“What about Thanos?”
A strange question, I’ll concede, to emerge from an impassioned conversation about the transformative systemic overhauls required to our energy policy, our health care, and our economic ideology in the wake of the coronavirus—
—because what could the cartoon villain from the Avengers movies possibly have to do with any of that?
The answer, frustratingly, is: More than you may realize.
During a recent online confab with the leadership team of the San Fernando Valley Chapter of the Climate Reality Project, the discussion drifted momentarily from existential matters to televisional ones: What’s everybody been binge-watching?
Now, anyone who knows me—in person or through this blog—is peripherally aware of my immedicable disdain for movies and television. Yet… with no baseball this spring to occupy my time, I’ve been reluctantly compelled to sample quite a bit of scripted media to which I’d have otherwise turned up a nose. And, to my surprise, I find myself excited to share a handful of programming that, in my view, embodies creativity with a conscience. (We’ll get to those coveted endorsements shortly.)
To that end, one of our Climate Reality Leaders recommended Schitt’s Creek: “The evolution of the self-absorbed yet well-meaning characters as they deal with the adversity that helps them discover what it really means to love is quite endearing,” my colleague said, “and I believe has left an impact on many who are out there now hoping for the world to refashion itself in that way.”
Schitt’s Creek is one of those shows that got away from me in our era of Peak TV, but I second the motion for more prescriptive fiction that both challenges us to be better—individually and collectively—as well as provides a model to do so. Hard as this may be to fathom for those born into a postnarrative world, but our popular entertainments used to reliably perform that public service. To wit: Earlier this month, this unflinching indictment of white privilege from a 1977 episode of Little House on the Prairie resurfaced on Twitter to considerable gape-mouthed astonishment:
Bet you didn’t recall that show being so edgy. Thing is, the stories we tell about the world in which we live are only as aspirational—and inspirational—as the moral imagination of our storytellers. Alas, ever since meaningless worldbuilding supplanted purposeful storytelling, the function of popular fiction has shifted from lighting a path forward to drawing us down a rabbit hole of “Easter eggs” and “spoilers” that lead only to the next installment of a given multimedia franchise (meaning: keep your wallet handy). As the late Neil Peart wrote forty years ago:
Art as expression – Not as market campaigns Will still capture our imaginations Given the same State of integrity It will surely help us along
Talk about advice unheeded. Consequently, our commercial entertainment is often embedded—however unconsciously—with culturally pernicious values, from glorifying vigilante justice (superhero sagas; revenge thrillers), to undermining trust in public institutions (the self-serving White Houses of Scandal and House of Cards were a far cry from the empathetic Bartlet administration), to romanticizing criminal sociopathy (the street-racing “rebels” of Fast & Furious) and—bonus!—thereby validating a mindset in which “environmental degradation is not only a given but a goal” (robin, “The Fast and Furious Films and Mad Max Fury Road,” Ecocinema, Media, and the Environment [blog], September 20, 2019)
Our sci-fi, particularly dystopic fiction, hasn’t been immune to such moral abdication, either. Whereas Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four served as “self-preventing prophecies” (author David Brin’s astute term), we now have the back-to-basics doomsday fantasies of The Walking Dead and Mad Max: Fury Road, in which an apocalyptic reset conveniently absolves us from our civic obligations to one another—and even to Mother Nature herself. Why take on a page-one rewrite of the social contract, after all, when we could instead race hell-for-leather across the waste-blighted landscape in one of these sweet rides:
As for my group’s pet campaign—climate change? Hollywood hasn’t necessarily eclipsed Exxon with respect to irresponsible messaging, but when two of the highest-grossing movies of all time, Infinity War and Endgame, feature a genocidal antagonist motivated by “restoring balance to nature” through population control (a long-debunked and overtly racist “solution,” since the problem isn’t overpopulation in developing nations but rather unsustainable resource-intensivity right here in the West), you have to wonder if Avengers is produced by the Walt Disney Company… or the Heartland Institute? More appalling yet is that the only ones who can stop Thanos are—you guessed it—a pantheon of messianic demigods in adult-size Party City rentals.
Viewers cannot help but cheer when the Avengers vanquish Thanos and thwart his plan.
But what about the environmental problems that prompted Thanos’ actions, problems everyone accepted as real at the beginning of the story? As nothing is said about them at the end, are viewers being encouraged to think that these problems, too, have been vanquished?
Michael Svoboda, “Cli-fi movies: A guide for socially-distanced viewers,” Yale Climate Connections, May 7, 2020
Thusly, Thanos is emblematic of Hollywood’s dispiriting trend of conflating environmentalism with eco-terrorism:
In “Godzilla: King of the Monsters,” eco-terrorists unleash predatory beasts to forestall mass extinction and keep the human population in check. In “Aquaman,” King Orm, the leader of an undersea kingdom, concludes that the only way to prevent earthly destruction is to wage war on humans. . . .
. . . In the 2017 indie “First Reformed,” Ethan Hawke plays a radicalized pastor who plots to blow himself up at a church service attended by a polluting industrialist.
Cara Buckley, “Why Is Hollywood So Scared of Climate Change?,” Movies, The New York Times, August 14, 2019
Liberal Hollywood? If only. Hollywood movies traffic almost exclusively in conservative values. Remember the socially progressive sitcoms of Norman Lear? Those were the days…
And there’s more to come: Though unconfirmed, Remi Malek’s 007 villain in No Time to Die is reportedly an “eco-friendly” terrorist that operates not out of a volcanic lair but rather an algae farm, fueling speculation he’s “someone who’s willing to sacrifice human lives for their environmentalist vision” (Gabrielle Bruney, “Details About Rami Malek’s Mysterious No Time to Die Bond Villain Have Finally Emerged,” Esquire, October 28, 2019).
For that matter, demonizing tree-huggers isn’t even a particularly recent trope: The foil of one of my childhood favorites, Ghostbusters (1984), is a sniveling bureaucrat from the Environmental Protection Agency investigating whether the heroes are properly licensed to do business. (Spoiler alert: They weren’t.)
Hollywood knows the climate breakdown is a subject it should be exploring, but hasn’t for the most part figured how to integrate it narratively other than to use it as a new villainous motivation for the same old villainous schemes. What’s more, the (white male) hero called upon to subdue the misguided environmentalist evildoer is invariably a neoliberal defender of status-quo capitalism, be it a Randian wealth creator turned extrajudicial vigilante (Iron Man; Batman; Green Arrow; Iron Fist, whose surname is literally Rand) or some wantonly libidinous, balletically violent, deep-state superspy the likes of Bond, James Bond. Like Washington, Hollywood prefers reliable twentieth-century solutions to intractable twenty-first-century problems.
“More than ever, they’re missing the mark, often in the same way,” said Michael Svoboda, a writing professor at George Washington University and author at the multimedia site Yale Climate Connections. “Almost none of these films depict a successful transformation of society. . . .
“It plays into conservative talking points that environmentalists are out to reduce the pollution and restrict lifestyles and are genocidal,” Svoboda said. “They create mass murderers who are the only ones fighting climate change.”
ibid.
Hollywood can do much, much better. On occasion it does—even in the same franchise: If one of the first conspicuously anti-environmental movies I ever saw was Ghostbusters, it’s heartening to report that pro-environmentalism was the subtext of—wait for it—Ghostbusters II (1989).
The premise of the sequel, set in the Golden Age of Gordon Gekko, is that all our self-serving, antisocial behavior has manifested as literal toxic pollution—a current of supernatural slime oozing under New York that’s growing in both physical density and metaphysical intensity. At the climax, the Ghostbusters are only able to save the day not via some fanciful ghost-catching contraption, but rather by harnessing the collective goodwill of the city’s population by marching the Statue of Liberty down Fifth Avenue and rallying them in a New Year’s Eve singalong to Jackie Wilson’s “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher.”
No, Ghostbusters II is not a perfect movie—for reasons explained here and here—but its heart was in the right place, and it sought to atone for some of the morally questionable messaging of the original. (Not only did the Ghostbusters miraculously kick their chain-smoking habit between big-screen adventures, but on the second go-’round, Bill Murray wins Sigourney Weaver’s affection not with stalker-creep smarm, but by romancing her—and exhibiting signs of behavioral remorse and even emotional maturity.) Teamwork-centric adventures like this could be an effective vehicle for environmental thematics, but we’re going to need to aim a lot higher than cheeseball schlockfests like Sharknado and Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell, in which the terrors unleashed by global warming are easily subjugated with a chainsaw or an assault rifle.
Whereas disaster movies mislead by suggesting that life can return to normal, apocalypses and dystopias mislead by returning life to the struggle against nature. Seemingly unable to imagine how humans might solve the human-caused problem of climate change, filmmakers resort to re-telling old stories they already know.
Svoboda, “Cli-fi movies”
Consider, by contrast, how Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) brought tremendous public attention to the plight of endangered humpback whales while managing to tell an exciting and accessible story (the first of the series, it’s worth remembering, to appeal to non-Trekkies) in which the mode of problem-solving wasn’t gunship diplomacy but rather nonviolent cooperation. If only any of the recent Star Trek feature films were so boldly aspirational, so consciously ethical.
Now more than ever, we need fiction that strives to be prosocial and anti-dystopian. In the age of COVID-19, and in this grander epoch of the Anthropocene, we need storytellers with the moral imagination to envision a world worth living in, “a world which, having lived through the terrors of the Fifties through the early Nineties with overhanging terror of a nuclear Armageddon that seemed inevitable at the time, has found itself faced with the equally inconceivable and terrifying notion that there might not be an apocalypse. That mankind might actually have a future, and might thus be faced with the terrifying prospect of having to deal with it rather than allowing himself the indulgence of getting rid of that responsibility with a convenient mushroom cloud or nine hundred” (Alan Moore, Twilight of the Superheroes, [unpublished comic-book proposal, circa 1987]).
As promised, what follows is a small sampling of relatively recent entertainment with prosocial and/or anti-dystopian values. Please share your own suggestions, and I may very likely make this a recurring series as I encounter more principled programs worth spotlighting.
The Orville (2017–present)
Seth MacFarlane’s love letter to Star Trek: The Next Generation, so old-fashioned it’s actually somehow subversive, takes inspiration from Gene Roddenberry’s optimistic view of both the human race and our prospects for the future much more so than any of the “canonical” Star Trek series of late, which are less about boldly looking forward so much as nostalgically gazing backward. Tackling such issues as sex assignment, social-media approval, and online porn addiction while wringing comedy out of those everyday instances of uncomfortable social awkwardness that seldom seemed to occur on the Enterprise, some critics have savaged The Orville for its dogged refusal to be categorized: Is it comedy or drama? Sincere or glib? Spoof or homage?
The answer to all those questions is yes. After calling out contemporary scripted television as being nothing more than a self-gratifying wormhole of pop-cultural references devoid of meaningful narrative coherence on Family Guy, MacFarlane placed a bet that there was an appetite for prescriptive stories that challenged viewers’ intellect—their moral imagination—and not merely their aptitude to spot Easter eggs. His self-doubt-prone Ed Mercer may not possess Jean-Luc Picard’s stoic dignity, but both starship captains share the same faith in humankind’s capacity for both greatness and goodness.
The Good Place (2016–2020)
On the subject of defying genre classification, no one could accuse The Good Place of being formulaic: It practically reinvents itself conceptually from episode to episode. As funny as it is philosophical, the show explores the overwhelming complexities of living ethically in modern times—are the benefits of a good deed, for instance, offset by its adverse environmental consequences?—by dramatizing the shortcomings of zero-sum purity tests (emblemized by the Good Place’s admission-based “points system”) in favor of establishing a more flexible social contract in which morality isn’t a set of ex cathedra absolutes, but rather a mindfully applied ethos of acting in the interest of the common good.
Consciousness, not time, is the currency of existence, The Good Place suggests. The moral dilemmas intrinsic to sentience are the cosmic means by which we find our place and purpose in this universe; meaning isn’t a circumscribed mystery to be decoded via the study of our philosophies (though Chidi tried), but rather an ongoing project fulfilled by the very practice of compassion—the gift, the responsibility, and arguably the very point of consciousness. Through selflessness we find love (Eleanor) and direction (Tahani), and by accepting—even embracing—the limitations and imperfections of being human (Michael), there’s magic to be found in even the mundane. Anyone waiting around to be admitted to utopia in the next life, The Good Place teaches, is simply letting the best of this one pass them by.
The Simpsons: “Playdate with Destiny” (2020)
The Simpsons was the hottest new show on TV when I was in junior high, but by high school I’d moved on to horror fiction and mob movies, in college I had no time for television, and upon entering adult life, I regarded the celebrated animated series as a passing interest I’d cared about a long, long time ago, like Knight Rider or The A-Team or a hundred other juvenile things I felt no need to revisit. Still on the air after 31 seasons, I haven’t even accidentally watched The Simpsons in decades…
… but I was utterly charmed by “Playdate with Destiny,” a short featured before the theatrical presentation of Disney’s Onward, in which Maggie makes a new friend on the playground, and it’s all she can do to get back there to see him the next day, and again the day after that. Told entirely without dialogue, “Playdate” is about the deep longing we feel for human connection—a theme all the more poignant in our present state of self-isolation—and the acts of courage that primal drive can inspire in us.
Long Shot (2019)
A gonzo journalist (Seth Rogen), known for polemic exposés with artful headlines like “Fuck You Exxon,” goes to work as a speechwriter for his childhood babysitter, now Secretary of State (Charlize Theron), who’s running for the presidency on an ambitious environmental initiative; on the campaign trail, unlikely passion ensues. This one merits a mention because it’s so rare—especially in our era of formulaic Hallmark romances—that a Buddy Love movie truly explores, beyond merely an All Is Lost plot point, the key component to any lasting intimate relationship: compromise. How do you thread that needle between digging in your heels and selling out your principles? How do we allow love to transform us—into our best selves? It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a romcom this politically topical, snort-inducingly hilarious, and—yes—genuinely romantic.
(And bonus points to Long Shot for reclaiming Roxette’s still-gorgeous power ballad “It Must Have Been Love” from Pretty Woman.)
The Last Man on Earth (2015–2018)
What if the sole survivor of a civilization-ending plague weren’t the capable hero we typically associate with this genre (Stu Redman, Rick Grimes, Max Rockatansky), but rather a petty, infantile dick—the last man on earth you’d want to find yourself stuck with in the apocalypse? Watching Will Forte’s Phil Tandy Miller traverse the countryside in the actual DeLorean picture car from Back to the Future pillaging all our great cultural artifacts (from museum relics to White House décor) never gets old, but while Last Man on Earth keeps you belly-laughing at its antihero’s puerile antics, it quietly and patiently makes the case that just because the world has come to an end doesn’t necessarily mean you’re out of chances—or reasons—to try to be a better, more enlightened person.
Thanks to friend of the blog dellstories, author of “The Cat in the Sprawl,” for reminding me of the citation from Alan Moore’s Twilight of the Superheroes.
I do see your point, Sean. We need to use even our leisure time smartly, to learn more truths. But I so miss simple-minded entertainment. Where has that gone?
Thanks, as always, Jacqui, for joining the conversation! There is absolutely a place for escapist entertainment — undemanding and unchallenging. Sometimes we need to check our brains at the door, and withdraw into stories that don’t require our engagement, but rather facilitate our (provisional) disengagement from the overwhelming complexities of modern existence. Downtime is important, too. The same year I entered college, Hollywood gave us deep and/or challenging films like Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, and The Shawshank Redemption, but it also produced such uproarious odes to stupidity as Dumb and Dumber, Naked Gun 33 1⁄3: The Final Insult, and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective; the latter are in no way “lesser” films strictly because their ambitions were escapist, not intellectualist.
The problem with pure entertainment, though, is that it often exploits subjects deserving of serious discussion and reduces them to a mere plot point, a punch line, or both. I’ve demonstrated the way environmentalism and/or the climate crisis was invoked — and then summarily mocked or dismissed — in Avengers, Ghostbusters, Sharknado, and Tremors 6, but whenever an ignored/misunderstood social movement or sociological issue asserts a place of increasing prominence in the cultural conversation, Hollywood seems to reflexively respond not with thoughtful consideration of the matter, but rather insensitive (often downright cruel) exploitation. Case in point: When the LGBT community came out of the cultural closet in the late ’80s/early ’90s, “transgender villainy” suddenly became the new go-to trope. Consider, as evidence, the flagrant transphobia of the aforementioned Ace Ventura and Naked Gun 33 1⁄3, or even 1991’s Soapdish (with its all-star ensemble of liberals, no less). So, even entertainment that aspires to idiocy — and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that — needs to be written mindfully, with moral imagination. Such is the responsibility that comes with the privilege of being a writer of fiction of any tone, genre, or medium.
Thanks for the visit, Jacqui. Hope you’ve kept busy and stayed healthy this spring!
Really good points, Sean. And I have noticed some of the movies I used to call ‘escapist’ I now consider disturbing in their insensitivity. Sigh. No wonder I love writing about prehistoric times. All they had were sabertooths, mammoths, and giant winged predators.
Same here, Jacqui. I grew up on all the buddy-cop action movies of the 1980s — Lethal Weapon, Stakeout, Die Hard, Beverly Hills Cop, Running Scared, Tango & Cash — which we adored; it would be impossible to overstate how profoundly these movies were a part of our formative experience and how much they inspired our own adventures (those of me and my friends).
It was all fun and games: the violence they gleefully trafficked in, the glorification of go-it-alone cops who flouted the rules, the abuse of authority regularly on display (Axel Foley opportunistically flashing his badge to open restricted doors), the rights they comically violated (Richard Dreyfuss spying on Madeleine Stowe, sans court-issued warrant, from under her bed as she undressed in Stakeout), the hot-button issues they mined for laughs (Mel Gibson threatening to shoot a jaywalker in broad daylight in Lethal Weapon 3). In the ’80s, the cop became what the cowboy had been in the ’50s: the archetypal American hero, lionized and fetishized. None of these movies cared enough to take a critical or nuanced look at policing, the way, say, Stallone’s Cop Land did in 1997.
I’ve talked a lot on this blog about the role of artistic inspiration, and there’s no doubt some of those movies influenced the ways I thought and the kinds of stories I wrote. Now I’m trying to take a harder look at them — to demythologize them (which is hard to do, given the role they played in my formative years), and to try to draw lessons from their shortcomings to be a better, more socially responsible, more morally imaginative storyteller myself.
To that end, I’m aware of your passion for the prehistoric, Jacqui, and I was excited to see the book trailer for the forthcoming third volume in your Crossroads trilogy, Against All Odds. For those curious, here’s the blurb:
Let’s face it, you environmentalist types ARE scary:
You’re telling us that we need to change our ways
You’re telling us that we need to challenge the corporations and governments that hold so much power over us. Not just simple protest, but actual challenge
You’re telling us that if we don’t, we’re looking at disaster w/in the lifetime of our PETS! And you don’t mean turtles. You mean gerbils and hamsters
You’re actively out there, leading by example
Changing our ways, challenging authority, admitting things can get bad, (unwittingly) embarrassing us about our lack of effort?
Yeah, it’s easier to fantasize about some Rand-type superhero shutting you up and making you go away
BTW, you missed an obvious one. Batman villain Poison Ivy. Out to destroy humanity to save the world’s plants (in most continuities). Canonically gay. Enemy of a white man born to wealth and privilege
These overtones were not intentional, or probably even a factor, when Poison Ivy was created in 1966. But the implications are unavoidable now
Great observation about Poison Ivy, Dell! Didn’t even think of that one. Indeed — another genocidal “environmentalist” vanquished and locked away in the loony bin by an extrajudicial vigilante–cum–privileged wealth creator.
Long before I was particularly sensitive to this stuff, I recall seeing Batman & Robin in 1997 — when I was still in college — and I was struck even then by the staggeringly arrogant stupidity of the scene where Ivy (Uma Thurman) proposes that Wayne Enterprises divest from the extractive industries poisoning the Amazon, to which Bruce (George Clooney) condescendingly praises her “noble intentions,” but says that without dependable (and continued) reliance on fossil fuels, millions will die of “cold” and “starvation” (I’d like to see the utilities bill from Wayne fucking Manor), and that when it comes to preserving the natural world, “people come first.” (As if those two goals were at odds — as if humans weren’t part and parcel with the natural world!) Ivy is then literally mocked and ridiculed by everyone in the scene (which, as I recall, was a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new observatory), and then reassured that Batman and Robin — extrajudicial vigilantes — are all the protection we need.
Holy.
Shit.
And I fully realize Batman & Robin had no ambition other than to sell toys — a pernicious agenda in its own right — but that goes straight to the comment I made to Jacqui above: that stupid shouldn’t mean immoral. The Last Man on Earth is proudly stupid, but it isn’t immoral. And I know I’ve made this point ad nauseum (even I’m sick of hearing it), but we really — as a culture — need to take a hard look at our superhero fiction and ask ourselves if it’s serving us well anymore. Maybe it’s time to tell some new stories, “relevant and sufficient,” as Alan Moore says, to “this surely unprecedented era”? Because with respect to messaging, Avengers ain’t any better than Batman & Robin — the genre hasn’t come nearly as far, sophistication-wise, as we like to tell ourselves.
Dunno the context for that Last Man on Earth pic, but supposedly the Greek orator Demosthenes shaved half* of his head, so he’d be to embarrassed to leave his home, thus forcing him to stay in and practice speaking clearly and distinctly
Of course, these days staying at home is easier for most of us
*One source said he shaved his head completely. Since a shaved head was socially unacceptable, the result would have been the same. However, most of the sources I could find say half
I wasn’t aware of that, but thanks as always, Dell, for reliably elevating the conversation around here.
I won’t spoil Last Man on Earth by contextualizing that photo, I will only say that it is far from merely a one-episode gag, and that Will Forte’s real-life wife must’ve wanted to kill him for the duration he was made to sport that ridiculous look.
One thing that occurred to me after I’d already posted this essay was that the five programs I selected are all comedies to one degree or another, proving that — to quote Alan Moore yet again — there’s no reason you can’t have a bit of fun while dealing with the deepest issues of the mind! When was the last time anything funny ever happened on Game of Thrones, or Westworld, or The Walking Dead? Where’s the humor in Mad Max? I’m not suggesting everything needs to be a comedy, but there’s something to be said for keeping a sense of humor about life: It facilitates human connection, and breeds optimism. There’s humility in humor; it’s often an admission of our foibles. It allows us to confront unflattering truths safely, which in turn gives us an opportunity to reform behavioral habits. My WIP — which is a balls-out horror novel — has a huge comedic component to it, something that has proven unexpectedly cathartic for its self-isolated author in these admittedly dark days.
Fascinating re: Thanos, and I’ve heard other people talk about population reduction like it’s the cure-all when really it has nothing to do with corporations and governments and their blatant disregard for policies that are leading us in the wrong direction, possibly even to our ultimate demise. The Orville and The Good Place are both favourites of mine too. I haven’t seen The Last Man On Earth but it sounds like I would enjoy it!
Population reduction is a total ecofascist smokescreen — a way of blaming developing nations for climate change rather than holding First World consumerism accountable. Population growth is a central “problem” identified in the widely (and rightfully) disavowed “documentary” Planet of the Humans:
I suspect, Suzanne, given your sense of humour (I spelled it the Canadian way!), The Last Man on Earth would be right up your alley. It’s available on Hulu. It’s one of those rare shows that you can’t believe actually got made — and for network TV, no less — but you’re so grateful it did. You’ll have to let me know if you watch it!
“Creativity with a conscience.” That sounds pretty good to me, Sean. I’ve noticed too that movies about protecting the environment have an eco-terrrorist slant. In some cases the super villains are the climate-wreckers and the eco-terrorists are the good guys, but yeesh. None of it addresses the challenge, which is all of us revamping our way of life.
The virus is a pretty interesting example of what happens when things get out of whack. Mother Nature responding with a little havoc of her own. What’s interesting to me, is that she isn’t the villain in any movies yet (maybe everyone realizes that premise is ridiculous?). Good old Mother Nature is amoral in a way and the only solution is to take better care of her. Will we do that is the question.
Thanks for the movie/television recommendations. We’ve been looking for something halfway decent to watch. Right now, the news is on (all day) and it’s so depressing! If I ask my husband to turn the channel, he chooses Pickers or Ice Road Truckers. Gak! I have to leave the house to get away from it.
I hope you and yours are doing well. NY seems to be leading the way to a cautious recovery…if only the rest of the country would follow. 🙂
If this dreadful weekend we just endured demonstrates anything, Diana, it’s that we desperately need more creativity with a conscience — stories that envision a better world and provide a model to reify it, much the way the self-preventing prophecy Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home depicted the catastrophic unintended consequences of our environmental degradation (hunting the whales to extinction), and gave us a model to reform our ways (through nonviolent cooperation and sympathetic — even symbiotic — coexistence, to say nothing of good humor) — and was a colossal commercial success, to boot!
The problem, unfortunately, is that one of the important narrative tools we used in the twentieth century to appeal to our better angels, science fiction (Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, Planet of the Apes, Godzilla, the works of George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Matheson), has for the most part devolved into an exercise in self-referential fan service. The value of a Star Trek story used to be in the insight into human nature it offered; now, however, its value is measured in the number of obscure franchise callbacks the writers can pepper into a given movie or episode. As
viewerssuperfans, we take satisfaction not from the existential questions a story has raised, but rather how many “Easter eggs” we’ve successfully identified. The more we found, the more devoted a superfan we can claim to be.
Whereas SF/F once challenged our visions of what is possible, now its prime directive is commodified nostalgia. From corporate mega-franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars, we seek not thought-provoking truths about our world, merely coordinated continuity in those sprawling worlds. Sci-fi used to help us make sense of reality; now making sense of a franchise itself — exhaustively scrutinizing it for objective rules, for cross-referenced correlations, for canonical consistency — is the entire purpose of narrative. Superfans take meaning from a given installment’s adherence to the grander preestablished mythology rather than any philosophical quandaries presented by the story.
We don’t want to be provoked by questions — à la 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979 ), and Blade Runner (1982) — but rather reassured that the “universe” of our favorite fictions, in which we have invested so much time, attention, and money, “adds up” to an incontrovertible reality devoid of inconsistencies, ambiguities, or loose ends:
The dual crises of COVID-19 and the climate breakdown are also threatening to unravel the fictions upholding our obsolete social order, in which the rich get rich and the poor stay poor, in which our communities of color are made to bear the brunt of the environmental and economic consequences of disaster capitalism, and in which the institutionalized racism baked into the DNA of the American project must (finally) be confronted and remedied if this country is to have a prosperous future. Mega-franchises and superhero sagas are dazzling paeans to the status quo — they promote rapacious consumerism and socioeconomic inequality — and we need storytellers with profound moral imagination to reclaim SF/F (and all fiction, for that matter) as a vehicle for social progress, not superfan service, not pointless franchising. The time has come to tell some new stories, and to let the narratives of the last century go.
To that end, I believe you could do a lot worse than the ones I’ve suggested above, so if you happen to give any of them a chance, please let me know. And as someone who not only writes fantasy, but reads a great deal of it, I would always be interested in hearing about and promoting any works with pro-environmental messaging, so feel free, Diana, to reach out to me here or via e-mail with recommendations.
We are doing well, thanks, and I hope the same is true for you and yours. We are certainly in the most challenging period of history through which I’ve ever lived, but I am grateful every day for the health and security with which both my family and I have been thus far blessed. And now more than ever, I appreciate hearing from my blogosphere friends; I take no small measure of reassurance in knowing you’re okay.
>As viewers superfans, we take satisfaction not from the existential questions a story has raised, but rather how many “Easter eggs” we’ve successfully identified. The more we found, the more devoted a superfan we can claim to be.
Do video game “achievements” apply here?
Most (virtually all) modern games feature achievements to unlock. If you perform a specific task, then a trophy or other symbol is added to a specific “trophy room” or “achievement page” or the like
>Achievements are included within games to extend the title’s longevity and provide players with the impetus to do more than simply complete the game but to also find all of its secrets and complete all of its challenges. They are effectively arbitrary challenges laid out by the developer to be met by the player
-Wikipedia
Sometimes, getting an achievement will have an in-game advantage, such as a 1% increase in gold found in chests, or 3 seconds added to a timed mission. But sometimes the only reward is filling empty spaces in your achievement page
These achievement can range from trivial (finish the first level) to difficult (defeat the final boss) to obscure (find the hidden treasure chest) to playing differently (get past this level w/out killing a single enemy) to cumulative (get five achievements) to ridiculous (play this game for a full year (yes, that’s really an achievement listed in a game))
Now, I myself LOVE achievements. I personally prefer that games have them. I’ll spend hours hunting rats, not for gold or XP or because I need to clear this level of rats, but because I have to kill 1,000 rats to get the Ratcatcher achievement. I’ve actually lost games deliberately, because the game had a You Got Killed achievement. And there is a feeling of accomplishment when you get an achievement, and an even bigger one when you get all (or almost all), even though all you’ve done is play a video game
But I do have to wonder…
For someone who writes a lot about media, the video-game subculture is an admittedly enormous gap in my knowledge and experience, Dell; this was owed originally to circumstance, but now personal choice. We had a secondhand Nintendo in our house in the late eighties — around the same period I still watched The Simpsons on a weekly basis — but that was the last time video games were a regular part of my life. Gaming always seemed like a costly hobby, and I was in my early thirties before I finally had any “fun money” to play with (we never even went out to pubs in our twenties because we simply couldn’t afford it). At that point, I had friends who encouraged me to get into gaming; their enthusiastic encomiums of Uncharted and The Last of Us nearly sold me…
… but I nonetheless remained wary because A) it seemed like video games were a time-intensive hobby (and I was a young husband and writer hustling to make it in Hollywood at that time), and B) as a practicing minimalist now, I’m not looking to own any more stuff. I just don’t want to be the custodian of yet more gear. For those reasons, despite compelling testimonies like this, I don’t see myself taking up the pastime. But that is not to say I don’t appreciate the value of interactive storytelling:
Now, the beef I have with the worldbuilding agenda of series like Game of Thrones and the MCU (among many others) is that they capitalize on the appeal of interactive media without actually allowing for any participatory authorship. Sprawling doesn’t mean open-ended; the worlds of these sagas — and the choices made by the eight zillion characters — are entirely controlled by the writers:
Our relationship with these programs — and there’s a reason it’s called programming — isn’t collaborative; it’s compliant. We are trained to be superfans, rewarded with that designation for obediently purchasing all the products in the franchise. Back in the nineties, when Warner Bros. was producing a new Batman movie every three years — accompanied by a fresh set of action figures, natch, and a Burger King glassware “collector’s” cup — that was one thing; but the whole point of a mega-franchise is that there’s always a new installment (and corresponding tie-in product) available, and you better watch it now before the latest plot-twist shocker is “spoiled” for you on social media. That isn’t storytelling; it’s marketing — the 1980s Saturday-morning-cartoon model of advertainment writ large.
And there are a lot of reasons why we, as a culture, have fallen under the spell of the mega-franchise story model: partly because of the collapse of traditional stories Rushkoff identifies; partly because the unprecedented narrative scope of a crossover franchise is exciting; partly owed to figure/ground manipulation. And I certainly agree with Alan Moore when he observed that our fascination with fictional “continuities” — our obsessive search for patterns and correlations in “shared universes” — “seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence. It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite ‘universes’ presented by DC or Marvel Comics.” (Or, for that matter, Star Wars or Star Trek or Buffy or the Whoniverse or whatever.) This is a subject I first wrote about directly in “This Counts, That Does Not,” and has since been expounded upon in many subsequent posts, notably “Game Over” and “The Nostalgist’s Guide to the Multiverse.” It’s a thesis I think I could even expand into a book, but I’ve got enough projects on my plate at the moment!
My point is, we’ve got Aristotelian stories, like Little House and Star Trek and All in the Family, with a value at stake and a worldview or moral to impart. Then we have postnarrative fiction, like The Sopranos and The Wire and Family Guy, which are commentaries on the utter lack of narrative structure — and, consequently, meaning — of existence (in that way, they are scions of the absurdist fiction of Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett). And then we have corporate marketing campaigns like Kathleen Kennedy’s Star Wars, Alex Kurtzman’s Star Trek, and Kevin Feige’s MCU, which offer neither the prescriptive catharsis of traditional narrativity nor the existential challenges of postnarrativity; they are simply advertisements for the next thing you’ll need to buy, rewarding you for connecting one dot while leading you by the nose to the next. (I haven’t seen Solo — I refuse to waste my time on it — but I’ve been told by friends it’s like somebody wrote a script around a series of offhanded references made in the other movies.)
So, to answer your question about “achievements” — a term I’ve only now learned — I would think the satisfaction taken from pursuing those meta-goals and receiving recognition for doing so is one of the great joys of the special type of nonlinear narrativity video games have to offer, “because they engage with players in an open-ended fashion, they communicate through experience instead of telling, and they invite players into the creative process.” It’s truly participatory worldbuilding, and it’s gratifying because its participatory. Game of Thrones and Lost and Westworld and Orphan Black, by contrast, trick us into thinking we’re participating because they’ve given us puzzles to solve — puzzles that never seem to amount to a goddamn thing. And though their puzzling may occasionally be pleasurable — I enjoyed a great many things about Lost and Orphan Black — it never, after all its grandiose promises, quite leaves us satisfied.
It’s amazing what’s taken place since I first commented on your post, Sean. The protests have been frightening and yet filled with hope for a changed future. I can’t help but think that the tremendous energy to create a kinder, fairer society will expand to address climate change, economic inequities, and healthcare. It’s all connected!
It was when I trained under Vice President Gore in 2018, Diana, that I first learned the term intersectionality — that is, understanding how social and political identities (race, class, gender, sexuality) expose particular people to unique modes of discrimination and injustice. We were encouraged to study the intersectionality of communities in order to best communicate how the climate crisis is affecting them.
What we’re witnessing now, with the George Floyd protests, is intersectionality writ large. This isn’t strictly about police brutality, and how it is disproportionately imposed on communities of color; it’s about a corporate capitalist system that promotes wealth inequality as much as racial inequality, whereby “value ends up extracted from real people and places and delivered to shareholders, often very far away” (Douglas Rushkoff, “Restoring the Economy Is the Last Thing We Should Want,” Medium, April 26, 2020). People are done participating in that system, which is why all aspects of it — policing, health care, economic inequality, environmental injustice — are “on trial,” as it were, in the public square.
And the pressure is working: “Nine members of the Minneapolis City Council — a veto-proof majority — pledged on Sunday to dismantle the Police Department, promising to create a new system of public safety in a city where law enforcement has long been accused of racism” (Dionne Searcey and John Eligon, “Minneapolis Will Dismantle Its Police Force, Council Members Pledge,” New York Times, June 7, 2020). As Mr. Gore is so fond of saying, “Things take longer to happen than you think they will, but then they happen faster than you thought they could.” These are unquestionably dark, challenging days — and there are many more ahead — but I believe we’re going to emerge a stronger, better country for them. This is what moral growth looks like. But growth is painful, so we need to continue to stand by one another — fight alongside one another — and maintain our momentum for as long as it takes to bring about the change we want and need, and that includes reminding anyone you know succumbing to despair that there is more reason than ever to be hopeful.
Not sure if this qualifies, but I’d like to mention Syfy’s Walking Dead ripoff Z Nation. It was superior to its original in a few different ways
The first and most obvious was that it was a mixture of comedy and drama, never being wholly one or the other, similar to The Orville. Murphy and Doc, in particular, were quite humorous. And unlike Eugene in Walking Dead, they never seemed out of place
Secondly, Walking Dead reveled in hopelessness, darkness, and despair. Z Nation, OTOH, had a goal, a purpose
Before civilization collapsed Murphy had been injected w/ a vaccine that could STOP the zombie plague. The vaccine itself was lost in the collapse. The crew had to get Murphy from New York to the last CDC lab in California, where the vaccine could (maybe) be synthesized from his blood’s antibodies. Citizen Z (D. J. Qualls) helped them and other survivors from an abandoned NSA listening post in the Arctic Circle
It was not a GREAT series, and it lost its way after the second season when they actually reached California. But I myself vastly preferred Z Nation’s hopefulness to Walking Dead’s nihilism
I haven’t seen Z Nation, Dell, but I’m peripherally aware of it. I can’t speak to it, unfortunately, but I trust your assessment.
Yes, The Walking Dead — though cathartic fun for a while — simply became a dreary exercise in relentless nihilism and wanton violence. There was no point to any of it: No one was trying to find a cure, or rebuild society; it was just grimy, gruesome gladiator porn, with the characters invariably taking the lowest road in a given scenario, reliably succumbing to their basest, most primal instincts. And I don’t have a problem with that per se (the same could be said, in a way, for The Last Man on Earth), but The Walking Dead is just so depressingly (and endlessly) pointless. At the point where Rick vanquished Negan — and not a minute too soon — I bowed out of that shit for good.
The problem with The Walking Dead is something I could write an entire essay about — I know exactly what the problem was (and it’s something no one discusses) — but I’ll see if I can sum it up here as briefly as possible: Robert Kirkman has no talent. He was 24 years old when the comic began publication, with zero command of craft and absolutely nothing to say about the world. (With all due respect for the art form, comics are often where scribes without the chops to make it as screenwriters or novelists end up, though there are obviously notable exceptions.)
Kirkman conceived an admittedly provocative premise — What happens after the survivors of a George Romero movie are airlifted to safety? — but had neither the skill to execute that artfully nor the life experience to give it meaning or subtext. Romero’s movies had a lot to say (about civil rights, about consumerism); the Dead trilogy was never really about What Happens Next…? The Walking Dead, by contrast, is only about that; it is thematically bereft and morally bankrupt. It’s just very poorly written zombie porn, replete with bad plotting, characterization, and dialogue, to say nothing of its appalling gender politics. The TV series improved somewhat upon its narrative shortcomings (credit Frank Darabont’s talent for that), but could never overcome its thematic and moral deficiencies — its soullessness, its pointlessness.
I’ve personally known a few “Robert Kirkmans” — talentless writers who nonetheless found success (in Hollywood or in comics — which are now part and parcel, anyway, as comics are merely proof-of-concept pitches for TV and features these days). And there is no question that guys like that — which include the current custodians of the Star Trek franchise — are part of the reason so much commercial entertainment is embedded with the very questionable values I call out in this post. For the most part, it isn’t that writers consciously encode bad values into their stories, merely that they’re unconsciously regurgitating the values from the stories they were raised on without ever pausing to dispassionately scrutinize them, as I talked about in my reply to Jacqui re: the buddy-cop comedies of the 1980s.
And it’s precisely because we’ve refused to interrogate the institutionalized values of bygone eras — and, in fact, have longed for them, through poisonously nostalgic fiction like Ready Player One and reductive political sloganeering like Make America Great Again — that every one of America’s major cities is being torn apart as I type this. If ever an era in American history called for new heights of moral imagination, this is it.