Fatherhood is deeper in the Star Wars DNA than Light Sabers, deeper than the Force and the Light and Dark Sides. It's the thematic backbone and nerve center of the whole mythology.
Starting from Obi Wan, and going outward in either direction, you can see how the Patriarch is implicated in every mythical moment. Obi Wan is the keystone of the first six Star Wars films.
We are introduced to Obi Wan as mentor to Luke, through whom Obi Wan hopes to redeem himself. Obi Wan's training (continued by Yoda) allows Luke to face his own father, eventually becoming Vader's mortal enemy, echoing the patricidal impulse that the Sith swear by (the Rule Of Two).
The original trilogy is resolved, in episode 6, when Luke refuses the patricidal role that seems to be his destiny: refusing to destroy his father, even at the most decisive moment, he effectively breaks the murderous chain that runs through every Star Wars.
If you trace the line of fatherhood from Obi Wan in the other direction, you find, in the prequels, Anakin the fatherless, rebelling against one father-figure (Obi-Wan) and ultimately destroying another (Emperor Palpatine).
Anakin, the fatherless, the betrayer... from his betrayal of Obi Wan, unto his redemption, the betrayal of Supreme Leader Darth Sidious. And of course, in Kylo Ren, Anakin finds an analogue.
And so, fifteen years go by, and then come Star Wars VII and VIII, proudly restating the themes of their predecessors. Kylo Ren is Vader with his mask off: the tortured product of a compromised ideology, following in Anakin's footsteps as the consummate patricide (first Solo, then Snoke). He is a creature of naive idealism, twisted into a reactionary when faced with the imperfections of his symbolic order.
Fatherhood is still a pivotal theme in episodes VII and VIII, but now, a new question emerges to complicate it:
What of motherhood? Of the masculine, we've seen much... but of femininity, all we've seen, in Episodes I-VI, is maidenhood. The only mother who has any role in character development is Shmi, and she is effectively a disposable device, part of a section of backstory clumsily soldered to the Clone Wars narrative arc.
At the very least, we saw that the death of his mother was the first trigger for Anakin to drift toward the dark side (though it may have always been within him). In a sense, Anakin was a failure of nurturing, an id conditioned entirely through the one-sided application of austerity, specialized training, and detached spirituality.
So we might take the license of really reading into that: the whole story, from episodes I through VI, is the story of a universe without motherhood.
It is only in Episode VII and VIII that motherhood stands up and makes its return. Leia Organa is the motherhood of strength and survival, Maz Kanata is the motherhood of the concerned bystander, and Amilyn Holdo is the motherhood of secondary relations, the aunts and godmothers and best friends of the world. This motherhood includes both survival and sacrifice, two dominant themes of Star Wars Episode VIII.
In Episode VIII, Luke returns, and through Luke and Kylo Ren, the fatherhood theme continues its critical role. However, Luke Skywalker, now a hermit sage, drives a massive shift in momentum: he hesitates to become the father figure, and when he finally does, he is the ghost of a dying ideal. His critical contribution is a duel with no intention of winning; his final gesture is to fade away and vanish altogether.
FIRST, that the fatherhood complex is toxic... it has always been about ideological purity and passivity (the Light), or about envy and murder (the Dark).
SECOND, that the new virtues must be wholly different: the virtues of survival and sacrifice and rebirth. These are the virtues championed by the maternal spirits, and they are the stamps of destiny upon Rey, the orphaned female successor to the Jedi philosophy.
And still carrying this thematic burden, despite her tragic loss: Carrie Fischer as Leia Organa, forever the survivor, sending severed tongues to abusers, always shattering her stereotypes: the princess, the sexual chattel, the hysteric. Carrie Fischer, who seemed so linked to her own mother that the latter followed Carrie into the dark.
And so, we can follow Star Wars, one of our greatest mythologies, into one of its greatest discoveries: that motherhood survives and blesses our successors with their survival, and fatherhood finally learns when to let go and overcome itself, dissolving back into history.
A topical update on my creative endeavors lately: I've placed poetry in a few beautiful and respectable literary magazines (all online so far, which is cool, because it's actually easier to provide access to them).
I'm still trying to decide where to keep a running bibliography of my published poetry. It might end up in a side-page on miksimum.com, or maybe I'll create a post on here and continually update it.
If anyone has a burning desire for rapport on this or related topics, please don't hesitate to contact me on Twitter or email me.
"Explanations place all apparent possibilities into the context of the necessary; stories set all necessities into the context of the possible." -James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games[1]
Today's date is September 11, 2017. Thursday. Twin Peaks: The Return ended exactly one week ago, on Sunday the 5th.
With luck, the end of Twin Peaks: The Return will also be the end of Twin Peaks as a whole phenomenon. It's been pushed to its reasonable limit, and at that limit, it's found a kind of wholeness.
Another reason the series should reach its end: the whole world of Twin Peaks was annihilated in the closing moments of episode 18. That final scene showed the collapse of that universe.
Not everybody who watched the finale saw this. Indeed, the general drift of public opinion seemed to be frustrated confusion (as though nobody had noticed Lynch's whole, relentlessly consistent directing career telegraphing this kind of ending). Most people didn't know what they saw in those final moments... it registered as an unsettling non-sequiter, a rebuff to the closure that Lynch teased them with in episode 17.
The end of the episode is about those fans, hoping for some kind of closure. It's also about the FBI (at least, the fantasy FBI that Lynch has constructed for the world of Twin Peaks). It's also about characters, and audiences, and creators, and all their relationships to the art that defines them.
And of course, like everything Lynch has created, it's about the strangeness and singularity of the art.
This is not a particularly profound conclusion, despite this broken, aphoristic formatting, which is saturated with pretense and self-consciousness. (I'm only using it because these thoughts needed to be broken up, or they would have come rushing out as an exhausting torrent of interpretation and explanation [2]).
If you want to "understand" Twin Peaks... if you were frustrated by the lack of closure, by the fact that the ending didn't add up to anything meaningful or resolute... I have a solution. It may work for you... it may not... but at least I can offer it. It's an interpretation that convinced me, even in my resistance to it. It's the one that risen above all the other speculation.
I kind of hate that I've discovered a privileged reading. I kind of liked it better when I was wandering between interpretations. But it's only natural that, as a Fan, I find a form of closure here, because that allows me to be more at home with the series.
Judy has been translated by some fans as "explanation." This has been hotly disputed, and I'm almost ashamed to be referencing it, but it leads smoothly into this reading of the series' conclusion: that Judy is an embodiment of transcendence, or gnosis, in a terrible, destructive form.
By "transcendence," I mean the understanding of Twin Peaks from outside the fictional world of the show. This is what Judy represents. This is the "extreme negative force" that these characters are all chasing, even as they should be running away from it.
A lot of these ideas are assembled from comments in this Reddit thread, by the way. Despite my desperate desire to explain every detail of this interpretation, I am going to restrain myself. To read more of the textual connections, glance through that thread a bit. Also, I think this blogger got about halfway to where I ended up, so read that post for some more connections within the text.
Also, this post on syncing up episodes 17 and 18: this theory is brilliant, and may ultimately overrule any alternative, but it also dovetails with my own interpretation: the connection between Judy and the Demiurge, and the pathway into the real world, are particularly relevant.
If this is what Judy is, and they finally find Judy in the semi-fictional Limbo ("pocket universe") of Richard and Linda and Carrie Page, then the final scene is the discovery of Judy herself, and Cooper and Laura/Carrie's realization that they are fictional characters.
In fact, the sound of Sarah Palmer's voice calling Laura's name... to me, it looked like that was coming from a room in the house. It looked like someone in that room was watching a TV, and maybe that was the dialog they were hearing.
The fire of narrative, fed by credulity and poetic faith [3], is embodied as electricity. In those final moments, the electricity flows out of this universe forever. This is the destruction of the show's secondary reality, the collapse that closes out the whole series. When the characters realize they are parts of a fiction, that fiction can no longer be maintained.
So many of us amateur critics are willing to hand-wave Cooper's disorienting final question: "What year is this?" That line actually has great significance for this finale. To Cooper, it's a confrontation with a reality outside his own timeline, which is running discontinuously through it, on a million televisions.
Suddenly Cooper, the character, understands that he simply vanished for 25 years, and now he exists again, with a different name. He is the accursed fancy of a higher consciousness: a Creator with the power to construct a universe out of nothing.
For the audience, this is connected to the question of why: why should this creation, left fallow for 25 years, suddenly be resurrected in our age of cell phones and Skype? And why, 25 years after the story closed itself off to us, are we still so desperate for closure and "explanation"?
David Lynch has been hounded by demands for explanation his entire life. He knows that everybody wants it. He also knows that in the end, we don't want it... it dispels the glamour of narrative, chops down that fertile tree that grows from our subconscious.
And the reason Twin Peaks: The Return spoke to me was that Lynch had something to tell me... a warning, a threat, and a little koan. Because I didn't want explanation, I thought. I've always reveled in the open signifiers of Weird Cinema, and I've always appreciated the fluid meanings of poetry and surrealism.
But I also search for meanings. I search desperately for them. Where I see order, I can't help but divine for purpose. Twin Peaks was no special case in that regard... I digested for a day, and then I fell into the major outlet thinkpieces (numbingly repetitive, frankly) and then I dove deeper, surfing Tweets and comment boards and the subreddit.
And now that I've found it, I'm lost outside the work. I'm the consummate chin-stroker, hovering above the abyss, who's lost the grand mystique of unspeakable ideas. I've stumbled from Fandom into Criticism.
But even from here, I can still see the whole series, laid out before me, and part of me knows I don't really understand it. Though my sight is dimmer, I can still see sparkles: unresolved events, unanswered questions, and broad themes that I've only glimpsed.
[1] Carse has some fascinating ideas about Explanation, Narrative, and the Unspeakable. His theory is beyond the reach of simple paraphrase, but I should note: he associates explanation with what he calls "finite games," which are time-bound, goal-oriented, and seek as few players as possible (ultimately leading to a single "winner"). Explanation closes off possibility, and it's relentlessly rearward-facing, always hung up on the past. To Carse, explanation is self-limitation, and as a world is explained, it is also restricted.
Judy is the Finite Game descending upon the open signification of Twin Peaks. She is the knowledge that undermines wonder, and the darkness of pure transparency. To Lynch, she is terrifying.
The question "What just happened?" was asked repeatedly in the last couple episodes, and the repetition was pretty conspicuous. These characters are itching for an explanation.
The refusal to speak, the allusion to Judy as the unspeakable: "We don't talk about that" is echoed by Agent Jeffries, and also in Hawk's explanation of the spiritual map.
There are several pretty strong implications that the final scenes of The Return, after Coop and Diane's night in the hotel, take place in the "real" world (or something close to it, at least)
Electricity is a crucial image through the whole season, the 2017 "mutation" of Fire from the original series. There are lots of metaphorical possibilities here (the Lynchian Open Signifier), but there's no denying that electricity is necessary for running a television -- the lifeblood of the fictional artifact, and the lubricant that allows it to escape its container and get released into the world.
By this reading, the end of Season 3 echoes the discovery of Laura's killer in Season 2. By some accounts, this is what killed the show's momentum and mystery. Another explanation, another death of the show... then forced, now intentional.
1989 comes to a small northwestern town, just as it comes to every other place. This town, sheltered by the rains and forests of Washington State, is called Twin Peaks.
And in 1989, Twin Peaks becomes a place so unlike every other place, it's almost insulting to describe it with the same language, channeled through the same air.
Something will find Twin Peaks and linger there: an entity from outside space and time, incorporated in a human body, but endless and depthless when you look into its eyes... a creature of the abyss, feeding on suffering, whose emptiness infects the weak and compromised. This thing is called BOB.
Fortunately, this universe has its defenses. A coalition of reason and resistance will emerge -- a wise and perceptive FBI agent named Dale Cooper, a stern and earnest local sheriff named Harry Truman, and a cast of supporting personnel who will make their jobs possible. This coalition will both win and lose... it will vanquish a tormentor, save a life, and face down the darkness... but Cooper will be drawn into an existential prison, locked away, while BOB is let loose upon the world.
In a hotel that appears mysteriously empty, except for the small lobby where we linger, there's a meager crowd huddled together and looking expectantly at an empty stage. Suddenly, a chorus of music blares, and a figure descends on a long escalator from nowhere. He stands in front of this audience, hand-picked to receive him, and he tells them something small and strange that will end up changing the lives of everybody in the world.
This creature is a funny little monster, a sort of orange wax figure, always scowling, with hair that looks like the chaff from a bad harvest. It's truly a Thing.
There's a lot of mockery of this spectacle... disembodied laughter, a slow-reacting universe that sees nothing but an empty absurdity... but when everything becomes clear, months and years later, we'll remember that laughter as a terrible portent.
In that small northwestern town, where those terrible things happened twenty-five years ago, a girl meets with her boyfriend outside the Double R Diner. He is afflicted... everyone is afflicted... and in his case, it shows as bad skin, a twitchy demeanor, and sunken eyes.
The girl ends a tense conversation by giving him a wad of money, and he promises her the world. He is moving in the right direction, he says. He will be everything he's been promising. In the meantime, do a line and lean back while I drive you into the wind.
It takes a certain kind of person to do this -- to convince themselves, and those who trust them, that they own the world. If they're really that kind of person, they can give you the glow of a good high, even as they grind your life into dust.
On November 8, 2016, the strange Thing from the top of the escalator becomes the Thing-in-Chief. Garmonbozia Futures shoot up on the commodities market.
Dale Cooper returns to the world, but he loses something in the process: his shoes, of course, but also his sovereignty, his gifts of wisdom and cunning and personality. He is essentially reduced to a toddler, well-meaning, but diminished, adrift in everyday life. Nobody really seems to care, because they have no sense of his real value... to them, he is just a placeholder, like every other secondary character in their lives.
Sheriff Harry Truman is suffering from an unnamed medical condition, and his loved ones can only hope he will recover. Twin Peaks, 25 years later, has to function without him. The silence of his absence is deafening.
Where are the heroes, the protectors, the avatars of hope and compassion? Where have they been, while Bob has been ranging across the American dreamscape?
The Thing-in-Chief is constantly photographed. This is a world where every reality is measured in photographs, after all, and this Thing has changed everything. History will always have his mark gouged across the second decade of the 21st century, and there will be plenty of visual records to prove it.
In this particular clip, he is on the tarmac, walking in close proximity to his wife, a loyal beauty who's been reduced to an ornament... whether this flatness is his work, or whether it's somehow self-imposed, is presently unanswerable.
The distinguishing thing, though... the little touch that sets this moment off... is that he reaches for her hand, looking for reassurance (a show for the cameras? Or an unexpected moment of insecurity?) and she bats him away. With gait unbroken and stone expression, she rejects him. How easily she makes such a large Thing look so small.
And the lens of the entire apparatus... every looping GIF, every gasp and joke and conspiracy theory, is turned toward that snub. Here, in a soup of irrationality, we catch a taste of meaning, and it turns out we're starving for it.
In 1941, "Trinity" -- predecessor of the nuclear bomb -- changes the geographic face of New Mexico, and the political landscape of the whole planet earth. This is the epicenter of the sins that will be visited upon these humans for the next century.
Within the blast radius, shadows flicker against gas station walls, and something parasitic is born.
Hands are an especially persistent motif in this visitor's mythology. The dissenting voices of the void call them "small," and this becomes a creeping trauma for the thing-in-chief. He sometimes uses them as weapons in social situations, yanking people toward himself and crowding them when he needs social leverage. His handshake is a landmine.
One of his strangest spectacles is a session in his office, sitting across from a fellow world leader while the buzzing eyes swarm around them. The expectation is simple -- a handshake, the oldest convention of courtesy in Western diplomacy -- and he refuses to carry it out, conspicuously ignoring the chancellor with whom he is supposed to be negotiating.
What is he afraid of, exactly? Her good will? Her leverage over him? Or his own hands, that suddenly seem so tiny?
And now we come to the primal scene, the moment where everything is distilled into its purest incomprehensibility.
At the Double-R Diner, there's tense conversation, followed by an unexpected burst of violence outside.
If you want the imaginary center of this sequence of events, pay attention to the conversation. Twin Peaks Deputy Bobby Briggs is talking to his daughter Becky and his former wife Shelly, and the family's tenderness is palpable. Even so, the strength of their connection can't efface the cruel undertone: Becky defending an abusive husband, continuing a pattern of abuse that her mother once propagated... and that her mother is making the same mistake again, even as she disapproves. The deep compassion of this family is barely enough to balance the cycle of violence that plagues her maternal line.
After the conversation is over, the violence comes, and here, you will find the emotional center, hand-in-hand with the imaginary center. Two gunshots break the windows of the Diner, and everyone ducks for cover. Deputy Briggs runs outside and finds a family stopped at an intersection, the mother screaming at her sulking husband for leaving a loaded gun in their car, and their child sulking in turn. So the father, so the son.
Behind the derailed minivan, there's a white sedan, and it can't stop honking, despite the obvious emergency that's holding up the line of traffic. Like a good town cop, Deputy Briggs goes to the window of the sedan to convince the driver to stop honking.
There, Briggs finds something harrowing, in its inexplicable way: a woman screaming about the delay, enraged that she won't make it home for dinner, while a young girl writhes in throes of agony beside her... apparently having a seizure and coughing up black bile.
There is something absolutely alien and poisonous about this narrative moment. What impulses the driver is acting out... why she's so hysterical over banalities, even as she accompanies a suffering family member with a horrific illness... the malevolence is thick and oily and palpable. There is a sense, here, that Deputy Briggs has stumbled into a nightmare. Luckily, a scene change arrives to wake us up, so we don't have to remain there with him.
On July 25, the Republicans in Congress (the Thing-in-Chief's sycophants) held a vote on to bring a bill to the Senate floor. This bill would dismantle the ACA, and radically reshape the US healthcare system. It would rip health insurance away from something like 15 million people, and it would increase premiums by something like 20% (contrary to its stated aim of making healthcare affordable for all) [CBO via Business Insider]. Their "Yes" votes were audible over the national public outcry against the bill, and over the advice of medical associations, state governors, and their own constituents.
If you glance at this bill for more than a second, you see that it's actually illusory: no concrete policy is entailed, no strategy for solving the lingering problems with the healthcare system is implied. It's essentially a blank page, and the Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell and goaded by the Thing itself, are insisting on having a "constructive debate" on it.
At the heart of the process was a veteran soldier, famous for standing up against his party's worst impulses. braving the aftermath of major brain surgery... a mythical figure of politics, walking dramatically into the Senate chamber, and casting his vote: to conform without question to his party's nihilism, denying millions their health insurance when he himself had just undergone the trauma of a devastating medical condition.
He was applauded for his bravery, not just by his own party, but by the entire floor. And then the vote went through, and this bill -- a throbbing nuclear bomb for anyone with unstable employment and medical needs -- became an imminent possibility.
These are the children of reason's sleep. These are the scions of a chaotic, narcissistic, demented modern age.
It's 3 AM, and my town is very Lynchian tonight. The suburbs are deserted, with a hum in the background (a neighborhood of window air conditioners). Whenever I hear a car coming in the distance, it's always isolated, and I'm fully alone, and so I keep feeling a moment of panic. This is the dark road of the margins, and I am the bystander getting caught in the headlights.
Where are my protectors? Where are the people who have some grip on the world, who can still resist its tantrums and confusions and cruelties?
In honor of the Summer Solstice, I'll go ahead and compile all my Twitter reviews for this year. These were all written within a couple weeks of seeing the film, and they all take up exactly 144 characters, including the film title and date. As you can see, I gave myself some flexibility on the matter of punctuation and abbreviation.
If you follow me on Twitter, these will occasionally show up on my timeline. As you can see, I like movies. I am very forgiving. If you're looking for something more acerbic, maybe Armond White or the Angry Nerd has a Twitter account.
Spring (2014) - A wide-ranging young romance, with flashes of horror that are discordant, but don't do much to curb the warmth of the story.
Kagemusha (1980) - Grand & lush, all the elements of vintage Kurosawa, but didn't have the shapely arc and development of his better movies.
Anguish (2015) - A brooding, earnest "tormented ghost" tale with exceptionally endearing characters. In the end, it rather undersells itself
Tangled (2010) - Sort of a throwback Disney Romance/comedy, whose brilliant physical humor more than redeems some clumsy writing and pacing.
Enemy (2013) - A brilliant, chilling cyclical enigma that opens its own little self-contained universe, and ends by closing itself up again.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) - Not too scary, but stylish &; austere, with the feel of a dream on the edge of becoming a nightmare
La La Land (2016) - Sometimes too pat, but always earnest... you could tell the filmmaker wanted a happy ending as badly as his audience did
Dope (2015) - Malcolm and his crew are brilliant protagonists in a striking and spontaneous adventure, tonally cacophanous, but never boring
Happy People (2010) - Herzog weaves a spell of fascination and intimacy with the Taiga: its stern voices, its landscapes, & its bitter cold.
Quest for Fire (1981) - A muddy slog, bludgeoning narrative conventions with brute frankness, but limited in its capacity to create tension.
The Last Unicorn (1982) - A wise and bittersweet animated romance, crafted with gentle strangeness that makes it feel timeless and mythical.
The Lobster (2015) - A dry and twisted movie - sadistic in a lonely, alienating way, with traces of hope and romance. A singular experience.
I'm going to go ahead and post some more abstract notes, developing some ideas I've had floating around for a while. This is related to this post and this post, where you'll find what I was then calling the Aspect Aesthetic (I think I need a better name).
Still, the big idea is the same: that these three roles are fundamental, especially when talking about aesthetics... and they can be applied to many areas of life where investment and appreciation meet reason, loyalty, identity, and faith.
This depends on a lot of premises that haven't been proven, obviously... like, the idea that culture can be used as a guiding frame of reference for understanding humans and their relationship to the world, and that the more broadly you apply this frame, the more it seems to cover. You've started with culture and art and the creative instinct, and eventually, by talking about subjectivity and human nature and idealism, and the universe as a sensory phenomenon, you find yourself stomping clumsily through ethics and politics, and encroaching even upon history and physics and metaphysics.
Not that I necessarily mind that... I'm no analytic academic... but for now, we just have to start with the seed of the idea: the Consumer and the Critic. The Creator is a bigger construct, I think, and that will have to wait for a different day.
All works create an interior world, guided by certain patterns and assumptions, operating by certain rules, constrained in particular ways.
The world of the work is built according to the blueprints of its Creator, but it's not limited thereby. There's just as much input from history, context, collective memory, the subconscious, and the cultural preoccupations, as there is from the Creator herself, a small person with a limited purview and access to an disinterested creative force (the muse, the reservoir, etc... wait for the Creator entry for more on that).
The Consumer inhabits this world. They invest in it, accept its specifications, and make it real by acting as its observer.
The quintessential consumer is the Fan. If you're not a Fan, your status as Consumer is precarious. The Fan is the person who not only chooses the work, but who also chooses to advocate for it... a form of Patriotism for the work's conceptual territory.
The Fan has a shadow (the Jungian, or an archetypal video game Doppelganger boss, depending on your frame of reference). This shadow is the Anti-Fan, a genuinely weird creature -- a Consumer who rejects the work outright -- whose engagement takes the form of kneejerk denial. Anti-fans are the people who say, without any explicit reason, "This just isn't my thing" or "I don't really think I get it."
The true Fan defines the work from the inside. They are a necessary part of the work coming into fulfillment. Lots of works have no Fans, which leaves them stuck in a sort of limbo, having no relationship to the world except through the anemic will and intention of their Creator.
Fandom is a sort of religious experience, and all religions are Fandoms. Christians are the most obvious example of this, being Fans of God’s word, His creations, and Jesus, His central character/principle/motif.
The Critic may be free to focus on certain works and ignore others, but they're always bound by the obligations of rationality. They make claims about works, and these claims are supported or unsupported. Criticism is a parasite that feeds on justification. Consumers are immune to this infection.
The freedom of the Consumer is not merely the negative freedom of not-being-forced... it's the positive freedom of browsing and investing, the radical self-actualization of choosing something that defines you. Being a Consumer means you have this capacity… being a Fan means actually using it.
It's hard to imagine why anyone would choose to be a Critic, when there's so much content around to get swept up in. Because Criticism is, by nature, a self-exile from the subject (i.e. putting your beloved pet, the dog named Culture, on the dissection table of discourse).
It may be the access. The Critic DOES have access to certain dimensions that the Consumer can't get to.
For instance, being a Consumer means the loss of the economic dimension... and for the Fan, there is no economic dimension at all. In a way that's denied to the Fan, the Critic can step outside the work and understand it in terms of precedent, context, relative quality, the field. "The Market," as it were.
But the Fan could certainly argue that the Critic is denied a certain dimension, as well, and it may be the most important dimension of the work: the heart, the interior, the absolute investment that makes the work come alive.
The Critic has to acknowledge the possibility of the Consumer, but they can't fully Consume. They have to appreciate the Fan, but they are not Fans. Anyone who claims to be a Fan and a Critic at the same time is misunderstanding one of those two roles.
If they're truly a Fan, their criticism isn't true criticism -- it's merely an intellectual engagement, broadening the scope of the work by doing internal labor. If they're doing the difficult work of criticism -- sorting out the pros from the cons, observing technical weaknesses, categorizing the work, questioning its motives and its internal coherence -- they're not really being a Fan. They're being a Critic.
Perhaps they're being a Critic who has eaten a Fan. This is relatively common, and frankly, Fans make the best food (other Critics are bitter and chafe the palate). So Fans make the best food, and eating Fans makes the best Critics.
The Critic eats Fans like Kirby eats his enemies. By eating the Fan, the Critic gains the short-term, provisional ability to ignore the work's weaknesses and assimilate with it. Employed correctly, this can make the Critic's criticism far more robust, and thus more persuasive. Criticism written from this perspective -- from the post-prandial daze of simulated fandom -- I would call "Criticism in the sympathetic mode."
Still, this is an asymmetrical relationship. The Critic can temporarily effect Fandom because the Critic is outside the work, and has more freedom to operate in various modes in relation to it. The Fan can't become a Critic in the same way, because the Fan is a creature of the interior. The Fan can't survive outside the work, and they can't see the work as a whole, which is required for any meaningful criticism.
One of the key postures that challenges the Critic-Consumer dichotomy is Ironic Fandom. This is a popular mode in postmodern discourse, and a key part of the Hipster project of illegibility.
The Ironic Fan seems to blur the line between Fan and Critic, but inevitably, the rule still holds: a Critic can act as a Fan, and not vice versa. The Ironic Fan is actually a Critic simulating a Fan, but leaving the signposts of simulation out to see. They are highly conscious of context: history, genre, and conventions. Their temporary Fandom consists in recognizing all the conventions and tropes and standard templates, and willingly inflating the value of these conventions in order to distort the appraisal of the work. Their Fandom is not sincere... it's a game of superiority and obfuscation.
The Critic has other crucial roles in cultural production. These are related to those functions and dimensions that are the unique purview of the critical perspective: context, history, technical authority, status, independence, objectivity. These may be true characteristics, or they may be pretensions... in any case, they are crucial for the work of the Critic.
I'm feeling nostalgic for a time long before I existed... before most of Western civilization existed, really. It's a side-effect of listening to The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps (I'm up through the Middle Platonists) and reflecting on the potency and simplicity of those early philosophical doctrines, from Heraclitis and into Aristotle and Socrates and the Hellenistic schools.
I'm not nostalgic for the inevitable disease, scarcity, and slavery that made up everyday life in those classical empires... indeed, my nostalgia requires a certain denial about the real historical conditions. What I'm nostalgic about, obviously, is the freshness of thought... the way these philosophers could try to get a handle on the whole universe, the nature of reality and virtue and everything, in a way that's simple, that just requires a couple principles, one or two guiding concepts, and a faith in reason to reduce everything else.
It's been a long time since somebody could honestly say, "The virtuous life is the good life, and virtue is just the pursuit of wisdom and self-mastery." It's also been a long time since somebody could say, "Everything is made of air." How different history would have been, if one of those metaphysical statements had proven true! That behind the great multiplicity of reality, we'd found a simple unity! A history of childlike simplicity, of getting everything in order according to one principle... the whole mess of human conflict, just washed away, all at once.
I know philosophy can't really operate like that these days. That kind of innocence is long gone, diluted by cultural exchange and obliterated by the fires of war. No intellectualism can be honest without acknowledging the specific, the irreducible, the multiplicity of objects and subjects and vantage points.
So if you have a yearning for something that captures the world, or at least tries to grapple with everything at once, rather than with some small, isolated part of it, you have to go to those places that lean into ambiguity, that celebrate the strangeness and the mystery of it all... things that make space for meaninglessness, and accept infinite contingency.
Luckily, I've been watching the new season of Twin Peaks, and Lynch's sensibility scratches this itch pretty well.
It's not perfect... or if it is, I'm not far enough through the whole thing to see it... but Lynch does not shy away from the grand fog. He may find some monsters in the mist, but more importantly, it brings out the obscure discord of everything... the way all reality is sort of floating, removed from the simple constraints of logic and justice and cause and effect and archetype. Sometimes it's almost nihilistic, and sometimes it's merciful and melancholy.
There is something sad, to me, about watching Dale Cooper wander the city, helpless, only comprehending the most proximal connections and sensations. Because I am the proud parent of a toddler, and Dale Cooper is acting very much like her. And what it conveys, to me, is a particular point about how confused and venal and unnecessary the world is, with all its complications.
I'm uniquely sensitive to this kind of ambiguity at the moment. I think this is what I responded to in "It's Not Like I Tried to Hurt Anyone," a very compelling story I stumbled across in one of those Medium "recommended" sidebars... there is a sense in which the main character's refusal, her withdrawal from history, makes her feel vast and divine in a way that's not shared by all the rest of us, caught up and diminished in the flow of the everyday.
I'd like to do some more focused writing soon. I'd do a philosophical essay, if I could manage it, and I've got a starting point -- the Skeptics' investment in their own ignorance, which I strongly identify with -- but I need more content, something more compelling to structure it. We'll see what comes of the urge. I feel a terrible shortness in myself, an inadequacy, that I need to power through, even if I can never vanquish it.
As a final note -- I also ran across an excerpt from a book called Essayism, and it's made me want to buy the whole thing, when I have a moment to read it.
Yes, that's right -- armchair media critic raising a little girl has been watching a lot of Disney movies, and in the spirit of this blog, I can't help but appreciatively thumb through their themes and messages and motifs. Here, as anywhere, there are many beautiful things to discover.
Despite having great friends and family who are intense Disney fans, I remain a bit of a skeptic. I have to take the position of the Critic on this topic -- I can't shake the suspicion that "Princess" culture might feed into crass, commercialized, rigid femininity.
On the other hand, I can't deny the company's love for cultural myth, and their commitment to storytelling. Rewatching their various canonical films, both Classic and Contemporary, I'm struck by the complexity of their aesthetic. They run the wide gamut of Romantic sensibilities, from the folksiness of Snow White to the Gothic sprawl of Sleeping Beauty, up through Princess Tiana's Creole Southern Gothic Americana.
I've been struck by some of the emotional moments in these movies... as, for instance, the crushing moment in Tangled when Rapunzel says "Yes, mommy" to her jealous kidnapper.
And I've been impressed with how Disney has changed: before what Wikipedia calls the Modern Era, the Princesses were generally pitted against standard monstrous adversaries. Since the 2000's, however -- with the adjective-titled Disney films, Frozen and Brave -- you'll find that a focus on internal turmoil, rather than external conflict... the estrangement between two sisters, a girl who resents her mother and the traditions she represents. These are the battles all the young people of the world will have to fight.
I did love Tangled... despite being a crusty 35-year old man, I was genuinely delighted by its earnestness and its slap-stick humor.
These goofy men remind me more of myself than I'd ever be willing to admit to anyone, save the whole anonymous Internet. I imagine they're all living their Plan B -- they rehearse their piano lessons, reminisce about their first crush, and occasionally visit the storefront that was supposed to be their bakery. Pillaging was always supposed to be a side-job, they tell themselves... how did I end up here at the Duckling, just like my dad did, and just like his dad before him?
But they know. These bandits, they know -- it's not about who recognizes your hard work, or how much you get paid for it. They know that the free market economy chooses winners and losers based on inscrutable patterns, cynicism, charisma, and the flapping of a single butterfly's wings. For these ruffians, it's about flourishing, and they have faith that they CAN flourish, even as plunderers and highwaymen, as long as they set aside time for their true aspirations.
Eudaimonia -- a life of flourishing -- is all about having a space of your own to cultivate, even if it's deep under the radar of the prevailing social structures. It's all about having hopes, and passions, and a community of support.
That, of course, is the other beautiful function of the Snuggly Duckling... it's a community of enlightened, supportive masculinity, disguised as a rotten rat's nest of thieves. Who wouldn't want to be adopted by this circle of friends, who will listen to your concerts, taste your cupcakes, and watch your little puppet shows?
Of course, they have to keep up a front. Their furry capes and winged helmets are their Gucci business suits, and their battleaxes are their business cards. They have to talk in gruff obscenities, just like other male-gendered people have to make eye contact and shake hands. You never know when a potential client is going to come through that door and potentially catch you, looking like some kind of Unicorn Collector.
But for an earnest young lady who asks them the question -- what are your dreams? -- they will open up, just as they've opened up to one another. Breakin' femurs may provide a show of confidence, but it doesn't really indicate true security, genuine self-acceptance... only the recognition of your brothers-in-arms can do that. This is a truly magical little tavern, a temporary autonomous zone, where pretense is shed and aspiration takes all forms.
In fact, honesty and openness is so important to the denizens of the Snuggly Duckling that they will enforce it by violence, if necessary (truly an intersectional community). This is what Flynn Rider discovers when he refuses to sing.
Those swords have a clear message: In this community, a show of vulnerability and authenticity is the hazing, the expected trial by fire. If you don't open up and show your true self, they're saying, then you're not privy to the nurturing fraternity that's hiding here in the Duckling... nay, you get the malicious, mean, and scary outlaw pirates. And I don't think you want that, Mr. Slick-haired Pseudonymous Flynn "dying of insecurity" Rider. No, you definitely want to be on our Snuggly side.
My brothers, lost in this postmodern era, I promise you: we will eventually find our Snuggly Duckling. We will dream again!