Deadpool -- I didn't love it, Part 1: The Overview

I didn't hate it, either, but after all the hype that seems to be building exponentially on Twitter, I really went into it expecting more. Which, I believe, is part of why I wasn't that impressed. I think if I'd gone into Deadpool without hearing about how hilarious it was and how original and irreverent and surprising and all of that, I might have actually found it funnier, more surprising, and maybe even original. Though ultimately the conclusion I have come to is that Deadpool is unusual but not original.

But before I go further with this review...

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS. LOTS AND LOTS OF SPOILERS.


Anyway.

The first unusual bit comes with the opening, a frozen scene of a car accident which might as well have the word (abbreviation?) "FUBAR" written across it. As the camera winds and pans out, what appear to be credits begin scrolling, except that they are... unusual. Instead of actual names, they are things like, "A Hot Chick," "A British Villain," "A Moody Teen," "A CGI Character"... the producers are listed as "Asshats" and the writers as "the True Heroes Here." So that was cute. Except all the cliches promised are delivered without a twist. I was hoping, I guess, that there would be something interesting and unexpected about the hot chick, the British villain, and the moody teen. But the hot chick, played by Morena Baccarin (I'd watch a much crappier movie to see her) is just a hot chick. Sure, she doesn't take shit from an asshole in a bar, and eventually she does stab a villain (doesn't kill him though), but ultimately all she is, is a hot chick. A damsel to be rescued. More on her later. The British villain is all evil, no complexity, and he succeeds in making the viewer hope Deadpool ignores the advice of the CGI character trying to convince him to be a hero and not shoot the Brit in the face (Deadpool delivers). More on the CGI guy later, too. The moody teen gets defined right away by Deadpool, who says she'll spend the whole movie brooding silently or saying mean things... and she does. Pretty boring, actually. Pretty abysmally boring, to be honest. Why would you put together these elements? I mean, on the one hand you have a movie that's trying to be unusual (at the very least) with a surprising number of crude jokes (it's true that you don't tend to see Spiderman or even Iron Man referencing his masturbation habits the way Deadpool does), but then they just build a story that's nothing short of one big cliche, and they populate it with characters who are also all cliches, except maybe for Blind Al, who, I admit, does stand out: she's an acerbic, elderly, blind, African American woman who is Deadpool's roommate.

Deadpool is an antihero's origin story and not much else. It plays out nonlinearly, which was exciting back when Tarantino was doing it, I guess, though I never thought it was that big of a deal to begin with.

So before I come back to a discussion of the Vanessa character and the Colossus character (both of which relate to the only two times the movie managed to surprise me) let's recap. Deadpool is unusual in that it breaks the fourth wall quite a bit. A lot of the jokes are off-color in a way you don't generally see in a superhero movie. And... well, there's the thing that happens with Colossus, but I think you'll agree once I get to that that it's really not enough to make the movie original. Otherwise you have an origin story which I guess does have another unusual element--the motive for Wade to become Deadpool is that he's dying of cancer. Having a lead make a massive life change due to cancer has been done (Breaking Bad) but not so much with superhero stories (which actually relates to the other thing that surprised me). But besides El Cancer (as Deadpool calls it) the origin story isn't particularly interesting or original--Wade lets an evil private corporation do an experimental procedure on him, becomes their prisoner as they torture him for a while, eventually the procedure takes, and voila, he's a regenerating machine. He's also horribly disfigured but I'm sorry, that's not all that original. Plenty of superheroes go farther in losing their former looks--Swamp Thing, Beast, Hulk (who, granted, gets to change back and look human sometimes), V from V for Vendatta, Marv from Sin City, etc. Deadpool, as an antihero, scars more than most heroes, but that's so unoriginal TV Tropes addresses it. We're meant to like Deadpool because he snarks in the face of torture (don't we just love leads who do that?) but again, so not original.

"'Ba'al?! As in 'bocce'?" - O'Neill in the same scene as above, when he first meets his torturer.

What's even more disappointing as you peel back the layers is that one of the main things that makes Deadpool unusual is actually built on some old, overused ideas. Namely the crude humor. A lot of it grows out of the same old homophobia and misogyny powering all the "funny" not-gay-but-gay scenes in otherwise really good shows like Friends and Supernatural. And it's really too bad, because sometimes Deadpool seems to be embodying a new kind of masculinity, in which feminine poses and admissions of weakness don't undermine his strength. But then he "kisses" an early male encounter to cement his dominance over him, makes fun of the Brit for having the first name "Francis" (which clearly means the Brit lacks some essential masculinity) and provokes a fight in a bar by buying a guy a "blow job" shot and making it look like another guy sent it to him. Hilarious. What's more, Deadpool is just another man-child. He loves his toys (literally, he collects Voltron figurines) and can't face his illness with any kind of maturity, while Vanessa steps up right away. How many couples have we seen where this is the dynamic? Why aren't people sick of the man-child/woman-mommy relationship?!?

And despite the inclusion of Blind Al, Deadpool manages to be racist. DP gets in a cab driven by a South Asian man who is a wide-eyed innocent. The cabbie is soon so enamored of DP that he doesn't react when DP stiffs him, and in fact will gladly pick him up again later. The cabbie is in love but a rival has stolen his fiancee--DP advises him to kill the rival and kidnap the fiancee (and after a flashback in which he condemned stalking, too), and by the movie's end the rival is struggling in the trunk of the taxi, so it's clear the cabbie will do exactly as DP suggested. The cabbie's sole purpose in the film is to provide comic relief (though I gather he's not who the opening credits call the "Comic Relief"--that's DP's bestie, Weasel). If I were a South Asian man watching the film, I wouldn't be too happy with that guy as a representative of people like me.

Did you see Deadpool? What did you think of it? Did it live up to your expectations or, like me, were you let down?

More on the characters of Vanessa and Colossus in the next post...

Hop Against Homophobia and Transphobia, 2014

It's hard to believe it's been a year since the last time I posted for this event, but here we are. Things have gotten a little crazy around here, and I almost forgot to get the blog post done. Nevertheless, here I am.

Two things come to mind this year as I contemplate homophobia and transphobia. First of all, a student of mine--let's call him Nate--is consistently homophobic, and this really depresses me. It depresses me in Nate's case more than most, because in other ways Nate is among my most enlightened students. He's African American and when he first came to our school, which is majority white, he used to get a lot of laughs by making jokes that were racist towards black people. This is something I've encountered a couple of times before in mostly-white communities. A person of color, in order to gain acceptance, will be the first to make jokes and declarations against his/her ethnicity. But the thing about Nate is, he evolved. I don't know for sure what did it. I'd like to think some of the content in the classes I teach helped, but I really don't know. In any case, he's now one of the kids I can count on to say something intelligent about diversity as it applies to race, and I'm always so pleased when he shares a personal story. I just wish he'd get over the homophobia. He talks about people he knows that he thinks seem gay and how unforgivable that is. He suggests that if a gay man approached him, he'd beat him up. You get the idea. I know it's not realistic to expect a kid who has come so far in terms of how he addresses race to somehow also be able to address LGBTQ stuff with an equivalent level of maturity and security in his own identity. I just wish that's how it worked.

The other thing that comes to mind is the passage of California's so-called "bathroom law." It's actually a law requiring schools to allow transgender student to self-select bathrooms, locker rooms, sports teams, and other gendered options. A very vocal part of the local community here is totally freaking out about it, and screaming about their (straight, cis--or at least so they believe) kids' privacy rights. That would be bad enough, but the school board has said, out loud, at a time during the school board meetings when doing so meant talking out of turn, that they agree with these people and that they will do everything they can to resist implementing the law. I cannot express to you, dear readers, how very disgusted and fed up this makes me feel. These people (and these school board members) seem genuinely convinced that their children are the ones who will be preyed upon due to this law. They have no understanding and no interest in learning about the reality of the situation for trans students. I heard recently that there will be three (or is it two?) seats opening up on the school board and we'll be voting new people in this election. Which sounds good, right? Except the nutjobs are campaigning whole-hog for those seats. I don't know what alternatives we'll have, but if I have to write-in Hannah Phylactic Shock, that's what I'm going to do.

Anyhoo... I'll try to remember to check back with the election results. In the mean time, post a comment here to enter a random drawing (I'll use an internet randomizer) and you may win an ebook of The City Darkens in the format of your choice.

Also, be sure to visit the HAHAT blog to find out about other cool blogs participating in the event.

Vanguard of Hope, by Kathy Steinemann

Vanguard of Hope, by Kathy Steinemann, the first in her Sapphire Brigade series, is a melodrama set in the late 19th century. I have had quite an internal struggle over how to rate this book. Because I determined that several of the problems I had with it were probably personal taste issues, I'm giving it three stars instead of two.

One thing that Steinemann could easily clarify at the beginning with a quick edit is the location of the story. I was very confused--there were references to "Free Negroes" and the 13th Amendment, implying the United States, most likely in the South. But the spellings are often British, there is a reference to British tutors, and Peter, the husband, is described (too far in) as having a British accent.

There are also some other editing issues like verb tense inconsistencies and confusing shifts in focus from crucial plot points to details about a secondary character's appearance and personality.

But now, on to the major issues I had with the novel...

[Warning: Spoilers abound in the next few paragraphs]

First off, Steinemann sent me the book to review, and she probably didn't realize I am a historian, or she might not have. There were a few distinct, well-researched passages, but the book had so many anachronisms as to completely throw me out of the story. Finally I decided to pretend that it was set in 1958 instead of 1890, which took care of almost all of the problems. For one thing, the term "paedophile" was not in common use until the 20th century. I am not convinced that people in the 1890s would have reacted to Hope's confession about her secret as they did. Perhaps one or two exceptionally advanced thinkers might, but the vast majority would have labeled her "hysterical" and locked her away in a room with yellow wallpaper.

The concept of "racism" as a bad thing is also far more recent than the turn of the century. At that time and well into the first half of the 20th century "racism," and specifically "scientific racism," was widely accepted as an appropriate world view, not as something to condemn. Read some of Teddy Roosevelt's writings on the topic of race sometime. By the mid 1920s literally millions of people, including a half a million women, belonged to the KKK. It became something you had to do in order to make it in a career--even Harry Truman joined for a brief time. Had the novel been set in the late 1950s or in the 1960s, after the Civil Rights movement had begun, it would make a lot more sense to me that Hope would want to reject racism. And it would still make a lot of sense to me that she and those around her might suffer retaliation for it.

Terms like "cheating" and "stalking" are also later 20th century terms, for what it's worth. The book is full of language inappropriate to the time.

Another issue I had was that I thought I was reading a romance, and as romances go, Vanguard doesn't follow the rules. Some readers may enjoy this as a step away from convention. However, I like romance conventions. Introduce the main love interest at the beginning and that's who I want the main character to end up with. But Hope had not one, not two, but three loves. Hey, I'm all for polyamorous love stories, but this really wasn't one of those (way too much talk of offending God for that). The introduction of Owen in the last third of the novel really threw me off. I never trusted him. It didn't help that he kept breaking into her house and surprising her when he 1) knew she was a victim of sexual assault and 2) was a doctor who counseled her sister about her own assault and should have been a lot more sensitive to the repercussions of violating Hope's space and safety like that. On top of that, Hope's reactions to this violation didn't ring true for me. She wasn't the least bit unnerved. Maybe if she had met Owen before Solomon or Peter, if there had been established sexual tension with him from the start, I might have been able to hang in there. And it didn't help that I found their playful sexual banter awkward (they had names for their body parts) and tiresome (there was far too much of it).

Click on the image to purchase on Amazon.

I was disappointed because in the beginning of the novel I got hooked despite the anachronisms and minor editing problems, which is saying a lot for me. I get frustrated with that sort of thing usually. But I was impressed because the story of Hope's affair with Solomon was compelling and I thought that would be the focus of the book. Also, Steinemann has a good grasp of how to throw twists into a plot. In fact, I think she does it too much (he was murdered, no, he killed himself, no, he's not actually dead--that one annoyed me particularly because I was invested in the hate crime aspect of the murder scenario). But by the last third of the novel, I felt that the tension just wasn't there. The only looming threat was Hope's illness, and that wasn't enough for me. I needed something else to threaten her--the illness was just saddening, not exciting.

Anyway, I think others may enjoy this novel more than I did. Anachronisms really bug me (unless it's an alternative history) and I don't think they bother non-history buffs nearly as much. So if you like melodramas with lots of twists and prefer romances that stray from the usual conventions, you may enjoy Vanguard of Hope.

Adventure Stories & Orientalism

I'm so pleased that several people have commented on my post concerning dieselpunk and orientalism. I had already decided to write a follow-up post in order to delve more deeply into the question, as I really think it's worth discussing and it's something I mull over a lot. This is that post.

David Mark Brown commented on my original blog post about how he chose to flip character expectations around in order to challenge some of the problems of race relationships, etc., in his dieselpunk fiction. That shook me out of the assumption that the main characters of dieselpunk stories had to be westerners. I still have an issue with that, though, which is as a white westerner myself, I'm not sure how to believably write from the point of view of a nonwesterner or someone belonging to a nonwhite culture. I'm not ruling it out, just saying it would pose a considerable challenge to me. I've actually attempted to write from the pov of a black woman in the past (it was sci fi in a universe I built, so saying African American or Caribbean American doesn't fit). I never felt like I pulled it off, though.

A really big part of what troubles me is the issue of exoticism. Stephen A. Watkins commented on this blog post (which Tiyana Marie White wrote in response to my post), "I think there’s a difference between the aesthetic appreciation of something “exotic” meaning that it’s outside the norms of your experience and the type of problematic “exoticization” that results from fetishizing something that’s different for no reason than that it’s different." Exoticism/exoticization is huge for me. To be clear, the trouble I have is that I would like to write stories where the mc must go to some country foreign to them, to seek out some sort of treasure/have some sort of other adventure, much in the tradition of Indiana Jones. What I can't work out is how to impart all the thrills and fears of such a thing, without painting the culture as exotic and sinister. I'm not talking about describing the people in stereotypical terms (which isn't just offensive, it's also plain tiresome), so much as trying to achieve a tone of menace, etc., for the mcs, who are navigating a land that is foreign to them. Throw in some sort of cursed item(s) or whatever, and you have a recipe for your typical dark and threatening culture as seen in myriad books and films. The problem with that is that when you choose to represent a real Earth culture that way, you other them and contribute to a history of imperialism and oppression, something I don't want to do.

One option is to go ahead and represent some of the culture as sinister. For example, have some creepy big wig in the culture invite the characters to dinner, say, and then the characters proceed to navigate a house full of unnatural shadows and decorated with unsettling objects. The meal would be shocking to them as well due to whatever they're eating... if you've read my previous post, you might recognize this as a reference to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a movie that really beats you about the head with orientalist representations. As you may recall, part of the trouble with Temple is that it's not just portraying a culture in a very negative light, it's also doing so with blatant inaccuracies. Anyway, so let's say I want to have the creepy dinner chapter and I'm going to avoid the blatant inaccuracies. I'm still using items of the culture to create an aura of fear and danger. I could counterbalance that chapter with some sort of positive interaction in another chapter with much more approachable, appealing characters of the foreign culture. I don't mean yet another stereotype (lusty women who fall for the hero, mystical sages who provide guidance, etc.). No, I'm thinking more along the lines of the Colombian drug lord in Romancing the Stone (not a dieselpunk movie, but it operates on the same principal as interwar adventure stories with the mild mannered woman and rough and tumble male guide--think of The Mummy, same principle--who delve into a dangerous foreign land and encounter menacing characters, etc. in the pursuit of treasure). In Romancing the Stone, the audience is led to believe romance writer Joan Wilder and her adventuring guide, Jack I-forget-his-last-name are about to meet a stereotype of a Colombian thug: some backwards, unsophisticated guy who rides a mule. Turns out, the guy has modern ammenities, has read all of Joan's books, and the mule in question is a 4X4. Now, believe me, I'm not here to say that Romancing the Stone somehow avoided racist depictions because of this scene. Sadly, as much as I enjoy that movie, I think it's terribly problematic, too. But I digress. My point is that the scene challenges audience expectations. It does it, no doubt, in order to get laughs. Similar scenes abound in many films--and I think more often than not, they are there to get laughs. It's funny to set up expectations and then turn them on their heads.

My question is, do those sorts of scenes challenge expectations enough to be an antidote to the sinister scenes that paint a "foreign" culture as dark, dangerous, magical, etc.?

Anyway, to return to what Stephen Watkins wrote, I suppose another way to approach the issue of exoticism to interrogate whether those "sinister" representations fetishize the culture or simply represent it as unfamiliar to readers/viewers. When I wrote the as-yet-unpublished sequel to The River and the Roses I wanted to introduce Daniel Seong's family, and I wanted to do so intelligently. So I went on a Korean American chat board and asked a bunch of questions. The people on the board were super patient with me and helped to dispell some of the stereotypes I had knocking around in my head. They gave me insight into how to represent the family dynamics, the words people use, the way a dinner would play out, etc. It was all very cool and I learned a lot in the bargain. I'm reasonably sure I did a nice job of writing those scenes concerning Daniel's family. It's just a lot easier in the realistic setting of my modern day psychic mystery to not fall into the orientalist trap. In River, I can have Veronica come in as an outsider to a culture she's unfamiliar with, and have her be a bit uncomfortable and nervous about it, but still see it as a real, breathing, normal culture. Then again, she's not meant to be in a threatening situation. It's not an adventure story. Aside from her ability to commune with the dead (which really makes her more exotic than anyone else in the book), there's no magic, no cursed items, no spooky caves, no dungeon crawls, no evil villains (there are bad guys, but they are much more plebean). Is it possible to write adventure stories where there are all those things and not fall into the orientalist trap?

I suppose another option is to take the flipping-the-binary thing even further. Have a nonwhite and/or nonwestern hero who is dealing with a white, western villain. I mean, you do see that, of course. Nazis spring to mind. Is that the only way? Isn't avoiding casting nonwhite and/or nonwestern villains in a story just another form of discrimination?

Well, I've written myself into a corner. Help me out, folks. What's your take?

What is Dieselpunk?

After my recent blog post on Captain America: The First Avenger, I got a couple of questions about the terms "dieselpunk" and "decopunk." There's a pretty nice description of dieselpunk here, but I thought I'd talk a little about what it means to me.

I've come across a forum post where someone described dieselpunk as a scene rather than a genre, mainly, if I understand correctly, because of the dirth of actual dieselpunk fiction out there. I'll grant you that there aren't as many movies and TV shows with the elements that make up dieselpunk than there are capitalizing on the popularity of steampunk, but I think it's incorrect to say there aren't very many. In the last few months I've watched eight movies and two anime tv shows (notably Last Exile, which perhaps due to the fact that I watch it at 3am when I'm giving the baby his bottle and I have the sound turned almost all the way down, has come to a point where it is incomprehensible to me, unfortunately. I still really enjoy the soundtrack, though)--and of those eight movies, none were in the Indiana Jones series. There are also quite a few books that qualify, at least according to my definition.

So I should probably get to that.

To me, dieselpunk is fiction genre (or, more broadly, a scene) that draws on sci fi from the 1920s-1940s. Dieselpunk differs from steampunk in that its machines have internal combustion engines. You don't see airplanes in steampunk--at least, not unless they are some sort of steam-powered clockwork. You do see airplanes in dieselpunk--prominently so. But you also see other, weirder vehicles like the vanships in Last Exile. Also, very often you see robots. The idea with dieselpunk is that the tech is retro-futuristic (a combination that I find delightful). Lots of dials, knobs, gauges, levers, and grease, but I could see a story where these old-fashioned machines allow for (minor) space travel or teleportation--much like Telsa's inventions in The Prestige are steampunk yet futuristic.

The time period encompasses the decades of history I find most interesting to study--the 1920s, especially in the U.S. due to Prohibition, are fascinating because they represent the moment when westerners entered the modern age. Probably because of that, much of the pulp fiction of the time involved exploration of nonwestern parts of the world--the exotic, mysterious places most threatened by extinction in the modern age. More on that in a moment, as it raises a rather thorny problem.

The 1930s provides the concept of noir--film noir, detective stories, and the rise of fascism in several locations around the world.

And the 1940s gave us World War II--a terrible time, of course, but also a time people remember as a golden age of victory gardens, radio programs, and shared purpose. In our memories, everyone was in agreement in the 1940s--the Allies were working together to oppose the evils of the Axis Powers, who in turn were working together to destroy everything good in the world. Through a simple lens, World War II is the most ethically accessible war, because there are such clear bad guys, especially in Europe. (Please understand, I'm saying this as a writer, not as a historian. As a historian, this sort of thing does not fly.)

So dieselpunk has a rich playground to run around in. Add to that all of the bright optimism and faith in science that preceded the dropping of the atomic bombs and the discovery of the death camps. Think of the excitement of the World's Fairs. And to top it off, dieselpunk has its own artistic style: art deco. In fact, a subgenre of dieselpunk (itself a subgenre of steampunk, of course) is decopunk--basically everything dieselpunk is without such an interest in the machines.

But back to the exotic lands, for a moment, and the problem they pose.

I may eventually devote an entire post to this minefield, because it's a doozy, and it's one I'm particularly concerned with because I'm liable to get caught in the middle of it one of these days. Orientalism.

What, you ask, is orientalism, and what does it have to do with dieselpunk?

In a nutshell, orientalism is the representation of nonwestern cultures (most often Middle Eastern, but it's just as valid for various Asian areas as well as any other part of the world where people are predominantly brown, in my opinion) through the filter of western ideas, desires, opinions, prejudices, etc. It's a form of racism with a long history in fiction. Probably one of the best examples of a movie that is both dieselpunk and orientalist: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. One of the big problems with orientalism is that writers who fall prey to it often misrepresent cultures or conflate two or more cultures. In the case of Temple, for instance, the goddess Kali is depicted as evil and ruling the underworld, which is inaccurate. Much of the cuisine is probably closer to Chinese than Hindu, as well. The attitude in days gone by among writers and fans of orientalist fiction was to shrug and say something along the lines of, "It's all the same anyway." (In case that's your attitude, try turning it around and imagining what it would be like for a Hindu or Chinese film to depict your culture as the same or at least jumbled with some other culture--usually belonging to a historical enemy. Now imagine that happening over and over in every book and movie that depicts your culture for hundreds of years.) For more on Temple's issues specifically, go here.

Nowadays I see a deep uneasiness in movies like Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow--they so desperately want to be able to depict grand adventures like those of Allan Quatermain (a character who was originally more steampunk than dieselpunk) but they don't want to come under fire for racism. It's a pickle. I love stories of treasure hunts, dungeon crawls, scary jungles and survival in ice storms. But how do you write about exotic lands without othering those people the main characters, who by nature of being dieselpunk characters will be westerners, will encounter there? How do you portray a culture respectfully while simultaneously making it mysterious, sinister, and, in many cases, somehow mystical? What's a white writer in love with the retro-futuristic fiction of the1920s-1940s to do?

The best I've come up with is to take the story off of planet Earth altogether, and set the dungeon crawls, barroom brawls, and mystical encounters on other planets entirely (Firefly, anyone?). And don't even think about basing the alien cultures on specific (stereotyped and misrepresented) Earth cultures. Lucas did that and it's painful to watch. Of course, the real problem with that solution is that you've pretty much left dieselpunk behind once you leave Earth or at least an Earth-like setting. Yes, it's sci fi, but it's limited sci fi. Dieselpunk is not atomicpunk, and I can't see diesel engines powering even the most fun retro-futuristic space ships farther than a trip to the moon, maybe.

What do you think about dieselpunk? Do you like stories set in the 1920s-1940s?
How would you handle the orientalism problem?