Friday, November 13, 2020

Thursday, November 12, 2020

The British Establishment and the Media


Can anyone else remember those heady, halcyon, pre-Covid days from, oh, about nine months ago, when righteous liberals were challenging the British MSM to be sceptical about Boris Johnson? (It really wasn't so long ago...)

Things like Channel 4's eating humble pie after one of their classic blunders (if you can really call it a blunder to accuse the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of "racism") during last year's general election ought to have come with a sense of relief. For any of  the mainstream media (MSM) to repent of any of their screw-ups is unusual, after all. But at the time it felt a lot like a strategy of diversion and even (pace the current epidemiological situation) inoculation - apologising for a comparatively minor error in order to distract from a far, far larger one.

And so lo, before our very eyes the old symbiosis of the MSM and government was re-established. The two faces of the Establishment’s PR machine - its party politicians and its corporate journalists - duly kissed and made up.

Nick Cohen and Huw Edwards did their best to get a battle going on between Boris and the BBC - both readily supporting the latter - because supporting an undemocratic media corporation against a democratically elected government is, of course, democratic! (Cohen in particular might like to look up the word ‘democratic’ in a dictionary some time. Only people like him equate it with permanent rule in favour of a state’s “institutions” and their vested interests -and no normal person thinks the BBC or the civil service are impartial. In fact getting the latter to implement the manifesto commitments of a legitimately elected executive is a pretty good definition of what democracy ought to be. Of the people, by the people, for the people... and all that guff! But there’s no telling some people.)

Looking back on this supposed feud between Boris and the Beeb from just over nine months later unfortunately it's surprising how misguided it feels, not to mention how quickly it fizzled out. Most of this at the time, for example, just came across as paranoid partisan sniping, with little genuine sense of a big intellectual or institutional split.* As it happens, he was of course quite right not to trust Boris Johnson. And keeping an eye on Boris’s manipulations of the media would definitely have been a Good Idea. It just never actually happened. The MSM swallowed all of Boris's claims about Covid, including the claims that contradicted the other claims, and asked for seconds.

I would suggest though that since 2016 something has gone quite badly wrong with the mainstream media generally! After all, 'according to Ofcom 49 per cent of Britons now get their news from social media, a proportion that has risen from 18 per cent in just four years.' [The SpectatorTheir undisguised and undiluted hatred of Brexit and Trump, for example, has made them utterly incapable of reporting on current affairs in either Britain or America (and probably Russia, if you think about it) with anything even approaching fairness or balance. And lo and behold, half the population have given up on them completely!

Not that things are that much better across the herring pond. The ever redoubtable Douglas Murray recently blew the gaffe on Bill Maher.
Most people have mixed feelings about Bill Maher — they like him when he agrees with them and dislike him when he doesn’t. Perhaps I should note that throughout his career I’ve always admired him. But there’s a problem with his show: the unnaturally close relationship between him and studio-audience. When Maher says something vaguely funny, the audience whoops and hollers. When a guest he disapproves of says something funny or wise that he doesn’t agree with, the guest is met with stony silence. It is made to seem as though it is very hard to get one over on Bill Maher. 
It was only when someone who had been in the audience explained to me the warm-up procedures for the show and the fact that the audience is actually directed when to laugh, clap and applaud, that you realise how much power Maher has (far more than almost any other host) to be the one who decides which guests do well, and which points fly.
Every day’s a school day, I suppose. (Why is it always the creepiest and most feckless of libertarians - Emperor Boris included! - who wants to be Ming the Merciless?)

The "independent" media, alas, are not noticeably better. To this day it’s not entirely clear to me whose side the “investigative journalists” of Exaro were really on (let alone what they were on, given how whacky some of what they were coming out with was). Yes, their links to the British “mainstream” Left are a matter of public record. And their “anti-Establishment” credentials ended up being somewhat tarnished not just because the smears they were peddling were spurious (and morally appalling) but also because they were directed not against the Establishment per se so much as against various individual members of the Tory Party. In fact their putative founder Jerome Booth (Christ Church, Oxford and Anglia Ruskin, something big in emerging markets doncha know, etc.) is rather more “Establishment” than they might let on.

Perhaps the simple truth though is really just that everyone likes a good conspiracy theory, and if it involves sex then most people will like it even more. For some reason everyone but everyone likes either (a) reading about sex, or (b) looking down from a moral high horse on anyone whose sexual tastes are slightly more, er, exotic than his own, or (c) both. Though it may have a had a distinctly left-ish hue to it, at the end of the day the “Westminster paedophile” allegations scandal was really just a product of bigotry and titillation and not very much more.

The Establishment's very own little beagle on the other hand is of course a decidedly strange outfit called Bellingcat. (See here.) And they're strangely convincing. Even the good old Speccie has fallen prey to their enthusiastic tail-wagging.
Julian Assange’s Wikileaks was once fêted by western media for its willingness to release suppressed information — for instance, footage of US choppers shooting up unarmed civilians in Iraq — but later turned into a channel for political dirt stolen by Kremlin-sponsored Russian hackers.
Except that (pace Mandy Rice-Davies) they say they didn’t. What probably happened in fact was simply that Assange’s team fell from grace with the Left partly because of his own sexual peccadilloes (in Sweden a famous leaker can be undone by, er, a leaky condom, it turns out) but mostly because they simply went too far. Assuming that Hillary would win anyway (because Trump wouldn’t “be allowed to win”), they thought they’d bolster their credentials with the Far Left (or should that be Far Far Left?) by coming out swinging for Bernie Sanders. These are, after all, the same people who were quite happy to force the West’s allies in Afghanistan to choose between exile from their country or possible murder by the Taliban (because they were “informants” and “they had it coming”). For them the actual election of Donald Trump was presumably just one of those things.

And finally, if you really do want to go all the way, there's dear old Pooty Poot and what's left of the pro-Russian Far Left. So was Peter Hitchens supping with the Devil again when he was recently endorsed by the Canary? One would counsel him to use a long spoon, in any case.†

*And if Cohen was merely his usual obnoxious leftist self, this from Edwards was dubious in the extreme.
And you realise yet again that the real purpose of many of the attacks is to undermine trust in institutions which have been sources of stability over many decades. The apparent purpose, in short, is to cause chaos and confusion.
Surely the point of attacking perceived bias is to correct that bias in favour of truth - or at least of fairness and balance? Here and there, of course, one did come across small victories. At least, for example, the BBC stopped insisting: (i) that an Albanian gangster murdered in London was Swedish; and (ii) that there was any very great mystery about why he was assassinated. But they were only ever few and far between.
†For what it’s worth (and I write as one who is normally deeply sceptical of the anti-Russian fantasies of the MSM) my instinct is that here be Russian disinformation rather than that Hitchens of all people stumbled upon a massive conspiracy - by the Americans, presumably! - to fabricate reasons for a war against Syria that, thanks to Trump, never actually happened. But perhaps we’ll see!

Friday, September 25, 2020

The Bores


Well it had its moments, but really it failed to live up to any of the promise of the first season. Whereas Season 1 of The Boys finished with shock revelations, complex characters and a decisive break from the source material, Season 2 rowed back on all three.

The biggest disappointment was of course Homelander, who by the end had more or less been reset to the "stupid Superman" character he is in the comics. All the hints of depth that he had in the first season are now gone. He doesn't say prayers before bed with his kid, for example, so presumably we're to take it as read that his Christianity in the first season was simple hypocrisy, rather than something that might have made him an "interesting" person. And although he can still be sneaky and manipulative from time to time, for the most part he's basically so dumb he's hardly even frightening anymore.

Every now and again, for example, both he and other characters seemed to be forget what his powers actually were. Why doesn't he hear Ashley Barrett approaching the door of Stilwell's old office, for example, before she interrupts his "moment". (Did he drop the bottle? Why not just screw it up into a tiny ball? Was he too engrossed in said moment? Is he starting to lose it? That would a surprisingly human direction to take a psychopath former lab experiment, but otherwise it's just a strangely sloppy moment in an otherwise remarkably genre aware franchise.) Ditto in episode 2! Why does he need to go through his ex's drawers when he could just, er, x-ray them? And by episode 3 he can stand in the same room as someone having a 'phone conversation and pretend not to overhear it - although of course in the next episode we discover that he did overhear it. (Why did Maeve imagine that he hadn't? Is she genuinely not so bright as we thought?)

More painfully, it's no longer clear that there's much more to the show's "politics" than simple, unrelenting, grinding (post-Trump!) wokeism. The show does still have its moments, but they're sketchy and less frequent than they used to be. Is there a socio-political comment behind Ryan's home-schooling, for example? Possibly - but it could just as easily be that home-schoolers can't manage to hold out against the "real" world for long. The idea of superheroes' being not "born" but "made" is a direct rewriting of the palaeo-leftist X-Men mythology. And the cut to a therapy session with the Deep is a direct call-back to the whole "being a mutant (or a kid wizard, for that matter) is like being a gay" meme. (Hero or monster? Beautiful angelic higher-functioning sociopath or neurotic little pervert? You decide!) But it's little more than a joke that is funny for a moment and then goes nowhere. The whole 'Girls get it done' subplot meanwhile is a glorious satire on Hollywood's prurient intersectional approach to homosexuality, but it never goes much further than a basically clunky leftist message that celebrities should be entitled to their "private lives".* And the worst "racist" in the series is of course Butcher, who apparently blames all supes for the sins of a minority of them. But we're supposed to imagine that by the last episode he's started to see the error of his ways.

As it happens, the weakest element in the drama throughout hasn't changed at all. It's very much still there, and it is of course the Boys themselves. They're almost wholly unlikable and, more to the point, their motivation is seldom clear. It's possible that modern screenwriters just aren't able to create identifiable right-wing characters. But it's also possible they're just lazy. Why, for example, do our eponymous anti-heroes spend so much time just lounging around in a basement? I can't say. But it's very, very boring.

The best new addition to the series was of course new supervillain Stormfront, but by the end she's been outed as a "Nazi" and (quite literally!) disarmed. The possibility of an interesting relationship between Homelander and his son has been peremptorily curtailed. Simon Pegg's not in it anymore. Most the old cast are now more or less 'phoning in their performances. And the revelation that the new left-wing politician character (basically an Alexandria Ocasio Cortez calque) is really a baddy looks altogether doomed from the outset. We're certainly not being promised that next season's baddy will be Far-Left, to balance out this season's "Far-Right" character. In fact quite the opposite! There's little doubt that she'll eventually be exposed as a "hypocritical" liberal who's simply "sold out" to the corporatists of Vought. Her leftist ideology will no doubt remain uncritiqued.

So all-in-all something of a disappointment - and with Joe Biden back in the White House there's little prospect that it (or any of the rest of America's "cultural output") will be getting very much better anytime soon!

*And they, of course, get to decide what counts as "private".

Tuesday, August 18, 2020

Things to Do in Dallas When You're Bored


The first season of The Umbrella Academy was genuinely quite appealing. It was basically what you'd get if Wes Anderson did a reboot of the X-Men, and even when it wasn't wholly original it was at least knowingly so and even, at times, slightly subversive.

Season 2 tries to repeat the successes of Season 1, but it does so with an utterly leaden, beat-for-beat approach that is altogether un-involving and which at times is slightly repulsive. Indeed by trying simply to repeat the formula of the first season it completely fails to build on its successes, which has the effect of freezing the series' worldbuilding, hamstringing its plot, and all but throttling its character stone dead. Indeed by the end of Season 2 the members of the Umbrella Academy have either stayed where they were at the beginning of Season 1 or indeed regressed and become even less sympathetic (and thus less interesting) than they've ever been before.

So now for example we have a 5 who is more homicidal than ever - though to be fair he is at least still trying to save the world. Klaus meanwhile has gone clean, but then he relapses. Luther is now a rebellious and complacent git. The Rumour (because I can't even remember her name) is a self-righteous revolutionary. (Even if you think that it's fair enough that a black woman would support the race revolution in the 1960s, she's from the future. She knows that it's going to happen anyway. Why exactly is she taking out her personal problems on the white people of her grandparents' generation? Somehow I can't imagine it's because she was bullied at school for being black.) The Hispanic one is just an oaf who wants to save JFK, without caring or even thinking about the consequences. (Spoiler: He fails anyway.) And Vanya is now just an obnoxious little marriage-wrecking bean-flicker.

In other words all the characters we liked in the first season (and Vanya) are now just as unappealing as ever, nay more so. The dysfunctional family joke is no longer endearing. It's just tedious and disappointing. None of it feels fresh anymore, nor has it moved on from what went before, in terms of either character or plot.

Even the stuff about the Gallifreyan-style Time Agency (or is it the Temp Agency - which is a fun joke, if you think about it, but quite possibly one the neo-socialists who work in modern television wouldn't get?) makes no sense. If the 2019 "apocalypse" was a fixed point in time, how can the new one in 1963 be another one?

And the weirdest thing is that the show's mythology hasn't grown either. The main thing that made Season 1 so enjoyable was its inventiveness - constantly introducing new characters and ideas. And even if they weren't particularly original, at least they were introduced in an enjoyably kooky, left-field but ultimately knowing way. The old man in a child's body? It's been done before, but not for a while in a mainstream show. So why not? Time-travelling assassins? Ditto! Dysfunctional super-family? Might as well! Just turn it up to eleven. Super-intelligent chimp butlers are cool. So are robot moms. So are murder mysteries and apocalypses and adorable short trousers. Put it all together and what do you got?

My own hopes for the series - that they'd reboot the characters as children, and then have a genuine battle of minds and wills between what their father wanted them to be and what they eventually became - was obviously never going to happen. But in Season 2 there's virtually nothing new or even imaginative. We already know Hargreeves is an alien. But we don't find out anything more about him other than that. It's enough to leave one googling for Wikipedia.

Indulging in Far-Left fantasies isn't a good idea either, especially when the writers have to compensate for a singular lack of likeable negroes and lesbians by making every straight white adult male a bully and/or an incompetent buffoon. (This includes the baddies, unfortunately, making them unpleasant to no dramatic purpose and not really scary either.) Ellen Page for example is just as horrible as ever - narcissistic and one-dimensional to a tee. If your case is that she's an overgrown child actress playing a character with severely arrested psychological development then fine. But that none of the Hargreeves children has been able to form a meaningful relationship with a member of the opposite sex is something of a given. Page is just bad - and is particularly badly shown up by actual child actor Aidan Gallagher's range and energy (though in season 2 even 5 regresses to a somewhat one-dimensional mean here).

The characters hardly ever use their superpowers to move the plot along. Is this deliberate? The point that you don't need special powers to be a hero is perfectly legit. And more to the point the only dramatically satisfying victories are ones where superheroes don't use their powers. But here it's Vanya's super powers that lead to the end of the world (again!) and it's 5's time-travel powers that end up saving the day (again!).

The villains meanwhile have almost no motivation. (The Handler wants to make the time commission more "jazzy". That is literally it.) And the heroes just aren't motivated - with the exception of Aidan Gallagher, who still has just enough teenage energy to make his own scenes interesting, but not nearly enough to save this season in the way he both literally and figuratively saved the first. In fact both literally and figuratively the Umbrella Academy is more than the sum of its parts, and by splitting up the characters to do different boring things (boring boxing, boring asylum, boring sex cult, boring civil rights pressure group, boring nanny to a beautiful but boring autistic boy, etc.) we see just how boring each character is by himself.

What really drove the first season were the back stories and the flashbacks. They're almost entirely missing from the second season. What made us fall in love (or at least mildly warm to) the characters of The Umbrella Academy was that we were able to see the "good" versions of them (in their adorable short trousers and knee-socks). And yes, turning the Monocle from being a proud papa, who rewards his prepubescent charges with ice cream each time they save the day, into a straight-up dick (albeit an extra-terrestrial one) was definitely a mistake. Interestingly one of the few good things about Season 2 was the partial "redemption" of Hargreeves, but we'll see if this is a story-arc the show's writers are really going to continue with in Season 3.

And Season 3 need not (yet) be a total write-off. Arguably the biggest problem with Season 2 was a lack of source material, in principle because of how much of the second Umbrella Academy comic book went into Season 1. Well there's one more comic book still to go, and perhaps another in the pipeline, so it's to be hoped that the Sparrow Academy may offer some return to form next year.

But as usual we'll see.

Thursday, July 23, 2020

Monday, June 1, 2020

Saturday, May 16, 2020

Netflix vs. Amazon: Two Comic-Book Takes on the Post-9/11 World

Adorable shorts are cool. (Change my mind.)

It turns out 2019 was quite the year for dramas based on comic books. On the big screen we saw Disney's MCU series finally come to a gorgeous, decades-long climax with Avengers' Happy Ending Avengers: Endgame. On the small screen meanwhile Netflix and Amazon found themselves going head-to-head (although head-to-knee might be more appropriate given the disparity between the two) with two surprisingly watchable adaptions of comics from the late 2000s...

The Umbrella Academy

Tweenage superheroes in goofy prep-school uniforms (including kinky eye-masks, Argyle sweaters, knee-length socks and adorable little shorts) ought to be a genuinely fun idea. X-Men go full Hogwarts? Why not? Mix in time-travelling men in black assassins from Doctor Who (or at least from the 1990s "wilderness years" novels and comics versions of the franchise) and you should almost by definition have a kick-ass (if not quite Kick-Ass) comic book and a very serviceably fun but fucked-up TV show.

So! Did it work?

Well I've never read the comic, so I can't possibly say whether the Netflix people did a good job of adapting the source material. As a show though it's... OK. As I said, the main gimmick is sound, being mostly tried and tested, and the back-up time travel gimmick has of course been tried and tested to destruction (even if I use the phrase advisedly).

Just as Stan Lee taught us that superheroes can have their human sides, and Watchmen taught us that if Batman were real he'd have more in common with Nathan Bedford Forrest (or at least Bernhard Goetz) than he would with Sherlock Holmes, now we're invited to imagine that not all super schools are quite so "enlightened" as Charles Xavier's. In fact there's nothing like being brought up with your fellow (alien) septuplets in a big house in New York, with an emotionally distant authoritarian Englishman (also an alien though!) for an adoptive father and an android Stepford housewife for a mother and, er, an augmented chimpanzee for a butler to leave you... an angry, embittered, emotionally needy, "dysfunctional", and generally just typically obnoxious millennial. Only with superpowers!

If the X-Men were written to appeal to teenagers not too cool for school but definitely too cool to fight in Vietnam, the Umbrella Academy were evidently supposed to be channeling the angst of a generation that couldn't quite cope with 9/11, Bush and Iraq. Now they've been repackaged in time for the Great Awokening, I'd suggest that updating them by the better part of two decades wasn't such a great idea.

For one thing, they don't really fit into the post-2008 era, let alone the world post-2016. It's hard to sympathise with the marital problems of a super-powered Hollywood celebrity (for example) if you're a 40-year-old man who can't afford to move out of his mother's spare room, and when teenagers are being sacked from university and having their lives ruined for expressing the "wrong" opinions on WhatsApp it's a bit much to suggest they should be angry at their 'rents for having been too strict. (Then again, the total failure of the entire media establishment to come to terms with either the Great Recession or the post-Obama revolutions of Brexit and Trump is an ongoing cultural problem. So perhaps one shouldn't judge Netflix too harshly for failing adequately to adapt a 2000s comic-book to a late 2010s zeitgeist.)

Thomas Hoepker's "most controversial photo" of 9/11

Rather more important is that The Umbrella Academy has a very distinct post-9/11 vibe to it. When Mohamed Atta and his chums brought down the World Trade Centre, they also challenged many of the Baby-Boomers' and Generation X's previously devoutly held beliefs (even if in the end they didn't quite manage to bury them). Thomas Hoeopker's infamous photograph in fact illustrated not so much the indifference of young Americans' to their fellow citizens' suffering but their complete inability to comprehend what was going on. "I don't get it, dude. Why would anyone want to attack us? We're cool, aren't we?" Because whereas previously multiculturalism had been seen only as a Good Thing and America's role on the world stage had only ever (or at least since 'Nam) been seen as "a force for good", suddenly young Americans were invited to re-imagine both America's relationship with the world beyond their borders and their own relationship(s) with the American government itself.

Of course, in a comparatively short period of time the fantasies of the past all bounced back in the shape of conspiracy theories about Bush, oil, evangelical Christianity and (of course) racism. But for a short while the kids who'd grown up watching John Hughes movies and listening to the sonic sewage of MTV felt vulnerable both physically and intellectually. Having finished the first season of The Umbrella Academy therefore, I was interested to discover that it was the brainchild of Gerard Way, who was of course (with My Chemical Romance and in particular 'The Black Parade') one of the very, very few creative talents to have tried in any way to come to terms with 9/11 artistically. And whereas 'The Black Parade' was an unusual and (at least in some ways) original reflection on how young people should think about death, the first Umbrella Academy story gives the dysfunctional early 2000s generation their own comic-book avatars, who are supposed to overcome their own dysfunctionality and bickering in order to stop the End of the World.*

Admittedly, it's hard to make dysfunctional people dramatically engaging, let alone sympathetic. There aren't many people in The Umbrella Academy that we can really be expected to root for. But then one presumes that's the point. Deep down, each one of them is a beautiful damaged human being, and in the end they all love each other, and we learn to love them as they reconnect and rediscover what they have in common. Or... something like that.

The only really good thing about the Netflix adaption is of course Aidan Gallagher. Robert Sheehan finishes comfortably but still distantly in second place, playing a gay character who hardly develops at all. (He goes to 'Nam - having travelled back through time to get there - and comes back not significantly affected by the experience beyond having had a boyfriend who then died. Which makes one wonder if that's really all the significance that war can have to a X-gen/millennial audience.) And unfortunately it also has one really, genuinely bad thing going on, and that of course is the abysmal Ellen Page. And it is unfortunate because she's really, really, really bad. She's clearly supposed to be an "interesting" baddy. But alas, she really, really isn't.

And on the subject of interesting baddies, that brings us neatly to...

The Boys

Should one feel disappointed that a TV streaming series called The Boys hardly has any actual boys in it?†

Only joking! The Boys is glorious, and so gloriously fucked-up it should be on one of Russell Brand's 12-point rehab programs.

Simon Pegg gives it a big daddy kiss of approval. In the original comic book he was actually the inspiration for the main character, and he even wrote a foreword to one of the trade paperbacks by way of a wink and a thank-you. Here he literally plays the daddy of the main character, albeit with a slightly ropy Noo Yawk accent. Karl Urban sports an if anything even ropier London accent, though he goes on more or less to save the series on a character level just by projecting sheer scary bear charisma. Less successful is the actual main character, played tolerably but almost entirely without charisma or insight by Jack Quaid, as is his similarly one-dimensional super-powered girlfriend played by Erin Moriarty. (I just had to google their names, so trust me they're forgettable.)

In fact the series titular heroes - a slightly screwy squad of CIA gunslingers who are dedicated to "bringing down" (politically, legally and literally) the world's superheroes (who in general terms are asshole versions of DC's Justice League) - are surprisingly dull. There's a token black man (of course), who believes in Jesus and lies to his wife. There's a comedy token Frenchman (for some reason), who tortures people to death and then fusses about his baguettes and so on. And then there's Karl Urban's character Butcher, who's out for revenge, and we definitely feel his pain, but then he flies into a homicidal rage and murders Haley Joel Osment (whose guest appearance as a psychic washed-up former child prodigy is quite fabulously dark) in a public lavatory.

And that's sort of it for the goodies. Yes, obviously the series was trying to go down the now well trodden GoT route of not really having goodies and baddies. But there's a sense in which that wasn't quite what was wanted. It's clearly supposed to be "challenging", but if one really wanted to challenge modern norms one could easily have flagged up (for example) why a man and a woman who aren't married to each other should think it's OK to fornicate. Quaid's nerd and Moriarty's feisty blonde are supposed to be the goodies, but they're only goodies in that they both have utterly cliched story-arcs. Her "rebel without a clue" arc is even lamp-shaded by the Wonder Woman character. His arc looks as if he might be a new Breaking Bad-type character in the making, but as of the end of the first seasons he's nowhere near there yet. (In the last episode he shouts "Sorry!" whilst murdering private security guards. Is that supposed to be darkly funny? I'm not even sure that it was.)

"Post-modern? Moi?"

What saves the series rather than the Boys themselves is the baddies, who are of course the not-so-super superheroes. And boy, what wonderful baddies they are! If the X-Men comics humanised heroes and Watchmen and its followers meditated on the dehumanizing effects of having great power and great responsibility, The Boys takes the latter concept one stage further and asks what sort of people superheroes would be in the "real" world of rolling news channels, Hollywood blockbusters and media-savvy politicians.

Obviously the whole world at some point is going to have to come to terms with why we're currently spending the same sort of money at the cinema to see Iron Man thump Thanos as we used to spend on Gone with the Wind (or at any rate on a pseudo-sci-fi Gesamtkunstwerk like Star Wars - or even an American homemade neo-Marxist mythological masterpiece like Titanic). Personally I think there are perfectly legitimate economic reasons why we do. (Patriotic epics are all very well, but by definition they have limited international appeal. And yes, that includes Bondage.) And it's possible that even kiddie wizards and neo-mediaevalism may simply have had their day (especially now that China is opening up to Hollywood). But there's also a clear sense in which the 21st century world has both forgotten the past (the historical epic is currently beyond resuscitation) and lost faith in the future (because sci-fi as a genre isn't much better off), and so it contents itself with a fantastical version of the world of the present day. The question is, does it dare from such a vantage point to say anything about (let alone to) that present-day world. And does it have anything to say?

Like The Umbrella AcademyThe Boys does indeed "deal" with 9/11, but having been written by a Brit rather than an actual resident of New York it does so far less obliquely, far more cynically and (arguably) more observantly.†† In fact it has an actual 9/11 calque in the shape of a 'plane hijacking that the heroes then make a hundred times worse when they intervene. And the character who fails to save the day but who then goes on to save virtually the entire show is of course Anthony Starr's Homelander. In the current golden age of television, when writers write to character rather than plot and then write their characters to the actors playing them (even when it means they end up with character-arcs that make no sense in the context of the plot - witness Jaime Lannister and Daenerys for a couple of good examples!) it was perhaps inevitable that having cast somebody really good as their main baddie they would end up whether intentionally or not making him the most "interesting" character of all. Because Anthony Starr, to employ a phrase, absolutely kills it.

Homelander on screen is cleverer, more charming, more three-dimensional, more devious and more ruthless, and altogether more interesting than he was in the comics. Is this just a problem with writing to a genuinely good actor? (And the Great Awokening has certainly sorted the men from, er, the boys in that regard. With fewer white heterosexual roles out there, even a thorough-going scary villain like Homelander, much like Smith in MitHC, will end up becoming a deeply compelling antihero.) He's cynical enough to bring a baby into a room with a bomb just because he wants to know if it will survive the blast - because he wants to know whether it's his or not. And the scene when he finally gets the measure of evil domineering single-mother lipstick-feminist nympho Hillary-clone Madelyn Stillwell and lasers her brain out of her head must have raised a cheer from every God-fearing toxic masculinist throughout the English-speaking world.†††

Umbrella Academy went to town on the idea of superheroes being emotionally immature adults, but The Boys goes all the way to the big city on it. And in doing so it doesn't just dip into a somewhat hackneyed critique of what a liberal American might consider to be a cold-showers boarding school-style of education. Perhaps inadvertently The Boys holds up what a leftist Ulsterman might consider a mirror to America itself. Yes, it turns out that Homelander was brought up in a laboratory. But then "real-life" modern America is itself just as much an artificial being. After all, what other sort of country could ever be satisfied with such an utterly banal version of protestant "Christianity", in which religion is reduced to pop music, scriptural slogans and foreign aid campaigns? (Give me dogmas and incense any day!) In what other sort of country is it considered sexually mainstream for teenage boys to lust over women's mammary glands. (Over here, even straight men prefer their hindquarters.) If America were a superhero it would be Superman, and if Superman were real he'd a smug but neurotic evangelical obsessed with tits.

One final thing that The Umbrella Academy and The Boys have in common is that each breaks with its comic book source by giving its first season a cliffhanger ending, and one indeed that holds out a glimpse of a possible "nostalgic" resolution. The Umbrella Academy's is fairly simple. Even if is about to "get messy", we're still invited to imagine the characters are on the verge of going back through time and having a Quantum Leap-type second chance, with childhood innocence, order and beauty restored. The Boys on the other hand ends with a humdinger of a twist, when we find out that both Butcher's wife and Homelander's son are alive and well and living in a leafy suburb somewhere - though not how any of them will really react to their discovery.

So, have we seen the last of Ellen Page? Will the Umbrella Academy now be able to move on from that quirky, slightly convoluted time-travel story and continue having new wacky adventures for years to come? Will Butcher be able to come to terms with the probability that he was legitimately cuckolded by Homelander and certainly not widowed? Will Homelander give his long-lost son the chance to become the emotionally developed human being he could never be? (Because even being brought up by a single mom beats growing up as a super-powered lab rat.)

With second seasons in the pipeline for both shows, each has plenty to play for.

"No! I am Darth Vader."

*Interestingly there are several musical choices in The Umbrella Academy that tonally feel quite out of place. Generally speaking if I recognize a song in a show's soundtrack the chances are that it's too mainstream for the drama. So 'Run Boy Run' may have briefly fitted the mood for the opening of the second episode. But 'Don't Stop Me Now', though in many ways excellent, certainly didn't. The idea of having any Black Parade songs in there may sound in and of itself incestuous, but given that a Black Parade atmosphere pervades The Umbrella Academy the fact that it wouldn't have fit the tone of the drama rather makes one wonder what tone exactly the show-makers were aiming for.

†There is one, as it happens, and he's mouth-watering.
††Having been brought up on legends about Dunkirk, Brits are perhaps more familiar with the ability government spin-doctors have to turn a monumental establishment fuck-up into first a national tragedy, then a national parable, and finally into a foundational myth for whatever the Government wanted to do in the first place. (As a WWII nerd, one suspects Garth Ennis would appreciate the parallel.)
†††They did repeat Brightburn's goof though - i.e. when Superman's heat vision blasts straight through the back of your skull it's unlikely you'll have time to wince and say "ouch".

Saturday, May 2, 2020

Thursday, March 26, 2020

The X-Files: The Shape of the Conspiracy - Part Two: Kidnapping and Clones

Herrenvolk
As in the good old days when the previous Doctor Who's outgoing script editor would write the first serial of any new Doctor, 'Little Green Men' feels like a season one story meant to refresh our memories. It makes little sense, beyond that the military are still the bad guys and the Smoking Man is pressuring Skinner to close down Mulder's work. Sen Richard Matheson is presumably the connection in Congress that Mulder mentioned in the pilot episode. But here he functions mainly as Deep Throat's replacement. The only real revelation of the episode is Skinner, who now suddenly starts to come into his own, apparently protecting Mulder by keeping him in an inconspicuous job, albeit one that's well beneath his talents and dignity. (Later on, in 'Ascension', he says 'I can't protect you, Agent Mulder.' The clear inference is that he has been protecting Mulder so far.) And the 'Get out!' scene with the CSM is priceless.

Skinner comes even more into his own in the next episode, in which we learn that he's basically been trying to restart the X-Files by the back door. His 'This should have been an X-File!' is one of the most haunting lines of the entire show. (At least it was for me.) And when he does eventually reopen the X-Files in 'Ascension', because 'that's what they fear the most', it's something of a spine-tingling and/or punch-the-air moment. In fact all things considered 'The Host' is a really good reboot episode for the series as a whole. (On a personal note, it was the first full episode I ever watched, back in the day, on dear old Auntie's very much terrestrial second channel, and it immediately cemented the show in my family's weekly telly schedule.) Yes, the story is crap, but it's literally so - and that's a good thing! And yes, there's something glorious about the fact that Darin Morgan, who would go on to become something of a guru for those who like the "monster-of-the-week" episodes, started out playing an actual monster-of-the-week in that cheesy "fluke man" costume. Of course as yet there's still no real difference between the two types of episode, and in retrospect that's actually a very pleasing thing.

'X', like Deep Throat, is a spy from inside the military. This is all but confirmed later on in 'Fresh Bones'. (More specifically, he's probably ex-Marines.) Currently though, he's "at the FBI". (It's a normal enough career path, after all.) In 'One Breath' X has a little rant at Mulder in which interestingly he reasserts the conditions that Mulder and his "predecessor" worked under. 'You’re my tool, you understand? I come to you when I need you.' But it's quite a different relationship. 'I don't want to be here.' he barks, in 'Sleepless'. Are we still supposed to believe that he, like Deep Throat, just wants to use Mulder for the same ends (i.e. to expose the fucked-up shit the Government is getting up to with aliens and alien spaceships and alien gene therapy and, er, getting loonies who've been interfered with by aliens to kidnap sexy FBI Agents and hand them over to the Navy for Japanese scientists to do, er, weird things to them)? Presumably! But we feel that X's motives are personal rather than political. He's loyal, albeit in a somewhat grudging way, to his "predecessor" Deep Throat and to Deep Throat's ideals. But we never really find out what the connexion was between them. Given their quite different characters one can theorise that the nature of X's "loyalty" is one of personal honour rather than shared sentiment. (Did Deep Throat save X's ass in 'Nam? It's possible. X looks old enough.) Whereas Deep Throat claimed he was trying to make amends for his sins, we feel that X has been hurt by the system and wants revenge on it. And whereas Deep Throat always came across as a patriotic patrician ashamed of what his country had become, who was seeking to expose a nefarious conspiracy even at the cost of his own life, X has more of an angry black radical vibe. (Even X's disdain for opera in 'End Game' hints at a man who fundamentally despises the Establishment and wants to survive long enough to dance on its grave.) In 'Soft Light', when X effectively manipulates Mulder into leading him to Dr Banton, we get our first, er, glimmer of how he might be using Mulder: just as the Smoking Man used Mulder and Scully to retrieve Ray Soames's tracking device and the alien foetus from Fort Marlene, so presumably Deep Throat could always claim as cover that he was running Mulder as his own double agent within the Bureau. But in truth this is almost certainly just X at the same stage as Deep Throat was at in 'E.B.E.' - abusing Mulder's trust (not to mention sacrificing various mostly innocent lives along the way) out of fear that his own credit with the Syndicate may be about to run out.

The real watershed episode is of course 'Duane Barry', in which we "learn" (for want of a better word) that "the Government" are "in on it"
DUANE BARRY: The government knows about it, you know. They're even in on it sometimes. Right there in the room when they come. They work together with a, uh, secret, uh, corporation. ... A man, the military. They're all in it together. ... The government knows why they're here, but they wouldn't dare let the truth out. So they cooperate.
I have to say, personally, that I've always thought the new idea of the dear old, sinister old "Government" co-operating with extraterrestrials to be something of a lapse in tone for the series. Frankly, men in suits may be scary to crazy hipster libertarian types. But for me the vision of the men with the goofy tie-pins standing next to the creepy child-aliens just made the latter seem considerably less creepy. And fundamentally the whole idea of men dressed as bank managers nattering away to little green men is frankly just silly. It's a concept that gets somewhat salvaged later on, with the whole idea of the conspiracy within the world's governments working in secret to become the Vichy Government to the Alien Colonists' invaders, along with slogans like 'Resist or serve' and 'Survival is the ultimate ideology'. But at this point the revelation comes as something of a "now you're being silly" moment.

And then again, the whole idea that it's not really the government but a "government within the government", made up of men wearing stripey shirts and stripy ties, is itself somewhat disappointing - as indeed, for that matter, are the "politics" of The X-Files generally. But I digress.

Ostensibly at this point, the Smoking Man and indeed Alex Krycek are still just secret agents for the military, acting in secret for the sake of national security. (For all his pixie good looks, we can easily imagine that Krycek is ex-military as well. We later find out that he's a Russian secret agent, but hey, these things happen.) But the extreme possibility is dangled out for us not only that they look down on FBI dogsbodies like Skinner but also that they have no real loyalty either to the military, whose alien foetus they didn't return at the end of 'The Erlenmeyer Flask' or, indeed, to any legitimate government. And if they're the ones behind Scully's abduction, and in other words if they're controlling Duane Barry, then they may as well be the "secret corporation" that's "cooperating" with "them".

We later find out, in 'Anasazi', that the Smoking Man's "day job" is as head of Garnet, and it's the nearest we ever come to discerning what his actual official position is in the whole US (and international) establishment. Indeed it's almost the only time we see him actually break sweat over a case. As the MJ-12's chief troubleshooter he's essential not just to the generals who are trying to keep the truth about UFOs out of the limelight but also to the Syndicate itself. More generally, it's given him carte blanche, in the name of national security, so glide around not just the J. Edgar Hoover Building and the Pentagon but pretty much everywhere, keeping an eye on government secrets and finally, apparently, building up literally a vast storeroom of his own. And he's been around for so long that in the upper echelons of the FBI they can no longer even remember his name.

In 'Ascension' he gives Krycek some blather about not killing Mulder for fear of 'turning one man's religion into a crusade'. It's a cute line, and indeed it's repeated again and again in later episodes. (He uses it to Bill Mulder in 'Ansazi' and to Strughold in the 1998 movie, and clearly he's used it so much by 'Talitha Cumi' that even X has heard it.) But it's not terribly satisfactory, and one cannot blame the writers for retconning later on that the real reason he doesn't want to kill him is that the Smoking Man actually admires Mulder. (A mere two episodes later he tells Mulder to his face that he likes him, and we later find out, of course, that he's Mulder's father. In 'The Erlenmeyer Flask', Mulder refers to Deep Throat as Obi Wan-Kenobi: perhaps it was inevitable that the CSM would turn out to be Darth Vader.) It's just possible that even in the early years the Smoking Man was grooming Mulder as a possible ally in case things went pear-shaped with the Conspiracy.

Mulder for some reason (though we later find out he was right) assumes that Scully was abducted by the Navy, presumably on the basis that he knows he didn't kill Duane Barry so the Navy must have covered up his cause of death. (And Mulder calls Krycek 'Alex'. Soooooo cute! Ahem!) Yes, this feels like another lapse of judgement. The Smoking Man can sit in on meetings at the FBI, and he's got a big private stash of alien gizmos at the Pentagon. And somehow he also has a hold over Krycek, Blevins and, to a lesser extent, Skinner. (And no, we never find out how, exactly! For some reason we're just supposed to picture him as some sort of school superintendent, who can make people sit up straight and look nervous whenever he's around. "SKIN-ner!") We're encouraged to imagine (from the final scene of 'The Erlenmeyer Flask') that he's from "the executive branch", but what does that mean exactly? That he plays golf with the President and can have anyone who works for any government agency immediately fired on a whim. (According to X, referring to Sen Matheson in 'Ascension', 'They have something on everyone.') Or are we supposed to accept that anyone who knows anything about him knows the deep dark gangster secret of state power, and that none of them wants to end up like Deep Throat? It's fine, on a level of immediate drama - tone and setting and so on. But given that just two episodes on from 'Ascension' we find out that he's just a lonely old man who lives in a dinghy apartment, as X-Files mysteries go it's even less satisfying than most.) The only, slightest hint of an explanation we ever get is that as head of Garnet he has the authority of some sort of permanent executive branch, inter-agency chief "fixer". But is it really feasible to imagine that he has the entire US Navy at his beck and call?

Well anyway, for some reason the Navy kidnap Scully, they access her medical records by using a weird genetic tracking device that was put in her arm when she had her smallpox jabs, they snaffle her ovaries to make baby alien hybrids (albeit still quite crap ones that don't last very long), they put a Japanese microchip in the back of her neck to stop her getting cancer (and possibly to read her mind, possibly even to call her back whenever they feel like it using some hokey alien mind-control device!), and then they dump her back at the Georgetown Medical Centre. It's not at all clear how this all came about, but we're invited to believe that this is all part of a long-standing secret tri-services alien hybridisation programme. (Still all sold to the military as being in order to breed super-soldiers? And covered up in the name of "national security"? Presumably!) So presumably the Smoking Man just got her name on the list. And got them to accept deliverance at a UFO abduction hot-spot! From a gibbering loony in drawstring pants called Duane Barry!

And, er, then she got lost in the bureaucracy and ended up half-dead and half-alive at the hospital attached to her old uni in Washington. Because, er, these things happen! It is of course quite plausible that some sweet old navy doctor recognised Scully from some Christmas party when she was a kid and so quietly had her dropped her off at Georgetown. This would at least explain why the Syndicate, presumably smarting because they never got a sample of Scully's blood, dispense one of their thugs to pick one up from the hospital.

Of course, the Smoking Man claims that he was responsible for returning Scully because "he likes her", but it doesn't quite ring true - or at least not quite so true as his "I like you" to Mulder (because, er, I am your father, ahem!). His 'I'm in the game because I believe what I'm doing is right' though does have a glimmer of plausibility. It's possible that even at this point Carter was imagining the great project of the conspiracy - to resist colonisation or to serve the colonists, and to make sure their families (in C.G.B. Spender's case his wife Cassandra, and maybe one or other of his two sons Jeffrey and Fox) would survive. Certainly the 'If people were to know the things I know, it would all fall apart.' is a meme that's going to come up again and again before the conspiracy arc is exhausted. (And yes, the 'This'll be our secret.' is fabulously pedo.)

There's a sense in which 'Red Museum' is a sort of last hurrah for early-style X-Files. I starts out "monster of the week" and, after a fabulously overstocked* set-up (not just handsome teens being abducted at night and ending up in the woods in their underpants, but loads of paranoia - i.e. paranoia about eating meat, paranoia about vegetarian New Age cults, paranoia about teenage violence and rape, paranoia about modern farming methods, paranoia about peeping Toms and pedos, paranoia about family doctors, paediatric medicine and vaccinations, paranoia about, er, the government... and, of course, paranoia about paranoia) suddenly who should emerge out of nowhere but the Crew Cut Man (who killed Deep Throat)? Yes, by inference he's still working for the Smoking Man, so the experiment he's closing down here is either another hybrid operation (injecting children with alien DNA) or (just as likely!) the flip-side "Purity Control" experiment - "control" meaning probably not so much a 'control' as in an experiment as a means of fighting the spread of the alien virus by creating a vaccine for it. (And are we supposed to imagine that, like Michaud in the movie later on, he sacrifices his life for the project partly because he's been told that he'll come back as a super-soldier?) And of course it's all rounded off, once again, with Gillian Anderson's beautiful sexy vowel sounds and the beautiful chilling finale that the case is still open.

'Colony' of course introduces the theme of alien colonization. (Duh!) In the process, of course, we also get clones, alien viruses and, of course, the Alien Bounty Hunters (and, perhaps more importantly, their race) into the bargain. But Carter's original conception of his great arc seems to have been quite different. According to the original plan, apparently, the "aliens" actually doing the "colonizing" were themselves clones. That is to say (implicitly) that they reproduced asexually. They presumably had some rudimentary "shape-shifting" ability, so that they could look like humans (because by any stretch of the imagination it seems far fetched that an alien race would all look like humans with matching male pattern baldness), but at the same time, irrespective of external appearances, they could also always recognize other aliens. But they had no real individuality. (We learn later on that the Samantha clones have an "original", archetypal clone, who, if she survives, will somehow ensure the survival of her race as a whole. And the Alien Bounty Hunter's question "Where is he?" in retrospect sounds as if he was referring to an original Gregor archetype rather than simply to the next Gregor on his list.) The reason why the clones are interested in the "government"/military's hybridization experiments (which apparently go back to the 1940s) is 'to erase that aspect which has forced the community [i.e. the colony] to scatter... [i.e.] their identical natures'. If they don't all look the same then it won't look weird if they live together. But alas, they're now being closed down, and this time it's by their own people rather than by the US government. Though the extraterrestrial politics of The X-Files are never really explained, clearly there are nasty right-wingers out there just as there are down here. This at least seems to be the implication of the Samantha clone's explanation that 'The experiments weren't sanctioned. It was considered a dilution of their species, a pollution of their race. So a bounty hunter was dispatched to destroy them and terminate [Terminator-style] the colony.' The Bounty Hunters apparently are chauvinists who take the concept of "identity" very seriously. (One idea from this early stage that certainly didn't survive was that of the "impure" Gregor clones' wanting "to share the planet" with the "pure" Bounty Hunters. It's barely audible in the screened version of 'Colony', but just about detectable if you put on the subtitles.)

In practice, even Mulder doesn't quite believe this shtick from Samantha about racial purity. But at the same time there's a certain thematic elegance to all this, so it's something of a pity that so much of it was later implicitly jettisoned and retconned out of existence. The only thing that doesn't quite sound right, oddly enough, is the Samantha clone's claim that there were two clones who originally came to Earth in the 1940s and pretended to be her parents. If they really had arrived in the 1940s, presumably they would have been so old that they could only have posed as her grandparents. And since the only clones we see who are old enough to have been born in the 1940s are the Gregor clones we must, alas, admit that the story about the two original parent clones was probably a fib. After all, since when did clones need more than one parent, especially if we're supposed to imagine that like the hybrids in their vats in 'The Erlenmeyer Flask', clones can be grown to term in giant fish tanks?†

One of The X-Files's great strengths of course has always been that, unlike every other show on American TV (though not unlike older British shows such as Doctor Who, of course!) it never had a "bible": scriptural authority was never an issue, and sometimes even the show's fundamental doctrines could evolve and change from one season to the next. In the case of the hybridization and cloning experiments, it's not long before the show is using the two words interchangeably. (In 'Memento Mori' Mulder addresses the Kurt Crawford clones with a cheery 'You're hybrids!' and they don't disillusion him. And in the movie the Well-Manicured Man says 'Without a vaccination, the only true survivors of the viral holocaust will be those immune to it - human alien clones.') And yes, unlike the Jeremiah Smiths (who work for the Social Security Administration rather than in abortion clinics, albeit arguably no less improbably) and (we later learn) the Bounty Hunters, the Gregors never "shape-shift", so with a bit of retconning we might just about be able to shoehorn the Gregors into being not alien clones but human clones whose genes have been spliced with alien DNA. And arguably we can legitimately speculate about the nature of the Gregors' attempt to erase their identical natures, and about the individuality (or "freedom") that they were hoping to achieve for themselves: the only reason the extraterrestrial colonists would have engaged the services of a bounty hunter must have been that the Gregors, via their hybridization, had discovered a way to resist the Black Oil. We learn later on in 'The Red and the Black' that the Alien Bounty Hunters' race have started their own resistance movement against the Colonists, but these clones are evidently the original "rebel colonists". (Their goal of subverting "the Project" is shared by the Kurt Crawford clones in 'Memento Mori', and indeed we are probably supposed to imagine them sharing a similar grisly, bubbly green fate.) But then how things changed from season to season! In 'Colony' the Alien Bounty Hunter arrives from outer space in a UFO. In 'Talitha Cumi' he's apparently just bumming around New England waiting for a call. And by 'Memento Mori' these things can apparently be left to the Grey-Haired Man - who, despite not being very nice, is apparently quite human.

The Gregors' relationship with the later X-Files mythology (not to mention the later X-Files clones) does of course raise the whole question of timelines. We can legitimately deduce that there have been three periods when batches of the clones that appear in The X-Files have been produced: the original Gregor clones were apparently "born" in the 1940s, the first batch of Adam and Eve clones and the Samantha clones that appear in 'End Game' (and presumably the Kurt Crawford clones that appear in 'Memento Mori') were cloned in the 1960s, and the cute little Samantha and Kurt Crawford "drone" clones were products of the 1980s. (And finally, is William a clone as well? Was there one final batch of millennial-baby clones? It seems we'll never know, but the final shot of 'My Struggle IV' would seem to suggest that William has the standard "hybrid" abilities of surviving gunshot wounds and breathing underwater that were established in 'The Erlenmeyer Flask'.)

So was Samantha cloned when she was born? If she was, we might imagine it was her father's doing. Was the original Samantha a test-tube baby? Was Bill Mulder himself unable to get children naturally? It would certainly cast both his relationship with his divorced wife and his wife's affair with the Smoking Man in a different light. And did he put Samantha forward for the cloning programme because, you never know, a spare favourite child might just come in handy one day - not that such a plan would have worked, of course, because presumably the aliens would have "just known". But having his own daughter cloned, before later getting in touch with the Gregor clones from Russia, could well have been an early gesture of defiance, showing faith in the cloning programme and a personal commitment to the survival of his genetic inheritance. It also seems possible, if Samantha was that important, that that was why the Smoking Man was keen to hold on to her, as we later learn he did in 'Closure'.

The question then of course is why? What was the point of making all these clones? We learn from Chris Carter's "secret track" that the "Purity Control" project began as a series of cloning operations in the 1940s, 'its original conception the brainchild of German scientists given immunity themselves for war crimes, and allowed to continue the eugenic experiments that were Hitler's dark legacy.' It's perfectly possible that Carter was thinking of The Boys from Brazil at this point, and we know from 'Eve' that the US military were initially interested in clones for their super-soldier project, so it's quite possible that that's how the conspiracy started, well before the start of the hybridisation experiments and long before the great betrayal of 1973. (Of course it's also possible that by this stage Carter is confusing 'clones' and 'hybrids' willy-nilly.) And even when said "Nazi scientists" started splicing human DNA with alien it's perfectly plausible that the "control" in 'Purity Control' meant just that - because what better control group could one ask for than one made up of clones?

We can take it for granted that the Samantha clones tell Mulder that his sister is alive because they are manipulating him. (Somewhat cruelly, it has to be said - but, then again, survival!) But why does the Bounty Hunter then confirm it? Quite honestly, that's a tough one. It is just possible that he knows about the "walk-ins" who took her in 'Closure' - though again, in The X-Files we're not really supposed to know what happens "off-world". (As it happens, Cassandra Spender confirms in 'Two Fathers' that Samantha is 'Out there, with them. The aliens' - though admittedly this was more than a year before 'Closure'.) It's also possible that there are now so many Samantha clones knocking around that no one can remember which one is the real one - except the original one presumably, which could have been a neat Twilight Zone-type story to tease out, if anyone could have been bothered. Finally, in all probability the Bounty Hunter has just got it wrong. He was privy to the original abduction (because according to 'Within', abductions is one the services the Bounty Hunters offer) but not to the decision to return her just a couple of years later. If this is the case, it casts an interesting light on the whole galactic economy. The Bounty Hunters aren't controlled by the Black Oil. They do what they do because (by definition!) they're paid to by the Colonists. But how? With what? One possibility that springs to mind is that the Bounty Hunters really love their whole sweet, sweet shape-shifting gig and basically are just junkies for the DNA of different species, so the Colonists supply them with the means to travel between planets on condition that some of their best soldiers and assassins do a few jobs for them in return. (It's not so far-fetched when you consider that one of Carter's main inspirations for the clone/hybrid episodes is the old 1960s TV-show The Invaders.) The Colonists themselves, it later transpires, are actually quite slight, gentle creatures - albeit amoral, and with little more than disdain for humanity.

We might even speculate, given that we later learn that it was not the Syndicate but the Russians who eventually managed to develop an antidote to the Black Oil, that the Gregors really are from Russia and that their operation was the true beginning of "the resistance". And if the cloning of Samantha really was part of a plan by her father then it might well explain why he's oddly quiet in the 'Colony'/'End Game' story. If he's in on the Gregors' and Samanthas' resistance plans, his sitting outside smoking when Fox arrives at the Vineyard is lest any interaction between him and the clone give the game away to his estranged wife. It's also possible that his claim that Fox's mother wanted him to come is a fib. (Actually it was he.) And it would explain his reaction - frustration and anger, and an oddly faux concern for his estranged wife's feelings rather than personal grief -  when he learns that Mulder has "lost her" again. Certainly we later learn that he's on the Syndicate's "resistance" wing. (Indeed, in 1973 he was the lone dissenter in the vote to cooperate with the Colonists.) And so of course the reason the Bounty Hunter is there to terminate the Gregors and Samanthas is because (so far) they're the most dangerous potential resistance to the project that the colonists have yet come across.

And of course all this means nothing to the military - the best reason yet to think the the Syndicate's deal with the aliens (handing over their children as hostages in return for baby aliens to do experiments on, on condition that they produce a hybridization process that will allow them and their children to survive the Black Oil's colonization process so that they can act as a "Vichy Government" for the colonists, etc. etc.) is unknown to the wider US "government".

Alas, that would change quite drastically as the whole politics of The X-Files became re-imagined at the beginning of the Season Three.

*No pun intended!
†Incidentally, there's a weird sort of superstition amongst fans either that the alien foetus in 'The Erlenmeyer Flask' cannot be a true alien (because of the first movie) or that the aliens can reproduce sexually (despite the movie). In reality, there's no reason to imagine that the aliens gestate in any way other than as we see on screen: the Syndicate's bees are intended to infect the human population with the Black Oil, who will then be impregnated with alien foetuses that will come to term as violent, heavily clawed and armoured monsters. Presumably the hybridized members of the Syndicate would then have the job of taming them and helping them to mutate into their final "Grey" forms. (Again, this isn't just from Alien(s): it's also largely inspired by The Invaders. Alas, it's an idea that was ultimately missing from Prometheus/Alien: Covenant that the human race was in fact originally engineered to act as a host race for the xenomorphs, the Engineers' plan being first to "seed" Earth with their own DNA, and then to "seed" the human race with their X Files-style black goo in order to produce a new third race of purest malevolence. Indeed, The X-Files started as a clone of Twin Peaks, but it soon became a hybrid of every science-fiction film and TV-show you can think of. A bit of reverse genetic engineering was only a matter of time.)

Monday, March 9, 2020

The St Gallen Mafia


No, sorry, I just don't believe in the "St Gallen Mafia" conspiracy theory. They failed to get Martini elected in 2005, when Martini himself told them to support Ratzinger in order to stop Bergoglio. Austen Ivereigh of course claims that they then had a change of heart, and that the three of them who were left (three out of 115!) conspired to get Bergoglio elected in 2013. But how likely is this really?

Indeed is there any real evidence for this outside of the tittle-tattle collected by Ivereigh and Bergoglio's other liberal boomer boosters? Alas, not really! Ivereigh claimed in the first edition of his silly book that just before the 2013 conclave the three of them got Bergoglio's consent to campaign for him, but he was then forced to retract this allegation for the second edition. And is there any real reason even to think it, given that no one (apart from the St Gallen group, supposedly!) even thought of Bergoglio as a "liberal" before he became Pope? Certainly he was not considered liberal by his fellow Jesuits in Argentina, with whom he was deeply unpopular. At a time when "liberation theology" was booming in South America, Bergoglio was seen as something of a "conservative" JPII sycophant.

And for what it's worth I don't believe in the "British coup" theory either. (Again, would we really do such a thing? Did some just think it would be funny to have an Argie as Pope? "Haw-haw! That'll annoy The Sun.") On the face of it, yes, one can easily imagine Pope Bergoglio being elected as Dave and Nick's puppet as much as Obama's. After all, Britain is at best Washington's poodle and at worst Mini-Me to Uncle Sam's Dr Evil, so there's a certain thematic logic to it. In one sense the ultimate success of the "liberal" proddy British Establishment would be to have a Pope elected who was a liberal protestant in all but name.

And yet! And yet! For one thing, once again, the source! This is Ma Pepinster, the elderly schoolgirl who for no readily apparent reason is still writing for Britain's most oleaginously pro-Establishment "Catholic" periodical. And secondly, once again... just think about it. These are the same British Establishment lickspittles who are diehards for the EU on the grounds that internationally Britain is now a post-imperial pipsqueak. They're the sorts of Catholics who would despise the Commonwealth of Nations as an embarrassing relic of a bygone age (even though in practice they would approve of much that it does). Surely the idea that our own James Bond helped to get Pope Francis elected is one sycophantic conspiracy fantasy too far even for them?

In fact easily the best summing up of the "political" situation in the Church I've read in some time comes courtesy of someone called Shane Schaetzel on his blog here. The Catholic Church is "split" (although not technically, and for crude financial reasons it probably isn't going to be any time soon either) between American neocons and German liberals. The former are trying to keep the JPII "conservative" vision of Vatican II alive. The latter are basically in hoc to the German secular state thanks to its "church tax". What's more, they don't really believe in anything anyway and they don't see why anyone else should either. (And more to the point they don't want them to!) The way the whole "Pope Francis" phenomenon fits into it is so straightforward there just isn't space for conspiracy theories about Jesuits, conspiracy theories about the St Gallen mafia, conspiracy theories about the British Embassy in Rome, or even conspiracy theories about Communists, Freemasons and Jews, etc.

Because the simple truth is that when Ratzinger resigned the papacy he was seen as being old and weak. He'd wanted it for himself, for his vision, for his "reform of the Reform" and his "hermeneutic of continuity". And he'd failed. The Cardinals wanted another JPII. The American neocons at any rate remembered "their" Pope as a tough guy who used to stand up to one sort of son-of-a-bitch (i.e. the "atheistic" Commies) and pal around with the other sort (i.e. Galtieri*, Tudjman, Saddam, etc.). They wanted a strong man, they thought Bergoglio would be it, and even if Ratzinger wasn't seen as an old, weak has-been (and I suspect he was), the remorseless logic of the conclave was simply that Bergoglio was next in line. Besides, he was Sodano's golden boy, Sodano had been Galtieri's golden boy, and so as far as JPII's groupies were concerned Bergoglio could do no wrong. (See George Weigel, especially!) And so once again it was the Yanks wot won it - led of course by American Establishment Cardinal par excellence (see here and here) the Archbishop of New York (where else?) Cardinal Dolan.

Buyer's remorse has of course since set in fast, but the simple and obvious truth remains. When future church historians finally start to write up the fate of the glorious new Americanised Catholic Church that emerged after Vatican II, the answer will simply be that they did it to themselves.

*We now know exactly whose side he was on.

Monday, February 24, 2020

Woke Fate*


All one can really say for all the post-T2 Terminator films up until 2019 was that at least they weren't boring. Terminator: Dark Fate manages to be not only offensively boring but boringly offensive. In fact boringly offensively offensive and boring more or less sums it up.

Of course the first Terminator was genuinely scary. The body horror was genuinely horrible and horrific. Its first sequel, like Aliens, was a high-octane action thriller, complete with a cute kid and gun-toting mommabear. And all the others have been footnotes not to the original concept but to that later derogation. Because Rise of the Machines was both disappointing and toe-curlingly bad, though it was at least amusingly so. Arnie's ditching Ed Furlong and teaming up with Mel Gibson cast-off Nick Stahl certainly didn't save it. Then Salvation was head-spinningly mad, and not quite redeemed either by Anton Yelchin as Kyle Reese or by a typically over-the-top Christian Bale as John Connor. And finally Genesis was just bad full-stop, marred mainly by abysmal casting choices and even more abysmal liberties with the franchise's characters and ideas - although a silly plot and ropy special effects certainly didn't help.

The Alien franchise actually waited until number 4 before going self-consciously campy and kooky. But already by Alien3 it had ditched any sense that it was building a long-running saga by using its first few minutes to undo the happy ending of the previous film. The difference between that and the termination of John Connor in the first few minutes of Dark Fate is that casually (off screen!) killing off a cute little girl, a handsome young man and a cool funky robot was in retrospect very much in keeping with the bleak soulless Godlessness of the Alien universe - where there is no fate, but also no good and evil, and there probably shouldn't really be any happy endings. And that doesn't quite work in the Terminator universe, where the moral is supposed to be that we're all supposed to be in charge of our fates, because destiny is nothing but what we make of it.

So having seen unborn baby John Connor, bratty but adorable kid John Connor, twinky teen John Connor, angry adult John Connor and finally baddy (FFS!) John Connor, in Dark Fate we see boy John Connor go the way of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, and that's before we've even got so far as the opening credits. And as with the Star Wars characters the moral apparently is simply that we don't need white men to save the world anymore. We can make do with a young Latina call Dani Gomez. Or Ami Diaz. Or... or whatever her name is.

And she doesn't need no help from no man neither, be he machine or otherwise! Because she's got her super-butch blond-haired, blue-eyed girlfriend to rescue her, and to help her to get across the Mexican border illegally (yes, really!).

And that's before we've even mentioned the return of kick-ass sexagenarian† Linda Hamilton!

Well, the biggest disappointment of Rise of the Machines was that Hamilton and Furlong weren't in it. The biggest disappointment of Dark Fate is that now they're both back, only he got no more than a computer "de-aged"†† cameo after the manner of Princess Leia in Rogue One, and she's little more than a Carrie Fisher clone from circa The Force Awakens. Her beauty has gone, as has any trace of wit or charm. All that's left is some dried-up aged sass.

Sarah Connor herself now seems to be doing little more than channeling Hillary Clinton. She's old, she's embittered, she's out for revenge, and she doesn't just hate machines anymore, because now she also hates both men generally and indeed motherhood. One can only assume therefore that Ami Gomez is supposed to be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And Arnold Schwarzenegger is presumably supposed to be... Arnold Schwarzenegger? He was a baddy, but now he's a nice liberal gun-toting Republican Texan who just wants to help.

What else? Well it's possible the writers may have tried to be wise to potential "Mary Sue"-type criticisms, because their (literally, physically) strong female characters do get bumped around a little bit. But the truth is than one never really feels for any of them. (Sarah Connor alone in one scene manages to bounce burly security guards around like babies.) And I'm normally the last person to demand more "sex" in my films, but sex is leaking out of modern films not because of some new wave of Puritanism or even because of the dreaded PG-13 rating but simply because of the Chinese market. (The Chinese don't like slow build-ups either, of course!) And I suppose in a movieverse where women don't need men to rescue them, why should they have any other sorts of "needs" either?

So fair's fair! This isn't a film the Terminator franchise needed, and it's certainly not one that anyone will want either to re-watch or to remember. Its possible fate can be termination, and with extreme prejudice.

*I thought of Snark Bait, but there's a certain sense in which this may have been the high point of Trump-era wokeness. For various reasons, Hollywood may be about to turn a corner politically.
†In one scene I think she literally kicks the arse of a muscular twenty-something security guard. (OK boomer?)
What with this and the de-aged kids in [Sh]It, last year was perhaps the creepiest year ever for Hollywood boylovers.

Thursday, February 13, 2020

Was The Big Bang Theory the most conservative TV comedy ever?


When I first watched (or perhaps I should say caught sight of) The Big Bang Theory in daily early-evening repeats on E4, my initial response was simply to write it off as a cross between Friends and Frasier - those two 1990s stalwarts of America's sitcom export market, who taught us between them that it's OK to jump into bed with anyone you feel like provided you're young and attractive, make lots of arch, quippy remarks about everything, and somehow make enough money in your dead-end job to live in a palatial high-rise apartment.* It took a while for the penny (ahem!) to drop that this was actually quite a good formula for a sitcom - tried and tested, and only eventually (i.e. after a decade or so) becoming tired and testing.

The oddest thing for me about The Big Bang Theory in retrospect though isn't even its longevity, so much as its particularly peculiar brand of conservatism. For all its obsession with making up-to-date references to geek culture and "real world" science, there was actually something strangely old-fashioned about the multi-camera/studio-audience format. In fact although the sexual mores were 21st century, The Big Bang Theory was pretty much hawking the same American Dream as its sitcom predecessors had in the heyday of comic-books and astronauts in the early 1960s. The characters all live in clean and tidy houses and apartments. Religion, it has to be said, doesn't get much of a look-in, but at the same time when married female characters get pregnant "choice" is not even mentioned. And by the end of the series it turns out that friendship and family, intelligence and hard work, and eventually marriage and children - in that order, unusually enough - are the important things that make for personal fulfillment and happiness.

What made it feel even more old-fashioned in the dying days of the Obama era (not to mention amidst the woke hysteria that greeted Trump's election) was that it was a survivor from the time of Dubya. Back in them thar days, for example, it was still acceptable to have dark-skinned comedy characters like Apu and Rajesh in mainstream TV-shows. (Once the One become President, interestingly enough, it became politically incorrect to make fun of such people: for all their talk about not punching down, it was only once they finally had an opportunity to punch up that America's comedians stopped punching at all. I suppose it's funny how nakedly political political correctness can be!)

In actual fact the sub-textual racism of the way Raj's character was treated is quite troubling, dramatically at least as much as politically. Yes, it's lamp-shaded from time to time. Raj does occasionally call out his friends' ignorance about his culture. But it never changed the fact that the show's writers' fundamentally didn't know anything about people like him or indeed know what to do with him in particular. Even Enoch Powell thought that to all extents and purposes Indian people are basically like white people, but as far as the The Big Bang Theory was concerned they may as well be from Mars. So for most of the show's run Raj says and does comparatively little, and when there's a female character in the room he doesn't say anything at all (because he has selective mutism - hilarious!) and by the show's end he's the only one of the main cast who's still single (but he still has a Felix and Oscar-style relationship with Howard - hilarious!). In short, that Rajesh Koothrappali was only ever in the show as the token ethnic was definitely "problematic", and not just in the hip modern sense of the word. (The only other non-white regular character in the series is a black lady who works in HR. I'm not quite sure what that means, but just saying.)

Even more absent than unwanted pregnancies and ethnics, oddly enough, were gays. Perhaps one underestimates how spoiled one was for gay gags when watching actual Friends and actual Frasier (not to mention Ellen, or indeed their 1990s contemporary series on this side of the pond Absolutely Fabulous), but so far as I can remember there were no gay characters in The Big Bang Theory to be laughed either at or with. Indeed, most of the "comedy" of Raj and Howard's relationship depends on the ancient gag that they're not gay but they behave as if they are. Jim Parsons, who plays Sheldon, actually came out of the closet during the show's run, but his character on screen remained fussily heterosexual. And if there was an episode when one of show's character's started questioning his or her sexuality (like Frasier did one time, as did Malcolm and Reese, etc. etc.) I certainly don't remember it.

A legitimate question then I suppose is Why? Until he started fornicating with Amy (and he'd use the word himself), Sheldon Cooper was arguably the most moral character on American television (at least since Capt Janeway returned to Earth) - hardworking, clean-living, generous to a fault and (for all his annoying quirks) utterly loyal both to his friends and to non-optional social conventions. One possibility is that an old-fashioned format leads to an old-fashioned sort of show, complete with old-fashioned characters and golden oldies-type humour. After all there's only so much in-depth character development you can do when you have a studio audience always waiting for the next gag, and so the tendency is to cleave to perennial archetypes (or, if you like, the same sorts of stock characters who have been serving comedy for literally thousands of years). And so the show's first episode started with the original straight man joined with the idiot savant with a heart of gold, who were then in turn joined by the blonde bimbo with hidden strengths (the chief of which ends up being an ability to hold her liquor), the quippy Jew-boy with hidden weaknesses (especially his mom and his blonde Catholic wife), and, of course, the token ethnic.

By the end of the series, interestingly enough, all the important story-arcs have been tied up. Having started their first episode with a single timeless male-male relationship†, the show then built outwards eventually to include suitable female partners for all its male characters (apart from Raj, of course, but even including Stuart!). Penny meanwhile has given up drink (because she's up the duff), and Raj and Howard have accepted that their friendship is special but in a non-gay way. Most importantly though, Sheldon has got a Nobel Prize and used his speech to thank and apologise to his friends and to tell them he loves them. If this is "conservatism" then it's both old-fashioned and unapologetically elitist to boot.

Wisely though, the show's writers end the final episode with a final scene that is a return to the show's beginning. Nobody gets on a 'plane to LA. No one goes off to become President. No one gets married who wasn't already. We see the same group of friends, albeit with their relationships deepened and their circle expanded, returning to the same apartment and to their same positions, eating together around the same table and implicitly (slightly Simpsons-style) in front of the same TV-screen. And so even the show's ending is comfortingly conservative: a reminder that true growth and prosperity are ultimately spiritual in nature, and that "change" is not always either necessary or desirable.

*The Simpsons at the same time could somehow afford to live in a similarly palatial suburban villa, though their show at least had the sense to hang a lampshade on that from time to time.
†Apparently the only thing that worked in the show's ill-fated pilot episode was the relationship between Parsons's Sheldon and Galecki's Leonard.