Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn

Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn (3.5/5)

By 1991 the Star Wars series had been in a carbonite type deep freeze.  Return of the Jedi had come out eight years earlier, and in the interim Star Wars fans were tossed mere scraps, including two laughable made for television Ewok films.  If you wanted a decent Star Wars story between 1983 and 1991, then you pretty much had to start writing fan fiction.  Aside from the actual quality of Heir to the Empire, I think its reception, then and now, is clearly colored by the fact that when published in 1991 the novel served as a veritable oasis at a time when fans of Star Wars had been trudging through the desert.  That might seem like hyperbole, but not only has Heir to the Empire made it on just about everyone’s list of best stories from the Star Wars Extended Universe, but the entire trilogy was also voted onto the list of NPR’s 100 greatest sci-fi and fantasy novels.  (It beat out Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man!)  While I’m not sure Heir to the Empire qualifies as one of the greatest sci-fi/fantasy stories of all time, I can understand why people hold the book in such high regard.  Zahn has a real talent for creating new characters who fit within the Star Wars galaxy while also writing old favorites in ways that make them believable simulacrums of our celluloid heroes.

But the story begins not with Luke, Han, and Leia; it begins with Grand Admiral Thrawn, a red eyed, blue skinned Chiss who, after the demise of Emperor Palpatine five years earlier at Endor, has taken over the remaining imperial forces in the outer rim.  In a retcon to the films, the Empire is represented as racist (speciesist?), preferring to promote only humans into the ranks of the upper echelon.  On the one hand, considering that the work of Leni Riefenstahl and the Third Reich form the visual template for the Empire, this makes a certain amount of sense.  But considering the vast diversity of species within the Star Wars Universe, and considering the films never hinted at this policy, it seems somewhat counterproductive.  Still, the fact that Thrawn achieved the Empire’s highest command despite this policy of discrimination tells us a little about his skill as a leader and tactician.

Questionable retconing aside, Thrawn is a wonderful villain for our heroes.  Where Vader was quick to anger and would execute underlings at a steady clip, Thrawn is reserved, mindful.  When not occupying the bridge of his Star Destroyer, he’s often in his quarters studying hologram images of art created by different species from a myriad of different worlds.  Of course, he’s doing this in order to better understand the culture of these people so that he can get inside their heads and understand how to defeat them.  In the tradition of the erudite villain, like Hannibal Lecter, Thrawn can appreciate both tactics and aesthetics.  Part of Thrawn’s scheme to reassert the Empire as the central power in the galaxy involves recruiting Joruus C’baoth, an insane cloned Jedi master.  In order to convince C’baoth to aid him, Thrawn collects a bunch of small lizard-like creatures, the ysalamirir, which have the power to dampen a Jedi’s use of the force.  He also promises C’baoth that he will deliver Luke, Leia, and the twins Leia is currently pregnant with.

Of course, all these machinations are unknown to Luke Skywalker and the now married Leia and Han Solo.  They’re busy attempting to rebuild the New Republic, which also appears to be teetering on the brink thanks to political infighting and a lack of resources.  Han Solo is tasked with recruiting smugglers into legitimate shipping operations for the new government, but because it’s not clear how long the New Republic will last, many of these illegal operators are wary of taking any sides so long as the Empire is still a power player.  Zahn does a wonderful job of capturing the voice of not only the three main characters but also of secondary characters like Lando Calrissian and C3PO.  Even Admiral Akbar and Wedge Antilles make appearances.  But he’s especially great at capturing Han’s sardonic charms, something that’s not easy to mimic. 

The book is well plotted and has the easy momentum of a snowspeeder on Hoth.  As the protagonists attempt to unravel the mystery of who is attempting to kidnap Luke and Leia, Thrawn is drawing them and the fledgling Republic into further traps.  I don’t want to give away too much plot, but Thrawn’s plans come to a head on Mykyr, the planet where he collected the ysalimiri and home to the criminal operations of smuggler Talon Karrde.  Karrde is another great creation by Zahn.  As a smuggler with a code—he appears to have a sense of duty towards anyone he views as his guests—he fits nicely within the Star Wars galaxy.  Likewise, Karrde’s mysterious underling, Mara Jade, appears to hold a burning grudge against Luke Skywalker for reasons that even Karrde is unaware of. 

Perhaps the only drawback during this section of the novel is that because of the ysalimiri, Luke is without the powers of the Force.  I can only imagine the disappointment of fans who waited eight years since Return of the Jedi in order to read about Luke swashbuckling across worlds as a full fledged Jedi Knight, only to have the author take away those powers.  The ysalimiri are a somewhat dubious plot device to begin with (they’re strangely reminiscent of the controversial midichlorians from the prequel films), but using them as Luke’s kryptonite somewhat deflates the novel’s action and adventure. 

There are a few other aspects of the book that are creakily constructed.  Despite C’baoth being positioned early in the novel as integral to Thrawn’s schemes, he does very little throughout the course of the story.  Leia does not get much attention, and she’s essentially shuffled off to the Wookie planet of Kashyyyk where she’s forgotten for a long stretch (a chapter following Leia even ends on a cliffhanger that isn’t resolved until much later in the story).  There’s a little more retconning here and there that, as someone who’s protective of the original trilogy, I could have done without.  For instance, the novel suggests that Emperor Palpatine used the Force in order to increase the performance of his men during the battle of Endor.  (Was he also doing this while simultaneously attempting to turn Luke to the darkside?)  The prose is mostly serviceable, and while this makes for easy, fast-paced reading, it would have been interesting to see how an author might try to remake George Lucas’s visual palette into language.

Still, for those hungering for Star Wars adventures beyond the films, Heir to the Empire may very well be the perfect place to start.  Zahn does more than give us adventures with our favorite characters in a galaxy far, far away; he adds invaluable characters, places and concepts to this world.  Without a doubt, Heir to the Empire shows what creative minds can further conjure beyond the original trilogy. 

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I would like to touch upon one issue that I remember having with some of the Expanded Universe novels when I was a kid and that reading Heir to the Empire really reminded me of.  In the sticky concoction of influences that make up Star Wars, the novels always include far too much science fiction.  In an article about Heir to the Empire, Ryan Britt argues that the novel brought science fiction into Star Wars.  He argues that the ysalimiri demystify the Force and that even though the Clone Wars were mentioned in the original trilogy, making C’baoth a clone feels more like hard sci-fi.  I don’t agree with all of Britt’s examples, but he has a point, especially about the ysalimiri. 

Zahn’s non-Star Wars work is in the genre of science fiction, and it shows in the novel.  There’s a lot of technobabble that belongs more in a hard sci-fi world like Star Trek than in Star Wars.  Kevin J. Anderson, the other major author of the Star Wars EU novels, also writes primarily in the genre of science fiction.  The problem is that Star Wars is only partly a world of science fiction.  I remember as kid starting to realize that Star Wars and Star Trek had very little in common with one another beyond similar titles.  This made me happy since I never had to choose between these two distinct series. 

While Star Wars has some elements of science fiction, mostly culled from the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the old Flash Gordon serials, the space setting is used simultaneously as a means of escapism and a mythical projection outward.  In other words, this unreal setting serves as a means for us to forget our surroundings and delve into another world for a few hours and a new version of mythology’s tendency to project us backwards and outwards.  Myths never take place at the time they are being told.  They always take place in the past in order to provide gravitas and to create a sense of continuity between the mundane now and the transcendent world of myths.  Using space as a setting for mythic storytelling has always been one of the genius aspect of George Lucas’s creation.

Star Wars is a collage of so many diverse influences, from David Lean’s epics to Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films, that it would be shame to overemphasize its sci-fi roots.  In fact, I would argue that Star Wars has more in common with fantasy than science fiction.  That’s not to say that science fiction authors shouldn’t work on Star Wars properties.  But I do hope that after this latest reboot of the Star Wars EU, Lucasfilm will decide to bring in a broader set of creative minds to work on the Star Wars novels and comic books.  It’s a big galaxy; let’s not make it smaller.

How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Forty Years Later

How to Build a Universe thatDoesn’t Fall Apart Forty Years Later; Or, My Trip through the Star Wars Expanded Universe

 With the recent announcement of a third trilogy in the Star Wars saga, fans of George Lucas’s brainchild have, naturally, found themselves cycling through a complicated series of emotions, but mostly those of fear, anger, and other states of being that could lead one to the dark side.  I too have felt some trepidation about three more film entries into the world of warrior space monks, light swords, and intergalactic war.  Some of these concerns have already been plastered across the internet, so I won’t rehash them here.  (I will say that one of the things that bothers me about Abrams is that he seems like such an obvious studio choice that you could almost hear a studio exec telling his friend over a cell phone at brunch, “You know that guy who redid those other star movies?  Well, why don’t we just get him on board our star movies?”) 

After this initial rush of dread, I started to think about the possibilities inherent in the world of Star Wars.  George Lucas crafted a unique and inspiring box of toys that have allowed plenty of creative minds to conjure some imaginative continuations of his world.  Like plenty of geeky children growing up in the 90s, I became interested in the Star Wars Expanded Universe (EU) that was having something of a renaissance in the lead up to the new prequels.  I’ve decided that for my blog, I should revisit some of the ancillary works derived from the Star Wars Universe but not directly from George Lucas himself.

Here, I should probably provide you with a brief overview of my take on the prequels.  The short version is that the first two are incompetently made while the third one is mostly an enjoyable film that only falls flat towards the end because it’s tasked with doing the heavy lifting that the first two films failed to accomplish.  But others have gone over what’s wrong with the prequels (at length).  What’s rarely mentioned, however, is that the prequels are filled with great concepts that are poorly executed.  I quite like the idea that we follow Anakin from his days as an innocent child to his turn to the dark side, even if the lines poor Jake Lloyd had to deliver would have been impossible for even the most accomplished actor.  I love stories about romantic relationships stifled by monastic orders, like the famous the letters between Abelard and Heloise or the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.  But there is absolutely no chemistry between Hayden Christiansen and Natalie Portman.  Still, when the characters kept their traps shut, the audience was often treated to impeccable displays of action choreography, special effects and spectacle.  For whatever reason, directors half George Lucas’s age are mostly incapable of staging action nearly as well as him, and this holds true even for the much maligned prequels.

But there is one crucial aspect of the original trilogy that holds true for the prequels as well: they are both immaculate examples of world building.  In recent years, when I watch any one of the six main Star Wars films, I’m reminded of Michael Chabon’s brilliant essay, “Fan Fictions: On Sherlock Holmes.”  Reflecting on some fictions’ ability to invite others to join in the process of creation, Chabon writes:

Readers of Tolkien often recall the strange narrative impulse engendered by those marginal regions named and labeled on the books’ endpaper maps, yet never visited or even referred to by the characters in The Lord of the Rings.  All enduring popular literature has this open-ended quality, and extends this invitation to the reader to continue, on his or her own, with the adventure.  Through a combination of trompe l’oeil allusions, of imaginative persistence of vision, it creates a sense of an infinite horizon of play, an endless game board; it spawns, without trying, a thousand sequels, diagrams, and Web sites. (54)

Well, there are obviously no maps in the Star Wars films on par with the now iconic one that opens up each book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but Lucas’s galaxy still engenders flights of imaginative fancy through the alternating elements of that which is cloaked and that which is elaborated. 

First, the elaborate detail of the Star Wars films is awe inducing, which has only become truer as special effects have developed over the decades.  But let us just take the Mos Eisley Cantina scene as an example.  That scene is striking for a variety of reasons, not the least among them is the fact that we are introduced to a dozen or so species built out of the imagination of an extremely talented makeup and special effects crew.  You can imagine how overwhelming that scene must have been to audiences in 1977, especially considering they were probably used to the elongated ear and funny eyebrow aliens on shows like Star Trek.  This brings me to the fact that the origin and background of these creatures are completely cloaked, allowing the viewer’s imagination to conjure a million unique backstories.  Lucas provides us with the raw materials as well as the open space necessary to build a world in our own fecund imaginations.  The incredible detail with which Lucas painted his galaxy has lead many people to wonder what other stories are out there, what other tales there are to tell, while the mystery of what’s hidden gives us space to craft these narratives in our own head. 

I still remember the first inkling I had that in Star Wars, unlike some other imaginary worlds, there is an entire universe of stories that appear to be happening even as we are following the three main characters.  It was when I realized that the fighter pilot, Wedge Antilles, appears in all three films, first helping destroy the Death Star, then fighting AT-ATs on Hoth, and, finally, destroying the second Death Star.  As a kid it blew my mind that a single actor would reprise his role for what amounted to maybe five minutes of screen time over the course of three films.  I became quickly enamored with Wedge because he seemed to be at the center of all these major, galaxy changing events, but he was just an everyman.  He wasn’t royalty, he didn’t win the heart of the princess, and he wasn’t secretly the chosen hero.  He was just a damn good pilot fighting for a cause he believed in.  Realizing that Wedge appeared in all three films made me understand that this galaxy extended far beyond a handful of characters.  Wedge was another means for Lucas to develop a sense of simultaneity in his world. 

By carefully crafting these blank spaces, Lucas has invited plenty of artists to collaborate in creating this universe, which they did in droves starting in the early 90s.  At the time, I read a number of EU novels and comic books, and I’ve played plenty of Star Wars video games in my day.  (I especially liked Michael A. Stackpole’s Star Wars: X-Wing series, which, naturally, followed the exploits of Wedge).  But it’s been many years, and I cannot be certain that the works I enjoyed were any good and the ones I hated were actually bad.  Besides, the Star Wars EU was quite the cottage industry back in the day, and there are plenty of well regarded or infamous works that I’ve never touched.  Now that Disney, the new owners of the Star Wars universe, have effectively put a lid on the EU, it seems like now is as good a time as any to see what I missed out on during my early days reading Star Wars novels and comic books before this portion of the Star Wars Universe is reimagined by Disney.  (Fans appear to be upset about the fact that Disney has stated unequivocally that the EU isnon-canon, but since they never really were canonical, I don’t fully understand what the big deal is).  My plan is to drop some reviews here and there over the course of the next year as we lead up to the release date of Episode VII.  I just hope I don’t become completely consumed by 90s nostalgia in the process.  Wish me luck.

Niketown by Vern

Niketown by Vern (5/5)

The pseudonymously named Vern, author of Niketown, is perhaps best known for his book Seagalogy, an extensive analysis of the filmography of Stephen Seagal.  It’s an impressive work of popular film criticism that offers up a robust taxonomy of the themes and reoccurring motifs in the work of Stephen Segal.  In Niketown, Vern’s first novel, he uses his extensive knowledge of narrative tropes in order to both fulfill audience expectations and to continually challenge them.  Although it’s a relatively slim novel, Niketown is brimming with ideas, and it’s an absolute joy to see an author take his readers into new and unexpected places by pushing at the limits of genre fiction.

Niketown follows ex-con Carter Chase as he is recently released from prison for a botched robbery of the Nike superstore known as Niketown.  Chase has to deal with an onslaught of problems as he enters the world outside of his jail cell.  Both of his parents have passed away—his father years ago from medical problems and his mother shortly before his release due to an unexpected accident.  He also has to decide whether or not he wants to walk away from the Niketown job completely or to turn around and get revenge on his partners who betrayed him.  And if this weren’t enough, Chase discovers that his brother has mysteriously gone missing. 

Perhaps the novel’s cleverest conceit is how it deals with Chase’s attempts to reenter “polite society” after being locked up.  Because he has spent years in prison, Chase’s release acts a sort of time warp.  He’s not used to the way in which people seem wholly consumed by their cell phones or the changing fashion trends or the idea that people actually refer to themselves as “foodies.”  What’s even worse, the world he finds himself in has been taken over by advertising.  The Pepsi Company has even taken out an advertisement on the grave of Chase’s mother.  Chase appears to have a better sense of decorum and values than just about everyone he encounters.

As a character, Chase is a wonderful creation.  He’s someone who has messed up in life.  Before being shipped off to jail, he spent his time occasionally pulling off haphazard robberies, but he knew what he was doing was wrong right up until he was locked up for stealing from Niketown.  (When taking on the Niketown job, Chase comforts himself with the knowledge that at least he’s stealing from a faceless corporation and not some mom and pop joint.)  He’s someone who wishes to atone, but at the same time he looks at the world around him and finds that there’s nothing sacred anymore.  The old rules of what’s acceptable in society have shifted over time, and while Chase’s shock at where we as a culture have arrived may in part be a result of his time tucked away in jail, much of it has to do with an unyielding sense of right and wrong, even if he isn’t always capable of following his own moral compass.  In one particular scene that stands out, Chase goes online to check in on old friends and acquaintances from high school, and he finds himself both jealous and disgusted by the bland, yuppie lives they’ve created for themselves.  Chase is a man fighting against time, both on a personal and a larger cultural level.

Vern sets up the novel as both a mystery and a story of revenge, and while these elements form the spine of the narrative, Vern is confident enough as a writer to take us down several detours along the way.  In an interview, Vern says his fiction was inspired by Richard Stark’s Parker novels, George V. Higgins’s Friends of Eddie Coyle and the writings of Elmore Leonard.  You can definitely see the influence of these authors on Vern’s writing style.  One of my favorite moments in the book, the actual set up and execution of the Niketown robbery, reminds me of Leonard’s cast of crooks who aren’t stupid, exactly, but they are just a little dumb.  But to Vern’s credit, he’s never fully beholden to these authors.  He has fashioned a world that is familiar and yet still one step removed from ours, and, likewise, he is working in genres that have certain expectations attached to them, but he never feels obliged to fulfill those expectations.  Vern has taken the crime fiction story and infused it with satire and pathos in equal measure, which is quite an accomplishment for a first novel. 

Future of the Left - How to Stop Your Brain in an Accident

Future of the Left – How to Stop Your Brain in an Accident (5/5)

These days it’s easy to be pissed off.  Six years after the biggest financial disaster since the Great Depression, Wall Street continues its game of risky bets while the rest of us are shouldering a tepid recovery; when it’s not trying to replace school teachers with computers, Silicon Valley seems intent on producing time wasting apps and obnoxious looking techno-glasses, and they almost certainly will be the next financial bubble to burst; the U.S. government has been spying on its citizens and foreign leaders for years, and they somehow managed to convince the nation’s largest media conglomerates to defend the practice; while maintaining a go nowhere war in Afghanistan, the U.S. is also haphazardly bombing “terrorists” halfway around the world, making it that much easier to recruit more terrorists; and instead of getting upset at the state of things, the masses are too busy staring at their cell phones or watching vapid reality television shows.  I think we can all admit that the world is well and truly fucked. 

At least this seems to be the assessment of the sardonically named, Future of the Left.  Hailing from Wales, Future of the Left can spit vitriol like none other, and their latest album, How to Stop Your Brain in an Accident, is no exception.  Over the years, lead singer Andrew Falkous has mastered the angry rant.  You may or may not know what’s making him irritable, but you can be certain he is truly, righteously enraged and, from the sounds of it, probably for good reason.  This kind of indignant anger can be difficult to maintain for the long haul, so it comes as somewhat of a surprise that How to Stop Your Brain, the band’s fourth full length, somehow manages to be the band’s best album yet.  The crew in Future of the Left has crafted a series of bone hard songs capable of tackling any target within sight.

The album starts off punchy with the stuttering “Bread, Cheese, Bow and Arrow,” an explosive diatribe from a naïve everyman living a world that has left him behind.  The song’s narrator repeatedly insists he’s “just a man of simple things” before describing his powerlessness.  In a line that deftly weaves between absurdity and commentary, Falkous sings, “Once I dreamt of owning my own home/and renting six bedrooms…but ambition encoded in an economy dominated/by forces so deep they confound themselves.”  Here, a typical middle class man expecting to live out his boring bourgeois life is stymied by economic forces so convoluted even the supposed geniuses on Wall Street couldn’t keep the under control. 

The strength of Falkous’s diatribes lies in how you could imagine them delivered either by the homeless many down the street or by an ultra-righteous protester shouting through a bullhorn.  This is evident in what for my money is the album’s triptych centerpiece: “Singing of the Bonesaws,” “I Don’t Know What You Ketamine,” and “French Lessons.”  These are perhaps the three strongest back to back songs in Future of the Left’s career, and they’re a superb showcase of the diversity and dynamics of the album.  In “Bonesaws” Falkous affects a fake upper class English accent in order to narrate a twisting tale of reality television and existential epiphanies.  The song plays out as if the surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel had decided to start a punk rock band.  The posh faux-accent serves as a mask for the depressing emptiness of popular culture, including a new reality television show where a man dressed as a bear who is angry about losing his pension chases down Kim Kardashian.  During the filming of the show the entire crew suddenly comes to the conclusion that “They have wasted the precious gift of life which has been/given to them by science!” and begin self-mutilating themselves.  There are too many fantastic lines in the song to recount here, but I’m a particular fan of this swipe at the BBC Jimmy Savile sexual abuse scandal: “Our survey says pedophiles run the BBC/But look at the alternatives!” 

“Ketamine” showcases Future of the Left’s ability to allow a song to build until they completely let loose in the last third of the running time.  Helpfully, it also matches a superlative song title with a killer song.  (My pet peeve is when an amazing song title is let down by the song it’s attached to).  The explosive ending to “Ketamine” fittingly leads into the relatively understated “French Lessons,” the one song that isn’t engulfed in fury.  While Falkous’s lyrics are just as surreal, the song, which ostensibly touches upon relationships and drinking for twelve hours straight, feels honest even as it’s obtuse. 

There are plenty of jabs at the music industry throughout the album, which makes sense considering Future of the Left avoided the usual recording rigmarole by fundraising online.  This populous support may have helped reinvigorate the band, because How to Stop Your Brain manages to best even their 2009 effort Travels with Myself and Another, which was such a fantastic album that at the time I was certain they would never beat it.  At this point, it’s probably best not to underestimate this band.

These days it’s easy to be pissed off.  But at least while Future of the Left are around you can take comfort in the knowledge that rage is not only cathartic, it’s the only conceivably sane reaction to the world we live in. 

The Turin Horse

The Turin Horse (5/5)

In the grand tradition of some great action adventure films, Bela Tarr’s film The Turin Horse, opens with Friedrich Nietzsche.  A narrator relates the story of Nietzsche encountering a man in Turin, Italy whipping his horse because it refused to move, forcing Nietzsche to step in and protect the horse by placing his body in between the animal and the whip.  The event involving the horse in Turin apparently led to Nietzsche’s mental and emotional break.  But, as the film notes, no one knows what happened to the horse.  The first scene of the film, then, follows a similar horse and driver as they make their way home to a weathered barn and adjacent home.  It’s not clear whether this is supposed to be the exact same horse and driver Nietzsche encountered in Turin, and even though it appears the film takes place at the end of the 19^th century, it does not look like the film is set in Italy.  Even if the man and his horse do not serve as a literal link to Nietzsche and the events in Turin, they serve a clear thematic connection.

With the exception of a neighbor who doubles as a prophet of the apocalypse and a band of gypsies we see through the home’s windows, the film follows only three characters, a man, his daughter and their horse.  The movie boldly refuses to offer up even a semblance of a plot.  The anti-plot unfolds over the course of six days, and in that time the viewer follows the father and daughter closely as they go about their daily business fetching water from the well, eating potatoes and getting dressed and undressed.  The horse, either because it is old and dying or because of some hidden existential malaise that seems to also permeate every frame of the film, refuses to eat and can barely serve its purpose as a porter. 

Tarr appears interested in marking time.  As mentioned, the movie is divided into six days, and we follow the man and his daughter as they engage in a number of menial tasks.  At the start of each day, the daughter walks to the well, fills up several buckets, and returns to the home.  This daily event is filmed in a single shot, so we see every action.  We also watch as the two characters sit down and eat potatoes for dinner every night.  By filling up the film’s two and a half hour screen time with the minutia of repetitive work, Tarr seems to be asking us to examine the monotony of living.  The labor necessary to even stay alive occupies these characters world to the exclusion of nearly everything else.  With the exception of a scene where we witness the daughter reading from some sort of book, these characters spend their time being busy dying.  Their lives are labor.

The kinds of labor these characters engage in are related to their material conditions.  They must feed and clothe themselves.  There is no transcendence in this kind of work.  It is quotidian, necessary and ultimately pointless beyond mere existence.  The characters appear to have no internal lives, their conversations never extending beyond the immediate here and now.  Strangely, the stoic horse is the only character who projects some sense of understanding of these larger truths.  He is the one who refuses to eat, who refuses to go on.  And if this is merely an audience projection onto an unthinking animal, then this only further emphasizes the impossibility of making meaning in this world.

Some might wonder how it’s possible to spend time with these characters in the small space opened by Tarr.  But despite the film’s bleak tone, there’s something inviting about Tarr’s stark and gorgeous black and white imagery.  The little home is constantly surrounded by leaves and dirt kicked up by an unending windstorm, an appropriate visual approximation of the director’s bleak worldview.  Likewise, the intermittent score by MihalyVig is beautiful while maintaining an underlying sense of dread.  (Although, I would be curious to see what someone could do with Tarr’s images and music by the Seattle post-rock band, Earth, since they seem to be artistic cousins.  Make it happen, internet!).  While the film can be obtuse, especially towards the end, Tarr pulls the viewer into his world.  And it’s because he marries the beauty of everyday images with large existential questions that if you give yourself over to it, the film will stay with you long after it the final fade to black. 

A Hijacking

A Hijacking (4/5)

It’s an odd coincidence that two films about Somali pirates were released last year.  While all the public attention and critical praise has flowed towards the Tom Hanks vehicle, Captain Phillips, the Danish film, A Hijacking, is arguably much more of an artistic triumph.   If you were to watch these films back to back, it would be easy to see why Phillips has garnered so much attention: it is flashier, has bigger stars, and celebrates the triumph of American military force.  By contrast, A Hijacking is a much more subdued, but no less suspenseful, affair.  Where Captain Phillips is about ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances, A Hijacking is about extraordinary circumstances fitted into ordinary business practices.

The narrative of A Hijacking is split between the men on the boat and the men from the boardroom. On the boat we mostly follow the ship’s cook who we are introduced to in the first scene as he tells his wife that he will be out to sea longer than expected and will miss his daughter’s birthday.  Although his name is listed as Mikkel, most people, even those trying to negotiate his release, mostly just refer to him as the cook.  While the cook and the crew strategize about how they might survive this ordeal, there aren’t any last minute heroics.  At best, the cook and a colleague attempt to befriend a particularly unstable pirate with the hopes that this will make it less likely he will execute them; at worst, the cook’s desperation to get home to his family is used as a bargaining tool by the Somali negotiator, Omar. 

But the film is just as interested in how the Danish company who owns the boat handles the hijacking.  While the hijacking isn’t an everyday occurrence, events like this are apparently common enough for the company to call in an expert in negotiating with Somali pirates.  The negotiation expert recommends that the company brings in one of his men to engage directly with the pirates, but the suit in charge, Peter, decides that he wants to handle the negotiations himself.  Early on we see Peter play hardball with several Japanese businessmen, so we know he is competent, and he is coached through the process by the negotiation expert, but the audience knows that Peter’s decision is part hubris.  In a sense, he’s like a much more competent, much less coked up version of Ellis from Die Hard.

As explained early on, these negotiations can stretch on nearly interminably.  And the film does a good job of illustrating how time wears down all of those involved.  In this instance, the hostage negotiation lasts for months. And while early on Peter expertly deals with the pirates in the manner he has been coached, eventually the day in, day out pressure of the situation begins to erode his cool, Danish exterior.  It was also interesting to see the negotiation expert explain certain tactics.  For instance, Peter cannot immediately give in to the Somali’s initial demands, not necessarily because it will be too costly, but because once the pirates know the company is willing to shell out some big bucks, they will find a way to draw out the negotiation longer and ask for more. 

As the article “A” in the title suggests, this particular hijacking is often treated as the cost of doing business.  It’s unusual, but not unexpected.  One of the more interesting characters in the film is Omar, who speaks English and negotiates on behalf of the Somali pirates, although he takes umbrage when Peter suggests that Omar is himself a pirate.  Throughout the negotiating process, both Omar and Peter attempt to maintain a cordial relationship, although it naturally breaks down over time.  It’s easy to view this film as the clashing of two cultures within a global marketplace.  They’re making a business deal, but it just so happens that one party has brought weapons to the negotiating table. 

A Hijacking makes a fascinating comparison to the style of Paul Greengrass, the director of Captain Phillips.  Both films take on a cinema verite, documentary aesthetic.  But where Greengrass prefers to haphazardly throw his cameras about to mimic the intensity of the situation, A Hijacking director, Tobias Lindholm, uses his cameras in a manner similar to an actual documentary.  In other words, he uses handhelds, but he does not purposefully engage in frenetic jostling.  Greengrass uses the veneer of a documentary in order to reveal the subjective state of the characters in the film, but Lindholm seems interested in maintaining a calm distance from the procedures.  Arguably, this less frantic take provides the film with a more grounded feeling.

Beyond the individual narrative of Captain Philips, stories of Somali pirates are fascinating because they’re examples of desperate people from a failed state using what seems like anachronistic tactics to force their way into streams of global capital.  Perhaps better than the Hollywood blockbuster version of this story, A Hijacking illustrates ways in which men are trapped within a world and economy they have no real control over.  It’s eerie to hear Peter negotiate over numbers when men’s lives are on the line.  It’s an unsettling reminder that within this system the value of our lives can be reduced to a number written on a marker board in a conference room. 

Fuzz - Fuzz

Fuzz – Fuzz (4/5)

When was the last time you heard a drum solo on a new album?  Think about it.  Drum solos have long been relegated to the realm of live albums from 70s rock gods like Led Zeppelin or of overreaching prog bombast from the likes of Rush.  Well, on Fuzz’s debut self-titled album a drum solo appears a little over three minutes into their song “Loose Sutures.”  But more surprising than the inclusion of a drum solo in an album released in 2013 is the fact that I didn’t immediately recoil.  Like many, I’ve long accepted notions of musical aesthetics that decried bombast for its own sake.  If anything, Fuzz’s debut could convince a new generation of musicians and listeners that it’s time to reassess what we value in modern rock and roll.

While I may be overstating my case somewhat—after all, bands like Queens of the Stone Age, Comets on Fire, Woods, and The Black Angels all borrow from classic rock radio—there’s still something invigorating about hearing Fuzz’s unabashed instrumental noodling.  And if anyone can make us rethink what’s currently fashionable in rock music, it’s probably Ty Segall, the incredibly prolific artist who not only produces his own albums at breakneck speeds, but also seems content to collaborate with whoever is willing to pick up an instrument and play.  The songs on Fuzz give you the sense that they morphed out of epic basement jam sessions.  But what saves these songs from accusations of excess is the fact that musicianship always serves the songs.  “Sleigh Ride” contains a hook that continually whips the song forward to its conclusion, and album opener “Earthen Gate” evolves from the primordial goo of its opening into a fully formed rock riff.

Perhaps the key to Fuzz’s success is that, despite the call backs to early 70s proto-metal, it also doesn’t pretend that the last forty years of music hasn’t happened.  With a little tweaking the shortest song on the album, “Preacher,” could be transformed into a bona fide punk shredder.  And unlike most rock music from the 70s that were looking for bigger and better studio sounds, Fuzz has a distinct lo-fi element.  In a sense, Fuzz might best be viewed as another variation on the sound of Seattle grunge whose members like Mudhoney and Soundgarden seemed perfectly happy to break down barriers between classic rock and punk.  Whatever ingredients were used to concoct Fuzz’s curious brew, the results are undeniably engaging.

Oldboy (2013)

Oldboy (2013) (3.5/5)

Hollywood has been threatening to remake Oldboy for some time now.  At one point Stephen Spielberg and Will Smith were supposed to team up and tackle the Korean revenge drama, which suggested to many that any American remake of Oldboy would be a watered down remake of Oldboy.  But I don’t think anyone suspected that Spike Lee would be tapped to helm the American version of the cult classic.  Like others, I love Lee’s work because he is such an idiosyncratic auteur, capable of plastering all of his thoughts, concerns and fears across a movie screen.  The idea of Lee working on what is essentially a genre exercise seemed counterintuitive, but it was also the incongruous meeting of director and film that made me interested in an American version of Oldboy a decade after the release of the original.  If nothing else, Lee’s Oldboy shows people that he can deliver the goods when it comes to blood, guts and action.  If he didn’t have so much to say, Lee could have been a damn good director for hire.

Of course, I was never a huge fan of the original film, and I think Chan-wook Park has made better movies, but over the years I’ve come to appreciate the movie as a collection of bizarre and engaging images.  For me, the original never coheres as a whole, but it is a great series of disconnected segments.  Lee’s remake stays relatively true to the broad outlines of the original’s plot.  And while in interviews Lee is quick to stress that he thinks of the film as a “reimagining” rather than a remake, his film is a lot more faithful than that word suggests.  If nothing else, the 2013 version of Oldboy is an interesting genre exercise that is likely to be just as shocking as the original to the uninitiated but probably only an odd curiosity for those of us who caught the first film ten years ago. 

For those who haven’t seen Park’s film, the protagonist of Oldboy, in this version named Joe Doucett, is an overworked businessman.  Early in the film we see Joe not so clandestinely take a few chugs of vodka out of one of those flask sized containers, made for those who are committed to being day drunk on a semi-regular basis but don’t want to go all the way and buy an actual flask.  Later Joe blows up at his ex-wife after she suggests that he show up for his daughter’s third birthday, and then proceeds to clown his own business dinner by hitting on a prospective client’s date.  Lee’s version paints a far more desperate and depraved image of its protagonist as a member of the corporate good ol’ boys club.  While some might take issue with this change, complaining that Joe’s eventual entrapment seems more justified in the remake, it does add another layer to Joe’s determination to get revenge.  Tracking down those who imprisoned him seems as much about making amends for who he was as it is about plain old vengeance.

 

After a major bender that finds him yelling in the middle of the street and vomiting on the sidewalk, Joe wakes up in an unsettling hotel room with little more than a television, creepy photo of a bellboy, and an adjacent bathroom.  Joe’s captors provide him daily meals every day, including a small container of vodka and the ever present dumplings from the original film.  Here Joe spends the next twenty years of his life, barely holding on to his insanity.  Lee actually extends this portion of the film, and he arguably improves on the original by including little details like Joe’s attempt to befriend a mouse and her brood.  Like much of the film, the sequence is born on the shoulders of Josh Brolin’s surprisingly engaging performance, which spans the gamut from confusion to rage to debased desperation. 

Joe does eventually get out, but instead of following through on an escape plan he has conjured, he is unceremoniously released.  From here, Joe starts to plot his revenge with the aid of an old friend played by Michael Imperioli (a Spike Lee regular) and a young medical assistant played by Elizabeth Olsen.  The remake follows the guideline of the original, and if anything it actually spends more time wallowing in the Grand Guignol twists this time around, perhaps as a rejoinder to those who believed an American remake wouldn’t have the guts to follow through with some of the more revolting aspects of the first movie.  Lee evinces a clear love of Park’s film, and there are a handful of visual allusions throughout the film, which seem to pierce the thin membrane separating the original and the remake.

As always, Lee brings his consummate visual eye to the proceedings, and he often garnishes his dark and seedy cityscapes with bright flashes of color.  He even films the action with aplomb, besting other directors who supposedly direct action movies as a career.  (Rumor has it that Lee filmed an even longer version of the single shot hammer sequence, but that the studio forced him to cut it down, perhaps the only real concession to American audiences in the film).  And as I mentioned, Brolin’s varied performance carries the film along with the same magnetic pull as one of Lee’s double dolly shots.  In all the film is well made.  I’m just not completely certain it’s a necessary film.  The 2013 Oldboy is like a good cover of a song that stays pretty close to the original.  The new band knows what made the song great in the first place, and they dutifully reproduce that.  But in the end those who love the original will always prefer listening to the original. 

Why the Hell is Best Buy Staying Open for Thanksgiving?

In a fit of impotent rage, I decided to run off a letter to Best Buy in response to the fact that they have decided to stay open during the Thanksgiving holiday. I know that this is a widespread issue that extends far beyond Best Buy. It truly is a systemic problem born out of consumerism and commercialism run amok. If these workers had adequate union representation, then they could more effectively advocate for time off during the holidays. I tend to believe that this recent trend of stores staying open during Thanksgiving is indicative of larger economic issues. I’m certain that this single letter will have no real or lasting effect, but it made me feel good, and I believe that concerted writing campaigns can in fact have an impact. Feel free to steal any of this for your own ineffective expression of anger and despair.

Dear Best Buy,

My name is Tom Birkenstock, and I am writing to express my dismay that you have chosen to stay open on Thanksgiving. Keeping your store open on a holiday is harmful to your employees who wish to be spending time with their families as well as to Thanksgiving as an American tradition. I believe that your choice to stay open on Thanksgiving cheapens the holiday and hurts those in your employ.

I have been a customer of your store for well over a decade. During that time I’ve been attracted to Best Buy because of the convenience of your selection and the helpfulness of your staff. But because of your decision to stay open on Thanksgiving, I have decided to stop shopping at your store. Recently I needed accessories for my laptop, but I purposefully chose to shop at one of your competitors specifically because you decided to stay open during the holiday. I will also refuse to do any shopping at Best Buy in the coming months.

This may only cost your company a few hundred dollars this year, but I don’t think I am alone in my belief that you are harming America’s holiday tradition. I hope that in the future you will decide that not only is staying open on Thanksgiving a poor economic choice, but it is an immoral choice.

Sincerely,

-Tom Birkenstock

Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne

Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne (1/5)

Popular history is a strange genre that often seems suspended between genuine academic rigor and amateurish quackery.  For every book of popular history written by a well regarded historian and aimed at educating the general public, there are at least a hundred written by a layperson that, even if he or she does the appropriate amount of footwork, usually ends up reproducing antiquated historical narratives.  While a professor of history might understand how to read nuance into old sources, an amateur too often takes the word of a writer from the past at his or her word.  S. C. Gwynne’s book on the Comanche’s, Empire of the Summer Moon, is just such a book.  Gwynne’s lack of understanding of the past causes him to repeat racist tropes from the 19^th century that have no place in the modern day.

I knew little about Empire of the Summer Moon when I picked it up, except that it provided a lengthy history of the Comanche tribe alone with a recounting of the raid of the Parker family homestead, an incident that would go on to influence the John Wayne and John Ford film The Searchers.  While reading the book, however, something seemed off.  There was a certain leering quality to the way in which Gwynne described Comanche violence.  There’s nothing inherently wrong about describing Native-American violence against white settlers.  Across the centuries and over the course of many wars between whites and Native-Americans, atrocities were of course committed on both sides.  But Gwynne often presents these acts of violence with little historical context, especially early on, and more troubling he continually returns to the word “savage.”  While he applies the term to the violent actions of the Comanche and not necessarily to the Comanche themselves, the word has such a charged racist history that it would have been best to avoid.

But I soon realized that the language and the manner in which Gwynne decontextualized Comanche violence presaged a shockingly racist book.  Even after this early warning sign, I continued to read, expecting popular history to offer its usual Eurocentric bias.  But as I got deeper into the book, Gwynne’s racist attitudes became even more prevalent.  The attitudes and beliefs that Gwynne espouses about the Comanche people are almost certainly relics of the 19^th century, and it became a fascinating, if at times deplorable example, of how 19^th century discourse has survived into the 21^st century. 

Like many writing in the 19^th century, Gwynne represents the Comanche as a chronological throwback, an image of Europeans translated back into time.  In recounting the impact that the introduction of the horse would have on the Comanche, Gwynne writes of the “astonishing change” that occurs because of “what this backward tribe of Stone Age hunters did with the horse” (28).  You can see from Gwynne’s language how he moves from what he believes are merely descriptive terms, like the use of savage to describe incidents of violence earlier on in the book, to pejorative, qualitative language, like the term “backwards” in the above excerpt.  This pattern repeats itself again and again in the book.  It is an intriguing example of how racism simmers underneath Gwynne’s writing until it finally reaches a full boil and settles down once again. 

Gwynne further explains that despite the Comanche ability to incorporate horses into their culture, “[t]hey remained relatively primitive, warlike hunters; the horse virtually guaranteed that they would not evolve into more civilized agrarian societies” (31).  Here, in language that is oddly reminiscent of how some English spoke of the Irish’s dependency on potatoes during the potato famine, Gwynne points to the horse as a detriment, preventing the Comanche from becoming farmers (which should be read as assimilating to white American culture).  Any cultural development that does not eventually lead to Anglo-American style agriculture and socio-political institutions are perceived as headed in the wrong direction.

While Gwynne manages to acknowledge Comanche skill at riding, he simultaneously robs them of the ability to reason when discussing the Comanche horse culture.  Discussing the shrouded introduction of horses into Comanche country, Gwynne writes, “Whatever it was, whatever sort of accidental brilliance, whatever the particular, subliminal bond between warrior and horse, it must have thrilled these dark-skinned pariahs from the Wind River country” (32).  Relying on the assumption that Comanche human beings must have had some kind of mystical relationship with their horses, Gwynne can only imagine that the incorporation of horses into Comanche life and subsequent technological development to tame and breed horses must have been “accidental.”  It never even occurs to Gwynne that the Comanche could possibly observe the natural world around them and logically manipulate both nature and their own society in order to better fit their own needs.

Gwynne never provides a full and complete image of contemporaneous white culture.  He seems mostly concerned with comparing military technological and tactical differences between American settlers and whites (like a lot of popular history, Gwynne is often obsessed over military matters to the exclusion of the social, cultural, and economic).  He decries how the Comanche treat their women, which is certainly fair enough.  But he never notes that because of coverture laws, women in antebellum America had the legal status of property.  He lingers on images of Comanche violence, but nowhere does he discuss the fact that American settlers in Texas were importing slavery and its systemic sins of forced labor, torture, rape, and extra-legal execution.  Nowhere does he mention that the violence of slavery imposed by whites dwarfed the violence committed by the Comanche on almost every level.  

It’s truly incredible how racist discourse from the 19^th century influenced Gwynne’s writing.  He even uses the term “barbarian” in what is presumably an anthropological sense.  This is an outdated term popularized in the sciences by Lewis H. Morgan, John Lubbock, and Frederich Engels, all 19^th century scientists.  The continued use of this single word long past its expiration date characterizes Gwynne’s writing and mindset.  At one point he defends his project by noting that we shouldn’t pretend as if American-Indians were naïve innocents who lived in a perfect state of nature.  I agree.  And if Gwynne were more familiar with academic research about Native-Americans, then he would realize that the image of Native-Americans as a culture of Adams and Eves has been out of fashion for decades.  I also don’t think the alternative to describing Native-Americans as pure innocents is to resurrect racist ideas from hundreds of years ago. 

If Gwynne’s book were just an isolated piece of poorly written popular history, then there wouldn’t be too much of a story here.  But S.C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon was actually a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  This means that a large number of journalists not only did not see a problem with the racism of Gwynne’s text, but they believed that this was the sort of historical work worth celebrating.  If nothing else, Gwynne’s book and its apparent success is an instance of discourse’s inertia.  We like to think that language and ideas are always changing, moving forward and, ideally, improving.  But the inertia of discourse suggests that backwards concepts from the past will remain with us unless there is a strong concerted effort to push against them.