Hello readers! Some of you are new arrivals, probably because of my last podcast. Welcome! You can expect a newsletter roughly like this on Fridays, though today is an especially fruitful day. If you upgrade your subscription to Citizen, you also get to be in our Discord server! It’s got 40-odd people presently and people seem to like it! If you’re already a Citizen and want to join the Discord, please let me know in the comments where I can DM you an invite, because Substack doesn’t have built-in integration. Oh well! I linked to the podcast in this newsletter in case anyone missed it. I also review some books, and we have a new missive from Roomie Ed! He actually wrote it a while ago but I got caught up in some stuff and it fell through the cracks. Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Podcast: Reading in the Time of Monsters 010: “Unmask Alice” and Literary Fraud, with John Dolan
Reading Notes: Cole, Reed
Review Essay: Finally Reading Strauss, and the Art of Misprision
Ed’s Corner: I’m Here For the Mechanics, Not the Aesthetics & I Guess I Have To Actually Watch the Movies I Review Now
PODCAST
As many of you know, John Dolan has been a massive inspiration for and influence on my critical work. While he might be most famous as “The War Nerd,” analyzing the world of wars from his unique perspective, I always also valued the work he did under his own name on literature and rhetoric. Among his topics of expertise is literary forgery. It’s a fascinating subject, and we get into it as we discuss Rick Emerson’s Unmask Alice, his journalistic account of arch-forger Beatrice Sparks, who made a fortune — and an impact on many lives, almost entirely a bad one — with her series of “found diaries” like Go Ask Alice and Jay’s Journal. We had a lot of fun recording- I hope you have fun listening.
Reading Notes
I listened to Matthew Cole’s Code Over Country: The Tragedy and Corruption of SEAL Team 6. It was interesting, and probably took the story about as far as you were going to go with a standard liberal journalistic framework. He pretty thoroughly gets across how fucked up the SEALs, and especially Team 6, are, and how they got that way- a combination of founder effect (starring Richard Marcinko, who featured prominently on book covers when I was a kid, with his bearded glower) and the massive amount of killing American authorities had the SEALs do during their Forever Wars post 9/11. The SEALs were originally founded to do something that makes sense to have a special, in-house elite unit to do: underwater demolitions. You need specially trained people for that. Kicking down doors or sneaking up mountains to kill foreigners is the sort of thing a sensible empire – not saying a good empire, that doesn’t exist, but a sensible one – jobs out. You don’t take your most motivated recruits, expensively train and equip them, make them into this special secret unit, and then have them do something a local gunsel could just as easily do with much less expense and exposure. It made a little more sense when Team 6’s mission was hostage rescue, but it hasn’t done much of that for a long time. It’s a hit squad. It has the dysfunctions of a highly-strung hit squad: poor discipline, killing civilians, developing a gang mentality that leads it to victimize other servicemen, etc etc on and on. There’s a lot of pretty ghastly stories here, I won’t rehearse them all here. What’s especially galling is the way SEALs, including their worst actors, get rewarded seemingly the more dirt they do. Cole points to the way they’ve been sacrificed as the tip of the spear of the war on terror, and there’s truth to that, though we don’t have good casualty figures for them. But they’ve also become a willing symbol that the worst Americans use to justify and even model their descent into barbarity. There’s no better example of this than Eddie Gallagher, an obvious sociopath who murdered civilians and stabbed a captured fighter to death while one of his teammates was trying to save his life. On trial for his crimes, Gallagher became a culture war figure- his fellow SEALs, who broke “code” and reported him, were weak Millennials who were rebelling against his stern discipline! That’s the insult to the injury of all this… assassins become the symbol for warrior valor (yes, I know, they can do a lot of push ups), the one violating all basic military rules is the one who’s imposing discipline, a group of people defined by wars they lost become the paragons of leadership success. The crimes are awful, the anti-lessons drawn from them are… not worse, but unbearable.
I also listened to Hammer by Joe Mungo Reed. I can’t remember where I learned about this one. I had it in my “contemporary literary fiction” list. It got no votes when it was up for election! I guess I didn’t “sell” it and honestly I wasn’t expecting much… but it wasn’t bad! It’s the story of a young-ish British dude, Martin, who works in the art business in 2013. An old college friend of his is married to a Russian oligarch living in London. The oligarch has an impressive art collection and, through his wife, befriends Martin and makes him an adviser on further art buys. Oleg the oligarch, the glory days of making a fortune behind him and with an Anglo-Russian younger wife who despises him (no points for guessing what Marina and Martin get up to), decides he wants to play politics in the old country and see about getting rid of that Putin guy. The plot isn’t super-compelling, but the writing and characterization is strong. Among other things, Reed resists stock characterization, especially surprising when a character is a Russian oligarch, one of the stereotypical heavies of our era, and enough of them have made caricatures of themselves to justify one more in fiction. Reed doesn’t go that route. His characters are passionate but stuck. Even when they’re passionate about stuff I don’t care about, like modern art, Reed still gets you to feel it (the audiobook narrator, Ralph Corkhill, puts some good mustard on the narration, too). I’m not going to say this is an amazing book, but it was a solid read, well-paced, unsentimental, a good surprise.
Review Essay: Finally Reading Strauss, and the Art of Misprision
When I was a kid, on usenet (I know you’re not supposed to talk about usenet off of usenet but… come on… the dream is dead), I ran into people with some piquant signature quotes. I well remember the dude who toodled around alternate-history-scenario usenet with the sigfile quote “Al Qaeda delenda est.” You know, in case folks were slacking! There were a fair few wingnuts going around usenet at the time, I don’t think this guy was one- just a normal, probably politically moderate (back when that meant more) dude who wanted it known he did not like Al Qaeda, not one bit. Similarly, there was someone – I want to say a Canadian lady? There were a lot of Canadians but not that many self-presenting ladies around, but it was long ago – who had, for a little while at least, the motto “Stick it to the Straussians!” as her signature.
Young me had heard of Straussians by then, because I had heard of Project for a New American Century and might have seen the Adam Curtis documentary “The Power of Nightmares,” so it wasn’t an altogether opaque reference. I was very much on board with the idea that a small group of bad actors were responsible for the frightening developments going on around me after 9/11. Split the difference, now: those actors were bad actors, virtually all of them completely unrepentant, and deserve whatever punishment we can give them, but this was America. The system as a whole (which they upheld and steered) was responsible.
I figure that has to be a whole generation’s introduction to Leo Strauss: his relationship to the neoconservative movement and from there to “regime change” in Iraq and the mad, but somehow still corny, dream of remaking the Middle East in the image of something between the Bushes’ Texas and the Podhoretzes’ Manhattan. People depict him as some weird old German dude who created a cult around U Chicago and before you know it, they’re puppeteering the Bush dynasty’s fortunate son, providing the intellectual heft that everyone thought the rest of the right lacked. What a difference a few decades make! “Neocon” now is thrown around as an insult on the right, much more than on the left (we’ve got neolibs to worry about, and David Harvey officially denoted neoconservatism as a variant on neoliberalism, so…). Ambitious young right-wingers now would compete to denounce neocon “globalism” (complete with anti-semitic overtones) the way they would have competed for neocon favor twenty, even ten years ago.
The point is, I came to Strauss with who knows how much baggage. If I read “Persecution and the Art of Writing” twenty or even ten years ago, I wonder how I would’ve reacted. The polemical context around the guy was more heated, and I knew less intellectual history. It’s possible to think about Strauss as a philosopher, critic, and intellectual historian (of sorts) in his own right- he may be the only intellectual figure whose reception is less politicized now than it was in the aughts! That’s not to dismiss the very real political agenda he had, even in his most high-flown works about ancient and medieval philosophy. It’s just that it was never a matter of Strauss saying “Plato says to invade Iraq.” There was always a more complicated transmission going on.
“Persecution and the Art of Writing” has the sort of thesis that lends itself to widespread propagation: simple, provocative, broadly applicable, encouraging of further research. The idea is that throughout history, philosophers have faced persecution by religious and political authorities. Therefore, especially in the pre-Enlightenment period (but, Strauss hints, maybe also now that the fascists, communists etc also suppress free speech in their domains), philosophers hid the full meanings of their works. They wanted to make sure only people receptive to their truths would find them. This was both to avoid direct persecution, like what happened to Socrates, and also because many philosophers believed, as did the authorities who might persecute them, that making philosophical truth available to the simple-minded masses would create disasters. So, in order to understand the great philosophers of the past, you need to learn to read them as intended and grasp their esoteric meanings. Say what you want about Strauss, but he brooked none of your po-faced self-effacing attitude humanities people (myself included) perform about their fields nowadays. This is serious business.
This is an interesting hypothesis, and truth be told I can see it in many cases. Maybe it’s because my education in pre-modern intellectual history has been, in some sense, Strauss-filtered, but it seems indisputable that thinkers past understood the value of knowledge and its transmission differently than we do today, or did in the Enlightenment period, etc. It would only make sense that these valuations would change, if nothing else with changes in political economy and in technology. To be brutally reductive, before the printing press and mass literacy, it would make sense to go for a “quality” propagation strategy rather than a “quantity” one: when people read work that had been painstakingly transcribed onto papyrus or something, you might indeed want readers who are learned enough to piece through some light puzzles to get your truth, whether or not you also face prosecution, which was always a possibility.
I’ve never made a system of it, but I do notice common patterns of argument and wonder why they come about amongst whom, when. Impressionistically, there seems to be a pretty common argument pattern, I associate it with my generation but maybe it was always as prominent and commonly-used as it seems to be now: “I was with X until they said A, B, and C- they took it too far, or in a direction I couldn’t follow.” This might partially describe my feelings towards Strauss’s argument in “Persecution and the Art of Writing.” But, because I’ve gotten into the study of intellectual history and some associated fields (and that includes, in some small part, reading Strauss!), I think it’s worth examining the arguments, cliches, tropes, topoi, so on that we use, in general and in this case. Because I think I can feel myself reaching for that pattern, which involves a mental reconstruction of Strauss’s argument. This reconstruction can probably hold some water for relatively casual conversation. But it’s not quite all there. Strauss didn’t start with an argument I could agree with, and then started making a crazy wall of Maimonides exegeses and/or political arguments I just couldn’t agree with. The elements I can follow and those I can’t are present from the beginning.
So let’s leave the false chronology of “they started smart and went off the deep end” behind. Such a narrative works for some works but not this. To me, we can find the crux of a lot of issues with Strauss’s work, and which would inform the bizarre story of his somehow becoming a touchpoint for foreign policy debates thirty years after his death, with the question of transmission. The whole thesis is about the transmission of ideas. But Strauss has very specific ideas in mind, very specific communicators, very specific modes. Coming from the depths of Mitteleuropan high kultur, Strauss’ idea of what is and isn’t meaningfully philosophical is both considerably more ambitious than what we have today – essentially, the keys to universal truth – but also much more limited. The transmission of philosophical knowledge in these esoteric texts concerns capital-T truth, freed of the dross of the incidental (except where that dross can be used to hide dangerous truths), and constitutes a single body of knowledge that is superior to all else, except perhaps religion, which Strauss (like many of the thinkers he interrogates) understands as often existing at cross-purposes to philosophy.
That this is elitist… well, it is, but the right or wrong of that, morally/politically speaking, is mostly beside the point here. We can also point to a more serious intellectual/political problem, Strauss corraling all of philosophical thought into one tradition that starts with the Greeks, passes on to the Romans, the usual Western Civ story (though, if we’re being fair, arguably more diverse than many Western Civ types at the time, or now, would have thought, including many Jews and Muslims) that ends with, wouldn’t you know it, the author. This is more to the point, because it helps raise the stakes of the game that Strauss plays – you’re either in the lineage and dealing with objective ultimate truths, or you’re irrelevant – while also making it a bit easier, limiting the number of players and possible messages sent between them.
What it also does is ward off misprision. I’ve long argued that misprision, just as much as influence, should be the subject of intellectual history, that misunderstanding, misapplication, misappropriation of ideas should play as much of a role as anyone “getting” any given message. Strauss, unlike many scholars, does, sort of, incorporate misprision. Supposedly we’ve all been misreading the classics this whole time! But when all things point to the Truth in this Platonist sense, there’s always a safe way home to clear understanding. Static doesn’t define the existence of a channel like it does in real life. The idea that maybe there is no message without static other than, perhaps, between your ears, the idea that the potential for misprision across centuries, continents, languages, vastly different contexts… well, we get back to Plato. There’s a reference point, above us all, and that’s how we get any messages, at all, anywhere, why it’s not all static…
Well, that’s as may be, and surely we have some good and interesting work as the result of people with dubiously sanguine attitudes about communication. But even in its own terms, Strauss’s insistence that, as part of this tradition passed down from Athens, he has the keys to see what the great sages hid, fails as an exegetical – a cryptographical, even – method. Strauss’s basic method of analysis is to look at a text and decide that some given part of it is wrong, off somehow. Not too dissimilar to how detectives find hidden messages in crime novels, sometimes! A philosopher says something banal, uses a funny phrasing, etc. From there, assorted other hints will tell you what the blooper was meant to conceal. No one, even across however many generations of transmission, ever just… writes an off paragraph, or just something that Strauss can’t see the point of. I want to say “despite the radically differing contexts” but to Strauss’s kind of Platonist, the differing contexts don’t matter. Truth remains the same. If only he and his followers had such strong dedication to truth in the lower-case sense, the truth of failure…
In any event, to use another framework Strauss probably would not want applied to such important philosophical work as his, this was pretty fun to read. I enjoy displays of erudition, and Strauss is actually quite clear when he chooses to be (presumably, as a materialist and a socialist, I am not privy to the esoteric meanings in the text… I think I’ll be ok). You can see how this could provide the basis for a kind of academic cult: the air of secret knowledge that could prompt either serious exegeses or National Treasure-style vaguely-historical bullshitting, the feeling of being part of a secret elite stretching back however long, the possessors of the true knowledge – which, Strauss makes clear in a few places, entitles the holder to power others couldn’t or shouldn’t have – acting for the betterment of all (whether the all know it or consent or not)... well. Apparently there’s a whole clique of Trumpian Straussians, the “West Coast” Straussians, who are still at least somewhat active in right-wing circles. The once-prominent leaders of the other Straussian crowd, the Kristols and Wolfowitzes, have become anti-Trumpers but are just as sinister as ever, and one suspects they may not be as buried as one might hope. When Strauss’s message transmits to future generations, these channels, made by history and circumstance, will inevitably shape what is received on the other end- though, you have to figure the insistence that the listener can, if they are wise and special enough, receive a clear bolt from the Platonic blue will come through loud and clear.
Ed’s Corner: I’m Here For the Mechanics, Not the Aesthetics & I Guess I Have To Actually Watch the Movies I Review Now
In the process of cohabitating with Peter, he’ll occasionally come across me while I’m watching a Mario Maker stream capture on YouTube. These are most often stream captures created by PangaeaPanga, an old hand at speed running Mario ROM-Hacks who keeps up his skills by playing custom Mario Maker 2 levels fairly regularly. While watching one of these YouTube videos Peter asked me if I watch these videos because I was a fan of Mario, and if I was excited that there was going to be a Mario movie coming out soon. This was a hard question to answer. Or rather, it was fairly simple- it’s just the answer is counterintuitive.
Very simply: yes I like Mario, but no, I wasn’t particularly excited about the movie. Now, it’s not that I have a grudge against Chris Pratt, or think that they’re butchering the source material or anything. In fact, I wouldn’t know it if they were, even if I were to watch the movie, which I eventually will. Rather, the fact is I don’t like the Mario franchise for Mario or any of the characters or the story. However pleasing Mario and his pals might be, and they are spectacular in terms of character design and animation, I was never really a fan of that part of Mario. If I just wanted to experience Mario on the aesthetic level I would watch walkthroughs of the various games with commentary turned off, or the cut scenes from the games, or look at scans of the art books, but that’s not how I’m enjoying Mario these days.
I’m watching PangaeaPanga play the levels, with commentary – something that distracts from the aesthetics of Mario – because as true connoisseurs of the game will tell you, many of the Mario games are held together as games much more by their excellent sound design than most people give it credit for. I’m also not keeping the commentary on because of some parasocial relationship with Panga, although he’s a personable and interesting guy, constantly revealing interesting tidbits about himself: his deep interest in basketball, or the fact that he has perfect pitch. He certainly deserves a lot better than the paleolithic ancestor of the “touch grass” meme that this USA Today columnist huffed out in a short featurette about his taking the world record of blindfolded Super Mario Brothers speedrun back in 2015. Rather, what I find interesting about Panga’s commentary is that he has an excellent understanding of the mechanics of the 2D Mario games, and just what exactly can be done with the tools in the tool box that the Mario franchise offers up.
You might be thinking, “wait, the mechanics of Mario games?” You basically just run and jump, and occasionally you spit fireballs if you have the right power up. Maybe there are a few other interactions with enemies and obstacles, go down pipes to hidden areas, throw the Koopa shells, or get squished by the Thwomps, but that’s about it, right? I’ll grant that the individual mechanics appear very straight forward, but there’s a lot of hidden depth to them for those who take the time to break them down. Sure, you are basically just running and jumping throughout the whole game, but those two systems work in combination to inform one another, as the game tracks how much momentum Mario has built up by running, and allows the player to jump higher and farther if you’ve built up enough speed by running, jumps you couldn’t make if you cautiously stop right at the edge and try to jump from a full stop become easily makeable if you’re running at full speed. But the amount of momentum the player has is actually surprisingly granular. If you needed to hit a very narrow opening between two pipes several tiles away, running at full speed might cause you to overshoot the mark, while jumping from a full stop would cause you to severely undershoot it, such that you have to jump when you’re running almost, but not quite, full speed to hit your narrow window.
These complexities compound when you add in the other elements in combination with these basic mechanics. For instance you can pick up and throw Koopa shells, which normally players use as an offensive tool against the enemies in the level. You pick up the shell and then you carry it until you see an enemy moving at you in a straight line and then you throw it at them to eliminate them. But there’s an element of risk/reward to it, because the shell will bounce off of walls and solid blocks and come back towards Mario to potentially injure him after being thrown, which is an interesting tension in its own right. This shell bouncing also adds an interesting possibility when applied to the running and jumping mechanics explained earlier. A player can jump while carrying the shell, as well as throw the shell while they’re in the air, and it’s entirely possible to jump, throw the shell, and then jump off of the shell on the rebound to clear ledges that would be otherwise too high for Mario to scale with even his highest jump at maximum speed. If you’re quick enough, you can throw one shell into the air, grab another, do one shell jump, catch the falling shell you threw in the air and then do a second shell jump after the first. There are even set ups to do triple shell jumps, but leave those to the professionals as they are very annoying to do properly. But then you can add in the other elements of the level. For instance, you don’t necessarily need a static wall to do a shell jump, you could also prompt a Thwomp to fall to shell jump off of that.
The kind of challenges players can build from the simple building blocks of the Mario rule set, and the ability for other players to overcome those crazy challenges is truly staggering. While Panga was known for doing speed runs of the basic Super Mario Brothers game, he’s most famous for both playing and creating early Kaizo ROM hacks, which he’s brought forward by playing and designing levels in this tradition that are made in the Mario Maker series. To give you an idea of exactly how crazy these levels can get, check out this custom level Panga designed in this video here. Kaizo levels contain all of the basic mechanics of your standard Mario levels, but with the complexity turned up to a punishing pitch, often requiring split second sight reads of what the level is prompting the player to do, as well as a highly technical series of inputs to get Mario through the hostile environment. You might think the usual lackadaisical pace of your average Mario levels would preclude players from finding and developing these advanced tricks, but it's exactly this mild and forgiving pace in the base game that gives room for players to slow down and experiment to find these advanced mechanic interactions. Kaizo levels allow players who find interesting uses for Mario's moveset to put them into practice at a high level.
By way of example, a common trope in Kaizo levels is the so called "Kaizo block." In Mario games, some of the series' well known coin blocks can be made to be invisible until the player jumps through the space where that block is hiding, and in the process totally cancels out all of their vertical momentum. Often in Nintendo-made Mario levels, these hidden blocks exist as means of building hidden paths that players can discover in order to traverse the level in interesting ways. In a Kaizo level, by contrast, if you hit an invisible block, you're likely about to die. Generally, Kaizo level creators place invisible blocks right over the most obvious point to make a long jump between platforms, the player then bonks their head, loses all of their vertical momentum and falls straight into the pit they were trying to avoid. While there is indeed more than a little bit of malicious intent here, and most modern Kaizo level designers put these in more as a joke than a challenge, they did serve a purpose once, long ago, besides a petty “gotcha!” By setting up and then frustrating what appears to be a standard jump, the level designer is highlighting there is more to the Mario tool box than just running and jumping efficiently. Either the player has to approach the jump with a higher level of precision, or span the gap in a different way than merely jumping, like leapfrogging off of a shell they kicked earlier or something. In this way the Kaizo block is a cheap kill, but one that conveys useful information: this isn’t a usual jump, you’ll have to find another way.
Meaner still is the “Kaizo trap,” which doesn’t exist in its original form today, but really opened up the play space by catching players right at the end of a level, just when they thought they were safe. Most of the earlies Kaizo levels were made off of ROM hacks for Super Mario World, for the Super Nintendo, which would mark the end of the level with a little goal tape that would slide up and down a tall gate, which after Mario crossed the gate, all of the enemies on the screen would be deleted, the level would iris out and Mario would automatically walk forward a bit, do a little victory pose, and then proceed to the next level. A fun quirk of this little jaunt to the victory podium at the end of the level is that in the game code as written, Mario could still die if he fell into a pit during this walk, and not only that, if he did die even during the victory walk, which was in no way under the control of the players, then they’d fail the level and have to go all the way back to the start to try again.
While the most obvious way to implement this would be to just put an open pit a short distance away from the goal tape, you could also have a contraption activate a “P-Switch,” which converts breakable blocks into coins. Thus, what appeared to be solid ground a few seconds ago, gives way to open air, or, because enemies are despawned but objects aren’t, you could hide a springboard behind one of the goalposts so the player is pushed backward in the instant they touch the goal, straight into a pit. While there are a couple of ways around a few of the traps discussed here, such as crossing the goal tape backward after jumping forward into a side facing spring, so that Mario walks left during his victory pose instead of right, or waiting out the P-Switch before crossing, the most straightforward way of arresting Mario from walking directly into a Kaizo trap also has the potential to entirely recontextualize the entire level you crossed to get to the trap.
Like I said, enemies are despawned as you cross the goalposts, but objects aren’t. This includes objects that Mario carries with him. If Mario can carry a P-Switch, POW Block, or springboard to the goal, and set it down somewhere between the goalpost and the pit, the Mario sprite will walk right into it and not proceed forward into the pit after crossing the tape. Now imagine whatever object Mario had to carry with him to stop him from wandering into the trap was placed at the very beginning of the level, or better yet, in a hard to reach area of the level that needed some difficult maneuvers to gain access to visible a short distance from the start of the level. This way, the level’s challenge becomes crossing the level while juggling the item to get it to the end with you, because there are some transversal mechanics that become a lot more complicated while carrying a springboard. Kaizo traps, then, become a workaround to issue the player the challenge of crossing the level with the added difficulty of carrying an item, but communicated entirely through the mechanical language of punishing you with death for trying to cross the goal without it. Modern Mario Maker levels dispense with this by just allowing level makers to set requirements such as carrying a specific object before spawning in the goal, but at the time it was an interesting innovation in what can be communicated through mechanics.
So, this explains the paradox of my tepid excitement for the Mario movie. The movie is an extrapolation on the visual language of the world of Mario, of colorful pipes for colorful plumbers to slide down, with cute little mushroom creatures and dangerous dinosaurs to avoid and jump on. None of that has anything to do with the mechanical language that engages my interest in the Mario series. That’s not to say that it’s a bad idea to make a movie that engages with the visual language of Mario, because its visual language is also quite strong. But it won’t necessarily appeal to everyone who likes Mario, because there are different facets of the appeal of Mario. It definitely has the potential to be a fun movie, but it’s a mistake to assume that engaging fans of a particular kind of media is merely a matter of reproducing the visual aesthetics of that media in higher quality. The Mario movie will have to use those aesthetics in an interesting way that adds something to the conversation.
While I’m not excited for the movie, I do plan to watch it, if only because it seems to be one of several movies to have come out recently based more around intellectual property, like a brand or toy line, than a creative work like a novel or previous movie franchise. Obviously this all calls back to the Marvel movies, but it’s taken a strange turn whereby there’s some invocation of brands that never really had much in the way of characters to begin with. Mario is actually the most characterized out of most of these summer movies coming out: While generally the games don’t talk much about who Mario is, opting instead to set aside story for mechanics, there’s some elements of his character communicated by the game and his environments. Mario is a pretty straightforward working class guy, he’s not a superhero, he’s just someone trying to do the right thing in a weird psychedelic world in which he is an outsider. You can infer a bit of this from the fact that Mario is the only human in a world of mushroom creatures and dinosaurs. He’s not a rich character, but he does have some characteristics to base an adaptation on.
Then you have things like the Dungeons & Dragons movie, or the Barbie movie, which while they are recognizable visual and aesthetic elements to both, inherently resist conventional character structure, in that they are toys and games that purposefully elide specific characterization to facilitate the imaginative play of those engaging with the product. Like yeah, Barbie may be beautiful, have dreams, and have a house, in fact she has a beautiful Malibu Dream House, and she may be a fashion designer, and a doctor, and an astronaut, but these are merely descriptors. To some extent they’re accessories, that the person playing with the doll can choose to engage with or not. In playing with the Barbie, it’s entirely possible that even if the person played with both the fashion designer Barbie and the astronaut Barbie one after the other, they’re not necessarily developing a continuity in their head where Barbie is moonlighting between several careers. Barbie’s more of a blank slate for the individual player to project their imagination onto, “what if I was a fashion designer? what if I was an astronaut? what if I had all of these nice clothes and owned a pink Corvette? &c.” Barbie isn’t all of these things, but she could be whichever of those things the player wanted to imagine an avatar of themselves to be at the time.
As a vessel for fantasy Barbie (and incidentally the player characters in Dungeons & Dragons, but I feel I talk about that franchise enough already), is naturally resistant to developing the particularities that would lend themselves to possessing a character, and indeed narrative consistency. Not that you couldn’t tell a story with the aesthetics of Barbie, but in so doing you’re kind of changing what Barbie is to the people who had thus far been engaging with it on a purely imaginative level. I’d be interested to see if these imaginative play franchise movies address this paradox of characterization by adopting a sort of avant garde anti-narrative cinematographic language, but I kind of doubt they will. In any case, I’m going to go out of my way to look into the matter, and watch The Mario Movie, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and Barbie. I’ve been predicting this attempted shift from creative property to intellectual property for a while now, and it seems that cultural forces are trying to make that exchange at several points with this recent spate of movies. Look forward to my reviews(?) of them over the next couple of Ed’s Corners, where we’ll finally get to experience my reviewing a movie I watched instead of one I read about on the internet.
Mithra would do a better job rescuing princesses than some plumber, if you ask me… if she wanted to bother
I’d like a discord link please!
As a St John's College grad I've always seen the Straussian conspiracy theory as a left-wing equivalent to the right-wing Frankfurt School/Cultural Marxism conspiracy, which has now metastasized as "critical race theory". There's nothing in Strauss that tells you that America is the legitimate heir to the divine tradition, just like how there's nothing in Adorno that says the solution to Auschwitz is to set up DEI offices.