Femininomena

Dario Argento, the Italian horror director and father-in-law (sort of) to the late great Anthony Bourdain, is a very strange man who has had many contentious relationships and made a lot of enemies in Italian film culture over the decades. It’s probably a bad idea from a health-and-safety standpoint to let him keep making the kinds of movies he does, even though many of those movies are very good. Reading the things he said about his movies, at least in English translation, is almost as surreal and troubling an experience as watching them. It always reminds me a little of the commentary that Ikuhara Kunihiko did on individual episodes of Revolutionary Girl Utena (translated in the liner material for my Nozomi DVD box sets of that show), except Argento is at least trying to invite his interlocutor, his Model Reader, to understand the movies on a somewhat more conventional level, whereas Ikuhara is more interested in adding more of the same.

Here is Argento on Suspiria (the original Suspiria, not the compromised second draft): “In Suspiria I wasn’t primarily interested in the theme of motherhood but, rather, in women’s lives. In fact, if you want to give a deeper reading of the film, it can be seen as a vaguely lesbian story; where lesbianism has a certain importance, or, more precisely, where the relationships between women are sometimes of a lesbian nature and are characterised by power struggles.” (My best friend read a version of this quote where that last part goes “a world where the relationships between women” etc. and just said “so, any world with women in it.”) And here he is on Phenomena: “When I was thinking of Phenomena, I imagined that between 1940 and 1945 there had been a very serious incident, the war, and that the Nazis had won. After thirty-forty years, the people had wiped this dramatic event from their memories and didn't talk about it anymore. In reality though, the Nazis won the war, and life therefore has a totally different vibe, it's a world where the Nazi order won. If the movie is watched attentively, then it is obvious that, from that perspective, whoever made it was working from this principle.”

Phenomena is a movie that I like a lot, and I like it in part for the same reasons others don’t, starting with the diffuse and meandering plot (what does the knife-wielding chimp have to do with Jennifer Connelly’s insect powers? What do either have to do with the serial killer’s motive? Why is Connelly’s character, who is also named Jennifer, the daughter of a famous Italian-American actor? What’s with the extraneous argument about the Bee Gees partway through? Who knows? It’s called Phenomena, not Phenomenon!). There are, as Umberto Eco might put it, no privileged causal chains in this movie’s universe, because privileging a series of events and attempting to clarify exactly how one leads to another would, if the characters were to do it, inevitably lead them back to the Ishiguronian “buried giant” they’re all avoiding. Jennifer wears a high-fashion blinged-out Iron Cross as a statement piece and has never heard of Passover despite having a Jewish lawyer, who in turn is (rightly, as it turns out) extremely reluctant to come pick her up in Continental Europe when she’s getting tormented at her boarding school. None of this seems to bother anyone; it also oftentimes doesn’t seem to bother anyone in real life that Donald Trump and JD Vance are running a supposedly-populist political campaign enthusiastically supported by the richest people in the world, or that various Nazi and/or Stalinist and/or pedophiliac and/or wife-killing thinkers are still titans of Continental philosophy despite these things having been widely known about them for decades. (I’m not entirely innocent of this last example; I haven’t fully figured out how to account for some of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s more repellent behaviors around adolescent boys in my reception of Pasolini’s intellectual and artistic remains.)

The movie’s intense ableism, where deviations from the norm are approved or deprecated by the protagonists based on cool and special they do or don’t make someone, so angered Daria Nicolodi that she divorced Argento and vowed never to work with him again (although she would end up in Opera two years later). Yet in the Buried Giant account of what the movie is doing, this too makes perfect sense; the preteen with trisomy 13 who incites his serial killer mother becomes somewhat akin to the main character of Wright’s Native Son. At one point Jennifer sleepwalks around muttering “I must wake up!” So must everyone around her, from Donald Pleasance’s paraplegic entomologist (who explicitly spells out, at his own expense, the movie’s hypocrisy about difference while trying to make Jennifer feel better about herself) to much less sympathetic characters like the bullying schoolgirls and the serial killer headmistress and the various fascist cops.

Opera is a movie that Argento specifically did not want to be viewed as a companion piece to Phenomena, but I still think this movie informs that one in some ways. Argento respects animals more in Opera than he does in some of his earlier work; the slasher kills animatronic ravens whereas in earlier Argento one sees things like real lizards getting killed onscreen. Indeed the last shot of Opera has the heroine, Betty, freeing a lizard that is trapped under a piece of undergrowth. Phenomena required so much animal work, both with the Jennifer’s insect powers (a scene of a firefly leading her to a murder scene is a standout; this is a real firefly with a nylon string tied to it!) and with the chimp, that it’s hard to imagine it not permanently changing its director’s understanding of nonhuman life. Betty’s sexuality in Opera doesn’t fully return to the vaguely communicated lesbianism of Suspiria, since she sleeps with men and by the end of the movie is implied to have started enjoying it. There is, however, still a bloody-minded anti-civilizational separatism to the movie’s final moments, when she dissolves psychologically into a mountian meadow after everyone she loves has been murdered and her career as a dramatic coloratura probably irrevocably derailed, as indeed there is to Jennifer embracing the chimp in the final shot of Phenomena when every other character in the movie is dead.

Argento understands gender and particularly women in an interesting way, and it’s hard to tell why. He likes to present dark-haired young women escaping peril, but only just barely. Once again much like with Ikuhara, it’s impossible to really understand what cocktail of, to name just a few potential contributing factors, dysphoria, feminist sentiment, and prurience motivates this. Argento almost certainly fucked up the task of raising his daughter, enormously and sometimes in publicly knowable ways, like by casting her as Christine Daaé in his Il fantasma dell’opera. Whatever is happening with Argento Sr. and gender, or sexuality, or both, might well also be happening with Argento Jr. and through her with the late Bourdain. On the other hand, it’s perhaps best not to speculate too much about this, because I don’t actually know any of these people and there is almost certainly a lot about the lights and shadows of the famiglia Argento that would surprise me very much if I somehow learned it. In any case, gender in Argento is not done in a style that served him well in the 90s, a magical time in which beautiful young women could become famous singers for screaming vulgar threats onstage (hi, Courtney Love!; hi, Aikawa Nanase!). After a certain point he just stopped making movies that were good. Phenomena and Opera, though, individually or as a diptych, retain an odd sort of power around sex, death, and fascism, especially for people who like horror movies and can deal with almost-cartoonish gore.

Indigenous Religion in Popular Fiction: The Case of Yellowjackets

Note: This essay is, I hope, to be run eventually in some more “august” format such as a journal focusing on theology, on popular culture, or on both; however, the slow pace of publication in many such outlets, in combination with the fact that a third season of the show is currently in production, made me believe that time was of the essence when it came to getting this out in some form or another. Thus I am running it here first.—Saint John’s Eve 2024

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The wildly popular (in some circles) television show Yellowjackets, which so far has two seasons out of a planned five and airs on the American cable channel Showtime, tells the story of a turf war between a Francophone demon and an albino moose for the souls of a team of ambiguously lesbian soccer players.

           I hope that the rhetorical strategies I am employing in saying so—attention-grabbing overstatement, deliberately strange wording of concepts that are in fact more ordinary, leading with an extremely confident assertion of a view my actual grounds for holding which are more tenuous—are clear to most readers. I also hope, however, to make it clear that this is a genuinely held interpretation of the program. Not only is it a genuinely held interpretation, it is an eminently defensible one based on Yellowjackets’s style and tone, narrative conceits, and genre antecedents.

           To avoid overloading this essay with ponderous “expository” material, and in deference to the precedents set in “acafandom” writing on more established genre canons like Star Trek and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, this essay will at various points presuppose the reader’s familiarity with the characters, situations, and visual and auditory aggregates depicted in Yellowjackets. Readers who have not seen the show can consult breakdowns of the first two seasons on entertainment websites including Vulture, The Cut, and Cosmopolitan, although these also contain elements of subjective review and not everything that has been said online about the show’s aesthetic or narrative quality aligns with my own opinions.

           Much of Yellowjackets’s unique thematic richness when it comes to the issues that this essay will address—issues involving religion, indigeneity, ruralism and the “Wilderness” topos, and their relationships with one another and with more obvious issues in the show such as gender—occurs by accident. For example, the indigeneity-related subtext informing the character of Lottie Matthews (and the closest relationships that she has with white characters, Laura Lee and later on Natalie Scatorccio), subtext that is substantial and is by turns endlessly fascinating and somewhat troubling, cannot have been intentional from the beginning because the mixed-Maori actress Courtney Eaton was matched with the character through a race-blind casting process. Yet by the show’s second season efforts are clearly being made to establish this as an intentional element of the character, such as the casting of another mixed-Maori actress, Simone Kessell, as Lottie’s older self.

           Nor is this to be wondered at. Television production is a collaborative process and an element of serendipity, chance, fate, or providence is inevitably one of the collaborators.[1] Authorial intent in this context is an important consideration when thinking through why the show is the way it is—attempts to artificially bracket out authorial intent as a consideration are just as limiting to one’s understanding of a text as are attempts to artificially inflate it—but it clearly cannot be the whole story. For example, the extremely common belief among the show’s viewers that the character of Jackie Taylor comes across as a closeted lesbian can be amply backed up with comments to that effect from writers, directors, actresses, and so on, yet there is also an element of sheer reader response in the audience’s decision that Jackie is simply more legible as a lesbian character.

           The intentional aspects of the show’s religious commentary mostly involve either what get called the dueling “supernatural and rational” explanations for some of the events that take place (incorrectly; supernatural and rational are not, properly, antonyms or a dichotomy) or the motif of cannibalism itself. The “supernatural or rational” issue is, in my view, a red herring tout court, and a pernicious one for multiple reasons: it creates a false sense that a “rational” version of the series would somehow automatically be narratively and perhaps ideologically superior, it betrays a habit of baselessly expecting that the series will eventually provide “explanations” rather than accepting that it is set in a stupefying universe, and it distracts the viewer from the analysis of religious belief in which, according to the series’ own creators, Yellowjackets is engaged:

I think if you are a spiritual person on any level, or had ever considered or wrestled with spiritual questions, something else to throw into the stew here is that there is an experience or phenomenology of like belief in spiritual experience. There is an expansive quality to it that perhaps you’ve felt in religious ceremony or looking at the Grand Canyon or an art or piece of music (sic), or being with family. However you’ve gotten it, I think we all have a kernel of that experience. So on the one hand, yes, something that expands this feeling seems great. But then there is all the tragedy and the times that it is elusive or completely unhelpful to you. So if you’re going to have a show that in some sense is trying to explore these elements of faith and spiritual experience, if you’re not also going to have the moments where those things are failures or useless, then you’re really not having a fair conversation.[2]

So much for the “supernatural or rational?” non-issue; the program is (in part) about religion, and the program is not a proselytization tool. What of cannibalism?

           Discussing the evil eye, in which some of my own relatives grew up believing in the Italian-American community of the 1950s and 1960s, Sam Migliore writes that belief is part of a “language of distress.” “First,” that is, “[believing in the evil eye] provides people with a means by which they can identify, explain, and communicate specific experiences to significant others. Second, it provides people with a means by which they can take action when confronted by misfortune.”[3] The Yellowjackets take action when confronted by misfortune in many ways, but, as is well-known and as is one of the main draws of the series, eventually they take action by eating people. This action, as with Migliore’s evil eye curatives, they connect to and situate within the magical or religious thinking that the show depicts (and that the show refuses to condemn).

           A great deal of research about the cultural and mediatic history of cannibalism went into the show’s development and writing. Some of this research, when performed in a Christian country by people interested in telling a story that touches on spiritual concerns,[4] is inevitably going to involve the Eucharist. Direct, clearly communicated Eucharistic imagery in the show is surprisingly sparse (especially given that there are major characters to whom religion in general and Christianity in particular are very important), but it is present at two key moments in the first episode of the second season, which are also the chronologically first cannibalistic acts to take place. At the beginning of the episode Lottie Matthews performs a series of protective rituals over Natalie Scatorccio and Travis Martinez—Nat calls them “Wicca bullshit”—before they go on a winter hunting expedition; one ritual has her make them drink her diluted blood, a finger pricked and allowed to drip into hot water or tisane. At the end of the episode Shauna Shipman, grieving her best friend Jackie Taylor (whose death in the last episode of the first season Shauna feels she caused), furtively eats a small, roundish piece of her ear in a moment whose visuals are immediately familiar to people who regularly attend Mass.[5] The symbolic connection is compounded by further connections that have already been established between Shauna and Roman Catholicism. According to Jackie, she “tried to become Catholic” at some point in the past (“I liked the saints; they were all so tragic,” Shauna says),[6] and Shauna reveres Jackie herself in ways explicitly analogized with devotion to a saint, even decades after adoring/consuming her bodily.[7]

            Catholicism has a long history of attempting and failing to “beat the cannibalism allegations” regarding the Eucharist, and an almost-as-long history of deep ambivalence about the Wilderness topos. As Fumagalli, among others, has pointed out,[8] for the bulk of the religion’s history, remote areas were generally seen not as spiritually nourishing or closer to God, but as pernicious because deprived of the “civilizing” aspect of the Church’s mission in the world. This is difficult to understand today; the Romantic movement changed the typical Western conception of the relationship between “wilderness” and the divine so utterly that the previous way of looking at it now seems alien, almost incomprehensible. Even consciously medieval-influenced twentieth-century writers, first and foremost Tolkien, struggle to replicate the medieval worldview on this point.[9] Yet in the medieval and even early modern Christian mind, it was important, obvious, and only dubiously countervailed by the experiences of hermits and desert saints. As Belden C. Lane puts it in The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, “[t]hroughout much of the history of Western culture, mountains have been viewed as physically threatening, aesthetically distasteful, even morally reprehensible”; thus “fascination with mountain terrain is a relatively recently development in Western thought,” earlier writers having “scorned [them] as proud, insolent, sky-threatening, and aloof.”[10]

           The historian Allan Greer, in his biography of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha—on whom more later in this essay—Mohawk Saint, discusses this at length in the Yellowjackets-esque setting of seventeenth-century Quebec, where French Catholic missionaries of the Jesuit order and indigenous Iroquoian and Algonquian cultural systems did ideological and spiritual battle. Of an episode in Kateri Tekakwitha’s life in which she maintained her religious practice as a Catholic convert during a long hunting expedition, Greer writes that:

The vignette featuring [Kateri] praying at her rustic chapel in the forest came to be the favorite image in modern versions of her life story; it seemed to epitomize all the most appealing qualities associated with the “Indian maiden” as an innocent woodland creature at one with nature. All the more reason to note that the seventeenth-century Jesuits attached a very different meaning to this scene. Chauchetière and Cholenec worried about the moral and religious dangers of long hunting trips, even though they recognized their economic necessity for the convert Iroquois. Not only did the hunt pose practical problems in their ministry in that it kept people physically removed from the mass and from the supervision of the missionaries, but it took Indian neophytes into a wild environment with perilous associations. For the original biographers of [Kateri] Tekakwitha, space had moral meaning: the Christian village at Sault St. Louis, together with the fields that surrounded it, was good, whereas the forest was almost entirely evil, the dark haunt of demons and pagan savages. Thus, far from “communing with nature” in her woodland oratory, they saw [Kateri] doing her best to commune with civilization.[11]

On this point Yellowjackets is closer to the medieval Christian worldview than are most expressly Christian modern works of art. The two characters to die first in the Wilderness experience, not counting the initial plane crash, are both associated with the norms of the parent society on the urban or suburban, secular or conventionally Christian or Jewish, affluent East Coast of the United States. Laura Lee has a strong and mostly-conventional Evangelical Christian religiosity, and Jackie Taylor maintains her priorities about things like interpersonal hierarchy and who is having sex with whom long after the others have ceased to care. The Wilderness evidently does not need this. Yet it is Laura Lee who is Lottie’s first and most devoted confidante and Laura Lee whose baptism of Lottie backfires and sets Lottie down the path to starting the group’s later cultic practices;[12] it is Jackie whose earthly remains are the stuff of Shauna’s first act of cannibalism and, an episode later, the first full-fledged cannibalistic feast.[13] There is a series of motifs being put together here—a snowbound cabin; w/Wilderness; Canada; cannibalism; religion; the atavistic or uncivilized or “primal”—that recalls an episode in the earliest biographies of Kateri Tekakwitha. In this incident, Kateri’s closest friend, Wari Teres Tegaiaguenta, is a member of a group that resorts to cannibalism during a disastrous winter hunting expedition, guilt over which inspires her to adopt extreme ascetic practices to which she then introduces Kateri. The cannibalism motif informs their religious practice in a way that is technically separate from but unavoidably juxtaposed with the Eucharist, and untamed forest is again a place of extreme physical and spiritual danger.[14]

           In other aspects of Yellowjackets, as well as in Laura Lee’s and Jackie’s deaths, the Christian elements of the religious aesthetic and of the characters’ religious imaginary seem incongruous in the Wilderness topos. A piece of set design is, tellingly, a reversal, so to speak, of the attributes of St. Hubert, the patron of hunters. Hubert’s attributes include a stag with a crucifix between its antlers (and thus above its head), in reference to a vision that he is said to have had.[15] On an interior wall of the Yellowjackets cabin, however, there is a crucifix positioned below a stag’s head that has been mounted as a hunting trophy. Other reversals or parodies of well-known biblical and liturgical narratives and images abound, from Lottie’s chrismation with blood in the episode “Blood Hive”[16] to the Exodus 16-inspired “suicide on our roof” of a clutter of starlings in the episode “Digestif.”[17] These kinds of reversals and parodies are, in orthodox Christian belief, associated with the demonic, which at several points in Yellowjackets lends substance to an otherwise somewhat tendentious-seeming interpretation that the supernatural force in the Wilderness is a demon (despite various characters’ insistence that “It” is neutral or amoral rather than wicked).

           The demonic overtones interact somewhat uncomfortably—we might even say problematically—with the elements of the show’s look and feel that are most obviously influenced by Native American religion and culture. The “Antler Queen,” for instance, a polysemous symbol of the girls’ cult that is sometimes the person leading the group and sometimes a separate being sort of like an avatar or paraclete of the Wilderness/It, wears a crown of deer antlers like those worn historically by Iroquois political leaders.[18] Lottie, the first person to don the antler crown in the episode “Doomcoming,”[19] has, as mentioned above, at least two relationships with blonde white characters whom the narrative generally favors over her, morally speaking. (It must be acknowledged, however, that, subtext aside, the question of Laura Lee’s or Nat’s moral superiority over Lottie is one in which the show as scripted says it is not interested; these are, among other things, characters who love and are loved by Lottie on what is supposed to be a more or less even footing. The failure of writerly intent on this point seems to me to be an honest one.) The Antler Queen also conjures up specters of the pop-cultural wendigo, an appropriative and (according to many people) spiritually dangerous reperiodization of the folkloric Alqonquian cannibalistic monster of the same name; in mass media this being is typically depicted as a sort of stag-man, a portrayal especially popularized by the mid-2010s cannibalism-themed television series Hannibal. All of this is to say that juxtaposing Yellowjackets’s religious imagination with its preferred depiction and framing of cannibalism rapidly raises questions of cultural sensitivity vis-à-vis indigenous worldviews.

           In a key storyline early in the show’s second season, Nat runs across a large white moose on a hunting expedition, fails to shoot it, then, an episode later, finds its body half-immersed in a frozen-over lake. Efforts to haul the moose out of the lake prove unavailing as the group’s ropes break and it instead sinks to the bottom. The white moose too is an Algonquin religious and folkloric being, one much more benevolent than the wendigo; this is reflected by its positioning in Yellowjackets as a ray of hope, even though that hope is ultimately dashed. Particularly significant is that in the Algonquin culture in which the white moose plays the most important role, the Mi’kmaq of Maine and Atlantic Canada, it is a guardian spirit and a “messenger or link to the Creator.”[20] Several Native American people whom I know have told me personally that the white moose, among other things, leads hunters to food in the winter—exactly the situation in which Nat encounters it in the show. It is in this lake that the Yellowjackets eventually allow Javi Martinez, the second cannibalism victim, to drown, in a cruel parody of Mi’kmaq beliefs much like the cruel parodies of Christian beliefs elsewhere in the series. As Masuzawa points out,[21] to treat a religion similarly to Christianity is, in a primarily-Christian intellectual landscape, to ratify and validate it as worth taking seriously; looked at this way, the sequence of events surrounding the white moose validates indigenous North American religion more than anything else in the show.

           The white moose would, had the Yellowjackets successfully hauled it out of the lake and consumed it, have obviated the real or perceived need to engage in the ritual cannibalization of Javi five episodes later. It is possible that it falls through the ice as a way of taunting them and driving them further into despair, but I, and much of the show’s fandom, prefer to see the moose as a more positive figure. This turns its loss in the lake into an instance of power struggle between multiple forces within the Wilderness, and thus turns the Wilderness itself into a morally and spiritually contested space. In this context we might note that, early in the development of the Lottie-focused Wilderness cult, Lottie refers to “the ancient gods,” only shifting to the singular “It”—“we hear the Wilderness and It hears us”—later on. A reading that sees the moose positively—the way a Mi’kmaq audience would see it—would have it that Lottie got it right the first time, and that the Wilderness is a stage on which sacred dramas play out, dramas whose main characters might be very different from the main characters of Yellowjackets-the-television-series.

           Yet, sacred dramas aside, the this-worldly, human concerns of the characters we follow in the show generally see reverence for or deference to the Wilderness topos functioning in a socially corrosive way. It does not always corrode the microsociety that the Yellowjackets themselves build in the woods—quite the contrary; important moments like Taissa and Van coming out as lesbians in “Doomcoming” or Shauna barely surviving childbirth in “Qui” are made emotionally and relationally easier, if anything, by taking place in the new society and according to the new cultural practices. It does, however, corrode the connections that most characters seek to maintain with the parent society. (There are a few exceptions, characters who do not seem to miss anything about their pre-crash lives and might even actively prefer the Wilderness, and these are the characters who tend to become the diehard cultists in the show’s second season.) The stage of Yellowjackets is not one whose players can maintain at will investment in their backstage lives.

            It should go without saying that in most situations the concerns of a suburban high school are going to be both more legible and more sympathetic than the concerns of a backwoods cannibal cult to most television audiences. Admittedly, with the sort of viewership that Yellowjackets has attracted, this hasn’t always been the case, but it does mean that we can’t ignore the associations between Wilderness, religion, violence, etc., nor even the (atypical and quite boldly articulated) connection that the show proposes between all of these things and femininity. Yellowjackets is a feminist series; it is also a series in which womanhood and women are somewhat horrifying. The same can be said of its relationship with rurality and atavism, and there is much less of a history of conceding this sort of point or seeing it as acceptable and empowering among indigenous and ruralist thinkers than among feminists.

           What is one to make, then, of the questionable symbolic and aesthetic association between indigenous religion and violent, atavistic brutality? Two avenues come to mind for reparative reading of this admittedly troubling facet of Yellowjackets’s aesthetic schema. The first is for the viewer to determine that what appears to be presented as terrifying and despicable is in fact not, and that, like Melville in Chapter 57 of Moby-Dick,[22] the Yellowjackets writers are willing to entertain an astounding degree of relativism about what the characters are doing and then commend that relativism to the audience. This avenue has an intuitive appeal and at points is spelled out within the text. “When you were with those women you were free,” the Antler Queen tells Lottie in “Burial”;[23] “God is alive; magic is afoot,” the soundtrack (Buffy Ste-Marie interpreting Leonard Cohen) tells us two episodes later.[24] The viewer doesn’t have any immediate reason to doubt that this is partly the case—that, whatever else Yellowjackets’s Wilderness is, it is also an enchanted forest where the terrifying and transgressive contains or points to the sublime.

           A second avenue might be to look at the show through a more conventional cultural or moral lens but conclude that this lens isn’t actually being inherently violated by the Wilderness topos. Put simply, in this reading, what produces the barbarity is not the look, feel, or Sitz im Leben of indigenous culture and indigenous religion themselves; it is how that is experienced and engaged with by interlopers from the cultivated world of end-of-history liberal suburbia. None of the human characters in Yellowjackets are actually from the Wilderness or from cultural groups that traditionally live there, and the most obviously malevolent supernatural agency in the series communicates in French, a colonial language par excellence in much of North America’s vast internal frontier.

           As Margaret J. Leahey remarks in “‘Comment peut un muet prescher l’évangile?’ Jesuit Missionaries and the Native Languages of New France,” French missionaries and traders in what is now Canada and parts of the Northern United States had little interest in forcing, encouraging, or even teaching Native peoples to speak French; indeed, many of them preferred to learn Native American languages instead despite the extreme difficulty of doing so as adults from a Romance starting position.[25] Kateri Tekakwitha likely understood more Latin than French, because all the Frenchmen she ever met would have spoken primarily Mohawk outside Mass and Latin in Mass. Thus early in the settlement and colonization process French was a white man’s language in ways that English and Spanish ceased to be much sooner. To this day French is somewhat racialized (as “white”) within Canada; when primarily Anglophone First Nations voters helped sink the 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum, Premier Jacques Parizeau infamously blamed “l’argent pis des votes ethniques” (“money and the ethnic vote”) for the loss. It’s difficult to say whether the writers of Yellowjackets are expressly aware of this history; as Americans it is likelier that many of them tend to associate the French language with Canadianness writ large.[26] Nevertheless, it provides a potential resource for interpreting the horrors of the Wilderness as those of imperialism rather than those of indigeneity.

           But let’s set indigeneity and imperialism aside and think, on a human level, on the things the characters in this show do to one another. The show connects brutality and survival in ways that are less Golding than London or even Nietzsche; the “freedom” in “when you were with those women you were free” bears more than a whiff of Also Sprach Zarathustra’s madman or Hawthorne’s Ethan Brand, that nineteenth-century Will that baptizes harpoons “non…in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli.”[27] I don’t think this is by any means a moral problem with the show, since the demonic can’t be honestly depicted without depicting why some people find it appealing, but it does mean that Yellowjackets is a story that contains Tolkienian “pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold.”[28] The view of the Wilderness’s ominous quality as solely an issue of colonial domination would seem to run into a wall here.

           I would further submit a third, synthesized avenue of understanding, which has become my own preferred reading of the show. As seen above in the discussion of Mi’kmaq beliefs, we can support an elevated moral and aesthetic reading of the Wilderness even if there is something genuinely foul and evil out there too—even if, so to speak, the Francophone demon as well as the white moose is a going concern with real power over the enchanted woods. Lane, moving on to the subject of deserts from the discussion of mountains quoted above, introduces an interesting and illustrative nuance, a nuance that itself produces much of the Christian spiritual tradition and grounds that tradition ecologically.

In a similar way, deserts have been viewed with fear and contempt as the snare of the devil, the abode of dragons, or the lair of the lawless. As wilderness, wüste, waste, the desert becomes the haunt of demons—at best a “negative landscape” or “realm of abstraction,” located outside of the ordinary sphere of existence, susceptible only to things transcendent. In early Christian tradition, the desert was perceived ambiguously, usually as an unfriendly, intimidating domain; but for those able to endure its purifying adversity, an image also of paradise.[29]

Looked at with this stereoscopic spiritual and moral vision, Yellowjackets seems to share concerns not so much with Lord of the Flies or even with The Call of the Wild as with Dune. Perhaps, much like Arrakis, God created the Wilderness to train the faithful.[30]

           Yellowjackets on a human level is almost certainly meant to communicate a studied and methodologically “correct” agnosticism about not only the existence of God (or the Wilderness) but the existence of any religious “knowledge” as such. Yet resources within the text for a theological reading of the show exist, and are not present within the text necessarily merely by accident.

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[1] Might that “serendipity” or “fate” itself be viewed as an “author,” depending on the religious beliefs of the interpreter?

[2] Bart Nickerson, quoted in Jackie Strause, “‘Yellowjackets’ Bosses Explain Shocking Episode and “Perversely Celebratory” Final Scene,” The Hollywood Reporter, March 30, 2023.

[3] Sam Migliore, Mal’uocchiu: Ambiguity, Evil Eye, and the Language of Distress (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 49-50.

[4] See the above block quote for a denomination of the show as “spiritual” rather than “supernatural.” The narrative is interested in epistemology to an unusual extent; much of the second season, in both timelines, involves the characters factionalizing based on degree of receptiveness to mystical experience, as opposed to more obvious cleavages such as race, class, sexual orientation, amount of practical survival prowess, or on-paper religious background.

[5] Yellowjackets, season 2, episode 1, “Friends, Romans, Countrymen,” directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer, written by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Simone Kessell, Courtney Eaton, and Liv Hewson, aired March 26, 2023, Showtime.

[6] Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 1, “Pilot,” directed by Karyn Kusama, Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Courtney Eaton, Liv Hewson, and Ella Purnell, aired November 21, 2021, Showtime.

[7] Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 6, “Saints,” directed by Billie Woodruff, written by Chantelle M. Wells, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Courtney Eaton, Liv Hewson, and Ella Purnell, aired December 19, 2021, Showtime.

[8] Vito Fumagalli, Landscapes of Fear: Perceptions of Nature and the City in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, England: Polity, 1994).

[9] The degree and suddenness of the change in attitudes can be and has been, however, exaggerated. Martin Korenjak, “Why Mountains Matter: Early Modern Roots of a Modern Notion.” Renaissance Quarterly vol. 70, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 179-219.

[10] Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1998), 42.

[11] Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2005), 131. Greer favors the French form “Catherine” over the Mohawk form “Kateri,” for various reasons to which I am sympathetic but which I have made a decision against; thus in quoting him I render “Catherine” as “[Kateri]” to maintain consistency with the rest of my text.

[12] Op. cit., “Saints.” The character is always referred to and addressed as “Laura Lee,” either a double-barreled given name, like the Mary Graces and Mary Katherines that many families have, or a full name the use of which is ubiquitous among the other characters, like Charlie Brown or Mary Poppins.

[13] Yellowjackets, season 2, episode 2, “Edible Complex,” directed by Ben Semanoff, written by Jonathan Lisco, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Simone Kessell, Courtney Eaton, and Liv Hewson, aired April 2, 2023, Showtime.

[14] Op. cit., Greer, 182-184. Cf. footnote 8 for Greer’s “Marie-Thérèse” vs. my “Wari Teres.”

[15] The legend appears in most older reference works on Catholic saints and is amply attested in art, heraldry, and even alcohol labels; that of the liqueur Jägermeister will be the most familiar depiction of St. Hubert’s stag to many readers of this essay.

[16] Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 5, “Blood Hive,” directed by Eva Sørhaug, written by Ameni Rozsa, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Courtney Eaton, Liv Hewson, and Ella Purnell, aired December 12, 2021, Showtime.

[17] Yellowjackets, season 2, episode 3, “Digestif,” directed by Jeffrey W. Byrd, written by Sarah L. Thompson and Ameni Rozsa, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Simone Kessell, Courtney Eaton, and Liv Hewson, aired April 9, 2023, Showtime.

[18] William N. Fenton, “Structure, Continuity, and Change in the Process of Iroquois Treaty Making,” in The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy: An Interdisciplinary Guide to the Treaties of the Six Nations and Their League, ed. Francis Jennings (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1985), 17.

[19] Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 9, “Doomcoming,” directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer, written by Ameni Rozsa and Sarah L. Thompson, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Courtney Eaton, Liv Hewson, and Ella Purnell, aired January 9, 2022, Showtime.

[20] Chief Bob Gloade, quoted in Diana Hall, “Hunters spark outrage after killing ‘spirit moose’ on Cape Breton Highlands trip,” National Post, October 8, 2013.

[21] Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). Masuzawa does not condone or approve of this; nevertheless, she makes a strong case that this is, descriptively, how this works in Western intellectual and artistic cultures, and thus, for our purposes, that this is a case of Yellowjackets taking its implications seriously.

[22] 278-280 in my Collins Classics edition. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (London: Collins Classics, 2011).

[23] Yellowjackets, season 2, episode 7, “Burial,” directed by Anya Adams, written by Rich Monahan and Liz Phang, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Simone Kessell, Courtney Eaton, Lauren Ambrose, and Liv Hewson, aired May 14, 2023, Showtime.

[24] Yellowjackets, season 2, episode 9, “Storytelling,” directed by Karyn Kusama, written by Ameni Rozsa, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Simone Kessell, Courtney Eaton, Lauren Ambrose, and Liv Hewson, aired May 28, 2023, Showtime. We might note that the choice of song also reinforces the series’ connection to Kateri Tekakwitha in that Cohen’s lyrics are taken from Beautiful Losers, a novel that he wrote as a young man in which she is one of the main characters.

[25] Maragret J. Leahey, “‘Comment peut un muet prescher l’évangile?’ Jesuit Missionaries and the Native Languages of New France.” French Historical Studies Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 1995): 111-112.

[26] With all that Canadianness tends to imply to Americans—remoteness, coldness, “nordicity” in general, perhaps a more collectivist political culture, a history assumed to be without the series of enormously violent inflection points (Revolutionary War, Civil War, etc.) that characterizes the United States’ history.

[27] Op. cit., Melville, 501.

[28] J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf. In The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), 33.

[29] Op. cit., Lane, 43. This passage in Lane goes on to cite, in its own notes, Estés’s Women Who Run with the Wolves, which, while beyond the scope of this essay, has immediate areas of relevance to Yellowjackets as well.

[30] This Herbertian bon mot appears most prominently on 501 in my 2010 Ace Books edition.

Bibliography

Fenton, William N. “Structure, Continuity, and Change in the Process of Iroquois Treaty Making.” In The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy: An Interdisciplinary Guide to the Treaties of the Six Nations and Their League, edited by Francis Jennings, 16-36. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1985

Fumagalli, Vito. Landscapes of Fear: Perceptions of Nature and the City in the Middle Ages. Cambridge, England: Polity, 1994.

Greer, Allan. Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Hall, Diana. “Hunters spark outrage after killing ‘spirit moose’ on Cape Breton Highlands trip.” National Post, October 8, 2013.

Herbert, Frank. Dune. New York: Ace Books, 2010.

Korenjak, Martin. “Why Mountains Matter: Early Modern Roots of a Modern Notion.” Renaissance Quarterly vol. 70, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 179-219.

Lane, Belden C. The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Leahey, Margaret J.  “‘Comment peut un muet prescher l’évangile?’ Jesuit Missionaries and the Native Languages of New France.” French Historical Studies Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 1995): 111-112.

Masuzawa, Tomoko. The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. London: Collins Classics, 2011.

Migliore, Sam. Mal’uocchiu: Ambiguity, Evil Eye, and the Language of Distress. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.

Nickerson, Bart, Ashley Lyle, and Jonathan Lisco, lead writers. Yellowjackets. New York: Showtime, 2021-2023.

Strause, Jackie. “‘Yellowjackets’ Bosses Explain Shocking Episode and “Perversely Celebratory” Final Scene.” The Hollywood Reporter, March 30, 2023.

 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966.

Mr. Miyagi’s America

The aesthetic appeal of Japanese culture in the West has, I think, had at least as many points of continuity as points of rupture over the decades. Consistently Western observers of Japan have noted that it has an exceptionally beautiful visual and material culture, in ways that are difficult to define without lapsing into Orientalist cliché, regardless of what the observer thinks of the social and ideological aspects of Japanese life. Yet the way people in the West respond to this aesthetic appeal has obviously shifted over time; a Victorian artist’s model lounging in a kimono gives one a feeling of change-in-continuity vis-à-vis a cosplayer wearing a similar kimono at a late-2000s anime convention.

            The points of continuity and points of rupture become a little easier to identify if one allows oneself to consider some of the cliches, which, after all, are cliches precisely because they are widespread conventional wisdom. As I write this there is in my own apartment a whole stack of books on Japanese subjects from the mid-to-late twentieth century, after World War II and the Occupation but before the anime-focused Cool Japan boom of the 1990s and 2000s. We have The Inland Sea, Donald Ritchie’s travelogue about the waterways and coastal towns between Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu that presents Japan as a land of precariously-surviving tradition semiconsciously negotiating with globalized modernity; The Tale of the Shining Princess, an adaptation of Taketori monogatari whose title seems intended to imply a connection to Genji monogatari; The Makioka Sisters, the English translation of Tanizaki’s Sasameyuki, whose English paratext and reception history emphasize the same things as The Inland Sea despite the novel also containing a great deal of political content and Tanizakian cultural hobbyhorses; and The Golden Naginata, a pulp fantasy novel about Tomoe Gozen that I have not read yet, which is by an author named Jessica Amanda Salmonson and is dedicated to, among other people, Kaji Meiko.

            I have a lot of these kinds of books because I do like this visual and storytelling approach, even though I’m aware of the many things that are the matter with it. I always have liked it; as a child it sparked a lot of my earliest interest in Japanese society, before anything anime-related did. That being the case, it is surprising even to me that until recently I had not seen The Karate Kid.

            I’m going to be discussing the first three movies here, made in the 1980s and starring Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita. There’s a fourth movie with Hilary Swank, a remake from around 2010, and the recent TV series Cobra Kai, but these were made in somewhat later periods in terms of US-Japan cultural exchange. The first movie, which came out in 1984, is down-to-earth and in fact semi-autobiographical. Macchio’s character, Daniel LaRusso, moves from New Jersey to a Southern California community full of affluent beachy assholes; he gets bullied; then an aging Japanese handyman, the iconic Mr. Miyagi, teaches him to use karate to stand up to his bullies. At the end of the movie Daniel wins a local karate tournament and earns the respect of his main bully, whose harassment of Daniel is established to be downstream from his own karate teacher’s abusive treatment of him. Nothing in the movie is that implausible, and it’s an interesting and surprisingly intimate portrait of a certain sector of mid-80s West Coast life, even though the events on which it’s based took place decades earlier.

            Nothing about the movie necessitates sequels, but it did well enough to get them anyway—and more, as we’re seeing with the fact that Cobra Kai is still on the air almost forty years later. The sequels, as is often the way, go a bit off the rails. The stakes are higher, the characters less plausible, the conflicts continually mediated through a karate tournament for Californian teenagers. The third movie has an evil billionaire waste disposal executive who is just as invested in youth karate as everyone else is, to the point of personally backing the first movie’s evil dojo. (A lot of eighties movies have evil property management and utilities executives, a needed counterweight to the view held widely elsewhere in American society at the time that a property management or utilities executive was a type of culture hero.) The second movie, which is set mostly in Okinawa, is a bit more grounded than the third, but there are still serious problems with it that that original Karate Kid lacks, most of which boil down to the old “is this a sequel that needed to happen?” question. The Karate Kid Part II is a so-so movie; The Karate Kid Part III, a bad one (in, do not get me wrong, a very fun way, and one that continues to have a sound emotional and thematic heart slathered in ropey balderdash).

            Even watching a mediocre movie from 1986 like The Karate Kid Part II is, however, an inspiring and convicting experience after fifteen-odd years of box offices being dominated by half-billion-dollar exercises in copyright trolling that seek to resemble movies. Watching it I kept noting things that filled me with blindsided joy: what considered acting and directing! What a human touch even in the corny, implausible villains! What a shrewd decision to make the August Karate Room of Old so obviously important to Mr. Miyagi, so that even if the audience only ever spends one scene in it, they’ll care about its destruction because they care about him! This is competent moviemaking in late-twentieth-century Hollywood. Not even always that, as with the villains, although I wonder if perhaps viewers in Okinawa find it more plausible that someone who teaches martial arts to American military police could use Evil Karate to dispossess and kill people with impunity than do audiences and critics in the United States.

            With this USFJ base issue, as with other of the more geopolitical and (thus?) more moral aspects of Japan’s relationship with the United States, the Karate Kid movies take a stance that is subtle, at least for this series, but present and difficult to stop noticing once one starts. Mr. Miyagi is a World War II veteran; he served in the US Army and won the Medal of Honor, even though given the facts of his biography we are to understand that at the time of Pearl Harbor he had been in the country for very little time and possibly only slightly legally. This decorated veteran of the 442nd, a bona fide World War II hero if there ever was one, is humble or even dismissive about his war record; indeed, Daniel learns about it while Mr. Miyagi is drunk, trying to sleep, and in great emotional pain. The emotional pain is more than understandable considering that, while Mr. Miyagi fought for the United States against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, his young wife died in childbirth at Manzanar! John Kreese, the evil sensei from the first and third movies, is, conversely, an arrogant white Vietnam veteran about twenty years Mr. Miyagi’s junior. Ostentatiously self-confident, he insists on the style “sensei” despite not seeming to speak Japanese and insists on teaching a highly aggressive, deliberately unmerciful style of karate to his mostly high-status white students. World War II and Vietnam are tacitly depicted not only as different but as poles apart, opposite ends of the movies’ moral universe.

            Yet America’s role in postwar Japan isn’t presented as straightforwardly good in the second movie, as we see with the villains, who are intimately tied up with the American military presence, and with the constant presence of American military aircraft in the backgrounds of otherwise idyllic scenes. There’s a great scene early on where Daniel, reading a book about Okinawa on the plane to Japan with Mr. Miyagi, turns to him and excitedly, guilelessly says “did you know that Okinawa has the largest US air base in the Pacific?” Mr. Miyagi barely responds; of course he knows that, even though the movie makes it clear that this is his first time going home in forty-five years. It’s practically impossible to follow Okinawan affairs and broader Ryukyuan issues at all without knowing that. It’s a decisive issue in most prefectural elections, and as of this writing there has been a decade-long dispute between the prefectural government and the all-Japan government in Tokyo over moving the US base, because the prefectural government and the vast majority of the prefecture’s population want it gone entirely. So Mr. Miyagi—and Daniel, who adopts his perspective on Okinawan issues after spending time there with him—are men alone, at least within the movie’s framework; they’re American patriots who don’t always side with America, aficionados of things Japanese and Okinawan who believe that Japan and Okinawa were at one time badly in the wrong.

            Mr. Miyagi’s relatives, and most other older people in his village—not necessarily younger people or residents of the relatively large city of Naha—are presented mostly as cowed, intimidated normies. They stand up to the villains but only to an extent, in part because these are economically powerful people on whom their community is dependent. Even when Sato, the relatively-reasonable uncle, starts demolishing the entire village until Mr. Miyagi agrees to fight him in a duel, there’s only so much they feel inclined to do about it. Yet one somehow doesn’t get the sense that this is a commentary on the qualities of Okinawan people; the aesthetic of Japanese “submissiveness” is almost completely absent. Even in a scene in which Daniel and a young woman named Kumiko share a kiss over a sort of tea ceremony, we do not really get that sense. This scene could very easily have descended into a Miss Saigon-esque creepy fantasia of Oriental femininity (especially since in real life this sort of thing tends to happen with sake, not with tea; but this is the Reagan 80s, when moral panic about underage drinking among American audiences is at its height). The fact that it does not is mostly a testament to the acting, which is good in general and excellent for this type of movie.

            The demoralization that most of the supporting characters in the second movie feel may not be a commentary on the so-called Japanese character, but it certainly works as a broader commentary. Indeed most people in political situations like that on Okinawa are cowed, intimidated normies, just like most civilians in violent dictatorships, most civilians in non-violent non-dictatorships, and even people who are “caught in the middle” in our own society here in America. We could name not-particularly-pro-Israel Jewish students on college campuses throughout this great land as an especially pertinent example, one that would currently be very high-profile if the media had any interest in understanding them or knowing what they have to say. There is moral significance to this experience of things just as there is to fighting forthrightly for some side or cause or another.

            Mr. Miyagi does not need to be or for that matter want to be some kind of historical protagonist in order for his relationship with Daniel and his relationships with other Okinawan people to have a moral weight to them. He does not need to be in order for his Medal of Honor to have a real significance to it, either, even though the significance is not to him—it is to Daniel, who would have grown up on straightforward stories of World War II heroics and who clearly does not see any reason to doubt the benevolence of Reagan’s America until well into the second movie. The villains in the third movie at first use Mr. Miyagi’s war record to ingratiate themselves to him, then, later, mock it to his face. It should be noted that John Kreese is back in this movie, and that his backer Terry Silver, the above-mentioned evil businessman, was with him in Vietnam. They actively bring up World War II in conversation, to manipulate and belittle someone who fought in it. Daniel brings it up less, and Mr. Miyagi deliberately downplays it; their relationship the subject, conversely, is presented as straightforward, grateful, and, bluntly, morally sane.

            Albert Camus’s novel The Plague has a lot to say about the concept of heroism. Camus is suspicious of it, and for that matter he is as suspicious of saints as he is of heroes. I don’t share the suspicion of sanctity, which, as an abstract concept and as an ideal reality to be lived out (or lived into) I do believe exists, but with the Karate Kid movies’ treatment of war and politics I think that there is an admirably Camusian refusal to advocate going around as a self-ordained moral superman, even if you’re one of the few people in your world who’s taking a consistent moral stance on things. Mr. Miyagi’s nonfatal karate leaves people, crucially, free to make up their own minds and, when possible, see the error of their ways, even if it can sometimes seem implausible when some characters, like Sato in the second movie, actually do so.

            I am Catholic and the belief in a transcendent, abstract, absolute moral law is therefore not optional for me. But when morality becomes concretized between human persons—and little can possibly be more concrete than a martial arts movie, where moral significance is applied literally and directly to specific postures and movements of the human body—a sort of reverse alchemy happens to the moral principles that are commended to us from somewhere on high. It becomes possible for a moral decision to show greater or lesser fidelity, not only to the abstract moral law, but to the concrete human person as such. Anything that gets treated as an edge case in Kantian ethics is likely to be something of this kind. So too is the set of ways in which something like America’s military and political history during World War II can be so admirable and worthy an object of national myth-making on some levels and yet so squalid and unedifying on others. It’s perhaps appropriate, then, that the fascinating food for thought in these movies comes alongside a great deal of phoned-in, Orientalist, or just plain schlocky material. The storyline and tone of The Karate Kid and its immediate sequels support the thematics even in the trilogy’s moments of full-tilt campy hokum, not just when it is grounded and its verisimilitude is assured.

Another Autoflorilegium

The foregoing is a collection of my further thoughts on a variety of topics, mostly having to do with what gets broadly termed pop culture, and mostly from recent months. Some are gleaned from other platforms like fora or multiblogging websites, others from my personal notes about things that I watched or read or listened to or experienced. It is arranged by topic.

On the Relationship between Religion and Politics

In grad school I watched the Scorsese adaptation of Silence. It was in a seminar on East Asian Christianity so we got some very good discussion out of it. My parents watched the movie on their own as well. Between the three of us, my parents and I came up with what my professor thought were two very good, very important observations: First, the persecutors seem just as strangely obsessed, from a modern liberal standpoint, with the martyrs’ religion as do the martyrs themselves; secondly, why does this sort of killing and dying for religious beliefs come across as more irrational than killing or dying for political or philosophical beliefs? It is not immediately obvious why it should, yet it does.

            It is, in fact, possible, I think, that the order here has been entirely reversed. The habit now is of viewing a political worldview—leftism, rightism, the “MAGA movement,” “common-good constitutionalism,” Posado-Catholicism, neo-Ikkō-ikki Pure Land communism—as a static mass, a single object. A set of beliefs is bundled together and given over as handsel to an adherent. Religion and morals, now downstream from politics, become individuated epiphenomena, to be filled and animated, or deadened, by the waters of the person’s oceanic political conviction. Yet from the beginning it was not so.

On Identifying the Least Unbearable Social Media Platform

Tumblr is the only usable one, mostly because the bulk of its unbelievably toxic early-to-mid-2010s user base bolted for Twitter about five years ago, but also because its algorithm doesn’t work and all its updates are done by frivolous twits; yes, these are selling points, or at least they ought to be. More generally, though, social media is bad for society and everyone should be able to acknowledge this in the same way that, for example, the Victorians knew that constant exposure to lead and arsenic was unhealthy, only they didn’t know exactly why or have viable alternatives yet. Don’t be fooled by the idea that banning TikTok will fix it, either, although it won’t hurt; teenagers getting zonked out on Osama bin Laden apologia and slickly repackaged Holocaust revisionism is socially and politically and culturally disastrous, and boomers getting their personalities so thoroughly replaced with hateful parafascist conspiracy slop that they believe it over their own loved ones is socially and politically and culturally disastrous as well. God have mercy upon us. Butlerian Jihad now!

On Soda, Tonic, or What You Will

I was very surprised by how ingrained the culture of free refills of non-water beverages is when I visited a friend in Indiana last year. I was especially confused that one wouldn’t just order the smallest size of something if the actual amount of it one gets is arbitrary no matter what. It’s indeed very stereotypically Middle American, despite certain affluent coastal liberals’ characteristically nasty and bigoted way of saying so.

On the Incumbent Governor of the Great State of New York

Kathy Hochul doesn’t really make sense if you're looking at her through the usual ideological-spectrum and blue-tribe-red-tribe lenses, but she makes perfect sense through the lens of being a creature of the New York Democratic machine, where it’s still the Clinton-Gingrich era and everybody with real ideological or moral commitments, of any kind, is a dumb Columbia sophomore who doesn’t know what’s good for them. In the House in the early 2010s this expressed itself as a mostly productive, collaborative, “bipartisan”-for-the-time voting record; in Albany in the mid-2020s it expresses itself as out-of-touch heavy-handedness and open alignment with property developers and people who think rural Upstate school districts somehow have too much money.

            I think a successful 2026 primary challenge is a possibility. James has about the same approvals as Hochul but much lower disapprovals, and could probably raise a lot of money through various #Resistance channels, especially if it’s another Trump midterm…

On LED Headlights

Let’s discuss. I’m sure we can all come up with a naïve argument that these things shouldn’t be street-legal; I know multiple people who no longer feel safe driving at night because of how blinding they are if you’re not in the car or truck or whatever that has them. So what gives? Is there some specific legal or regulatory reason why they have to be allowed, or is it just that nobody’s bothered to put through a rule against them because they tend to be popular with car buyers in our antisocial and fuck-you-I’ve-got-mine-oriented age?

On Evangelicalism in Latin America

Latin American Evangelicalism has very much been ratfucked into existence there by various Republican-led State Departments but, also, I have heard that it appeals because of its dissimilarity to Catholicism. I have heard, that is, that it’s able to present itself as less corrupt and hypocritical and less politically overconcerned. All of which is demonstrably untrue, but Evangelicalism has a certain Teflon quality to it when it comes to those particular charges, because it’s so decentralized—nowhere for the buck to stop—and because we as a civilization cannot have nice things. It should go without saying that I see the growth of this kind of Christianity as a serious, direct, and quite personal cultural and sectional threat as well, which affects my ability to think about it with any sympathy.

On the Collapse of the So-Called Liberal World Order

I do not like the way the current state of the world has caused me to think and feel. I will not say “made me” or “forced me,” but “caused me to” I think is true. I unironically say things like “heiwaboke,” I treat it as a red flag rather than a green one when someone says that they are into “peace activism,” and when I rewatched “The City on the Edge of Forever” recently I was not initially sure I would be able to see Edith Keeler with any charity. I hate all of these things about my current self, and I hate feeling like this. We live in a cruel and coarse time.

            I do need to wonder if people who were perhaps similar to me in the 1930s and 1940s felt the same—the bulk of the Catholic Worker movement, for example, who temporarily broke from it, or at least from its leadership, over Dorothy Day’s no-nuance opposition to getting involved in World War II even after Pearl Harbor. There are circumstantial reasons to look at her later writing and conclude that she perhaps realized afterwards that this had been a serious mistake, but it is a serious blot on her copybook. I wonder how disillusioned people like me felt.

            I do not like to feel disillusioned. One’s illusions are a precious thing, but one only realizes that after one realizes that they are illusions, and one only realizes that they are illusions after one no longer has them. There needs to be some route to gratitude for what one still has; I know that for some people there is one, but I suppose I spend so much time dreaming the kinds of dreams that I wish to dream.

On Gender

If you, like me and like Courtney Love, want to be the girl with the most cake, what is stopping you? Where is the rub? What is your trouble? What part of that target are you unable to hit? We often hear of girls who do not have the most case, or of people who acquire the most cake without being or becoming girls.

On Wedding Culture

My mother has long felt, and raised me to feel as well, that weddings as commonly done in this country are monuments to the couple's excessive self-regard and impositions on everyone else involved—but other Americans tend not to agree with us on this.

On Various Fictional Women

Nobody knows Cordelia Flyte’s story like I do (in the sense that it’s important to understanding her and Brideshead Revisited as a whole that she is 1. a wonderful, wise, compassionate person but also 2. a fascist).

            There should be more Tar-Míriel fanwork out there that’s emotionally and morally complex without using the Z draft or going we-all-know-what-early-2010s-fandom-figure-I’m-vaguing-about-here full King’s Men apologia.

            There’s a pervasive mischaracterization of Lottie Matthews as an outgoing popular party girl that seems to be based exclusively on the fact that Courtney Eaton is really, really, really hot. The hints of pre-crash Lottie that we have in the actual show suggest that she was a weird, introverted, studious girl who disliked popularity drama and probably listened to Hole.

            You know that headline that’s like “he’s gay, she’s a lesbian, and their thirty-three-year marriage will redefine how you think of love”? I never actually read the article that that was the headline for, and I suspect I would not necessarily like everything it had to say if I were to read it, but that is Makioka Yukiko, she of the Telephone Incident and the dancing-sushi bloodlust, and her eventual husband.

            Lila dissolving-margins-brains herself into realizing, or assuming, that sending the dolls did not have the intended psychological effect, so she escalates to sending blunter and blunter Mysterious Parcels until finally for an eightieth birthday present Lenù just gets a flash drive with an MP3 of “Good Luck, Babe!” on it. It still doesn’t work.

            As for Galadriel—it’s hard to know what’s left to say about Galadriel. What is there? She’s a great character. She’s a creep. Lothlórien is one of the most terrifying places in Middle-earth. Much of what I say about Tar-Míriel also applies to her, less because there’s any deficit of thinking and writing and art about Galadriel and more because she’s oddly inexhaustible for a character so well-understood (well-understood, that is, except by people who like the pig disgusting Amazon show).

On the Locked Tomb Books and the Carole Lombard Movie Nothing Sacred

Hazel Flagg walked so Cytherea the First could run.

On Anomie

On a day, I went to pick up an online order at Walmart. Simple, right? One would assume that it was simple because online orders and the picking-up thereof are how we’re supposed to do everything now, how we’re supposed to prefer it at any rate—it’s more “convenient,” a term, or rather a way of using a term, to which I will get back later.

Anyway, I had thought so, but there is A Process now, and it starts on An App and involves another person putting things into your car.

            I did not know that, so what I did was I went to the store, I walked in, I got directed further and further away from my car by multiple greeters who could tell that I was in the store and on foot and thus should, perhaps, have explained the Process to me and explained that one is meant not to do it outside of a fucking internal combustion engine, then, when I finally got out to the loading bays, I saw signage indicating that I’d done the whole Process wrong.

            So I shlepped back to my car—through, I should add, an unpleasantly warm, humid, drippy day—and, since I had budgeted “walk into a store and go to a customer service desk” time into my errands, not “wrestle with a fucking app and then wait for some sort of confirmation” time, I realized I had to go back again tonight and do the entire process over again on a separate trip. It really made me appreciate the previous week’s civilized, human-scaled, reasonable-expectations process of “run around to two libraries asking if either of them had kept a bookmark that I accidentally returned with my copy of an Elena Ferrante book, because I got the bookmark at a church in Italy that does not have an online presence and would not have been able to get another one until some time in 2025 or 2026.”

            If I had known about this in advance, I would have just walked in and bought the speaker the old-fashioned way. But the speaker was bought and paid for and, presumably, would be brought out to the loading zone when I finally figured out The Process, so oh well.

            In any case, I went  to the library to do something else and then, while there, realized that I had a badly frayed section in my pants, in an area where with that kind of thing it matters whether or not you are wearing underwear—which I wasn’t. Fortunately I did not have to do anything after that before I could go home and change. If I had had to I think I would have committed vehicular manslaughter.

            Attempt #2 to pick up the speaker worked, but was also aggravating as all hell. This is the world of everyone being confined to their cars all of the time because relentless anomie has been plugged to us all as “convenience”—and perhaps it is “convenient,” in a way, since people will simply believe anything that advertises itself as “convenient.” If something claims to be cheap and it isn’t, you can tell; if it claims to be fast and it isn’t, you can tell; if it claims, however, to be convenient and it isn’t, there is a temptation to assume that, since “convenience” is so vague, maybe it is more “convenient” on some difficult-to-measure level that you’re just too much of a luddite to see. More often than not this level is the level on which anomie sets in and people become obsessively unhappy with and afraid of one another. At the store, one shops. One goes out to the shops and meets people in the shops. Growing up I did in fact dislike that process very much, but that was just one case among many of people who were unhappy kids in the 1990s and 2000s not realizing how good we, in fact, had it.

On the Egotism of the Summer People

Warm-weather people are the morning people of weather.

Other Topics Not Covered in This Autoflorilegium: The unconscionable treatment and constant betrayal of people who live in the Gaza Strip; New Caledonia; Great Britain; the apparently extraordinarily bad movie Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage; the very good movie Marathon Man and the virtues and vices of the schools of acting that it features; my health; other people’s health; Pope Francis’s use of the quasi-reclaimed offensive Italian slang term frociaggine; what makes a good and a bad socialist realist propaganda poster.

Greetings from the Peacock Room

I.

Recently I undertook a solo road trip to Washington, DC, one that I think aided my understanding of the country, of many things of deep importance to me, and, least importantly, of myself.

The trip to DC itself was interesting, as was the return drive, which took a different, more coastal route. Traveling often puts me in mind of the Japanese writers who perfected travel literature, as Occitan writers perfected lyric love poetry and English writers perfected the novel. Bashō Matsuo is the obvious (in certain circles) example, but we could also name Arii Shokyū, Jippensha Ikku, and Suzuki Bokushi, list just a few from the Edo period alone. I’ll describe part of the journey in a narrative mode that vaguely pastiches some of these writers:

I set off through New York down Interstate 88, through fields and hills speckled with hard snow, on a frigid evening after leaving work. Stopping at a Mirabito in the middle of nowhere for a chicken spiedie—not something I normally eat—and to fill up my gas tank, I played with the cruise control to get the mileage as economical as I could as I finished the first leg and entered Pennsylvania. I stopped for the night at a Fairfield Inn and Suites in Wilkes-Barre, in Northeastern Pennsylvania. The second day of travel, the bulk of which was in Pennsylvania, was perhaps the most interesting from a human-geographical perspective, in some ways more so than the time I spent at my final destination in the capital.

My main objectives for that day were to meet up with my friend Laurel, whom I do not see often, and to visit Centralia. Centralia, a town almost entirely abandoned because of an anthracite coal fire that has been burning underground since the 1960s, is well-known among connoisseurs of decaying, left-behind, and generally vanishing places. To the extent that the town still has life to it, that life is, touchingly, almost entirely religious; there is an active Catholic church (built on solid rock, not on burning coal) that now serves surrounding towns, and people are still being buried in Centralia’s Eastern Orthodox burying ground. (Also touching is the view from a still-active coal fire vent to a ridge on which a series of windmills stands; volvitur orbis!) The town smells about how one would expect, only the smell is so faint that it manifests as a mild headache and unpleasant aftertaste in the throat, rather than as anything that one recognizes as an odor. Before Centralia I tried and failed to get to confession at a church in Hazleton; after Centralia I proceeded to Ashland, a small town hard by where I made a spontaneous stop at a little restaurant for a fried haddock special, it having been a Lenten Friday. I had it with a strawberry milkshake; my diet that day was, in general, very bad.

Northeastern Pennsylvania is generally quite bleak, a region whose heart has been broken not only by deindustrialization but by policy choices that accompanied deinsdustrialization; there’s no iron law that technological unemployment has to end up like this, quite the contrary. It takes deliberate choices to let somewhere like this rot on the vine rather than building up new industries and new lines of work in the same general region. Reagan and Clinton both have much to answer for on this point. Also, like many other parts of my route, it’s full of overtly religious and patriotic appeals in advertising for businesses so disconnected from religion and patriotism that it gave the heebie jeebies to a New Englander like me. One small city has a “Christian Clothing” consignment store; another has a gutter cleaner whose logo has multiple separate American flags in it. It was a trip that many people from my part of the country, especially LGBT people, would have thought twice before taking. This is not to be wondered at; trans people in particular, which I’m going to define in an unfashionably objective and concrete way as “people who have a persistent discomfort or unease of some kind with the visceral aspects of what sex they are and would like at least in theory to do something about that,” are currently a political football in Middle America to a point that tends to raise real questions about one’s safety. I’ll return to this point later on in this essay.

After Centralia and Ashland, I met up with Laurel in the little town near Lancaster where she lives, no thanks to the exit I decided to take from Interstate 81. After spending about an hour with her, chatting and looking at a South-Central Pennsylvania chocolatier that she insists—correctly—is much better than Hershey’s, I got back on I-81 as quickly as possible and played a game with myself: I would drive so as to conserve gas and not need to refuel before crossing the Mason-Dixon Line into Maryland. I almost made it, but I did not want to risk getting stranded for a pride about which nobody else knew or cared; I pulled off in Greencastle, Pennsylvania, just before the Line, and refueled at a Sheetz whose pump, for some reason, did not stop automatically once the tank was full. I noticed that gas prices in the Mid-Atlantic are much higher than in New England and Upstate New York. The land was getting greener, spring rather than winter, and the sky was just turning from blue to evening-gold.

As much for the sake of it as to avoid the worst of Beltway rush hour Friday, in the gloaming I took a detour through Harpers Ferry, the first time I had ever been in the State of West Virginia. I was delighted to see that it had one of the best-preserved downtowns I have ever seen, from the standpoint of intact buildings from the period for which the town is famous. The landscape, where the Shenandoah River meets the Potomac, is craggy and dramatic even in near-dark; not for nothing is West Virginia the only state entirely covered in mountainous terrain, no matter how much Vermonters like me try to relativize the Lake Champlain basin. The John Brown Wax Museum, at least when driven past in the blue hour, looks as macabre as it should, and as inviting.

The last leg of the trip into DC—or technically into Northern Virginia, where Mary, the friend with whom I stayed for the second and third nights of the trip, lives—was not very interesting, although I did survive driving the Washington Beltway (so well-known from the phrase “Washington Beltway”), as indeed I would again the next day and the day after that.

II.

That Saturday was rainy in the morning and cloudy-to-sunny in the afternoon. This did not bother me overmuch; “rain in Northern Virginia” is an inside joke with some friends of mine, and it also meant that I was able to park in East Potomac Park without too much trouble and see the somewhat bedraggled, but still very pretty, Tidal Basin cherry blossoms without jostling enormous crowds. The last time I had been to the capital, in either 1999 or 2000—certainly before Bush took office—when I was a small child, had not been in the cherry blossom season, but I had a clear memory of the Tidal Basin and, of course, found it almost unchanged. So too with the National Mall. Some of the specific buildings and monuments that I passed were, of course, new, but nothing about the overall layout was; indeed, it had not been in 1999 or 2000 either.

This did not surprise me. DC is set up in a way that, were it an archaeological site in England, would get it called a ritual landscape without qualification or controversy. This is well-known to the point that there are conspiracy theories about it. The city is an interlocking series of gridlike, starlike, and triangular patterns, most of which are themselves relatively normal urban or suburban streets but which end up converging on the famous central features: the Washington Monument, the White House, the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, and numerous other national and constitutional structures in and around the National Mall, Tidal Basin, and Ellipse. The general approach to changing anything about the setup is additive rather than substitutive; recent structures like the World War II and Martin Luther King Memorials have simply been incorporated into previously open areas of the existing layout. (The King Memorial has a distinctly Mosaic vibe, with a rock wall split in two over which artificial waterfalls course.)

One would think that this reflects an additive principle in American civic nationalism in general, and in some ways it does, but in other ways our general approach to history as a country has actually been getting thinner and poorer over time. With someone like Christopher Columbus (who distinctly lacks a memorial or monument in the capital’s ritual landscape, although Union Station has one), the current status of fodder for flame wars about wokeness is clearly a step down from the twentieth-century status of ecumenical national hero. That, too, however, was already a step down from the nineteenth century’s more complicated and realistic view of the man. When last winter I visited a preserved 1870s schoolroom at the Bennington Museum in Vermont, I found a poem called “The Discovery of America” by an author named John Townsend Trowbridge, which tells a pat, conventional, complacent version of the story until the last stanza, then cold-cocks the Gilded Age schoolchild with:

With wondering awe, the red men saw

The silken cross unfurled.

His task was done; for good or ill,

The fatal banners of Castile

Waved o’er the Western world.

This in an otherwise approving story told about American colonial history! In the twentieth century this sort of observation became a political third rail, and now in the twenty-first it has become a culture war flashpoint. In the late nineteenth it was uncontroversial enough for publishers of primary-school readers to allow it to be made to ten-year-olds. Clearly some of the texture of American history has been sanded down here, whereas the National Mall and Tidal Basin ritual landscape just keeps adding texture, as, frankly, it should.

Americans in the 1870s had quite a lot to say about other cultures as well as about our own, which brings me to the central reason why I wanted to visit Washington: a visit to the Peacock Room, an installation artwork by James Abbott McNeill Whistler that currently occupies part of the Freer Gallery at the National Museum of Asian Art. I became aware of the Peacock Room in the early 2010s during discussions about Orientalism in the Japanese language and literature major to which I have alluded twice already, and in divinity school a few years later I did a lengthy independent-study paper about Western receptions of Buddhism that touched on some aspects of its look and feel. Thus it came up in both my undergraduate and my graduate education, and, I think, reasonably so; the style and content are indeed Orientalist, and specifically japoniste, as all hell. The room is executed mostly in gold and a vivid peacock-y teal; there are gilt fighting peacocks on the wall at one end and a painting (famous in its own right) called “The Princess from the Land of Porcelain” over a fireplace at the other; multiple owners of the room have filled it with Asian ceramics to suit their tastes. Frederick Richards Leyland, the British shipping magnate who hired first the architect Thomas Jeckyll and then Whistler to design and execute the room, was unhappy with it both aesthetically and because of the enormous fee Whistler charged; the fighting peacocks represent Leyland and Whistler and are titled “Art and Money; or, The Story of the Room.”

This is one of a very few instances of this type of conflict in which I tend to side with the industrialist over the artist. Whistler did a dramatic installation in another person’s house without adequate involvement or consent either from the house’s owner or from the original artist from whom Whistler had taken on the job. This is not, to me, so much an issue of art versus money as one of hubris versus humility. But at least the Peacock Room looks astonishing. People who behave like Whistler do about artistic commissions nowadays more often than not come out with some kind of AI drivel or, at best, art that’s no better or worse, no more or less impressive, than what the commissioning party asked for in the first place.

After the Freer Gallery I parted ways with Mary for a few hours and went on a very long walk, much of it in the company of still another friend (I meet a lot of people online). I did briefly take a bus, to get from the area around the Mall to the area around Georgetown University, which is more leafy and dense-suburban and closer to a “normal” East Coast city of Washington’s rough size. The bus routes ostensibly take cash for the most part but after the COVID year 2020 there was a push to make some app the default, like for seemingly everything else these days; the driver’s machine had some problems with the cash and I couldn’t figure out how to work the app even once I had it downloaded, but the driver, kind man!, let me on anyway.

I enjoyed meeting up with this friend; we talked about things like fascism (agin’) and the architecture of the Washington National Cathedral (fer), to which we walked through Dumbarton Oaks Park and past the Naval Observatory and up Embassy Row. (I particularly liked seeing the Italian embassy, the Wiphala flying outside the Bolivian embassy, and the aggressive pro-Ukraine propaganda throughout the residential street immediately facing the Russian embassy.) After about two hours we parted ways, because I still had to get to confession—I had been trying and failing throughout the previous week, for a variety of reasons that I personally find hilarious with the long /aɪ/ in retrospect—and then to the MLK Memorial to meet up with Mary at five o’ clock. Since my phone was by this point dying, and then dead, and since I did not really have time to sit somewhere fiddling with its infernally finicky charger port, this turned into a long and almost completely uninterrupted shlep across Washington, orienting myself by a combination of street signage, the Washington Monument, and vibes.

I walked, in total, about eleven and a half miles that day, not counting however much walking I did inside the Freer Gallery. It was worth it. My right hip, both knees, and both calves hurt for days.

III.

Let me come back again to my observation about people from my part of the country, especially people who are “queer” in whatever sense I am. I refer here to what gets called gender dysphoria, which gives me a relationship with LGBT self-concept that is indeterminate in a way that pains me; I am on the side of the concrete and the legible whenever possible. A lot of people in my position would have avoided making parts of this trip. This probably includes the eleven-and-a-half-mile hauling-of-ass through the nation’s capital; this is an almost completely unfamiliar city to me, after all. Yet I went, I did all of this, and I’m glad I did. There’s a Sylvia Plath quote that I often think about:

Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...

My situation is unlike Plath’s in many, many ways, most of which give me more freedom when it comes to things like this than she had. I too wanted and still want to be able to do these kinds of things, and I, unlike Plath, am in a position where I actually get to make a choice about it. Or it’s better to say that I have to make a choice, maybe; as with all choices, to have this one looses in some ways and binds in others. This sort of thing is, simply put, in large part why I’ve set aside any realistic prospect of outwardly expressing my subjective sense of myself to the world. I suppose I have spent too much of my life too zonked-out on Japanese literature to find this as troubling as would many; who am I, that I would be mindful of myself?

Troubling or not, self-abnegating or not, this served me well when I was poking around Centralia, or ordering the “haddie” special at the restaurant in Ashland, or undertaking the hours-long trek across the District of Chaos. “You exist in the context,” as Kamala Harris (a resident of the Naval Observatory herself) says, “of all in which you live and what came before you.” This distinctively Californian spin on the Democratic Party’s more general “you didn’t build that ethos” seems, to me, relevant here. We are discussing queerness, closetedness, travel, and, on the other hand, the sense of having been passed by or passed over that animates a lot of the cultural and political tenseness in the fruited plain. These aren’t really matters of individual identity. They’re matters of what one can bear in order to relate to other people, and what one cannot.

The Freer Gallery currently has, in addition to the Peacock Room, another Whistler exhibit, and I think this exhibit might valuably be put into conversation, as they say, with this issue about “existing in the context.” The exhibit focuses on Whistler’s streetside scenes of storefronts and working-poor houses, many in neighborhoods of Paris or London that were about to be redeveloped. The interpretation of this material is some of the most critical I’ve ever seen in any museum, in the sense of calling attention to moral problems with the artist. If Sargent painted the élite in a way that deliberately bracketed out social and political tensions around their status (he did not, but this is the common stereotype about his work), Whistler painted the poor that way, reducing them to a closely cropped individual and thus subjective ego. The cropping, in many cases, is literal; the pictures are physically very small, unlike “The Princess from the Land of Porcelain,” which is much larger than I had realized. Divorcing the subject’s ego from his or her surroundings, from the political and economic situation appurtenant to a butcher or an ironmonger or a mud lark or a lady of the evening or whatever, leaves the élite client’s, patron’s, and audience’s egos out of it. Sargent is able to criticize his subjects on a personal and psychological level; “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit” is the famous example, but I find his mother-daughter portrait of Gretchen and Rachel Warren, which is in the same room at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, at least as troubling, in a Sarah Waters sort of way. Whistler’s patrons are off the hook here because not only does he not depict them, at least not in this particular subset of his work, he doesn’t even depict the socioeconomic order that they built and that they maintain.

Whistler didn’t want to exist in the context, yet he did; I would not be able to be so critical of him otherwise. I hope if people end up as viciously critical of me and my decisions, about the world and about myself, a hundred and fifty years from now, it’ll be in connection with an achievement as impressive as the Peacock Room. I doubt it, though, and that’s okay too, because there’s no inherent virtue to either the chase after achievement or the chase after earthly memory.

IV.

After my “main” DC day I still had almost twenty-four hours before I absolutely had to start heading home. I ended up using, more or less, twenty-one of them.

A lot of what I did with that Saturday evening has to do with family history that I have around Annapolis and on the Eastern Shore. I don’t want to go into too much detail about this; I think of my family history, especially the positive parts, as having put certain deep structures at the roots of my personality that I do not now want to air out in detail. What I will say is that I had a very good and not-even-too-late dinner on Kent Island, a snapper (or bream, as some call it, such as in Sasameyuki) braised in some unidentifiable but very delicious sauce, on a bed of rice pilaf with steamed vegetables. I had all this with a glass of prosecco. It was windy and got dark faster than I would have expected, perhaps because it was so close to the spring equinox. The restaurant gave directly on the Chesapeake Bay and the lights of the Bay Bridge were insistent in the gloaming.

I also went to a Wawa in Annapolis; I did not know that there were Wawas in Annapolis. More on Wawa generally some other time.

The next morning was Palm Sunday. I took my leave of Mary—whom I did greatly enjoy spending time with; I have not talked much about my visits with the friends mentioned, or about my friends as people, but that is a matter of their privacy and not my level of interest—and went to Mass at Saint Matthew’s Cathedral, near Dupont Circle. It is a remarkable building, even though it is not a purpose-built cathedral; the Romanesque Revival art suggests somewhere like Ravenna, and there is a chapel to Saint Anthony of Padua that has beautiful frescoes of early Franciscan history. I prayed in that chapel with the text of (most of) the Canticle of the Creatures carved below the frescoes to three sides of me, then sat down for Mass under a distinctly worried-looking Saint Mark the Evangelist.

The Archbishop of Washington, Wilton Cardinal Gregory, preached, mainly, about trees. The locus classicus here is The Dream of the Rood, although one finds everything from motets to terrible Christian children’s videos on the same theme. You can probably find the homily online; it’s a pretty good one. “Pretty good” is, as will probably not surprise anybody with a quantum more familiarity with Washington than I have, unfortunately not something that can at all be said of the traffic leaving this Mass. (Incidentally, on the way out I overheard two older women arguing about whether or not “vote early, vote often” is an LBJ quote. I think I recognized one of their voices from cable news.) In part because the weather was now fair—and how beautiful the cherry trees were when I drove along the Tidal Basin!—it took me an hour longer than I expected to get out of the District for a supposedly planned-ahead lunch with my editor at a Catholic website for which I write. The lunch was in a very suburban place, which I have to say I do not mind as much as I once did. The conversation and company were good, but of course had to be cut much shorter than would have been the case had I had a more reasonable way of coping with and arranging things around that traffic.

From there on home, an adventure itself and one not necessarily as pleasant or as edifying as the drive down through Pennsylvania. Several points stick out. Before entirely leaving the Washington area, I stocked up on Old Bay as requested and required by a Marylander colleague back home. In the Eastern Shore, I listened to gospel radio out of Baltimore until the station gave out; this was a mere couple of days before the bridge collapse in that city. (One standout was a partially spoken-word rendition of the story of the empty tomb; I’d love to find it again some day but I did not look for the title and the name of the choir in time.) From the Eastern Shore on Route 301 I crossed into the State of Delaware, where the constant smoke of some kind of horrible DuPont chemical plant rises up between the branches of flowering fruit trees and the struts of white bridges. The state has been a point of amusement for my housemate Veronica and me for years now; I stopped and bought her a two-and-a-half-dollar refrigerator magnet that reads “Delightful Delaware,” nothing more, against a simplistic gradient background.

From Delaware one crosses, of course, into New Jersey, a state which is full of places of my memory. I lived there between the ages of eight and fifteen and then on and off, because my parents were still there, till the age of twenty. I owe to my time there many of my tastes and habits, a few lasting friendships, and a certain feeling of push-pull with ugly or disreputable places; this last is a feeling of which I am very protective. Once when my friend Antonio told me that I could not invoke home-state immunity-from-criticism privileges for every state I had ever lived in, I chose to invoke it only for New Jersey from then on; “bold choice,” he said, “but I understand it strategically.”

I’ll elide this, for the same reason I elided some of the stuff about my family history around the Chesapeake Bay. I will say only that I returned home very late at night, after a sparkling snowstorm with an underlayer of power-line-downing ice.

An Autoflorilegium

The foregoing is a collection of my thoughts on a variety of topics, mostly having to do with what gets broadly termed pop culture, over the past five or so years. Some are gleaned from other platforms like fora or multiblogging websites, others from my personal notes about things that I watched or read or listened to or experienced. It is arranged by topic.

On Taylor Swift

As a Taylor Swift fan who cordially dislikes gridiron football (I think this combination of tastes is what in right-wing grievance lingo is called “cultural Marxism”), I hope the “synergy” in which she is for some reason to do with the NFL now loses its luster as soon as possible.

I haven’t been to any of the Eras Tour shows (I don't exactly make “Taylor Swift tickets” money as a museum archivist, and even if I did, I overstimulate easily), but I’ve seen a fair number of fan bootleg clips from them and it’s really an astounding spectacle. We’re talking a setlist that rivals your typical Springsteen concert, pyrotechnics that could seriously injure Swift if she gets sloppy with her choreography, lighting effects and stage design that seem precision-engineered to remind one at every moment that she is an overgrown theater kid with an unlimited budget and at least one unmedicated mood disorder—why be to do with football as well?

This is not apropos of the above (except in the ways that it is), but I have, as I’ve said, been spoiling to tell people off about this:

Substantively, strong-to-dispositive arguments can and should be made that Taylor Swift’s actual ouevre is a lot less monomaniacally obsessed with buttressing heteronormativity than her public image tends to suggest. This shows up in her choices of hypotexts, in her aesthetic and intellectual relationships with other artists, and in specific songs like (off the top of my head) “Wonderland,” “Seven,” and “Ivy.” This doesn’t mean that Taylor Swift the human person is gay or bisexual, but it’s at least a little bit likelier to mean that than it is to mean that Taylor Swift the cultural product (an ungainly generation-absorbing chimera better understood by drinking heavily while watching Millennium Actress than by experiencing or researching anything in the mind-independent physical world) is “queer.” She isn’t, and people aren’t really saying that she is. These are three separate Taylor Swifts. No one worth listening to is arguing that the one who’s to do with gridiron football now for some reason is gay.

What’s demoralizing about every time Gaylor (both in the narrow sense of speculation about Taylor Swift not being straight and in the broad sense of the LGBT side of Taylor Swift’s fandom) makes mainstream news is the hostility to which LGBT Swifties, especially lesbian Swifties, are subjected. It can get shockingly overt, to the point of making one wonder how much other homophobia is just barely repressed in our society rather than having actually been overcome, but it also shows up in coded forms. Foremost among these is the idea that Gaylor speculah (to use an old anime fandom word) is somehow more egregious and insulting than other kinds of invasive speculah about Taylor Swift’s affective life, an idea that only makes any sense at all if you do on some level think that saying that someone is gay or bisexual is derogatory. The bemusement with which LGBT people who like more-firmly-queer art and do not like Taylor Swift tend to react is a bit more understandable, but still depressing to see because of the no-true-Scotsman element and the apparent lack of awareness that millions of people like Taylor Swift and also like Jen Cloher and Rina Sawayama and Boygenius and Killing Eve and so on.

In conclusion, Gaylor is a land of contrasts.

On Sports

Speaking of football, but not of Taylor Swift, the legalization of sports gambling has made mainstream sports TV, ESPN and the like, damn near unwatchable for anyone who isn’t a gambler, and I know people with otherwise vigorously libertarian views on gambling and other (of what used to be called) “vice” issues who think it was a mistake from a sheer quality-of-life standpoint.

It seems like such a shame to see sports in terms of bets about outcomes anyway, and this fuels my aesthetic dislike for sabermetrics as well; obviously it “matters” who “wins,” but in other countries, Tunisia for instance, I have seen large celebrations of local soccer teams that did not even win, just because they played a good game—and I myself liked both the Red Sox and the Orioles better when they won less.

On the 2023 Writer’s Guild of America Strike

Not only does a television writers' strike not cause much harm, out-and-out automating cultural production does. Too, if human writers really can't produce anything better than whatever ChatGPT’s great-grandscion program spews out for Avengers Wars 69, then we’re already halfway down the road from Rossetti’s “Amor Mundi.”

The only current scripted American TV show that I’m actively following is Yellowjackets, which genuinely could not be written, at all, without human consideration. If subsequent seasons suck because of this then I’ll be upset, but not nearly as upset as I’ll be if the strike fails and in ten years nobody has anything to watch that’s better-written than a fin de millénaire car commercial.

Moreover there have by definition to be some things that aren’t automated in order for human society to not just be that one wojak comic of someone hooked into a Harry Potter-themed VR headset while on a morphine drip.

On the Remake of the Film Mean Girls and Its Discontents

For Regina George being on TikTok now, she doesn't default to saying “fucking kys” nearly as much as is realistic for a high school bully born in ~2006. I'm not sure I'd say this ruins the tone—Mean Girls isn't exactly Heathers or Jawbreaker to begin with—but the tone is noticeably different, especially given instances of outright bowdlerization when in the original they call people sluts or dykes. There’s also a failure to accurately reflect the huge differences between bullying twenty years ago and bullying today, even though everyone is on social media (i.e., again, Regina should always be telling people to kill themselves, probably from behind seven burner accounts). We're left with unnecessarily softened forms of bullying behaviors that were mostly extirpated from American schools over a decade ago, all being filmed for TikTok for some reason. Some of the songs are really fun, and there are interesting and considered acting choices being made, particularly by the women playing Regina and Janis. The woman playing Cady is a bit more questionable, but that's interesting in itself since it means that she comes off as genuinely offputting and difficult to understand from the perspective of the characters who have been socialized normally.

On Various Movies That I Watched in June 2019, Written at That Time and Largely Unedited

Tolkien (2019)

This is a paint-by-numbers biopic that at more than a few points actively bored me and that felt way longer than it actually was; I would not see it again, at least not in its entirety. It fudges the facts in ways that sometimes make its subject look worse rather than better than he actually was and its treatment of his religious background is perfunctory at best. However, it’s not completely fatuous, not compared to actively audience-insulting biopics like The Babe Ruth Story or that Lifetime movie about J.K. Rowling; it does dramatize some of the key moments of Tolkien’s early life pretty well, its lead actors (Nicholas Hoult as Tolkien and Lily Collins as his eventual wife Edith) more or less know what they’re doing, and the production designs are pretty. A few early scenes with Tolkien’s mother Mabel, who is often overlooked when people discuss his early influences, were especially welcome to me; I particularly liked one where she puts on a magic lantern show for him and his brother.

From Up on Poppy Hill (2011)

With this Studio Ghibli movie we have a “save the historic building” plotline wedded with surprising grace to what in other hands would probably have been a shockingly melodramatic emotional arc involving the female protagonist’s male love interest finding out his true parentage. It’s set in Japan in the early 1960s and when I watched it with my mother a lot of the material culture and even some of the songs felt familiar from her 1960s American childhood. These moments of recognition and nostalgia are common with Ghibli movies and I felt them too even though I was born in 1993. People say that Japan is a socially conservative country, and they’re right to say it, not because of “hot-button issues” but because much of the country looks basically as it does in this movie even now. The cute, fun-but-contemplative, jazzy soundtrack is a particular standout.

Suspiria (1977)

Midnight-movie stalwart Jessica Harper and her friend Stefania Casini go up against an evil coven at her posh European ballet school in this gore-soaked Italian horror classic directed by Anthony Bourdain’s father-in-law. A female friend of mine says that this movie looks the way a heavy period feels; its chief strength is its lurid cinematography, and Harper’s mega-ingenue balsa-wood acting style would go on to serve her well in the lesser-known Rocky Horror Picture Show sequel Shock Treatment. Harper is in her late twenties in this but looks maybe nineteen after wardrobe and makeup; her character is an interesting missing link between classic Gothic heroines like Mina Harker from Dracula and The Turn of the Screw’s nameless governess and more proactive but also more morally and (sometimes) sexually innocent “final girls” like the girl from Scream and Buffy the Vampire Slayer from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Field of Dreams (1989)

It surprises me that there’s never been any kind of fad for this movie in Millennial social media circles. In so many ways it’s tailor-made for “Tumblr”-ish aesthetic tastes—it’s pervaded with American Gothic imagery with its unexplained disembodied voices and time-traveling baseball ghosts manifesting out of cornfields, Kevin Costner’s character is defined by proto-Chris Evans nonthreatening flannel-and-dad-jeans masculinity, it has an unsympathetic character being called a Nazi in public, it’s an unintentional eighties period piece in a way that people were all over two or three years ago, and on top of all this it’s a well-written and visually beautiful movie. It’s possible that the sports-driven premise and the fact that the movie is a Father’s Day staple and lots of people have awful relationships with their fathers put the social media scene off of it, but if so, I think that’s a shame.

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018)

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is both a prequel and a sequel to the original Mamma Mia!, and that fact, which sounds at first like a gimmick, is in fact exactly what makes this otherwise insubstantial movie work and resonate at a surprisingly deep level. It would be ridiculous to say that this is a religious movie in the sense that The Song of Bernadette and Kundun are religious movies. What it is, however, is a movie that is at least occasionally able to look beyond its own boundaries to imagine an eternal world of total significance and utter joy. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is a rigidly-enforced no-irony zone in which past, present, and future; sea, sand, sun, and sky; art and nature; “and we ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted” are fused into a bright blue eternity whose beginning is in its end, through a riot of unselfconscious musical joy, in saecula saeculorum.

On the Battle of the Sexes

People who get set off by every little thing have always been with us. Thinking of it as a recent phenomenon specially linked to women or to feminism strikes me as confirmation bias.

On Bob Katter, Australian Politician

Every three months, a person is torn to pieces by a moose in Northern New England.

On Jim Jordan, US Congressman

A few ideas for unconventional Speaker candidates, given the GOP's demonstrated preference for abusive sports coaches:

Jerry Sandusky
Joe Paterno’s ghost
That Jim Foster guy from Northwestern’s baseball team
John Kreese from The Karate Kid
Ben Scott from Yellowjackets
Rex from Napoleon Dynamite
Eteri Tutberidze
Tonya Harding’s ex-husband
My high school gym teacher, from what I can remember

On Elena Ferrante

There’s apparently serious controversy among meridionalists about whether Ferrante is sufficiently critical of her namesake protagonist’s attitude at the end of L’amica geniale (the first book in the series that, in Italian, has the same title). As of this writing I have not finished the series and so I am keeping an open mind; I think how angry I am at Lenù right now is intentional on Ferrante’s part, but we’ll see how things evolve from here.

Galling, either way, that someone would make an active choice to ignore a real class conflict happening in real time in the same room as her in favor of listening to some guy bloviate about his trick of writing magazine articles about class conflict by regurgitating other articles and ISTAT papers. Plebs this, plebs that; Lila deserves better, especially since Lenù’s thoughts and feelings about Lila herself—we all have some idea what I mean by this; “dissolving margins”; “I had made a place for her in me”—are also so vague and self-evading, things she just won’t look straight at no matter how much mental drudgery she has to put into looking at other things instead.

Not that that is entirely her fault. Every time I think the teachers in L'amica geniale can’t get more classist, they come out with some horrifying shit like “Lila’s mental beauty all went to her tits and ass,” said directly to another teenage girl. It’s not even classism in the economic sense, since Lila is one of the wealthiest characters at this point, but that makes it all the more pernicious since, especially if you are the Smarted Gifted Kid Who’s Good at School, it’s more difficult to recognize it as classism rather than as a sound appraisal of the value of an education. It is to be mourned that Lenù eventually loses the ability to see through it.

I know that Ferrante is doing this for a reason and I know what that reason is, but every time Lenù’s narration refers derisively to the Neapolitan language as “dialect” my skin crawls. And that starts early on.

Other Topics Not Covered in This Autoflorilegium: the 1990s Children’s Book Series Animorphs; the 2006 Anime Simoun; the Locked Tomb Books; the Band Boygenius and Its Discontents; Most Matters Directly Involving Religion; Preservation; Touch-Aversion; the Egotism of the Summer People

Must Art Be Good?

For much of the Early Modern period the French were, to most tastes, not at good at playwrighting as the English. This was not because France lacked talented people in its theaters and its literary culture; there were Racine, Molière, and Corneille, to name just a few. The problem was, rather, one of standards being set at the cultural level, especially at the level of the elite culture; French playwrights were still expected to adhere to certain “unities” that artificially constrained things like time and setting, whereas in English theater Shakespeare and most playwrights after him, as well as some before him, had exuberantly dispensed with the unities and with the absolutist, prescriptive attitude towards “good” narrative that they represented. Some playwrights, especially Molière, occasionally mocked the unities, but the fact that they had to be responded to in the first place constrained the dramatic tradition in the French language for well over a hundred years, even as the language and the Parisian literary class that spoke it exploded with creativity in other genres.

Today we can look back on the unities, laugh, and mourn what could have been in terms of French theater in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is easy, however, to get complacent about this. The truth is that current artistic production, too, has rules for good art, especially good narrative art, that seem objective to us most of the time but are in fact just as culture-bound as were the unities. It is not at all obvious across all times and places that The Lord of the Rings having non-naturalistic dialogue and character writing that progressively reveals static personalities to the reader are objective problems with the text. It has these “flaws” insofar as current readers often dislike books that are written this way. Tolkien's audience first and foremost was himself, and the fact that a large audience of other people like his writing as well was, for him, a happy accident. This is without even getting into more expressly political or ideological aspects of artistic taste like the idea that a story should seek to “represent” the experiences of an abstract intended reader. I asked my mother once what she thought of representation as a priority in narrative art and she said that, when she was growing up, she wanted to read about practically anyone other than lower-middle-class white Catholic girls from suburban New England, an experience of the world that she already knew more about than she cared to by virtue of her self-awareness. In that sense my mother was more “represented by” the characters in books by authors like Kipling and Hardy than by those in, for instance, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, because her priorities as a reader were being represented and it isn't self-evident that every reader's priorities will include self-recognition. This is without even reaching the cases of those who might learn new things about themselves by encountering the apparent other in fiction, like religious converts, transgender people, and people inspired to learn a new language after reading or watching something in translation.

Some of these newer norms for “good art” are religious or religion-related in character. Yellowjackets, my favorite current television show and one that I think has the potential to be the most interesting mainstream American television show of the 2020s, is a survival horror story that treats the question of supernatural agency within the plot with a light (or, in less well-considered moments, muddied) touch. The effect is somewhat akin to that achieved in classic folk horror movies like The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General. Are the characters having the severe psychological problems that they are because of literal, external supernatural agency, or is the darkness entirely located within them? We don’t know for sure, although there are suggestions that something genuinely spiritual or paranormal is occurring, but this does not stop certain viewers of the show from arguing for the sake of “realism” that the supernatural must be absent—as if people who believe in the supernatural never have psychological problems in real life. The effect of this is to imply that what someone who has supernatural or religious beliefs sees in her own experiences of the world is deficient and can never rise to the same significance as what someone with no such beliefs sees in the experiences of her “believer” peer; the idea that Yellowjackets is a show where the supernatural events aren’t actually occurring isn’t itself a prescriptive or exclusionary one, but the idea that it “should” be that type of show for “realism’s” sake certainly is. Never mind that in many other societies in the past it would be seen as unusual for this kind of story not to include supernatural forces. As Doris Bargen points out in A Woman’s Weapon, the well-known episode in Genji monogatari in which Lady Rokujō possesses Lady Aoi and causes her to die in childbirth reflects Genji’s origin in a society where attempting to possess people one disliked was simply what one did as a woman in certain types of social situations.

Sometimes the implied preference for secularity as a precondition for artistic merit affects entire genres. Most of us take it for granted that, put frankly, Christian contemporary music, especially of the sort that burgeoned in Evangelical and some Catholic spaces in the 1990s, sucks. Why? Is it because it is religiously motivated? So is half of Bach. Is it because the artists are mostly right-wing? So was Ian Curtis. Is it because they tend to have bad taste in other media? So do tons of secular pop stars. Is it because it prioritizes achieving effects other than maximum artistic and technical ambitiousness? In the age of poptimism, that usually does not matter. I think the issue is less any of this and more that this music has the “vibes” of being for a narrow religious interest—which, to be fair, it is; the genre, especially today, pillarizes itself from outside culture in a way that gives the impression that most Christian contemporary artists would rather not be considered “good” by secular critics. If there were a Natalie Merchant song from the same time period as Rebecca St. James’s rendition of “Be Thou My Vision,” even if it was a cover of a hymn (and there are Natalie Merchant songs that are!), where halfway through the track the lyrics cut out and a combination of reverb effects and hi-hat cymbals and helicopter sound effects from a bad Vietnam War movie started eating the melody alive, the secular music press would take that song dead seriously. St. James, however, probably does not want the secular music press to take her “Be Thou My Vision” dead seriously, because the foolishness of God is wiser than Pitchfork.

Readers will have noted a generally author-focused approach in this essay so far; this is because I think that the pop reception of Roland Barthes and the “death of the author” harms attempts to assess art as a process of communication between a creator, or creative community, and an audience. The pop-Barthesian reader is solipsistic and is unable to assess what she thinks makes art good or bad because she is unable to assess the social and cultural pressures on the creator or creative community. This is once again relevant to Yellowjackets, a show whose fandom tends to misattribute its flaws to the screenwriters even though most of them are demonstrably the fault of other people, such as network and production executives. It is also relevant to essentially anything that is read or watched in translation, because pop-Barthesianism puts forward John Dryden’s attempt in his translation of the Georgics “to make Virgil speak such English, as he wou’d himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present Age” as the only kind of good or even conceptually apprehensible translation, for what amount to ideological reasons.[1] A translator cannot, instead, with Friedrich Schleiermacher, seek to build a conversation between two people, the (abstract structure of the) author and the (abstract structure of the) reader, unless she is willing to try to make the reader have a conversation with a corpse. Certainly it looks a bit morbid for a translator who takes the death of the author seriously to attempt to lead the reader towards the original author rather than vice versa, as was Schleiermacher’s own preference. Pop-Barthesianism’s extremely low understanding of “authorship” overthrows the tyranny of the author at the expense of imposing a tyranny of the reader that takes on overtones of cultural supremacism whenever the reader’s values are closer than the author’s to those values that are culturally dominant. (Barthes as a critic of the “dead white men” canon may or may not have believed that this was possible, but it obviously is.) Combine this with straightforward misunderstanding of what the artistic production process actually involves, as in the Yellowjackets example, and one gets the basic conditions for the infamously entitled reading style of modern media fandoms.

I do not mean to suggest that criticizing the quality of a piece of art or writing is always ungenerous or entitled on the part of an audience, only that it should be undertaken with some humility about what “quality” means, and what aspects of a work might come across as quasi-objectively good or bad to some generations of readers, or fans, but not others. I often see younger people recommending older anime series like Haibane-Renmei and the original Trigun with caveats about the sketchy art styles and choppy animation; I, conversely, can’t watch many newer anime series because they are so smooth and high-definition that they make me feel like I am swimming in a vat of motor oil. I can practically hear the rank-and-file animators breaking out into “The Red Flag” in my head. Arguing that a piece of art or writing or music “just isn’t good,” or for that matter that it “just is good,” is never as simple as one thinks it will be when the argument begins.

❦

[1] Dryden had, as we say nowadays, bad takes on the unities as well. In An Essay on Dramatick Poesie he accuses Shakespeare’s history plays of seeking “not to imitate or paint Nature, but rather to draw her in miniature, to take her in little; to look upon her through the wrong end of a Perspective, and receive her Images not onely much less, but infinitely more imperfect then the life.” It’s not impossible to imagine him having the same problem with the supernatural elements of Yellowjackets, the dialogue in The Lord of the Rings, or the didacticism of Christian rock “if he had been born in America, and in this present Age.”

One Thesis on a Morality of Art

A principle that occurs to me when it comes to “separating art from the artist,” a concept and verbal formula that I think is stupid, misleading, and mendacious to begin with, is that on top of everything else it frankly depends upon the quality of the art. If we are going to use flippant aesthetic terminology in order to have half-baked discussions of morals, it ought to be used in reference to aesthetic and moral ideas that are themselves at least vaguely proportional in terms of scale.

Let’s take music as an example. Claudio Monteverdi was a favorite of the hilariously corrupt Pope Paul V, but this relationship gave the world some of the best religious music ever composed. Richard Wagner was so obviously antisemitic that not even the Bayreuth Festival people bother any longer to deny it, but he gave us the drone note at the beginning of Das Rheingold. Artie Shaw physically abused Ava Gardner for reading Forever Amber, then divorced her and married the author of Forever Amber, but his clarinet work has yet to be surpassed and he gave us one of the most influential recordings of the sublime “Begin the Beguine.” Roger Waters is a godawful tankie, but “Wish You Were Here” is almost as sublime as “Begin the Beguine.” Billy Corgan did…something to Emilie Autumn while they were dating in the early 2000s that is not my place to speculate about, but he gave us “Bullet with Butterfly Wings.” Compare all that to someone like, say, the insufferable edgelord nepo baby Matty Healy, who has been in the entertainment news a lot of late. Part of why we ought to be less tolerant of Matty Healy than of Roger Waters is that Healy, simply, does not produce anything whose aesthetic qualities come as close to offsetting his moral problems as “Wish You Were Here” comes to offsetting Waters’s. Healy has the personal habits and worldview of an edgy bro with a crappy boy band, and the music that that crappy boy band produces reflects this, whereas much of Pink Floyd’s output sounds “as if” it could have been written and performed by someone who does not engage in Putin apologia or “blood and soil but woke” anti-Zionism.

Speaking more generally, aesthetic qualities as a rule cannot offset lack of moral qualities because morality is more important than aesthetics. Almost everything that people value artistically, or politically or interpersonally for that matter, can, should, and must be sacrificed if that is what needs to be done to avoid serious moral lapses. On that note it is also much easier to read or look at or listen to older art without enabling these people by giving them one’s money. Monteverdi, Wagner, and Shaw are all long-dead; Pink Floyd and the Smashing Pumpkins both have discographies that are very easy to find on CD or vinyl in secondhand stores (younger people might have to buy CD players or turntables on which to play these hard copies, but that is not too difficult a task for anyone who is not an insufferably presentist, Whiggery-addled ghoul). I’m sure Matty Healy’s oeuvre is remarkably easy to pirate, and I wish his fans joy of it. But after a certain point aesthetic judgments do need to be made in order for moral questions to be approached in a way that feels truthful and compelling.

Divine Right of the Girlboss Downline

When I was growing up in the late 2000s as what people call a “transfeminine” person, an identity that I would later start, and then stop, publicly claiming for reasons that I do not care to discuss, I watched an awful lot of bad anime. I watched plenty of good anime too, and as I wrote in my essay “Heyday Heisei and Rewatch Reiwa” I think a strong argument can be made that the medium, and especially its fandom, were better and healthier fifteen years ago than they are now. Even so, plenty of crap was being put out in the 2000s, some of which was uninteresting, stagey, quasipornographic schlock. There was plenty of stagey, quasipornographic schlock that was interesting, too—I still wholeheartedly enjoy Black Lagoon, and I’m told even Elfen Lied holds up if you watch it in the right frame of mind—but that is not what I want to discuss right now. What I want to discuss is a deliberately sedate, very conservative series, one that is shockingly long for how little happens in it and was shockingly popular for how niche one would expect its appeal to be. I speak of Maria-sama ga miteru, usually translated Maria Watches over Us, a hypnotically slow-paced and minute series about not-quite-lesbian not-quite-Catholic students at a posh girls’ high school. It aired in four seasons between 2004 and 2009, it adapted the first two-thirds or so of a serialized novel series with the same title that came out between 1998 and 2012, and I find little to say in its favor except that it commits to its offputting premise wholeheartedly and understands the characters and relationships that result exceptionally well.

            Maria-sama tells the story of Fukuzawa Yumi, a scholarship student at Lillian Girls’ Academy, a Catholic high school in a leafy suburb of Tokyo. Lillian has what is called the “sœur system,” an institutionalized mentorship organized into linear chains that take on romantic overtones sort of like the chain marriages in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. An older girl will offer a rosary necklace to an underclasswoman, and if the underclasswoman accepts she will become the older girl’s petite sœur (French for little sister). The maximum number of active members in a sœur lineage at any time is three, the number of years in the Japanese high school curriculum, but many alumnae maintain close friendships, and in a few cases more, with their former sœurs for their entire lives. The system has been going on for about a century—the school was founded in 1905 and the series appears to take place around or a hair before Y2K—and has implications for how Lillian is run since three sœur lines monopolize the Yamayurikai, a student government that appears to regulate most aspects of extracurricular life. In the first season of the show—the first few novels in the series—Yumi becomes the petite sœur of the beautiful, aloof, aristocratic, short-tempered Ogasawara Sachiko, who inducts her into the Yamayurikai. The series then develops Sachiko’s grande sœur (the phlegmatic Mizuno Yōko) and the members and associates of the other two Yamayurikai lineages. The overall structure is a bildungsroman in which Yumi learns to confidently wield social power within this system despite her relative humble class status and initially poor self-image.

            I generally take it on faith that other people find some or most elements of this premise offputting. I don’t, because it is a pitch-perfect throwback to a body of pop literature and ephemera that I have studied extensively and about which I am enthusiastic academically and professionally. This is the Japanese women’s and teen girls’ magazine and serialized novel literature of the early-to-mid-twentieth century, from roughly 1900 to 1960. Key figures in this milieu would include the artists Takehisa Yumeji and Nakahara Jun’ichi, the translator Muraoka Hanako (famous for her efforts to translate Anne of Green Gables into Japanese despite the wartime government’s denomination of it as “enemy literature”), and above all the writer Yoshiya Nobuko. Yoshiya, a more-or-less-out lesbian herself but one who attained wealth and fame by not shocking the establishment overmuch, specialized in writing about what in the West was called romantic friendship; much of her fiction about the subject is almost identical to Maria-sama in narrative focus, theme, and tone. (Stylistically Yoshiya was a bit bolder; she wrote in an excited way full of exclamation marks, Western loanwords, and nonstandard use of onomatopoeia and phonetic glossing, a style that most literary critics in Japan despised then and despise now. I have translated Yoshiya’s prose and she does not make it easy.)

            Anyone who has read George Orwell’s excellent essay “Boys’ Weeklies” should be able to imagine what this body of literature was like in a roughly accurate way. It had memorable but not particularly complex characters, an aesthetic and semiotic repertoire stressing stability and comfort, a preference for very sedate and low-stakes storytelling, and a tendency to provoke moral panic among the parents and grandparents of its readership whenever its messages seemed insufficiently oriented to social control. Part of what the Maria-sama series is interested in paying homage to is, thus, a defunct understanding of the world in which, as the Orwell essay puts it, “Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever.” A quick overview of the main characters, and what their storylines seem to be intended to tell the audience, makes this clear.

            Each of the three Yamayurikai families gets a somewhat different set of plot emphases, although all of them ultimately support and comment on Yumi’s journey to maturity in one way or another. Yumi and Sachiko’s lineage, the Rosa chinensis lineage, gets plotlines dealing mostly with emotional self-regulation and, to an extent, class distinctions. The Rosa gigantea lineage, consisting of Satō Sei, Tōdō Shimako, and later in the series Nijō Noriko, is generally angstier and gets most of the storylines that deal with religion per se; the only point in the series at which Lillian’s Catholic identity is stressed over against other religions present in Japan is an episode that has Shimako and Noriko get outed as sharing an interest in Buddhism. (Shimako is from a Buddhist priestly family; Noriko has an autistic-seeming special interest in Buddhist statuary, an art form with which suburban and small-town Japan is positively teeming.) The Rosa foetida lineage, consisting of Torii Eriko, Hasekura Rei, and Shimazu Yoshino, live in a psychic universe somewhat closer to what most people probably think of as normal high school experience; they are concerned with sports, health problems, and learning how to delineate their sœur system commitments from other types of relationships. That the series treats all this as ultimately secondary compared to Yumi and Sachiko’s generally more refined and genteel worries is traditional for the genre and part of its generally conservative worldview.

            This brings us to one facet of Maria-sama ga miteru of which I took special note when I rewatched it with my roommate over the past year, which is the show’s peculiar political stance. It is—I am not going to mince words here—thoroughly extreme-right, but it represents the extreme right in a hypothetical world in which the center is the radical feminist commune from “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” This is reflected in its infamous (in some circles) paucity of actual lesbian relationships, although as I will discuss further on in this essay there are multiple major characters who do actually seem to be lesbians in the normal sense as well as in the sense of partaking in Lillian’s institutionalized situational sexuality. The fact that the situational sexuality is institutionalized is the main way in which the series touches on politics. It is not interested in usual Japanese rightist gripes like World War II apologia and support for the sexual double standard—quite the contrary; the narrative implicitly but quite strongly disfavors men, once they start actually showing up in the Maria-sama universe, which takes some time—but it is intensely interested in questions of political legitimacy. Its stance on those questions is close to unreconstructed divine-right royalism; the linear passage of membership in the Yamayurikai through the sœur system, which in this context operates much like the early Roman Emperors’ practice of adopting their intended successors, is presented as right, stable, morally and culturally appropriate, and more important than the wishes of the individual characters. Two plotlines have characters outside the three ruling sœur lines run for the Yamayurikai and get crushed; both characters are sympathetic but they are presented as having personal dysfunctions that impel them to run against the Leviathan’s chosen avatars. Shimako, the “insider” candidate in the first of these two plotlines, does not even want the position, but it is not up to her; she heads the body politic whether she likes it or not, and if she does not like it, she should not have accepted Sei’s rosary in the first place. All of which is to say that, in the show’s moral imagination, Lillian Girls’ Academy succeeds where the ancien régime failed, because it is small enough to enforce the succession through interpersonal relationships and because France had the misfortune of being ruled by people with cooties.

II.

One way in which Maria-sama “liberalizes” relative to its early-twentieth-century foremothers is in its diminished degree of interest in shunting its characters into adult heterosexual relationships. This is, to many tastes, damning with faint praise; I have close lesbian friends who find the series infuriating since it is indisputably beyond coy about the relationships between girls that it depicts. Even so, whereas quite a few of the stories in, for instance, the early Yoshiya anthology Hana monogatari end with girls getting up and “graduating” to heterosexuality (Yoshiya did not, of course, do this herself), or even focus to begin with on married adult women reminiscing on their girlhood loves, Maria-sama depicts those loves while they are happening and ends with most of them intact. To a somewhat lesser extent this is true even of the books, which cover more time and thus transition more of the characters into adult life but still show little interest in rushing to pair them up at the end. Yoshiya might have felt the need—or, to be fairer to her, might have been made to feel the need—to have Yumi meet a nice man and settle down at the end of the series, or in some kind of epilogue. Konno Oyuki, the woman who wrote the Maria-sama novels, does not do this.

            In fact, in one episode of the show’s fourth and final season, “The Sigh of the Red Rose,” Yumi has a remarkable conversation with Sachiko’s arranged fiancé Suguru, a gay man who does not love her. (The novels establish that Suguru is bisexual and simply happens not to love Sachiko in particular, but in the show he does seem to be gay.) The conversation is elliptical, and words like “gay” or “lesbian” are never used for Yumi herself, but Suguru makes it clear that he sees a commonality between Yumi and himself, a disposition towards love that they share and that many of the other characters seem on the surface to share but in fact do not. When she asks him what, ultimately, he is to her, he says that he is her dōshi, a word that means “comrade” in senses like brother in arms, kindred spirit, or extended family member. It does not take a quick spin through Psychopathia Sexualis to figure out what is happening here—although, conversely, the fact that the conversation is still allusive and euphemistic raises ultimately unanswered questions about how comfortable the series is with its own subject matter.

            The other example of overt homosexuality in this otherwise classically pseudo-gay series is better-known, comes earlier in the show, and raises that question even more dramatically and in a way that leaves even more unresolved because it is further removed from the core Yumi-Sachiko relationship. Sei, a major character in the first season who spends most of her time preparing for college and aggressively flirting with Yumi before becoming more peripheral once she graduates in the second season, gets called to the principal’s office for allegedly having written a pulpy novel called The Forest of Thorns. The Forest of Thorns is about a doomed lesbian affair at an all-girls’ Catholic high school that is obviously based on Lillian and writes in fervent, sometimes angry terms of the effect that one partner’s over-the-top piety had on the other when the former broke off the relationship. The teachers and principal suspect that Sei wrote this because the plot is very similar to an open-secret relationship that she had with a student named Shiori before meeting her eventual petite sœur Shimako. (Shiori is a common name for this type of character, for some reason; Revolutionary Girl Utena also has someone with that name who is dealing with internalized homophobia in a flaky, selfish, and destructive way.)

            It turns out that the actual author of The Forest of Thorns is someone else—an adult (indeed aging), very successful novelist who went to Lillian forty or fifty years prior and is still working through an experience there that was almost beat-for-the-beat the same as Sei’s experience with Shiori. This, again, raises questions about the sœur system and whether it masks significantly more dysfunctional homophobia-inflected dynamics between the girls at Lillian. The series, again, does not answer these questions. Instead the main effect of this storyline is to establish that Sei isn’t just a comedic slacker or a flippant sex pest but someone with actual reasons for her closeness to the much more sedate and thoughtful Shimako. They share an outsider status, Sei because she is gay in a more substantive sense than her schoolmates and Shimako because her father is a Buddhist priest and she knows little about Catholicism despite being interested in the religion. Sympathetic viewers might note that this is an affirming framing both of homosexuality and of interreligious contact, because Sei and Shimako are framed more approvingly than are the people who are suppressing or hassling them. Unsympathetic viewers, conversely, might note that representing Sei as a tragic eternal outsider is a treatment to which Shimako is not subjected; she is integrated into the Lillian community on mutually agreeable terms after a storyline in the second season dealing with her and Noriko’s shared Buddhist connections.

            What to make, then, of Maria-sama ga miteru’s enthusiastic reception at the time among audiences interested in lesbian anime, both in Japan and in the West? The simplest answer, at least as far as the West is concerned, is that lesbian anime of the 1990s and 2000s did not appeal to the same sorts of audiences as most other lesbian media; the anime fandom writ large already selected for weird, reticent, mildly asocial people who were often unlucky in love (I touch on this in “Heyday Heisei and Rewatch Reiwa” but it is not a primary concern of that essay), and people in that fandom who were interested in series with gay themes were no exception. As far as Japan is concerned, I think the throwback element goes some way towards explaining the appeal. An American TV series that deliberately aped the lesbian pulp novels of the 1950s would probably find a loyal audience pretty quickly as well.

III.

The Rosa foetida line—Eriko, Rei, and Yoshino—have storylines with perhaps a bit more distance from Maria-sama ga miteru’s political or sociosexual motifs. This is not because they are uninteresting characters, and indeed there is one exception to this: Eriko is the show’s only expressly heterosexual main character, who has a crush on an older man that is revealed early in the second season. (He handles it in a commendably age-appropriate way, especially for Japan, a country that has still not had a full-fledged #MeToo moment regarding adult-adolescent relationships.) She sees the sœur system in what is probably a significantly more “normal” way than the other Yamayurikai oligarchs do; to her it is a stylized and spiritualized mentorship system that is a fun part of her school’s culture but probably not one that will have much influence on her decisions as an adult. Other than this, the Rosa foetida mindset mostly revolves around less ideologized and less “sexy” but still very important subjects: Rei and Yoshino, who are cousins as well as sœurs, must learn to navigate and define different types of relationships, and Yoshino has health problems that for much of her life have given her peers an inaccurate understanding of her personality because they limit her physical activity level.

            The episodes early on that establish Yoshino and her issues are some of the funniest in the show. A strong argument can be made that, uniquely for Maria-sama episodes, they would be among the funnier episodes in plenty of higher-energy anime as well. Yoshino, apparently a shrinking violet who relies on the strong and sturdy kendo player Rei to protect her from the mean old world, is actually a violent or violent-adjacent spitfire who loves historical novels and gung-ho motivational proverbs. The only reason she does not publicly behave in ways that comport with this is that she has a heart condition, which turns out to be easily fixed via surgery. (I have a close family member who has been to the hospital in Japan; although it does not have health care that is comprehensively free at the point of use the way Britain does, it still isn’t expensive or difficult to navigate, and even if it were, almost all of these characters except for Yumi are filthy rich.) The other characters find out about this because the school newspaper, the Lillian Ledger, runs a series of personality quizzes and everyone assumes that Rei’s and Yoshino’s answers got flipped by mistake. The Lillian Ledger in Japanese is the Lillian Kawaraban, a name that implies that it is a rag but an old-school rag, since kawaraban is a term normally reserved for the fly-by-night block-printed broadsheets of the Edo period. Comedy gold on all counts. I know people who hate the series in general but still chuckle at these episodes.

            There’s some good intentional humor with Eriko too, in the episode that establishes that she is interested in men and has a crush on an older science teacher (at another school, not Lillian). She is an animal lover who often goes to the zoo to look at charismatic megafauna such as elephants, which is where she meets the man on whom she develops the crush. They fall to talking about the charismatic megafauna par excellence of Earth’s prehistory—dinosaurs, of course—and he compares her to Hypsilophodon, a comparison to which she responds with the immortal line “I have never been compared to a dinosaur before! I am very pleased!” This isn’t for the obvious reasons, such as Hypsilophodon being known for ferociousness or being “badass.” To the contrary, although older interpretations about the taxon have it as armored in much the same way as the Ankyolsaurus, Stegosaurus, or Triceratops, by the time that the Maria-sama books were being written newer studies had shown it to be a small, beaked, grazing, relatively docile biped. Someone like Yoshino would be flattered for the usual reasons by being compared to an Ankylosaur or a Stegosaur. Eriko is simply happy to see her interests shared and validated. It is cute and would be downright adorable were not the line itself, even in context, so silly-sounding.

            The Rosa foetida line, despite having plenty happening that is worth discussing, nevertheless interests me a little bit less than the other two Yamayurikai lineages. In part this is because the abbreviated third season, which consists of five direct-to-video episodes that are themselves longer than the other seasons’ thirteen half-hour television episodes apiece, is the show at its most narratively dynamic (relatively speaking) and has less focus on them than usual. Then again, the third season is itself less distinctive and less characteristic of this particular series, for the same reason. Things like a hectic school sports festival or a class trip to Italy (on which Shimako reconnects with the girl who ran against her in the first of the two political-legitimacy storylines, who is studying to be an opera singer) happen in plenty of other school-life anime. So I am, I will admit, giving the Rosa foetida girls short shrift because they happen to be out of focus when the series is at its most conventional. This is not their fault and I would want to have more to say about them if not for the circumstances in which I am writing this essay—right before Christmas, and with a great deal of other writing to get done.

            This essay is going to end up a good bit shorter than “Heyday Heisei and Rewatch Reiwa” was. This is both for the reasons that I just gave and because that essay attempted a series of personal reflections, and even some amount of materialist historical analysis, of an entire medium and its fan culture, whereas this one is about a particular, very atypical, and now relatively obscure series within that medium. I don’t think I would recommend Maria-sama to most people. I rewatched it with my housemate, someone who is uniquely predisposed towards it demographically (as a Catholic lesbian) and temperamentally (as a civil servant with that profession’s attendant tolerance for “boring” experiences), and even she and I could only take so much of it at a time and took about a year to get through the whole thing. Yet being able to “recommend” it is not, I think, really the point. Orwell would probably not have “recommended” most of the material he discusses in “Boys’ Weeklies” either (he quotes some of it within the essay itself and it is truly terrible, far worse stylistically than anything in Maria-sama or for that matter in the girls’ magazine culture contemporary to Orwell), but he still presents it as worth cultural and genre discussion. Maria-sama isn’t necessarily bad, just written in a deliberately dated-to-hyperconservative way; as Orwell might put it, it is the Magnet to schlockier late-2000s anime’s Wizard. Nothing in Maria-sama suggests sadism, direct appeal to viewers’ prurient tastes, or reactionary political concerns in the nationalistic way that is unfortunately so common in other anime. Lillian Girls’ Academy is the Chalet School of anime, minus the shilling for upper-middle-class heterosexual domesticity, and I for one think that one could do a lot worse than rule by the sœur system downline. Nec pluribus impar!

Takasawa Keiichi’s “Kimono”: An Artistic-Cultural Treatise from Occupied Japan

Cultural relations between the United States and Japan in the twentieth century are today best remembered for two periods of hostility. In the 1940s the countries were enemies in World War II, and in the 1980s the strong postwar cross-Pacific alliance was strained due to manufacturing and trade policies that in some ways prefigured today’s rivalry between the US and China. Although President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro were both personally and ideologically close, many Americans thought of Japanese people in insecure, envious, and hostile terms.

However, between these two periods, there was a flowering of American Japanophilia influenced partly by American servicemen’s experiences in Japan during the prolonged Allied occupation of the country. The 1950s saw the Japanese printmaker Wada Sanzō (whose “Greenhouse Workers” from his Occupations of Shōwa Japan series hangs in my parents’ living room) win an Academy Award for costume design and the actress and singer Umeki Miyoshi win one for Best Supporting Actress. Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder admired (what they knew of) Japanese Buddhism, and D.T. Suzuki became a more famous and respected figure stateside than in his home country. It was in the earliest days of this midcentury Japanophilia that Takasawa Keiichi wrote and illustrated Kimono: A Pictorial Story of the Kimono.

Kimono is a 40-page book printed on Japanese paper, featuring Takasawa’s drawings and photographs of women in traditional Japanese dress supplemented by his own commentary (or an English translation thereof). The publisher has the unsurprising name Japan Travel Bureau, and the book was printed in Occupied Japan in 1948. It retailed for ¥250, and, I would guess, has been out of print since the early 1950s or so.

  I ran across Kimono while searching for a Takasawa work to buy that lacked some of the questionable artistic qualities of much of his oeuvre. As a visual artist he is best known for a massive body of portraiture most of which focuses on the same rail-thin, wry-faced model, who is generally thought to have been his wife. Many of his paintings and drawings of this woman are sexually charged or even pornographic; a common Takasawa subject is his wife having sex with other women. The illustrations in Kimono, on the other hand, are generally of a sort that one would feel comfortable showing one’s grandmother: the women are fully dressed and attractively but not sexually posed. They also show a broader range of ages and attitudes than the model of Takasawa’s other work; one drawing is captioned “Miss Teen-Ager learns the intricate steps of the classical dance,” and the women’s facial expressions range from contented to annoyed (“I wonder if my obi is on straight!”). The drawings are well-executed and done in an appealing palette, a sort of subdued four-color of charcoal grey, indigo, deep red, and pale gold. The photographs in the book, on the other hand, often suffer from the over-luridness of midcentury color photography, in a way that reminds me a little of the contemporaneous Chiquita Banana commercials with Carmen Miranda.

  The book was intended to capture the kimono as a “symbol of Japanese women” for a Western audience, and contains very lucid and easy-to-follow descriptions of what different types of traditional Japanese womenswear are, what events or times of year one wears them for, and how they are made and sold. The only section that tripped me up was one discussing how properly to put on an obi (sash), an aspect of kimono-wearing that has stymied me in life as well as in art. If anyone can ever explain to me what exactly is meant by “Make a little fold at the end of the long end of the obi, tuck the other end of the obi into the bow, and fasten all these tightly together with the obi-dome which is also taken around in front of the obi and tied there,” that person will have my heart for life.

  Takasawa’s politics, which do make it into the book, are “reconciliatory” and focused on a revivification of Japanese society, including traditional arts and customs, after the traumatic war years. The implication is that he, like many other small-c conservative Japanese artists and writers, was unhappy with the war primarily because of the way it destroyed Japan’s Meiji- and Taishō-era civilian culture. This is a position shared with, among others, the novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, whose family saga The Makioka Sisters was censored during the war for its focus on “the soft, effeminate, and grossly individualistic lives of women.” Something very similar, or at least similarly sexist, could well have been said about Kimono had Takasawa written it five years earlier.

Tanizaki’s Some Prefer Nettles introduces to Japanese literature the somewhat self-conscious distinction between feminists and “woman-worshipers,” who idealize women but have no particular respect for their opinions or their values. Kimono outs Takasawa as a woman-worshiper of the old school, as if his later paintings of his wife weren’t enough. The copy accompanying his drawings idealizes women and states several very strong preferences about female dress and behavior as if those preferences are facts. One passage makes an absolute statement about the female love for changing one’s clothes that a butch lesbian or even a vowed religious sister of the period could and probably should have disabused him of immediately had he asked.

However, I don’t mean to suggest that Kimono is a uniquely misogynistic work; I don’t think it is. The premise itself, and Takasawa’s breadth of knowledge about women’s clothing, show an interest in women’s lives completely absent from truly woman-hating Japanese art of the period, such as Confessions of a Mask (a novel of whose misogynistic homoeroticism, or homoerotic misogyny, I was strongly reminded when I finally sat down and read American Psycho). It’s easy to imagine a version of Takasawa alive today as a sort of male Karolina Żebrowska or Safiya Nygaard, taking to YouTube and Instagram to share his interest in traditional womenswear with the world.

Kimono can be found used on Biblio and similar websites for roughly between $30 and $100. My copy was on the expensive end because several of its pages are signed by Takasawa (in an idiosyncratic format with “Keiichi” in kanji and “Takasawa” in roman letters). I would recommend the book to those interested in Japan’s presentation of itself to the West at this point in the country’s long history, provided they can put up with some of the author’s less-than-feminist sentiments and views.

Who Said It: God-Emperor Leto II or Greta Thunberg?

One is a visionary who thinks in the long term about the future of the humanity but often stakes out incendiary or extreme-seeming positions on here-and-now issues that some argue damage the credibility of the overall cause. The other is a climate activist. Can you tell who said what?

1.       Most civilization is based on cowardice. It's so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.

2.       We have to tell it like it is. Because if there are no positive things to tell, then what should we do, should we spread false hope? We can’t do that, we have to tell the truth.

3.       I am the most ardent people-watcher who ever lived.

4.       Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me most.

5.       It has not occurred to you that your ancestors were survivors and that the survival itself sometimes involved savage decisions, a kind of wanton brutality which civilized humankind works very hard to suppress. What price will you pay for that suppression? Will you accept your own extinction?

6.       That is what we have to realize, that that is what we have to do right now. I’m not the one who’s saying these things. I’m not the one who we should be listening to. And I say that all the time.

7.       We will not understand it until it’s too late. And yet we are the lucky ones. Those who will be affected the hardest are already suffering the consequences.

8.       Only fools prefer the past!

9.       Almost everything is black and white.

10.     If everyone is guilty then no one is to blame. And someone is to blame.

Answers: Leto, Thunberg, Leto, Leto, Leto, Thunberg, Thunberg, Leto, Thunberg, Thunberg

2. and 6. come from a Financial Times interview and a Democracy Now interview, both from 2019. 7., 9., and 10. come from a book called No One is Too Small to Make a Difference. 1., 3., 4., 5., and 8. come from God-Emperor of Dune.

Heyday Heisei and Rewatch Reiwa

It is never pleasant to have our old shrines desecrated, even when we have outgrown them.

—L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island

I.

The year is 2022, and anime is in decline.

I don’t think I know anybody my age who seriously denies this. Friends of mine who are in my age cohort—the ages of, let’s say, twenty-five to thirty-three, people who were in their late childhood or adolescence during the international anime and manga glut of the early to mid-2000s and who populated college anime clubs around the same years I did during the first three-quarters of the Obama administration—seem to be unanimous in the opinion that the medium and its fandom aren’t what they once were. Current high school and college students still entertain and enthrall themselves with My Hero Academia or whichever generation of Precure we’re currently on, and I don’t think the medium is dead or is no longer producing anything of value; each of the past three or four years has produced at least one series that I’ve enjoyed. Even so, there have been subtle but noticeable changes in both the content and the reception of anime over the second half of the 2010s and now into the 2020s, and many of those changes are making it difficult for people who’ve long been in media fandom to maintain interest in what’s currently coming out of Japan. In this essay I will seek to diagnose some of those changes.

First let me share my general impressions of what the medium and its fandom were like around 2007, when I was first becoming a fan. 1999-2007 are commonly accepted among fandom historians as the dates of the Western anime boom, in which brick-and-mortar bookstores had manga sections several aisles deep and the Western anime market was (according to Matt Clement’s Anime: A History) actually driving or partially driving Japanese production. “Animesque” Western cartoons came into vogue partway through this period, some (such as Avatar: The Last Airbender) becoming classics themselves, others (such as Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi, which I had to be reminded existed) fading very quickly into obscurity. Spirited Away won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature at one point, and basic cable stations like Cartoon Network had entire programming blocks of competently dubbed anime for teen and young-adult audiences. I came up at the tail end of this period; the first anime that I followed as it was airing was Code Geass R2, and I was probably part of the last wave of American teenagers to start using LiveJournal for fandom purposes before that website’s death spiral in 2009-2011.

At this time there was an accepted cursus honorum for inducting oneself into the anime canon before venturing forth into the badlands of cult classics and genre specialization. It differed a little for boys and girls, but I watched shows from both sets, probably because I was being introduced to anime by two girls with whom I was friends in high school. The first anime movies I watched were Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and one of the InuYasha movies (I had a hard time focusing on that one; I don’t remember why). The first full series I watched were Azumanga Daioh and Neon Genesis Evangelion. This was in the era of DVD box sets; for Azumanga Daioh I borrowed a friend’s DVDs and for Neon Genesis Evangelion I spent a couple weeks’ allowance. Once you saw some of these works that were in some sense representative of the medium, or at least representative of what other American teenagers were into, then you could venture forth into discovering new shows and favored genres and subgenres on your own. By late 2008 and early 2009 I was watching a lot of the “girls with guns” subgenre of action anime—Noir and its spiritual successors, Black Lagoon, and so forth—that had come out earlier in the 2000s. I also started watching a lot of anime with gay themes, especially shows with lesbian connotations that were less overtly sexual than a lot of what was being produced about gay men. And it was great for a while.

The problems with this fandom environment—and such problems did exist—mostly revolved around two core issues, gatekeeping and amorality. 4chan, a website that is now mostly known as a hotbed of far-right politics but in the late 2000s was an anime fandom standby, was in some ways the locus classicus for both of these issues with its culture of eviscerating “newfags” and “moralfags.” I experienced this more in Western science fiction and fantasy fandoms than in anime and manga fandom—for some reason I just had a thicker skin about, say, Fullmetal Alchemist than about Doctor Who—but I still noticed it. These problems became extremely relevant later as a highly pop-moralistic backlash against them began permeating fandom spaces around 2015.

The unsustainability of the Japanese foreign and trade policies that had led to the early-to-mid-2000s boom in the first place probably also contributed to the unsustainability of the fan culture that built up around Japanese products. As is well-known, the fundamentals of the Japanese economy were not sound, and a semi-deliberate national policy around pop culture exports did not have enough failsafe measures to survive the decline in faddish Western interest. The list of localization companies and fandom media organs that went defunct or had to merge with one another to stay afloat between 2008 and 2013—the peak years of my anime fandom participation—includes ADV Films; Newtype USA magazine; Shojo Beat magazine; the North American version of Shonen Jump magazine; Central Park Media; Bandai Visual USA (dissolved back into its Japanese parent company); and the original incarnation of Toonami. Perhaps oddly, I didn’t really notice this at the time; since I was just getting into the fandom, it didn’t really occur to me that its glory days were, in some wise, already behind it. I had the same experience with LiveJournal, which I had no idea was already a dying platform when I joined it.

This in some ways commonplace story is one that I tell by means of explaining what I think a vibrant and interesting anime fan community does look like. I’ve deliberately avoided passing comment on the actual content of the shows that were popular at that point, because I want to discuss content in the context of where—in my opinion—it all went wrong.

When I told a friend about the concept for this essay, he said it had “Boomer energy.” Despite my self-consciousness about this, I am not going to take any special efforts to make the essay seem value-neutral or judgment-free, because it is not; it would be insincere to avoid the impression of someone worried about premature middle age complaining about the tastes and interests of teenagers, because that is, in part, exactly what this essay is. What follows is an attempt to explain those fogeyish opinions and complaints and to and advocate for them based on historical and cultural facts.

II.

Having come of age in anime and manga fandom during what we might call a transitional period—the late 2000s and early 2010s, when the fandom wasn’t at its peak in the West anymore but was not yet in obvious enough decline for me to notice it at the time—I can’t approach this question exactly as somebody with clear memories of the fandom of the 1999-2007 period might approach it. The decline that was underway during my period of heaviest fandom involvement had material economic roots that I mentioned above, and it was secular in the sense of being a sustained long-term process that would have been difficult to reverse. The collapse, or transmogrification, of a medium and a fandom that I recognized and with which I felt comfortable into a medium and a fandom that I did not, felt more abrupt, and I would argue that it was more cultural and in some ways even ideological. The cultural and ideological shift of the mid-2010s may have had its historical genesis in the economic and material shift of the late 2000s; however, I do not have enough experience or knowledge of the latter event to feel confident saying for sure.

I count three major factors that, taken together, determine what kind of characteristics a medium fandom will have: What kind of content is being produced, how that content is being disseminated to its fans, and what the fandom’s culture and ideology (i.e. its “superstructure,” Marxistly) are like when the fans receive the content.

I’ll begin with the intermediate stage, how content is disseminated to its fans. Until the mid-2010s, the prevailing model for anime and manga localization was what we might call “fansub (or scanlation) first, license later (if at all).” That is, a title that was making waves in Japan would be informally translated—a process that was legal under Japanese law but of dubious legality under most Western copyright regimes—by a group of fansubbers (if it was an anime) or scanlators (a portmanteau of scanner and translator, if it was a print manga). This informal localization would then be made available online, through several avenues that were themselves of dubious legality; when I first entered the fandom, you still often saw anime episodes uploaded to YouTube in five- to ten-minute-long chunks that you had to watch in order. (Amazingly, one can still at the time of writing find certain old episodes of the extremely well-known Western cartoon The Simpsons on YouTube this way!) YouTube ceased to be usable for these purposes around 2010 as its user base and the culture surrounding it were formalized and professionalized, so the fandom moved to an archipelago of other sites with names like KissAnime, Mangafox, and so forth. Many of these sites still exist in diminished form. They had—still have—domain names out of places like Tonga and Christmas Island, and were only usable if one had both an ad blocker and a good antivirus program; fortunately, most fans did.

An official, indisputably legal localization would appear later if enough interest built up in the West—or sometimes if a Japanese studio or distributor wanted to shill something in the West to make it turn a profit, as happened with the infamously iconoclastic localization of the flop horror anime Ghost Stories in 2005. The push-pull of Japanese production with a Western audience in mind had its genesis in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and by the 2000s it had created a system somewhat similar to the “usual channels” of parliamentary democracies. That is, Japanese creators, Western localizers, and prominent fandom figures had some degree of professional and even social familiarity with one another, and negotiated amongst themselves to bring most official localizations into existence. For example, a gay-themed anime called Simoun that was a personal favorite of mine for a long time—it’s now mostly forgotten—got an official American DVD release almost solely because a well-known fan personality saw the fansubs and brought it to the professional localizers’ attention.

The underlying economic process that made this social and cultural system possible was the buying and selling of DVDs. The system relied on the practice of accumulating physical home video sets of one’s favorite shows, because “fansub first, license later” was only economically viable for localization companies if the fandom had a collector mentality and an ethic of “rewatch value.” Western anime fandom as such had been intimately tied to the technology of home video from its inception; many fan communities had originated as AV clubs in the eighties and nineties. The almost totemic quality of DVD sets in “old” anime fandom—something analogous to the totemic quality of hardcover books among self-professed bookworms—can hardly be overstated. I still have complete DVD sets of at least half a dozen shows I’ve only ever watched once, despite the fact that my computer no longer has a drive to play them in, because you never know.

With the advent of online streaming services and their supplanting of physical audiovisual media culture starting around 2012, the economic incentives for professional localizers changed enormously. There was no longer any real reason to tolerate illegal or semi-legal fan treatment of Japanese material as a means of building up word of mouth about a property. So producers, distributors, and localizers began to build a “license first, fansub never” model, which relied on simulcasting via streaming services such as Crunchyroll and, eventually, Netflix. (I know I said I felt self-conscious about this essay’s boomery premise, but I have to say this: I feel a pang of genuine heartache whenever I see the words “A Netflix Original Anime” at the beginning of an episode of Carole & Tuesday, a show I otherwise love.) This had the effect of making the economics of anime fandom much more similar to the economics of first-run Western TV fandom—only first-run Western TV fandom was itself being transmogrified into something much more top-down and supply-side.

Moreover, because of other technological and social shifts that are part of the same zeitgeist as the rise of streaming services, such as various “pivots to video” and the increasing stranglehold of algorithmically-arranged social media platforms on our culture, attention spans in general seem a lot shorter these days. I once ran across someone who watched Haibane-Renmei, created a fan Instagram account for the show (of all platforms!), then abruptly decided barely a year later that they were no longer interested in the show or in anime in general. Someone doing that ten or fifteen years ago would have been called a filthy casual and told to get the hell out of Otakon, the way a cowboy might be told to get the hell out of Dodge.

III.

The first of the three factors I mentioned above is one I’m addressing second because it requires somewhat more extrapolation and interpretation as opposed to hard facts. The actual nature of anime being produced, and whether and why it’s changed, is difficult to assess from a vantage point stateside, and it’s been the better part of a decade since I actually spent time in Japan (although I’m in both internet and postal contact with people in Japan semi-regularly). Summer 2013, most of which I spent in Japan, could be taken as a transitional period in terms of many of the changes I am discussing, but even that requires some degree of eisegesis—what makes 2013 “more transitional” than 2014, or 2012?

What I do know is this. Although Western demand driving Japanese production was a phenomenon that created its fair share of cross-cultural problems and resentments, the relatively mukokuseki (“stateless”) characteristics of the shows being made in the 1990s and 2000s did mean that most of those shows avoided the worst excesses of Japanese political and artistic discourse. A show that was consciously being produced for an international audience would have to include internationally appropriate themes not only in the sense of “statelessness” around character designs and pop-cultural references, but also in the sense of avoiding preachy overconcern with domestic Japanese issues and, in particular, Japanese nationalism. This was how you could end up with a property like Code Geass that was obviously sympathetic to Japanese nationalism and anti-Americanism but that was still watchable as something other than a rightist screed because its themes were couched in abstracted terms about imperialism and self-determination.

Moreover, Western fantasies of Japan as some sort of “animeland” utopia (which Japanese politician Yuriko Koike has, hilariously, tried to make into a winning message in Japanese domestic politics) were always missing something essential about Japan itself. Japan, like every other country on the planet, has a “normie” supermajority in its population, and because it is also a conformist and collectivist society, people who are “weird” have diminished social capital relative to weird people in most Western countries. Continued passionate love for anime and manga into adulthood is seen as unusual in Japan—the arbitrary yet curiously widespread “age ghetto” for animation and comics is probably, if anything, weaker in Continental Europe than it is in Asia. Being an “otaku,” a word whose Japanese usage is clearly pejorative and comes from a formal and slightly archaic term for one’s own house, has for a long time actually been more broadly acceptable in North America and Western Europe than it is on anime’s home turf.

For both of these reasons, diminished demand for anime in the West could be argued to have actually sapped the medium’s vitality even in Japan itself. This is not because Westerners can judge Japanese art more sagely than Japanese people can—far from it!—but because the assortment of Japanese action-movie and romcom tropes one commonly sees replicated in your “typical” anime benefited from having to be used more judiciously to attract a worldwide audience. Somebody inclined to laissez-faire thinking might even see it as a competitiveness issue, in which 1990s and 2000s anime had to make a name for itself on a grander scale and over against a massive variety of rival cultural products.

In Japan in 2013, I noticed that a lot of the anime and manga being produced for what we might call domestic consumption was being microtargeted to maladjusted subcultural interests. The most benign such case, and possibly also the most familiar to Western audiences, was the inexorable advance of the toxic cult of “deconstruction,” in which an anime that treated its genre, its medium, and even its own fans with cynicism and contempt could actually attract a devoted audience due to the false perception that it was saying something profound. Good “deconstructive” anime have been produced—nineties masterpieces Neon Genesis Evangelion and Revolutionary Girl Utena being two such—but invariably the deconstruction in such shows is commenting on something external to the shows themselves: mental illness and antisocial behavior in Evangelion’s case, misogyny and homophobia in Utena’s. In 2011 a bombastic attack-from-within on the magical girl genre called Puella Magi Madoka Magica emerged, dominating fandom conversation in both Japan and the West despite its mere twelve-episode length. The delayed airing of its final two episodes due to that year’s earthquake and tsunami cemented the show’s instantly legendary status. Madoka itself did have interesting things to say, but for some reason that I cannot quite pinpoint, the series solidified a perception of edgy, grimdark subject matter and themes as both artistically superior and more profitable than sincerity and optimism. Very little has been produced in the magical girl genre since 2011 that isn’t somehow preoccupied with either replicating or refuting Madoka’s extraordinarily gloomy take on the genre’s key conceits, and much of what is being produced is therefore very difficult to watch.

If the Madoka phenomenon was a peptic ulcer, making “old” anime culture significantly more painful and annoying but not actually killing it, the Attack on Titan phenomenon was the bubonic plague, or possibly some sort of bioengineered supervirus thawed out from some IJA ice prison to maraud through modern Japan. I actually loved Attack on Titan initially, as did, I dare say, the vast majority of rank-and-file anime fans. Its 2013 first season, which was actually airing while I was in Japan that summer, is the most recent anime for which I’ve bothered to buy fandom merch. I still in spite of myself have genuinely wonderful memories of fiercely debating its twists and turns with my friends, and of becoming invested in its, at the time, wonderful female characters. It wasn’t until at least a year into its initial burst of cross-Pacific popularity that it began to be widely suspected not only that its creator was aligned with the political far right but that the series itself was actually meant to communicate and advocate far-right views. The series recently ended, and won back some of its old fans by ending in an unexpectedly pensive, ambivalent, and self-reflective way, but by that point it was too late to save its general reputation as “a fascist anime.”

Japan as a whole has lurched to the political right over the past decade. This is true of many countries, but in Japan the effect has been particularly pronounced, producing repeated electoral landslides for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which despite the name is conservative and nationalist. A center-left government that briefly dethroned the long-dominant LDP in 2009 proved inept and rudderless and was itself turfed out in 2012, after which right-wing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe managed to entrench himself as the longest-serving premier in Japanese history.

The pluses (they do exist) and minuses of Abe’s time in power could be an entire essay of their own, but the policy area most relevant to anime and its fandom is his avowed nationalism, historical revisionism, and desire to rehabilitate the legacy of the Japanese Empire that was defeated in World War II. This is a winning issue for younger Japanese people, and in particular younger Japanese men, because young adults in Japan right now do not have much else to believe in; it hasn’t been a good economy into which to come of age for nearly thirty years, and the economic incentives of Japanese life make timely family formation for young adults all but impossible. Thus, the Abe years saw a boom in overtly right-wing anime.

Attack on Titan is an infamous example of a right-wing 2010s anime, as is a mecha show called Darling in the Franxx, which aired in 2018 and included an extended paean to heterosexual family formation, including via teenage sex. (Personally, I think the moral panic about teen pregnancy that characterized left-leaning Western fans’ reaction to Darling in the Franxx was also ridiculous, but it is still probably not something a mecha anime should be outright glorifying.) My personal favorite example of this cottage industry, though, is something called Gate: Thus the Japanese Self-Defense Force Fought There. This was a 2015 isekai anime based on a light novel series about the JSDF, Japan’s postwar “military,” launching an incursion through a wormhole into a high fantasy world. Gate actually had to have some of the web novels on which it was based edited for conventional publication to tone down some of the nationalism.

Another subcultural-pandering genre that’s become more and more popular lately is difficult to describe except by saying that it tends to be based on light novels and those light novels tend to have titles that go on for half a paragraph. Examples include No Matter How I Look At It, It’s You People’s Fault I’m Not Popular (I actually liked this one to an extent); Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?; Are You Willing to Fall in Love with a Pervert, as Long as She’s a Cutie?; I Don’t Like You at All, Big Brother!; My Mental Choices are Completely Interfering with My School Romantic Comedy; Lately, My Little Sister’s Been Acting a Bit Strange, But…; and Though Young People Recoil from Entering the Black Magic Industry, I Found Its Treatment of Employees Quite Good When I Entered It, and the President and Familiar are Cute Too so Everything is Awesome! Some inkling of the common themes and plot conceits of this type of series should be evident from the titles themselves.

I don’t mean to say that no overly cynical, politically questionable, or sex-fetishistic anime were being produced before 2011 or so. Obviously that would be an absurd claim. When I was coming up in anime fandom it was common to sarcastically recommend that people watch a show called Boku no Pico that was honest-to-goodness child pornography. (Since it’s animated, no actual children were harmed, and I don’t think anybody actually watched it—the suggestion that one do so was basically a form of hazing—but even so!) However, it does seem like shows that appeal to baser instincts—sexual, political, philosophical—have cornered the market in a way that wasn’t always the case, and I would attribute this to the perceived need to sell things to the harder core of Japan’s domestic otaku subculture. It’s not just me who says this; quotes floating around imputing hard forms of this claim to all-time great Hayao Miyazaki are usually falsely attributed, but he has made the claim in softer forms. In a television interview in 2014 Miyazaki said that most anime then in production was being made by creators who “don’t spend time watching real people” and “can’t stand looking at other humans.” I can think of no better way to describe a creative industry that would make a fantastic actress like Eri Kitamura voice a protagonist who’s motivated by proving that she’s not really related to her brother so that it’ll be legal for her to marry him.

IV. 

This brings us to the issue of reception and the cultural—and, yes, moral—strategies that anime fans have for watching anime and deciding what it means to them. Obviously the sort of material that I described in the above section does appeal to real audience desires; as early as 2000 Tamaki Saito could claim in his book Beautiful Fighting Girl that many anime fans were interested in the medium due to a psychosexual fascination with the types of female protagonists common at that time. (Think of Evangelion’s Rei and Asuka or Sailor Moon’s Inner and Outer Senshi.) However, there is also an intensely moralizing style of anime engagement, one that interacts with the fetishizing style in unexpected and sometimes counterintuitive ways.

A lot of this interaction has to do with a time-honored fan tradition called “shipping.” Most readers of this essay will be familiar with this concept, but some may not, so I’ll define it briefly. Shipping, short for relationshipping but these days invariably used on its own, is the practice or habit of favoring, rooting for, or creating fan content (such as fanfiction, fanart, etc.) for a romantic relationship between two characters in a work of fiction. A real-life equivalent of shipping is familiar to anyone who’s ever attempted to set up two acquaintances on a date; the fandom version will be, on some level, known to anyone who came away from Little Women wishing Jo had said yes to Laurie’s proposal, or who wanted Jerry and Elaine to stop sleeping around and get back together in Seinfeld. The pairing being shipped can have any level of textual support ranging from “completely nonexistent” to “they’ve been blissfully married since before the plot started,” and oftentimes a particular fan will have a preference for shipping straight, gay male, or lesbian pairings. (I mostly ship straight and lesbian pairings, but there are gay male pairings I like as well.)

For most of modern media fandom’s existence, it was understood that a fan’s shipping preferences had very little connection to what that fan actually wanted in a real romantic or sexual relationship. For example, there was never any question of whether a fan who favored ships between characters who were on hostile terms in the source text also favored relationships between people who hated one another in real life. An anime fan might enjoy Beatrice and Battler from Umineko: When They Cry, a pairing that has a sadomasochistic subtext, without desiring a sadomasochistic relationship for themselves; a fan might think that a three-way would solve some of the entanglements in Toradora! without condoning infidelity or even open relationships between real people.

For a few different reasons, fandom discussion in the first half of the 2010s gradually called these understandings into question. First of all, an important feature of traditional shipping culture was that it was mostly disconnected from questions of sexual morality. This made shipping spaces relatively convivial for people whose beliefs about real relationships might sharply differ—“your kink is not my kink, and that’s okay”—but it also meant that in many cases fans found themselves exposed to content to which they might have strong ethical or even religious objections. The overall ethical framework, such as it was, derived mostly from the “sex-positive” Western feminist consensus of the 1990s and 2000s, making it very difficult to get any moral criticism of consensual sexual behaviors (and sometimes even certain kinds of nonconsensual ones) taken seriously in fandom. This made life in fandom very difficult not only for people with strong religious beliefs about sexuality but also for partisans of the by-then-unfashionable “radical feminist” project of constructing a specifically feminist normative sexual morality. For whatever reason, in the early 2010s there was a convergence in interests between these two groups. A close friend of mine who’s narrated much of this history to me suspects that what happened was that a group of young people raised in conservative Protestant religious environments developed radical feminist opinions upon reaching adulthood, then set about putting those opinions in active opposition to prevailing fandom mores.

I don’t mean to over-idealize pre-2010s shipping mores, especially since they actually weren’t totally amoral but rather reflective of generically social-liberal views, which are not as value-neutral as they claim to be. Had I been asked at the time, I would have said that I was all for attempting to impose some moral parameters on the way media fandom, including anime fandom, approached shipping and fictive portrayals of sexuality. However, given what happened next, I would evidently not have been careful enough what I had wished for.

In 2014 or 2015, a subset of users of the microblogging website Tumblr.com whose own fannish interests mostly lay in newer lesbian-themed anime undertook an organized push to change the way their preferred series were discussed online. I noticed this at the time because it involved an, in my opinion, bizarrely disproportionate degree of hostility to the 2006 anime Simoun, mentioned above, which at the time was already fading into obscurity but was still a personal favorite of mine. According to the friend of mine mentioned a paragraph and a half ago, a lot of these people had specifically come from Madoka Magica fandom and were understandably upset about a then-recent sequel movie’s even darker and more cynical take on the show’s already-edgy subject matter. The culture of Tumblr—to which much of Western media fandom had migrated after the LiveJournal death spiral a few years before—encouraged, and in some corners of the site still encourages, taking an overtly political and thus in some sense overtly moral angle on almost any imaginable aesthetic question. The purpose of fiction is, as Marx might put it, not so much to describe the world as to change it; the purpose of changing the world through fiction is to vindicate the values and priorities of the post-materialist Millennial and Generation Z political left. Therefore the measuring rod for works of fiction became how hard they tried to represent, and how well they succeeded at representing, oppressed social groups in a positive way. It was into this overall structure of thought and set of standards for assessing media that the phenomenon of “anti-shipping” was finally introduced—first in lesbian anime fandom, then in anime fandom in general, finally in media fandom writ large.

“Anti-shipping” does not mean that one actually opposes all shipping; this would be next to impossible in media fandom as currently constituted, in which it is almost a dogmatized fact that the best reason to become invested in a book or series or movie is for its characters. It means, in effect, that one opposes the culture whose basics I describe several paragraphs above. To an extent this entails reasonable and normal moral positions (it’s true enough that well-adjusted people don’t usually want to read extensively about, say, incest). I don’t want to completely elide or discredit that point; in the days of “old fandom” much of the tone of fannish discussion of relationships and sex made me uncomfortable, and some corrective, at some point, was probably necessary. Those who knew me back in the early 2010s remember somebody who was in fact very rigidly moralistic in many ways. I was once challenged to write a piece of Doctor Who fanfiction using a common sex-related plot conceit that I strongly dislike and the only way I was able to make it convincing was to play it up for cosmic horror.

However, the anti-shipping mindset also entails a moral stridency that, much like similar moralizing styles elsewhere, often apophatically carries a prurient subtext. In other words, if someone looks at (to use an example I have in fact seen very recently) a relationship between two orphans who were raised in the same institutional setting and sees a case of sibling incest, that “someone” probably already had incest on the brain to begin with. So too with seeing a relationship between a twenty-three-year-old and a seventeen-year-old as not only legally dicey and probably exploitative but actually pedophilic in the same sense as if the twenty-three-year-old were molesting an elementary school student.

Some—admittedly mostly in the fandoms for Western cartoons rather than anime as such—apply this quality of moral analysis to previously uncontroversial forms of fanwork such as fanfiction about child characters as adults or ships between high school-aged characters played by adult actors. As well, many “antis” tend to see anybody who disagrees with them about these things as themselves suspect of an actual desire for pedophilic or incestuous sex in real life.

What happens when this lens is turned on anime, a medium with a long history of otaku-baiting raunchiness that comes from a culture with little in the way of a deeply ingrained theory of sexual morality? The answer is that many younger anime fans who have come up in an “anti”-dominated environment in the past five years don’t actually like anime as a medium at all. The idea of anime as an art form in conversation with itself seems to have evaporated. In its place we have, as I said above, a fandom culture more akin to that of Western first-run TV fandom, in which someone can happen to be a fan of a few shows-that-are-anime without knowing or caring much at all about the medium as a whole. Sometimes this even extends to whether or not one is actually a fan of the show in question. “I don’t watch My Hero Academia,” I saw one person with a My Hero Academia-themed Tumblr say recently. “I’m just here for Bakugou.” (Bakugou evidently is a specific character in My Hero Academia.) Evidently this person didn’t get the memo that being a Bakugou fan makes you an emotional abuse apologist.

V.

I don’t mean to moralize overmuch about the current state of the fandom or imply that my way of doing it in the 2008-2013 period is the way everybody has to keep doing it forever. I also don’t mean to suggest that there is no good material coming out of Japan anymore; in fact there is still plenty, despite the trends I have described. Carole & Tuesday, which I mentioned above, is a delightful show that fuses a mellow singer-songwriter sensibility with the two-fisted sci-fi setting of 90s classic Cowboy Bebop. Anime movies like Your Name and A Silent Voice still speak to audiences worldwide in much the same way that The Girl Who Leapt through Time and Summer Wars did in the late 2000s; Netflix distributed a movie of this type too, A Whisker Away, after its Japanese theatrical release got cancelled due to COVID-19. I’ve even liked the episodes of My Hero Academia that I’ve seen, although I evidently haven’t seen enough since I still barely know who Bakugou is. A friend of mine keeps trying to get me to watch Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! and I’m confident that I’ll love it once I get around to it.

What I think has been lost is the sheer amount of high-quality content that was coming out of Japan in the 2000s; the “innocence” of anime fandom as it didn’t use to need to ask questions like whether a show was shilling right-wing nationalism (since even if the show was, it could usually be ignored); and the wild-west fandom culture that made anime fandom such a hot spot for heady cultural and aesthetic remixing. These features are in decline even among people who are nominally committed to preserving or honoring the way the fandom used to be. 4chan anons who were once apolitical and latterly became Ron Paul or Occupy Wall Street types have converged on the identitarian right along with the genres they follow. Nobody these days is as blasé about ungovernably amoral fan content as they used to be (and that, if nothing else, is almost certainly a good thing). People with discerning tastes have less to discern from, have become pickier and picker for all sorts of reasons, and often end up repudiating shows they once loved. Of course, some of this may be, simply, the fact that anime fans who were not grown up ten years ago are grown up now, and growing up is the first step on the inevitable road to bereavement.

A year or two ago I heard an interview with an academic of some sort, I think it might have been Jonathan Haidt, who said that after 2014 or so he had noticed a change among university undergraduates. New classes, he said, suddenly began to have next to no brute-facts, pre-ideological understanding of, interest in, or tolerance for the past beyond what they had personally experienced. This has not universally been my experience with younger people, but it is something I have noticed about some. It is something I have noticed in fandom not least of all spaces. Fortunately, “some” is not “all,” and there has not been a complete loss of memory. Plenty of people are still talking about—or, more often, being lectured to by people like me about—the fandom of the 2000s and early 2010s. Even though it is not where the fandom is right now, even though it is difficult to see how it could ever be where the fandom is again, it has not become a place that is never visited or never remembered.

Reading Narnia in My Late Twenties

A couple of years ago I reread the Chronicles of Narnia series of children’s fantasy novels by the British literary figure C.S. Lewis. The series was one that I devoured and greatly enjoyed as a preteen, although it was never as personally important to me as the work of Lewis’s friend J.R.R. Tolkien, and I became interested in seeing how it held up when I became aware of the sizeable, politically and intellectually fractious fandom that the books have online. Moreover, I’ve been reading a lot of Lewis’s non-Narnia writing over the past several years, mostly due to having fallen in with a number of people who greatly admired it when I was in graduate school.

The Narnia books are the only works that Lewis wrote for children; the rest of his literary output consists of academic writing on medieval and Renaissance literature, works of popular philosophy and theology of varying but mostly high quality, and a variety of science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories for adults, some of them excellent and some of them less so. Lewis had become an atheist in his youth and returned to the practice of Christianity in his early thirties, and much of his work assumes a culturally Anglican but philosophically skeptical audience. There is a lot to admire about his gentle, humane perspective and writing style; however, the man and the writing are far from perfect. Some of his work is gallingly sexist or racist; some is poorly-argued or about subject matter of dubious relevance or importance; some of his science fiction short stories in particular are much more amoral than the rest of his body of work. For the most part he is “to the left of” Tolkien politically and theologically, but he is still firmly right-of-center and he talks about current political and social issues a lot more than Tolkien does.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a cottage industry emerged, particularly in Britain, of criticizing the Narnia books on all sorts of grounds related to Lewis’s religious beliefs, political positions, and personal prejudices as expressed in the books’ writing style, thematic emphases, and plots. Philip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials series of young adult fantasy novels, emerged as a particularly fierce critic of the books’ Christian thematic content—one of the connecting threads of all seven novels is Aslan, the Great Lion, the creator of the Narnian world and a manifestation of Jesus Christ in a world populated by talking animals, as whose agent most of the protagonists act. I do not feel like addressing these criticisms in depth and checking their validity was not one of my reasons for rereading the books; however, I do acknowledge them and believe that some (but not all) of them are responding to genuine problems with the books and with Lewis’s worldview.

The Narnia books were published in one order but have a different internal chronology. I read them according to the internal chronology; this is apparently how Lewis preferred that they be read, but he did not have particularly strong feelings on the subject and many fans elect to ignore him. Personally I think that both orders have their strong points and weak points; first-time readers will better follow the overall narrative by reading the books in chronological order, but the order of publication carries on a more complete plotline for the first four books.

The first thing that struck me about the books is that their casual, conversational style is clearly intended for children—contrast the stark-yet-prolix style of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—but more literate children, or at least children more willing to consult a dictionary, than children’s authors today seem to assume exist. (I myself had to look up the word “apophthegm” and a slang use of the word “brick” that is dated now but might not have been at the time that the books were written.) The Magician’s Nephew, the book that I started with, involves human children from around the turn of the twentieth century being present at the Narnian world’s creation; travel between different universes was not the commonplace in science fiction and fantasy in the 1950s when the books were published that it is now, so Lewis spends some time explaining the concept in addition to showing instances of it. The setting’s earthly timeframe is introduced with observations like “schools were usually nastier than now. But meals were nicer.” Child readers are invited to imagine themselves in the days “when your grandfather was a child” via comparisons involving things with which they will be familiar.

The comparisons of various things in the stories to the British education system in particular persist throughout the books; one of the few good things Lewis has to say about the culture of Calormen, an Arabian Nightsistan-type country in the Narnian universe that figures prominently in two of the later books, is that “story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you’re taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.” British educational culture in the 1940s, which was transitioning to more humane disciplinary methods and a more modern, science-oriented curriculum relative to the “nasty” schools of the 1890s and 1900s, also comes in for attack. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair, which feature children transported to Narnia from around the end of or just slightly after World War II, involve a progressive boarding school called “Experiment House” with discipline so lax that it produces loathsome priggish brats at best and sadistic bullies at worst. Lewis’s depiction of Experiment House is part of a sustained satirical criticism of the social policies of the postwar Labour Party government, one in which he also ridicules as faddish the progressive convictions (vegetarianism, republicanism, pacifism, etc.) of one of the main characters’ parents and laments the decline and eventual demolition of a previously well-off character’s country house. One wonders what possible educational philosophy Lewis would have presented positively in the books. Perhaps he was simply mindful of his audience and aware that most children would rather not be in school than be there, unless they are abused or very lonely at home.

In addition to being better able to perceive the political content in Lewis’s depictions of the education system in the books now that I’ve done considerable time at every level of my own country’s education system myself, I’m also a lot more conscious of the books’ circumscription of sexuality. Obviously a children’s book series can’t and shouldn’t be sexually explicit, but it’s remarkable how little even implied sexuality figures into the lives of even the adult characters. This is something that Pullman criticized fiercely due to his inference of an attack on female sexuality in particular from the fact that one major character, Susan Pevensie, is absent in The Last Battle because she would rather focus on “nylons and lipstick and invitations” than on coming to Narnia’s aid in the world’s death throes. (Personally, I think that the idea that the only reason a twenty-one-year-old woman would be interested in looking put-together and getting invited to things is that she’s looking for sexual partners is itself profoundly sexist, although there are other things about Lewis’s decision to single out Susan in The Last Battle that I do take exception to.)

There is one notable exception to this feature of the books, also involving Susan. In The Horse and His Boy, which is the first (and less racist) of the two books to feature Calormen, Susan and her three siblings have been living in Narnia ruling it as kings and queens for fourteen years and have grown to adulthood there (which will subsequently be reversed when they finally return to England). Susan is contemplating a political marriage to Prince Rabadash, the eldest son and heir of the Tisroc (may he live forever!) of Calormen. At first, when Rabadash visits her in the capital of Narnia, she’s charmed and more than willing to go through with the marriage; however, when she visits him in the Calormene capital, she finds that at home he is a petty, capricious tyrant, and tries to call the marriage off. At this point Rabadash attempts to imprison her in Calormen and she and her brother Edmund have to escape via subterfuge. Rabadash then spends the rest of the book attempting to invade Narnia to abduct her. He insists that Susan is obliged to become his wife because he wants her to and because he perceives it as good for Narnia to be allied to Calormen; when discussing the fact that she sees things very differently, he calls Susan a “false jade.” Most readers will take this term to mean something like “liar” or “deceiver” but in fact it is an archaic euphemism for a prostitute—shades of self-ordained “nice guys” today who call women “sluts” and “whores” for not wanting to have sex with them. Rabadash, naturally, is resoundingly defeated by the book’s heroes and heroines. The Horse and His Boy’s perceptiveness about this particular type of male sexual mentality, to my mind, covers a multitude of the series’ sociopolitical sins.

I was surprised by how much I liked The Horse and His Boy in general. It is an atypical Narnia book in a number of different respects. A good friend of mine says it feels the most like a “typical fantasy novel” in that it is set entirely in the Narnian world, has relatively scanty religious content, and has protagonists who take their quest on themselves rather than having it handed down to them as a mission from God. It’s a story about freedom and slavery, and a story about knowing that the place where you are or the place where you are from is not really “home.” Our male protagonist Shasta is fleeing being sold into slavery by his cruel foster-father in Calormen; our female protagonist Aravis, a Calormene noblewoman, is fleeing a forced marriage to a powerful man several times her age. Through coincidence (which does not actually exist in Narnia and is instead the will of Aslan), both Shasta and Aravis have horses in their lives who are in fact Narnian Talking Horses enslaved in Calormen, and the four of them set out for freedom in Narnia together.

 ❦

The Horse and His Boy represents Narnia as Anglo to the point of overt cultural chauvinism against the generically Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Calormen, a representation that becomes explicitly racialized in the second book to feature Calormen, the series finale The Last Battle. However, the themes in this book resonated strongly with me, as someone who has had a hard time making a “home”—family and friends and gainful and meaningful work and a rich religious life—in any of the various places I have lived. Although I have never been enslaved, I have definitely felt unfree in other ways and believe that there is something inimical to true freedom in the society in which I live. Calormen is, of course, a symbol appropriately overt and unmistakable for young readers—slavery and rigid hierarchies in general pervade every element of the empire’s society. “For in [the Calormene capital] Tashbaan there is only one traffic regulation,” says Lewis, “which is that everyone who is less important has to get out of the way for everyone who is more important; unless you want a cut from a whip or a punch from the butt end of a spear.” Even a generally sympathetic Calormene character at one point casually threatens to beat her slaves to death, and Shasta is not initially appalled by the idea of his foster-father selling him into slavery because for all he knows his buyer might be less abusive. C.S. Lewis wrote in a letter to a fan that The Horse and His Boy is about “the calling and conversion of the heathen”; I prefer Lewis’s still-living stepson Douglas Gresham’s belief that it is about the experience of longing and the desire to be Someplace Else.

The Last Battle involves a Calormene invasion of Narnia under the aegis of a Narnian Talking Ape who sets up a phony Aslan to encourage Narnian collaboration with the invaders. The heresy that ultimately leads to the end of the Narnian world is the idea that Aslan and the Calormene god Tash are the same being. Many people have a difficult time understanding the book’s interfaith stance, largely because Lewis was writing before today’s main positions on interfaith issues were fully developed. Muslim readers have seen something sinister in the book’s depiction of Tash and Aslan as not only separate but antithetical; since Calormene society is generically “Middle Eastern,” could this not be taken as an allegorical repudiation of the idea (accepted in most circles but rejected by many Evangelicals and some very conservative Catholics) that the Abrahamic religions are worshipping the same God? But the Calormenes are not monotheists, and Tash has no real symbolic affinities with Allah; he’s described as a monstrous four-armed vulture-man, more akin to something out of pre-Abrahamic Semitic paganism or the Rigvedic pantheon than to the bodiless, appearance-less deity that Muslims confess. A devout worshipper of Tash is invited into Aslan’s paradise at the end of the book, because he sincerely and with a good heart sought the divine. But the book has absolutely nothing good to say about the worship of Tash as a religion, only about this particular devotee as an individual. The conventional interfaith stance that the book is closest to is probably inclusivism, which holds that members of religions other than that of the inclusivist can be saved, but not saved because their own religions are in themselves true. In online forums and social media sites there is much misunderstanding among Narnia fans of what exactly inclusivism entails and how it is different from other interfaith stances.

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The actual theology of the Narnia series is a little offbeat in general, and generates controversy even among conservative Christians who share most of Lewis’s sociopolitical hobbyhorses. Tolkien nominally disliked the books because of their magpieish mishmash of different real-world mythologies (as opposed to Tolkien’s attempt at self-consistency with his primarily Norse and Celtic influences), but I have read articles suggesting that he objected to their implied theology too. Some Evangelicals today object to the inclusivism in The Last Battle, which tends not to bother mainline Protestants or Catholics. Some Catholics object to the books’ fundamental premise that Jesus might take a nature other than humanity upon Himself in another world, which tends not to bother Protestants. Some mainline Protestants object to the gutless caricatures of philosophical liberalism in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair, which tends not to bother Evangelicals or Catholics.

If I were asked to list three main theological concepts or premises present in The Chronicles of Narnia, here is what I would list:

1.      An integral, organic connection between humanity and the natural world. Humans, when present in Narnia, rule over the various Talking Beasts and mythological creatures as kings and queens, but there is nevertheless a certain ontological equality between human and Talking Beast nature, and indeed between Aslan the Great Lion and Jesus the Son of Man. Talking Beasts can and in some cases do lose the ability to speak and reason and revert to being normal animals; at the beginning of Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew, certain normal animals are chosen to become the first Talking Beasts. This is also implicit in the books’ inclusion of Classical figures such as Bacchus, Silenus, and various nymphs and dryads; the “natural” paganisms of Classical Antiquity coexist with and operate under the umbrella of the “supernatural” truths of Christianity.

2.      An emphasis on truth and reality. The Last Battle features a heavenly “real” version of Narnia in its final chapters, the phony Aslan is set up against the true Aslan, and the name of the Calormene who sought to serve Tash honestly and righteously is Emeth, Hebrew for “truth.” The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has “real water” that obviates the need for any other sustenance and enables its drinkers to look directly into the rising sun. In The Silver Chair Aslan is “The Real Lion.” Lewis wasn’t an empiricist and the series’ quasi-Platonism doesn’t have much of what people today would understand to be evidence to support it, but the books have no room or patience for postmodernity, relativism, or irony.

3.      A portrayal of God as a partner, protector, and friend before He is a father or king. Lewis would of course never deny the majesty or transcendence of God, but Aslan is primarily someone to be friendly with rather than someone to obey. The Magician’s Nephew and The Horse and His Boy are to a certain extent exceptions to this since the characters are less personally close to Aslan than the extended Pevensie family and friends who are the protagonists of the other five books.

Of course, there are numerous other theological ideas present and asserted within the books. The first core concept that I mention here is itself part of a wider celebration and affirmation of the goodness of creation and the real comforts of the world that extends throughout Lewis’s body of work. Michael Moorcock called Lewis and Tolkien’s writings “Epic Pooh” that had a lulling and complacency-inducing effect on the reader; this may have some merit, but Lewis genuinely believed that there was much about the world worth celebrating rather than simply buckling under and submitting to. He doesn’t see the world “sacramentally” in the way that a Catholic like Tolkien would—Lewis likes Pilgrim’s Progress too much for that, and there doesn’t even seem to be any equivalent to the Eucharist in Narnia—but he doesn’t have the occasional Protestant distaste for the phenomenal world either. In The Four Loves, not one of his best nonfiction writings, he speaks highly of St. Francis’s denomination of his body as “brother donkey,” because donkeys are next to impossible either to hate or to revere.

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The first-published and best-known Narnia novels are The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian, about which I have not said much, less because they do not interest me and more because they will already be so familiar to most people with any interest in the series. They got pretty good movie adaptations in the late 2000s; they’re the only books to feature the “original” core human cast of the four Pevensie siblings (although each Pevensie has at least one further appearance). The movie adaptations have led to some odd interpretations of the characters among the series’ fans. Most notably, Susan, who in the books is a pragmatic and convention-minded person of average intelligence and slightly above-average drive, in the movies stays pragmatic but is also more book-smart and willful than Lewis wrote her. I do not want to pass judgment on whether the Narnia fandom’s adoption of Susan’s movie characterization has made most fans too inclined or not inclined enough to see the sexism in The Last Battle’s treatment of her. It certainly makes her relatively passive behavior in The Horse and His Boy (not appearing at the climactic battle nor interacting with Rabadash when he is finally punished for his misdeeds) harder to take into account.

There is a great deal more to be said about the Narnia books but these are the main impressions that come to mind at the time that I am writing this. In particular, there were several moments in The Horse and His Boy and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in particular that were deeply meaningful to me as I read them but that I don’t really wish to discuss at any length in an essay like this. The two that come to mind right now are Aslan’s declaration of his steadfast presence in main male protagonist Shasta’s life in the former book and Lucy Pevensie’s ships-in-the-night instant feeling of kinship with a “fish-herdess” in an underwater kingdom in the latter. Maybe someday I will be more willing to address my feelings about these scenes logically and discursively. In that case I will have taken a great step towards fully understanding my own feelings on this touchstone series in the history of children’s fantasy literature.