Among countries for which we have food security data, the U.S. ranks 30th out of 37.
Our data for the right to food in the U.S. spans 2015 to 2023. The
U.S. food score fell slightly during that period, from 81.9% to 81.1%.
This means that as the U.S. got wealthier, Americans got hungrier.
Or this?
U.S. health scores have been relatively flat for a quarter century,
rising from 79% in 2000 to a high of 82% in 2012. In 2023, it had
receded to 80%. The rising scores were likely due to more Americans
gaining health insurance following the Affordable Care Act’s rollout. The later decline was caused primarily by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Or this?
The country has been losing ground on work and pay for 25 years. After
accounting for how much richer the U.S. has grown, its score fell from
about 62% in 2000 to 51% today. This reflects the growth in economic inequality, with the gains in wealth skewing toward the richest Americans.
Or this?
The U.S. scores a 76% on the overall right to education, placing it 20th
among 38 OECD countries. It’s behind Japan and the U.K. but ahead of
some peers, including Canada and Norway.
I finished a draft for a story - after five hurs - ate breakfast around 2:30 pm and instead of cleaning up and doing some housework, I looked at Google News. More press for Supergirl. I have already made my point that it is an ok movie. But what as bothered me is the reaction to it. The reviews I find more interesting, maybe more than the movie which was more entertaining than mind-blowing.
As usual, there’s a tyke in trouble: 13-year-old Ruthye (Eve Ridley), a
fellow orphan with a ramrod disposition and a tidy brunet braid that
gives away that her character is modeled on Hailee Steinfeld’s vengeful
teenager in “True Grit.”
Ruthye wants to hunt and kill the creep who murdered her family. Unlike
Supergirl, the child thinks it’s healthier to exorcise — not imbibe —
one’s heartache. The duo visit an Epstein-island-like planet of
kidnapped breeding women where, in one of the script’s subtler sick
horrors, the locals imply that pubescent Ruthye is more valuable than
aged 23-year-old Supergirl. (Although some of the caged extras appear to
be as ancient as 30.) It’s yet another swiped idea, this one from “Mad Max: Fury Road,”
for a minor story beat that’s unnecessary. Still, Alcock reacts with
exactly the right note of disdain: “Cool,” she croaks. ‘Nuff said.
The True Grit copy ends quick and conclusively, unless you've never read the book or watched both movies. Supergirl is not Rooster Cogburn, nor is Ruthye Mattie Ross from Yell County. Mattie Ross has more to do with Lobo. Only when Supergirl rises to the occasion of being Supergirl is there anything like the arc Charles Portis gave to Rooster Cogburn. It might also be noted what happened to Rooster after the main events of the novel - he reverted to his low-born, anti-social ways. Supergirl gives the hope that Kara has found her way back to people. Not that script makes this clear. Still, it is different from any other superhero movie I can think of right now.
Still, the production design has imaginatively askew takes on the
mundane: gridded jail cells, plodding space buses, clumsy oxygen suits
that shimmy on with a satisfying squeak. When Supergirl makes a pit stop
at a celestial convenience store, she samples a snack that I’m forced
to call poop-corn. If “Supergirl” sells enough of it, hopefully Alcock
can rampage again in a more confident sequel that truly cuts loose.
That might be the most fun scene. What the movie bodes for the DC's cosmic stories may be most interesting. More about that below.
James Gunn, along with Peter Safran, knew that he was launching DC
Studios right into the teeth of superhero fatigue. Gunn got asked a lot
about how he was going to avoid that, and the key thing he said was:
We’re not going into production on any movie until the script we have is
rock-solid. For that was the overriding problem with the superhero
overkill era: The films had lousy scripts, which were used as grids on
which to layer the visual effects. Gunn was right to want to take the
comic-book genre back to well-structured screenwriting basics. So what
has he done in his second DC outing? He’s given us a comic-book movie
with the worst script I can remember. (It’s by Ana Nogueira.)
What about all those Sony Spider-verse movies that bombed? No, the script is not Citizen Kane; it is not Iron an; but neither is Superman v. Batman.
I’ve never bought the idea that movies were ruined by “Jaws” and “Star
Wars,” but watching “Supergirl” you might well think that they were
ruined by the Mos Eisley Cantina scene of “Star Wars.” Because that
seems to be the movie’s dominant influence. One set piece after another
features rubbery creatures with heads like melting anvils and tentacles
coming out of strange places, as if this, after 50 years, was still
charming and awesome. (Industrial Light & Magic is one of the film’s
visual-effects houses.) Actually, the cantina scene was corny even back
then, and creatures like these now make you feel trapped in a Muppet
movie.
Alien came to mind along with Star Wars. Maybe even more in the atmosphere. Before Alien, the science fiction aesthetic was sterile cleanliness; after, it had a lived-in messiness of use and decay. That DC has a multi-species universe the creature designs had to follow the cantina scene's multitude of designs. Frankly, this felt like the greatest stretch of imagination in the movie.
Pulling from Woman of Tomorrow was a striking choice for a film
adaptation, showing audiences a different interpretation of Supergirl
than they might be familiar with and providing a unique foil to
Corenswet’s boy-scout Superman. It’s genuinely refreshing to see this
version of Kara on screen, as Supergirl is bravely uninterested
in toning down her flaws and eccentricities. Yet, Kara is still a
lovable character, and Milly Alcock slips so comfortably into the role.
Alcock gives Kara pathos and a razor-sharp edge that carries the entire
movie, sometimes even doing the heavy emotional lifting that the writing
and directing fail to deliver. I hope to see Alcock shine in a film
more worthy of her talents in the future.
This might be the best criticism I have seen; it runs through several reviews. Is it because our society has gotten so misogynistic? Did the men start crying and booing when Ripley killed the alien in Aliens?
Is this a cool neo-space western? Is this a grounded character study? Is it a flashy space opera? Supergirl never seems to commit to anything. Ana Nogueira‘s script prefers to sheepishly flirt with all these tones rather than balancing them. The main conflict of Supergirl also feels strangely disconnected from Kara herself. Notably, Captain Marvel (2019)
had a similar problem, where all the most compelling character
development occurred in flashbacks. It’s not that these heroines are
hollow; it’s just that we rarely see them make choices that shape who
they are in the present storylines of their films. Honestly, it’s
maddening how little the creatives learned from the past mistakes of
other female-driven comic book movies.
***
It’s far from the genre’s worst, especially within the standards of what the DC franchise has delivered in the past, but Supergirl deeply suffers from not knowing how to build a film around its iconic heroine.
Alcock successfully sells a character who doesn’t know what home is and
identifies with nowhere, using copious amounts of alcohol to dull the
pain of her past. However, the film fluctuates wildly on whether it
wants to be an origin story, making an emotional connection with Kara
difficult. The narrative expects the audience to understand her trauma
without elaborating on it early on, meaning she initially just comes
across as a drunk trying to be funny.
***
That disconnect is exactly why the viewing experience is so
frustrating. There are so many noteworthy moments buried inside a
disjointed narrative that it creates a constant push-and-pull; I didn’t
know whether to lean in or pull away. The relationship between Supergirl
and Ruthye lacks chemistry – it feels quite tame – but the dynamic of
Kara stepping into a “big sister” role to warn Ruthye that revenge
yields no rewards works beautifully in the film’s key moments. Kara’s
evolution into the hero we expect is genuinely impressive when it
finally arrives, especially since she spends most of the film out of
costume. And the brief cameos from Superman himself are wholesome enough
to conjure a smile – a sweet reminder of a cousin looking out for
family.
The foundation of a great story was there, and the character
development was exactly what the audience needed; it just required
tighter direction. To prove the point, Jason Momoa pops up as the
chaotic-neutral Lobo. The cameo is designed to provide comedic chaos,
but it feels incredibly tame. Instead of landing jokes, it just feels
like Momoa throwing his weight around and shouting his lines, with
little consideration for comedic timing or whether the character fits
the scene.
I never had any interest in the character or great expectation of the movie, but Alcok's performance is what stitches the script together.
Muchlike the Levity Test for awards hopefuls, there’s a similar test I have for action movies and sci-fi blockbusters — not a test, per se, but more like a common marker of baseline competence. I call it the “who is doing what and where” test.
That’s not a demand for more exposition, or that filmmakers pre-fill every “plot hole”
and explain away all the movie magic. It’s simply a plea for coherent
visual design. I tend to be invested in the action of an action-based
movie when I can tell who is doing what and where. Without that, it
turns into a montage of blurs and reaction shots that kills all
suspense. Rather than being on the ride, I’m simply biding time between
outcomes. Remember when filmmakers could convey a basic sense of spatial
awareness? We used to be a proper country.
Take the Harrier Jet sequence in True Lies.
The whole thing is pretty ridiculous on the face of it. It’s goofy, to
the point that you wonder how much is even meant to be taken
“seriously,” and some of the effects even look kind of chintzy to modern
eyes. But there isn’t a single second of it that leaves you wondering
who is doing what and where. Whatever you think of the ride, you’re on
it. James Cameron builds suspense and wonder through carefully
constructed frames, allowing this big, sort of idiotic cat-and-mouse
game played with hovering fighter jet to work as both drama and
slapstick. “Believable?” Maybe. But really who cares, it’s gorgeous.
Interesting test. I like it. I also like how he nails a few more references, potentially even more pertinent than True Grit.
The only way to save the dog from a protracted, painful death
is to find Krem and retrieve the antidote. Kara has three days to do so
(the relativity of time on different planets is never addressed, perhaps
mercifully so). And so, even if Kara is ambivalent about helping
Ruthye, she has to find Krem in order to help her dog. Popeye, John Wick, Princess Bride… what was I saying about obvious influences?
On
the one hand, it’s rather refreshing that the James Gunn-era of DC has,
on some level, solved the stakes-inflation problem that bedeviled the
MCU. Where every plot was about a big bad planning to destroy the Earth,
all life in the universe, the very fabric of reality, etc
(exhausting!). They solved it largely by ripping references from other
movies, sure, but still: an improvement. That being said, if you’re
going to make a movie that rests on a mission to save a cute dog, maybe
just use a real dog? There’s a limit to how much I
can care about a “dog” rendered in mediocre CG. I suppose I can
understand the need for CG when the dog is doing super stuff, but not
when he spends most of the movie lying sick on a table or doing regular
dog things. Could we not find a real dog? It’s not like there’s a
shortage of real dogs in the world.
Good point about the dog, too. Probably a problem of finding the right-looking dog. Even more in making the point about raising stakes. I see it as a coming of age story for Kara, not the usual beat up on the villain superhero story. Still the script muddles that point, but I am willing to give them points for making the try.
When we first meet the titular
Supergirl, Kara Zor-El, she's a sad, lonely, drunk who spends her days
hungover and her nights drinking heavily with her dog. She's taken off
to a planet with a red sun, which removes her powers and makes her
vulnerable like an ordinary human, so that she can feel the effects of
booze. She abuses it to avoid her real feelings of anger and abandonment
stemming from deep childhood trauma and a sense of parental abandonment
that the film slowly reveals.
If that isn't bright and cheery
enough, she quickly gets caught up in a young girl's quest to find the
Brigands—leather-and-spikes-wearing space raiders who murdered the
girl's mother, father, and brother in front of her, in one of the
movie's two (!) separate on-screen family massacres. It turns out that
the Brigands are essentially an intergalactic rape and sex trafficking
gang who make a practice of abducting, imprisoning, and sexually
assaulting young women, whom they call brides, to perpetuate their
all-male society.
Directed by Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya and Cruella), the movie is tinged with the sort of Heavy Metal-esque
trippy pulp weirdness that Gunn is known for, but it comes across as
forced and tonally at odds with its hero. The whole thing plays like a
fourth-rate Mad Max ripoff, but without the pedal-to-the-metal action
sequences or the single-minded vengeful fury. It's not fun. It's barely
even righteous. It's just miserable. At one point, Supergirl flat-out
murders a guy by pushing a giant sword through his neck. Somehow, I
suspect even Zack Snyder would be appalled.
Which makes me think it did not fit the reviewer's expectations rather than finding any good in what was on the screen.
It's not like the film does anything wrong, it's just slight. I
love not having a plot hinge on universe-changing implications, but
this film just establishes the Supergirl character enough
to lead to other stories. Table-setting is always a part of the deal
with these connected universe stories, but it's surrounded by such low
stakes and forgettable characters, it's hard to care...
None of this is the fault of MillyAlcock, who gives her all to the character of KaraZor-El/Supergirl. Any characterization of hers is lush, full, charismatic, and welcome. At the same time, despite making a Supergirl film, the filmmakers go out of their way to act like you should care about the Brigands, Kryptonianbackstory,
and the logistics of red, yellow, and green suns. It's a very busy
film for essentially a plot that contains two simple story elements.
***
More than anything, Supergirl
is ultimately forgettable. There isn't much to hang your hat on, though
I was mildly entertained. It's a terrible middle ground to be when you
put this much money and effort into a large-scale universe. It's an
underwhelming start for the character, despite MillyAlcock's best efforts.
I find myself agreeing with the grades given more than some of the written commentary. But I come back to my main question of late: by what standards are we judging and can those standards survive judgment?
sch 6/28
I finished my forays into Supergirl with this video that does a better job than most of the above review of distinguishing between the movie-in-and-of-itself and the novel-as-part-of-a-series. I will admit, grudgingly, there is an aesthetic to the series, but I remain convinced it is it the financial that overtops the aesthetic. YMMV.
Ah, but that last one … and here we return to the Suozzi letter. It
sings the praises of competition. Great. I’m all for it. But what force
today in the United States is crushing competition? It’s not the
Democratic Socialists of America. It’s not the government. It’s not
Zohran Mamdani.
It’s the billionaire class, or “the Epstein
class,” if you prefer Jon Ossoff’s acerbic locution. You call yourself a
capitalist, Tom Suozzi? Well, monopoly is the most grotesque perversion
of capitalism that exists. There’s a reason Adam Smith hated monopolies. Centrist Democrats should familiarize themselves with that history, if they don’t know it.
Before that I listened to this interesting interview about monopoly and privacy. I got a shock
that the Paramount-WB merger will leave the company in $80 billion worth
of debt. They shackling themselves for what purpose?
Out of my many sins neither playing the victim nor blaming others for my lack of success can be counted. Blaming myself, punishing myself for my errors were to the point of encouraging self destruction.
The feeling of abandonment is my strongest memory from that time. My
world became tiny and that’s where my dependence on the online world
grew. None of the content I was consuming was overtly harmful; I wasn’t
looking for dating advice or tips for the gym. I understand now that it
was the subtle thread of misogyny that wove its way through the content
fed to me by the algorithm. I watched videos of people criticising
feminist voices like Abbie Chatfield and found myself agreeing with
them. My political beliefs started to change. When things fell apart at
work, I blamed everyone but myself. It felt like the world was out to
get me, that I was being punished for being a man. I was angry, lonely
and stuck in a cycle of victimhood. The content told me someone else was
to blame and I believed it.
Misogyny affected me in high school. Girls did not like me, and I had a bad habit of falling in love. But I finally got lucky, I found someone loved or close enough to salve my heart. The old bluesmen were right: the ain't nothing like a woman.
That I would later attract crazy women, maybe always did according to my father, was not always a bad thing.
Crazy is not always a perjorative.
I see the danger of these online voices for young
men and I understand the lure of victimhood, the attraction of blaming
external forces for your own suffering. But it’s not real. There is a quote
attributed to film producer Franklin Leonard: “When you are accustomed
to privilege, equality feels like oppression. It’s not.” I understand
that for a lot of men, who perhaps don’t feel particularly privileged
beyond the fact of their gender, this can be a difficult idea to
understand.
But rather than shaming these men,
we need to sit alongside them, understand their pains and frustrations,
and guide them to take accountability for their own lives, happiness
and impact on others. I am lucky to have had two women who did this for
me. It is so often women and gender-diverse people doing this work, the
groups most likely to be harmed by men’s behaviour. As a man and a
father, I believe it is now my responsibility to model this for the men
and boys in my life. And that starts with these conversations, as
shameful and uncomfortable as they can be, about how men can end up in
these spaces in the first place and how they can get out.
What a would where such children masquerade as men. Where whiners hold high office.
I was taught the world owed me nothing, you 've got to make your own way. What has changed?
Find the worth in yourself, not in something stupid like status. This is a democracy, not an aristocracy. Doing gets you further than being.
Brush your teeth, learn to make women laugh, do not think you deserve a damn thing from them, and then you might just get lucky.
I went to the hospital to check on whether there was paperwork I needed for the pre-op. Also, I paid a bill. Then I decided to run up to Enterprise to get a car. No car. So, I ate at Burger King. I think for the first time since I got home.
I went out about 9 and got back home around noon, to a steam room. I had put in a repair order for the air conditioning on Sunday. No one had come. Why not I found out later.
A bath to make the heat and humidity tolerable.
Then it was time to head back to Enterprise. I got a little Nissan, then off to the property management company. I did not want the car towed. While there, I found out the work order had been cancelled. That got fixed.
I did a little drive around Muncie, ending up at the west side Payless. The car had air conditioning.
That got me back here around 6:30. Mierable, I must remember not to eat solid food. And the closeness of my rooms did not help. I cannot remember what I did after 8:45. Then, too, I am not sure what I did before!
I could not sleep, I have been up for three hours now. I went out for smokes and RC Cola. The car had air conditioning, remember? Strange how quiet the town is. I do not think there are any all-night restaurants. It seems I was told the bars close around midnight now. Little traffic, but it is probably safer traffic than before I went away. I do not know how much of the change is due to things like COVID-19, but I think the town is getting old like I am.
Early Migration to Indiana (Before Railroads) goes back to this past weekend and I have not had time to add it on here.
Same with “Copperheads in Indiana” Civil War Roundtable w/ Author Nancy Baxter:
(3) There Are More than Five POVs - by Lincoln Michel explains why I have been having trouble with POV as an idea because I have been focusing on who has the information and how it is conveyed. Five seems like my experience.
Look, I said this was going to be a pedantic and low-stakes post. But
for fun I’m going to offer a different taxonomy of POV based more on
storytelling than grammar. From a narrative perspective, I think there
are three main questions as far as POV goes. 1) Information, aka what
can the narrator know and convey to the reader. 2) Filtration, aka whose
consciousness(es) is information filtered through. 3) Modulation, aka
how is the narrator shaping information for the assumed listener.
Today we’re tackling the topic of
VOICE, otherwise known as perhaps the single most abused word in the
entire craft vocabulary (am I dramatic? No not me). People say voice to
mean tone, style, sensibility, character interiority, the way the prose
sounds, that special je ne sais pas quoi a certain
author might possess. The idea of voice is used to praise work and also
to dismiss it and seldom does it seem to mean the same thing twice.
And
the reason this matters — the reason we’re dedicating pretty much the
entire second unit of this series to voice — is that almost every
failure in writing is a failure of voice.
This ties into the POV essay above.
Alan Palmer1, in Fictional Minds sums it up as follows:
When
you read a discourse and ask “Who speaks?” or “Who narrates?,” you are
concerned with narration. When you ask “Who sees?” or “Who thinks?” then
you are concerned with focalization. Sometimes an agent sees and speaks
at the same time, and sometimes the agent who sees is different from
the agent who speaks.
A
first-person narrator recounting her childhood is speaking as her adult
self, but the narrative might be focalized through the child she was —
seeing a parent’s argument with the limited understanding of a
six-year-old, even as the adult voice arranges those impressions into
sentences.
***
If I wanted to pick one primary takeaway from this, it’d be this: please remember focalization can shift! Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway
slides between Clarissa and Septimus and Peter Walsh within a single
paragraph… the third-person narrator remaining stable while the
focalizer flickers. These moments of transition are where the prose does
its strangest, most beautiful work. Two consciousnesses brushing
against each other through the same syntax.
Focalization is one of the few narrative tools that can carry a metaphysical claim. Liviu Lutas10,
for examples, writes about disembodied focalization — that is,
narratives focalized through a brain in a jar, a forest, a mountain, a
house — what he’s exploring is the idea of whether vision can detach
from a human body.
So much for headhopping, sort of. Shifting without attribution seems to be headhopping.
Walter Mosley: “A Novel is Not a Machine” (Literary Hub). If you have not read Walter Mosely, you might overlook this. You're mistake twice over - not reading Mosely is the first.
All the readers of Dorn have interpretations that come from
their histories, their particular intellects, and desires, and yearnings
they might not be aware of. That’s the beauty of fiction; it is a
continually mutating protoplasm in the minds of readers. This colorless,
almost invisible ever transforming blob of reactions is the party. It
is not a machine. It is not good or evil, bad or boring—it is a cry in
the dark, a hope looking for a harbor, something that pretends to make
sense but, in actuality, is much deeper than that.
And let’s not forget the original definition of the term, the word
novel; it means that you’re about to encounter something original,
different, unique. And so, when the critic in your newspaper, your
classroom, when the editor in your mind, or of your book, tells you that
your novel would make a poor coffee percolator (or potboiler) you tell
them, thank you, because the novel you created (and that is
recreated by each and every one of your readers) is an ever-transforming
document that grants the power to evolve in the minds of the many. From
Conan the Barbarian to Othello the written word has the potential for
transformation no one can predict.
The fewer ideas and perceptions and
influences you allow into the gene pool, the smaller it gets. And the
smaller the gene pool, the weaker the population.
For the arts, homogenization leads not only to stagnation and retrogression, but boredom.
And if you think the pool’s not going to get any smaller, I’ve already witnessed an exclusion from S&S of the preeminent 21st-century
S&S series, the Chronicles of Hanuvar, written by the late and
much-lamented Howard Andrew Jones—who, as writer, editor, and critic,
was the most important figure in modern S&S until his untimely
passing.
To be clear, I’m fine with a definition of
S&S that doesn’t want a lot of SF elements or a lot of grand
fantasy quests or a lot of world-saving or multiverse-traveling. That’s
reasonable. We want people to understand what we mean when we recommend
something as S&S.
And I’m fine reading about white cisgender barbarian swordsmen. I’m currently reading Battlepug: The Compugdium,
an omnibus graphic novel featuring exactly such a character. It’s a lot
of fun—fun that respects and subverts and sends up the trope—and it
embeds its lead, the Warrior, in a lot of weirdness.
What I’m not fine with is having one character type or one identity increasingly foreclose other possibilities.
I saw Supergirl, thought it a good enough movie, and the reviews were generally puzzling. Some wanted a bigger more spectacular follow up to Superman. Some thought it was not clearly enough feminist. The comic book fans decried the divergences from the art. One review in The Guardian is the only one I saw that reviewed it on its own terms.
Why have we become so needy for purity, for clearly defined content that reassures our prejudices against women, against the oddball? Why do we hug so closely to the past and cliches?
As a term, nostalgia derives from the Greek nostos, meaning homecoming, and algos,
meaning grief or distress. It is a yearning for something which no
longer exists or perhaps which has never existed, and, crucially, this
desire is less spatial than temporal, often closely linked to childhood
memories. It is a feeling which Star Trek has often dramatized (think about Annorax in Voyager’s “Year of Hell”
who longs to restore an erased timeline containing his wife and…
<dramatic flash> …wait, what do you mean you don’t remember
him?!). But understanding nostalgia is not just useful for writers.
Knowing more about how it is expressed can also help viewers and critics
when contemplating our situationships with popular culture. Indeed,
when we analyze what I like to call the flavor profiles of nostalgia we
begin to account for why different audiences vibe differently with
different incarnations of contemporary Trek.
Nostalgia bothers me. I think it is the amber into which our world and its cultures are being trapped. But I did learn there is more than only one nostalgia.
First, restorative nostalgia. For Boym, this involves a strong emphasis on so-called “truth and tradition,” a stance which Strange New Worlds emphasizes by positioning itself as the heir to classic Star Trek. Such an approach tends to be anchored in a particular historical moment (or, at least, in a recollection of that moment, for as Boym warns, there is always a risk of conflating “the actual home for the imaginary one”). Consider how Strange New Worlds treats the original Trek
as a kind of sacred text, with the relationship between the old and new
based not on evolution of the material but, instead, on Boym’s
“transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home.” This is evidenced not
just by SNW’s literal recreation of the original Enterprise
(albeit much more spacious given Pike’s smaller crew complement) but by
the recasting of franchise stalwarts such as Kirk, Spock, Uhura,
Scotty, and Chapel. We further see it in the way the series retells
classic stories, for instance how the first season finale, “A Quality of Mercy,” offers what is essentially a cover version of the TOS episode “Balance of Terror” by transporting Captain Pike forward in time from 2259 to 2266 while also sending the viewer nostalgically back in time from 2022 to 1966. Even the title Strange New Worlds is itself nostalgically (and restoratively) Trek, drawing as it does from the credits narration of the franchise heyday.
Which is opposed by:
This kind of layered approach suggests a similar kind of “longing for
continuity in a fragmented world” as that exhibited by genuinely
reflective nostalgia. It is something that the post-Burn setting of our
second example, Starfleet Academy, is designed to take narrative advantage of. Nine hundred years beyond Strange New Worlds, this period is a stage for “unrealized dreams of the past” (dovetailing neatly with the show’s use of hauntology as I have discussed on this site before). Starfleet Academy, so, is as undeniably nostalgic as Strange New Worlds,
but while its reflective approach uses similar triggers to the
restorative tendency, the series fashions these into very different
results. Because reflective nostalgia thrives in the act of “longing
itself.” It relishes ambiguities and contradictions (something we will
sadly now not see in a mooted third or fourth season installment which
would have had the holographic Doctor meet the copy of himself from Voyager’s “Living Witness”). Reflective nostalgia calls “truth” into question as several Academy episodes, notably “Series Acclimation Mil,”
pointedly do. Most importantly, it acknowledges that remembrance is an
“imperfect process” (which, as much as anything else, is the crux of Academy’s
first season finale). Along the way it champions an open approach to
history, one in which youth (personified by cadet Caleb) challenges
authority while simultaneously being poised to create its own stories.
This philosophy celebrates the past of Star Trek but still
exhibits a strong longing to forge a new future—via a new ship, a new
crew, and a transformed setting—all while honoring what has come before(most obviously in the USS Athena’s
commemoration wall, something I hold to be an object lesson in
imperfect recollection if only because I refuse to believe that Nog
never advanced beyond lieutenant).
The Death of Robin Hood Brings a Legend Low - Reactor I offer as an antidote to my own opinion that the movie works. The points against my opinion are accurate. It is grim, it does hint at other movies, and it does evade what the reviewer wants. The violence is horror level high. I think the changes in Robin Hood are subtle. I think it may be that he had no other means of escaping his past. His world was too circumscribed by place and rank for reinvention.
