Strangest

[ateolf]

In the evening after work, Mary Beth and I did a quick run to CVS. Then at night we finished up Stranger Things. The final season kept up its momentum of each season being a little less good than the previous one. I'll try to sum up some things without getting into spoilers. The only real "spoiler" I had going in (and it's not a real spoiler) was that Linda Hamilton's character was completely wasted and pretty pointless...this was accurate! I'd say it was like the most stretched-out cameo in the history of moving pictures. I felt all the characters had really lost much of their character, especially in the first half, I thought it got better in the second half (with some unevenness, pasting in speeches instead of real character development/delivery). And it's always less good the bigger and more epic and bombastic it gets. The big and ridiculous gun battles and the giant epic cgi monster battles lose me (big reason each season decreased in value as more of that was added each time). The Henry/Vecna thing was a big reason season four lost something for me, one of my least favorite plot points. I thought maybe the way that played out in this season was better than I thought it'd be. Anyway, there was some good in the season, overall it was a bit messy. While the Coming Up With A Plan sequences could be fun in the earlier seasons, it was a little ridiculous during the first half of this season when they had one like every five minutes. Okay, and this one is hard to talk about without spoilers but I'll try: Eleven. Another reason I felt that each season got a little less good was diminished focus on her character. Maybe that's because of where it was all heading? So where her story goes, I think overall I disliked it. At first though, I was appreciating the ambiguity around it. But the more I thought about it, the more it really feels not really ambiguous but a having-cake-and-eating-it-too thing, where they can have the definite ending they want but also an out for fans who want this different definite ending. And a big thing about it is that it's not a case of there being two plausible possibilities, but two options that are both available because both are implausible (though one is much less plausible than the other). Anyway, the season was okay. Mixed bag but happy it's over. Now I'm off to work which is sure to be frustrating. We got stuck with this project where we have to recreate this integration for this sub-company we've never heard of before because the thing currently being used is going away and we have the insanely ridiculous need to do it in like two weeks. Just started working on it recently and I'm very likely going to be working over this weekend (to be comped later, but still not looking forward to it).

Comments

[ifjuly]

in the words of the one character, this show (and yeah its blenderized try to nod to every audience member's possible inclinations but in a nonsensical way approach) can suck a fat one, for many many reasons but floating right up at the top for me immediately is the whole thing with Kali. and yes, all the super predictable and tiresome backtracking weasel-y square-as-shit-while-pretending-not-to-be stuff, and the dude-blinders that never come off really just lazy paint by numbers half-assed demonstrative bs ("if we meet this cast quota...but don't write jackshit that's real about anyone but the usual kinds of folks...or notice we'll let someone maybe be a tad "weird" but it's always in the single prescribed ok ineffective unchallenging (in fact affirming of our squareness actually...oh and like relatively "safely" (though, the backtrack/backlash goes further so that's not even true now either ugh, though one might argue this sort of cushy assimilationist thing is partly to blame for that sooo) 25 years late, too, this liberation scene has moved on and has wayyy different stuff to discuss now!...) way...whee that's a wrap, good job Being Good(TM) everybody!"). goddang people are just not going to freaking learn anything really from the explosion of much-needed expression circa '15 are they?? i don't miss mainstream culture at all. and kind of want to revisit my memories of what i got out of paper girls and saga relative to this. and it makes me appreciate all the encounters with women and queer people and people of color (and all overlaps of course) in the arts and in basic life-sharing memoir accounts over the last decade, how much straight up wiser and better and way past due but apparently will never be allowed to come all of that is. it's almost like the inverse/photonegative of the power pyramid scheme going on, but with actual knowledge/wisdom: the privileged are gonna be the last to know any of it, what's needed, if ever.

the flows and concentrations of power that are now constraining just about anything going on collectively visibily are, well. watching the results of such organizing principles is both depressing and affirming, proves the point once again.

[ateolf]

Yeah, the Kali was the worst example of a cardboard-cutout plot-prop of a character and she was really mistreated, not just as in what happens to her, but also just in passing up every opportunity to actually make her a real character (that was from the beginning too).

And the whole "you messed with the wrong family" thing was there from the beginning (it feels like it was probably an exact quote in multiple seasons...other examples of that too, but that one jumps out) and always pretty cringey.

[ifjuly]

also! i don't remember if we talked about last season at the time and i just forgot we had, so forgive me if we did and i'm repeating myself here without realizing: i didn't know you felt that way about the henry arc, and i am grateful you do! because yeah, i cringed a hell of a lot last season, i'd forgotten, how much i thought the henry stuff was proof of a kind of turn, or if not turn, i was finally getting sharper at recognizing certain prejudices and oblivious, uninformed and common limiting biases from whoever makes this thing. and actually, because for some weird reason it's often like this now for me, a moment in some popular/mainstream/supported art i'm not digging flashes me back to something for me earlier i did, thought was better and deeper on some similar themes, the whole stuff in the not-a-well-what-do-you-call-it, with his first trauma memory thing reminded me of some of the pivotal and near the end Deep Shit moments from tuca and bertie.

[ifjuly]

i wanted to laugh out loud when they're like, repeatedly, "no! no more violence! there's been too much violence already!!" and then within 10 minutes it's all, lots and lots of glorifying and satisfying violence that solves everything.

and connected to that, Joyce's "you fucked with the wrong family" reminded me, and i'd thought it repeatedly watching this season anyway, some of the unexamined universals in the show, one of them is about the particularization of, when it's MY friend or MY family it matters now and i can and should be expected to do anything to protect them. that kept happening over and over, and each time i realized, one of the things that sets me apart and makes me a freak people are uncomfortable with on some level is, i don't have that, i could never have that given how things went for me early on repeatedly. you don't have to have me get to know you or like you for me to assume it's in everyone's best interest everyone's doing ok. it's not personal to me compared to most folks i think, there's a near universal assuming it is more so than it is for me; i operate from, it should be universal and knowing you doesn't matter, there. which i think is why people think i'm cold maybe, or i'm not good at signaling "let's be friends" because sometimes things you do for people are to indicate some level of that show-me-our-mutual-and-sometimes-exclusionary-allegiance stuff...and what people don't understand is, it's not necessarily a bad thing in all ways, being this way instead. there are moments, like watching that stuff, where i'm reminded i actually think it can be a good thing, a better for the future even, thing. not ashamed, beginning to sense a bit of pride perhaps actually. because as others have begun to notice and talk about, this whole "as long as my household's ok", "fuck you got mine" super duper Is Not Working. for anyone, included people who say and do that. (nancy kress, among others, all over again...)

(i think this is important because there's a lot of inversions going on this season i was grossed out by, and one of them's about that. you get the feeling what makes henry creepy and unnatural in the logics and aesthetic-expressions of the show is not so much that he has anger and a desire for power from trauma but that he's A Single Solitary Guy of means, independent from the prescribed communal order (got some vibes of that specter-for-squares for sure--it's the weird well dressed timid looking pansyish guy (with his pansyish house!) skulking around the schoolyard, not laura palmer's stoic macho dominant star businessman dad pillar of the community or the general vise grip of conformity, and also the whole tired cloaked queerphobic, if a guy seems sensitive/therapeutic it can't possibly be so, the whole, "guys shouldn't REALLY be allowed to be kidnergarten teachers, c'mon!" thing--and all that, the whole bundle of weasely unsaid but pretty clear baggage of all that actually had me thinking a little bit of queerer takes like keepers of the flame, the "not much of a joiner" driver etc.) as opposed to this facebook-ified wonderful round table community. it's like, it's more about him visually and whatnot being that, not a proper suburbanite, weird alone guy and not minding (you can be a loner on the show so long as you Repent and come to the side of Community and whatnot--maybe getting rather handwavily killed/besmirched in the process btw--including literally one that kills together which somehow makes it alright and noble). and one gets the feeling it's more about the unease of, he's not plugged in with us (speaking of inversions), his early life wasn't textbook normal like us, so what could he be thinking?? we're not sure, and that's terrifying, unacceptable, and needs to be destroyed. time to project every terrible thing lurking in us onto that, yes, so we can feel ok destroying it. which does happen in real life to harmful effect...Will's gayness doesn't upset any of this conformist order of things, and honestly, Henry is coded waaaaaaayyyy more old school phobia-ed queer because some of these seeming universals of good the show never shuts up about, being one in a group and not having any secrets or independent free parts from it, the bundle of things that make up what makes Henry creepy visually and affect-wise and whatever else, are affronts/challenges to, potential free-spaces-from that, and that's the real offense/presented grotesquerie (on the show and irl these days), not actually Henry's violence or horrors because going by that the group (and the show)'s not different from that.

and in an also-margins way, similarly Kali's (earned! absolutely valid and not hard to understand at all if you don't get to live with kid gloves on) perspective, pain, and straight up death!, and her (chosen!) family/friend's deaths!, aren't important or as valid (only/except in service to mainstream others) because, what? because her sphere lacks a hopper type, or d and d playing nerd dudes, mainstream relatable something or other...and they mistrust and are uneasy thinking about her too, because she's shadow, edged on a periphery they won't admit is shadow in the first place because that subsidizes that gia's-mom-thing of denial of full reality include others unlike yourself.)

...

i was just reading earlier this week the part in Joycelyn Elders' memoir about her brother being murdered, and she talked about the family never wanting to have to see or think about unprompted the guy who did it again, right, but they also didn't want him to receive the death penalty (which he might've). and she talks about why. and something Maya Angelou said in the documentary from yeah, circa 2016 or whenver it was imff, how she'd had enough violence. the way she said it, all the sediment of what had happened underneath. what we talked about a few nights ago looking at the stars, the oracle in her kitchen and the turtle they eyeroll at in movies, that figure being Bored Of The Patriarchy because she knows how it ends (or rather never does). yes.

...a night before, and then it comes back to me watching all this mess that never changes or learns: "thought i was over the bridge now/circles and circles and circles again, got to stop spinning..." (which, you heard that live version with me come to think of it!) and, always, "and the man with the golden gun thinks he knows so much, thinks he knows so much". watching the tiers of it, the nesting, how one version of that looks on another and says it's the wrong one but this time he is the right one (gah that whole, but it's okay when hopper's doing it thing--"no really, i'm the 'Right' kind of Papa!"--or yeah what you smartly saw through all along, the but it's ok to do it this way because OUR tech and weapons and fighting skills will be the best ones!). no.

...still looking for some raisin girls to hang out with though.

...did happen to read more eve babitz essays this week that so happened to be good timing for me too, where she's still raving to all who'll listen about dancing, men with dancing skills and making that something that matters (instead), and swayze and dirty dancing (his break she was sort of on the edges of with the skate punk movie was it? ha!)

[ifjuly]

and the stuff about the hollow and tedious speeches that are supposed to have emotional weight but don't anymore: yeah, that follows what i've tried to fumble around saying in the past, it reminds me of how that always goes hand in hand with prioritizing what the show's really prioritizing, and the churches i grew up in, and the country now, and and and. cart before the horse constraint and front-loaded "shoulds" that make it impossible for the real, the horse to move at all. then when you cue the horse there isn't one 'cause you've obstructed/blocked it so completely, just the cart you built and it's empty and unmoving. you wouldn't let bell hooks and marion woodman and rachel pollack and george cukor w that "in a garden"/holiday playwright and others Who Know What She Knows affect anything else in this world you're building, why do you think without what she knows affecting this world the parts that are most directly about it in lower stakes ways she'll show up for, or could? chained mother at the bottom of the ocean, where could she be when you decide you do need her? those parts will always ring hollow, because you wouldn't let her do her thing in a real living alongside-way, everyone knows her thing's not allowed anywhere in this place so you can't just airdrop it when you feel like it and have that mean shit. "you can't just sweep in for dessert, dearie"--burroughs' thing about, the only way to be there is to be there, and if you decide what being there is is relatively unimportant (compared to your creed or your weapons tech or performance metrics or whatever else) or challenging to the status quo, real living is "threatening" to planning and conformity (and fascism), then yes, you get this kind of emptied result. the real ("language!" -all those folks on the show) flees (because it's been shut out), and you can tell a lot about things from that, where the real has left. my whole "that kind of christian artwork that's so empty" thing, anytime it's not about liking or focusing on artwork but on bending artwork as a means to a supposedly greater end (messaging a pre-determined creed/agenda), "art" seen and used and treated as a generic placeholder not a dynamic response to a living world. you made something else more important and so the real expression has left. "a sick and boring life" indeed.

so yeah. of course you're gonna get a lot of bs techy cgi and macho explosions instead of one emotionally true and humble moment between characters. because that's how you chose to prioritize (and see) things. both on the show and in the real world right now.

[ifjuly]

and i also keep thinking about (and do think it's related in its way here, these tensions that feel they're coming to a boil again cyclically re: what kind of person/household/life is "productive" or whatever). something femmepress Shar has in her profile these days, "pushing the outer edge so the middle can survive".