Contagion (flim; 4-25-2020 FB interchange turned into a review)

This post is saving a long comment that FB wouldn't let me post for length, but I had it penned and I would have put it up here anyway so that it doesn't get lost amid the many FB memes I post. I rewatched Contagion recently during lockdown and posted a link to youtube video of the musci and lyrics of U2's "All I Want Is You," which plays over the final scenes in the film, and what follows is an interchange between my friend Rob and myself about the film.

Me:
Can't stop listening to this song since I rewatched Contagion and the played it at the end over-top of Matt Damon's character setting up the prom dance for his daughter at home with the boyfriend who now has his inoculation bracelet, as Damon pauses looking at the pictures he found of his deceased wife ... they wrapped a lot up in that one scene about the struggle of being human.

Rob:
I agree. Those scenes were powerful n hopeful/nostalgic at the end of a pretty grim series of events!

Me:
Nostalgic but also, I thought, still painful and looking at character. I found the portrayal of Paltrow's character the most interesting on this watch. I think that one of the things that most drives Damon's character's reaction in finding the pics is the mystery of her doing what she was doing, because he works at being a good husband and father. And it's not really a moral or justice commentary on her action. I think it really is meant to be shown as a painful mystery. That doesn't necessarily negate any possibility of moral commentary being made on adultery, but the film is examining another point, or at least I think it is. I think that the whole way through, she has a kind of unfocused stare that bespeaks in modern life a quiet or masked desperation. I think that the whole way through her scenes, you see somebody who is not malicious, not saying things about what a loser her husband is, but somebody who is going through a lot of motions that your culture tells you you're supposed to go through when your company sends you on trips around the word: gambling at the casino, shaking hands with the chef, taking pictures with everybody, but always with this lack of focus that hints at wondering whether you're being a good "fulfilled" modern person, whether you're doing what you're "supposed" to do in these situations (I think you see that most in the blowing on the dice and things like that ... the "excitement" you're supposed to show when having fun in places like this, but always a little wondering whether you're getting it right) ... and then the same unfocused look (which Paltrow does well, and seems almost like a trademark of hers, just like everybody knows the pensive stare in the eyes of Harrison Ford that Abrams had to get him to break out of to do Han Solo again convincingly) and the same distant stare when she calls her old flame and the unsure "if that's a thing you would like me to do," that look of doing something because, well that's how things happen, right?, at least in all the modern stories you have been told. I think that what drives the final scene effectively is Damon's effort at rebuilding life for his daughter in the midst of the pain of the mystery of what happened with his wife (I've become a big fan of Damon's, he definitely has his stock characterness, but I find it pretty relatable, and what I really like is his choices of roles ... just recently rewatched Downsizing, which I think is an incredible commentary on the precarity and preciousness of life ... and rewatched Adjustment Bureau, which of course has the always-good Emily Blunt ... I think something about his sensibilities breaths some life into places you usually don't think about it too: I like SNL's political commentary and some of their individual players' characters, but there's also a good bit of stuff in which they get stale, and I noticed that, when Damon hosted, the whole thing felt fresher because some core human thing got injected through things like his Christmas skit with Cecily Strong and his being the finally revealed "Tommy" from the Weekend Update's recurring character "Angel, the girlfriend in every boxing movie" ... and the whole thing he has going with Jimmy Kimmel is among the most creative parodies on late night and has really had a staying power as a gag [although I didn't like the "who's the father?" one at all ... the topic was very morbid fascination]).

Rob: 
 I think u r correct in that the movie doesn’t really comment on g.p.’s character’s moral choices. I’m not sure if the influence of the modern world is the culprit behind her character’s actions. I really think it is more the case of a person putting their own desires over the commitments to others she had made. Good old sinful impulse at work there. When I was married, I was the stay at home husband taking care of young kids while my wife enjoyed a high profile job n travel n all that stuff. I think Damon’s character deserves better than what he got. In the midst of all the chaos, he remains true n steady, parenting the child he has left through the worst. Steady, faithful people aren’t often painted as heros, but that character is a hero to me! 

Me:
Oh, I definitely think he's a hero, and I definitely think he deserves better. And, as I say, I don't think seeing this other side precludes examining the story for whats there on a justice side for his character and maybe even a moral side for hers. But I think the commentary I'm thinking of on her is, I guess, not so much about whether the modern world is the influence that causes, but more about her as a sort of emblem or representative of humanity in the modern global world, which I mean in a little bit different way than metaphorical symbol but maybe still a little bit like it (I spent waaaaay too much time on metaphor theory in relation to other figurative language when doing comps). I think part of what the film examines is that, in our globalization, we are a bit in over our heads. We have ideas like "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" because we still think of the physical distance between us and Vegas like a safety buffer (ironically, while we keep it in mind in hoping it's a buffer, we have also become alienated somewhat from our own embodied nature through the speed of travel, it doesn't register with us that a thousand miles is a thousand miles because of how quickly we can cover it ... heaven help us if we ever find a way to make the Star Trek teleporter more than just fiction; even if the material side works, we're going to wind up the psychological version of Jeff Goldblum in The Fly), and THAT becomes sort of an "if you build it, they will come" in the form of "something should happen in Vegas that you would want to stay in Vegas" (I think this thing occurs on the consumer side that is a bit like the technological imperative, that we feel like, if something is potential in the package we paid for and we don't use it, we're somehow wasting it; I remember being on the BX 12 bus hearing a guy talking about sports on his cel phone loudly and thinking, you know, if we hadn't built the cel phone, we would have never thought there was a need to discuss sports scores right now on a crowded bus with a bunch of people also having conversations on their phones; we feel like, if we don't use up the airtime we paid for, then we overpaid), and we still sort of have these ideas of distances as buffers that we don't realize we have broken when we broke the barriers of getting ourselves there and back so quickly. We wanted to travel at jet speeds but thought that we were going to be the only ones who could or that we got to decide who else got to, as if we could put up a sign that said "no viruses allowed on this plane" and it would be obeyed, just like, once we could go to Vegas hundreds of miles away for a weekend, we thought that we could tell what happened in the weekend in Vegas to stay there (and there's a bit of social justice at play in this one ... if all the naughtiness that happens in Vegas stays there, then it's a pretty infectious place to live for those who can't leave Vegas because they live in the industry there, or on cruise lines, in both of which places promiscuity among personnel is supposedly rampant, and there I do think there is a bit more of a metaphor between the virus and lifestyles that sink in when people live in and services the zones where we think we get to go to have fun and then leave it there). I think maybe there is a bit of critique of not taking consequences into account (still one of my favorite lines, maybe in all of lit, at least for being both funny and very insightful, in one of the last two Tiffany Aching books in Terry Pratchett's disc world series, I think the last one, which makes it the last book in the whole series, actually published posthumously, when Tiffany's personal favorite excuse from the people she has to help, as their witch, out of the scrapes they get themselves into, is "I didn't know it would go boom," when it says "Goes Boom" in big letters on the side of the box it came in).

I think that one of the things that tipped me to thinking of the film Contagion like this is the abruptness of her death and the lack of exposition of any kind of interaction with MD;s character versus the amount of exposition you get through flashback. The process is sort of doing a character archeology in the same way the researchers are doing an archeology of the path of the virus's transmission. There I think there is a much more straight-up metaphorical relation: researching the virus is symbolic of trying to figure out the human behavior being interjected in flashbacks of her trip, trying to understand why we do the things we do. There's definitely a moral component and free will, but I think we also have a lot to learn about the psychological forces that impinge on it. The exposition of her character just seems too intensive to me and intensive beyond the issue of infidelity to be simply about that. It doesn't hold a real revelation placement, for one. You get pretty early on that she cheated, because the male voice on the phone mentions having sex recently and then she gets back to her house and it seems pretty obvious that it was not MD she had been talking to, if she is returning to him ... and then, just like that, she is dead, but then you have all this screen-time of her in the casino, making that the sort of setting that is important for some reason before you get the full researcher archeology of the timeline in which that is where it definitely started its spread (I think, along the lines of interpretation, that having so much time in the casino before you have the end-of-film revelation that that is where the spread started, happens not just so that you get this revelation feeling about the physical spread of the virus, but also so that the setting can saturate you brain a little bit and make you focus on her disposition there as a character exposition that works hand-in-hand with the revelations about the physical spread of the virus). And then, in that packed ending sequence, pretty much right alongside the final revelation scene of the bat dropping the stuff in the pig pen and her shaking the chef's hand, you get Damon's discovery of the collage of pictures on the camera as a last kind of emotional exposition in the midst of the trying to move forward and create a meaningful life experience for his daughter. I think that that is one of the things that really endeared me to the film on this watching, the layers of human issue and human experience in the midst of this pandemic. setting.

I think that one of the things that the social distancing in the present situation can do is to teach us to pause and think, take time to "be still" and, if not "know that I am God," at least reflect more on why we do the things we do, what ways of thinking we let in the door that make it easier or harder to have the presence of mind and the disposition to do the right thing. I don't think it is good for us to stay always like this because there is something quasi-holy in contact with other human beings, but sometimes we need to step out of being swept in the jet pace of the world we have created and realize that we might be bringing narratives on our travels with us that, in their impact on our disposition, will make it harder to be good (to answer that question so wonderfully put by the drunken angel singing a Lou Reed song in Wim Wenders's Far Away So Close, "why can't I be good?") , the same as we bring viruses on a plane without realizing it because we don't listen and take into account the fact that those kinds of things can be carried with you and can be spread "under the radar." I always like that moment at the end of Her when, after the OSes have departed, Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams are on the rooftop, forced to take a moment in the void left by the OS "relationships" to reexamine human relationship (I thought that film also had some strong exposition of the embodied nature of human existence and relation by contrasting it with the OS thinking ... I've thought for a while now that it's important to the understanding of the Incarnation to see that it's important that it says the Word became "flesh" [sarx] and not "body" [soma], I think of flesh as kind of the squishiness of human bodily experience, and while it's important that that is not the more sort of abstracted holistic concept of "soma," it does dovetail and mesh with that concept because, for that ancient mindset, body was not defined by extension in three dimensions [they did think about breath, height, and depth, but it was not what defined "body"], it was defined by relationality: the body is the way you relate to the soil through tilling it, to God or the gods through cultic acts, to your spouse by physical conjugal acts, to your kids through hugging them ... and the way we experience "body" is through the squishiness of "flesh" ... "Why had [Harry] never appreciated what a miracle he was, brain and nerve and bounding heart?" [Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 692).

OK, enough exposition lol ... but I will probably copy and paste this out to my blog. 

Numbers in Lord of the Rings

So, this is just a random thought I wanted to get out while it was fresh in my head today as it came about from listening to Return of the King in the car. I have this project piece that hopefully I get around to sometime in the not too distant future, but it won't be any time right soon. It will be a long piece, maybe the only real definitive thing I ever write about Tolkien's work. It will be about the "biblical mode" in his work, but it will be specifically stated as an interpretation, which is one way of approaching meaning in a text but not the only way and not a way that pins down THE meaning in a text, but that will be a lot of explaining of what is meant by "mode" and in what the "biblical mode" consists and the idea that the particular outflow of that means that a Christian meaning cannot obliterate the flavor from the other backgrounds on which Tolkien drew, cannot eclipse them, without cutting back on it's very own content (no time to elaborate, but in brief, grace does not obliterate nature; if the Christian source eclipses the others, then you're into bad allegory of the Bible rather than artistic subcreation) ... but that will all be a long story (hopefully I write it sometime before I grow old and die, as it will kind of encapsulate everything I have studied and cared to study across my life ... it won't define Tolkien's work, but it may well define the life of my mind over 25 years, from Tolkien, to biblical studies and theology).

But for here I just want to record a detail. I have mentioned in other posts and will use it for the once-and-future "Tolkien and the Biblical Mode" that Tolkien uses the number 40 as a cipher-like key to allude to a material source. Moria is 40 miles from east gate to west door, as stated by Gandalf. I believe Tolkien is borrowing from the book of Numbers, chapter 20. The people were in the wilderness for 40 years (that's actually the Hebrew name for the books, "In the Wilderness"; the Greek name in the Septuagint, Arithmoi, from which we get the English "arithmetic," refers to the two censuses taken, the first generation at the beginning of the book before they get banished to the wilderness for 40 years and not allowed in to the land and the second generation at the end of the 40 years; but the Hebrew name be-midbar means "in the wilderness" and refers to the 40 years themselves). There are a number of markers. First, there is an inclusio (sometimes called an envelope) consisting of an opening scene in which Gandalf is told to speak to the stone (door) but instead (among other things) strikes it with his staff in anger and a second scene in which he again strikes the rock (bridge) with his staff and forfeit his entry into Lorean, the golden land. When Moses struck the rock instead of speaking to it  as instructed in Numbers 20, he became symbolically connected with the first generation by suffering the same fate materially in that he was banned from entry into the land, just as the first generation was banned for failing to trust the two who said to trust the LORD for victory in Numbers 13 (hence the 40 years while the first generation reached retirement age and the second generation got old enough to be the main adults entering, led by Joshua). Another image hook is a first born son complaining "why did you bring is up here, to die in this desolate place?" Israel is called the first born son of the LORD and complains asking Moses why he brought them out of Egypt to die in the wilderness, and Boromir, a firstborn son, asks, if Gandalf didn't know the password, why did he bring them up to this desolate place.

Now, the thing with material like that and a forecast of an essay to be called "The Biblical Mode" is to clarify that I don't think he is doing allegories of Bible stories. Material from the Bible is only one among a number of sources from which he borrows. For him personally, obviously, the Bible is very important (interesting factoid: he did a translation of the book of Job for the Old Jerusalem Bible), and ultimately it's central to the faith that was for him the only reason really to do anything, in the end, but as far as the story of the LotR itself goes, the Bible is still only one among a number of sources from which he borrows to create his own unique story. In this case, he is building the character of a leader who is not perfect but is beloved and does manage to get something done even though he has to pay a price for his shortcomings. And the story of Moses is one model he uses to do that, although there are changes. For one, while Moses's striking the rock does identify him with the first generation, it doesn't provide them entry into the land, whereas Gandalf's sacrifice on the bridge does enable his friends to enter Lorien.

(As an example of not overdoing it on the connections, while I said above that Boromir is a firstborn like Israel, I don't think it goes much further than fleshing out that image of Numbers 20 here; I don't think he's an allegory of Israel.)

So, that was all build up to say that today I heard a second use of 40 in a key place and I think for a similar reason. When Frodo and Sam make it out of the tower past the watchers and begin their trek to Mount Doom, the text describes the mount as being 40 miles away. I have always thought that among other things, the via dolorosa was a model for the trek through Mordor, including the falls ... that line actually took my breath away on one reading; Tolkien ends a chapter masterfully for that when they finally get off the road and Sam finally gets them far enough away from it to be somewhat safe in a small crater and Frodo collapses in exhaustion, and the final line of the chapter is, "and there he lay, like a dead thing." I have to watch stepping on toes, but there is a definite birth canal imagery in emerging from the tunnel in Mordor, and especially if one recalls Tolkien's comments about Galadriel and the Blessed Mother, there is definite female and mother imagery going on, for which I take the main referent to be the image of being born into this mortal coil of Mordor, into the via dolorosa (to quote Randall Jarrell's "Death of a Ball Turret Gunner": "From my mother's sleep I fell into the State / And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze / six miles from earth. loosed from its dream of life / I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters / When I died they washed out the turret with a hose").  And if the Catholic Tradition sees the 40 days of Lent as mirroring Christs 40 day's in the desert, which itself is a callback to the 40 years in the wilderness for Israel, and as also the via dolorosa, the dolorous trek to the hill of the skull to die, it makes sense to use that number again as a motif for the trek through Mordor, the march with no expectation of return, across Gorgoroth to Golgotha, to the end of all things.

I also just wanted to note  another pairing that struck me (and part of this is the hope that writing about this will make it stick in my head better for when I go to the book club I love going to down at the Abbey in Lawrenceville section of PGH, in which we are now in Two Towers ... I always feel like I've been to the Green Dragon or the Prancing Pony after one of the meetings; I want to remember this pairing for when we get to this part). The trip through Mordor has a feel very similar to the trip through the forest to Crickhollow at the beginning of Fellowship, that line put well by (I think) Pippin (but maybe Merry): "short cuts make long delays." Tolkien is a master of that style of "interesting" detours you have to take in walking through the woods. In both cases there is a pronounced need to stay off the road, and there is even a mention made when entering Mordor of escaping a black rider in those earlier woods, because that is the song that Sam sings to get through the watchers and specifically because it reminded him of that escape from the rider in the woods.

And just to track another pairing, since I am on that subject (while I don't think Tolkien does chiastic ring composition, I am becoming more convinced that he uses inclusio structure on the level of the macro organization of the whole story ... maybe not planned from the beginning, especially if you read Shippey's wonderful telling of the birth of the LotR in Author of the Century, but still doing it fully aware by the end, and on this round, with some other recent learning under my belt even since returning from NYC and CLE, I am noticing it more on this reading ... I really am greatly inspired by this reading group, which is called "The Pittsburgh Inklings" ... and the Abbey is not a library reading room with meeting chairs or something along those lines; it's a bar/eatery that used to be a mortuary, and so it has all kinds of different seating, from the coffee shop and front bar back up around the loop to the back bar area, all dark wood interior, so it feels like being in a place like the Eagle and Child, and the big patio in warm weather, and not down at the ass-end of some super-mall parking area or manufactured "village" shopping area, but in a real city section, by all those tight streets and quaint ancient row houses of lower Lawrenceville with people walking by on the sidewalk outside ... I always try to exercise some in the day before going down, as their burger is delicious but I'm sure a lot of calories, and with the ever-changing import/craft selection on the taps, there's that too) ... anyway, the pairing is that I think the image of Gollum as almost an affectionate old Hobbit reaching out to touch sleeping Frodo gently near the end of Two Towers is meant to pair off against the flash of Bilbo as a greedy little monster in Fellowship.

Addendum: This was running through my head in bed after writing this: Randall Jarrell's "Death of a Ball Turret Gunner" actually has some strong imagery resonances, such as that of being born and waking, Frodo's waking from dreams in the tower (like the big guy in the original Blade Runner says: "Wake up, time to die") and the nightmare fighters, the nazgul, circling over-head and perching on the gate.

More Thoughts on Lost

Some thought from watching through Lost again on my ellliptical machine in January and February of 2020.

Middle of season 5 of Lost: for some reason the survivors spending three years in the Dharma initiative in the 1970s feels like going into the core of the world of the island, even though the further back origins of the oldest things on the island are revealed in season 6 (the further back origins on the island are what Owen Barfield would call "original participation," whereas the specific story of Lost is the myth of modernity, the interaction between the original participation of the Others and the science of the Dharma initiative, what Barfiled would call alpha thinking). I think there is this layering thing in Lost: The regular world seen in all the flashes, then the island that somehow mystically exists somewhere in that as it's mythos, as the land of smoke monsters and polar bears and mysterious remains in caves and desperate escapes and armed standoffs and temples, but yet inside that, there is this history of a "modern Western" world 70s-style, and now into THAT you get injected the present-day survivors who landed on the island in the crash, including Faraday crossing the line between the 50s others and the bomb and the 70s Dharma folk about to be taken over by Ben crossing from Dharma to Other, kind of the jungle's Barfieldian "original participation" taking back over again.

There's the obvious sci-fi draw of the time play (I love Faraday's line that either the island is moving through time or the people are, and the second is just as likely, that interplay of people and place and which is stable and which is dislodged and can you tell objectively when the people from the same time stick together in where they land, although I think that makes it that the people move, since the other people like Richard don't move with them), but my interest is beyond that. Season 5 in the 1970s is like all the layers coalescing in preparation for shooting out (after Jack "drops the bomb" literally, that key device of real-world horror coming into the 1950s) into season 6's core-triple-myth-connection: the side flashes that are "real life" (despite being the "purgatory" in the world in which the island is the real world, they represent "real [mundane] life" in the context of the island being the mythical dimension of real life; the episode that made the mythic reading coalesce for me the first time I watched the series was "Dr Linus" in season 6, with the same core decision going on for Ben in both worlds), then the present island as mythic battle ground, and then the mythic history of the island itself with the origin stories of Jacob and the Man in Black and Richard Alpert revealed and the most ancient mythical place of the island (the temple) in play (if you want to look at it another way, taking the material aspect of the sci-fi element, time play, and taking it to the thematic level: the history related in season 6 is no longer the flashbacks of the flight survivors, but rather the history of the mythic place; the present on the island is the battle ground, and the flash "sideways" are really the future aspect, the waiting room of the eschatological, not in the Marxist sense, but in the Jewish and Christian sense, the preparing to move on ... see below on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying).

And of course, the finale where it began; with Jack laying in the high grass in the jungle; to quote a source maybe disparate but with common theme, but also hopefully with a more optimistic tone; Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, a title borrowed from the lines of Agamemnon to Odysseus (but, and again hopefully the tone is more hopeful, but Aggie's statement to Odie does have to do with a recurring visual in lost, and the one that is right there at the end because it was there at the beginning, the open eyes). And maybe Southern Gothic was a little on their minds, as they did have Jacob reading Flannery Oconnor's Everything that Rises Must Converge as he sits on the park bench in the final episode of season 5 as Locke has his 8-story fall behind him... I will have to keep an eye out for any Faulkner, in the rest of seasons 5 and 6. I know from the general hearsay etc that they didn't have a clear plot path going in, but I think in the end, they skillfully rode the wave and pulled it together into a cohesive plotline, albeit perhaps a bit like chaos theory, but I think they would like that idea (it is one that I use to discuss structure in Terry Pratchett's writing, who would hate the thought because of his attachment to the rambling feel, but I think he would allow a discussino of structure if phrased as chaos theory; I think his brain just worked certain ways such that he came out with a structure while having fun rambling, and I think the same thing is probably true of those who crafted Lost), Also playing on that last shot as "As I Lay Dying," there are definitely similarities: Faulkner's novel is stream of consciousness told by 15 different narrators and involves the quest to bury somebody in a certain place, like Christian Shepherd's and then John Locke's coffins being on the planes ostensibly on the way to burial in a homeplace, LA for Christian and the island for Locke ... and the island is the place Locke's body returns and the place where Jack passes after returning..

Response to Amazon's "Middle Earth"

This is what I recently put up on Facebook 

I'm coining a new term: "Hump Capitalism." Capitalism, especially the American version, has never met a meaningful thing in human experience it hasn't wanted to hump like a horny dog til it's lifeless..
A rule 34 kind of thing: if anybody anybody ever found any meaning in it, capitalists will find a way to hump it to death.

I recently bought a book that I very much look forward to reading as some point, probably piecemeal, a collection of essays on world-building in Tolkien by the likes of Tom Shippey and John Garth. I expect it to be quite good. And I think what Tolkien made as a world is incredible, but I also think he succeeded at creating a world better than anybody else ever has because he didn't waste time wanking over the idea of "building a world." He started off dreaming up explanations for words of Anglo-Saxon origin, and I've become more and more convinced over the past few years since reading Garth's book that Arda never actually made the turn for him of becoming a separate world in the way everybody "builds worlds" now, especially the likes of George R. R. Martin. And I think that most people like Martin who dwell on it so much (and those who try to capitalize on it, like him and Amazon) I think probably understand actually very little of what is at the core of any really good world-building. Jane Austen did it better than any of them by simply reproducing the core of the social world of her England as a world into which she could plug her characters, in which the towns were at the same time those real-world towns in England of that period but also unmoored enough from real history to work for her fictional characters ... I think Stephen King probably gets it at least somewhat with his idea of parallel earths with some things altered (one of the things I thought made Wonder Woman such a piece of brilliance was that it maintained a villain from OUR world while maintaining its own fictional-world protagonist, and it made it work ... no other super hero film has done that that I can think of; the villain always comes from the same realm as the hero ... in fact, interestingly, WW maintained the very our-world villain against which Tolkien himself actually fought: WWI German war-mongering [Ares says he only ever has to give a few whispers and they do what they already wanted to do, which is kill each other, and it's the self-sacrifice of the plain vanilla mortal Steve Trevor destroying the plane of bombs that is crucial, averting the immediate physical danger and being her motivation for winning the mythical battle]). But I think the people involved in "world-building" for pay these days, like Martin and Amazon's "LotR" project, probably actually for the most part miss the point.

 At the end of the day, the world exists for the story, not the other way round. When Tolkien shifted from calling himself a philologist to calling himself a poet, I am relatively convinced that (in spite of his turn away from classics and to Anglo-Saxon studies) that he meant it in more the original sense of the word in Greek: a maker. And I don't think he was first of all concerned with making "worlds" in the way that people like Martin and others like to think about it. I think he thought of it as the Greeks did, and more importantly centered around a key thing for him: narrative. Homer didn't make Olympus, let alone Troy and Athens. He inherited the idea of the mountain and he knew the cities as part of his real geographical world (even more closely than Tolkien's cities and isles corresponded for him directly to places like Warwickshire and Oxford). Homer's originality was in his compiling together of the source material into the narratives of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Tolkien's essay on fairy stories is focused on what he calls "narrative art" ... the making of narratives.

I think Tolkien knew better than anybody that one of the things that made the anonymous Gawain and the Green Knight author great was the criticism the tale made of the "world" that "chivalry" had become (I think his translation of the tale is still pretty authoritative in that field, and his essay that comes in the same small paperback is really good too). And I think he would probably be as much in favor as anybody of Jeremiah 4:23 coming true of the "world" that projects like Amazon's try to make out of his work: It's the only passage in the Hebrew Bible outside of Gen 1:2 where the pairing "formless and void" (tohu wevohu) appears, when Jeremiah prophetically looks out on a land of Judah that is being returned to the "formless and void" of primeval chaos as the earth quakes under the iron wheels of the Chaldeans. The material Tolkien himself wrote will stand the test of time, and I think that works based directly on the actual stories, like Jackson's trilogy, will be able to fare well .. but as for the "Middle Earth" that a behemoth like Amazon will create, let it burn.

Tolkien's depth of world making was great, and I think it's a mark of the greatness of the literature he wrote that it necessarily builds this world, but the narrative builds the world, not the other way around. I think the maps an amazing interpretive movement on Tolkien's part and that part of his genius was that he could do a map as an interpretive move that nobody who's come after can wrap their heads around, not really being able to wrap their heads around any idea of what interpretation is in the first place, although I'm pretty sure that Tolkien would not have called the maps interpretive (and more than he would have called the more detailed timelines in the appendices an interpretive move on the actual story as written, but I think that is the best description for what those are), but I highly doubt he would have said that the maps are simply of the same kind of scientific utility that the timeline mappings were that he did in writing to ensure accuracy between the character-event stands when the characters are separate ... the maps are kind of like his artwork, some if which (according to the placards in the exhibit at the Morgan Library last year) was simply to help him conceptualize for writing the story. Personally, I think particularly for the mountains, the maps of the "present" Middle Earth were an attempt to make a scene on which to do the same kind of archeology that he did on Anglo-Saxon words: see the present contours (of mountains, like the contours of present words) and start hypothesizing backward to the possible original shape of the world the Valar formed. It's still always about a story: the story of how the land came to be this way and how the words came to be the way they are.

But the maps are still not the original core of the world. That original core is the simple narrative line that "the elves came to teach men songs and holiness."

(On the personal level, of course, as he said, the "kernel of the legendarium" is the tale of Beren and Luthien: of course, really the tale of the mortal John and the immortal dancing Edith).

Morality in Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones

I recently had a conversation with somebody who watches Game of Thrones who was sort of classing everything not Lord of the Rings in a big group together as the other modern stuff we all read that doesn't achieve the same class as LotR but it's all got some good qualities etc, and the term "moral quality" was used specifically of Tolkien's work versus all others. I agree on there being  a high moral quality in Tolkien's work, but I don't agree with putting GotT and HP in a group as coequals in that regard.

I've read only the first three chapters of GoT before I gave up, and I've watched none of the show, but I gave up at that point in the book for specific reasons, and one of them was precisely moral. The first and more general reason was boredom with the prevalence of dark brooding: the dark brooding warrior comes home from the grim wars and sits by his dark well and broods, gazing at his fell sword upon his knees and pondering his family's dark gods ... *yawn*

The second issue, the moral one at which I put the book down, is the nipple-tweaking scene. I hit that and my first thought was, "ok buddy, you enjoyed writing that way too much for this to be healthy." The more general way to put that thought is to say that it seemed to me to be merely morbid fascination. It's a scene of manipulation of a young woman's (really a girl's) sexuality for political purposes, and that shit does go on, and maybe there is a place for examining it in some literary contexts, but this did not seem to me to be that; it did not feel to me like it had any moral tone ... it seemed simply morbid fascination at the phenomenon and the titillation of examining some sex shock material, being aloofly "adult" about some nitty gritty sexual stuff.

I actually came up with a jingle for it. Halsey has a song, "The New Americana": "We are the new Americana, raised on Biggy and Nirvana; high on legal marijuana, we are the new Americana." My version is "The New Sophisticati" (riffing on the whole illuminati trope): "We are the new sophisticati; we're very smart, but a little naughty; reading Game of Thrones and eating biscotti, we are the new sophisticati." I actually picked the book up to read it because I figured I should read it if I was going to compare it to Harry Potter because that was what was already being done in a conversation thread on Facebook I got dragged into by a a friend on a post he had on Harry Potter, in which the friend's brother was dissing HP and saying he had tried to get my friend into some real "adult high fantasy" like GoT. The "adult high fantasy" thing is what I mean by "sophisticati." I don't think Tolkien would have considered himself part of what is now considered under that self-identification, especially the "adult" part (Treebeard was, in part, a rebuttal to a beef he had had since childhood with the fact that the march of the woods on Dunsinane Hill in Macbeth wound up to be just a trick of the light and psychological night terror). The real meaning of the "adult" in the term "adult high fantasy" is much more akin to the more popular use of the word "adult" in contemporary culture, which is basically what the whole nipple-tweaking scene comes down to. There is a facade of "concern" for "understanding" such phenomena, a supposed quest for understanding or maybe "wisdom" that really is only the type of pipe-dream of "scientifically objective knowledge" Owen Barfield critiqued, a facade that easily gives way to the real morbid curiosity and quasi-pornographic fascination that  is really there.

Now, having basically stated that I think Game of Thrones is not in the same class as either Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter as far as moral quality (having felt some need to address that issue because it was that conversation and statement of putting HP and GoT in a class together under LotR in that regard that started me in the first place on the path of comparing LotR and HP on moral quality), I will move on to the question that really interests me, which is the differences between LotR and HP in regard to morals (and just in case you missed it, my verdict on GoT was that it has no morals).

The moral tone of LotR is largely exemplarist. The actions of the protagonist characters are exemplars when interpreted through certain lenses and language. Often the language comes from mouthpiece characters (but not always). When Gandalf advocates Bilbo's pity when talking to Frodo, we know that that is Tolkien talking, taking what is called a "stage-affirmative" tone toward having pity. Sometimes the moral quality is signaled by Tolkien's love of verse/song, and so Sam's not despairing in the tower and instead singing is an example to be followed, underscored by the fact that that it what finds Frodo. When Sam carries Frodo in Mordor, that is an exemplar of love. When Saruman tries to seduce with his voice, that is an exemplar of the type of manipulation not to do. When Faramir speaks softly to Eowyn of not rejecting Aragorn's pity because not all pity is arrogant, that is an exemplar of understanding to try to have. When Frodo argues for the life even of Sharky and Wormy, that again is pity to be emulated. And, to say that it is basically exemplarist, versus the existential question that I will describe as JKR's genre, is not to say that it is shallow. The issues and themes with which it deals are very deep ... and often interact with a certain type of psychological characterization (Frodo's suffering on returning to the Shire is heart-rending, and there are few lines that have knocked the wind out of me for a second like the last line [that final punch position] in one of the chapters in the trek through Mordor, when the last thing in the chapter is when Sam finally gets them to a safe distance not to be seen from the road and Frodo simply falls face first into the shallow pit, "and there he lay, like a dead thing" ... although one of them would be when Harry finally understands, and puts his lips to the snitch, and whispers, "I am about to die").

Harry Potter's approach to morality is a different genre altogether. I would almost call it more moral, but that would not be exactly right. It is that its genre is more directly focused on a question of morality. The morality of LotR suffuses the work in action and tone. Harry Potter, however, is preoccupied, and I think consciously, with a question that wasn't, as far as I can tell, on Tolkien's plate consciously, and that is the question of the relation between psychology and morals. As I said, Tolkien does have some psychology, and another example would be the father issues that Eowyn and Faramir have, and it does interact with virtue, particularly hope and forgiveness. But it's not the same kind of question as in Harry Potter. I maintain that Harry Potter does have a real moral focus. It's just that HP's question is an existential one of source, interpretation, and course of action: psychological or moral, or what mix.

JKR is very focused on psychology (see side note 5 at the end for extra instances beyond what I bring in here ... and there I go on a more vigorous defense of the HP series as legit because of taking on issues that should be taken on). I went to Lumos in 2006 in Vegas, and there I heard a paper by two clinical psychologists, Kim Decina and Josella Vanderhooft, that traced a number of characters out to clinical psychological disorders  by cataloging traits of those disorders as described in the then DSM IV: Lockhart as narcissist; Snape as disthymic disorder (persistent depressive disorder); Harry's reaction to the dementors as clinical depression episode ... and Voldemort as anti-social personality disorder (ASPD; the personality disorders, versus mood disorders, are purely behavioral, with no organic component, and start at a more formative age, such as what we see Dumbledore observe of eleven-year-old Voldy in the pensieve). KC and JV did some background too concerning JKR's background, and without recounting the details, JKR has done her time on the couch or in the chair ... psychological struggle is on her radar as a human issue. And I think it goes beyond using the DSM IV, which was an interesting conversation with KC and JV in a comments thread once, because I proposed Lupin as a psychological character and they said they tried him but could not trace him to a DSM IV disorder, and my reply was that he's not a specific disorder, but rather the self-perception of a diagnosed person: "too old, too poor... too broken" (end of book 6) and applying beast language to oneself, "my kind don't usually breed" (in the kitchen of #12 Grimauld Place early in book 7).

Quite simply put, I think morality is every bit as much a part of HP as it is in LotR, but it is being operated on in a different way, as a question rather than as an exemplar, although, as I will say in a moment, I do think that JKR gives an answer and that it is a bit of an exemplar, but in the end it is definitely a key element of difference between Tolkien and Rowling that it seems important to Rowling to keep it front and center that there is a question involved. And that question is: when you have somebody who is so toxic and harrmful and whose actions can be understood as either psychological malady (ASPD) or spiritual (moral) malady, which do you see it as, and more importantly (or rather, this is the reason the interpretation is important), which approach do you take in rebutting it or trying to change it? JKR's moral exemplar is to go with the moral approach, but I think it is also important to here to keep it on the page that the psychological is a factor and that it can be damn confusing trying to figure out which is the source (for more on this trend in HP, meaning making a choice to go with something as best that you can do in a difficult situation, see side note 4 below). In the final showdown in Hogwarts, JKR has Harry tell Voldy to "try for a little remorse" before he makes a huge mistake in attacking Harry again with the elder wand.  That is moral language. I think her point is that you go with that as a best guess or bet, but always admit that the interplay of the psychological and the moral is complicated, damn frustrating, and often damn painful for all involved. And that message, while still presenting a moral exemplar, is still simply a different project from JRRT's ... but still concerned with morality. As I said, she's almost more concerned with morality, but I have to clarify that, by that word here, I mean that it's more a burning question of interpretation and choice between two paths of action for her. Both LotR and HP are ultimately concerned very much with morality.

I can't deny that Tolkien's work, in addition to being of such greater breadth of world-creation and depth of world-texture, has a much higher and epic tone that does JKR's HP series. She has bits of Austen (particularly the third-person limited-omniscient narratival perspective) that simply are not Tolkien's genre at all (but I must try not to offend any Austenists by saying that Rowling has yet attained the classic status of Austen: where Tolkien has his breadth and depth of his created world, Austen has her breadth and depth of that period of historical English culture about which she writes; and as much as I love Rowling's wizarding world for what it is, the project of building a world with the same intricacy as either Tolkien's or Austen's is not the strength of Rowling's work, although she does borrow the manners and mores genre some ... Rowling's strength would really more be called "magic as metaphor" ... which is a different project even for magic than what Tolkien really does with magic in his world). And in spite of the fact that Middle Earth did become technically an alternate universe, I don't think it ever fully became the alternate universe of other modern "fantasy" works. In some ways it always remained "the mythology" he set out to create for England, closer to the world of fairy you find within our own in something like George Macdonald's Phantastes than it is like any other "alternate universe" in the "fantasy" genre (among those, my favorite is always Discworld, but I do like the first Name of the Wind too, epscially it's Dickensian city of Tarbean, and I remember Wizard of Earth Sea being good; interestingly, both of those have a strong focus on name magic, which JKR uses in places too, but you have to know the theory to catch it in her; see my post on the deluminator as a positive name-taboo device in HP book 7).

All that to say that Tolkien's imagination is a wonder, and he did something that I think is unmatched in many ways. But I don't think simply having substantial moral content is one of them. It may be arguable that Tolkien's is a higher form of art, for combining moral clarity with grand myth, than is Rowling or any of the more recent fantasy writers, but I also do think there is a very real place in the discussion of morals in literature for a more postmodern psychological voice like JKR's ... the postmodern is where we find ourselves at present, and I think there is a place in discussion of morals in art for works written in the postmodern language (but I stick to my guns that Cormoran Strike, or at least the first book, falls flat with regard to any real characterization, it's almost a caricature of psychology at some points, like she was trying too hard to write an "adult" work, when she had already done an amazingly deep psychological project in her "kids" book, and like she unfortunately listened to people who told her she needed to write adult works to be taken seriously).

And I would vigorously defend, to the teeth, against putting HP in the same boat as Game of Thrones as far as morals go. As should be evident in the first part of this post, neither my reading of the opening chapters of the first book of Game of Thrones nor anything I have since heard of either the books or the series gives me any indication that there is any moral content at all in GoT, or really any content other than the titillation of "adult understanding." I don't even have the incentive to read it that I had with Da Vinci Code, which was 400 pages of the most tedious mechanical writing I have ever endured (I agree with the NYT reviewer who called it "Dan Brown's best-selling guide on how not to write an English sentence" and Stephen Fry's characterization of it as "loose stool water and arse gravy of the worst kind"), but I finished it because I thought I should process it if I was going to critique it ... and indeed, as I suspected, it's argument was a little bit more involved than I initially realized, although not enough to amount to truth, just enough for the rhetorical ploy of "see, the religious side overreacts and shouldn't be listened to because they haven't even read enough to get the real position/event/etc. in the book ... the negative response is uninformed reactionism." But at least it was saying something. GoT really isn't saying anything that I have ever been able to tell.


[Side-note 1: Other contemporary works that I did manage to finish but only because it was the friend who actually suggested them and I did not want to offend the friend by not finishing [with GoT, it was a friend's snooty brother, so I felt no compulsion to finish] are Niel Gaman's American Gods and the first book of Lev Grossman's The Magicians, both of which, while I did finish, I found to be extremely derivative and tedious to read, and having the same kinds of morbid fascination with sexual material as GoT.]

[Side-note 2: On JKR and psychology in relation to the more-than-psychological, and not just morals, I think there is a question in book 6  especially of what goes into the question of divorce and annulment. She's not Catholic and I doubt she subscribes to the particular sacramental understanding of marriage that underlies Catholic teaching on annulment, but I do think that romantic love and marriage are a kind of magic for her that is among the class of such mystical or mysterious things she tries to symbolize in the magic in her world, the other key instance of which is the power of imagination. And the question is what psychological factors impact that magic of romantic love, particularly Merope Gaunt's unrequited love leading to her not using magic anymore and dying from that ... where is the line between the magic of romantic love and the manipulation magic of a love potion? Was her attachment to Tom love or desperation? And the issue of marriage plays in another two ways, one in the fiction and one in the history: there is another woman who engages in desperate action that has connotation of marriage imagery, Narcissa's hand-wrapping unbreakable vow (this is not some seedy tryst of Narcissa cheating or whatever pundits would accuse me of for suggesting this; it is a matter of literary themes and images circling together, the desperate actions of women and the effects on their child, one of them, Merope, losing hope to care for her child because the father did not return her love and that issue then reinforced by Narcissa, in a desperate attempt to protect her son, engaging in something that resonates on the level of image with the Scottish hand-wrapping wedding practice), and in the real-world history in relation to psychological issues, one of the two times JKR is on record as having suffered depression episode is with the divorce of her first marriage ... the relation of the psychological to love of all kind, Dumbledore's "deeper magic," is a key central question just under the surface of the whole series].

[Side-note 3: The film The Exorcism of Emily Rose is a good exposition of the question of the tension between psychological explanation and spiritual explanation, in which they shot all of the key flashback possession scenes recounted at the trial in two ways, once in a way fitting the demon-possession explanation by the defense and then another time in a way fitting the psychological explanation by the prosecution ... say, demonically forced contortion versus catatonic rigidity in schizophrenic episode, with each explanation getting a nuanced, distinctive visual effect, so the eyes flying open in the blackened eyes of possession versus showing a close up of full dilation happening in schizophrenic episode ... and the point of the film, which was was made by two evangelical Christians, is the extreme difficulty of discerning these phenomena.]

 [Side-note 4: The thing of choosing between two options when it's damn difficult to discern the situation is actually a core thematic element in book 7, the finale and wrap up of the whole thing, and so a focusing lens for theme. It is basically the statement made in Harry's head when talking to Aberforth near the end. He knows the damned difficulty of the question of Dumbledore's goodness in light of the history of which he has learned through Rita and Aberforth, but there is a specific, clear, purposeful statement that Harry has made a distinct decision to trust what Dumbledore left for him, fully aware of the problems, but doing the best he can with what he has.

And speaking of the deconstruction of Dumbledore, I should bring that in here, because (1) it was actually brought up in a recent book-club discussion in which the person bringing it up was doing so to place HP at a point clearly below LotR and (2) it is an instance of the same thematic playing out in the treatment of DD. The criticism was of the deconstruction, and I didn't have time or preparation there to rebut, but this would be the rebuttal. I myself have actually done interpretation of material on DD in book 7 that met with the response, "well, if you really want to totally deconstruct the character I guess." It's not a claim I have heard anybody else make, and so I have to assume I am the most deconstructionist bugger in the room. Only, I don't think it really deconstructs him in the end. I think it rather points up the dire difficulty of the situation. The instance (which I have heard nobody else talk about) is the brief snippet in Snape's string-memory Harry sees in the pensieve after Snape dies in book 7 in which Snape and DD are talking after the Yule Ball in book 4: Snape says Karkaroff intends to flee; DD asks if Snape will flee too; Snape replies that he is not such a coward; DD replies that no he is not; DD THEN adds "sometimes I think we sort too soon" and walks off; and Snape is described as looking as if he had been slapped. In Snape's world, to question whether he is truly a Slytherin is to attack his identity; part of what drives him is summed up by Phineus Nigellus's portrait when all the portraits cheer the victory at the end, "and let it be known that Slytherin house played it's part!" AND most importantly ... I think DD knows this and knows Snape will take it as an affront to his identity. AND I think it is intentionally done for this purpose by JKR: all the other memories in the string serve some other purpose, either Snape relating to Harry his real connection to Harry's world and his love of Lily, or revealing his own role in keeping Harry alive even while really, really, REALLY not liking how much he looks like James, or giving Harry DD's final instructions, or even just filling in details on moments in the plan we had gotten only a snippet of earlier, like getting the full argument between DD and Snape in book 6 that Hagrid hear only a snippet of or seeing DD's involvement in Sanpe pressing Quirrell in book 1; but this scene at the end of the Yule ball serves no purpose like that; all things materially relevant about the sending of Snape at the end of book 4 have been covered in other conversations since then in the books; the only purpose that scene serves is to cast DD in this light. I think DD intentionally antagonizes Snape. BUT I also think that it is telling that it is shown happening in a discussion of the dark-mark brand signalling an immanent return at the end of book 4, because I think the point is not to deconstruct DD as a way to deconstruct God and all that, but rather to point up the extreme difficulty of sending Snape in as a spy. We are talking about the most accomplished legilimens of the age, and DD knows this more than anybody because he is the only one who saw the young Voldy issuing the "TELL THE TRUTH!" command and saying he can always tell when people are lying to him. If you are going to send a spy in to try to trick somebody with that level of perception, they damn well better be the best liar on the planet. And the surest way to do that is to make it real ... method acting. No fat suit; you take time off from filming and go to Europe and eat like a pig like Deniro in Raging Bulll and come back with your health in worse shape to the extent that you can't take the same rigor of shooting schedule you could when you were in the stage of peak fitness for that section of the boxer's life. If you want to somebody like Snape to walk in and trick the greatest legilimens with the line "I am on your side because I hate Dumbledore," you give them some real antipathy toward yourself to make it believable by antagonizing them. That description on top of the tower is not just Harry's imagination; the hatred an loathing he sees etched in every line of Snape's face is really there: loathing for manipulating him, loathing for abandoning him by dying and leaving him to walk into the moth of hell alone. But I don't think DD is mean or antagonistic by nature or enjoys it ... but he is cumming. And it is like Snape himself says the first time he teaches DADA in book 6: the dark arts are a hydra, "ever-changing and eternal," and if you want to beat them, you have to be every bit as "creative" as the arts you seek to undo. It is a gray line, thinking about intentionally antagonizing somebody like this, but it is the line DD has to walk if he wants to defeat Voldy, or at least it is the best he is able to do with the situation and still be able to keep moving on it and not get frozen by the difficulty of how to do it and thus lose the opportunity and abandon how many to torture and death at the hands of Voldy and his followers. The point is not an evil DD; the point is the direness of fighting so cunning an evil as Voldy, and having to go with the best plan you can figure out (like Harry says when Hermione says she doesn't like the plan of being ambiguous on what they're promising Griphook, when he replies, "I don't much either ..." but it's the best plan they can get given the situation).

I think the "sometimes you go with the best you can" even plays out in JKR's material plotting of mechanics (on a side, side note, I once heard a nice funny way to put this: a certain prof in grad school always used the line in discussing how evil always starts with some good seed taken in the wrong way, often in not letting go of the good and letting it be fulfilled in something higher, "when the good becomes the  enemy of the best, it becomes evil," but in paper season, he would say not to get bogged down in perfectionism and despair, and he would say "in this case, don't let the best be the enemy of the good," and one time a friend in the class turned to me and whispered, "at this point, I'm more worried about the good being the enemy of the turned-in"). There has been a question ever since the end of book 7 of whether she dropped the ball on realism or plausibility of mechanics in having the Elder Wand be able to know Harry had beat Draco. And I think her mechanics actually work, although it takes some work to get it and so this type of reading is not for the lazy, but I was once telling a friend and he said it just seems like there should be some more core thematic answer to the riddle of Voldy, that even the mechanics should be more something along the lines of the magic of love. First let me detail the mechanical issue and that solution. The issue is how the wand knows Harry as having bested Draco such that he is now master of itself. Did it quickly view some news-reel of the Malfoy Manner events hosted on the magical version of the cloud? It seems a bit Deus ex machina. The solution is the wands involved: all the elder wand has to recognize it two things; the first is that the spell it is meeting in midair is being cast through the hawthorn wand it recognizes as the wand that disarmed its own former master, and therefore the master of the hawthorn wand is its own master, with the key factor being that it can recognize the other wand because they have had direct contact with each other before when Draco used the hawthorn wand to disarm Dumbledore of the Elder Wand on top of the tower at the end of book 6; and the second is that the hawthorn wand is acting under the direction the true master to whom is has given allegiance; the elder wands does not need to know that that allegiance has changed, just that this spell is cast in true allegiance, which it can sense through the strength and a sort of integrity. The main point in bringing this in here is for the purpose of the discussion of the "making do with what answers you can have in difficult situations," as I have been discussing, this material aspect of her work is actually pretty fitting of that theme. It would be ideal if Voldy was beat in the most fitting way, but the important thing is to get Vody beat and not killing and torturing people. One can argue that such pragmatic theme puts Rowling's work on a lower level than Tolkien's, but my main point is that I don't think you can put it in the same class as Game of Thrones, or even closer to GoT than to LotR. Rowling's point is still one of moral action, whereas I don't think, at least from what I have seen, that GoT is capable of that theme.]

[Side-note 5: I will put here some other instances of the heavy psychological theme in the Harry Potter series. Arainna Dumbledore is almost too obvious to need to be mentioned. There is also a psychological issue of class/economic disparity: when Ron interrupts Harry talking to Sirius in the fire in book 4, while they are mad at each other, Harry throws the "support Cedric Diggory" badge and hits Ron in the forehead with it and storms past him hoping Ron takes a swing, and it specifically says Harry hated every bit of Ron right down to the couple inches of bare ankle showing beneath his pajama legs. That's an odd detail to throw in, and I don't think it just means he hated Ron so much that he hated even little minor details about him ... that's not how good literature works. The too-short pajamas are a symbol of Ron being poor, because his parents can't afford to keep him in well-sized clothes with as fast as he is growing, and the strain of the self-consciousness of that poverty as combined with being overshadowed by brothers, a kind of poverty of prestige, is what drives his tension with Harry, whom everybody notices and who never worries for money, whereas Harry feels impoverished in regard to a certain natural membership Ron has in the wizarding world, having grown up in it and understanding it, whereas Harry is a bit of an alien sojourner in it sometimes, a theme that is actually fairly relevant in current affairs in America and the whole fight over born citizen with long family history versus immigrant.
And that is the place where I will defend Harry Potter as relevant literature to the teeth, the issue of psychological impact on kids. That is my last example here and the most central for my point here. Book 5 is obviously focused on psychology: even the surface level from the beginning has psychological dream interpretation, thank you Freud, and on more hidden levels of series structure, it chiastically pairs with book 3, which introduces the dementors, which JKR specifically has said she intended as the embodiment of despair and depression (and anybody who can't recognize the result of the dementor's kiss and even Harry's blacking out as catatonic state has never studied), with which Decina's and Vanderhooft's reading of Harry's response as depression episode fits well. But the one in book 5 on which I really want to focus is the eye of the snake: when Harry sees the attack on Arthur Weasely from within the snake itself and thinks he actually became the snake. This is internalization, pure and simple. This is when kids internalize the tensions between parents and see it as their own fault or have manipulators and abusers convince them that it's their own fault. This is when kids are allowed to internalize violence and see themselves as the aggressor who is wrong, and sometimes dirty. The epigraph from Aeshylus's Libation Bearers at the beginning of book 7 is not simply some line randomly chosen from some old Greek stuff simply because it has to with death; it's climax is: "answer the call, send help; bless the children, give them triumph now." Whatever other shortcomings there may be, and however much I may disagree with JKR on some attempts to force post-script interpretation through a tyrannical "authorial intent," the psychology in her work is done with clear concern for the suffering of kids and should not be put in the same class with some morbid-fascination description of the machiavellian older brother twisting his thirteen-year-old sister's nipples to make her appear more sexually interested in the political player with whom the brother wants to ally through a political marriage ... sorry, I saw no sympathy in that scene for the manipulation of a kid, just morbid fascination with the "sophistication" of being in the know that such things happen.]

Us (film review; Jordan Peele, 2019)

This is where I am basically collecting the material I wrote on facebook after seeing Us by Jordan Peele, his second film, following his debut as writer/director/producer, 2017's Get Out.

Us: Really strong second feature-length film by Jordan Peele as writer/director/producer (warning: *SPOILERS*).
I thought he upped the content beyond Get Out, which was a strong film on its own. When Shyamalan did Unbreakable, it was a strong follow-up to Sixth Sense, but he mainly did the same level but in an new arena (super heroes) other than the first (thriller/horror), and so it was a good second film but he mainly avoided stagnation by going with a completely new arena (a perfectly fine move, in my opinion, showing he could adapt his style in more than one arena, so that is in no way meant as a criticism). Peele managed to stay in the same arena (a sci-fi underpinning for a race-critical horror/thriller story) but took it to a new level within that arena: not just race-critical but now broadened to include culture-critical (best random thing I have heard in a while: some girl walking out of theater a little back from me saying to her friend, "Well, there's Trump's wall," meaning the untethered hands-across-America at the end ... the culture critical is evident in her answer "who are we? we are Americans" and maybe, but very latently, in the title being "Us," with the "United" part of "United States" mirroring "tethered," but as I said, very latently ... and a nice little tidbit maybe of criticism of the culture of technical manipulation), and the resolution involving a revelation of something that happened in the central opening scenes in the past (at least I think, the topside woman would not be able to pull it off if she had not originally been a tethered, and the tethered her would not have been able to orchestrate the rising if she had not begun in the world above; notice that, while she talks creepy and hoarse, she is the only one of the tethered who has the power of speech, which I think is an early clue to the final revelation ... I maybe had some "I wonder ... that would be possible" inklings before the reveal, but only brief and fleeting and only because of thinking "ok, there is always a final hook"), incorporating an established interpretive model like Jung (the shadow), and that dancing scene near the end (a three-part choreography of the young girl doing ballet in the world above and the tethered girl doing it in the world below spliced with the two grown-woman versions dancing around the desks in the classroom fighting) was a definite advancement in style by using such a highly stylized choreographed sequence (I also think there was a nice chess motif at the one point with a little Alice spin: notice that the topside woman is dressed in white and the tethered woman in red, so they are the white and red queens, respectively, and then the topside son as white knight pulls his tethering move that saves the white queen while at the same time, unintentionally, sacrificing himself by being taken by the red queen, so white knight sacrifices capture by red queen in order to save white queen from red knight ... so, a nicely done choreography there too), all while keeping the race-critical element up (it is only the African American family that is able to handle the attack; the white people all fall to their dopplegangers immediately, just as Jamie Foxx's African American character in Law Abiding Citizen, while having been partly corrupted by the white mentality, is still the one who survives the story of destruction, or Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury reaching Easter Sunday only with the section focused on Dilsey, the African American matriarchal figure who heads the servants in the Compson home).
And in the end, I don't think the revelation of the original switch is the typical "oh no, we're actually still in the horror and the bad person actually won" thing that is common in some (cheap) horror, but rather some form of Jung's resolution in the shadow's integration into the mature person.
All in all, a really strong follow-up performance by Peele after the critical success of Get Out (and and advancement in his style and film/story-crafting, especially for doing it in the same arena as Get Out, although without race being as up front in the material plot, but that is mostly as a result of moving it up to a broader culture criticism). In short, I liked it a lot and was really impressed.

So further thoughts: On the race-critical and possibly gender-critical: only an African American girl has a doppleganger that have enough indepence of thought to initiate and accomplish the switch. She is also the only one with enough sole to power thought and speech and self determination in both the uplander and the tethered versions of herself. Somebody noticed even just from the trailer that she can't get the rhythm in the car (can't snap her fingers in correct rhythm when she tells her son to) and guessed early that she might be the one without "soul," and I would say that that works on the level of the a hidden clue to the basic material, but that it doesn't onto the material level of the story in the form of saying topside Addie has absolutely no soul: they share the soul, and when Red dies, topside Addie gets it all.

Culture/Class-Critical: Of all the people, and whatever one thinks of Rick Santorum in other regards, he said something interesting when he spoke at my college commencement. He said that it is those with the advantages in a society who bear the great responsibility and culpability. I don't know if this is what he subjectively meant, but it is objectively a meaning in the words he said: The rich set a standard of acceptable escapism, and they get to follow it "respectably" because they are the ones who can afford weekends at resorts and jet skis on the Hudson and all the allowed and "respectable" methods, whereas somebody in a housing project may have to do their escapism in a less legal and more physically precarious and damaging way; rich men can afford to club there women over the head with fancy clothes and jewelry, but the man in the hood, if he is to follow that lead, has to do it more literally or with more directly brutal psychological manipulation. I think that that is part of what is symbolized in the structure of the tethered down below mimicking the those above.

Alice: Another possible Alice reference is when Red is pressing Adelaide's face into the glass surface of the table to point where it is cracking, so she is, in other words, about to be violently forced through the looking glass. And of course, the house of mirrors fits that image set, where she literally goes through the looking glass, being dragged to the interior by what she thinks at first is her reflection (and the way he worked that scene of her looking at herself from behind reminds me of Tiffany Aching's "see me" spell, but I would guess that as more of a simple borrowing of a material concept without carrying over theme etc.if it is even that ... the way C.S. Lewis borrowed the idea of grass that won't bend from a sci-fi book but used it for something completely different in The Great Divorce ... although, here, there is the possible connection of the things that kids do without knowing they're dangerous, as Tiffany's use of "see me" opens her to invasion by the hiver in Hat Full of Sky, and maybe a critique of preoccupied parents in American life).

The Real tragedy: There is kind of a dark moment toward the end that sort of signals the coming revelation. When Adelaide kills Red, she pants and growls in an animal way you haven't seen her do yet, even when trying to flip herself up over onto the bed to protect her daughter from the white woman's tether. And I think you can see that it worries her. Whether it is a worry that she has allowed a consciously constructed facade to crack some or because she simply worries that she has become like Red in order to defeat Red with that being unfolded in the revelation that she is a subconsciously constructed faced and the revelation worries her (but then smile a natural and good smile because there is hope of her having normalized), one way or the other, whether she thinks of it as possible CONversion or possible REversion, she worries that she has become like Red. At the end of the day, while I say there is a happy ending to the film (and not the cheap horror thing of "oh no ... the evil one actually wone; the demon made it out of the containment circle, etc."), there is stiall a tragedy in the the original human girl Adelaide has to die. It has to be done; as topside Addie says, Red Addie will keep coming otherwise, and simply hiding out isn't an option. But it is materially a tragedy nonetheless that the human girl has to die. And the critical aspect is the idea that the real villains are those who made the situation in the first place in which that had to happen, the scientists who created the clones for manipulation. They are the white greasy men who set up the battle royal in Ellison's Invisible Man. The other part here is the son, Jason. I don't buy the speculation of some at this point; think it would simply require to much rigging to have him actually also be a tethered living above (and I really hope that Peele doesn't make a sequel unless he has a really good idea that works without the kind of rigging it would take to make Jason also a switched person), but I think his actions at the end are significant. I think he realizes what has gone on and is now in on the secret of somebody who was originally a doppleganger trying to do the best she can at being the whole now and being truly human etc after having had to kill the other because, beyond her control, the other had gone feral and turned malignant from the psychological duress, and also at dealing with possibly the guilt feeling of realizing that she was the one who initiated that duress (although, can you blame somebody for wanting out of that life below?). And Jason pulling the mask down over his face is symbolic of his willingness to keep the secret, but I think it is also a double-edged sword in that it hides his face from her too, but that is just how it has to be in this situation that is the fallout of what evil people like the original scientist power-players and government do.

And one more thing on the rabbits: Gollum?

Here is a comment I wrote in the "reaction" posting area at https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/us-easter-eggs-references-hidden-meanings-weve-found-jordan-peeles-latest-spoilers-190658023.html?fbclid=IwAR0wo9QNgSpnwRfUBiYFw4jrJRUDxqPyN3u7fcFHEfXiyCtvmxUO_j4jzYA : Has anybody else noticed Alice? Going through the looking glass and down to underland (to borrow Burton's name for it) in the hall of mirrors, then her face pushed into the glass table top to the point it cracks, so Red is almost paying back a violent through-the-looking-glass experience, and Addie wears white (maybe a nice race-critical-tradition hat tip to the dot of black in Liberty paint's "whitest white" paint in Ellison's Invisible Man), so she and Red are white queen and red queen so that, in the burning car scene, white knight (Jason) protects white queen (Addie; and actually he protects white king, Gabe, who is actually next to the car that would explode) from red knight (Pluto) with his walking-backward tether move but gets taken by red queen (Red).