Princess Unchained

A couple of years back I wrote a post about the character Princess Leia in George Lucas' Star Wars epic. Specifically, the bizarre incongruity of putting the character in a metal bikini for no real reason other to, well, frankly, ogle Carrie Fisher's pretty figure in a skimpy outfit.

In the post I wrote that;

"...Slave Leias are troublesome...because they have the effect of (making the Leia character valued because of) sexual display, and, in turn, devaluing (the female characters) based on a sort of juvenile smuttiness about seeing their bodies."

The whole macguffin of Star Wars, women, their bodies, and how they come together seems to have returned with the new Lucas flick, The Force Awakens with Ms. Fisher, again, in the middle of it.

Fisher isn't happy that she has been slammed by viewers for "not aging well", and is pretty pissed off that - unlike her co-stars Hamil and Ford - her value relative to the new film is often being weighed based on her looks.

(It's worth noting that a hell of a lot of this goes back to the ridiculous but bog-bro-standard of a woman's sexual desuetude increasing with age, a stupid idea I've discussed here before...)

Why bring this up? Because the Boy and I went to see her new film last week.

I could go all Siskel and Ebert on you here, but why? You know what it was; a Star Wars flick. X-wings and blasters, "I have a bad feeling...", droids, alien critters, good Jedi and bad Sith.

Overall we both enjoyed it. It was good popcorn entertainment and a fun diversion, which is all I'd ask from a popcorn film.

The plot rolled along nicely with the minimal required fanservice, the two young leads were well written and well acted, and even though you'd think that after the first TWO times the Empire would have learned about the whole...ah, but I won't spoiler that part in case you want to go see it.

Here's the thing, though. The most challenging and intriguing thing about it - two words I'd never have thought I'd ever say about a Lucas film - was watching Fisher and Harrison Ford, the two of the oldest actors on screen. They've been mailing it in for so long that I'd almost forgotten what made them stars back in the day. But together they provide what modest throw-weight there is to the tale and, as such, do the best work they've done in a long time.

Ford's Han Solo was spot-on; trying to be the same "scoundrel" that makes him feel like he's still got some remnant of his youth and the sort of swagger that captivated the Princess when they met.

But...he's also smart enough to know he's kidding himself. Years and sorrows have slowed him down. He knows that he's slowing down and that the things he's running from are catching up to him. He knows that while he can't stop running that he can't run fast enough to escape his past and his grief, and that's as grievous as what he's fleeing.

All the while Ford doesn't lose the essential core of the guy. It's an older Solo but still Solo. Good work...but Fisher's older Leia was as good or even better.

I've read reviews that called Fisher's performance "perfunctory" or "embarrassed" but I disagree completely; her restrained work is perfect for the part. Leia is scarred as her lover is scarred, but her way of dealing with that is to lock down. She withdraws inside the austere senior officer and faction leader, all too aware of her responsibilities, just as her ex retreats into his feckless bad boy all too heedless of his.

Fisher conveys this by using her older looks and body to great effect. She wears the strained face of someone who lives with the constant fear of agony, a veteran trooper who has taken the big wound. She moves slowly and cautiously as someone who expects at any moment to be spitted on the spear of old pain that she knows from experience will stagger her and drive her to her knees.

She's damaged, just as he's damaged, but her scar tissue is formed in stillness as his is in motion.

As a couple they're terrific.

(Selfishly, I wish that there had been a little more sexual desire, some sexual tension, but expecting adult sexuality from a Star Wars flick is like expecting grand opera from friggin' Care Bears; you know it ain't gonna happen.)

Together their work shows the viewer that all their emotions are still there but that both have wrapped those emotions away in deep storage because they hurt too much to be exposed. They hate the baggage each of them carries while loving the person almost - but not quite completely - buried under the baggage. They're still in love but given their griefs and, more particularly, their disparate reactions to their griefs they can't stand to live with each other.

I was amazed...until I remembered that George Lucas had nothing to do with writing this thing. Anyway, this was perhaps the first time I've ever seen one of these SW flicks where the characters 1) felt like actual people and 2) drove the story along. It felt like an actual movie instead of a toy commercial written by a 12-year old. I think a huge part of that was the age of Ford and Fisher, and the knowledge of the actual pain and suffering that the blasting and slashing were inflicting.

The characters they played in the earlier films were young people having "an adventure" for other young people to enjoy.

In this one they're still "adventuring"...but at the heart of the adventure, like a hidden knife inlayed with old blood, is mortality. Age and pain have taught them that "adventuring" has a deep and sorrowful cost.

The two young actors in the piece are their yesterday and our today, strong and brave and striving for today's bright crown of honor and glory.

The two older actors are tomorrow; the slave standing behind us holding above our heads that crown and whispering into our ears alone the reminder that beyond today is the inescapable nightfall of age and death.

And as important as the quest for, and the brightness of, that light is how we face the darkness.

A'maelamin*, get me rewrite!

Came across a - to me, anyway - fascinating little piece of literary trivia over at Mannion's site today the sheds some rather different light on the whole issue of J.R.R. Tolkien's work and the Peter Jackson adaptations that I've been sorta-reviewing here (for Part 1 of The Hobbit) and here (for Part 2).

If you remember, The Boy and I pretty throughly enjoyed Jackson's first installment; good Middle-Earth thud and blunder and some clever character development, in particular Martin Freeman's Bilbo Baggins.

The second film, however, seemed to go off-track quite a bit more, especially in the roaring under-the-Mountain action sequence at the end and, as I observed particularly, in Jackson's insistence in making the Ring the Ring from Lord of the Rings instead of, as I saw it, a pretty gimmick for Bilbo to sneak around and trick others. Regarding that I said:

"I see Bilbo as Ringbearer as completely different. He's a bit of a wideboy, indeed, to him the Ring is nothing more than a nifty gimmick he uses to turn invisible to steal stuff. It's a burglar's tool to him, and he uses it as nothing more than a tool.

He spends the years between The Hobbit and the opening of The Fellowship of the Ring using it to duck local busybodies and prank his neighbors.

That's how he manages to stay free of the corruption of the Ring; he treats it like a shiny gold lockpick.

He's not a hero, not hungry for power. He's a retired wideboy, a former-burglar in slippers with his pipe, and his comfort, and his gold gimmick to play tricks and outdeal people. A tragic hero? A Boromir? An Isildur?

Not our Bilbo."

Hmmm.

Well, as if to prove that no matter what we think we know we never know as much as we think we know, Mannion's post has a bit of incunabula that suggests that Tolkien himself was a little more like Peter Jackson that I knew. He cites Corey Olsen's work Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (which I now absoultely HAVE to read...) as showing that the old professor himself ended up making the Ring more like the Ring from Lord of the Rings and, in the process, Gollum more like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, as well.

I apologize for quoting so extensively from Mannion's work, but this entire bit is pretty important to get the sense of Mannion's argument. The emphasis in bold in the following, however, is mine:

"In the original version of The Hobbit Tolkien published 1937, Bilbo doesn’t steal the ring from Gollum or trick him out of it. According to Corey Olsen, in Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Gollum gives it to him as the prize for winning the game of riddles. And it is a prize. Tolkien himself didn’t know the ring the Ring because he didn’t know yet what he was going to do with it when he got down to writing the story that became The Lord of the Rings.

When Tolkien set down to write The Lord of the Rings as a sequel to The Hobbit...(h)e wanted...some link that he could establish between the story of The Hobbit and the later story, some seed that he could take from The Hobbit and grow into a new story.

The link he decided on was Bilbo’s magic ring, but in the process of developing the story of The Lord of the Rings, he decided that Bilbo’s ring would be much more than just a very useful invisibility ring. That change in the nature of the ring did not conflict with all of The Hobbit** but it did require a significant reconsideration of the “Riddles in the Dark” chapter, and of the character of Gollum in particular.

When Tolkien sent his publisher some corrections to the text of The Hobbit in 1950, therefore, he made some very important changes to his original depiction of Gollum, making him much more like the [wicked and miserable] Gollum that we read about in The Fellowship of the Ring and finally meet in The Two Towers.

Thus, though the story of Bilbo and Gollum’s meeting was published twenty years before The Fellowship of the Ring, I think it is fair to say that the Gollum in The Hobbit, as it now stands, is actually based on the Gollum of The Lord of the Rings, and not the other way around."

Howboutthat?

**[Note: I'd argue that while changing the ring from a shiny gimmick to the Great Ring of Power doesn't really change the Tolkien Hobbit it does change the Jackson Hobbit due to the relative importance to the whole Necromancer storyline in the latter.

In the original the Necromancer is a very shadowy figure that primarily functions as a way to get Gandalf out of the story so that Thorin & Co. can get captured first by the spiders of Mirkwood and then by the sylvan elves.

The film version makes the Necromancer the Phantom Sauron Menace and an important plot point, so you can't really have the One Ring being the One Ring and not introduce that to the story of the Hobbit. You can argue that as such it distorts the story - in fact, you can argue that it distorts the story past the ability of the original to sustain the distortion - but you can't really argue that its not appropriate to make the change...]

So perhaps Jackson's interpretation isn't quite as wrongheaded as it seems to me; Tolkien himself retconned the original meeting between his two characters, the hero and the villain (or perhaps the tragic victim, depending on how you see ol' Slinker/Stinker...), to make his older story hew closer to his larger work.

At the very least it makes me willing to think a little harder about all of that.

Now.

The whole giant-dissolving-molten-gold-dwarf-statue bit?

THAT still sucked ass.

*[A'maelamin: Elvish for "beloved"; in other words, "Darlin' get me rewrite!"]

There and Back Again, Again

Last year I - well, "reviewed", I suppose, is the right term - the first Peter Jackson installment of The Hobbit.

If you recall from that (and you probably don't; I think that post has been viewed something like eight times total...) I rather liked Jackson's version, noting that the one question I had was how he was handling the overall "tone" of the story. Here's what I said then:

"The one thing that did irk me a bit (as a writer, tho, rather than a parent) is that I don't think that Peter Jackson really has a handle on what "tone" he wants to set for this series.

Lord of the Rings is Middle Earth as drawn by Victor Hugo; stern, tragic, monumental - and Jackson got that perfectly; his flicks are ol' Prof. Tolkien's "yea, verily" language in film.

But The Hobbit is Middle Earth as drawn by A.A. Milne with a touch of Georges Feydeau; confiding, jolly, romping, and a trifle twee - a children's book written by an Oxford don in the arch style of the kid's books of his day.

They're very different."

With the second installment The Desolation of Smaug Jackson clearly thumps down on the "yea, verily" side of the question. There's no gray here; this is not The Hobbit. This is The Phantom Nazgul Menace, the prequel to the Lord of the Rings.

Now I'm not entirely opposed to that, OK?

I'm not some sort of Tolkien purist and I can enjoy these films as films, as one man's vision of Middle Earth, without feeling the need to bitch about every departure from the Canon. Because the Canon itself is far from perfect.

Lance Mannion - who wrote a fine review of this film - sums up some of the issues with The-Hobbit-as-written:

"The Hobbit was written for children but to be read by grownups who believe children need to be and want to be protected from life’s harsher realities.

The narrator’s jolly, confiding, chummy tone is meant to fool adults listening to themselves as they read out loud at bedtime that the story they’re telling won’t give the kids nightmares. They hear The Hobbit as a merry little fairy tale about a funny character with pointed ears, furry feet, and a pot-belly who goes on a treasure hunt and has some comical adventures along the way before coming home, safe and sound and rich, to live happily ever after in his snug little house in the ground in that cheerful and protected place with the comfortingly bucolic name the Shire and name that insists this is a place where nothing scary ever happens.

Children listening aren’t fooled. They know better.

The Hobbit is about what Terry Pratchett says all the old stories are about, sooner or later.

It’s about blood."

And y'know what?

That's fine. It's one artist's interpretation of another, and I can work with that. I can enjoy "Peter Jackson's The Hobbit" alongside J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. One is different from the other, but much as I enjoy Tolkien's work it's not without flaw (get me going on the whole pointlessness-of-the-entire-Tom-Bombadil-episode-in-The-Fellowship sometime...) or without the possibility of improvement by others' hands.

And while I was initially not particularly pleased with Jackson's treatment of the entire captive-of-the-Sylvan-elves segment and the inclusion of the character of Legolas in a story that seems well-off without him, Mannion makes some good points about that as not at all a bad emendation. I'll reserve judgement on that bit, then, until the final installment.

However.

A couple of Jackson's choices seemed a trifle ripe to me; several minor and one that seems to me to be a very large misunderstanding of both the story and its main character that, in turn, does significant damage to the story and Jackson's telling of it.

First, the small stuff:

Evangeline Lilly's Tauriel character and her budding romance with Aiden Turner's Kíli. Call me a cynic on this one. Lilly and Turner both do adequate work with their characters in this film, but unless Jackson plans to simply rewrite the casualty list from the Battle of Five Armies we already know where this one is heading; both these two might as well be showing their pictures of each other around to their pals in their respective squads, "Tauriel" being the Sylvan Elvish and "Kíli" the Dwarvish for "deadmeat".

Call me a curmudgeon, too. It kinda irks me that after the Eowyn-Faramir romance, one of my favorite bits of byplay from the Lord of the Rings, got cut out of Jackson's version he manufactures this hot-hot-hot-elf-on-dwarf romance out of whole cloth knowing that it's gonna end about as badly as any romance can.

The entire sequence between Smaug and Bilbo (and then Thorin & Co.) in Erebor. In the original Bilbo's conversations with Smaug are one of the better pieces of writing that Tolkien ever did, from Bilbo's slippery verbal fencing with the great wyrm to his discovery of the weakness in Smaug's armor (and subsequent role in the dragon's fall...) to the not-laughing-at-live-dragons as Bilbo dashes back up the secret passage. I was anticipating a terrific, ominous, creepy scene complete with the verbal talents of Martin Freeman's Bilbo and Benedict Cumberbatch's Smaug while the delightfully-scary CGI dragon looms over Bilbo and us.

Well, what I got was, frankly, a fucking mess.

Mannion had the same issue I had with the Smaug character. Instead of the dangerously cunning serpent - all the more dangerous for holding that immense power in check as he riddles with Bilbo - we got a standard-issue D&D dragon complete with standard-issue voice. The dangerously cunning serpent is reduced to a thug.

Meh.

But worse yet was the completely unnecessary extended chase-scene between the dragon and Thorin & Co that followed. That was a complete fucking clusterfuck, a Warner-Brothers-cartoon level piece of idiotic slapstick and action-movie thud-and-blunder culminating in perhaps the most moron-grade "special effect" I've ever seen - the dissolving-molten-gold-giant-dwarf-statue thing.

From beginning to end that entire bit was a disaster.

First, because as a sequence it was loud, incoherent, and useless. And, second, because it overwhelmed and undercut the earlier Bilbo-vs-Smaug scenes, poorly conceived as they were.

Bad, bad piece of filming; one of the worst I've seen from Jackson yet.

As for the remainder of the changes, well, like I said; I'm fine with the notion that this isn't "The Hobbit" but Peter Jackson's take on the original work. I wasn't pleased with what he did with the Beorn sequence, or the fight against the spiders in Mirkwood, but his version wasn't entirely discreditable to my mind and I can live with what he filmed. I would have done things a little differently, but I could tolerate his vision.

Same-same the orc-fight during the barrel escape from the Elvenking's halls; not what I would have done with the scene but not entirely unworkable.

But.

This episode of the film series introduces one theme that, I thought, was a complete misunderstanding of the entire Hobbit-LotR cycle and a big, big, mistake.

That's how Jackson treats Bilbo's relationship to The Ring.

Now this is not a universal opinion. For example, it seems from his review that Mannion actually likes Jackson's version a trifle better:

"We know Bilbo kept the ring. What we maybe didn't know or maybe only suspected or knew in our hearts but didn't want to believe is that Bilbo didn't make a mistake because he didn't know better. Jackson is showing us that Bilbo knew and kept the ring anyway.

Right away after he finds it in An Unexpected Journey, Bilbo senses there's something odd and disturbing about the ring. In The Desolation of Smaug it's dawning on him he needs to get rid of it. Since we already know he's not going to, we know that what's ahead in There and Back Again is Bilbo's moral failure. The hero-hobbit is going to fail to resist the temptation the hero-king Isildur failed to resist, the temptation the hero Boromir will fail to resist, the temptation Aragorn can only resist by letting Frodo continue to suffer on his and everyone else's behalf. With what he's doing with Bilbo, Jackson's effectively gone back in time to set up the need for the Fellowship and the need for its being Frodo who carries the ring.

This is what really makes The Desolation of Smaug more than a bridge between An Unexpected Journey and There and Back Again. It's the chapter in which the plot of The Lord of the Rings really gets underway."

But that's where Mannion and I disagree and what I see as Jackson's biggest screwup. I don't see that Bilbo keeps the ring because he's a hero, because (as Mannion says) the adventuresome Tookish side of him is coming out, and he's drawn to the sense of Power and Danger he feels from it.

I think he keeps the ring because he doesn't feel it.

It's the shrewd, hardheaded Took in him, the guy who finds that he thoroughly enjoys getting the better of other hobbits (and dwarves, elves, and dragons, come to that) by trickery.

Frodo as Ringbearer is Christ-with-his-cross; I agree - he is as Mannion describes him, a saint and martyr. He feels the power and dread of the Ring intensely and is ground down by it as he's drawn into it.

But I see Bilbo as Ringbearer as completely different. He's a bit of a wideboy, indeed, to him the Ring is nothing more than a nifty gimmick he uses to turn invisible to steal stuff. It's a burglar's tool to him, and he uses it as nothing more than a tool.

He spends the years between The Hobbit and the opening of The Fellowship of the Ring using it to duck local busybodies and prank his neighbors.

That's how he manages to stay free of the corruption of the Ring; he treats it like a shiny gold lockpick.

He's not a hero, not hungry for power. He's a retired wideboy, a former-burglar in slippers with his pipe, and his comfort, and his gold gimmick to play tricks and outdeal people. A tragic hero? A Boromir? An Isildur?

Not our Bilbo.

I understand why Jackson gives Bilbo a Frodo-esque frisson of horror in his handling of the Ring, why he shows us the Lidless Eye (And, incidentally, why he makes Smaug a sort of super-orc, a minion of the Dark Lord in this film, instead of just a big ol' dragon greedy for loot and furious with competition); he's using the theme of the One Ring to make The Hobbit into a genuine prequel to his LotR films.

But to my mind that diminishes The Hobbit.

And that's too bad. The Hobbit is a genuinely great story in its own right; a dark and bloody tale of adventure and war, of heroism and cowardice, of high intentions and low cunning, of vaunting ambitions and blind groping around in the dark.

I want Jackson to make that book into a movie; I want him to respect the story for its own worth, to do it justice on its own terms.

But by making the Ring in The Hobbit into what it will become in The Lord of the Rings, into the Great Matter that is the center of the greater story, he makes what is on its own a damn good little story smaller and lesser; in my opinion in this Jackson shows a lack of understanding, and lack of respect, for his own source material.

And that's a damn shame.

Navel Proceedings

Watched the Disney John Carter again with the Boy last night.



My online pal and commenter mike luuuurves this film, and I have to admit that mostly because of that I really wanted to love it, too. Instead I liked it well enough but not with the same fervor.

I found a lot of the same problems that many of the reviewers had; a fair amount of draggy exposition mixed in with the slam-bang action sequences, and an overall sameness to the general feel of it. Lots of it is fun, there's some gorgeous spectacle, but it's hard to avoid the feeling that you've seen it done elsewhere before.

As this Globe and Mail review pointed out, that isn't really a John Carter problem, it's a Burroughs problem. The stuff that seemed so awesome in 1917; flying machines, ray guns, dying empires on lost planets...by 2013 they've been done to death. We've been there and done that so often that the liveliness just kind of leaches out.

It's not a bad film, though, not at all. It's a good popcorn actioner and both the Boy and I enjoyed it.

The Boy liked the fighting, we both love the Tharks, but I think one of the reasons I enjoy it is Lynn Collins' Dejah Thoris.



And let's face it, why not? Dejah is a fanboy's wet dream. A nubile and gorgeous alien babe dressed in a couple of bits of jewelry and...well, a couple of bits of jewelry

(Here's how ERB describes her costume: "She was as destitute of clothes as the green Martians who accompanied her; indeed, save for her highly wrought ornaments she was entirely naked, nor could any apparel have enhanced the beauty of her perfect and symmetrical figure."

Here's cartoonist Frank Cho's version per the ERB description:

Good luck with your PG rating with THAT one, Disney. Sheesh.)

This is pure Slave-Leia-dom; the slavering fanboy inventing his perfect naked dreamgirl.

I'm shocked, shocked.



Getting away from Dejah for a moment her creator ERB was kind of a piece of work, a 20th Century writer with deep roots in the 19th Century, a wanna-be soldier and a vicarious adventurer. After I watched John Carter the first time through I went out and picked up Princess of Mars from our fine Multnomah County Library and tried to read the original story.

I gave up about halfway through.

A big part of the reason is ERB's prose style. It's hopelessly 19th Century, full of the sorts of romantic and heroic conventions that 20th Century wars knocked the stuffing out of. At the time it was written the notion of the hero wearing a "fighting smile" while dueling furiously probably seemed rakish and admirable; with a better understanding of how frightening and stressful fighting for your life really is it seems ludicrous, almost parodic. All the description is florid to a Baroque degree and the way the people interact just seems ridiculous; you can't imagine people, any people, even imaginary people in an invented world, acting like that.

The other is that ERB's values were straight out of his times, and those times are so gone that they might as well be the Paleolithic. His good men are all parfit gentile knights and his good women all chaste and gentile ladies - who are kidnapped again and again and threatened again and again with rape - including our gal Dejah. Not that anybody actually gets raped; it's all good fun and our hero always wins. So the whole notion of making the rape of your heroine a plot device kind of slides by, and that kind of squicks me out; I got the feeling that ERB kinda liked the idea of rape.



He also has a rock-solid certainty that Race is Destiny, and there's no confusing who the White Men are. Even the backstory of the protagonist as a Confederate veteran of the Lost Cause seems kind of skeevy in retrospect; ERB obviously intended it to help establish John Carter as a cavalier, a kind of American aristocrat but the effect is, instead, to loop back to the nasty racism that saturated his timeperiod. You can almost hear the happy darkies crooning spirituals down in the slave shacks in the background.

Gah.

So the original book is kind of a wash.

But Collin's movie Dejah isn't; she's fiery and smart and tough. And funny. And, of course, a total babe; this isn't real life, fergawrshsakes.

Her costume, while more voluminous than a Burroughs original, is skimpy enough that a genuine fighting princess of Helium would have spent most of her time worrying that one of her opponents was liable to snip off a dangly bit or two.



But, here's the thing I kept thinking about watching the film again.

The film stays fairly close to the ERB canon, from the radium pistols to the Thark jezails to the nefarious Therns and so on and so on. So the assumption is that the other aspects of the original story are in there. We see the Thark egg-incubator in the opening Barsoom sequence; the Tharks hatch from eggs, K? That's important.

Because on Burrough's Mars everyone and everything hatches from eggs.

Martian women, regardless of species, are oviparous.

So why the hell does Dejah have one of these;



Nothing that hatches from eggs has a navel.

(Update 5/15: In the comments section Jack Saint raises a good point; some of the non-mammals of Jasoom DO have navels, specifically, some birds have a sort of small scar from the chorio allantoic duct that connects the yolk sac to the embryo. This at least gives our gal Dejah a shot at having a navel, though (as I discuss in the comments as well) the chance of her sporting anything like Lynn Collins' cute little innie is fairly low. Still - at least the possibility's there. Proof, if we needed it, of the awesomesauce of Nature in all Its Works...)

But regardless of the biology of navels, there you have it; the fanboy in me comes out not drooling over naked space babes but niggling over ridiculous petty plot details like who has or hasn't got a bellybutton.

But, damn, Disney...how hard would it have been - how tiny an amount would it have cost amid the ginormous CGI budget - to spackle over Lynn's bellybutton? Nobody but us fanboys would have even noticed it but we'd have nodded knowingly and appreciated the gesture.

Silly? Sure, but then so's making a multimillion dollar picture of a sort of ragtime-era sci-fi version of the Prisoner of Zenda.

Call me nitpicky. But there you go; I can't be other than I am. I'm the sort of person who looks at a gorgeous woman playing an alien princess in a sci-fi action movie and notices Dejah Thoris' navel

Princess in Chains

Bear with me. This one is a little complicated, and self-indulgent. It's something that's been floating around in the back of my mind for a bit and will take a little exposition. Okay? Here goes.

It started with this post at Geek With Curves where Amy Ratcliffe talked about

"...the "fake geek girl" joke isn't funny anymore. This ad sends the message that girls aren't wanted. I feel it also perpetuates the belief that we must question geek girls. If you want to be really extreme, you could say this comic encourages people to stop girls who are wearing Star Wars shirts and quiz them about the movies to ensure they've earned the right to wear it.

This shouldn't be a thing. But it is. This very discussion comes up semi-regularly, and it's disheartening. It seems that there are still enough people whose knee jerk reaction to meeting a geek girl is to question her "cred."

And that actually took me back to a related post that John Scalzi (whose typeface I am unworthy to set) put up at his blog Whatever back in July:

"Because here’s a funny fact: Her geekdom is not about you. At all. It’s about her.

Geekdom is personal. Geekdom varies from person to person. There are as many ways to be a geek as there are people who love a thing and love sharing that thing with others. You don’t get to define their geekdom. They don’t get to define yours. What you can do is share your expression of geekdom with others. Maybe they will get you, and maybe they won’t. If they do, great. If they don’t, that’s their problem and not yours.

Be your own geek. Love what you love. Share it with anyone who will listen."

Why all this geek love?

Well, because at heart I'm still the same sci-fi and wargame nerd (or geek, call the thing what you want to) I was in high school. An older, more confident, fatter-and-slower geek, but I still get a kick out of building models, playing wargames, and reading and watching everything from fantasy to sci-fi and beyond.

And, being someone who loves women, I love that there are women who love those things, like Amy, and hope that they can get the same love back from them that I did and do.

And so it ticks me the hell off when I read about the sorts of people that Ratcliffe and Scalzi talked about - or run into them, which is worse and, fortunately, something that hasn't happened lately.

And this, in turn, got me thinking about my son's turn away from George Lucas' Star Wars universe and how its left me as the only geek in the family who actually cares that the new Clone Wars episode is coming along tomorrow.

And that, in turn - remember, I told you to bear with me - led me to thinking about how women are portrayed in science fiction/fantasy and, specifically, in Lucas' universe, and from there to one of what I consider the real problematic images in the canon:

Slave Leia.

Let me preface my next section with this; I'm a het guy. I like women, and as part of that I think women are lovely to look at and I enjoy looking at them. Pretty, shapely women are, well, pretty and shapely. And a pretty, shapely woman in a skimpy, form-fitting outfit tends to reveal more of that shapely prettiness. And I had when the first trilogy was filmed and still have a bit of a crush on Carrie Fischer, a strong, smart woman who has toughed her way through some tough days.

So on those criteria, Carrie Fischer...in a metal bikini?

Success. TOTAL success.

But.

If I stop being all testosterony and starting thinking with my large head it's not hard to recognize several problems with the entire idea of Slave Leia and especially the image of Leia/Carrie in her alloy undergarments.

First, in a created universe notable for its prudity, how come Carrie was the only one prancing around Tatooine in her beach wear? I mean; desert, sand, sun(s)...but no Luke in speedos? Leia is the only one who gets to show some skin?

WTF?

Well, you and I both know why TF; it's because the boy-geeks wanted to see Princess Leia in her undies and George was catering to them. Like a LOT of other tropes in fantasy and science fiction, this one is pitched directly at The Boys.

Which would be fine...except in doing so it tells the Girls that they are supposed to be eye-candy.

Sure, Leia is an action heroine; she shoots and swings from a rope and rescues her lover (okay, well, love, then, since we never get to see the couple exchange more than a chaste kiss or two). But so is Harrison Ford and he never strips down to his jockeys or whatever the hell the guys in the Star Wars universe wear for skivvies. He's supposed to be female eye-candy fully clothed.

Leia gets to strip.

It's not hard to see a message there.

But in context the message is even cruder.

That's the second point; in the context of the movie Leia's near-nudity makes no sense.

Let me run quickly through the two main reasons I think this.

2. The critter who is making all these wardrobe decisions is a ginormous space slug. Presumably Jabba's notions of sexual attractiveness do not encompass female primates, so the point of shoving the last Princess of Alderaan into a bronze Brazilian tanga probably isn't to inflame Hutty lust.

2. And nowhere in the story do we get any idea that the natives of Alderaan have a particular nudity taboo, so if the point is to humiliate the proud Princess we have no way to get that. In fact, if that WAS the idea - and the censor wasn't an issue - why not just chain Leia up in her skin? But since the censor clearly IS an issue, why not put her in ostentatiously Victorian rags? Or a clown suit? Or half a suit of stormtrooper armor?

My point is that given all the above Slave Leia isn't really sensible as a plot point in the context of that portion of the story of The Empire Strikes Back. There's no reason for her to be in the metal bikini as opposed to the bounty-hunter outfit she's captured in, or rags, or a chador.

She's in that bikini purely as eye candy for us boy-geeks and the lack of context makes that crystal clear.

So...

To get back to the original point of this post; the Slave Leias are troublesome, to me at least, just because they have the effect of dividing Star Wars/geek fandom into camps based on sexual display, and, in turn, devaluing one camp based on a sort of juvenile smuttiness about seeing their bodies.

They make a woman-fan's life more difficult because - all the way back to the original image - they are based on that fan-boy snigger at "that girl showing her titties!"

And that - to me - is a problem because, frankly, it makes it about the guys watching rather than what should be her choice whether to emphasize or downplay her sexuality.

Our job is to simply be smart and civil, and enjoy the fun with her, or not, and to STFU if not. Yes, her "titties" are pretty, but they're hers and not ours. We're grownups, guys, and we really need to get over our 8th-grade selves and start treating the gals with some respect.

I know that this seems like some trivial shit at a time when a real woman can be brutally raped, and what's worse raped in such a way that the rape tool tears out her guts and she dies.

This is just silly and trivial.

But it occurs to me that this woman-sneering, fanboy-leering shit is part of a spectrum, and the kind of guy who gets a dirty snigger out of a woman in a metal bikini - whose idea of his take on Star Wars is that woman should be in that metal bikini for his pleasure and not hers - is sharing a teensy bit of the sort of disrespect for her with the kind of guy that sees her as just a body to be used for his enjoyment.

For me it turns what should be an enjoyable bit of silly fandom into another damn part of the whole business of turning women into objects and meat for men's delectation.

That's a goddamn shame.

I don't think there's much I can do about Slave Leia, or should; it's really just ridiculous pop culture when you get down to it.

But here's what I can do; I can raise my own son so that when he sees the Slave Leia image he thinks not of women in chains, of himself, not of her body as a thing to leer at but as a person, as a woman, and as heroine in her own right who lives in that body. And to respect her AND that body.

For his own good as well as hers; because the other thing about Slave Leia is that if you fuck with her she will strangle you with her own chains and it'll serve you goddamn right.

And I can also raise my daughter to expect that men will treat her with respect, regardless of whether she's wearing a bathing suit or a spacesuit, and do the best I can to give her the means and methods to be the woman she can best be. If she still wants to be a princess, why not be a princess that can kick ass?

Are you getting all this, kids? Sorry it took so long to get here, but you both need to quit fooling around and brush your teeth. It's almost bedtime.

There and Back Again in One Night

Well, last night's The Hobbit was a success.

The Boy enjoyed the film overall and was very brave; it's hard not to be a little scared when you're not really sure that Baltimore Woods might not be full of vicious wargs, but he brought his stuffed friend Leo the Lion to hug and covered his ears during the loudest and scariest parts and so did quite well.

Although the film is long it doesn't drag once you've got past the opening scenes, and the story moves right along from one bit of action to another. The party of dwarves led by Thorin is sturdy, the goblins/orcs are reliably nasty sword-fodder, and the principals acquit themselves well, notably Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Martin Freeman as Bilbo, and Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenshield.

Going in I couldn't help by wonder how Peter Jackson was going to manage to get a three hour film out of nothing more than the first third of a 300-page "young adult" novel.

Well, you do it by dragging in bits and pieces from the author's other works, including the appendices of his magnum opus as well as posthumous publications such as the Silmarillion.

I was frankly baffled by the appearance of Azog the Defiler, having completely forgotten the "War of Dwarves and Orcs" from the appendix of Lord of the Rings. No matter - he was a good, frightening "bad guy".

I do want to stop and give a deep nod of respect to Cate Blanchett, who manages to continue to provide her character with true gravitas and magic.

I never "got" Galadriel from the Tolkien stories. She seemed to be a nice Elvish lady and not the wonderous creature that dazzled the other characters. Blanchett's Galadriel, though, convinces you that she really is the ancient and luminous being that Tolkien wanted to portray.

Bravo, Cate.

The one thing that did irk me a bit (as a writer, tho, rather than a parent) is that I don't think that Peter Jackson really has a handle on what "tone" he wants to set for this series.

Lord of the Rings is Middle Earth as drawn by Victor Hugo; stern, tragic, monumental - and Jackson got that perfectly; his flicks are ol' Prof. Tolkien's "yea, verily" language in film.

But The Hobbit is Middle Earth as drawn by A.A. Milne with a touch of Georges Feydeau; confiding, jolly, romping, and a trifle twee - a children's book written by an Oxford don in the arch style of the kid's books of his day.

They're very different.

And a good example of this are the differences in how each story draws its bad guys.

In LOTR the forces of Evil are genuinely Evil; they're dangerous and frightening and they'll kill you if they can. And they do - several of the important Good characters are killed or badly injured through the course of the story.

In fact, that's a huge theme of Tolkien's story; that sometimes in defeating Evil you suffer the loss of the very things you're fighting for. Frodo never recovers from the burden of the One Ring and his wounds at Weathertop. While he returns to the Shire he cannot remain. Through his suffering and pain he has lost the innocence and joy of the place he loves forever.

Pretty much all the goblins in the Hobbit are comedy bad guys, the the three trolls (Bert 'Uggins? Really?) are an outright joke. They don't really scare you. And while there are deaths - several of the dwarves including Thorin are killed in the Battle of Five Armies that ends the story - the overall tone is a jolly adventure. No deep sorrows are engrained, no hopeless losses endured.

This same pattern follows with all the other character types. Hobbit dwarves owe more to Snow White than to the Kalavala or the Norse sagas; they're a more than a bit roly-poly and cheerful compared to the grim axes of the LOTR dwarves. Hobbit elves are noble and graceful but can get drunk and foolish or cruel, a far reach from the austere, elegantly noble creatures of LOTR.

Jackson tried to reproduce the kid-lit tone of The Hobbit with stuff like the slapstick Radagast bits, the trolls, and the Goblin King's banter...but I think he had a hard time pulling his head out of the Grand Epic mode. It made the film uneven, veering from goofiness to gravity and back. Hopefully he finds a more steady approach to the next installment.

Mind you; he did do himself and everyone else a HUGE favor cutting the goblin's "Fourteen birds in five fir trees" song from the final fight at the end.

Now songs and poems are all through Tolkien's works, and The Hobbit is no exception. And generally the film did a fairly good job handling the singalongs as part of the story and not a sort of musical-comedy full stop. But had Azog and Company burst into song it'd have immediately turned the whole enterprise into Bored of the Rings and, while I'd have laughed my ass - getting slightly numb after 170 minutes of movie - off, I think that might not have been Jackson's intent at all.

So we emerged, satisfied and hungry for a late-night snack before bed. The Boy hugged his little stuffed friend, engulfed his french fries, brushed his teeth and tumbled into his bunk full to overflowing with even more stuffed buddies. I promised to "check on him" in a moment or three.

And when I returned to his darkened room he was unquietly asleep, his head moving and eyes darting under their closed lids, surely journeying with Bilbo and his party over the high peaks of the Misty Mountains.

I stroked his hair and spoke quiet nonsense until his movements stilled and his breathing steadied.

And kissed his head. And went to sleep.

Nu kyr'adyc, shi taab'echaaj'la

I'm beginning to understand my own parents' confusion a little.

I don't recall being a particularly mercurial child. But I know I went through...phases?...when I was in my grade school years of "liking" certain things and then abandoning them. So every year my folks had to use their parental intel skills to suss out whatever it was that I was liking and wanting as gifts for Christmas.And as a kid, that was critical. Without ready cash or access to a way of making cash - since I was too small to work and too cowardly to steal - anything I wanted to possess had to come from someone else.

And it's amazing, now that I think of it, how that made that "stuff" seem incredibly important.

Now that I do have the ability to work and steal (or both, my employer might opine) that notion of accumulating "stuff" seems kind of louche. There are physical objects that I enjoy holding for the pleasure or utility I derive from them. Books, particularly; my bride lacks the same greed for the printed page. Books to me are like friends; if I like them I enjoy returning to visit with them. A genuinely good work of fiction yields new pleasures to me when I re-read it; the work may have not changed but I have, and the words reach me in different ways as the person I am changes.

But the objects are valuable to me for the use of them.

My son, however, is still in the place I was when I was his age. Objects - toys, mostly, since childhood is still about play and play for most children in our material world means playthings - are of value to him for themselves, for the look or the size or shape; the "coolness" of them.

For example, for all that he enjoys playing certain electronic games he has never asked for any of them as gifts. I think this is because they are not tactile enough for him to picture them as desirable swag. He doesn't "see" them enough to desire them, they don't give him the rich feeling of possession that more gross toys seem to.

This year his lusts are all about LEGO kits.Now I will be forthright; I hate these damn LEGO toys.

They're expensive as sin, first of all. And they are wretched as "toys"; heavy, delicate, and breakable even with great care, and an eight-year-old is nothing if not careless. We have a massive plastic bin full of LEGO bits from various spendy LEGO contraptions that lasted less than a week or so from contruction to destruction. If the Romans had built with fucking LEGOs Rome might have been built in a day but would have lasted less than a month.

But this isn't about me, but my son, and what he wants and cannot get for himself.

Mind you, he is required to earn through household chores the money for most of the smaller LEGO kits he wants. I had hoped that would inspire him to treat the things with less brio, but no. The small LEGO sets he buys with his hard-earned (because the Boy is a huge martyr about working for his pleasures, and you'd think that raking leaves was invented for the torment of prisoner's on Devil's Island or the punishment for deadly Sin rather than a way to make a buck or three and keep the goddamn grass from dying) last no longer than the big ones he gets as presents.

Regardless of the particular kit, though, this year is all about the LEGOs and, to a lesser extent, military toys, because the Boy has moved on almost completely from his Star Wars Period.

I say almost because he still enjoys watching the Clone Wars series on television when he remembers to watch it - which is in itself an indication of how far the mighty franchise has fallen, since a year ago he knew to the minute when his beloved show would begin.

So we still have a tenuous connection to the world George Lucas created, although that connection is dwindling as I watch. I fear that my son will not be a lifelong sci-fi geek. Which is a little chastening because I am, a bit, and I see that I have not passed on this particular part of me.

And what's been fun is that his understanding of the stories we watch has grown noticibly deeper and more sophisticated over the short space of a year. When we last talked about this he was just beginning to appreciate that the "clone wars" stories weren't as simple as they were being told to him, and that there were deep difficulties with the simplistic "Jedi good/Sith evil/clones tools" way that Lucas has been telling his story.

The most interesting so far was the "Umbara" series of stories that aired in October.To cut to the nitty, the deal was that you're introduced to this fictional battlefield on this creepily-dim planet, "Umbara". The context is minimal other than that Lucas' "Republic" soldiers have to take this place and the locals (and the local wildlife) resist. The usual military hi-jinks ensue, delighting the Boy who is still all about things that shoot, go fast, and blow shit up.

For me it was another chance to watch the Lucas organization biff another one.

Because there was a potentially terrific story there.

The macguffin was that the clone soldiers you've been introduced to, Captain Rex, "Fives", the blue-and-white Boys of the 501st Legion - the future "Vader's Fist" - are placed under the command of a Jedi they don't know. And who seems to be either utterly whack or tactically insane, because he continually orders them into fatal attacks or pointless and dangerous movements and then threatens them with military justice when they protest. This mook, a four-armed gitch called "Pong Krell", is presented as a fiercely strict commander who gives orders and then refuses to hear any questions about them.The Peep was puzzled by this.

"Why is he doing this?" he kept asking, "Why is he so mean?"

I wondered that myself. Because Peep's question lies at the heart of a great, terrible story, a story as old as fighting men; which is the danger - obeying a commander who might be a fool, or a savage, or a madman...or disobeying a commander who may be seeing tactical or strategic levels not visible to the squad-level grunts? Where is the line that can't be crossed? Where does obedience to military order become suicide or, worse, homicide?

Great fiction has been made around this very question; films like "Paths of Glory", novels like "Catch-22", tales like the "Illiad", focus completely or in part on the complex relationship between fighters and commanders.

And in this case there's this huge rock in the story-stream up ahead; the moment that Lucas' just-self-elevated Emperor orders his army to kill all their Jedi officers; "Order 66".

You might think that this could have been a story fraught with brilliant opportunities to examine the relationship between these men - slave soldiers bred to die for a Republic that gave and owed them nothing - and the leaders placed over them. To look inside a man like "Captain Rex"; a veteran professional, a created-man bred and trained to obey, but already a survivor of dozens of Lucas-battles where he and his friends and fellow-troopers are taught to stand without cover and shoot or move until killed, and scores of them are, and get to understand how he thinks and feels about beings like his new general.And, in particular, you'd suspect that he'd have figured out by this time that his Jedi "officers" have none of the tactical training he's received. They have certain psychic skills but even those are not by nature useful in battle. So there's no real reason for a man like that to trust another being whose primary qualification for combat leadership is some sort of participation in a woo-woo Force religion and the ability to twirl a laser-sword.

You might also think that this would be a terrific opportunity to look at the relationship from the other side; from a member of a semimonastic Order instructed to avoid "relationships" suddenly placed in the most intimate of relationships - of deciding who lives and who dies. Of being a being gifted with mental powers who is thrust into war and told to command soldiers whose skills are merely physical to overcome physical fear and death in order to win sordid, gross political objectives.You'd be thinking that the story had a chance to examine the same things that Karen Traviss did such a hell of a good job developing in her "Republic Commando" books with special effects no more sophisticated than damn good writing and an adult sensibility; what is obedience, and what is responsibility? What is courage and what is cowardice, what is the way of a man with other man, and what are the ways of men and women?For if fiction, regardless of genre, has any value other than as brain-candy it gives us a chance to step out of ourselves into other people, other places, even other worlds and enjoy thinking about the galactic range of choices we all face, about the consequences of those choices that we make or those that are forced upon us. It can entertain while it makes us more thoughtful, more humane people.

But you'd be thinking without reckoning with Lucas & Co.

The man must be an eight-year-old in the body of a grown-up. I swear.

I'm not going to give you a review of the whole magilla; it's not really germane to my post and, besides, Peter over at "Lightsaber Rattling" does a better job than I ever could at discussing the whole story. But basically, after a ton of time spent on relatively aimless (but visually cool) thud and blunder, the clone soldiers in the television story finally turned on their Jedi master - the near-impossibility they found the task of subduing him made a subtle point about the mechanics of "Order 66", though I'm not sure that was Lucas' intent - but it turned out that he was neither a sadistic fool nor a misunderstood genius but that weakest of cinematic conventions, the Hidden Enemy. He was a "Sith", not a "Jedi" at all, not a bad officer, not a clueless but insecure fucktard, not an incompetent promoted above his abilities and furious at the innocent soldiers that forced him to demonstrate just how incapable he was...but a simple Black Hat, a cartoon baddie, a cardboard villain who has been murdering his troops because he can and because he likes it.

And the soldiers didn't have to confront the questions they raised about their commander, about what they would have done if he HAD been an incompetent commander, a brute, a fool, or a power-mad rogue. He was just Evil. So they killed him.The Boy was fine with that; they're surprisingly callous at eight. But I wasn't, and I found myself regretting again that the creator of this facile universe was not a better father to his creation that I was to my own. I just wish that ol' George had a little more Karen Traviss in him.

I'm still a retired clone trooper at heart, and I will always have a soft spot for the boys in the white armor. But my son, hard-hearted little realist that he is, knows that clone troopers are born to be used up and forgotten.

So while this Christmas there's still some lingering affection for the clones and their world I get the sense that soon we will not visit Rex and his comrades, still fighting their eternal war in the pages of books and on the screen, forever new to some boy somewhere else but soon to be lost to us, my big son and I; nu kyr'adyc, shi taab'echaaj'la.Not gone, just marching far away.