. On the one hand, there is Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), who believes the TVA must be dismantled. She is a victim of the TVA, forced into a lifetime of hiding, and she wants it gone. "The TVA is the problem. It's broken. It's rotten," she tells Loki.

We also have those who want to preserve the status quo. This perspective comes from the genocidal General Dax as well as regime holdouts such as Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Miss Minutes (Tara Strong). They want the TVA to return to what it was before (at least initially).

Finally, we have the perspective of Loki himself, who spends most of this season trying to prevent the TVA from falling apart. He holds the reformist perspective. He wants the institution to change, not be abolished. As Loki tells Sylvie: "Sure. Burn it down. Easy. Annihilating is easy. Razing things to the ground is easy. Trying to fix what is broken is hard. Hope is hard."

I was worried that when Season 2 resumed, the narrative would come down hard on Sylvie, and we would get a frustrating plotline where her decision to kill He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) is depicted as "going too far." Season 2's plot point of various branches of the Sacred Timeline blinking out of existence in the wake of He Who Remains’ death made me extremely nervous that Loki would have to kill Sylvie and reset everything back to the status quo. Indeed, the show does make a false pivot in that direction. Loki even has a conversation with He Who Remains, discussing this very idea, but that turns out to be a red herring.

The fight to preserve the TVA's dominance is eventually tossed aside as we learn that the device that allowed the TVA to create the Sacred Timeline — i.e., the loom — is causing this problem. When the loom loses the capacity to sort all the various branches, it deletes them. Loki spends an excessive amount of time in the second season trying to keep the loom operational because he's worried the multiverse will lead to a new war and, consequently, the destruction of everything.

Ultimately, he has to come to terms with the fact that he cannot keep this remnant of control in place, and the loom is destroyed. I found this to be an excellent metaphor for how you cannot keep the mechanisms of fascism in place if you wish to move past them. The phrase "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" has been used extensively in Internet circles, but I believe it rings true in moments like this. When you build a big gun meant to destroy worlds, realities even — and that is what the loom effectively was — keeping it around guarantees its use. The best thing to do is to let it die.

And yet, while the loom is destroyed, the TVA is not. It is reformed. They push for an incrementalist direction for what to do with the dying remnants of fascism, and that is an interesting conclusion worthy of reflection.

A mischievous conclusion

As the second season ends, the TVA still exists, but it has been transformed. The other branches are not only “allowed” to exist, but the organization has taken an active stance of non-interference. The TVA is now an observer who has committed to being a final line of defense if and when things spiral out of control: peacekeepers on a temporal level. The reform perspective has won out, and it's hard not to believe this is the perspective the show believes is morally correct, given that all significant tensions have been resolved.

Now you can have a whole other debate on whether you can "reform" fascist institutions or, like Sylvie says, you need to burn them down. Loki claims this is the easier approach. However, you can argue the opposite, as doing the dual work of dismantling an institution and building a new one is much more complicated than simply working with “what you have,” especially since “what you have” makes it easier for you to default to older, more fascistic patterns.

Again, we can go around in circles here, and that's a sign of this being a good narrative: one that makes you think even if you do not always agree. Loki season 2 tackled something much more challenging than depicting the black-and-white rigidity of fascism: it talked about its end.

Wonka & the Myth of Meritocracy

Wiki Commons: Marcus Quigmire from Florida, USA

The prequel to the famous Roald Dahl story Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is about the titular Wonka (played by Timothée Chalamet) as he pursues his dream of being the world's best chocolatier, specifically by owning a store at the prestigious Galeries Gourme. Starting at the bottom, Wonka teams up with a ragtag group of outcasts to defeat the bigwigs who control the current chocolate industry.

From its special effects to its silly characters, this movie was fun to watch. The feats Wonka manages to achieve are downright impossible and yet feel emotionally real. Wonka is a fantasy where our aspiring chocolatier uses mythical ingredients such as bottled weather to make his candy. The movie is not meant to be practical, so it's perfectly fine for it to be impossible: that's the whole point.

Yet all narratives are trying to say something, even if they don't have the best execution or make unintended messages in the process, and part of our job as viewers is to imbue and debate meaning from the works we see. It's worth asking ourselves what this fun movie was trying to say. Not everything was sunshine and everlasting gobstoppers. When we examine the emotional core of this movie, we come across some interesting messaging that seems to uplift the very businessmen it initially lampoons.

The making of an entrepreneur

From a marketing standpoint, it would have been challenging in an age of rampant wealth inequality to tell a story that glorifies a wealthy entrepreneur without ruffling a few feathers. A lot of people are tired of seeing billionaires justifying their fortunes. If this had been a story about an upper-class or even a middle-class person building his financial empire, I am not sure that the child-like awe and whimsy of Wonka would still be there.

So Wonka smartly reworks the source material to add a tragic backstory, where none had existed in the books, to tell a classic "rags-to-riches" tale before Wonka was rich and powerful (the only stories about wealthy people Americans tend to like). Wonka now grew up poor, with only a single mother (Sally Hawkins) to raise him. He had to work hard in his young adulthood as a cook on a freighter ship to both learn how to make chocolate and gather all of his mystical ingredients. He is a hustler of sorts who has put in his time and is now branching out on his own.

On the one hand, the film parodies the hustle culture that Wonka ascribes to. The opening song literally refers to bootstrapping ("Gotta drag myself up by my one good bootlace"), a reference to the impossible feat of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. A phrase that has since been adopted in earnest by aspiring entrepreneurs. Wonka learns almost right away that this viewpoint of going at it alone is naive. He is quickly taken advantage of, losing all of his savings by the end of this initial song.

Throughout the movie, his efforts are disrupted by corrupt cops, politicians, and unscrupulous businesspeople. There is even a running bit where one of the main antagonists, Felix Fickelgruber (Mathew Baynton), gags whenever he hears the word "poor." The villains of this movie are out-of-touch rich people and their aspirants, whom we are supposed to despise (and rightfully so, as they are awful).

Wonka, conversely, cares for the "poor." He charges a fair rate so that even lower-class people can afford his candy, and he ends up redistributing stolen chocolate to the community. He is a nice person, a good capitalist who is trying to help who he can.

However, it bears stressing that Wonka never stops being a hustler — in fact, his core demeanor and motivations never change. Even during his lowest point, he is still able to pour chocolate out of his hat and create an automatic laundry machine using dog-powered labor. It's not that he doesn't have barriers — he has plenty — but he's no longer hustling alone. He partners with a team of outcasts, primarily the orphan girl Noodle (Calah Lane), and there is nothing that he and his compatriots can't achieve with a little hard work. The hustle archetype has not been challenged so much as expanded. You can't conquer the marketplace alone, the movie seems to suggest, you need a team.

With Wonka, we see someone who builds his life around laws and contracts. He isn't willing to steal, even when at his lowest, and puts all his efforts into honoring his agreements, not just with his business partners but with everyone. He is honorable to a fault. Wonka is ultimately manipulated into leaving town due to a deal he establishes with the movie's villains in exchange for his business partners being able to get out of a bad contract. It's a deal Wonka would have honored if not for the villains breaking it first.

It's honoring a contract that ultimately saves Wonka's life. He and Noodle find themselves drowning in chocolate via a James Bondesque death trap devised by the devilish Arthur Slugworth (Paterson Joseph). Before meeting his fate, Wonka requests that these villains bring a container of chocolate to an oompa-loompa named Lofty (Hugh Grant), with whom Wonka has been feuding. This action would fulfill a debt Wonka owes. It's his only request — a feat that compels the oompa-loompa Lofty to rescue the trapped Wonka and Noodle.

One of the things that makes Wonka such a good guy is that he honors his contracts while the baddies break them. These corrupt businessmen have not only watered down their chocolate, lying to all of their customers in the process, but have used that excess chocolate to bribe the local chief of police so that they can shut down any and all competition.

They are nasty, unscrupulous, cutthroat individuals, and it's this perspective that leads to their downfall. The oompa-loompa overhears their decision not to deliver Wonka's chocolates to him (these villains eat them instead), and Lofty decides to rescue Wonka, saving our protagonist's life and sealing our villain's fates. Wonka promptly exposes the trios' corruption, as well as the crooked chief of police (Keegan-Michael Key), and we see the system immediately work for the young entrepreneur. The police act on the information and arrest the film's villains promptly.

With the barriers of corruption removed, the exceptional Wonka is able to rise to the top of the chocolate-making world — a nostalgic "Pure Imagination" sung as the viewer sees a montage of his factory rising to the surface: the origin story complete without any complications that would place our capitalist in a negative light.

A bittersweet conclusion

Wonka was, again, a delightful movie. It had a lot of good humor in it, and the special effects really do make you feel like you have been transported to a world where "magic is real" (also, side note, Hugh Grant's oompa-loompa character was the highlight of the entire movie for me).

Yet, despite making a few jabs at detached rich people and bootstrapping, it does not appear to be a text criticizing hustle culture as much as it criticizes people who do not honor the rules of the marketplace. What unfolds is a morality play where the hero is someone who respects the law (at least toward non-rulebreakers) and always honors his debts, while the villains are lecherous cheats who are not playing by "the rules." People who eventually are removed — a small hiccup on the way to a fairer, more equitable marketplace.

It's a nice fantasy, and that is all Wonka ever promised to be anyway. However, as we navigate a society where the Arthur Slugworths of the world are not just a barrier to the marketplace but its architects, we must reflect on how far from reality this fantasy is.

A Tumultuous Year: What Lies Ahead in 2024

Photo by Ross Stone on Unsplash

The 2020s have already brought with them so much uncertainty and heartbreak: the surge of a terrifying pandemic, the thawing of geopolitical conflicts thought to be frozen in amber, active genocide, and ethnic cleansing. It's hard not to look at the situations unfolding before us and not believe they will worsen.

While we cannot know precisely what the future will hold, we can make a few educated guesses. The predictions I have made below are not a definitive list (and I am sure a few of them will end up being wrong), but taken as a collective pattern; they paint a picture of the dark year ahead of us in 2024.

The Ukrainian-Russian war will rage on

This war has been waged for over two years. Both sides are significantly depleted. Russia has lost hundreds of thousands of troops and is loosening conscription laws. Ukraine has not faired better, losing hundreds of thousands more (in overall casualties, not troops) and about 20% of its territory.

If such material indicators were why wars ended, then this war would be over. Unfortunately, both countries appear to be bleeding out while waiting for the other's defeat. Ukraine is part of the United States gambit to deplete Russian military forces, and Russia has staked so much on this quagmire that Putin might be worried for his political survival (and actual survival) if he were to end the war without achieving his objective of holding onto captured territory.

Since the GOP blocked December 2023 funding over the border, some claim that a Republican Congress will kill funding in 2024 as well. Yet I see this as a larger play for border funding (and they'll get it). Biden does not want to lose Ukraine right before the election, so he will sacrifice a lot to prevent that from happening.

In the meantime, Putin will most likely wait out 2024 for his Hail Mary: the election of Donald Trump. The Republican Party and Trump, more specifically, do not appear to be as supportive of the War in Ukraine as the Biden administration. And so, Putin hopes to wait out the clock on Biden's presidency. If and when this happens, and the Republican government cuts Ukraine's funding and military aid, the Russian government will then pressure Ukraine to accept a new, smaller Ukrainian map.

The border will be further militarized

As alluded to in the previous section, our country's conservative attitude toward border control will become more entrenched. The US has been militarizing its border for a while now. The establishment of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in 2003, as well as a steady increase in funding for border agencies (and the businesses who supply them), have been pointing us in the direction of a someday locked-down US-Mexico border (at least for migrants coming from outside the US).

Yet I suspect things will get worse in 2024, in no small part due to the presidential election, which will incentivize more funding to border agencies and more troops to be stationed there. In the words of Mark Akkerman in the Migration Policy Institute on this funding increase:

“The United States has in recent years spent more money on immigration enforcement than at any other point in history. For fiscal year (FY) 2024, the Biden administration has asked Congress for nearly $25 billion for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an increase of almost $800 million over the previous year and nearly equal to the entire gross domestic product (GDP) of Iceland. U.S. immigration enforcement budgets have been steadily increasing for many years, irrespective of the political orientation of the country’s federal government.”

As we can see, neither party has the incentive to roll back the decisions of the other. The GOP wants to militarize the border, and the Democratic Party seems largely indifferent to this. This status quo creates an incentive to increase militarization to score easy points and deflect criticism.

I don’t think the border will close in 2024, but I do suspect this year we will see the continued contraction of civil liberties for people along the border (both for Americans and refugees), which will have ripple effects for years to come.

It will be the hottest year on record

If there is one thing on this list that is a near certainty, it's that 2024 will be the hottest year in recorded history. Not only because climate change has made the last decade already quite hot but because El Nino (a meteorological process that brings warmer-than-average sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific) will increase that heat. As mentioned in YaleEnvironment360:

“Next year is likely to surpass 2023 as the hottest ever, according to the U.K. Met Office, which projects that 2024 will likely measure 1.46 degrees C warmer than preindustrial times, but could conclude up to 1.58 degrees C warmer.”

This process will lead to a year with stronger hurricanes, rising ocean levels, famines, and, as we shall soon discuss, lots and lots of refugees.

The heat in the American Southwest will lead to internal mass migration

Climate change and political instability will lead to a lot of people fleeing their homes, but I want to focus on the American Southwest (i.e., Arizona and New Mexico, along with parts of California, Colorado, Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah) because I don't believe people have come to terms with how dire the situation will be there this year.

The American Southwest has been projected to be severely impacted by Climate Change. In 2021, the IPCC had an entire section devoted to the region. With poor water security, severe wealth inequality, increasingly poorer air quality, and worsening wildfires, the rising heat levels in 2024 will lead to a situation where many people lose (or are forced to leave) their homes.

While some states in the region, such as New Mexico, have low, almost flatlining growth rates, states like Arizona have experienced steady population growth. I understand why this has happened, as the cost of living there is lower than on the coasts, but as water and electricity become internalized into these residents' costs, this incentive will shift.

Indeed, we are already starting to see this internalization happen. The metropolitan area of Phoenix, Arizona, voted to increase water rates significantly this year (the same in Tucson, Arizona). Water rates have also increased in the last few years in Denver, Colorado, Las Vegas, Nevada, and Colorado Springs, Colorado. Other Municipalities, such as Albuquerque, New Mexico, are delaying increases despite the need.

I believe that 2024 is going to be the year the "shit hits the fan" for a lot of people in the region. And since America already has a very poor social safety net, many Americans in the Southwest, particularly in New Mexico, will be forced to move with little resources. Next year round, I expect to see very different growth figures from the American Southwest overall.

Artificial Intelligence will cause the further degradation of Google Search Results

2023 was a cultural flashpoint for AI, mainly because of programs like ChatGPT, where people could suddenly churn out low-effort content with less than 30 minutes of effort. It wasn't great content (mostly), but there was an abundance of it very quickly.

Google search results, at one point the backbone of the Internet, have been flagging for a while now. Unless you are very good at keyword searches, for years, the top couple of pages of Google have been SEO soup for most search results. This is because the economic incentive is to produce clickbait and misinformation. AI will make this problem much worse. As Casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer write:

“In 2024, AI-produced dreck will find its way into nearly every corner of the internet. While most of it will be inoffensive and generally correct, it will get enough wrong — and cause enough frustration among those it misleads — that trust in search will decline.”

Yet the way that AI is trained might also lead to new problems. Companies like OpenAI set their AI on the Internet to learn how to do tasks like writing and image generation. However, now that the Internet is quickly becoming filled with AI content, it leads to a situation where AI starts training on more and more AI material, possibly leading to model collapse. As a recent paper writes (first coming my way via reporting from VentureBeat):

“…learning from data produced by other models causes model collapse — a degenerative process whereby, over time, models forget the true underlying data distribution … this process is inevitable, even for cases with almost ideal conditions for long-term learning.”

All in all, expect the Internet to be just a little worse in 2024.

We will still be arguing about a recession

Most conversations about economic health are usually framed on whether or not we are in a recession — i.e., a decline in economic activity that lasts for at least a few months.

However, that framing comes with some significant limitations. The National Bureau of Economic Research, the main trusted body in the states for determining such a thing, uses quantitative indicators such as "real personal consumption expenditures" and "industrial production," among others, to make such an assessment. The nature of tabulating and comparing such figures to past trends means these assessments are made after the fact. And so, political leaders have to act to stabilize the economy before a recession is determined.

Yet, as many Americans know, another problem is that indicators like "personal consumption" or "how much businesses produce" are not the best for judging their standard of living. Real wages in the US have been very slow to grow and, in some sectors, have yet to meet inflation or increased productivity. Other essential costs such as housing and healthcare have likewise increased, reducing many people's wealth generation. If you have to deal with these problems, it doesn't matter what the US's GDP is; you won't experience that alleged prosperity.

This creates a disconnect where the forces in power will bring up figures such as increasing GDP, low unemployment, and more as signs of economic prosperity, but that wealth is not felt by most Americans. These two sides are essentially talking past each other (often callously so for those focusing on recessions), and I don't expect this debate to go away in 2024. If anything, it will intensify as two different ideas of who the economy should serve come head-to-head during this election year.

Covid will be here to stay, and we won't care

COVID-19 defined 2020, and much like 9/11, I expect our geopolitics to be discussed in terms of a pre-COVID and post-COVID world. And yet, much of the country has gone "back to normal." Masking mandates have been lifted, and much of the initial measures have been rolled back with no signs of returning.

Yet the virus is still with us, and although vaccines have made it less deadly for those countries that have access to them, there is still much we do not know about long-COVID (i.e., the long-term negative effects from the initial respiratory infection). The virus may have already disabled over a million, possibly even millions of Americans (but again, we still don't know with certainty).

I suspect this status quo will remain in 2024. COVID will remain a persistent problem in the backdrop, but we will not pursue systemic remedies such as extensive air filtration systems and masking up while using congested public transit. Instead, our society will learn to live with long-COVID.

Elections all over the world will be very unstable

There will be 2 billion voters across 50 countries in 2024, and they will have dramatic consequences on the world, particularly the elections of the United States and India. These elections have authoritarian people running in them who have no problem encouraging their followers to use violence to achieve victory. We all remember the January 6th riot in reaction to the 2020 election, but that potential instability will not just be in the US.

In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BJP party has long manipulated ethnic and religious tensions for political gain. While the BJP has launched an effort to increase its share of Muslim voters in the 2024 election, nationalistic rhetoric has still been part of the party's bread and butter. And with recent clashes in Manipur (a state the BJP controls), there is reason to be concerned that such tensions will enflame further this election season.

In Indonesia, according to reporting from the Carnie Endowment for International Peace, for years, power has shifted mainly in the hands of elites who first built their fortunes during the authoritarianism that existed in the country before 1999. Upstart Joko Widodo tried to challenge the status quo in 2014 but quickly became coopted by the establishment. He is now trying to use this election to make himself Indonesia's new kingmaker, and that comes with the possibility of high tensions.

From Mexico to the European Union, many pieces are on the board this year. And yes, the US election (a Trump-Biden matchup) will be one of them, and it is expected to be very messy. The election denialism of 2020 has not gone away (if anything, it's hardened with Trump's base). It feels terrible to say, but expect at least one attempt of a US-based terrorist attack motivated by the 2024 US election.

Military conflicts will escalate in 2024

There is no other way to say it: 2024 will worsen military conflicts. 2023 was already pretty bad, with many (though not all) parts of the African continent engulfed in conflict (see Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, etc.). Elsewhere, there was also the Ukrainian-Russian War, the hostilities in Palestine, and many more.

I suspect some of these conflicts will expand, even as new ones burst onto the scene. The more prominent tension is in Palestine. The Israeli government is currently committing genocide in the Gaza Strip, and that has eaten away at much of its international goodwill, jeopardizing support for the first time in decades. Israel is also currently engaged in border skirmishes with Hezbollah in Lebanon, which have the genuine potential to spill out into a regional war, forcing the country to deploy troops on multiple fronts.

Another contentious region is Haiti. Groups have been sounding the alarm here for a while. The economically impoverished country has been struggling with famine and criminal activity (two interrelated issues), and now that entire swaths of the capital, Port-au-Prince, have been captured by gangs, this violence risks increasing into an informal Civil War.

We could spend here all day listing and recapping geopolitical situations potentially spiraling into war, civil war, or genocide. You might also want to check out Guatemala, the cartel skirmishes in Mexico, and possibly even Taiwan.

TL; DR

The year ahead will be a rough one. From the deteriorating Internet to terrible heat waves, every aspect of life is expected to get a little bit harder in 2024.

It might seem like things are hopeless, but I genuinely don't think so. Yes, the current political regime has failed us, and these problems unfolding are the fruits of that failure. However, there is still time to change course. We do not need to live in a world of constant war, famine, and political instability. These are political choices.

But to change things, first, we must accept the world around us as it is.

ExxonMobil's "Let's Deliver" Commercials Are Malicious Propaganda

Captured; ExxonMobil YouTube

Recently, ExxonMobil has been putting out these ads that tout its efforts to "reduce" emmissions. The one I always see is of a woman of color standing in front of a backdrop of gas refineries and saying, "Heavy industry with low emissions. Let's deliver." Sometimes, the ad will be longer and tout solutions such as carbon capture and clean energy from "hydrogen" (e.g., usually by using methane).

These ads imply that this company is trying to do something to combat the worsening of climate change. Yet, given this company’s historical (and current efforts) to deny the full extent of climate change, we must view them with heavy skepticism. ExxonMobil is not trying to "save the planet" but perpetuating a form of greenwashing propaganda, and today, I wanted to explain the reasons why this is the case.

A brief breakdown of what this jargon means

Since this company's propaganda relies on using complex terms that people may or may not understand, we must explain what ExxonMobil means by words like "clean" hydrogen and Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) (note: if you already know all this stuff, skip to the next section).

CCS means pulling carbon at the point of emission and then storing it somewhere, usually underground. It is not to be confused with Direct Air Capture (DAC), a technology that theoretically pulls Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere. ExxonMobil is not touting Direct Carbon Capture because the technology has yet to be deemed feasible on a widespread scale (who knows if it ever will be). However, the company most likely benefits from people's confusion between these two terms.

When ExxonMobil is talking about "clean" hydrogen, it is advocating for using fossil fuels such as natural gas (i.e., methane) to produce hydrogen, the latter of which the Department of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy (a subdivision of the US Department of Energy) claims "…is a clean fuel that, when consumed in a fuel cell, produces only water." Water is, after all, a much better byproduct than CO2.

However, while this consumption is better, emissions are still involved if you use fossil fuels to create that hydrogen. This is where Carbon Capture and Storage is supposed to come in. Since CCS is used to allegedly store the majority of the Carbon Dioxide underground when the fossil fuels are used to create hydrogen fuel cells, less CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere (again, allegedly) — hence the tagline "heavy industry with low (not no) emissions." ExxonMobil is trying to make the case that with these few tweaks, they will be able to curb the majority of their carbon emmissions (by 2050).

Now, you can create hydrogen with renewables through separate processes, but that's different from what ExxonMobil is advocating for. They are trying to claim that the fossil fuel industry can be retooled to be "green," and their claim very much depends on whether Carbon Capture and Storage, as well as Clean Hydrogen, will work as advertised.

F@cking with methane is a bad idea

It needs stressing that the substances ExxonMobil is asking us to rely on to create "clean" hydrogen are "natural" gases like methane, which, according to the EPA, has "a global warming potential more than 25 times that of carbon dioxide." We still need to extract it from the Earth, too, usually via hydraulic fracking (i.e., injecting water, sand, and other chemicals deep into the ground to crack rock and allow more oil and natural gas to come to the surface) so that it can be used in a separate facility to create hydrogen fuel cells.

Fracking, on a fundamental level, requires altering the geology of where it happens — you are cracking the rocks beneath the Earth. It is a process that has come under intense scrutiny for creating high amounts of pollution. Plenty of studies have indicated that the chemical substances used to extract methane can leak into the water table. Hydraulic fracking has also been noted to increase geological activity (i.e., earthquakes) in the areas where drilling occurs.

Again, methane is 25 times worse than carbon as an emission, and even if everything goes right with extraction (which we have already established is not happening), there are then problems with transportation. Methane must be liquified, usually via high-energy refrigeration (see “Liquified Natural Gas”), stored in a pressurized environment to be transported long distances, and then regasified at the point of origin. There are a lot of ways that process can and does break down. Indeed, the most common way methane escapes into the atmosphere is during transit. Millions of tonnes of methane are estimated to leak from pipes every year. As stated in one Environmental Defense Fund report:

“Natural gas is primarily composed of methane, meaning that all leakage from natural gas pipelines contributes to harmful climate pollution. EDF analysis, using the latest research, finds that U.S. natural gas pipelines are leaking between 1.2 million and 2.6 million tons of methane per year.”

Before we even get to the technology that companies like ExxonMobil are touting as the solution for climate change (i.e., so methane and other fossil fuels can be used to create hydrogen fuel cells), we have to contend with the fact that the entire supply chain to get to that point will be detrimental to our environment. It's quite frankly not worth the risk, and unfortunately, this is just one small problem with CCS — the bigger one is that the technology may just be keeping oil and gas extraction alive for years to come.

It might extend oil & gas projects

It's important to remember the history of CCS. It's not a new development but a rebrand of an old technology called "Enhanced Oil Recovery." Rather than capture gas byproducts inside a permanent storage system, one way these companies extended the lifespan of an oil or gas formation has been to reinject collected gases into said formation to build up pressure so more oil, methane, and other fossil fuels would come to the surface.

As the truth of climate change has become undeniable, this technology has been rebranded as the solution to the climate crisis, but it wasn't designed to do that. Indeed, most current Carbon Capture and Storage projects are Enhanced Oil Recovery projects devoted to extending oil and gas formations, not permanently capturing carbon. We have to assume that this trend will continue. As Bruce Robertson wrote in 2022 for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis:

“The [IEEFA] has estimated that most of the total captured carbon throughout history found its use in enhanced oil recovery — approximately 80–90 percent. Only a small proportion of carbon capture projects (approximately 10–20 percent) have stored carbon in dedicated geological structures without using it for oil and gas production.”

As things currently stand, rather than wrapping down overall production, Enhanced Oil Recovery has the potential to extend the life of oil and gas formations. The expansion of CO2 “storage” pipelines only makes that possibility more likely, not less.

We will still have to worry about leaks with CO2

Then there is the issue of what happens once most carbon is "captured" (keep in mind that even under the most theoretical of circumstances, some CO2 is still escaping into the atmosphere). In theory, the CO2 is transported to a storage site or an adjoining factory for reuse (this may have started sounding familiar). But if you are very clever, you might be asking yourself, "What happens when this carbon leaks out at any stage of the process?"

Again, one of the more significant concerns is that this technology works as advertised, but leaks are widespread in the current natural gas space. Are we expected to believe the problems already rampant in the oil and natural gas industry will not continue with the transportation and storage of carbon?

Pipelines meant to transport and store carbon can and have leaked. In one infamous example in Satartia, Mississippi, the pipeline ruptured. According to a report by NPR, hundreds had to be evacuated, and 45 people were hospitalized. Years later, respiratory and brain issues are still common. According to Anna Mattson in Scientific American on CO2 leaks from such pipelines:

“A study released in May found that carbon capture pipelines are more likely to experience small punctures than large ruptures such as the one in Satartia. Smaller holes release the gas at a slower rate, which makes them harder to locate. And a delayed response to smaller punctures could cause them to be deadly.

When CO2 vaporizes and escapes, it causes the temperature in the pipeline to drop immediately — a process [described] as “violent.” The escaped gas doesn’t ignite or dissipate. It moves quickly along the ground and can collect in low-lying areas, including small valleys and basements near the pipeline route. If a person in one of these pockets breathes air with a 10 percent concentration of CO2, they can fall unconscious within one minute.”

Oil companies often try to stress that the risk of leaks is small. Yet, when even small leaks can have such devastating consequences, it's worth wondering if this technology should be ditched in favor of other technologies that do not have the same drawbacks (see renewables and natural carbon sinks).

While leaks are allegedly believed to be low once they are successfully stored underground, there is the issue of the CO2 that escapes at the source. According to a paper by Yuanrong Zhou, leakage at both active and idle wells (especially the latter) is very common. As Zhou writes: "Based on historical information, researchers estimated an average of 7.5% of wells may experience continuous leakage, at about 150 metric tons of CO2 per year for active wells and 300 metric tons of CO2 per year for abandoned wells."

We can increase regulation in these areas to mitigate that leakage — something Zhou and most academics in this area stress passing — but the truth is that we will only know the leakage rate for these projects well after the fact. Implementing this technology at the scale needed to theoretically curb emissions will have all sorts of unintended direct and indirect effects we cannot anticipate. Again, it isn't worth the risk.

Little CO2 captured, bad storage

And all of this is before we get into the efficiency and cost of the current technology. While many CCS facilities are in construction, only a few have been completed for the explicit purpose of long-term storage, and the ones studied by third parties have often revealed less than stellar results. As the Center For Internal Environmental Law claimed of one example in Texas:

“The Petra Nova carbon capture facility installed at a coal-fired power station near Houston, Texas, in 2017 illustrates the failure of CCS to deliver meaningful emissions reductions and the folly of deploying CCS in service of fossil fuel extraction and use. During its operation, the CCS system only captured 7 percent of the power plant’s total CO2 emissions, well below the company’s promises to reduce CO2 emissions by 90 percent.”

The IEEFA conducted a study of 13 flagship CCS facilities and found that "Failed/underperforming projects considerably outnumbered successful experiences." That report also noted that CCS does not account for the majority of Scope 3 emissions —i.e., the emmissions created when the product is burned by consumers outside of initial production. As the report goes on to claim:

“It is obvious that [Carbon Capture & Storage] in the [oil and gas] sector is not about reducing Scope 3 emissions from the final combustion/use of gas. Rather, it is about minimizing production-related Scope 1 emissions from gas with excessive CO2 content.”

In essence, little thought and care is being placed into what happens to these emissions further down the supply chain.

The technology is also expensive because the markets for carbon outside of the oil and gas industry are small (i.e., outside Enhanced Oil Recovery). CCS is only being made economically viable via massive subsidies from the federal government, paying these polluters directly to store CO2 underground. These are subsidies that could be plugged into more viable renewable sources such as solar. "A dollar spent in renewable technologies will avert a lot more emissions than CCS will," MIT Professor Charles Harvey told CBS News.

We have to contend with the fact that right now, this technology does not work as advertised. We are being asked by the fossil fuel industry to roll CCS out en masse as the solution to the very problem the oil and gas industry helped cause, and doing so ignores the lessons of the last fifty years.

A gassy conclusion

Again, we are being told to preserve the oil and gas industry through the magic of Carbon Capture and Storage so we can use fossil fuels such as methane to create "cleaner" technologies. Yet the technology behind this modern-day alchemy (i.e., carbon capture and storage) does not appear to work, comes with high economic costs, and might even extend oil and natural gas production much longer than necessary.

While we need to switch our energy production to something greener, the natural question becomes, "If hydrogen fuel cells are so amazing, why not just use something like solar to create them?" If we must ramp up production for these things (a big if), why use methane as a middleman when it has so many drawbacks?

And, of course, ExxonMobil doesn't have an answer to this other than its existence. It has built its identity around fossil fuels and wants to keep the gravy chain going. But that is not a good enough reason to justify the continued mining of a highly volatile substance such as methane. A substance whose effects will be felt much more immediately than CO2 and will impact us not 50 years from now but in the present.

Don't let a self-assured commercial convince you otherwise. ExxonMobil gave us our precarious present. It should not be involved in building a better future.

The Strange Trend of Pretending to Have a Marginalized Identity in Movies

Image: compiled from movie posters hosted on IMDB

Stop me if you have heard this plot before. A character, usually a man, and usually a white man, is down on their luck. Their career is dead in the water for whatever reason, so they take on a new persona. They decide to impersonate a woman, and it revitalizes their career. They go from nobodies to stars almost overnight.

Or here's another one: a boy is in love with a woman who will not give him the time of day. He wants to get close to her but doesn't know how, so he lies about his sexuality to get in as her gay best friend, and, at least initially, all is well. He connects with her as an individual, and by the end (after a comedic reveal), they're dating.

There are a lot of films where a privileged character pretends to be a social minority for laughs. The character, either for prestige or romance, has adopted the persona of a less privileged person so that they can achieve their goals. Although the truth is almost always revealed to some (or all), they usually achieve one or all of their objectives, reinforcing problematic tropes in the process.

'They have it easier'

One trend we see a lot in these films is the misconception that stigmatized populations have things easier than more privileged people, at least in some ways. A common throughline in many of these films is that the role the main character adopts has immediate financial or social benefits.

In the film, Tootsie (1982), the character Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) is such a difficult actor that no one will hire him, but these attributes as a woman allow him to gain success (albeit because a powerful woman is at the helm of the soap opera he was cast in). It's not that he doesn't experience harassment as a woman (he does), but he is depicted as a "better" woman because his upbringing allows him to act with assertion. He loses that career after his "big reveal," but not after wooing the heart of the woman he admires.

In Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), a film about a cis-gendered man named Daniel Hillard (Robin Williams) dressing up as an older nanny to secretly take care of his children, the sexual harassment he receives dressing up as a woman is mainly played for laughs. And while Daniel may not be able to rekindle the relationship he had with his ex-wife, his cross-dressing revitalizes his career. He ends up hosting a new children's show under his Mrs. Doubtfire persona.

In Soul Man (1986), Mark Watson (C. Thomas Howell), a posh white kid, pretends to be Black after his parents cut him off so that he can secure a scholarship. He obtains this with some Blackface and little effort. Although the film does try to underscore the difficulties of the Black experience in America, albeit in a problematic way, Mark is still able to go to college for free for most of its runtime. He ends the film not by going to jail for fraud but by earning the affections of a girl with the "cool" pickup line: "How do you feel about interracial relationships?"

For most of their runtime, these films allow these characters to extract benefits for donning the role of a stigmatized population, and they end with either financial or romantic success. This outlook is false. Stigmatized populations do not have an easier time overall (a reality that is backed up in the data). If it was easier to be gay or a woman (or both), especially to be a gay Black or Latina woman in something like the film or entertainment industry, our lived reality would be much different.

Yet this falsehood is a real feeling that many people hold. For example, before conservatives were successfully able to end race-conscious admissions for universities via the Supreme Court case Students For Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, a common argument was that such a process gave Black and Latino populations "unfair" advantages.

Given the pervasiveness of this belief, even a passive reinforcement of this idea in films can be pretty damaging.

'It's funny & educational'

Another component is that these movies allow the actors and the audience to promote stereotypes against the stigmatized population in question. And since the people acting out these roles (and writing and directing them) are usually not from the stigmatized population in question, there is a certain voyeurism with how they revel in these tropes.

In a scene from Soul Man where Mark is invited to a dinner party, we see how the white family views him in their minds, and it's all stereotypes. For example, one of the characters views him as a "pimp" eating a watermelon slice. These are portrayed as damaging stereotypes but also simultaneously given extended air time in a way that feels gratuitous.

We could also look at Big Mamma's House (2000), a police comedy that tells the story of Malcolm Turner (Martin Lawrence), who dresses up as a Black woman to stake out the wife of a dangerous criminal. The comedy mainly involves Malcolm in a fat suit doing over-the-top physical humor, and it has been well-criticized for perpetuating damaging tropes, particularly the mammy trope (i.e., a Black-faced minstrelsy character of a fat, loud, cantankerous Black woman). As Ukiya C. Henson writes in THE MAMMY RELOADED: African American Men Portraying The Updated Caricature In Contemporary Films:

“The mammy is further emphasized in the trailer to [Big Mamma’s House]. It begins by positioning the film as an action movie involving two agents going undercover. However, it soon becomes apparent that the film is actually a comedy centering on agent Turner’s undercover stint as the plus-sized, sassy, and nurturing matriarch, Big Momma. The trailer also features the tagline, “It aint over ’til the fat lady sings.” This expression places even more emphasis on Big Momma’s figure and weight. Thus, the underlying meaning is that House’s humor derives from an African American male dressing as a plus-size African American mammy.”

Similarly, the movie I Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (2007) is about Chuck (Adam Sandler) and Larry (Kevin James), who marry each other to extract financial benefits. Hilarity ensues as they must pretend they are not committing fraud, and in the process, we have two straight men trying to pantomime gayness to prove their relationship. And while I don't care if two straight men decide to get married, there is something strange watching Adam Sandler suddenly having a flair for fashion the moment he has a chance to go out for a "girl's night." There is also a cringe-worthy "drop the soap" scene that, although it is meant to highlight the homophobia of Chuck & Larry's straight coworkers, goes on for way too long.

By taking on the aesthetic of a stigmatized population, these characters can act out the worst stereotypes imaginable while still having the psychic distance of "educating the viewer" on how awful these stigmatized minorities have it. How could the film be racist, sexist, transphobic, etc., when this privileged person is merely acting out that characterization to talk about how bad it is?

These narratives are trying to play "both sides" with how they depict discrimination and highlight injustice, all while giving space for the viewer to laugh at the stereotypes in question.

'They're heroes in the end'

Another aspect is that the film allows the pretender to learn about how awful being a social minority is, usually after simultaneously extracting all the perceived benefits, so they can swoop in and save the groups they are impersonating.

Tootsie has an entire subplot where Michael Dorsey, as Dorothy Michaels, pushes up against the misogyny on the set of her soap. She stops a man who uses his position to make out with women on set by publicly shaming him. She then causes a secondary character to gain self-confidence by being such a great example of female independence. In fact, in the movie, Dorothy Michaels becomes a role model for many women for being able to speak directly about misogyny.

In the film I Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, Chuck punches a homophobe and becomes a mini-gay celebrity. In one scene, Fred G. Duncan (Ving Rhames), comes out to Chuck after being inspired by his "out and proud" relationship with Larry. Their relationship gave Fred the chance to come to terms with his sexuality and "be true" to himself. These two characters are portrayed as heroes. Larry ends the film with being able to keep his benefits. Chuck "scores" a new woman, and neither of them experiences consequences for their fraud.

In Soul Man, Mark Watson not only returns the money from the scholarship to the person he stole it from (with interest) but establishes a new scholarship and pledges to devote his life to serving "underprivileged" people. He also literally beats up a white duo that has been making fun of Black people the whole movie and is "rewarded" with the Black woman he has been courting (and lying to) the entire film, deciding to start a relationship with him.

There is a level of entitlement that comes from these types of plots. Whether we are talking about false rape accusations against Black men or grooming allegations against LGBTQ+ people (or both), accusations of sexual impropriety are some of the first things to be weaponized against social minorities. As a trans person, I have been called a groomer by people since I transitioned just because I exist. And if a trans person were to do the things depicted in these movies (i.e., to secretly court a woman by dressing in drag), they would be arrested and then held up as an example of immorality.

Yet here we have characters actively lying in one of the worst ways possible — in ways that are arguably predatory — and there are not only few consequences, but often these characters are depicted as heroes in the text to the communities they have infiltrated.

A hidden conclusion

Since most of these films are comedies, a common response is to say, so what? Who cares if a comedy has a whacky premise?

But I find that excuse to be intellectually lazy. Art is a mirror that influences our perceptions of who we are and who we believe others to be. The better question to ask is what these films are telling us about how dominant society views stigmatized populations, and often, the lessons are not very flattering. We have characters who pretend to be members of a stigmatized population and reinforce harmful stereotypes for the sake of "education" while simultaneously centering characters outside that population.

And, of course, this situation is rarely reversed. Except maybe the comedy White Chicks (2004), where two Black male cops named Marcus (Marlon Wayans) and Kevin Copeland (Shawn Wayans) dress up as posh white women (parodying that subculture to great effect), you don't get a whole lot of examples where socially stigmatized characters get to put on whiteness, maleness, cisgenderness, and the like to “punch up” for laughs. It's almost always a subgenre for “punching down.”

Thankfully, when we look at the dates of these films, most of them started to wrap up in the late 2010s. The most recent one I could find was Adam in 2019, where the main character of the same name pretends to be trans to date a woman. That movie not only takes pains to stress how f@cked up this action is, albeit pulling a few narrative punches, but some viewers were so upset by the premise that the film received calls for boycotts before it even came out.

Hopefully, we can put this trend to rest as we go deeper into the 2020s. We don't need to understand marginalized identities through the lens of someone who is not that identity. A white main character isn't necessary to explain how bad it is to be Black in America. A straight character isn't needed to understand gayness. Let's leave the Sociology 101 course films to people who actually understand these identities, shall we?

The MCUification of Edgar Allan Poe

Photo by Mel Poole on Unsplash

The Mike Flanagan TV show The Fall of The House of Usher is, first and foremost, not a modern retelling of the famous Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name — at least not only that. How could it be? The original short story was at most 12 pages.

For those unfamiliar, The Fall of The House of Usher short story is about an unnamed character coming to visit his sickly friend. Most of the story is about the mood — how Poe describes the decaying architecture of the Usher house and the deteriorating mind of its master, a failing Roderick Usher. The story ends with Roderick meeting his untimely end and the house collapsing as the friend flees.

Some of the significant beats remain the same in the Netflix show, such as a "friend" visiting Roderick Usher in the house (although the nature of the relationship has completely changed). Roderick’s sister, Madeline Usher, also tries to kill him. However, these elements are reshuffled to the point of being almost unrecognizable. Many components are also added, a major one being multiple Usher children, with the Usher estate being decentered to focus on this latter development.

Instead of a recreation of The Fall of The House of Usher story, the title is used more as a vehicle so Mike Flanagan can guide the viewer through some of Poe's greatest literary hits, all within one self-contained universe. If that sounds familiar, it's because it's the narrative template for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) — the property that has dominated the US box office for over a decade — and it leads to some complications.

A brief aside on the MCU & Storytelling

The MCU hardly needs an introduction: a retelling of the Marvel comic characters on TV and film where every story exists within the same cinematic universe. So, theoretically, the events of one story can have wide-reaching consequences within the next.

Some have argued that this is taking the season-wide arcs of television with seasons (or "phases," in MCU lingo) and bringing them to the Silver Screen, but it's actually more complex than that. Sans anthologies, television shows, although having wider arcs and characters, will still be loosely connected from one season to the next. If you have watched some of House or BoJack Horsemen, or whatever, you will still understand the gist of any episode, even if there is an adjustment period as you come up to speed.

Conversely, the MCU relies on a much larger meta, both within the text and outside of it, where subsequent seasons and sequels are entirely incomprehensible unless you have been following the entire cinematic thread. For example, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness cannot be understood easily if you watch the first Doctor Strange alone, but only if you consume the Avengers Infinity Saga, the TV show WandaVision, and the TV show Loki for good measure.

This leads to very structured and arguably stilted storytelling where creators not only have to factor in the beats of their current story but the larger beats of the MCU, as well as the narrative history of Marvel characters overall. You cannot merely do anything with Dr. Strange. The director and creator have to balance their work with the wishes of the MCU's showrunners and producers, as well as "honor" the source material.

It leads to a type of filmmaking where the text is constantly alluding to and referencing people and concepts either within that larger cinematic universe, will be within it, or could be. You see a character referenced in one movie, and although it has nothing to do with the story, it alludes to what is possibly coming down the horizon. It's storytelling that is first and foremost referential to not its own story but its metatextual brand.

Back to Poe

I bring all of this up because a very similar set of constraints was visible in Mike Flanagan's The Fall of The House of Usher. Most episodes are a recreation of a famous story told within the meta-narrative of Flanagan's Poe Universe (although episodes A Midnight Dreary and The Raven are both references to the same poem). In The Masque of the Red Death, the show is loosely recreating the deadly party of Lord Prospero (though in this retelling it's an orgy). In the Tell-Tale Heart, the character Victorine Lafourcade experiences the same general beats of guilt and paranoia for killing someone as the nameless protagonist in the original story. And so forth (although the episode Goldbug has nothing to do with the original story except for the name).

We don't get an anthology but a world where all these stories live together, so the Poe fan, like the MCU fan, can point to the references they remember reading. In some cases, this is done even when the narrative hasn't built up to the same catharsis as in the story, but it's done anyway because that's what the original IP did. We are honoring the larger meta at the expense of the current story.

For example, in the original The Fall of The House of Usher, Roderick keeps hearing noises because he accidentally entombed his sister Madeline alive. The noises he hears are real, and so when she tries to kill him, it makes perfect sense. But his sister isn't entombed alive by mistake at the show's end. Roderick mutilated her eyesight on purpose because he wanted her to be "like a queen." There is no doubt he did this, unlike in the story, so instead, the noises and sights he witnesses are now visions of his dead children. He feels guilt for the Faustian deal he made with a supernatural figure (more on this later).

But then, why replicate this dynamic with his sister at all? Well, because it happened in the original story.

The same critique is valid with the house collapsing at the end. The entire short story was as much about the house as it was about the eponymous Usher family. The Usher line is associated with the house in the short story, so much so that Roderick has not left it in years. Its decline is linked to him, Roderick's friend recalling:

“He believed that plants could feel and think, and not only plants, but rocks and water as well. He believed that the gray stones of his house, and the small plants growing on the stones, and the decaying trees, had a power over him that made him what he was.”

In the Netflix show, the house doesn't have this emotional weight. The Usher family is more concerned with the survivability of their company, Fortunato Pharmaceuticals than some abandoned property that only Roderick and Madeline know about. There is no storied history with the house. Roderick grew up poor and had to build himself up (and make a deal with a supernatural entity) to gain success.

And yet, the house still collapses in the show because it did in the story, and it just comes off as contrived. We didn't need the house to literally fall in the show because it does not have the same emotional weight, and unlike in the story, we have an entire family and company to play with. Their destruction is narratively enough, but again, we have to get the reference: the nostalgia for the property we have already consumed, the fall of the house of Usher.

Then there is the force tying these recreations together in the same world: the Raven from Poe's arguably most famous poem. We learn that the brother and sister, who in this retelling are recast as stereotypical "greed is good" business tycoons, made a deal with some supernatural entity (i.e., the Raven, a loose stand-in for death) to get a head in the world. The agreement is that Roderick and Madeline will bear no accountability in life in exchange for the lives of all their children.

This Raven entity, who has come to collect on the Usher's debts, is the narrative vehicle allowing us to recreate old Poe stories. She kills Roderick's children in fantastical ways because she is a fantastical figure. The first story (The Masque of the Red Death) reads almost as a morality play as the "depraved" bisexual trope Prospero leads to his own undoing by unwittingly dumping toxins on his partygoers, but many of the other characters die just because they need to: driven crazy because the plot is forcing all these characters to recreate the beats of Poe's stories. Because the Raven is making them.

And this would be fine if we were experiencing a modern anthology, but as an extended universe, it all feels a little pointless. By the death of the second Usher child, we know what is going to happen, and so we are just left with this push forward as we watch these stories recreated, regardless of whether they fit in the context of the world. The story was built to move in one direction, and that's where we are going.

A dreary conclusion

I can see the pitch for The Fall of the House of Usher: Edgar Allan Poe meets American Horror Story (another extended universe so similar I had to stop the screen and make sure Ryan Murphy was not an executive producer). We are given a story assembled from the loose threads of Poe, cramming as many references as we possibly can, including a partial recreation of the poem The Raven.

It's a type of storytelling I find enjoyable sometimes (I have watched most of the MCU), but must everything be this? Are we just going to place all existing stories within a cinematic universe where we must connect every reference together for the sake of brand completionism?

Call me old-fashioned, but I am okay with a bit of separation in my stories: only this and nothing more.

Downsizing: A Bad Movie About Capitalist Degrowth

Image: Paramount Pictures

Downsizing is a high-concept movie driven by a technology that allows people to shrink themselves down irreversibly to about five inches and some change. We follow white "everyman" Paul as he weighs the merits of the procedure and ultimately moves to a retirement-esque community called Leisureland.

Downsizing is not a good movie. It's tonally inconsistent as the film moves from a vicious satire to a deconstruction of those who slip through the cracks of capitalism to an existential treatise on the end of the world. The jokes start out quite funny, only to sputter into an ending that feels like it belongs in an entirely different movie.

Much has been written about the casting and acting of this movie (see Hong Chau's accent and, separately, Matt Damon's sexual assault and harassment allegations), but something I want to talk about today is how this movie discusses the philosophy of Degrowth and its incompatibility with our economic system.

Degrowth, what now?

Degrowth is an economic philosophy that claims to prioritize social and ecological well-being over the vices of our economic system, such as corporate profits, over-production, and excess consumption. Proponents of this school of economics argue that current free market ideologies fail to factor in environmental laws such as the laws of conservation and entropy. As written in the piece, The Economics of Degrowth:

“…economic growth of the productive economy depends on energy and materials, and on the availability of sinks for waste such as carbon dioxide. We see the building industry or car manufacturing as part of the “productive” economy but they depend on exhaustible resources. “The entropy law and the economic process” by Georgescu-Roegen (1971) insisted in the fact that energy cannot be recycled, and that materials are recycled only to some extent. Fresh supplies are needed, and this is problematic when we rely on exhaustible fossil fuels and on materials which are ever more difficult to obtain at the commodity frontiers….”

Most advocates of Degrowth are coming from the left because current market economies demand continuous growth, which is hard to do if you believe overall consumption and pollution must be capped and reduced. Downsizing provides an interesting counter to this tradition because its conceit — i.e., a magical technology that allows us to cut our emissions without changing our behavior— allows its characters to theoretically cut emissions while still operating within the confines of our capitalist system.

In the movie, the inventor of Downsizing, Dr. Jørgen Asbjørnsen (as well as the Institute he represents), investigated this technology to reduce emissions, believing that "overpopulation" was the main driver of climate change. As one of his comrades says during a Ted Talk-esque presentation:

“…overpopulation [is] mankind's single greatest long-term threat. The cause of all catastrophes we are seeing today: extreme climate and weather events and the devastating impact on food and water security…And [so] today, we are proud to unveil what we fervently believe to be the only practical, humane, and inclusive remedy to humanity's gravest problem.”

Several years after the introduction of the Downsizing technology, companies have emerged to provide downwardly living Americans the ability to downsize in exchange for a higher standard of living. It's advertised as a chance to save the world, but really, it allows companies to capture a significant amount of life savings from such individuals as these new littles live off the big-to-small exchange rate. Little people don't have as many expenses, so a little, the argument goes, goes a long way.

Yet, there are problems with this transition. As many current DeGrowth activists have indicated, the neoliberal economy actually can't survive an economic contraction. People who downsize are effectively taking themselves out of the economy or, at the very least, reducing their consumption significantly. This removal from the economy unsurprisingly leads to a social backlash. As an anti-small bigot tells Paul and his wife Audrey at a bar:

“…do you think in your that small you should still have all the same rights as the rest of us normal-sized people? I mean, like the right to vote?… You're not buying as many products; you're not paying as much sales tax. Some of you aren't even paying any income tax. You're not really participating in our economy…..In fact, you're costing us money and jobs….I think you should have a quarter of the vote at most. I think that’s pretty generous.”

This man's rhetoric is abhorrent (someone's citizenship should not be linked to their productivity), but he does underscore the reality that the current economic system can barely support a status quo in consumption, let alone a widespread economic contraction. Men such as Dr. Jørgen Asbjørnse may believe overpopulation to be the problem, but in reality, our economic system is what cannot be separated from the unlimited growth destroying our environment — Downsizing is only a bandaid to this problem.

Another criticism of the films is that even when this technology is introduced, it doesn't mean everyone will adopt it. Indeed, only 3% of the global population undergoes Downsizing by the film's end. Contrary to popular opinion, markets are not the best tool to get people to adopt a necessary technology in a very short period. If that were the case, solar and other such renewables would have already been widely adopted (behavioral changes require different incentives, and our system seems very good at sabotaging those).

As we can see, most people avoid Downsizing, and there are excellent reasons not to in the logic of this world. Apart from the cost ($7,500 a person for a downsizing procedure), the most obvious is the power dynamic between big and small people, with the latter being physically weaker and less dominant than their bigger counterparts. It's made quite clear that governments use Downsizing as a punishment against dissidents. We even see an example of the government of Vietnam secretly shipping dozens of dissidents in a television box, killing most of them in the process.

It's not easy being small and on the margins. As one character says of this reality:

“That’s the wonderful thing about becoming small. Because you're immediately rich. Unless you’re very poor. Then you're just small.”

A shrinking conclusion

Downsizing is a poorly executed movie, but that doesn't mean we cannot mull over its ideas. The lesson that capitalism won't save us — even if we invent a magical technology to combat climate change, it won't solve our fundamental problems — is an important one to consider.

To this day, there are oil executives and think tanks pushing the idea that we are days or months away from a magical technology that will scrub carbon from the atmosphere so we don't have to change our underlying behaviors of consumption and pollution. These cases are often overstated, but even if they are invented (a big if), texts like Downsizing call into question whether our current economic system will allow them even to be implemented properly.

There is no magical technology coming to save us, and we will properly have to engage in degrowth (willingly or unwillingly) as an act of survival. We ultimately don't need to shrink down to comprehend this fact — just a little perspective.

‘No Hard Feelings’ & The Cinematic, Double Standard for Female Predators

Image: Captured on Netflix

The coming-of-age comedy No Hard Feelings is a strange film. Its premise borders on the problematic, as a much older Jennifer Lawrence plays a woman named Maddie secretly hired by the helicopter parents of the character Percy (a recently graduated high school senior, I must emphasize) to have sex with him. The reasons for this charade are contrived (and that's okay), but throughout the film, I was very uncomfortable about this much older woman trying to "seduce" a nineteen-year-old (don't worry, he's technically legal, I guess).

The plot of this film thankfully moves us away from this angle, as Maddie and Percy fail to have sex and eventually just become friends, and the parent's behavior is depicted as wrong. Yet I was left wondering that if the gender of Jennifer Lawrence was swapped for a man, would we still find this movie funny? I don't think a lot of people would.

No Hard Feelings seems to tie into a double standard with how we treat female predation, and although I think the film's heart was in the right place, we still walk away with a comedy that trivializes male victimhood.

A Brief History of Pop Culture Downplaying Male Sexual Assault

There seems to be a double standard in film (and society at large) where sexual harassment and assault toward men are depicted as a joke. For a long time, whenever the concept of perpetrators grooming or raping men was brought up, a lot of people would make fun of it. "I roofied you on [two dates]," the alien character Roger from American Dad says to the high school boy Steve Smith, in a longstanding bit about how the character rapes any and everything, but mostly men.

One of the most pervasive myths is that men simply can't be raped because they all want to have sex. In an old episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, he referred to male victims of sexual assaults as experiencing "Lucky Bastard Syndrome." The movie Wedding Crashers had an entire bit where Vince Vaughn's character Jeremy Grey was tied to the bed against his will as another character tried to rape him — it was played for laughs (see also Get Him To the Greek, Get Hard, etc.).

And this dismissiveness is not only in media: legal systems all over the world have denied the existence of male rape, especially in the case of female perpetrators or perpetrators perceived as queer. Much hay was made in 2018, for example, about how England and Wales still had a legal definition of rape that was gendered, only recognizing victims of rape as those who are penetrated by a penis, either vaginally, anally, or orally. (see also Switzerland, Finland, etc.).

This willful ignorance of male sexual assault sadly even applies to young boys and teenagers from authority figures such as teachers and the like. There is an entire South Park episode aired in 2006 that parodies this grim reality (see Miss Teacher Bangs A Boy). A young boy is engaged in a sexual relationship with a female teacher, and when someone comes forward about it, the police are pretty dismissive, saying it's "nice."

There is also the contradictory belief that those who rape men are "sexual deviants," particularly queer people, who are often erroneously portrayed as the primary (and sometimes sole) initiators of sexual assault. In the words of Dr. Aliraza Javaid from the paper Male Rape, Masculinities, and Sexualities: Understanding, Policing, and Overcoming Male Sexual Victimisation:

“…the male rape myth that ‘male rape is a homosexual issue’ is highlighted in more recent research. Demirkan-Martin (2009) perpetuates male rape as solely a homosexual issue and believes that male rape is either incited by sexual deviance, sexualised aggression, or sexual lust/desire, instead of male rape being totally desexualised. This suggests that male rape does not affect heterosexual men and is essentially a sexual act, whereby the offender is unable to control his aggressive and sexual impulses.”

This myth is again untrue (queer people are more likely to be sexually assaulted and often not well studied when it comes to sexual predation), but it is pervasive nonetheless. We started this section with the alien character Roger, a "depraved" bisexual trope whose gender and romantic fluidity are intertwined with his predatory nature. This type of paring is common in media, especially in comedies, where a depraved bisexual is pushing the limits of his more timid and "stereotypical" heterosexual cast mates, many times nonconsensually. Other media characters that might fit this mold are Dr. Frank-N-Furter in Rocky Horror, Frank Underwood in House of Cards, Logan Delos in Westworld, and many more.

We can likewise see this outlook of deviancy leading to assault with male prison rape jokes, which are ubiquitous in pop culture. Whenever the threat of prison comes up, it's common in media for a character to jokingly bring up the threat of rape as an unavoidable aspect of this “deviant” environment. As Tony Stark implied to the character Ivan in Iron Man 2: "Where will you be watching the world consume me from? That's right. A prison cell. I'll send you a bar of soap," he laughs, referring to the widespread myth of men in prison bending over to get a bar of soap only to be raped as a result. "I am going to slather you up in Gunavian jelly and go to town," a prisoner says to Peter Quill, in a line we are meant to find funny in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie (see the "Don't drop the soap" meme more broadly).

These jokes are almost always directed at men, and the whole punch line revolves around trivializing male rape. As stated in the video Sexual Assault of Men Played for Laughs: "Men's vulnerability is an endless source of mockery in mainstream comedy and vulnerability that results from sexual violence is no exception…The idea behind the joke here is as obvious as it is toxic: that men who aren't tough or manly enough to avoid being victimized are pathetic and therefore deserving of ridicule or worse."

We can see how, historically, sexual violence toward men has often been downplayed. While some media and academics are starting to challenge these misconceptions, for the most part, it's not uncommon for our society to reinforce the idea that sexual violence toward men is funny, nonexistent, or, paradoxically, both — and that is where the film No Hard Feelings comes into play.

How 'No Hard Feelings' fits this trend

The movie No Hard Feelings takes a very similar stance, trivializing male sexual assault for laughs. Maddie initially abducts Percy. She goes to his place of work and pressures him into her vehicle. Percy nervously glances at the back of the van he's in and sees a machete and other equipment that could kill him. He starts messaging 911, and Maddie takes his phone. In any other context, this would be horrifying.

However, the way this scene is framed shows us that while Percy thinks he's getting abducted (which he is), the film doesn't want us to think about it too much. We hear not horror music but The Stroke playing in the background. When they get out of the car, Percy maces Maddie, and it's played as a comedy of errors. He tells her that she tried to abduct him, and she denies it, saying, "I can't kidnap you. You’re 19. Grow up." This statement, along with several other assurances, is enough to convince Percy, and he rushes to get Maddie a hose, which he, of course, fails to administer. Maddie's actions aren't depicted as creepy as much as funny and ineffectual.

I want you to imagine now that a man in his early to late thirties shows up unannounced at a 19-year-old woman's place of work. He tries to sleep with her in her office, and when that fails, he pressures her into his van so aggressively that the teen fears for her life. He offers to drive her home, a lie, instead bringing her back to his place, and then when the 19-year-old finally has the courage to mace her would-be assaulter, he responds: "I can't abduct you. You're 19."

Is that funny? More to the point, would that be believable (note this is your public service announcement that adults too can be abducted)? I am not the only one who has asked this question. As Claire Cohen writes in Vogue:

“It’s just all a bit tone deaf, isn’t it? And while I do think a predatory older man and a young girl has different connotations when it comes to the power dynamic and threat of physical violence, frankly I’m not sure a film about a young person of any gender being pressured into having sex after their parents decide that they’re “ready” is a feel-good “coming-of-age sex comedy,” as No Hard Feelings is billed.

And indeed, this movie does not feel very lighthearted. Maddie is very unstable. She has her reasons (i.e., being abandoned by her father and almost losing her house), but that doesn't change the fact that she actively puts people in danger. There is one "funny" scene where she doesn't let Percy into her car after the two have lost their clothes, and he jumps on her car's hood, begging to be let in, and she starts driving with him on it. It's, again, framed as a laugh-riot, and while Percy eventually gets to do the same to Maddie, the power dynamics of this initial interaction make me very uncomfortable.

It also bears mentioning that while Percy may be legal to bang (gross), he's emotionally stunted. The whole reason his parents hired Maddie is because they somehow thought that having sex would allow him to mature (parents of the year, right here). And so, emotionally, he's like fourteen. He doesn't navigate the world very well, and so his parents hiring this very mature woman to pressure him into having sex is just abusive — there's no other way to say it, really.

While their helicopter parenting is depicted as wrong in the end (although childishly so), that's not the primary issue here. I am not angry that they are tracking his phone and other such over-functioning — like I am a little peeved by it — but mostly, they arranged for their son to get sexually assaulted. That's what I dislike about them.

The film eventually pulls away from this premise, and Maddie and Percy become friends (in the last ten minutes), but again, most of the film is just Jennifer Lawrence's character very aggressively going after an immature 19-year-old.

A hard conclusion

The most disappointing aspect of this whole thing is that the film was trying to say something meaningful. A significant tension is that Maddie, a townie, is resentful (rightfully so, in my opinion) of the wealthy vacationers gentrifying her town. Her only significant friend is another working-class white woman who can no longer afford to live in that community and is considering moving to Florida.

There is even an intelligent lampshade where Maddie is complaining about this gentrification to a Native American, only to realize that yes, maybe other people do understand how she is feeling — a nod to the fact that although gentrification is hurting poor white people, as an attractive white person in a settler-colonial state built for white people, she still has many privileges. There is a better comedy movie trapped in here that talks more succinctly about the intersections of class, gender, and whiteness that I would have loved to see.

Yet, instead, we go ham on this very outdated gag about a cougar hitting on a late teen and there being no power dynamic because men love to f@ck. This film felt very anachronistic. We are in the 2020s, not the 80s. Can we accept that men, too, can also be victims of sexual assault and stop with this patriarchal nonsense about men being so "horny" that any harassment directed toward them doesn't matter?

As Claire Cohen continues in that Vogue article: "The truth is that it's this tired old storyline that has come of age — and should rapidly be put out to pasture."