Thursday, August 31, 2017

Me and 1 Million BC (AKA Marvel, that's not how this works)

It might not be super clear in this blog but I’m an archaeologist. This means that at the most basic level I’m interested in what people did in the past and I try to access that by looking at the things that they left behind. (My specific research toes that line but that's another story). If you can stand some strange hours and a lot of learning, it’s a really cool gig. Special note: WE DO NOT INTENTIONALLY LOOK FOR DINOSAURS. If that’s your gig, look into paleontology. Archaeology digs people stuff.

So here’s my beef with Marvel’s 1,000,000 BC, it is on the very edge of making sense but is just one order of magnitude off. You say 100,000 and I’m there. But at 1 million you are in the territory of "do we call what we evolved from people” or "are they still not quite similar enough to us for that".

Yes. I. know. it. is. fiction.

The problem is that in many other ways comics do things that undercut what we know about the human past (Kree involvement to make the inhumans etc.) that this extremely close but not quite right event becomes the last straw and I can't suspend my disbelief. Besides the Inhuman influence, the implications of the 1 million BC arc are so far reaching that in some ways I seriously question if the “regular” humans in the Marvel Universe would even be recognizable to us as regular earth people. On top of that I hate that this timeline actually undercuts human achievement because we came up with the cool shit they are doing/wearing much more recently than 1 million years ago. AKA in less time we came up with the same complex stuff. For me errors like 1 million BC are closer to Ancient Aliens than something I would want people being inspired to do archaeology from because it takes all the cool shit away from people and makes them supernatural. If they had just removed a couple of zeros, let say 10,000 BC, I would have been fine but 1 million (so exactly 1,002,017 years ago), nope cool story Marvel, you're drunk please go home.

What is going with the Earth and our ancestors at 1 million years ago? Well we’re chilling as Homo Erectus, with some possible variation into maybe a few other species maybe just some cousins who are from a distant relative, and making some of the first stone tools, not the first but more advanced stuff. We probably make fire and it’s an ice age. There is nothing like Homo Sapiens for like another 800,000 years give or take. There is no such thing as symbolic culture at least that we have evidence for. Being white doesn’t exist yet and actually is a phenomenon that outside of Neanderthals may not have been common in Homo Sapien Sapien until the last 12,000-8,000 years. Related to this, there probably were not the ethnic separations that would produce the type of “avengers” Marvel is selling as of 1 million BC and also red hair didn't exist yet. So who were these "Avengers"?

Starbrand – The concept of a “Brand” doesn’t exist in the sense of signifying similarity or ownership

Agamotto – Fine basically except for there not being Ethnically Asian people yet

Iron Fist – We have not developed metallurgy enough to smelt iron

Black Panther – Possible except the human evolution hang up explained above

Ghost Rider – Not clear that we had the symbolic capacity to understand an afterlife and hence “ghosts” or if the concept of “riding” something had been invented

Phoenix – We just got around to fire and Phoenixes are associated with Ancient Greece which does not exist yet

Odin – Not human, so of all the Avengers he is actually the only that makes sense in this context because he did not evolve on Earth so doesn’t fall under my critique. The irony abounds.

My annoyance with settings like this are that we know a lot about what happened in the past. We spend a lot of time excavating sites and reconstructing climate and behavior by examining material culture. So to not take those as facts or even consider that as an avenue for consideration is really frustrating. While this is probably something that other scientists regularly get annoyed with, many of those technologies and sciences exist to some degree in the “future” of humanity. They are things that we are moving toward, in some cases, going from science fiction to science fact on the back of scientists interested in creating what was envisioned as part of our future. Unfortunately, that is not the case with historical sciences like archaeology. By remaking the history of the earth, and of human evolution, you are going from science fact to science fiction.

We can’t increase the pace of human evolution just because we wanted to have extra zeros to make our event look more existing. On top of the pace needed to sustain that, there’s also the problem that all of the characters come from what would essentially be complex civilizations that would need to have come about extremely quickly to support the symbolic behaviors, particularly with the mantle-like traditions of Iron Fist and Black Panther. We didn't even farm until 10,000 years ago during something called the Neolithic Revolution.

I also have to address the possible existence of people with the x-gene in 1 million BC. We would all have the x-gene by now, most likely, if people with it started popping up a million years ago. Especially if those were children of, or they were, the people who were smartest, most powerful, and had good reproductive power (all helpful for making sure your descendants continue to live). Most likely, in the absence of too many supervillains, such new “powers” would be highly adaptive and fitting for the unpredictability of the early Pleistocene so those with the X-gene would have definitely taken over the world by now. No Doubt. Also I’m very confused by the weird Starbrand/Hulk thing that is going on. Is It supposed to be Gigantopithecus (which is what Sasquatch might be based off of)?

So why do I even care so much as to write this? Well right now, as the March for Science demonstrated, science is being regularly attacked and under funded. Particularly, anthropological sciences, such as archaeology and paleoanthropology, that teach things like evolution are under attack and are presented as “one of many possible explanations”. And because of that it matters a fucking lot that comics espouse an evolutionary agenda more akin to creationism than evolution, especially when people like to think of comics as science fiction rather than just fiction or fantasy. From a storytelling point of view, it is a disservice to feed the public a thinner fictional world when we have a wealth of knowledge about the realities of prehistory. Particularly when prehistoric life rarely gets the sort of publicity that a Marvel event brings. This could have been a great chance to collaborate and use archaeological knowledge to color a fictional world using the comics art to illustrate a complex prehistory. A chance to do something fun but also use what we have learned about the past to give it a depth that goes beyond prehistoric “cavemen” stereotypes. In the same way I think that comics should be doing better with culture, they should be doing better with science. We know more about science and culture than we did in the 1960s, it's time we did something about it.

Sunday, August 27, 2017

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 Redux

I really like the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Guardians of the Galaxy (GOTG). I read the run of the GOTG series written by Brian Michael Bendis leading up to and after the movie (ending at 27 before Secret Wars)and it pales in comparison to the characters set up in the film. Other iterations of the Guardians, before and after that run, have had the same problems and particularly those that came before it fall into the unfortunate trap of so many comics from that era, everything centers around the white male experience, and any character that can’t be coerced into that form basically has no character to speak of.

However, when I originally left the theater after GOTG vol. 2 I had a funny feeling and I couldn’t quite figure out why. I liked the movie but didn’t love it the way I had the first movie. What was it? Was it that I didn’t laugh as much? Was it because of the insulting nature of Drax? Was it that almost everything Gamora said started with a No? Was it the soundtrack? Was I hungry during the film?

I let the movie go for the summer though, letting it settle into the back of my mind and not questioning the hesitant positive feeling I had about the film. So when Clara Mae’s article exploring the misuse and abuse of Mantis in the film came out recently, I knew I couldn’t let that rest any longer. I knew I had to re-watch the film and knowing about the twist, and remembering some other low moments of the film, to try to pinpoint what it was exactly that create such a funny feeling.

Upon re-watching, which I did at a theater so I didn’t tweet through the whole thing, I enjoyed it. It was a good movie with a solid theme that someone on twitter put succinctly, its about living with your family. Obvifously, that’s not a hard theme to pick up on. Everyone has their “travel through the Galaxy” buddy and very rarely do we see any of the characters alone at any point in the film. With the exceptions being some great character shots of Starlord and Gamora.

But the movie falls short of fully developing this idea particularly failing in the humor and in the portrayals of relationships that involve women. Gunn has done a fantastic job dealing with issues of fatherhood. Rocket and Groot, the Daddy triangle of Starlord, Yondu, and Ego; and even Yondu’s relationship with Stakar (Sylvester Stallone’s cameo character) but when it comes to relationship with women of the story, it falls flat.

Mae’s article describes the misuse of Mantis and explores the character in relation to her comics inspiration in more detail than I give here but in general it made me ask the question, what, if anything, is actually funny about the interactions between Drax and Mantis? I think they were trying to go with a sort of “tough love” relationship and I appreciate the idea (not the execution) that Drax has a different conception of beauty than the implied “norm”. (Side note: Personally the apparently common beauty standards, gender categories, and romantic relationships in an infinite galaxy in the MCU and elsewhere gets old and for me feels extremely unimaginative but I digress). There’s a difference between being honest and being rude. Drax even acknowledges that Mantis is naïve and yet continues to insult her. He knows what insults are just because he might not understand metaphor. Also while apparently naïve, Mantis knows what she looks like and what she likes to look at, so it’s very unlikely that she has no conception of what “beauty” is. I do appreciate the idea of having a beautiful soul but it comes at odds with other things that Drax says. He talks about how ugly beings know that they are truly loved because people can’t just enjoy their appearance but at another point talks about how beautiful and attractive his own wife was, who he clearly loved but maybe she didn’t trust him to have done so truly.

Other interactions with Drax, who for some reason carries the majority of the comedic load of this movie, are particularly unfunny. The jokes in the film seem to have devolved from amusing and cute non-sequiturs, such as the “I'm Star Lord Man. Legendary Outlaw” line in the beginning of the first film, to literal poop jokes and extremely predictable physical gags. The consistently mediocre humor dragged down the film. I assume Gunn was trying to link such intimate details, the sort of things you only talk about with family, to establish the relationships that the Guardians have built since the previous film. However, there are other ways to do it especially this isn’t a G rated movie where toddlers are looking for fart jokes to giggle to themselves. Also because there are other moments that execute this idea more clearly and more meaningfully. Peter mention that he told Gamora a drunk story and Rockett’s continued references to wanting to listen to “Peter’s Music”. These details build the relationships without the need for cheap laughs or insults and is the sort of meaningful reliance on family that the movie is trying to portray.

Without the jokes, much of the portrayal of family as theme works really well and there’s a lot of good self reflection on the nature of family and what makes beings bond.

I also have to say that the movie does a pretty great job (and sort of in parallel to but also intersecting with) critiquing the idea of white male exceptionalism and superiority. The fact that an exceptionally powerful being when they conceived of what biological life (in general) would look like, he selected a humanoid white male says a lot. While it may have been unintentional on Gunn's part as the character was created in 1966, it says a lot about who has power and who we imagine as powerful in our culture. But acknowledging something isn’t necessarily a critique Paulina! Yes. That is true. BUT that comes with the fact that the character is named EGO, encompassing the essential nature of the character also as the quintessential non-reflective cis-het-white man. This metaphor can extend to all the other characters in the film too, who by the end of it work together defeating their own egos to be successful in defeating the big Ego. This critique is also confirmed when Peter retorts, “What’s so bad about being like everyone else?” directly confronting the idea of the inherent exceptionalism of white men and then Peter rejecting the idea of being divinely special.

This whole thing is great. However, all of it basically centers on the white male perspective and while a critique, it doesn’t back that up by bolstering its use of their none-white male characters. It is a self-critique of the white male perspective rather than an expansion of that critique in application.

This shortfall is of course most evident in the woman characters. (Side note: Michelle Yeoh is the only women of color in the film who is not in make up.) This comes across as most problematic with the two most prominent woman characters, Mantis and Gamora. Specifically Mantis, literally performs the emotional labor for the team, and Gamora, for most of the film acts as a “no” woman.

Empathy powers are not out of the ordinary for Mantis as a Marvel Character however, it means that she literally embodies performing emotional labor. Her job is emotions, changing other beings emotions or using them to transform her own. The entire final battle, to give time for the rest of the Guardians to come up with a plan to defeat Ego rests on her empathic ability. The scene demonstrates how powerful Mantis’ powers are (though it’s undercut by Drax’s unneeded commentary). But it is the physical embodiment of learning to use her emotions and empathy for the benefit of others at the expense of her physical safety, which is also used for a cheap joke. This is also not given as critique, it is demonstrated as a gift, the thing that makes her special and unique. It doubles down on the idea that the emotions of men come down on the shoulders of women.

Gamora, rather than being sympathetic to Mantis essentially treats her as a non-entity, although they both should have a lot in common considering they both (along with Nebula) were manipulated and enslaved by powerful males. This commonality is not explore of course (though I would also love a Guardians with Nebula, Gamora, Mantis, and Michelle Yeoh) and instead the more prominent role Gamora takes in the film is as another stereotype, the “No” woman. If I’m honest, I love Zoë Saldaña particularly as Gamora but the only Marvel product that’s really done anything to give Gamora a full character is Nicole Perlman’s short-run comic entitled Gamora (WHICH TOOK FOREVER TO COME OUT AND THEN ONLY RAN FIVE ISSUES AND I AM SAAAALLLLLLTTTTYYYYYY about this).

Both movies have some great Gamora moments but she rarely comes across as a full character and often she gets relegated to a slightly more emotive Drax. But I digress, the most unfortunate thing that happens with her character is her status as the “no” woman of the group. She’s the Hillary to the Starlord Bernie, shooting down all the male characters ideas and getting to basically mother the group. It is a valid personality choice if it wasn’t such a goddamned trope for smart and capable women. What is a “now” woman? Well they essentially act as the curb to the grand ideas of men. They are practice, realistic, and rarely seem to have inventive ideas on their own. Generally, and what are then figuring is their conservative, interactions with the inventive, impractical (cis-het-white) male character. Gamora, admittedly isn't always a “no” woman in the film, as she is the whole reason Peter takes a chance with Ego but in that she basically only serves to further the white-cis-het-male plot and up until that point almost every one of her lines begins with a “no” or a negative statement.

Paulina after so many paragraphs of critique how could you say that you actually enjoyed this movie? It has so many problems. Well my dear readers, everything I love this problematic, from my dog to my chosen profession. The film has some excellent points, is lusciously shot, and designed. Baby Groot is fantastically cute and the songs fit well with their associated scenes. Also the points that the movie gets right are fantastic. Also needless to say the portrayal of the Sovereign as the embodiment of “whiteness” upon re-watching is fantastic. Yes a couple of the attendants to the High Priestess are people of color but the majority of them were white, and their entire culture screams stuffy white people especially with all their gold and high and mighty attitude. And of course the super creepy “construction” of perfect individuals and their controlling of their entire world. Anyways it was good but because of the unfortunate single-mindedness of the creation wasn't great. It is a fantastic treatise on white-cis-het-male relationships and critiques them but doesn’t take those to the next level. It remains in that world rather than expanding the repercussions of that critique to impact the agency of the other characters. Assuming we get a vol. 3 and on the results of the Infinity War films, we will probably be exploring the idea of losing or living without one’s family and I hope Gunn brings in another pair of eyes to critique the script based on problems like this to give meaning to the myriad characters that are now part of the Guardians team. Yes, there is a lot we can critique cis-het-white-males for, but the real end results of that should be giving agency to those who are not that and letting their diversity and personalities shine through.

Thursday, August 24, 2017

Dr. Quinzel, Dr. Moone, and Systems of Oppression

So a while back I watched Suicide Squad. You may have seen my tweets. Now a few months removed I remember it as generic, at points boring, and very poorly constructed, with a cast full of character that did not, in any way, need to be there. It was an ensemble movie for the sake of ensemble movies. However, I was surprised to find myself really enjoying the special effects for Enchantress who, spoilers, turns out to be the villain. Which is as a concept was pretty cool. Ancient deity plays stupid government who thinks they can control it. I can dig it (ha terrible archaeology joke). But beyond that, and the thing that I kept coming back to the longer I’ve been away from the film, was the fact that the Suicide Squad has not one but two women Doctors, Phds in fact, on their team. This of course fascinates me because I too will be a doctor and graduate school has a special fascination for me as someone going through the process.

In relation to the movie, Dr. June Moone’s degree is integral to the plot, as a driver for why she becomes Enchantress, while Dr. Quinzel’s is not. However, they both end up on the wrong side of the law, or at least Enchantress does. Side note: There is some debate about whether Dr. Moone has any say in the issue. Personally, I think she does and for the same reason I dislike the idea that all bad people are necessarily mentally ill or unstable or for a more “biblical” explanation are possessed by evil spirits, in some people it comes down to choice and some people do choose to do bad things and we can’t always blame it on things out of their control. In this case though, I don’t think it’s clear that Enchantress is necessarily doing anything wrong, how would you react to being trapped in a ceramic totem for thousands of years, and I don’t like the idea that Dr. Moone is just a vessel as that removes all of her agency. I don’t know how they play it in the comics, as honestly DC hasn’t sold me a on a floppy in years, if ever and her origin story there is actually as an artist, but I think Dr. Moone is there and pissed too.

Anyways, regardless of how important their particular degrees were to the plot, this is a team that consists of very educated women with essentially “common criminal” dudes. Why is it that, at least in this case, smart women and uneducated men are the villains? What does that tell us about gender in the world of DC? This is not to say that all men villains, or women heroes, are dumb or uneducated, merely that when you have a fully formed woman villain (in character) she is often smart and there is diversity in the portray of good and bad men and good women.

For me, that then becomes a question of why. Why are women villains so smart? One explanation is that these are metaphors to undermine smart women. That essentially at one point a woman learns too much to be considered a “good” or “heroic” woman and then necessarily becomes bad because women cannot be naturally bad in the same way that men can. There is also a clear history in many cultures of perpetuating the idea that smart women are not good women so it’s not surprising that this comes across in fiction.

For me, regardless of where this concept came from, if we accept the premise that being smart, or becoming educated, has something to do with becoming villains there are a couple of different roads that can lead down. There is of course, liked explored above, the idea that smart women are naturally bad, regardless of if they were inherently smart or received education. But this “essential” quality doesn’t do anything to inform characters and while not all fiction has to be an in-depth examination of the psyche, well-developed characters often come from something and this is particularly true of villains. So if we look at the idea that it is not essential or innate but instead that there is something about being smart or becoming educated that transforms smart women into villains, what systems of oppression or bigotry or misogyny compel smart women to believe that lawful actions are not the just ones or at least not ones that lead to their desired outcomes.

This runs into an issue plaguing many comics and because of DC’s growth from Detective Comics, "heroes" beating up people doing petty crimes, they seem to have suffered the most. Many people still believe in the idea that most criminals do “bad” things because they just do or are inherently bad. However, as we have learned more about the causes of poverty and criminality, de-coupling them from culturally assumed ideas about predispositions or heredity, most smash and grab criminals, like those presented in Suicide Squad, and particularly if they didn’t have powers, become less “evil” and more clearly products of structural violence. In some ways, understanding that makes one feel like there are no real villains that didn’t have a good reason for doing so, at least when it comes to the street criminals that are in many comics. With one exception in Suicide Squad, that being the Australian Bank Robber dude whose name I forgot. All the other men characters are products, to greater or lesser degrees, of structural violence and any heroes that we see *cough* Batman *cough* end up playing the role of the white-status-quo-bourgeoisie savior. He’s not saving Gotham, he’s saving an idea of a system that helps to oppress minorities and thrives on their exploitation. If those are the systems that created villains like Deadshot then what systems of oppression may have pushed women like June and Harley?

Obviously they are not the victims of race-based structural violence, being white women, and they probably had quite a bit of power in their lives to be able to pursue PhDs at all all, so what changed? What shifts an affluent white woman from the cogs of the wheel of oppression to being squashed or feeling squashed under that wheel?

Is it, in fact, the academy? I think it is and particularly because academia is in a unique situation where it both perpetuates systems of oppression and gives people the tools and knowledge to dismantle them.

How does the academy perpetuate systems of oppression? Well, almost everyone who has done graduate work will not need me to tell you. But I will because this is a blog. We can look at the fact that most academic departments are still comprised of cis-het-white-men most likely from middle-to-upper-middle class backgrounds meaning they dominate what we can call the “academy” and essentially are the academy. This is not to suggest that such people cannot promote diversity, many of the people who pushed me into graduate school were such dudes, but when you see incoming classes of graduate students who continue to reflect what came before them you, begin to wonder if they are actually doing that. Also while college education helps to level the educational playing field, studies demonstrate that college makes the field less lumpy but it is by no means flat. Those with privilege tend to be more aware of the resources available to them and continue to succeed even more, standing on the shoulders of giants. While those who do not enter with that privileged knowledge, do not enjoy additional resources and don’t get anymore help.

However, something that the academy, and education in general, are also good at doing is opening the eyes of students, at least with good professors and teachers, to witness and recognize systems of oppression. In many cases, giving students the tools to recognize what is wrong in society and the hope of being able to fix it. Education is how you learned about systems of oppression, structural violence, and issues of intersectionality. Or at least you can, it is an option. Not everyone takes that option, which is probably why changes in academia have not been as fast as they should be.

Ok So how does this create white women villains with PhDs? Well it creates a system that will oppress them, a la institutional sexism if they want to pursue work beyond their PhDs or just even conduct their PhD research, and the knowledge about that system to want to fight back. It removes them from the Ivory Tower and places them at odds with the things that created their knowledge and impacts their abilities to succeed as much as their white-male colleagues.

For me that transition is the most interesting part of the stories of Harley and June, outside of current cannon and Suicide Squad as a film. Particularly in the case of Dr. Quinzel. What in your life as a psychologist happens that makes the thoughts of a known psychopath, or obviously bad dude, seem to make sense? I don’t assume that she didn’t already have issues going in, as the show Hannibal likes to portray all therapists have their own therapists, but she knows all about psychological issues, manipulation, and had to go through extensive training for these things. So what changes, what makes the ideas of a patient seem like the sanest perspective. Personally, I don’t find the “she fell in love with him” aspect to really mean anything or allow for much discussion but even if that were the case it still follows this path. Dr. Moone’s path is more complicated because of the issue of, at least in the movie, her possession, which does crazy things with her agency. But if we assume that she has at least some choice in the matter, what changes in her where the ideas of an ancient deity wanting to reign havoc seem like the best possible option.

I have some ideas but I’m not a comics writer. I’m just someone going through a PhD and I can definitely see where any of us might run off the rails, in a world where supervillainy is a thing. Regardless, these titles are not just aesthetic. They imply something about the characters and about our society. They help us to understand their motivations and create richer stories for the public to consume and it does the dual duty, like many comics and science fiction did in the past, of exploring serious social issues in a detached world allowing those who don’t have the eyes to see them in our world explore them in a different one.

Sunday, August 20, 2017

There's more, I promise

Hey! So this still exists and I'm working on a lot of blogs right now that will hopefully make for some entertaining reading over the next few weeks/months. Summer got the best of me so I didn't get to develop some of the ideas I had at the start of summer into real blogs.

A quick preview of what's to come though:

  • Something on whitewashing and stereotypes in movies/TV (I'll let you guess who'll be the subject of that :D)
  • Me discussing Marvel's 1,000,000 BC line which explodes my brain
  • A set of posts on community engagement and conventions
  • An examination of Feminism in Fandoms
  • Some comics recommendations

Also, not 100% in that order as some of those topics require a bit more work than others to fully articulate into meaningful things that I want people, or bots or whatever stumbles upon this, to read.

In other news, I will be moderating two panels in the coming months! One at Rose City Comic Con in Portland and another at GeekGirlCon in Seattle. They are part of the community engagement at conventions I am/was/will be talking about because what's all this PhD learning for if it just stays in the Ivory Tower? I'm a Scientist not Rapunzel!

The panel at Rose City Comic Con is entitled "Adaptation versus Appropriation: How to borrow respectfully from other cultures in fiction" and will be on Sunday, September 10th at 1:30pm, in Room 8. I got some awesome people to participate including Tristan J. Tarwater, Yoshi Yoshitani, Jemma Salume, Marissa Louise, and possibly one more person who is not sure if they are coming yet. It's a simialr topic to the panel I ran at GeekGirlCon last year but with a new crop of people and at a larger convention. Join us if you're in the Portland area.

Panel 2 is at GeekGirlCon and is entitled "Scion or shafted: Being mixed-race in science fiction and fantasy cultures". This one is also on Sunday but this time October 1st from 3:00-4:00pm. I also found some great speakers for this one including Kiku Hughes, Tristan J. Tarwater, Symantha Reagor, and Sarah Gulde. If you are in Seattle around that time please come to GeekGirlCon and hear us talk about this awesome stuff.

I'm hoping to be a panelist at Emerald City Comic Con in the next year as well with Miles Greb and a few others. We're hoping for it to be a sort of Science Fiction/Science Fact thing with creators and associated scientists both being part of the discussion. That's still in progress and I hope it goes through.

Anyways, thanks for reading, and I hope next time I've got something a bit more meaty for you to think about.