#35 -- "Jane Eyre (2011)" Reviewed | * * *

"That's humanity. It's a time-traveling bullshit-breaking missile, killing insecurities, past and present, with chemical weapons that violate the Geneva Conventions."

This is a creeping story about outdated ideas presented through a modern lens. It's a lady-movie that has a gender-neutral opinion on what it means to be emotionally miserable. Progressive! English countrysides, stupid rules -- mental, emotional, and meta-physical demons crawl the background. It's a chick flick staged as a gritty ghost story. There are old books that were written with the intention to trundle on for months and months, dragging a reader down with them. In many ways, those stories were ahead of their time. You are meant to read them chapter by chapter, digesting them slowly, distancing yourself when you don't have time to read or can't stand the story's boredom or the villains' cruelty anymore. Remember for the entire back half of Wuthering Heights when Heathcliff was donkey-punching every stable emotion he encountered? Urgh. You can only process so much slobbering misery in book-form. As a movie though, you're stuck with it for a limited engagement. Movies are watched in one sitting. You're there from beginning to end -- there's no escape and that's a good thing. You're there, just like characters, bound by stupid rules.

This is not a stupid movie though. It's an S-grade production of a D-grade concept. It's thesis: "Sad you can't have that," has sold more stories than "Once upon a time..." but it's through that simplicity that we can enter this story, and its simple thesis, a million and one times, sometimes with great results -- this is one of those times. Jane Eyre is to Byronic-romance as Avatar is to science-fiction. Who knew that Charlotte Brontë was working in the wrong medium?

Baby Magneto (Mad*Men*Spy*Cool out of 4) is Edward Fairfax Rochester. He's unhappy with the fact that shit catches fire around him. Master of Thornfield Manor, he carries a lot of emotional baggage around the English wilderness, being a dick to everybody that works for him because there's not much else going on. Can you imagine that? You're so rich and so indifferent, and there's quite literally no television, so you devote your entire life to being a growling-contempt-man-blob, draped in self-pity. Gentlemen would devote entire lifetimes to acting like this and it was socially acceptable, and quite normal, actually. Fantasy kicks in though -- "Maybe he's got a good reason for being an unchained face-cock?" Leave it to the ladies to want to draw some good out of a man like Rochester. Money can't buy a man happiness, as per usual. Wait, sorry, we're talking about this from a man's point of view, and this is a proto-feminist story.

Alice of Goddamn Wonderland (Worst*Movie*Of*All*Time out of 4) is Jane Eyre. Orphaned, abused, well-educated, but not self-pitying, this is a girl that hears voices. She hears voices, but doesn't let it bother her. It's not disabling, she can still speak and is rather kind. Normally we'd burn a female lead -- or any lead, c'mon, what are we talking about -- for being self-pitying, which, fortunately, Jane isn't. She isn't delusional either. She's skeptical, but not of herself. She's able and realistic. Compassionate to a fault from a young age, she succeeds in becoming an individual in an era when that is commonly bad form and worse news for a woman. She's likely to end up a missionary's wife with that attitude.

Does anybody do cruelty like the British? They're so right-proper and passionless in their emotional bitch-slaps. It's as if the country is one gigantic frat house and the adults all haze their kids to be loveless skull-fuckers, who will, in turn, raise the next generation in a becoming fashion. Even the rich kids are raised by nannies, educators, and governesses. They don't really have to grow up until its time to smother their parents in their beds to inherit the vast, vast, vast estates for their own. Then they'll brood for a few decades, have a an illegitimate child or two, and then realize all their friends are having "actual" kids, and they gots to keep up their appearances, lest they be social outcasts. Any non-diseased women want in?

That's how it was. Just give him a girl that won't annoy him too much and might be able to squirt out some spawn that don't die form typhoid at age two. What use is there for a woman that'll be any more than that? Brontë really saw an easy market for our simple thesis: "What if people didn't, as a rule, have to suck? What if emotions worked properly and made sense?" Fairy tales, lady. "What if there were ghosts, supernatural entities getting in your way too?" Whoa, stop pitching, Wilma Shakespeare, you struck oil with Ghost-Romance!

The existence of demons in Jane Eyre is a magic trick. They're very real in a Batman Begins kind of way -- and now we have to stop bringing up Chris Nolan movies. It looks real, you're told it isn't, you comply with the unreality, then you find out you were actually right with your first guess. The 2011 film version of Jane Eyre (which we're talking about right now!) is a story that should have been a 2011 film before it was ever a book from a quadrillion years ago. Framed the way it is, and knowing that Wuthering Heights is a book that exists (and was only published two months later in 1847), Jane Eyre is haunted. It must to be! Fireplaces explode whenever Jane gets angry as a child. Rochester's bed catches fire for no reason -- all of these moments are surrounded by voices in Jane's head, hiding inside the walls, causing deliberate cruelty. Life, society, and The Rules hate Jane, forcing her to assume that all people are entirely rotten inside, frogspawn boiling at the sight of her, and there's no way her good can beat all that bad.

There's no beating ghosts. Ghosts are the only thing that could make a man like Rochester so gnarled and jagged. Rochester begins as a cagey, hideous fucker and Baby Magneto plays him like a cross between Axel Rose and Anakin Skywalker. He's an shifty, arrogant rockstar that cares so much about what people think of him and hates them for it. He hates where he is. He hates that he has to live with the ghosts lurking around Thornfield Manor. He hates that he has an illegitimate daughter who is so adorably French and he must educate -- not himself, no, hire a woman to do it, fuck, what kind of man do you take him for? Enter: Jane Eyre, who is named Jane, and must act as such. Is Jane a bad name? No, it's a just a name. We don't feel like completing that thought, we'll let you chose your own adventure.

Jane's humanity snaps Rochester out of his mire though. Humanity, in a woman, to a man, is that thing where your buddy is trying to describe the dreamgirl and he says "She's indescribable," and then you hit him for having no vocabulary, and he adds, "She just talks to me, and it makes sense." That's humanity. It's a time-traveling bullshit-breaking missile, killing insecurities, past and present, with chemical weapons that violate the Geneva Conventions. Humanity kills ghosts. It doesn't take Rochester long to make the right decision, weird as it is, to marry Jane. How far into the movie are we? About an hour or so?

This does not bode well for humanity. Enter: The Twist. The ghost bites back hard. It has a lair right inside the wall behind Rochester's bed. It would have stayed there if it weren't for this one little he-bitch calling Rochester out on the bullshit in his past. Humanity gets killed by stupid rules, by rotten English tradition, by generational contempt that you can't fight. It just froths inside, giving the men sepsis, and giving women, well, we dunno, let's say, toxic shock. That sounds gross enough. Real gothic horror kicks in now, shit that would make Poe beam. Rochester kept his half-mad first wife locked in a secret room behind a tapestry. That's the ghost, she's actually real! That is so fucking cool. If that was the plot twist in a modern horror story, and it was set in New York City or something, and the rich guy kept his mentally-unhinged ex-wife to prowl a back room of his expensive mid-town loft, your very organs would walk out on you for exposing them to that kind of trauma. It would knock peoples' brains off. Sitting and watching the movie for a solid 80 minutes, with the viewers assuming that eventually a real un-live banshee would come howling across the moor to reave somebody's soul, we suddenly get this?! This comes so far out of left field that you realize Rochester was a dick for very real reasons -- his daddy married him to a crazy girl for money, basically ending his life, because he can't remarry (for some reason, were annulments still not cool back then?), especially not to Jane The Deserving.

Jane saw this coming too! She isn't a precocious shrew because she's enjoys defiance, she's humane because she has decided that is best way for her to live. She warns Rochester that he shouldn't assume that she is heartless because she balances honesty and reserve with elegance. He shouldn't want her just because she's different. But Rochester says: "Fuck it, let's wedding the shit out of this scenario!" Heroes always enjoy blissful matrimony midway through their stories, never to see sadness again. We love the "falling in love" montage they have during the wedding preparation. It's a total Sword of Damocles. Mere sentences from being happily married, Act 2 has to end, crushing all hope. The Ghoul-Wife sees an end to that and Jane has to bolt in the night.

Here is where the story frays. The movie actually begins at this moment with a flash-forward of Jane bolting in the night, being a decent place to begin the story. The time Jane spends with the kindly sisters and the mildly-odd missionary. We suppose this is supposed to represent the banal existence one could choose if love became too hard. It's the fire escape and it's lunacy. It's a chaste, sucky existence, is what it is. Fortunately, Jane is all, "Later, haterz," and leaves Billy Elliot: Missionary. She realizes she'd rather go back to Baby Magneto than go to India as a missionary's wife, which is the safest job in the goddamn world. She wins because she doesn't comply, which is totally what Ellen Ripley would have done, and that's why her name is the title, and why this story is more modern than modern -- she gets what she wants by growing, not by complying.

Does Jane sacrifice some pride and conscience here? She goes back for Rochester, finding the manor half-burned by The Ghoul-Wife. Root for the happy ending, root for forgiveness, root for love -- the fact that she chooses something risky and stupid (something that's actually counter to her character earlier in the story) over something sure and simple, is why wins Jane back her humanity, and why, for once, she isn't running back, needy, to a man. Again, this is why she wins. At the end of it all, after being hauled through the Uruk-hai muck with Jane for roughly two hours, it concludes with optimism, which is more than we'd expect from a Brontë. Praise for an old story about old people whose premise becomes too modern for its own good.

* * *

(out of 4)

-- Ghost Little

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

Recommended related reading:
[Behold, The 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance®] by Ghost Little
[Sly Cooper and the Thevieus Raccoonus  |  * * *] by Doberman
[V.i.] by Ghost Little

#14 -- "Paradise Lost" Reviewed | * * * *

"Paradise Lost has the balls to dissolve confusion, changing the topic of conversation from 'why?' to 'because, bitch.' It's a great piece of mythological fan-fiction. It's a great piece of persuasive advertising."

"Satan's actions are all the more identifiable given that there are quite literally no other humans to be found in the story at this point. He doesn't even know that he's evil though." 

"There's nothing about the contents of Hell in The Bible. It's woefully under-represented." 

". . .we suppose it's communication that is humanity's greatest survival tool. It fights the confusion. It's a tool for prosperity, for growth, for demonstration of intellectual prowess. When there is communication, there is stability, and when there is stability, there is great opportunity for freedom." 

"You're not afraid to leave this world because this world is negligent and it won't care when you're gone, and yet to identify with even one person and admit that you can't name every voice speaking in your soul, and to give over that responsibility in the face of absolute terror, that is the greatest persuasion." 

NB: This is entry #14. We've been working on it since the middle of February. Why? Because #14 is Paradise Lost, the greatest thing ever written. Not only did we need to do it justice, we got to writing about it, and left the computer for a bit, and then came back, and had an epiphany. Needless to say, in order to prove a point, we took our time and pledged months ago not to have this thing be "done" until July 19. That's today. Enjoy!

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We're huge admirers of actionbutton.net. Those guys have got it going on. Their freewheeling aggro-talk inspired a lot of what we do here. Our favorite feature of their site is that they are inclined to re-review things, sometimes more than once, and sometimes months or years later. What a concept! Imagine if we did this for the Academy Awards, for example. Did you know Shakespeare In Love won best picture? It did. Do you know what year it won in? Do you know what didn't win that year? Saving Private Ryan. Can you imagine if the evaluation system involved a re-review process 5 years later? Which of those two movies resonated further with audiences then, now, and a decade from now? Did you know Chicago won best picture? Over both Gangs of New York and The Two Towers.

There's a toxicity in our need for immediacy. It hinges on demand and on people's inability to make decisions for themselves. Make enough small bad decisions in a row, you lose yourself in your vat of errors, and incorrectness becomes unrecognizable. Sure, everybody has a right to accurate news though, to information, and to have it delivered in a timely fashion. It's when information blurs with consumption that things become clouded. We fear the day when all information and interpretation of events, both recent and ancient, are homogenized into a singularity, like the eventuality of Wikipedia. Information might one day be so ubiquitous and accessible that to be "intelligent" will become obsolete. People will be able to claim data and fact from the ether, its finality will be undisputed, and we all go Eloi (cruel irony, tell the people what Eloi are if they don't already know).

This in mind, we say delay immediacy. Slow your mental plow, man. Humans might like to think that their brains are solid-state hard drives. We aren't. We're better than that. What if we operated on a six-month delay of professional critique, analysis, and review? First, a lot of people would lose their jobs. We know we would, for sure.

This delay though -- would it add stability to our critical process? Is your gut reaction your best reaction? Well, write that down, but it won't be official for another six months under this system. Sleep on it. Think about it. Then forget about it. You'll go through a lot of days, moods, and interpretations over the course of that time. If you're doing your job correctly though, you'll arrive at the truest answer. You will always have your initial interpretation to fall back on if you can't discover anything else.

But what are we talking about again? Shit. How about that, four paragraphs and no mention of Paradise Lost, just ramblings about why we like actionbutton.net so much. Well, heads-up, this is probably the most importance sentence in the review, since it contains the statement, "Personal, prolonged justification in decision-making is a human's greatest capability, too often lost, and too often perverted, so when you attempt to cast off responsibility, you are also casting off self-worth, and that cuts you in a way that may never properly heal." Or maybe it's not the most important statement. We just riffed that without even looking down at the keyboard or taking a break to check email. Maybe we should write this over the course of six months? That'd be pretty righteous. Patience. We'll see what happens.

So we did.

Understand this: people lean. It makes us great. It's life-affirming and gives us worth. We slouch when we can't stand straight. We rest to collect our thoughts. We go to others when we need to verbalize. Rare is the person that doesn't shudder with fatigue. The other half of this webbed scaffolding we build around ourselves is that we don't quit. People, we mean. We don't lay down and die. There's always one last question we can think of, always one last thing we need to do, one last answer. The human soul runs on description and justification. 

In order to obtain description and justification though, we have to run on a crude fossil fuel: confusion. Paraphrasing Kierkegaard in limited vernacular, "The Bible is a simple book with a simple message, it's just that even the most intelligent man will deliberately refuse to understand it." The confusion powers us. Paradise Lost has the balls to dissolve confusion, changing the topic of conversation from "why?" to "because, bitch." It's a great piece of mythological fan-fiction. It's a great piece of persuasive advertising.

Confusion and rage power our protagonist in Paradise Lost. Beginning in medias res, as the best epics do, our hero is in trouble, annoyed after a fight with his father. It's some heavy shit. Family drama is the meatiest, most sticky drama. Because of the falling out, the kid has been sent to live in a crappy neighborhood with his equally confused friends. The electrical work in his new place is bad and the water damage makes the floors smell. The fight with his dad is rolling around inside his skull like a baker's dozen beetles with megaphones. In the beginning, he just wants to get what he did wrong. Our protagonist's confusion stems from his inability to understand the "why" of his father's displeasure. He felt he'd always done the right thing, admiring dear old dad, talking him up to people he met -- seriously, that's why we're here, right? To make our parents look good? And isn't out-doing them the best way to make our parents look good? 

The answer was apparently "no." This confused the living shit out of our hero. It started a fight and it came to blows. The hero left, sad, angry, violent, upset. He went to bed mad. He doesn't quit. There's always another question, the need for another answer. Approach a bad situation with both eyes open. If you don't like where you're at, change it. Good lessons for all people. 

The biggest problem is that our hero isn't "people." He isn't even human -- he's an angel, and a fallen angel at that. Our snap-judgment kicks in immediately when we're told the most ancient "oh, he'll be bad" red herring drops. Still, we're so compelled to side with him. Now, we've always been told that God created the angels to be different from humans. How different? Well, we were never really told that, the mythology's fuzzy. Yet they are seen as pious, pitying creatures, protecting earth-dwellers. There are no rules about how they "should" behave. In fact, the only rule is that God loves humans more than angels. 

Period. 

Angels get their wings and their halo and they get that one hard and fast rule. Paradise Lost is the story of the first angel to ask why that is. Worse still though, our fallen angel hero might be central to the story, but his struggle isn't the reason for this story. With that in mind, we readers already know there's no way in hell that he'll get the closure he demands. We know how the Genesis story ends. He doesn't know that yet, so the tragedy stems from the reader knowing before the hero. Also, he isn't a hero, he's an anti-hero. Eventually, he'll grow up to be The Prince of Darkness, Ruler of Hell, once called Lucifer, Satan now. He's a charming piece of work, sympathetic and seductive, and wicked to the core without even realizing it. 

He's the most human character in the story. Definitely easier to identify with than the actual humans. "Humans" and "humanity" are new concepts at the beginning of the story. Lucifer knows they exist and he knows that they've got a deluxe apartment in the sky. He does not. He's in Hell. It's pitch black, it's fucking hot, there are lakes of acid, and he just got his head stoved in by Michael, that kiss-ass punk. A lot of people don't get that. Lucifer was an, and is, an angel. He'll never be stronger than God. He's got the mystical firepower of some mid-level entity like Michael or Gandalf. So the next time you want to claim Satan-induced weakness or insanity, remember that Lucifer was a fairly weak spirit. 

Lucifer decides he should wreck all the nick-knacks hanging on the wall in God's den. We've all been there, it's a reasonable reaction. Satan's actions are all the more identifiable given that there are quite literally no other humans to be found in the story at this point. He doesn't even know that he's evil though. Those are the best villains. Ones that are true believers in their missions. They see themselves as wronged, as righteous, or as so disconnected from good and bad that what they're doing as malevolence. 

Top 10 villains of all time:

1. Iago, from Othello
2. Kefka, from Final Fantasy VI
3. The Operative, from Serenity
4. Ozymandias, from Watchmen
5. Aton Chigurh, from No Country For Old Men
6. Michael Corleone, from The Godfather Part II
7. Stringer Bell, from The Wire
8. Mary Tilford, from The Children's Hour
9. Satan, from Paradise Lost
10. Kerrigan, from Starcraft

So Satan isn't 'evil.' Or rather, we have no way to actually label Lucifer, the character, as evil. He hasn't done it yet. We know he will. We will always know how the story ends. This is good drama, children. Make the lead sympathetic, make him charismatic, make him wronged in a very human way, make his downfall predestined, then blind him of it. Make the reader hope for him. We hope for redemption, always. What a weird quality -- hearing this story about a guy that's supposedly the embodiment of all evil in existence, and we want to forgive him, want him to be redeemed. Says something about people's hearts being in the right place. The most popular religions are founded on that belief -- the eventuality of redemption. Out of our confusion, there is hope. Eventually. 

Hope will deliver us from confusion? Wishful thinking. Lucifer is an action-man! When others would wallow, he tells his bros that he's gonna go totally sick-house on God's favorite creation: mankind. OK, if you're a human reading the story, at this point, you can't abide that. "No, Lucifer, don't do it! You're going to get God mad at you and you'll be turned into a snake forever! Watch out, it's a fucking trap!" You can't save him. You have to watch him. Watch him and know that his suffering will teach you a lesson. It will teach you, human, the lesson of: "Why God acts the way he does around you."

Why do bad things happen to good people? Why is there disease? Why do we experience confusion? Why do we experience heartbreak? What is the purpose of giving us free will and then demanding obedience? Why is power given to those who do not know its value?

What is the purpose behind the ways of God to man?

An amazing hook. Everybody grapples with why others act a particular way toward a particular person. Everybody grapples with God, especially atheists. We at What's That From? believe in a non-systemic beliefs system. It's paradoxical and contradictory, like all religions, so it still counts. We don't align with a political party. We rarely vote. We don't believe in a specific god. We don't read a specific book when we feel confused, except maybe The Alchemist. We can understand why people would, but the idea of taking advice from something written, translated, and re-written by a loosely-assembled cult of malnourished, dehydrated, hallucinating, persecuted, angry desert-dwellers that blame another loosely-assembled tribe of malnourished, dehydrated, hallucinating, persecuted, angry desert-dwellers for killing their ret-conned messiah -- it just doesn't sit right. Seriously, ask any Christian, for example, why he or she believes in God. The good ones -- and they do exist -- will answer that they enjoy guidance, or they enjoy the communal betterment the church can bring, or they're trying to nail the organist. 

Then there are the funny ones. They might say something like, "because Jesus will save me." Jesus. The guy from The Bible? OK, we'll ignore that for a sec. What's Jesus going to save you from? "He's going to save me from the devil and get me to Heaven." 

Let's start here. The devil? You mean Lucifer. The prideful angel that stepped out of line in 1337 BC (not the actual year), confused about God's immediate and unexplained love for his second children? Why does God love us more than the angels, by the way? We're getting to that, that's what Paradise Lost explains, dummy! Anyway, the devil runs Hell, and that's where the people that Christians hate go when they die. Man, religion truly is a dish best served cold. Good to know that the motherfuckers of the world will be shot with acid-filled paintballs for, like, forever. Forever is longer than a human mind can fathom, maybe even longer, so they'll get theirs, don't you worry! 

What's Hell like? Well, any well-educated man of God will begin by describing the Circles. And the layers of sins. And the homunculi that torture the exposed flesh of the wicked. And the things that are done to people in their personalized Hellzzz, and how Satan is chained in the deepest frozen circle with three different heads that constantly masticate on the undying remains of the worst sinners in Christian mythology. 

Spoiler: these circles of Hell, the personalized sin-spas that the heathens are hot-tubbing in, these things do not appear anywhere in The Bible. You are thinking of The Inferno cantos from Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. You'd be just as well off reading The Canterbury Tales or Hyperion if you're looking for realizations of Hell. There's nothing about the contents of Hell in The Bible. It's woefully under-represented. The people (characters) in The Bible might refer to Hell on occasion, but what this is saying to us is that the people (characters) in The Bible have no idea what they're talking about. Which means all of their threats are empty. Which means their stories might be exaggerated for dramatic effect, ideally scaring readers into believing them, put there for dramatic effect. Which means they were making it up as they went along. The fact that committees were formed to decide which version of the Revelation story was to be canonized worries us. 

It doesn't matter though. All confusion over religion can be washed away by Paradise Lost. All the annoying fear-mongering and condemnation -- gone.

We are at a strange place in history. We're on a technological launching pad, yet we're still fighting wars circulating around religion and interpretation. Hatred hold-overs because of fear and confusion.

The good technologies in human history were born out of necessity, created for the betterment of the human condition. Consider America as an easy-to-follow example. Are you American? Don't answer that. Welcome, non-American reader!

See, cities needed power, so complex coal mines were developed to fuel growing metropolises. Anybody that says London is foggy doesn't know what they're talking about -- that Dickensian fog they're always talking about is actually coal soot, not actual fog. Always was. Nevertheless, the filth and squalor of early mega-cities brought overpopulation. Overpopulation led to people moving west, railroads systems were crafted. America needed food, invented massive agricultural machines to feed the baby boom after World War II. Pride in one's family lead to expansion, big cars, big houses, big yards, big dreams. Men in particular would say things about themselves without even speaking, poetry, truly, in that pride, pride's the two-faced composition notwithstanding, naturally. Needed to prove themselves, so they bought these things. Still, populations and sub-cultures were established all across the country -- trains too slow, flight industry exploded. Still not fast enough, telecommunication networks were built, people drawn even closer together -- closer still with the speed high-fidelity broadband connections allowed. The concepts of day and night on the planet are nearly negated due to the speed at which humans can communicate today.

There was always a necessity. Always a need. Sometimes for business, sometimes for survival. Always for speed though. The rate at which a human life can be extinguished is lessened with the speed at which one human can communicate with another. Therefore, we suppose it's communication that is humanity's greatest survival tool. It fights the confusion. It's a tool for prosperity, for growth, for demonstration of intellectual prowess. When there is communication, there is stability, and when there is stability, there is great opportunity for freedom. Freedom from time leads to exploration and wonderment, stimulation, and ways to specifically spend the free time that cooperation afforded.

Cooperation, then speed, then communication, then freedom, then stimulation -- art. Expression of existence. Replication of existence. Interpretation of existence. Go read Chapter 4 of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It'll change your life. It'll make you want to buy a dead poet's ashes off of eBay, chop them on a mirror, and do a few lines of an Irishwoman named Angela.

This art will become beauty and reflection. It is still a result of necessity. Human communication's final form is a desire, a necessity, even, perhaps, to convey presence at all times to others. To say without saying, again, is poetry. Yet, when presence becomes omnipresence, it is no longer felt, only its absence is felt. Anything less is inadequate. It can't be maintained, and we should not desire it to be maintained. At which point, we must assume that fluctuation, rising and falling and rising again, is the best communication, the best art, the best freedom, the best stimulation, the clearest expression of existence.

Existence, as humans define it. Buddha said that life is suffering -- we say think that thought is incomplete.

We think there has to be way more than people are aware of. For example, X-rays exist. We can't feel them, but we know they're there. We know they're capable of penetrating our reality, our level of perception -- it just takes a lot of technology and perception. So what else is there? There might be life-forms whose existence we might not even count as alive.

That which serves in symbiosis, aware that it will someday fall apart, will be the proudest. Sound like anybody named Satan that you've heard of? There may perhaps never be another like him, rebel angel that he is, and he knows it, so his uniqueness is a keystone to his expression. Utter individuality simultaneously manages to be just as inadequate as omnipresence, for it is in utter individuality that weakness is bred. It's here that the proudest, which we mentioned above, shows its true colors. It is too driven. Too absorbed into the necessity of self.

In Paradise Lost, God is the omnipresence, and Satan is the first individualist. Neither of them end up doing very well by the end of the story. The question is, and always has been: "Why is it this way?" We're nearing the answer. What is God? What is Satan?

By comparison, what is human?
 

It's in one's ability to shift, at necessity, that shows life's true colors. A shift from firmness to softness. From fast to slow. From high to low. From light to dark. And back again, if we find ourselves regretful.

People are bad at shifting quickly. Physically, the human body can bend if pressure is applied over time -- coincidentally, the brain is kind of the same. Lucifer is hung up on themes of freedom and fairness. 

Americans, by default, are raised on the concept of freedom and equality, but when released into the wild, like all creatures outside of the familiar, they find themselves without the emotional vocabulary to craft an independent persona capable of conversing with a concept as expansive as freedom, so they gravitate towards something immediate and safe. We don’t just gravitate to the path of least resistance though, we also regress back to baser comprehension. This is a big cause of mid-life crises -- people find themselves unrecognizable later in life, just overgrow meatbags of values described in childhood, running on auto-pilot, too indifferent now to move. From there, we're snuggly and compartmentalized, still deploying unshakable, playground-caliber notions of right and wrong. If we're told that we're not free, we will instantly deny that statement. Anybody that even thinks it would be so humanely inhumane, so starkly wrong! Yet being "just wrong" is not enough for us. There has to be a reason that anybody would suggest America isn't free, so we'll assemble myths behind their motivations, modifying their circumstances, adding gravitas, adding personal complexity to this monolithic wickedness. Recognize that we aren't talking about a trait specific to America anymore. All people create demons. We fight demons. We, free humans, declare we are indeed still human in violent defiance.

Shit, Americans win wars. Our career record is 11-2-2. 

Creatures of conscience, we want to kill our enemies in an odd kind of equation sorta unique to the American brain, marrying violence with freedom. Innumerable modern cultures have borrowed this persuasion recently. America is a culture of psychos (it's okay, Yossarian pointed out that you won't know if you're crazy), a byproduct of the inherent character envy implanted when its citizens are young –- the way one is told that all are equal, and yet it becomes increasingly clear as we stare into our surrounding culture, that Americans are in no way equal, and that gnaws at an American's brainstem. We know it, but to say it out loud is to let our demons win, to admit that we aren't free. We can either accept it or fight, and the fighters, the true, honest psychos, indifferent to the social posturing that the others submitted to, are the ones that get all the envy they can, eventually becoming creatures that feed on the feeling. 

Think. Remember back home to the cagey, self-loathing, dishonest people, knowingly unworthy of being 'American,' the irony not lost, sadly. They've submitted knowingly, debased their independence knowingly, handed envy, a sick emotion, to the truly craziest crazies, and all because they can't channel the freedom they had learned years and years ago. We've been taught it and told it was good, but freedom, and its uses, are so vast and so variable from one person to the next, that its value is lost to so many of us. It's intangible and it has to be given its value. 

All deserve freedom! This isn't right. The answer has to be elsewhere. Lucifer decided he would find it. 

Find the humans. Find out why they've been given freedom and life and love. Lucifer carries hell within him -- back when when was just an individual emotion, and not a metaphysical place -- he verbally abandons good, incapable of rising back to hope. He wishes he could abandon fear. He cannot. He knows what he's doing is wicked, so sorry for himself that he is so predestined to destruction. His dark materials, indeed.

The story of Paradise Lost tapers and accelerates once Satan has entered the Garden. We're nearly there.

There is no turning back. We all know the story. Snake sees woman, woman sees fruit, snake offers casual suggestion, woman fucks up. Did woman fuck up? Eve, proto-lady as she was, proto-innocent as she was, she is not to blame. Everything she did, she did out of love, crafted with the base-simple logic, seeing good, knowing only good. She immediately understands what she did (because, you know, it's the Fruit of Knowledge), yet it's in Adam's identification, even before he himself has eaten, that there is the seed of human redemption. Perhaps God realized this would happen, perhaps not, but to see Eve, afraid, aware, and alone inside 'Knowledge' itself, in proto-humanity that is so much greater than Lucifer's self-diluted pity, Adam would rather die with Eve than live forever alone, ignorant to the meaning of her love for him. 

He eats the fruit. It's a sad triumph. Satan has helped evict humanity from paradise, from the original paradise, and we see him for what he is and always was.

Books IX-XII are so elegant and respectful of the story we all know. It's not mistake that Lucifer goes from charismatic to a recoiling ash serpent, Lord of Darkness, and Fucker of Death (seriously, he had to fuck Death to gain entry to the earthly plane (read this poem!)). The torch is passed to the actual humans, Adam and Eve, who make an emotional calculation of devotion before they technically been given the tools to make such a distinction. It isn't spelled out -- it needn't be. 

Justifying the way of God to men is a difficult task -- mostly because we refuse the answer given. Suppose God is an expansive metaphor for misfortune, bad luck, fate shitting rain and lightning on your weekend plans. We reject this. Satan took a bad situation and attempted to make it good by becoming evil itself. The humans took a bad situation and decided to love one another instead. Who had the better reaction to fate? The ones that were given the capability to create good out of misfortune, rather than the One that couldn't learn from his mistakes? Which would you rather be?

Humans can bend. Evil fallen angels can't.

No matter how smart you think you are, there is somebody in the world that has the simplest answer to a question you don't even realize you're asking yourself at the beginning and the end of every day. You can't face that answer until you're brave enough to admit you are a confused little shit living in absolute terror. You're not afraid to leave this world because this world is negligent and it won't care when you're gone, and yet to identify with even one person and admit that you can't name every voice speaking in your soul, and to give over that responsibility in the face of absolute terror, that is the greatest persuasion. It's the admission that you don't know yourself, not entirely. This idea can't be planted in your heads by an outside force. For it to work, you have to persuade yourself. 

It's prolonged serendipity. That's it. That's love. Not forcing yourself, but loosing yourself from your personal singularity, is how love works. You have to persuade yourself that somebody else could have an answer.  

* * * *

(out of 4)
++ CERTIFIED: GREATEST THING EVER WRITTEN ++

-- Ghost Little and Doberman

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#24 -- "The Hunger Games" Reviewed | * * *

"A farmgirl with a compound bow on a mission to kill teenagers on a reality TV show run by a totalitarian government in the not-too distant future wilderness."

We deliberately kept ourselves from reading The Hunger Games too much, because we wanted it to last.

Ready for some misogyny? Women need to stop writing self-pitying stories about childhood and motherhood and iambic pentameter that have the themes of 'sadness' and 'ladyness' circled in big fat "fuck my life" red marker. Looking back, we had to read shitloads of books about female oppression in school, and do you know the moral of all those stories? "Sucks to have a gash." 

Yes, we've heard that one. Now tell us the one about the girl that isn't a girl with girl problems who can't overcome them because she's a fucking girl in a world built by the dudes, for the dudes, and of the dudes, and you just might construct a character worth remembering. Christ, Pride & Prejudice was a load of shit with an apocryphal 60 pages tacked on by Austen at the end because she wanted to hit a page quota, and thus that whole bit with her sister running away for no discernible reason is entirely irrelevant to the already wholly-resolved plot. And yet at least Elizabeth was an interesting woman. She liked embracing her inner shrew and she hated her life, so she curb-stomped it with English riding boots, Colin Firth's in-born bionic eye-monocle be damned.

Woman are inherently better at capturing character motivation. As such, women should always be better writers than men. Instead, they settle for being just equally as bad at writing as men, per-capita. If you handed a woman an outline to Raiders of the Lost Ark and told her to write a screenplay of that story, it would become a better movie (that's funny, because the story outline was co-written by a woman, haha!). As a decent rule, female writers are less direct with physical movement in their work, going for a poetic approach to internal character dialogue instead of writing a fucking story that goes somewhere. Without the primal infatuation with things that explode that mens' dicks bless them with, most women will lack the idiotic aggression to write something that isn't inherently female at its very core.

As an aside, modern femininity actually is something, whereas modern masculinity is entirely an absence of aforementioned femininity. We know, ironic, right? That's some twenty-first century yin-yang right there.

Men are men, and they are not complex in how they convey emotion. In storytelling, women are the wandering deltas of the Amazon basin, rich with life, indifferent side-thoughts, tangential little streams, and bent, weird, tributaries -- men are the LA River. Men are the LA River. Men are the LA River. Concrete. Shopping cart.

Writers want to reveal themselves via a medium that they are most comfortable with, hence the written word. Or maybe they're just boring, self-aware individuals and they want to disguise that plaster-white personality in cryptic, directionless similes like a fantastic grilled cheese bought at an east coast train station.

People are boring. People dealing with fantastic circumstances is not boring.

This is where The Hunger Games succeeds. Like a fantastic grilled cheese at an east coast train station, it succeeds.

We've read thousands of books and stories where the hero/ine is a talentless ponce that is chucked into a fantastic situation and has to whimper and whine their way through the whole thing before finally capping the big-bad with a one-liner and copping a feel on the love interest in the second-to-last page. It's insulting to the reader when the story's lead doesn't enjoy their adventure. We readers want more actionable traits to envy! Think Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. We want more world-building! Think Neo in The Matrix. We want latent talent to shine through, not a destined pussy getting magic powers from a sword hewn from living stone. Think Arthur in The Sword in the Stone. He took orders from an owl.

The heroine in Hunger Games is a girl. She's a member of the badass tribe but doesn't like to admit it. If we had to equate her to a mythical Greek demi-goddess, it'd be Atalanta. Sure, there was some initial mouth-puking when we realized that the book was written in the first-person present tense, meaning we were going to be up in Katniss' head (in the MOMENT!) for the duration. This, whiny, self-pitying 14 year-old girl was going to be our guide?

She's not going to talk about the boy she likes, is she? Or worse, be smarmy in her desire for independence? Did she like a band before they were cool? Shit, she doesn't like photography, does she? If so. . . just. . . goddammit.

No, actually. Yeah, wipe off the chocolate milk that you just spat all over your display, man! Seriously, Katniss is a dynamite girl. She's a great big sister. She provides for her family. She's an expert at cool crafts like hunting and trapping and skinning. She's responsible. She's a crack shot with a bow and she knows twelve thousand ways to skin a cat -- in the future!!

It's semi-totalitarian future-America. There aren't a ton of details, but the states (districts) don't have names, just numbers. If we had to guess, Katniss lives in future Pennsylvania coal-mining country, aka, District 12. The above-mentioned totalitarian government exacts control over the states by having mandatory annual battles between children from each district. Killing kids is a no-no, which is why Spielberg always puts them in near-mortal danger, so when The Hunger Games Capitol government makes kids kill other kids, shit gets downright Japanese gross-out brutal.

These Hunger Games are the most popular thing on TV, which is a tar-black heroine caliber of morbid, and even more sickening is the huge American Idol vibe running beneath the competition. You need sponsors and support from the crowd to get supplies dropped in, so you have to be charismatic to get better survival tools. This is a brilliant plot device that in the most perverted way possible, forces the kids competing, Katniss especially, to come out of their shells and grow up a little bit. . .

. . .And to learn how to shoot a boy's throat out at point-blank range with the ol' compound bow.

It's during the sequence where they're prepping for games etiquette that it all gets interesting. We were nearly blackout drunk at a bus-stop in South Boston reading this part and we still remembered it, so listen the fuck up when we say this shit is good! Training sequences are great world-building moments. If done well, they make the reader giddy -- "What? They're going to have to crush each others heads with massive stones? They're going to have to become corporate whores to earn supply-drops during the event? That one girl weighs approximately 40 lbs., and can jump across tree branches like a squirrel? Can't wait. Lead on, Hunger Games." The press covers all of the competitors' prep work too, so the kids are getting total exposure to the pageantry of a competition that will end with all but one of them dead. So don't make any friends. Haha! Just like high school! Except with quicker, less heart-wrenching death, decades later, due to a Xanax overdose. . .

The shades of American Idol, and reality TV in general, pop up elsewhere too. Some of the kids from the other districts are raised from birth to be selected for the competition, pampered, and given idiotic names like "Glimmer" -- a certain nod to the half-human, half-stripper names that people in the south give their kids, like Amber or Chastity, or perhaps a reference to the dickish names east-coast WASPs give their kids (seriously, we were told this past weekend that a couple had just named their child "Crew" (we asked if it was spelled "Crüe" (it wasn't))). With this in mind, we realized that this wasn't a simple young-adult novel. It was a smarter than that. It was meaner than that.

Want to know what happens when the games start? Exactly what you expect. It's children murdering children, and we're inside the mind of a very scared, but quite capable, 14 year-old murderess in-training. She knows she could physically kill the competition with her bow skills, given the chance, but she is, again, a 14 year-old girl that loves her little sister from future-Pennsylvania coal mining country. There's going to be conflict. Who do we root for? We root for Katniss. What a stupid name though. 

Here is where the "woman-writing-a-woman" shines. Did we mention that The Hunger Games was written by a woman? Let's check back up top. Wow, no, we never actually said it during our women-writers' pep-talk. Huh. Whatever. It'd be fucked up if a guy wrote a book from the first-person present-tense about a 14 year-old girl. Or if a woman wrote a book about the awkward pre-pubescent years of a young boy wizard going to school in Scotland.

Back on the topic of rooting for Katniss, we don't care if you're male or female, we are all instinctively bound to cheer for the girl that you know is capable, if she can just summon the guts to compete, and there's nobody better at getting into the scariest brain-corners of a non-combative huntress than a sardonic American woman writer. Katniss cowers on occasion. We all would. She isn't saved by a man or by a more reckless friend. Actually, she is, once or twice, but she also saves the day a bunch of times on her own too, and that's all the better. Friends saving each others lives is vital to building likable characters in adventure stories, which we talked about in Princess Mononoke, and it holds true here. It's all of these gender-neutral "fuck-yeah!" moments that make The Hunger Games great.

Read it. The heroine is a real girl. You get scared with her, you share triumph with her. The world is a dark realization of America's obsession with competition and death. It's light on futura-slang but it's not pretentious and it's easy to read. It wants to be read by a lot of people and yet it's almost written with modesty and humility. No snarky rebel is trotted out at the beginning, clicking through her iPod, hating on girls prettier than her, pining after boys -- nope, just a farmgirl with a compound bow. A farmgirl with a compound bow on a mission to kill teenagers on a reality TV show run by a totalitarian government in the not-too distant future wilderness.

* * *

(out of 4)

Recommended related reading:

[Shakespeare In Love | * * ½] by Ghost Little

[Paradise Lost | * * * *] by Ghost Little and Doberman

[Jane Eyre (2011) | * * *] by Ghost Little

[FULL REVIEW ARCHIVE]

-- Ghost Little and Doberman

on Twitter | @GhostLittle_WTF

#17 -- "The Alchemist" Reviewed | * * * *

"Something even better than value."

For a while, we were wondering what all the fuss was about with The Alchemist. We read it years ago, so the fact that these details come straight from memory are a testament to how sticky these concepts are for us. It's not that long of a book and it's written. . . poorly isn't the right word. "Simply," is the right word. It is "simply" written. It's a vivid vehicle for a concept, not a style.  

We don't mean that we went into it to see what all the fuss was about -- we mean we went into it looking for answers. About what precisely, we weren't sure. Our familiarity with alchemy is limited to Fullmetal Alchemist, a fantastic TV show. It's only 52 episodes, detailing the concepts of loss, value, exchange, and circularity, featuring the travels of two brothers across a weird, oddly-interpreted version of early-1930's Europe. Short version, the brothers' mother dies, their father is estranged, the brothers attempt to revive her with alchemy, a practice identified as science, but contains more than two-scoops of juicy mysticism too. The boys wrongly assume their mother's dead human body can be resurrected by transfusing the elemental components of a person -- hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, literal elements and such -- thus remaking her. "Transfusion" is the valuable word in the previous sentence.

Transfusion, in the alchemic sense, is taking something and turning it into something else of equal value. This time, "value" is the valuable word in the previous sentence. When you have something of value, what gives it that value? There are only two answers: "you" and "not-you."

See, what The Alchemist does is explain value, and it does so with grace and quickness. You are permitted to place value upon certain things, but not all things. That's just life. That's the way the world works. The boy in the book -- who we don't believe is ever really properly named, and fucking whatever if he is, it's not like people make puns about it that are pivotal to the plot -- has a herd of sheep at the start of the story. They have a tangible worth. He could sell them to buy a new book to read. He could use the book as a pillow while he travels. He could keep traveling happily if he's rested. He understands the value of the things he posses. He values his life, yet he hasn't learned to value his existence. 

His soul is short-sighted. A short-sighted soul is not as valuable to the world. The world wants every soul to be valuable, to be enriched and full of experience, which is part of the Gaia Theory we touched on during the Princess Mononoke review. As souls travel through the world, without realizing it, they are contributing to the growing strength of other souls. A moment very late in the book emphasizes this point, that we don't realize how far our actions reach. They don't just touch immediate lives, no, these actions can sometimes lie dormant for generations. A character remarks that there was once a man whose ancient poetry was lost for centuries, considered inferior to his brother's poetry at the time of its writing. Centuries later, that lost poetry was found, revered, and caused a revolution of goodness. This is an example of human energy's reach and how it can extend across the epochs. The universe wants human souls to grow strong and to win. A soul striding towards its destiny casts resonance onto others, which manifests in the form of "beginner's luck" -- that luck brings confidence and the confidence brings inspiration. That's how it works. That dose of beginner's luck will in turn propel that lucky soul in the direction of its own destiny, the correct direction marked by the appearance of omens. Understanding this Algorithm Of Spirits (we just made that up) is how a person grows. 

At first, the boy's understanding of the world is confined to his current contentment, his sheep, the books he loves and trades, and a girl he spoke to once with raven-black hair. Again, names are never really important. The boy is approaching her village and hopes to see her. When he is in the village, he is approached by a king disguised as a beggar. The king explains that the boy should go to the Pyramids and find the treasure buried there. Uh, okay. The boy is in Spain, the Pyramids are in Egypt. Fun fact, the boy doesn't understand just how far Egypt is. Roadtrip? 

Now the boy has to extend himself or wallow in complacency. That's a heavy moral for just a kid with a flock of sheep and a crush on a local girl. Unsurprisingly, he doesn't handle the advice very well (or does he?). 

What he grows to learn is that he can always go back. He will always know how to be a shepherd, so even when he is mugged and left on the wrong side of the Gibraltar a few pages later, he learns to handle his shit. He gets a job polishing glass ornaments for a man that doesn't like his own life all that much. What follows is the most thrilling vignette about polishing glass ornaments ever put to paper. The boy realizes he isn't going anywhere soon and his job is decent enough that he's at least sort of happy. While doing this, saving money, talking with the glass seller, he really gets to thinking. He thinks slowly about where he is, what he's learning, and focusing on the more immediate things in life. Weeks and months go by. His enthusiasm to speed up his return to his sheep makes him think outside the box, coming up with ideas on how to sell the glass ornaments better -- serving tea in them, selling them outdoors, drawing in patrons. This has the intended effect. 

He realizes that even though he can always go back to his sheep, he suddenly has a new skill he can always go back to in glass selling. What else might he learn if he takes another step? Who knew he could make so much good out of a seemingly bad situation. Take another step, boy. And what has he truly lost in spending time learning this skill? Time? Time that would've been spent on indifferent contentment herding sheep. Which experience would you prefer? If this time working with the glass seller had yielded no good returns, he could always go back to the sheep. But that isn't the case! No, this is getting exciting. 

Into the desert. Travel with the caravan. Onward to the Oasis. To Fatima. 

Fatima is love at first sight. Literally sight, not words. There is no getting to know you, no "meet-cute." The boy goes in for the kill because he knows all kinds of unusual weirdness and strange circumstances have brought him to this continent with these experiences with this band of men at this time in this state of mind and Beautiful Fatima was there right then. He tells her he loves her. Jesus, dude. What if she said no, or if she had a boyfriend? 

Well, logically, he can always go back to the raven-haired girl in Spain. But he's so fucking full of confidence, the boy is a human buzzsaw. #Winning. He just starts knowing shit is true. He's listening to the Soul of the World. He's able to resist fear with training, and if nothing else, isn't that a great lesson to be learned? He trusts instinct and he acts on it -- not lying to yourself, not being divided internally, we tell you, is an intense, liberating feeling. Things really start to get interesting. 

He meets the Alchemist and tells Fatima he has to keep looking for the treasure at the pyramids. Amazed, yet understanding of a man's need to grow, she tells him to go, knowing he'll come back because. . . because. . . he's the man at this point. In the best way possible, he's the man. He's tested, yes, he's betrayed, threatened with death, but always, he's just in the moment. Yeah, he might die, but he's going to die with his boots on and with love in his heart. At least he didn't die in a cubicle.

The question: is he diluted? Normally, we'd say yes. But the kid has got massive onions to come this far. He's fearless in a noble pursuit, which downplays the possibility of delusion.

Not an actual quote: "Baby, I love you. I have to leave for a while though. This orphanage / righteous rebellion / ancient treasure ain't gonna save itself. I'll come back as soon as I can." That's the truth. And holy shit does the truth hit with crunchy impact.

He's the hero you normally wouldn't believe in because he becomes such a White Knight. It's the fact that we were given the "before and after" shots that we realize how he was made into the zen-ified, monogamous, desert badass. He's the guy we hear about at high school reunions that make us scratch our heads and go "whoa, he refused how many awards?" And that's the point -- that's the resonance! It twinges our can-do attitude for just a second, nipping us just a bit to maybe risk something, to step out of line, to pursue what we consider -- and feel deeply -- to be destiny. What's better than deciding our fates, knowing our fates, seeing that it's good, and then growing as people further than we ever thought possible, finally taking what it was we wanted so badly. And what happens if that wasn't destiny? Well, ideally, you've grown, changed, gotten better. If not, you can always go back to your sheep, man. That's something better than somebody else slapping a value on what you've done. It's something even better than value. Because you made it that way through an assemblage of intangible experiences known only to you, ones that make you who you are in this moment, and in the unknown moments to follow. 

You kick your feet up on your desk. The air conditioner is a little bit colder than you remember. Your chair is a little bigger than you remember. The lighting in the room seems different. Want to try again? Want to walk at destiny? Think you can? You know you can.

* * * *

(out of 4)

Recommended related reading:

[Paradise Lost  |  * * * *] by Ghost Little and Doberman

[The Hunger Games  |  * * *] by Ghost Little and Doberman

[FULL REVIEW ARCHIVE]

 

-- Ghost Little and Doberman

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF