Dark Matter (Season 1 = 2024, Apple TV, Joel Edgerton, Jennifer Connely, Alice Brage)

 This is just a brief post because, when looking through the most recent posts for something, I realized I had not gotten this one in. Dark Matter is a great show. For one, I love the adaptation of The Odyssey, especially the ingenious way to work in the struggle against the suitors upon reaching home: all the other Jason's who made it back. 

 What I want to mention briefly for this post is another subtle but brilliant application of Schrödinger's cat. The question bugged me at first: all of these Jasons are by necessity versions of Jason #1 who began in the Jason-1 world; so what makes the one who finally winds up with her THE Jason # 1? We don't see necessarily that the Jason smoking the cigar in the diner is the one we have been following the whole show, but even if we assume that, who says that the Jason we have followed the whole time is THE Jason #1? Any of the Jason's who entered that box and came back in world #1 have the right to be called THE Jason #1, unless you are making some point about observation being a determining factor, which is a known topic in probability calculus (the experiment of three doors, choose one but don't open yet, the host opens one of the other two that does not have the prize, then are your odds better sticking with your original choice or changing to the other door, or the same either way? Statistics methods say to change, and some philosophical arguments have followed with theories that the act of observation is a determining factor). But that's not really the kind of thing going on in this series.

 This series is built around the Schrödinger's-cat thought experiment. And this is the real brilliant application, and one that could be easily missed. Not only are we not justified in assuming the one we have followed is the real Jason #1, but he actually isn't YET, just as the cat is not actually alive or dead until you open the box and see. In the case of the cat, I guess you could say observation does play a role, but not the role in the example of the doors, and more importantly, this is where the analogy between the cat and the show gets shaky, but we can accept it as (1) valid for an application to vary for the sake of artistic license, an idea that itself rests more importantly on a principle that (2) analogies always break down, otherwise they would be identities (in fact, along the lines of Paul Riceour's theory of metaphor that it is the places where elements of the metaphorical situation we thought would not carry over in the analogy now, by the very metaphorical operation itself, demand we do carry them over that are the places where the metaphor generates new meaning in the form of new revelations of truth, I would note that these places where analogies break down [or even material discrepancies; see my thoughts on the magically appearing 14 feet in the graveyard in Goblet of Fire in another post] are key places to look for core meanings; the discrepancies are actual signals for good places to look).  . . . Here in the show, the observation is the immediate cause (or here, Daniela's acceptance of a particular observation as the truth), which in the doors example and the cat example (to a lesser degree)  would remain somebody putting the prize behind one of the doors or the poison in with the cat. 

It's the fact that he reaches her first and in first to convince her of his being Jason #1 that actually MAKES him Jason #1. One could sort of make an argument that, in order to be Jason #1, he has to have had the experiences of our Jason #1 in letting Amanda go, but then all the other Jasons lost her as well, so maybe you would have to say that loosing her was the criteria for making it back to world #1 but having done it by choice is the criteria for actually being Jason #1, and I have to admit some valid observation of artistic theme-work there, especially when we take into account that the loss itself has to be a criterion even within the mechanics, because she is no longer a factor at all in his mind-world that determines his intention (even when Jason #2 abandons Ryan, we have to say that it is not the actual happiness of that world that determines them going there, but rather Jason #2's subjective understanding of what would make Ryan happy . . . and given what he is doing, it's a viable argument to say that he misunderstands what truly makes any human being happy), from which one might say that the will to let go of her is necessary for the mechanics of having the right mind to be Jason #1. But it still remains that the criterion of loss would be what is sufficient to get the others back to the right world. The only theory that truly satisfies the mechanics of the cat is the theory that he isn't the one until he is the one, until Daniela accepts him as the one. (This is a different matter from that above of adaptation varying from the original so as not to be an identity; here, the mechanics remains pretty important within the construct's established rules, unlike the issue of causation above, although I still would say that the variances are advantaged loci to examine for revelation of new truths.)

Indiana Jones Films Ranking

This is from a comments thread of a post I made on FB, in which my brother commented, and the final reply of which turned into a substantial exposition of my thinking on the things.

[Original Post] 

 I am here to declare what to some will be abominable heresy: Raiders, Dial, Skull, Crusade, Temple (that order)

[Brother's Comment] 

 Absolutely agree… abominable heresy

 [First Reply]

 Ha ha . . . What would be your order? I can forgive anything other than a change in first position.

[Brother's Reply] 

 

I actually don’t have a strong opinion on the order, but I recognize that putting both Skull and Dial before Crusade and Temple is a controversial move. I’d go Raiders/Crusade tie, Skull, Dial, Temple.

If it comes down to it, I would put Raiders before Crusade because of Marion Ravenwood. That’s also why Skull ranks so high.

Temple is last because it really didn’t age well. And what I do like about it probably has more to do with John Williams.

[Final Reply]

 My main criteria is female lead, and then probably place, and then probably object . . . although I have to say that the last plays a larger role for me than it would for many and comes from a different place of thinking about what makes narratives good, and a bit of esoteric content knowledge.

I'm not much of a Mads Mikkelsen fan, but Waller-Bridges really surprised me as a strong lead in Dial, really strong, and I thought it an unexpected but well-done move to replace the slot with daughter-type rather than lover. As with you, Marion is what put Skull up higher for me, and I loved her in it, but it wasn't as strong as in Raiders or as Waller-Bridges in Dial; Blanchet was good as maniacal villain but being female is only accidental to her role (some good flavoring to it, but not central), and she could not really best either of the other two in these films anyway, not for the kind of female-lead role these films do.

Then we come to Crusade, but I have to do it by way of the undeniable bottom of the barrel, Temple. For a long time I was "The original Trilogy is so classic, untouchable." Then I got the DVD set in grad school when Hollywood was catching up with the home-media tech advancements and all the old trilogies and other sets were coming out, and I re-watched Temple for the first time in decades . . . not good. I still liked Short Round, but the shallow blond celebrity just made the bottom drop out of any character dynamics, meaning fun character play, not just "drama" (*head and voice dropping in high Shakespearean tragedy mode*).

And then this is where object and place start to come in. India is fine, but the Raj is so far removed from modern popular knowledge of the times (if you're doing social-justice criticism, yeah, do India under the Raj, but that's not this) that they had to go with things like a cartoonish version of the Thugee cult. Other than that, the landscape is a lot more just like the villain, kind of generic oogie-boogie, and the stones as objects are just kind of blah at best.

So, we come to Crusade, where the object of the Grail is very, very high theme-object real estate, not just for Judeo-Christian tradition in general, and not even just as making a Judeo-to-Christian pair of bookends, each sort of as top contender to represent its own domain . . . but rather, there are specific, actual textual instances in which the two act as ciphers for each other in one direction or the other (debated: does the Grail code the Ark to hide it in a Dan Brown sort of way [Graham Hancock's take in his The Sign and the Seal] or does the Grail fulfill and supersede the Ark in a religio-cultural reading?) SO . . . all of that seems like it would put Crusade up behind Raiders for me as the great classic pairing above all else (but, I must insist, Raiders always first . . . too classic in both place and object to beat, and then the female lead that set the standard), and so it did until Dial came out and I realized the impact of the strong female lead . . . and the blond hottie German officer that father and son both bang is far from it. Not that you have to have some super intense dramatic or self-sacrificing heroine role, as these are really swashbucklers at the end of the day, but you can do it with more interesting characters or less, and she is pretty far down that ranking, although not as bad as in Temple.

I'm not a detractor from Connery, but I'm also not any kind of particular fan, so he has zero impact on the rating at best. But, I have to say, and I can't say it too strongly because I can't really put my finger on it in detail, but the "I'm as human as the next man," and "Dad, I WAS the next man" that now makes me go "Woof!" was the kind of thing that seems practically written with Connery in mind.

So, on place and object: Egypt and the Ark are unbeatable (even the anonymous island is really just an extension of Egypt in how it presents in the film). The Ark is even better value as far as mystique, with all that has been done on the Grail even just in cinema. The places in Dial may seem not that strong for mystique, but they do have distinctive swashbuckling value, each with its own flavor for it: New York, Morocco, and Greece. They even got a bit of the flavor of the European-tight-street car chase (most strongly seen in things like the Bourne series) into the mix, but using Greece and the little scooters rather than sleek/gritty cities like Prague etc and cars. South America, for Skull, actually has its own sort of grip in modern historical imagination, with the political situations there that imbue the dense and sticky landscape with a danger beyond the snakes and spiders. After that, it's very weak sauce: Crusade has a cliched Europe-and-North-Africa thing, and I have already mentioned the faults with Temple on this point.

Specifically on object as value for a basic project of, really, turning cultural tradition into adventure, I used to be of the mind that Ark-Grail could simply not be beaten, especially when that is one place where Skull undeniably falls short (and we shall not mention the stones of Temple again). But the dial changed my thinking on that, but as I say, that has some to do with recent readings that have greatly informed my thinking on the development of the shape of thinking, or what Owen Barfield calls the "evolution of consciousness." Barfield was the fourth of the "Inklings," and largely over-looked by those who are into reading them. His main works of note are esoteric philosophy/psychology rather than engaging fiction. He breaks the history human consciousness/thinking into two major stands: the older mystical "original participation" (his key coined term) of "pantheistic" cultures (for lack of a better word, since the very idea of "theism" comes from the other strand), and the "alpha thinking" of objectivity (divide between subject and object rather than participation), which finds its clearest form in science, and its radical form in science since the scientific revolution. For this latter (alpha thinking), he posits two starting points, one of them in the train of religion and the other in the train of broader natural philosophy (the ancient world's version of science): Moses and Pythagoras. The latter is most prominent in this regard in his concept of the "music of the spheres" as the relationship between mathematical precision and the messiness of the natural world . . . and he's in the same set of thinkers known for those same things as Archimedes, our endearing little fellow from Dial.

Obviously, on this esoteric uber-nerd level, Moses and Pythagoras give me Raiders and Dial as the brilliant pair rather than Raiders and Crusade. But even without going to that realm, there is something about the idea of Greece as the birthplace of so much in human culture. Archimedes is known more for a focus on immediate physical observation (than is Pythagoras), at least in the instance from which most people know him who do, shouting "Eureka!" and running out of the house and down the street naked when he discovered water displacement as a way to determine volume and density. So you have this sort of air of the beginnings of Western sciences of observing the physical world and learning how to do shit with it with greater precision and thus power.

Rifts in the space-time continuum is in the realm of fantasy, but then so is some presence being still in the Ark that comes out in the form of screaming witchy wraiths that burn peoples' eyes out. My point with the object is what place it holds in imagination applied to "history" of how humans "learned shit" or experienced. The Ark has this great mystique from the borderlands between the Judeo-Christian tradition and "paganism" or "pantheism" or whatever was back past it that it stood out against, and Greek thought is that borderland between our "science" and whatever oogery-boogery thinking was back behind it, where "medicine" was pushing a hot rock down somebody's throat to determine whether their ailment was a bogey spirit that would kill the tribe if you didn't throw them in a deep chasm or some trope like that.

But as I say, even that is a bit more on the esoteric side, and even any discussion of object at all kind of is, over against talking about certain types of characters and better- or worse-used swashbuckling elements and settings.

I really need to copy this over onto the blog I use for collecting my ideas, just someplace to have them out of my head. When I do long comments like this, it's in part to keep my composition muscles in shape (trying to choose good words and phrasings more on the fly to have those actions down better when examining other people's writing when editing), but it also does represent some of how I think about different instances of literature etc.

Severence Reveiw (copy from FB post I did on Colbert spoof short---see bottom for link)

 

See the bottom for link to Colbert spoof; and here is my one-liner about that: "As a new fan just watching season 1 recently, I must say this is hilarious, and awesome they got actual cast."

 

Now on to the content actually reviewing the show:

 

I'm very glad I didn't check it out until right before season 2 hits so I didn't have to jones for two years (but this is going to be murder on me having to do the waiting for a week for each new episode again).

It was a bit slow moving at first, but still pretty much doing its job adequately of a dystopian, funky setting, so it was "ok, this could go someplace good or it could fizzle" . . . and then it kept being interesting (and gripping character, especially Helly doing what she does; I'm no fine analyst of acting, but I thought she was great, subtle but tense, especially when she says goodbye to Dylan . . . and Dylan being the one to sacrifice what he most of all knew the psychological pull of from being the only one to have experienced it), and then that ending stuck the landing hard: perfect tension build jumping between especially the three scenarios of innie Mark in his outie world, same for Helly (and the reveal of that fact. . . . wow), and Dylan not sure how long he can hold the connection) (but Irving's more character-driven investigation is gripping on its own grounds), and then those two big lines of impact in the outie world right at the cut to black, and Irving, even though not saying anything, just that out in the cold, desperately banging on the door trying to find personal connection before the mechanical connection breaks.

And theme . . . balls to the wall. Especially if the symbolism they intend is what I read in it (I think it can be read this way legitimately either way, even if they have some other symbolic connection in mind that also works well just more satisfying if they did intend my reading too] . . . only a scientismist ever says that only one reading can be true because only one can be factual [for those Christians of an intellectually self-absorbed stripe who think that's just me being a snotty sophist, go read C. S. Lewis's "Myth Become Fact" essay---it's in either the God in the Dock collection or the Christian Reflections collection---hopefully coming from one of your icons rather than a heathen like myself will have some impact).

My reading of the theme is: The super whiteness is pretty dominant, so it is a white world doing something to itself. What is it doing to itself? It is making identities that it then abuses. One of the sort of eye-opening moments for me in college as a lit major was in a class on 20th-century American novel, reading Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, with a guy I got to know who had transferred in from SRU as also a phil/lit double major (sorry GCC, but some of your lit majors are pretty weak sauce, and Dan and I used to have our own conversation before and after class but not really find a way in to class discussion, and despaired of trying . . . and Sorry Dr Stansbury, I know it wasn't your fault things can be so banal at GCC), and who had had a bit more existentialist philosophy than I, and could explain how the novel fit existentialist tropes, and especially the idea of existence before essence, which then hit me: there is no identity that fits this better than the African American identity: disconnected from African roots and not allowed to make the connections of a full "American," and so no concrete cultural characteristics handed down, and yet still a distinct ethnic/cultural identity, and existence but with no positive essence other than slave.

But, are the innies symbolic only of the African American identity? No. there are two bereft children of the structural and economic racism in the origins of the US: the African American and the poor white. And remember, the innies are the same brain apparatus and mental capacities of the outies; not just the same level, but actually really the same material person-hood, identical The poor white is ostensibly the same race as the rich white, but also abused and abandoned, not to the level of African Americans, but still abused (and then convinced by those same white overlords that the raw deal is from the "liberals" and minorities and efforts to improve the situation for minorities . . . I have been saddened to hear young adults parrot what they have been handed by biased "teachers" about how some of the states were treated very badly in the Reconstruction era: the truth is that the poor whites got a very raw deal; plantation owners got reimbursed for "property" loss, including losing slaves as property to abolition).

Caveats:
(1) I'm not saying African Americans have remained where white European "christians" put them. From the beginning there have been very resourceful people who have learned a lot of skill and then escaped and been able to use it well to effectively make their way in the world of free Americans, or been especially great orators for their people, like Frederich Douglas. But it was starting from a brutally destitute place, not only materially but also psychologically as regards cultural identity.
(2) There are those who criticize ANY discussion of existentialist theme as anything other than completely evil, and so would write me off for using "existence before essence" (most prominently formulated by Jean Paul Sartre, if not the founder of existentialism named such then at least its first president). And I agree in belief in God and that creatures have an essence given by God before being brought into existence, there from the very first instance of existence, and that creatures are brought into existence AS an instance of that essence. But, if "existence before essence" is such an evil idea as they claim, and yet some people (white , European "christians") brought into being a situation and an instance that it works so well to describe . . . then how evil must those people be who made that situation?

Colbert link

Davita's Harp (Song)

 I have called this one "Davita;s Harp" after the novel of the same name by Chaim Potok because that is where the story comes from that is the base of the song. In that novel, young Ilana Davita Chandal is the daughter of a mother who grew up Jewish and a father who grew up Christian, both now active members of the communist party in America (as are the majority  of Potok's novels, Davita's Harp is set in Brooklyn in the time period when Potok himself was growing up there in an Orthodox Jewish family). Her father is a journalist and dies in the 1937 bombing of Guarnica while reporting on the Spanish Civil War (while trying to save a nun). Jacob Daw is a friend of the family and fellow member of the communist party, whom Davita calls "Uncle." Daw is a story-teller and writer, and after her father's death, to try to help cope, he tells her the story of a little bird who saw all the suffering in the world, but also saw that there is a very beautiful music from somewhere unknown but its beauty distracts many from seeing all that is wrong in the violence and destruction. So the bird set out to find the source of the music to ask it to please stop or at least pause so that people will not be distracted from the violence and see the need to remedy it and do so. But after flying the world over and not finding the source, the little bird has come back to live in the door harp in Davita's home, and every time she hears the door harp ring, it is that little bird singing a little of its own song that hopefully comforts her because the bird also saw all the violence and tried to help stop it (I think maybe emblematic of her father)

I usually would not straight out take a title like this from a novel as title of a song, but I pretty much carry that story over directly, so it seems that is the only accurate and fair title. What I hope is the new and further element is the participation (at first with the hearer and then with the bird) as a vehicle to talk about music as healing and the deep need for that, the need to let go and find peace, but also the interplay between that and the need to not tune out from seeing the troubles and trying to do what one can to help. Some of that is fleshing out the tiring travels (losing good friends), while some of it has hat-tips, especially to Bob Dylan, to whom I had been listening A LOT when the song first popped into my head decades ago, and just resurfaced recently out of the blue, and only the memory of the lines about the poor and the luck and the weather and cash stashed in aback bedroom dresser; the chords were not hard to remember from the melody, as they're pretty simple; I tend to think that the first verse was all I had done before losing train of thought on it, and so the first line about the powerful and  rest has been written fresh recently (the line about the powerful contains one of the hat tips to Dylan, which is "cold iron fetters" evoking his song "Cold Irons Bound" from the Time Out of Mind album, originally a kind of forlorn song of rejected love [you rejected me, now I'm "20 miles outside of town in cold irons bound"] but then given a new social-justice twist when used over for the closing mayhem in the film Masked and Anonymous; the other hat-tip is the line of along the way losing friends, which evokes the line in "Bob Dylan's Dream" from the Free-wheeling album, his line that "I dreamed a dream that made me sad, concerning myself, and the first few friends I had"). Other parts of it play off the imagery from the novel and the interior psychological word, a world within and a world without mirroring each other as the things the music must soothe. On the level of the world outside, there is bombing imagery akin to movie scenes of bombings because the Guarnica bombing was horrific (see Picasso's painting), and on the interior level, the elements used also sum up interior psychological struggle, like a person with anxiety or phobia feeling shell-shocked as if they just ran through a mine field in situations where others there didn't realize the situation was so harrowing to the person. The soot in the eyes is mainly the exterior bomb imagery, but I guess could be loosely tied to the idea of tears. The blood in the ears is more clearly both worlds: the ear damage you see in bombing scenes (blood trickles from ears) but also the blood pounding in the ears from anger or anxiety. Likewise, the noise in the mind can be the ringing in the ears from a bomb or grenade and the jumbled perception and panic of somebody concussed, but also, on the interior plane, something like the racing thoughts of hypomanic episode.

So this song mainly works through an idea of participation in that story (with some new twists, like in the last verse, the song to be sung from the harp is not simply soothing, or the loss of friends across a course of life, which is also why the old are sad--not saying that all the elderly are sad and depressed, but that if one lives that long, one has said a lot of goodbyes as family and friends die), with some further detailing of some aspects (the idea of a bombing) and a few hat-tips to especially Dylan and the albums I was listening to a lot at the time the song first popped into my head (Time Out of Mind and Free-wheelin' . . . and the song "Masters of War" on the latter definitely shares a theme), all in a project of looking at the interplay or back and forth (do we ever find "balance"? would we really want something as static as what people usually look for when they talk about "balance"?) between the need for healing through the mystical thing that is music and the need to try to help things getting better, which means a certain amount of looking at the ugliness that needs healing.

There is also a little hidden Greek-nerd word play in there being rivers from the music and that paired off against "remembering truth." The Greek Word for "truth" is alehtia, which is made from the alpha privative (atheism vs theism, amoral vs. moral, agnostic vs. gnostic) being put on the front of Lethe, which is the name of the river in Greek mythology into which one can be dipped and have memory washed away (eternal sunshine of the spotless mind kind of thing), and so truth is a not forgetting . . . and in fact, for Socrates, or at least Plato's Socrates, learning and seeing truth is precisely an act of remembering it from when one knew it before birth).

In case I bunged up any lyrics or slur them any, the lyrics are:

Verse 1

Well, the powerful, they rule with their cold iron fetters

And the poor they are suffering underneath their oppressors

And me, I get by on my luck and the weather

And a bit of cash I got stashed in a back bedroom dresser

But I hear a little bird sing in that harp on the door

And I don’t think about these things any more

 

Verse 2

For her song is sweet, and washes soot from my eyes

and blood from my ears, and noise from my mind

From the hurt of our age that blinds all my sight

I need a rest for the peace to walk in the light

and clean my heart and feel it beating once more

and not have to think about these things anymore

 

Bridge 1

There’s a music in the world, that is deep and serene

We need its rivers in our souls to heal our bad dreams

But we also need silence, to open our sight

And remember truth and change the things that ain’t right

Verse 3

So, like that little bird, I flew far and wide

To find the music powers abuse to hide the hard sights

And to ask it to pause, so we can open our eyes

but the source of that song I never could find

Now like that little bird in the harp on the door

I’m too tired to think about these things anymore

 

Bridge 2

For my journey was long, and my travels were sad

And along the way I lost the few good friends I had

They fell too earth tired, before we reached home

And when I flew through that door, I was singing alone

Verse 4

Now like that little bird, with her song sad and sweet

I look from my harp, on the door to the street

and watch passers by, the good and the bad,

The young who are happy, and the old who are sad

And I don’t howl like the wind, but I still won’t ignore

The sights we hide from our eyes, and lock out with doors

And like that little bird, I still hope for much more,

That someday, we won’t have to sing about these things anymore

 

 

Joker: Folie à Deux Review

 

I'm more and more convinced that there's an inability to grasp meaning in narratives that leaves modern critics clueless of how plot can depend on and be driven by theme (how form follows content), and really in how to think about theme. The evidence of which is that Joker II has only a 33% rating on RT, especially from critics saying the story doesn't go anywhere. The story was always about something most of them don't get (rather than whether he gets out and "wins" etc.): where will the people with psychological struggles wind up in the end? Will they simply suffer a materialist lex talionis? Will they escape and own being mad "heroes"? Will they be allowed to find some progress of healing in peace? Or will they be manipulated by those who romanticize and push the psychotic break and then toss them  away when they can't live up to the calling because they really do want rest from ills the manipulators would just use as fuel for the rockets they can't fuel themselves but can craft and control, and then will the ideological, dark-romanticist manipulators hijack the story when they (we, the bungled and the botched, to use Gilliam's paraphrase of Nietzsche) are spent and tossed, conscript it as an origin story in some sham mythology? (oh yea, almost forgot, from some of the theories that went around with the first film: will they be used as theory fodder by religious "insightful" gurus).

 

(And let us not forget the plan by some "christians" in America for the diagnosed: blame all of us [and probably infringe other of our rights on that basis] for gun violence that could have been avoided by sensible regulation that makes it harder for the few who have done it to get the guns to do it with in the first place.)

 

On another front: I wasn't sure what to expect of the whole "musical" thing, but I think it worked. Phillips is said to have "struggled" with calling it a musical, and I think that sums up the uniqueness of the use it makes of music. When *the actions accompanying the musical numbers* are so clearly NOT in the real world of the narrative, it can't really be a musical (when they sing Sunrise Sunset in Fiddler on the Roof, the singing is not how the things would have been said, but it really is a wedding scene in the material world of the narrative . . whereas there is no show stage where J and H have a Sonny-and-Cher style show . . . or in Fiddler when Tevye signs Tradition beginning walking down the road and then finishes it in his barn, even though in the real world of the narrative he would not be breaking a fourth wall or singing a performance number, he still does, in the real world of the narrative, walk down the road and put his horse in the stable in his barn and feed his chickens, whereas in Joker Arthur does not dance actually dance around the TV room in the prison in the real world of that narrative, he simply imagines it while staring blankly at the TV; actually, to a certain extent, the *song* there is more a part of real narrative by them showing he is imagining it, so it's in his head as a real place in the real world of the narrative---this means specifically the song, not the action . . . in Fiddler, while the action is really there, the song is not actually in the material-world narrative, on its page . . . but this starts to get a bit into the weeds of defining the genre of musical: Anna Kendrick is known for the Pitch Perfect films [which I have never seen, but I do like her in a certain kind of role, particularly the character type she played in The Accountant], and in an interview, she made the caveat that her Pitch Perfect films are not technically musicals because the characters know they are singing when they are, whereas in a musical, characters are not aware on the page that they are; I think there's a point there: definitely in Fiddler, they never know they are singing [with *maybe* the exception of Sabbath Prayer], likewise for Hello Dolly, but in Sound of Music, some of the times they don't know they are singing [e.g., A Few of My Favorite Things], but other times they do, like Edelweiss and the So Long, Farewell, both of those songs both when they are in the home and when they are on the festival stage), but the songs in J2 are definitely musical numbers for conveying particular theme material (not action-film-soundtrack uses of rock songs etc., or even the use of the marching band theme in the first film).

 

And beyond that . . . I like that it wraps out as its own thing but could also provide fodder if they want to, say, bring Gaga or another like her in as HQ in a sequel to the newest Batman (most probably another actress: given Gaga's comments on her focus in handling the music, in purposefully NOT singing as she has been professionally trained to do, but rather as a real untrained, rough and raw character would, I don't think she will be interested in pursuing the type of character there is in that kind of action movie, rather than this more crossover-genre film), . . . but it doesn't have to be more than the most basic fodder: you could bring in the new Harvery Dent and Joker (whether Joker is played by the guy here or the actor from The Batman, either way with the same story of hijacking the story of an Arthur) and the most basic physical fact but not need to have any more continuity than that with the two Todd Phillips films, and leave them to be their own unique cinematic project.

After the War (another song)

 sometime around 1994 to 1998 (second round of undergrad)

Some More Songs

 Since I taught my doggie a new trick ( = figured out how to record songs using a voice-recorder app on the phone and save in format I can embed here), I been messing around just sort of getting songs I wrote out there. The vocals may sound a bit out of breath, but then I am on only the second day of Paxlovid for having COVID right now (and while I stopped 5 years ago, there was still 30 years of smoking before that . . . but it's mainly the COVID that makes for the going out off-key so much in some places).

A Matter of Time 

(written sometime circa 1990 as freshman/sophomore in college)

One More Chance 

(written sometime 1994 through 1997 in second stint of college . . . this one has always been rough performance on guitar . . I can hear it much better in my head that I can do with my fingers on the neck, but there you have it anyway)

Roll On, Sister

(written sometime around maybe 1995; sometimes you keep a song around for one line in hopes you get around to bringing the rest of it up to that level from merely passable and predictable, and on this one it's "it was late November or a time of year I can't remember when you disappeared" . . . I don't think I ever got the rest of it beyond fairly common and predictable, but not too bad)

Wake Me

(written sometime 1994 through 1997 in second stint of college)