Let's Remember the Good Times: In Memory of Chris Cornell

Chris Cornell's voice could be as powerful as a hurricane, as focused as a laser. That voice could shatter brick. That voice could cut glass. He’s often compared to Robert Plant, which isn’t a bad comparison, except that he could huff and puff and blow Robert Plant off the stage. He will be remembered as one of rock and roll’s greatest vocalists. And he was a fantastic songwriter, contributing his fair share of classics to Soundgarden’s oeuvre. Naturally, his death on Thursday came to a great shock to fans of Cornell and Soundgarden.

Grunge has a reputation for being dour. And when I heard about Cornell’s death, my mind drifted to how bleak his lyrics could get on tracks like “Fell On Black Days,” “Black Hole Sun,” “The Day I Tried to Live,” “Blow Up the Outside World,” and, the now unfortunately titled, “Pretty Noose.” Cornell had apparently been struggling with depression for some time, and his suicide is a reminder that the void can chase us from our teens into middle age and beyond. Depression is a disease, not a phase.

It’s also impossible to separate Cornell’s suicide with the many other deaths that occurred within the grunge scene: Andrew Wood, Layne Staley, and Kurt Cobain immediately come to mind. Associated with Pacific Northwest, grunge music, with its downtuned guitars and sludgy sound, has always seemed to reflect that part of the nation’s downcast skies and omnipresent rain as well as its reputation as a breeding ground for serial killers.

But this was just one side of grunge and only one side to Cornell. In any life, we shouldn’t let the dark times completely define a person. And this is true of Cornell’s music as well. The original grunge scene wasn’t just about the drudgeries of life; there was plenty of irony and humor--plenty of light to balance out the darkness. I’m going to choose not to define Cornell solely by his depression; I choose to see him and his art holistically, not forgetting the kind of humor he infused into his music.

Perhaps the best description of humor in grunge was absurdist. In some way or another, grunge musicians seemed influenced by dadaism, the early twentieth century art movement that rejected logic, reason, and beauty as represented in 20th century capitalism. Dada itself is a nonsense word. Perhaps the most famous piece of dada artwork is Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” which was a urinal placed in a museum and signed “R. Mutt.” It was a crass middle finger to the arthouse establishment.

The influence of dadaism on Soundgarden seemed to go hand in hand with their punk influences, and it’s in some of their shorter punk-inspired songs that we can see Cornell play around with absurdity. On the one and a half minute long “Kickstand,” a song about the eponymous kickstand that Cornell implores to “stand me up,” the song’s lyrics don’t read easily. He could be writing about heroin, which is always a safe interpretation of music from the 90s, but the mentions of his mother and a “trike” suggest that maybe he’s actually writing about a bike. The song appears to have flummoxed the literal minded people over at “Genius Lyrics,” and that’s because they’re not supposed to be taken literally. It’s much more likely that Cornell intuitively came across these lyrics with a bit of a smirk. The lyrics are absurd, and the music serves as a streak of light in the brilliant if dark Superunknown.

The same can be said about “Ty Cobb,” another punk-dada composition. Included on Soundgarden’s final album of their original run, Down on the Upside, “Ty Cobb” has little to do with the curmudgeonly baseball player, and the title was suggested by bassist ben Shepherd to replace “Hot Rod Death Toll.” Cornell admitted that he knew nothing about Ty Cobb the person. The lyrics and title form a loosely connected game of association. In a stroke of brilliance, the band included a mandolin on the hard-charging track, creating a contrast between the stately instrument and the way Cornell screams the word “fuck” twenty-one times.

Plenty of Cornell’s humor comes from grunge’s troubled relationship with classic rock. Grunge had plenty of punk music’s sneering disdain for the mainstream, but it also happened to be influenced by some of the most popular rock bands of all time. Without a doubt, you can hear the influence of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin on Soundgarden, but the band members spent plenty of time in interviews distancing themselves from these groups. It just wasn’t punk enough.

Whenever Soundgarden explicitly pulled from classic rock tropes, they often did so with quotation marks. The songs “665,” “Beyond the Wheel,” and “667” occur one after the other on Ultramega OK, and they satirize metal’s obsession with satanic imagery. The middle track of the trilogy includes demonic chants and the flanking tracks each make use of backwards recordings. The same album includes a “cover” of John Lennon’s “One Minute of Silence.”

Cornell and Soundgarden were having their cake and eating it too. They both made fun of and borrowed heavily from the bands they satirized. They were experiencing of a form of what the literary critic called “the anxiety of influence,” but without this ironic distancing, Soundgarden wouldn’t have been able to move past those who preceded them. In this way, their sense of humor helped them push their music forward.

Cornell and Soundgarden’s music could be dark, aggressive, and epic, but it could also be really fucking funny. Cornell’s depression seeped into his lyrics, but so did his wry sense of irony. I'll always remember his great cameo in the love letter to Seattle's music scene, Singles. No person is defined by a single act, even when that act is as extreme as suicide. I’ll choose to remember Cornell as a fantastic singer and songwriter, as the frontman of the one of the best bands of the 90s, and as a guy who had a wonderful sense of humor.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (4/5)

When the first montage hit, I knew Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur film was going to be exactly what I wanted out of a Guy Ritchie King Arthur film. After witnessing the death of his parents, a young Arthur floats down a river, Moses-like, until he’s taken in by a brothel. In quick successive cuts and sped up shots, we see Arthur repeatedly getting the crap kicked out of him, train, get the crap kicked out of him again, train some more, and then start kicking the crap out of others. This wordless couple of minutes doubles as both training montage and character development--this version of Arthur is a rock hardened by the pressures of living in the lowest dregs of society. It also showcases some great visual storytelling that’s becoming increasingly rare in modern blockbuster films that are so often bogged down by exposition.

Hollywood has a long tradition of trying and failing to bring King Arthur to the screen, from the leaden musical Camelot my parents forced me to watch as a kid to the “respectable” 90s version First Knight to the Clive Owen starring film that drained the tale of its myth and magic--you know, all the good parts. The most successful King Arthur films are without a doubt Monty Python’s irreverent take and John Boorman’s surreal Excalibur. On some level, Ritchie imbibed the lesson from these two successful adaptations: if you’re going to tackle an oft told tale like King Arthur, then you’ve got to make it weird.

And the movie opens weird, with Camelot under siege by elephants the size of mountains. An evil mage Mordred has come to claim the lands of Uther Pendragon, but he is defeated by the king. The danger isn’t over, however. Uther’s brother, Vortigern, (here played by Jude Law) stages a coup, killing Uther and his wife, but letting their son Arthur slip away. (Never trust a young Pope).

When we finally meet adult Arthur after the frenetic montage, he’s more concerned with taking the piss out of his buddies and protecting the girls at the brothel than of staging a rebellion. Things change when Uther’s sword, Excalibur, reveals itself after years hidden under the tide. Knowing that Arthur is still out there and still a threat, Vortigern lines up all the men in the kingdom to try out the sword, hoping to uncover the last threat to his kingdom. After Arthur pulls the sword, he’s slated for execution, but the Vortigern resistance snags Arthur and takes him to their hideout in the woods to meet their leader and former Uther ally Bedivere.

The film follows the basic template of “the hero’s journey,” so you can imagine what happens from here. Arthur resists the call before finally meeting his destiny. By eventually accepting his role, he can unlock the powers of Excalibur, which in this version grant Arthur immense power up, like Cloud’s omnislash limit break in Final Fantasy 7 or Mario getting the star if you want to go old school. As with most blockbusters these days, the narrative is set on clearly defined rails, but it’s Ritchie’s flair as a stylist that makes the story work. Ritchie loves to intercut non-chronological sequences, using staccato editing to bounce back and forth in time. When Arthur refuses the call, Bedivere and a newly arrived Merlyn acolyte discuss whether to send Arthur to the “badlands,” a place of giant snakes and bats that would look great as a Manowar album cover. This moment is the katabasis or descent to “hell” portion of the journey, and it’s quickly montaged away at the same time that Bedivere and the mage discuss whether this dangerous journey is a good idea.

It’s this irreverence that elevates the material. Sure enough, King Arthur suffers from many of the problems that persist in fantasy films: a cumbersome backstory and the use of random magic as narrative device. But by quickly shuffling through these necessary but rote elements in the fantasy genre, Ritchie gets the audience straight to the good stuff.

And Ritchie gets plenty of help from others in this romp. His cast has an easy camaraderie with plenty of easy joshing between the characters. (With only a single female character of note, the mage who has only a handful of lines, this is a movie made by dudes about dudes and for dudes.) Jude Law once again reminds us at how damn good he is at chewing scenery. But Ritchie’s biggest ally might be composer Daniel Pemberton, who previously worked with the director on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Instead of solely relying on medieval signifiers in his music, Pemberton makes use of clipped percussion, which perfectly compliments the film’s rapid fire editing. “Growing Up Londinium” treats every sound like a drum, even the shallow breathing that functions as just another instrument.

King Arthur could have been just another Lord of the Rings knockoff, but Ritchie avoids this pitfall by injecting a bit of verve and energy. Sure, he’s influenced by J.R.R. Tolkien, but he’s also pulled in Sergei Eisenstein inspired montages, his early crime films, video games, Schwarzenegger’s Conan the Barbarian, and heavy metal album art. The common complaint against Ritchie as a filmmaker is that he favors style over substance. That might be a legitimate critique if we’re talking about art house cinema, but when it comes to blockbuster filmmaking style over substance is exactly what we should be aiming for. (And if you truly believe there’s lots of substance in today’s superhero saturated marketplace, then you need to get out more). While he started out making indie crime stories, Guy Ritchie might actually be most in his element making sleek, fun blockbusters.

Unfortunately, it looks like King Arthur bombed on its opening weekend, so don’t expect King Arthur 2: Merlyn’s Boogaloo. Perhaps more disappointing is that critics savaged the film despite the fact that it looks and feels different than the unending stream of blockbusters we’ve been getting these days. (Plenty of critics liked to mock the name of one of the film’s major locations, the city of  Londinium, apparently ignorant of the fact that this was the actual name of London starting in 43 AD). Still, let’s hope that Ritchie gets a chance at helming some more big budget films on the studio’s dime. I think up next is the live action Aladdin film about a charismatic, street-smart criminal who becomes royalty. It sounds a little familiar. Anyway, Ritchie’s King Arthur will be heaped upon the open grave of failed franchises, but like the legend itself, I have a feeling it will once again be resurrected...probably on basic cable.

The Curse of the Cat People

Curse of the Cat People (4.5/5)

In the tradition of Aliens, Evil Dead 2, and Halloween III, Curse of the Cat People is a sequel that radically diverges from the original film. Where Cat People was a horror film about a woman who descended from people who could transform themselves into, well, a giant species of cat, Curse of the Cat People changes gear by eschewing most of the original’s horror film trappings and instead becoming a family drama about children and their imaginary friends. While some people might say to themselves, “I watched the entire movie, and not one person turned into a damn cat!” Curse of the Cat People actually serves as a worthwhile follow up to the original, and the genre hopping only reinforces the fact that this is a thoughtful and unique picture that stands on its own.

In the original film, Oliver Reed, a dopey middle class striver, marries a woman from Eastern Europe, Irena, who comes to believe she is descended from people endowed with the ability to transform into giant cats. Irena slowly loses her mind as her husband begins to strike up a romance with his coworker, Alice. By the end of the film, Irna dies, but not before transforming into a panther and killing her therapist.

Curse of the Cat People moves its characters from the city to the suburbs. Years later, Oliver is living in a house and now married to Alice, his coworker from the first film, and the two of them have a six-year-old daughter, Amy. Amy is estranged from her fellow schoolmates because she spends most of her time daydreaming. She knows that she’s different from other children, and on her birthday, Amy wishes that she could be normal just like other children.

Like many films after Curse, Amy’s childhood alienation is demonstrated by the fact that her classmates do not show up for her birthday party. But in a twist on what has become a trope, it’s not that the other children are purposefully avoiding her. Rather, Amy never mailed the invitation, instead stuffing them into a gnarled tree that she imaginatively transforms into a mailbox. It’s not that other children don’t avoid Amy--the film doesn’t shy away from the cruelty of kids--but on some level I think that Amy wants to be alone. Like any creative person, sometimes it’s easier to escape into fantasy than to be around others.

Eventually, Amy starts to have visions of an imaginary friend who looks just like her father’s first wife, Irena the Feline-American. And yet it’s not clear whether or not Irena supernaturally appears to Amy or if the vision is only in her head. Before seeing Irena, Amy uncovers photographs of her that Oliver keeps around, and her presence metaphorically haunts the home in the form of one of her paintings that Oliver still keeps around. This naturally makes Oliver’s current wife uneasy.

Amy also strikes up a friendship with a former actress, Julia Farron, who is now an elderly woman shut up in her creepy home with her adult daughter. Julia and Amy form a natural pair because both are interested in the world of make believe, but Julia also represents what happens when you find yourself too invested in the unreal. Julia has developed an unhealthy belief that her daughter, who has sacrificed much of her own life to care for her aging mother, is not really her daughter. Perhaps a sign of increased dementia, but almost certainly tied to her career as an actress, Julia believes her actual daughter died when she was six and that this woman who now takes care of her is somehow an imposter.

Curse wonderfully recreates the imaginative world of children. Amy finds a place of her own in the family’s backyard, a site of imagination. In fact, the backyard is referred to as a “garden,” which connotes a place of play and fantasy, a location where fairies might exist. Like the imagination, a garden is both wild and cultivated, containing plants that would not naturally appear in our backyards. It’s no coincidence that gardens have become metaphors for imagination in children’s literature as we can see in classic’s like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden.

The directors, Gunther Von Fritsch and Robert Wise (more on them later), capture a child’s fantasy world. The one technique that I found particularly reminiscent from my own childhood is how brief shadows of clouds portend the arrival of the fantastic. I remember feeling a bit of a chill and a bit of wonder whenever a cloud would pass over a field I was playing in. For a moment, time seemed to stop, and I found myself looking around to see if anything around me had suddenly changed. This obviously come out of the overactive imagination of a child, but Curse suggests that I wasn’t the only child who took a passing cloud as a symbol for the supernatural.

Curse could easily stand on its own, apart from the original film. Without the first Cat People, I think most would read the appearance of Irena as solely the work of Amy’s imagination. At one point, Amy is told by her father that she must denounce Irena’s presence or suffer the consequences, which means he will spank her. This is referred to as a “special occasion” because it’s the first time Amy has had to endure physical punishment for misbehaving. (People sure were accepting of parents hitting their children in the 1940s).

While Oliver is smacking his child, Alice has a conversation with Amy’s teacher. (In another exchange that reminds us the film is made in the 1940s, Amy’s teacher is reminded that she doesn’t have children of her own, likely because if she did, she would be a housewife and no longer working.) The teacher reminds Alice that it’s healthy for children to have imaginary friends and that this is a phase that she will grow out of. She then quotes a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson on the subject, titled “The Unseen Playmate.” When Amy starts to truly connect with others, then her unseen playmate will disappear. It’s at this moment that the film unveils the moral of the story: having imaginary friends is a normal and natural part of a child’s progression to adulthood.

Curse has two directors, Gunther Von Fritsch and Robert Wise. Wise actually took over from Fritsch when he fell behind schedule, and it turned out to be Wise’s first directorial effort and served as the inauguration of an impressive career, which includes highlights like The Day the Earth Stood Still, Run Silent, Run Deep, The Haunting, and The Sound of Music. Moving from horror to domestic drama, Curse succeeds thanks to its empathetic and detailed understanding of a child’s imagination.

“When children are playing alone on the green,

In comes the playmate that never was seen.

When children are happy and lonely and good,

The Friend of the Children comes out of the wood.”

--Robert Louis Stephenson

Free State of Jones

Free State of Jones (4/5)

In 1948, Davis Knight was put on trial under Missippi’s miscegenation laws after marrying a white woman, June Lee Spradley. By today’s standards, Knight appeared white, and he passed to the extent that the official marrying Knight and Spradley didn’t even think to ask about Knight’s race. But Knights ancestry hid African blood, and the state of Mississippi eventually brought him to court and were able to return a conviction. In the mid-nineteenth century, his ancestor, Newt Knight, had taken up with a former slave by the name of Rachel, meaning that Davis Knight may have had at least one-eighth African blood, making him black according to Mississippi law. Fortunately, this conviction was overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court. Unfortunately, the overturned conviction rested not on the unconstitutional nature of miscegenation laws, but rather as a means to avoid a challenge to miscegenation laws in the federal courts.

Davis Knight’s incredible story is a shocking example of how race in America was policed by state forces. And yet, the story of his ancestor, Newt Knight is somehow even more improbable. Newt Knight lived in Jones County Mississippi, a poor subsistence farmer in a land ruled by the whims of large plantation owners. He would briefly serve for the Confederacy before going AWOL and leading a band of Anti-Confederate fighters in their resistance against the newly formed government. Director Gary Ross’s film, Free State of Jones tells the story of New Knight as well as Davis Knight, and it’s an important film that stretches our understanding of both the Civil War and its aftermath, Reconstruction. Ross seems intent on bending the traditional Civil War narrative in order to get the viewer to see how the problem of race in America was not settled with the close of the war in 1865.

Newt Knight worked as a medic during the war, and when we first see him, he’s exchanging a wounded soldier’s garb for an officer’s jacket so that the man will be treated more quickly. Already disillusioned with the war, Knight becomes incensed when he discovers the implementation of the Twenty Negro Law, which exempted those who owned twenty slaves or more from military service, making his service part of, as Knight puts it, “a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.”

Knight abandons the army and returns home to his wife and child where he finds that the Confederacy has been seizing a disproportionate number of food and goods for the war effort. After turning guns on some Confederate soldiers to prevent them from taking any more, he flees to the swamps and lives alongside a number of slave maroons.

Knight strikes up a friendship with an escaped slave Moses as well as Rachel, a woman still tied to her plantation, but who manages to smuggle supplies to the escaped slaves. The film treats this as an experience of cross-racial empathy. Not only does Knight live with these escaped slaves, but he also depends on them. Unlike Knight, these men and women are knowledgeable about the swamp, able to navigate its inscrutable waters and wrest food from its harsh corners.

After the battle of Vicksburg, which essentially cleaved the Confederacy in half, more deserters trickle into Jones County, and Knight begins to rally a resistance, a resistance that includes both black and whites. Using guerrilla tactics, Knight and his men eventually wrest Jones County and the surrounding area away from the Confederacy. During this time, he also strikes up a romance with Rachel. (At this point in time, Knight’s wife has fled the county, afraid that her husband’s lawlessness will mean repercussions for her and her child.)

Ross’s film is attempting to reinsert the notion of class into the Civil War narrative. Knight’s journey takes him from a realization that as a poor farmer, he’s being used as fodder to prop up an unjust economic system to the understanding that he has much in common with enslaved blacks of the South. This is not to mean that the plight of the poor white man is just as bad as that of enslaved persons. It certainly wasn’t. And slave narratives at the time from people like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs took pains to make it clear that slavery was a far worse situation than poverty. Still, both Knight and the escaped slaves he’s taken up with are being chewed up by an unjust economic system.

In a pivotal scene, Moses is chastised for taking food that one of Knight’s men believes belongs only to the other whites, not to “n***ers.” Moses responds, “How you ain’t a n***er?” This of course can be read a number of ways. This poor white has also been used by Confederacy, conscripted into a war that does not benefit him. It could also be read as a comment on the illusion of race as a biological category, an absurdity that becomes clear in the film through the intermittent intrusion of Davis Knight’s story.

In a film of this nature, it would make narrative sense to end at the close of the Civil War, perhaps also covering the fact that Knight and Rachel had to flee their home for fear of repercussions, just so that the ending isn’t too “Hollywood.” But nearly the last half hour of the film covers the Civil War’s aftermath and Reconstruction. Moses’s son is taken by a plantation owner as an “apprentice,” a form of slavery that persisted after the Civil War. We also witness the political disenfranchisement and violence blacks faced at the hands of terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.

By extending the narrative, Ross points out the long-term destructive force unleashed by slavery, which was not stopped at Appomattox, at the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, or at the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Like Knight’s descendants, we too are living in the shadow of slavery and the Civil War.

As a filmmaker, Ross is often faulted for being too much of a crowd pleaser, and you can see his desire to make buoyant entertainment in his screenplays for Big and Dave or in his directorial efforts like Seabiscuit. There’s really nothing inherently wrong with this instinct for making an audience happy, but I think critics also forget that Ross also directed the smart and nuanced take on Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” Pleasantville. And there’s a real desire on his part in push the Civil War drama forward in the hopes of counteracting the Lost Cause narrative that has infected the public imagination. And in doing so, he plays with the structure of Free State of Jones in unique and interesting ways.

That’s not to say that Free State of Jones is a perfect film. I can’t quite decide if it’s too short or too long. Davis Knight’s story seems essential to what Ross is attempting to accomplish with this film, but his intrusion into the nineteenth-century narrative is sometimes clunky. And while Ross worked with historians to make sure the details of his film were right, by necessity some of history’s weirdness gets sanded down. For instance, by the end of the film, Knight’s first wife comes back to live with him and Rachel, but we don’t really get a sense of what she would have thought about her husband taking up with another woman, especially a former slave. (Although, it is suggested in the film that Knight may have been carrying on a sexual relationship with both women, which the historical record appears to back up).

But Free State of Jones is a timely and necessary film. We live in an age where racism has forced many poor and working class whites to vote against their own interests. And it’s worth remembering that this has historical precedent that goes back generations. In time, I expect the reputation of Free State of Jones to increase. It’s another important film in a string of them that asks us to reexamine nineteenth-century America in order for us to understand how we’ve gotten into the mess we’re currently in.

Moonglow by Michael Chabon

Moonglow by Michael Chabon (4.5/5)

Michael Chabon’s latest novel, Moonglow, opens with the following:

“In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to the facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Wherever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events, and conversations, or with the identities, motivations, and interrelationships of family members and historical personages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon.”

Anyone familiar with Chabon’s work will recognize his belief in elevating narrative over “truth,” or to put it another way, to acknowledge that Truth is always out of reach and thus is shaped by narrative. It’s safe, then, to say that we shouldn’t take Moonglow, which purports to be a biography of Chabon’s late grandfather, at face value. Out of fact and fiction, Chabon weaves a tale that spans a good chunk of the 20th century, but never loses sight of the beauty to be found in a life at turns ordinary and singular.

As the story goes, shortly after finishing his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, in 1989, a younger Michael Chabon found himself beside his ailing grandfather’s hospital bed. During his final weeks, Chabon’s grandfather unfolds a sprawling personal narrative of a Jewish-American whose life was disrupted by World War II and who struggled to maintain a family in postwar America, ultimately constructing a sturdy middle class life that was more easily obtainable and also expected in the second half of the twentieth century. Along the way, Chabon’s grandfather (who is never given a proper name) endures a stint in jail and the reverberations of traumas both global and familial.

Moonglow finds Chabon continuing to turn his attentions to the everyday interpersonal lives of his characters, much like his previous novel Telegraph Avenue, which took as its subject two music nerds living in the Oakland area. At the time, Telegraph Avenue was a departure from his more conceptually ambitious works, like The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The most surprising change in Moonglow is Chabon’s more restrained style. You won’t find the kind of stylistic gambles as there were in Telegraph Avenue, such as an entire chapter consisting of a single unhinged sentence or a visit from a pre-presidential Barack Obama into the lives of Chabon’s fictional characters. Some of these artistic wagers worked (the former) while others fell flat (the latter). By reining in his linguistic trickery, Chabon fashions a tone that’s appropriate for a more intimate and personal narrative, even if not everything in Moonglow is to believed.

That’s not to say that Moonglow isn’t a beautifully written novel just like everything Chabon has produced. Read this short passage about Chabon’s grandmother, who escaped Europe only after the atrocities of World War II:

“There were days, however, when being left with my grandmother was not very different from being left along. She lay on the sofa or on her bed with the curtains drawn and a cool cloth folded over her eyes. These days had their own lexicon: cafard, algie, crise de foie. In 1966 (the date of my earliest memories of her) she was only forty-three, but the war, she said, had ruined her stomach, her sinuses, the joints of her bones (she never said anything about what the war might have done to her mind). If she had promised to look after me on one of her bad days, she would rally long enough to persuade my parents, or herself, that she was up to the task. But then it--something--would come over her and we would leave the movie theater halfway through the show, conclude the recital after a single poem, walk out of the supermarket abandoning an entire cart of groceries in the middle of the aisle.” (19)

Just in this passage, you get a sense of Chabon’s innate sense of detail. He makes use of parenthesis to indicate his split understanding of these experiences, one that’s contemporaneous and another that clearly occurs years later. And then there’s how Chabon chooses to reach towards the hidden trauma his grandmother has endured, using pronouns and French words to prevent us from ever fully grasping this penumbral history. While Chabon has largely avoided the syntactical backflips of some of his other works, his writing is just as powerful as ever.

The themes common to Chabon remain in tact. As ever, he’s interested in Jewish identity, nostalgia, and mid-twentieth century history and technology. The most immediately gripping portion of Moonglow occurs during grandfather’s service in WW II. As an engineer, grandfather is tasked with capturing both a V-2 rocket and the Nazi scientist, Wernher von Braun, a man who was never punished for his involvement in Hitler’s regime.  Instead, he was pardoned by the United States and enlisted into the emerging space race. The story of Von Braun and the V-2 rocket speak to the multilayered aspect of nostalgia. We venerate WW II as the good war while often overlooking the moral compromises endemic to every armed conflict.

The rocket becomes a reoccurring motif through much of Moonglow. Chabon writes of the V-2:

“None of that, however, could be blamed on the rocket, my grandfather thought, or on the man, von Braun, who had designed it. The rocket was beautiful. In conception it had been shaped by an artist to break a chain that had bound the human race ever since we first gained consciousness of earth’s gravity and all its analogs in suffering, failure, and pain. It was at once a prayer sent heavenward and the answer to that prayer: Bear me away from this awful place. To pack the thing with a ton of amatol, to hobble it so that instead of tearing loose once and for all from the mundane pull, it only arced back to earth and killed the people among whom it fell, was to abuse it.” (167)

Like William Blake’s “Tyger,” the rocket is both beautiful and fearful. This image of the rocket reverse engineers the technological utopianism found in postwar America. The rocket is a symbol of human endeavor, but in reality more often becomes a tool of violence. This is also a reminder that technology does not exist outside of culture and history, but rather is always bent to the will of its users. In our present age of technological fetishism, it’s useful to consider technological progress does not automatically lead to human progress.

Moonglow can be read as a story of the twentieth century as filtered through a particular American family. In this sense, there are some interesting parallels between Chabon’s latest and the Chinese author Mo Yan’s novel of the mid-twentieth century, Red Sorghum. Like Chabon, much of Mo Yan’s novel takes place during WW II/the Second Sino-Japanese War, and he refers to characters solely in accordance to their familial relationship to the narrator (father, grandfather, grandmother, etc.). Despite the countless amount of reminiscing we’ve spent on the twentieth century, we’re still forced to look back, attempting to make sense of the strange mix of destruction and unbridled optimism that impossibly stood side by side. And in doing so, we might somehow understand where we are and how we might move forward.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (3.5/5)

When Disney first announced that they were planning on taking the Star Wars IP (ugh) and submitting it to the Marvel model, where they produce one or more films a year, I was skeptical. As someone who grew up watching the original trilogy on TV and VHS, I felt there was something special about Star Wars, something that differentiated it from other big franchises. Sure, there were plenty of Star Wars material floating around outside of the main “Episodes”: comic books, novels, cartoons, video games, and even a soundtrack unencumbered by an actual film. And there’s been plenty of detritus within Star Wars, including terribly written novels, those Ewok movies, and the godawful holiday special. But these were easy to ignore because they weren’t meant to be experienced on the big screen. By pumping out a film every year, I reasoned, Disney was diminishing what made the experience of seeing a new Star Wars movie in theaters special.

The first of Disney’s anthology films, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (okay, they’re still sticking with that subtitle), does a fine job of justifying the practice, even if it doesn’t completely quell my worries that the Disney machine will grind Star Wars to dust in order to suck out every last cent. The plot of Rogue One is extrapolated from a line from the original film, and the movie recycles much of the aesthetic, character motivation, and even the macguffin from A New Hope. Jyn Erso, the film’s protagonist, is a lapsed rebel who now finds herself jailed by the Empire. She’s broken out of a labor camp in order to aid the Rebellion. As a child, Jyn’s mother was killed and her father was pressed into service by the Empire to help build the Death Star, which means this is the fourth film featuring some version of the original superweapon.

But what the Rebellion really needs her for is to make contact with Saw Gerrera, a rebel extremist who leads a guerrilla cell on the planet of Jedha (for some reason the film flashes names of locations in the bottom corner of the screen like we’re watching a Jack Ryan thriller). Gerrera has come into possession of information regarding the Empire’s new superweapon. Jyn, her handler, Cassian Andor, and his surly droid, K2SO follow these breadcrumbs all the way the film’s impressive third act. Along the way they pick up a motley crew, including Imperial defector Bodhi Rook and odd couple Chirrut Îmwe, a Zatoichi archetype, and Baze Malbus.

Most of the characters are quickly sketched, which isn’t necessarily a problem. In the great superhero tradition, Baze Malbus is defined by that massive gun he totes around while his friend Chirrut Îmwe is mostly defined by actor Donnie Yen’s beatific smile. Jyn, played by Felicity Jones, serves as the main character, but her story arc seems incomplete, like a Jenga puzzle threatening to topple because of its missing parts. At one point she must give a rousing speech to the troops, mostly because she’s the protagonist, so of course she does. But Jones’s prim Britishness can’t quite sell the dialogue, and it makes you appreciate Jennifer Lawrence’s conviction to deliver whatever hokum was necessary in those Hunger Games movies.

Part of me wants to snark on Disney’s four-quadrant, tentpole filmmaking, but another part of me has to acknowledge that this film is the product of a well-oiled machine. Director Gareth Edwards nimbly directs the action, and the quips are delivered right on time. The antagonism between Jyn and K2SO provides one of the film’s chief delights. And when the movie turns into the Star Wars version of The Dirty Dozen, it’s easy to lose yourself in the spectacle. Rogue One contains a number of striking imagery of imagined planets and environments that the series is known for.

**SPOILERS AHEAD** And yet, I still felt like the movie never came together like it could have. I love the idea of making a Star Wars movie in the direct mold of those WWII movies from the 50s and 60s, but the need to connect this to A New Hope continually threatens to undermine Rogue One. The Easter eggs come at a regular clip. Some of these make sense. It’s great to see Bail Organa working with the Rebellion, and the glass of blue milk in the opening scene is an unobtrusive nod to Luke’s favorite drink on Tatooine. But do we really need to see Evazan and Ponda Baba bump into Jyn? (For those who weren’t into the habit of tracking down the names of obscure Star Wars characters in their youth, these are the dude with the messed up face and the walrus-looking fellow who pick a fight with Luke in Mos Eisley’s Cantina. Ponda Boba’s arm sees the wrong end of Obi-Wan’s lightsaber.) And while Darth Vader’s inclusion makes sense up to a point, the tacked on ending that connects the film unambiguously to A New Hope seems unnecessary and superfluous, as if Disney felt the audience wouldn’t realize these are the same Death Star plans mentioned in A New Hope. If anything, it undercuts the arc of the characters we’ve been following for two hours by reminding us that they’re just minor people in the grand scheme. Finally, I’m flummoxed by the inclusion of a creepy CGI version of Peter Cushing’s Tarkin. I’m sure there are sexagenarian actors who bear a resemblance to Cushing with the aid of the makeup department. Seriously, the image of CG Cushing is more ghoulish than anything found in those Hammer Horror films he starred in.

**SPOILERS CONTINUED** It’s nearly impossible to discuss your reaction to Rogue One without spending some time discussing the ending, so there are some even more ruinous spoilers in this paragraph. You were warned. Above, I likened this film to Star Wars’s Dirty Dozen, but this film attempts to one up that trash classic because no one survives. Every major character meets their end in the final assault, and Jyn and Cassian die while standing ankle deep in the ocean as a mushroom cloud balloons in the background, an image beautifully cribbed from the film noir classic Kiss Me Deadly. I’ve gone back and forth between admiring this ending for its ability to smuggle such a bleak conclusion into a major blockbuster and thinking that the film never really earns this downer of a conclusion. Part of the problems is that following our heroes’ demise, there’s a coda that sees the Death Star plans make their way to a CGI Leia, unnecessarily connecting the dots between Rogue One and A New Hope and undermining the journey of the characters we’ve been following for two hours. The film never quite captures the acidic cynicism as The Dirty Dozen. It wants to be a gritty war film, but one that’s still fun for the family.

*SPOILERS CONTINUING* Additionally, I’m not sure the film ever really earns these deaths. There’s plenty of posturing in Rogue One about the kinds of sacrifices rebels must make in order to bring about change, but this is never really shown or discussed. I believe blockbuster movies can engage with complex topics, but there’s a difference between motioning towards complexity and actually engaging with complexity. (As an example, this difference can be seen in The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises in which the former actually has something to say about terrorism where the latter’s attempt at broaching the topic of economic inequality is simply laughable). Earlier I mentioned The Dirty Dozen, but where that film gleefully deconstructs “the good war,” Rogue One never has the gumption to really show us these supposed ethical quandaries.

*SPOILERS ENDING*

The big argument over Rogue One will likely be about whether or not the film is better than The Force Awakens. You could go back and forth on this question, outlining diagrams on the wall until they take you to a padded cell. I found them to be on the same level. When both films are working properly, they’re the kind of blockbuster entertainment spectacle that we go to the movies for. But they keep making unforced errors. The Force Awakens kills all momentum when Death Star 3.0 enters center stage. Rogue One likewise suffers when it bends over backwards to acknowledge the original trilogy or smuggle in a hero’s journey when the war film genre really should revolve around an ensemble cast. And while I like to avoid nitpicking, I think the inclusion of Peter CGIushing is simply unconscionable. Both films are good if ultimately unambitious. But I think Rogue One at least proves there’s some stock in the idea of creating anthology films. I just hope Disney figures out that not every film needs to tie directly into dialogue or characters from the original trilogy. It’s a big galaxy, after all. Let’s do something new.