Continuing my re-read of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman which I started here, as I’m focusing on portraits I’m skipping most of Volume 3 Dream Country and heading straight to the last issue, issue 20: Façade. “Façade” is fascinating from the portrait perspective and I believe the cover art for volume 3 is a representation of this issue.
“Façade” features Urania “Rania” Blackwell, DC Universe’s Elemental Girl and her inability to cope with living in her post-superhuman existence. Following her retirement, Rania is completely isolated, her only point of contact are phone calls to the agency to inquire the status of her disability cheque.
Rania has the ability to transmutate into anything… except transmutating flesh is difficult. She gained these powers through contact with “the orb of Ra”, a process that leaves her looking alien and monstrous. As a result, each time Rania enters the public sphere she must create a version of her face, to cover her disfigurement. Unable to transmutate flesh (the smell of rotting meat lasts for weeks), Rania creates silicon faces instead. These silicon faces harden and fall off in a day, but Rania keeps them. Throughout the issue we see blurred images of masks hung around Rania’s apartment. From this perspective, they look like Greek theatre masks.
While there is one photograph of Rania before she gains super powers, the masks themselves operate as a series of self-portraits. If portraits are meant to convey the essence of a person, presenting them as a mask subverts that objective, as a mask is meant to hide the true identity, transform a person, and allow them to play a role. And yet, as Rania notes herself, the masks are a part of her identity as well, telling the figure Death that: “I couldn’t throw them away. They’re part of me.”
Death response to this assessment of human identity is striking, as she offers her own:
You people always hold onto old identities, old faces and masks, long after they’ve served their purpose.
But you’ve got to learn to throw things away eventually.
Gaiman, The Sandman “Façade”
Is Death right? Do we dwell on the portraits of our past too much? Do we dream of days gone by, or dwell on our past miseries? I can’t help but think of pop psychology. How often do we locate the source and meaning of our current actions from events that happened in our past. How often do we react in a way because of a past identity, a past hurt or trauma? Can we ever move past it to form a new persona, or is it always built off layers of shattered masks, a series of silicon portraits continously created and discarded but never completely thrown away?
Too many deep questions for a Thursday afternoon. I’m off to take a nap. Until next time, take care!
Note that this is a reprint of a blog previously available to read on the Fantastika Journalwebsite. The original publication was posted on 4 December 2018. I have not updated it for publication here except to make formatting changes. Re-reading the piece, I’m sad that nothing has changed for the better in global politics – or we’ve forgotten some of the horrific things that occurred in 2018 because the last 3 years have been such a dystopian nightmare. I also didn’t think that Atwood’s prophetic fiction regarding women’s body autonomy would be so poignant in 2021 as when it first published in 1985, but here we are…
Screenshot from the Handmaid’s Tale television adaptation
The Problems of Atwood
Margaret Atwood is overrated. There. I said it. And I say that as a proud Canadian as well, so I’m sure I’ve just committed some sort of blasphemy. But bear with me here. I have three very important reasons on why The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is merely ‘okay.’ And if you disagree with all three of my reasons, only then may you commence the stoning. (Note that many members of the Fantastika Editing team are also Devout Atwood Fans and will likely help you lead the charge.)
With the recent announcement that Atwood is releasing a sequel to the novel, my initial impulse is to think that this is part of the Hollywood rebooting era that we seem to be ‘thriving in.’ Don’t get me wrong, some of these sequels have been good. Incredibles 2 (2018) leaps to mind. This is a sequel 14 years in the making and its makers’ care towards the Incredibles family shows. Blade Runner 2049 (2017) is another such film which took loving attention to its source material. Yes, it undermined the beauty of all the possible variations in the multiple released cuts (read more on this in Brian Baker’s editorial in volume 2, issue 1 of Fantastika Journal). But it seemed mindful of its status as an adaptation, demonstrating both continuity with the original and a break away from it, in order to be distinct and stand on its own.
But alongside of this have been plenty of adaptations and sequels that have been huge disappointments; far too many to list and point fingers at. I’m sure the reader can think of maybe just a few that were more money-grabbing nightmares rather than artistic endeavours. And it’s hard not to see Atwood’s sequel going this way as well. The Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t need a sequel. Having a sequel to a Dystopia seems to imply that there’s going to be a solution to the problems of society, one that was not planned by the author when they first envisaged their Dystopia. Of course, there have been plenty of Dystopic narratives that are introduced in trilogy structures, where one presumes that the outcome in the final book will be an eventual collapse of the dystopia. But this narrative progression is usually planned by the author, an idea made obvious by the fact that the trilogy publishes within a few years of the initial novel. In contrast here, adding a solution to The Handmaid’s Tale would undermine the very nature of the Dystopia that Atwood creates. Where The Handmaid’s Tale creates a warning of the possible consequences of society’s current actions, a solution to these problems would challenge that message. The other alternative of course is that society crumbles further. To me, this is a pointless exercise. What’s the point of lighting another fire when the world is already burning?
Which brings me to my first point on why Atwood, and The Handmaid’s Tale in particular, is overhyped. First, Atwood’s depiction of society is generally black and white. There are no shades of grey. There’s not even any colour. (More on that later.) We can see quite clearly that x is bad and y is good in the novel. Repression of women is bad. Of course it is. There’s no way that anyone morally decent would ever consider this idea as a good thing. But Atwood hammers these ideas into us, as a warning of the dangers of what could occur in our own society if we allow the repression of women to continue. And, while this extrapolation makes sense, my problem with it is that it doesn’t allow for the reader to think. Atwood leads you to the answer, like an examiner that will only accept one correct answer on a math exam.
Let’s compare for a moment Atwood’s dystopia to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974). With the subtitle “An Ambiguous Utopia,” we see right in the title two drastically different depictions of Dystopia/Utopia. The first page of the novel starts with the following description:
There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.
Le Guin, The Dispossessed p. 1
This concept sets up the entire narrative. Le Guin doesn’t tell you which ‘side’ is the side the reader to take. The wall represents two societies of Anarres and Urras, or a communist and a capitalist society respectively. As the narrative continues, the reader realizes that the societies governed on both sides of the wall each demonstrate their own idealistic ideas alongside corruption and decay equally. Some aspects of capitalism are bad, just as some parts of communism are. And some parts may be good. And so, Le Guin doesn’t tell the reader which of these societies to favour. She allows them to think, to contemplate, and to ultimately determine that there is no right or wrong answer. There are shades of grey, with no right path.
Now, I must admit that perhaps in today’s society, we need to see the black and the white clearly outlined. Atwood’s announcement of a sequel is based on the premise that she is updating the original’s ideas to reflect today’s global politics. And, it seems apparent that maybe some people need it hammered into their heads that some ideas are bad. Children routinely dying in school shootings is a bad thing. Tear-gassing people is bad. Locking children up in cages and separating them from their families is bad. And, the fact that certain people would argue against these ideas as ‘bad’ demonstrates just how far we’ve fallen. So, yes, Atwood’s work is completely necessary in a world where we can’t allow people to think for themselves for fear that they’ll rape and pillage those around them if we let them loose. But, I would think that these people wouldn’t be reading much of Fantastika anyway. And so, to the liberal-thinking reader (Atwood’s target audience), what ideas are they walking away with after reading The Handmaid’s Tale except an affirmation of those values that they are already hold to be true?
Of course, Atwood would not describe any of her work as Fantastika. Which brings me to my second point. Atwood believes that Science Fiction is fluff. This is quite clear in many of the statements she has made. She defines her work as Speculative Fiction, a distinct term that implies, to Atwood, a literary quality. “Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen” (The Guardian, 2003). And once again, I can let Le Guin speak here, in her review of Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009), the second book of her MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013):
In her recent, brilliant essay collection, Moving Targets, she says that everything that happens in her novels is possible and may even have already happened, so they can’t be science fiction, which is “fiction in which things happen that are not possible today”. This arbitrarily restrictive definition seems designed to protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders. She doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto.
Le Guin decides to respect Atwood’s statements of snobbery, as there have been plenty of Science Fiction authors (Le Guin included) who have had to fight for respectability as literary authors. But the capitulation is disquieting. How can we – as academics and readers of Fantastika – fight for the importance and value of Science Fiction and Fantasy if the very authors that produce these genres likewise disparage them? So my second point against Atwood has less to do with The Handmaid’s Tale, and more to do with the disappointment that fans are unable to acknowledge this work as a Fantastika text. Atwood here divorces herself from representing Science Fiction fans. She’s not a Science Fiction author. She writes Speculative Fiction – a term, to her, which has no or little connection to Fantastika genres.
And finally, third, let’s talk about representation itself. It took me awhile to see this one, as I was so indoctrinated in the problem. I am second generation Canadian. I was born in Canada. But my parents hail from India, and thus I am a visible minority citizen. It was in university, in a class dedicated to “Canadian Women Authors” that I first got a sense of something not quite right with the Atwood world. On the very first day, I felt like I stuck out. Now, in a university class of “Canadian Women Authors,” you can expect a fair number of students who were also Canadian women. So there was no reason why I should have felt a barrier. I, too, am a Canadian woman. As were the handful of colleagues around me who were taking the class, and the professor teaching it. But, as we started the class with a discussion of feminism – what problems do we face as women? – it quickly became apparent to me that we were speaking from one particular point of view; A group of (presumably) heterosexual and (with the exception of me) white Canadian woman, taking a senior-level university class about Canadian women – and discussing how hard our life was. This is not to dismiss or belittle the very real problems of equality that women in academia face. But it felt privileged to even have a discussion of our problems while looking down at the beautiful university grounds (we were on a top floor windowed classroom, and the metaphor of the ivory ‘tower’ of university was quite physical for me during this discussion.) I tried to point out some real-world problems that other women may face. As my classmates engaged in a discussion of living with their boyfriends (the problems of balancing domestic equality with studies and work), I contemplated how *lucky* there were to be able to live in an open and public relationship. An example of a young girl in India who was forced to marry a much older man sprang to mind as a contrasting experience. I myself, although born in Canada, struggled for years against the assumption that I will eventually get an arranged marriage. I couldn’t help but envy my classmates for their open and upfront acceptance of being able to live with their boyfriends, and, I must confess, the problems they were discussing in connection to this were absolutely alien to me at the time. But, with my undergraduate-level (in)experience, I was unable to communicate or even formulate for myself the distinction between the problems of inequality that were being discussed by my colleagues, and my own experiences and awareness of problems in other communities.
It wasn’t until I attended a lecture on Atwood and Canadian Literature as a PhD student that the problem crystallized so clearly. The professor was discussing Canadian identity in another of Atwood’s novels (Surfacing, 1972). This identity is English. And French. And – with some afterthought – Indigenous peoples. Although, I should say, that I’m not sure if Indigenous culture was included in the depiction of Canadian identity. Instead, the professor very clearly outlined Canadian identity as English/French colonial guilt. Period. “I guess I’m not Canadian then,” I remember muttering to the colleague sitting next to me.
And it was at that moment that I realized that in the Canadian Women Authors class that I took back in my undergraduate years – twenty novels studied over ten to twelve weeks, with fully three or four of these books by Atwood – none of these were written by non-white Canadian women. Or, there may have been one. Possibly. But the remaining nineteen were distinctly written by white women. Canadian women’s identity, then, is white.
And while Atwood obviously didn’t set the reading texts for this course, she perpetuates the system that allows these problems of representations to occur. The professor could not have read Canadian identity as either European or French (period) if the text itself did not allow for this discussion to occur. Moreover, how many visible minority characters can you think of – off the top of your head – in Atwood’s books? Does she have any? If/when they occur, are they major characters? Or are they in the supporting role? Dismissible. Canadian identity is not a beautifully coloured mosaic. To Atwood, it seems to be shades of pink. This is disastrous! An overly emotional response? But if you think about it, Atwood is often deemed representative of ‘Canadian literature.’ If you ask a non-Canadian if they can name a Canadian author, I’m certain that Atwood would be at the top of the list. How unfortunate then, that Atwood fails to speak for so many Canadians.
Now it’s true that this discussion of the representation of minority characters is fairly new. We only became really vocal about these concerns in last the two or three years, really. But this doesn’t mean that it wasn’t important until now! And I can’t help but think, why. Why did Atwood fail to represent a full spectrum of Canadian identity in her novels? Did she not see or consider them at all? Or perhaps this was this another act to protect herself from literary biases? (And which of these explanations is worse?) It’s true that – at the time of publication in 1985 – it may have been considered more appropriate to publish a text focused on normative characters. But again, I’m going to use Le Guin – my Fantastika-idol – as an author who is able to represent various identities without being shunned. (A Wizard of Earthsea, 1968, and The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969 are two obvious examples.) But perhaps she is able to do so as she was publishing despicable Science Fiction, and not the more ‘literary’ Speculative. How bitterly ironic, that representation is more acceptable in the ‘unreal’ genres, as opposed to those that are based on *real life*.
Moreover, Atwood’s novels are frequently identified as feminist literature. Yet Atwood’s discussion of gender-problems does not even begin to address nuances of identity in gender and sexuality. It is difficult to have a discussion of the ‘problems of minority representation’ without acknowledging the full spectrum of identity that this concept covers! Critical discussions of gender and sexuality are often integrated with issues of race. Problems of systematic repression are common to so many areas, after all. And so I fully hope that Atwood fixes some of this damage in her upcoming sequel, and takes the opportunity to represent the full spectrum of human identity. Problems of representation aside, I must admit that Atwood writes beautifully. Every word is well crafted. She not only paints a picture, but allows you to wallow in all five senses, so that you live in the world. She is a master craftsman in that regard. I simply hope that her world this time includes shades of gray and colour.
“Let’s not make this political.” Except – EVERYTHING is political. Everything. Waking up in the morning to get ready to go to work? Political. It’s an act that supports capitalism, the 9-5 workday, the need for job security to provide for yourself and your family. You’re doing what’s “right” and you can feel happy with that. So you get up and get dressed with work-appropriate clothes. Political. What’s work appropriate? Who decides?
“Let’s not make this political” – so you haven’t agonized over questions of identity, your way of life. You can get up and go to work in the morning without worrying about childcare needs, disabilities, your legal status to work. You’re wearing “work-appropriate” clothes because you can afford to buy whatever’s considered work appropriate. Maybe you slip on high heels because it makes you look and feel more feminine. But only if you birth certificate is stamped with an F of course. So bully to the people who can’t fall in line, right?
“Let’s not make this political.” But your very identity is a political statement. And I’m not talking about identities that you might think of as “other”, outside of the norm. How do YOU define yourself? “I’m a working mom”. Political. You live in a society where women are allowed to work, but need to consider child care needs at the same time. “I’m a high school graduate.” Political. How did you afford your education? Was it provided by the government? Did your science curriculum include evolution? Did your history and literature curriculums consider global perspectives? What about perspectives from different ethnic and cultural groups from your OWN country? Did you think there was only one?
“Let’s not make this political.” So you fit in the status quo and don’t want to rock the boat. But what about the people who don’t fit into the status quo?; who are persecuted because of it? And do you see what’s wrong with identifying people who sit outside the expected norm as political? Maybe you’re angry because you think they’ve made a choice and you personally should not be effected by that choice. But consider for a moment if parts of your identity was not a choice. “I am citizen of this country because I was born here.” Not a choice. You can not choose the country of your birth. Just as you can’t choose your skin colour or gender and sexuality. (And people who identify as a gender different from the one assigned at birth or to a non-heterosexuality are NOT making a choice.) “I grew up rich. Poor. Middle-class.” Not your choice. But are you still expecting people who did not choose their identity to live up to the same requirements as everyone else?
“Let’s not make this political” is a statement of privilege. And wait. Hold up. Beford you feel attacked by the word “privilege”, let me clarify that privilege doesn’t mean you didn’t struggle or suffer. Privilege means that you didn’t have to jump over *some* hurdles. You know the adage “walking in another man’s shoes”? Well consider instead running an obstacle course but your obstacle course has less obstacles than another’s. Or maybe obstacles in different places or of different difficulties. Unfair, right?
“Let’s not make this political.” You fit in the status quo. And people who don’t- well – that’s their problem. Except. Refusing to take a stance IS a choice. Refusing to take a side equates to choosing to continue with the status quo. And while the status quo might not personally effect you, we live in a community, a society made of up various individuals with a wide range of needs and interests. Politics is about addressing the needs of all. Are people hurting, suffering, struggling because they can’t fit in to the status quo? And are you okay with that?
“Let’s not make this political.” I laugh and cry when I see this statement made with regards to the arts (especially film, music, and literature). All art is political. Each artistic choice is a political choice. You’re reading a story. What’s the identity of the character? Is it explicitly defined? That was the author’s political choice. Maybe the character isn’t explicitly defined. So you assume that the character is a cis-white-male because it doesn’t have any details indicating otherwise. Here, YOU’VE made a choice, as a reader, a choice to identify the character as a cis-white-male because it’s not otherwise stated.
“Let’s not make this political.” Okay. So maybe you’re not worried about rocking the boat and keeping things calm. Maybe you’re ANGRY at things you see as political. You’re favourite movie is being remade but they’ve replaced the cis-white-male main character with someone who is LGTBQ+ or a visibly different race or a female or a disabled character. And you’re ANGRY at what you see as a political choice. That anger is a political choice too. But I’m sorry that society has failed you, that you can’t open your heart to empathize and be compassionate with all members of your community.
“Let’s not make this political.” = I personally am not effected/affected by this and I don’t care about the people who are. That’s statement in itself is a choice; a political choice. And a heartless one.
Earlier this year I read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) with a sense of quiet unease. The book, if you haven’t read it (and you really should!) depicts a life where books are banned. While there are pockets of people who keep a library, their neighbours are quick to report on them and a fireman’s job in this dystopia is to burn the stash.
When reading it, I couldn’t help but see comparisons with our own conservative government and those who reign globally. I’m sure it’s hardly a surprise that I vote left. In Canada, provincial power governs such things as health care and education, and so they have a lot of power when elected. And despite the signed declaration that, if elected, the conservatives would not dismantle health care, it came as no surprise that less than a year after taking power they cut funding to both health care and education. The party and the premiere have openly stated that universities are “outdated” models, and that they want to return the education system back to the basics: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Their education mandate is to remove all “liberal-agenda” from the curriculum. And by “liberal,” they mean the capacity to reason and question; critical analysis, scientific reasoning, sociopolitical consciousness = these are all seen as “liberal agendas.” Or, to state it simply, we have a government that actively refutes climate change and LTBQ+ rights. They have spread a propaganda campaign where public sector workers (health care providers and education workers) are greedily stealing money from the “real” hard-working Albertans. Or, in other words, we have a legally elected fascist government who is acting to further dumb down the population. And I’m sure that statement is true of a lot of states and nations.
So, of course, I couldn’t help seeing specters in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. But, it was an image that I scoffed at. It was the start of 2020, and the future seemed bright. I was uneasy with the state of the world, but blindly optimistic that things don’t happen like they do in a book.
And then the pandemic hit.
And we’ve seen governments not only struggle to cope (justifiably so), we’ve also seen leaders who have outright denied there’s a problem, or acknowledge the problem but then staunchly ignore the advice of medical professionals (and science in general). But while it’s easy to blame this incredible mismanagement on incompetent leaders, it’s important to remember that we, the public, put them there.
“Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its accord.”
Bradbury, p. 87
Re-reading that phrase now, I feel nauseated.
Could this pandemic have been avoided? Doubtful. Given the ease of international travel, a sickness of some sort was bound to spread sooner or later. Could things have been handled better? To give the benefit of the doubt, no one was prepared for the scale of this event.
But. Do we live in a world where – even today – people are doing all that they can to take the pandemic seriously? We have anti-vaxxers and science-deniers who are insistent that this is a government conspiracy to enforce vaccination – or that the pandemic was caused by science and medicine in the first place. We have news outlets who give equal voice to the opinions of Karen on the street as they do to the expert in the field. There are those who gather(ed) in large groups despite all warnings not to do so. We have governments who toed the line with declaring an emergency for fear of harming the economy. And those who use the pandemic to continue pushing through their own right-wing agendas.
In Alberta: contracts with doctors and other medical professionals were ripped up and then “put on hold until the pandemic is over” (read: made redundant after this emergency is all over); just this weekend the party suspended environmental reporting (reporting of contaminants in air, land, and water) for reasons that I don’t quite understand but are somehow pandemic related; 25,000 education workers were laid off just days before the premiere found $7.5 billion in the budget to fund the oil pipeline; university funding was cut despite the fact that this also includes cuts to a team who are right now working on a cure.
Public health continues to come last, despite all that is occurring. But more aggravating, disheartening, and, indeed, terrifying, is seeing corrupt officials using a global pandemic to continue dismantling public services.
And, I am absolutely confident that, despite everything, the voting public will continue to put these parties in power.
Given the year+ prediction for when a vaccine may be found (if at all; after all, the common cold still doesn’t have a cure), it is likely that societal structures may dramatically shift. But, will we see the end of late capitalism, into a more socialist, utopian reality? Or will we be like Bradbury’s bibliophiles: hiding, on the run, condemned for being different from the rest of society because of our love of questioning; reasoning; critically analyzing?
There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly thing we’ve done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we’ll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember every generation.
Bradbury, p. 163
That’s Bradbury’s way of saying “history repeats itself.” But, while Bradbury aims on a (tongue-in-cheek?) optimistic note, right now I’m feeling less confident of the resilience of humanity.
The year was 2015. Obama was President. Same sex marriage was – finally – legalized in U.S. And Star Wars: A Force Awakens released in theaters.
Although the film was generally positively received, there was a thread of criticism that underscored the new production; the repeated mantra that A Force Awakens was basically a rip-off of A New Hope. It was repetitive. Derivative. The same story told again and again.
Despite it’s long history (going all the way back to the great sagas of the Illiad/Odyssey, The New and Old Testaments, Ramayana/Mahabharata, etc, etc, etc), the Epic today is often derided for being unimaginative. It’s too repetitive; derivative; or – gasp – formulaic! However, as I argue in The Shape of Fantasy being repetitive isn’t a bad thing. As Patricia Waugh discusses for metafiction:
There has be some level of familiarity. In metafiction it is precisely the fulfilment as well as the non-fulfilment of generic expectations that provides both familiarity and the starting point for innovation.
Patricia Waugh, Metafiction, 64, original emphasis
Roland Barthes likewise stipulates that the pleasures of the text come from expectations, which, for the Epic tradition, means a familiar narrative:
The pleasure of the text is not the pleasure of the corporeal striptease or of narrative suspense. […] the entire excitation takes refuge in the hope of seeing. (Barthes 10, original emphasis).
Roland Barthes, The Pleasures of the Text, 10, original emphasis
Thus, I argue that the latest Star Wars trilogy does an incredible job of delivering a familiar story in a new way. Is the plot line similar to the original? Of course it is. But it is also recognizably different, with a distinct ending, perhaps one that may alter the course of the universe enough that evil won’t rise up again (or at least, not too soon).
More importantly, these criticisms that Star Wars is repetitive misses the point. Brian Merchant (Motherboard) argues that “science fiction is supposed to be about exploring the unexplored, not rehasing the well-trod.” I disagree wholeheartedly. Science Fiction, like any literature, is about exploring the human condition.
There was another important event in 2015 in America that eventually had global significance. Donald Trump, on the campaign trail, trademarked his “Make American Great Again” slogan.
And, whether coincidental or not, A Force Awakens reinforces the idea that even when you overthrow a tyrannical fascist government, another one will rise up to take its place. We are doomed to repeat the cycle – and have narratives that repeat themselves – until we are able to break away from this cycle of oppression.
As the latest Star Wars trilogy draws to a close, the same criticism has been launched at the final installment: it’s repetitive. Redundant. Flat.
To which I would like to loudly reply, “Don’t you all understand the point of the Epic?? That’s how it works!”
Any attempt to break the formula is only going to result in audience dissatisfaction. As we’ve seen with the end of A Game of Thrones, the televised adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s unfinished novels, it is impossible to solve a good versus evil story-line without some hint of a messianic figure. A sacrifice is necessary to restore the balance. That’s the Epic. That’s how it works. You can play around with the formula, and toss red herrings to distract the audience from identifying the final messianic Hero, but, at the end of the day, the restoration of balance requires a Messianic character. And, more importantly, the bigger the unbalance, the more special the hero has to be. Not just any sacrifice will do (as evidenced by the number of soldiers that meet an unhappy fate at the front lines of the final battle). No, balance to the universe can only be restored by someone special. Maybe someone who has special powers or abilities, or perhaps are special due to bloodline (parentage is especially important in this patriarchal narrative structure).
So while I agree with the criticism that franchise did a great disservice to any hint of non-heteronormative or miscegenetic relationships, I disagree that the plot is a disappointment. The plot follows exactly the pattern of the Heroic Epic that I outline in The Shape of Fantasy, a pattern that includes repetitions and cycles.
Why? Why is the epic repetitive, but incredibly necessary? Because – as historical and current events have shown us – this story will continue to resonant in our society so long as evil exists in the world. Melodramatic? Maybe. But I feel entirely suitable for the state of the world today. So long as there are groups of people that oppress another, there will be stories about rising up and defeating it.
Doc Fantasy Reads 