A Few Notes on Eight point Five

Some call him the War Doctor.  Others call him the John Hurt Doctor, or simply the Hurt Doctor (which seems apt.)  Still others call him Moffat’s Insatiable Need to Pull One Over on the Fans and Also a Tool to Facilitate His Desire to Be the One to Address the 12-Regeneration Limit.  This is Eight point Five.  (Spoilers ahead for “The Day of the Doctor,” the preceding minisode “The Night of the Doctor,” and the novel Engines of War.)

I think Eight point Five can be best characterized by his first interactions with the Moment.  Perceptively, she asks why he walked so many miles before priming the weapon and speculates that he didn’t want the TARDIS to see.  In this observation, more than any Doctor-numbering retcon, we learn how Eight point Five has drawn a curtain over himself.   He knows what he has to do, he knows how horrible it is, and in a particularly human flash of emotion, he’s trying to shield the eyes of his magnificent time-space ship from it.  He shies away from the light.  He wants to be alone with the weight of what lies before him.

This follows beautifully from “The Night of the Doctor,” in which sweet, vibrant Eight at last stops running from the Time War.  This decision comes in perhaps the most brutal way it could have:  a would-be companion, horrified to be in the presence of a Time Lord, chooses to burn in her crashing ship rather than let him save her.  Thanks to some strong-arming by the Sisterhood of Karn, the Doctor finally admits he can’t stay above the fray.  As the Sisters note, the universe is being torn apart, and it has to end.  He has to end it.  And in order to do so, he has to end as well.  He has to steel himself against the task at hand and become someone who can bear it.  “Make me a warrior,” he begs as he prepares to put away the mantle of Doctor.  Just as Eight point Five retreats from the TARDIS, Eight has to be alone before he can regenerate into this new, harder man.  When the Sisterhood tells him it will hurt, he’s glad of it.  He wants it to tear through him, he wants it to eat him, and with the coming role he’ll have to play, he wants to start his penance early.  His final words are farewells to the memories of companions he’s known.

However, in light of Eight’s sacrifice and the through-line that carries into “The Day of the Doctor,” there are two things I can’t get behind (to be fair, only one is really canonical, but still.)  First, there’s the glimpse “The Night of the Doctor” gives us of Eight point Five’s earliest moments.  It’s clearly not a contemporary John Hurt; instead, it’s archive footage of a decades-younger Hurt in a previous role.  The implication is that Eight regenerates into a fairly young man who spends hundreds of years fighting the Time War – it would have to be centuries for Eight point Five to age so much – before coming to “The Day of the Doctor.”  This is supported by Engines of War, which follows a single adventure of a battle-weary Eight point Five.

I hate that Eight point Five joins the war for so long.  The whole point of it being him instead of Eight or Nine (besides the aforementioned Moffat-related reasons) is that he has to physically become someone else to end the Time War.  That’s why the Sisterhood helps him, so he’ll spare the universe the endless warring.  It’s why Eight point Five regenerates at the end of “The Day of the Doctor” without any wound:  his job is done.  To take this small, intensely personal story from “The Night” to “The Day” and insert multiple centuries in the middle disrupts the flow.  Eight point Five wasn’t born to fight.  He was born, very specifically, to bring the fighting to a close, and the details of that first image and Engines of War, to me, go off-book.  Tsk, tsk, show.

Relationship Spotlight: Zoë & Wash (Firefly)

Wash and Zoë are a great example of my fondness for established supporting couples that stay largely in the background.  They get some focus, and some drama, here and there, but for the most part, they just carry on doing their thing and being awesome.

At the start of the series, Zoë and Wash are both the only existing couple on Serenity and a somewhat unexpected couple.  On the ship, they serve entirely different functions.  Zoë is Mal’s number two, an extremely competent former soldier who protects them stoic efficiency.  Wash, meanwhile, is a masterful pilot with a sardonic attitude and a mouth that’s often a step or two ahead of his thoughts.  Their respective positions often place them on opposite sides of the action – Zoë goes out on the crew’s sketchy jobs while Wash stays on the ship and waits to hear that she’s all right – and their respective temperaments make them a less-than-obvious pairing choice.

And yet, they fit together wonderfully.  Each looks after the other in their own way, no one brings Zoë into herself like Wash, and any shore leave they get usually starts with sexy fun times and ends with cheeky pillow talk.  They both give their work the attention it deserves (in the long run – Wash sometimes takes some doing to get there,) but their greatest priorities are definitely one another. 

One thing I really appreciate about them is that Zoë is the tough, fighting one and Wash isn’t, and he’s not the least bit concerned about that.  By which I mean, he does worry about her safety, and his biggest clashes with Mal come when he thinks Zoë is too often sent into dangerous situations.  However, there’s really not a sense that he gets in a snit over the fact that his wife is stronger than he is.  That’s a thread that works its way into a lot of pairings involving strong women, particularly those whose most apparent strength is physical and combat-related.  It somehow seems to become the woman’s fault that her partner feels emasculated.  Generally, it’s an unfortunate plotline at best; even if it’s addressed well, it’s a tired device, and it sometimes resolves depressingly with the woman trying to “hold back” to spare her partner’s feelings.  But with these two, we don’t get that.  Instead, it’s something that Wash loves about her.  He admires Zoë’s toughness, her calm in a crisis, and her superb fighting skills.  If anything, he finds it a turn-on.  Zoë loves Wash’s capability as well – her most overt come-in to him is just after a highly-impressive piece of expert flying.

I also like that there’s no real sense of a triangle between Wash, Zoë, and Mal.  There is one episode where Wash is openly bothered by Mal and Zoë’s connection, and he does make a comment about unresolved sexual tension while under serious duress, but when it comes down to it, it’s not about romantic jealousy, perceived or otherwise.  Rather, the conflict is born of several threads that don’t get trotted out as often.  Since Mal is the captain, Zoë’s devotion to him is essentially devotion to her job, and Wash worries that she puts their work above everything else.  Mal and Zoë are also old comrades from the war; as such, they’ve been through experience together that Wash can’t relate to, and he feels left out of their bond.  And, as I’ve said, Wash worries about Zoë’s well-being whenever she goes out on a job, and he fears that she follows Mal too willingly into danger.  All of that is more complex than any sort of triangle, and I love that, if the show needed to address Wash’s feelings about Zoë’s relationship with Mal, it took that less obvious route.

The Grandmaster (2013, PG-13)

This movie came nine years after 2046, Wong Kar-wai’s last Chinese film (true, only six years after My Blueberry Nights, but I have a hard time counting that as one of his.)  It was also the first film of his I saw on the big screen.  With all that behind it, it falls slightly short of my anticipation, and it also feels a bit un-Wong-like, but it’s still quite something.

One departure is its basis as a true story:  The Grandmaster follows Ip Man, the expert martial artist who went on to teach Bruce Lee.  Not that the film focuses on Lee, instead exploring Ip’s life before, during, and after WWII.  His craft comes of age in the 1930s, when kung fu in China divides along geographic lines.  Ip is a southern artist, and the film is marked by his encounters with Gong Er, the daughter of the renowned northern grandmaster.  Like all of Wong’s works, the story flows, river-like, between ideas, rather than following a more traditional three-act plot. 

On the kung fu front, this movie makes me wish I knew more about it, because I think I’d find the film much richer if I did.  It contemplates various schools of the art, with some fights set up like tutorials – half lecture, half demonstration.  As such, the action is fastidiously choreographed to reflect the particular affiliation of each artist, undoubtedly a feast for any kung fu enthusiast.  (Be warned, this also means the action can be slow at times, either interrupted by explanations or literally slowed down to emphasize the craft.)  That said, it’s uniquely gorgeous.  The fighting is by turns educational (Ip’s demonstration of Wing Chun’s eight kicks,) picturesque (the opening fight in driving rain,) and emotionally-charged (the climactic scene of Gong fighting beside a train.)  It also highlights Wong’s ability to imbue anything with romance.  I don’t just mean “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” romance, though there’s definitely some of that.  I mean a startling sense of beauty that almost aches, an electricity in the air binding the characters together through individual paths.  Movement, colors, and music saturate the film, nearly overwhelming in its intimacy.  It’s this type of romance that distinguishes it as a Wong film.

The story itself, less so.  I already mentioned that it does maintain Wong’s usual meandering structure, but overall, it feels much more “written” than many of his films.  Most of the time, the actual words in Wong’s movies are a stylistic blend of incredibly precise, everyday-poetic voiceovers and long scenes of rough-hewn improvised dialogue.  Here, the writing feels a lot more preplanned; the dialogue contains plenty of carefully-formed “golden phrases.”  Don’t get me wrong – it’s lovely, but it’s not what I expect going into a Wong film, and that means it doesn’t quite capture my normal experience of watching his movies.

At this point, it doesn’t quite feel like a Wong movie if Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s not in it, and he’s superb here as Ip.  His quiet performance is uniformly wonderful, all intent observation and understated emotion.  As Gong, Ziyi Zhang gives a performance I’ve never seen from her before, very brittle and controlled, but brimming with unspoken passions that bubble over when pressed.  Chen Chang, who worked with Leung (and Wong) in Happy Together and Zhang in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, makes a small appearance as a kung fu expert.

Warnings

Tons of sumptuous kung fu action, some smoking, brief drug use, and a little swearing.

Favorite Characters: Helena (Orphan Black)

The first of what’s likely to be numerous character posts for Orphan Black.  Helena is made up of elements from various types and clichés, but all of these facets piece together to create a really striking character who feels incredibly novel.  Spoilers, both for the character herself and major plot points of season 1, are unavoidable.

We actually start getting to know Helena long before we see her onscreen.  By the end of the pilot, it’s clear that someone is out to get the assorted members of Clone Club, and the mystery of who’s trying to kill them (and why) is a big question in the early episodes.  We meet Helena through some tried and true psycho-killer hallmarks:  creepy calling-cards in the form of Barbie heads made to look like the clone she’s killing, jumbled religious references, bizarre clues facilitating a cat-and-mouse game, and so on.  And once we clap eyes on Helena, more tropes follow.  She’s a bad-ass eastern European.  She doesn’t have screws loose so much as missing altogether.  She has frakked-up religious ideas and practices self-mutilation.  Despite her clear mental health issues, she’s an expert killer who’s as quiet as a ninja.  Plenty of these traits fit her type.

And yet, I’ve never seen a psycho-killer archetype quite like Helena.  At times, she’s almost animal-like, scrounging to get by in the wild and using every possible recourse to survive – watching her determined, untiring efforts to escape when she’s captured is fascinating.  Even when she finds more permanent associations, she still eats like she hasn’t seen food for days and won’t again for weeks.  Her life experiences are tremendously lacking, and in some ways, she’s as childlike as she is dangerous.  Her emotions scatter through her; she’s by turns woeful, raging, icily calm, desperate, bemused, and entirely numb, and there’s really no telling how she’s going to react in any given situation. 

As the show goes on and we get to know Helena, she emerges as something fairly unique – a truly sympathetic psycho killer.  Other shows and stories go down this road from time to time, but I don’t think any of them are written as effectively as Orphan Black writes Helena.  She and Sarah are the two “lost” clones, the ones that slipped through the grasp of their creators, but while Sarah was fostered by a fierce woman who would do anything to keep her safe, Helena first languished in a Ukrainian orphanage and was later discovered by a militant anti-clone cult.  They train her to be their weapon against her own sisters, feeding her their lies and filling her fractured mind with the idea that clones are abominations that mock God and nature.  Her emotional and psychological development is horribly stunted, and within her, there’s such an urgent tug – a longing for something she can call family and such a strong desire not to be an “abomination” that she kills her own and scars her back – that she’s easy prey for the cult.

This also means that Helena is a good candidate for being flipped.  She’s so alone, unloved, and deceived – when Sarah takes her on, Helena responds brutally, lethally, but when Sarah plays up their connection and shows Helena how she’s been used, Helena steps haltingly toward the fold.  She’s still wildly unpredictable and prone to acts of staggering violence, but despite her guarded wariness, she badly wants someone in whom she can put her trust, and inch by inch, she edges toward her “sestras.”

Top Five Songs: Pacific Overtures

I think, for me, Pacific Overtures might be Sondheim’s all-killer-no-filler score.  It has fewer songs than most of his shows, and musicals like Sunday in the Park with George or A Little Night Music might have some of the all-around best numbers, but every song in this show really makes it count.  Even though the score only features eleven songs, narrowing it down to five was no easy task.

(Pictures are from various productions - it's incredibly hard to find a good assortment of Pacific Overtures photos.)

“Chrysanthemum Tea” – A hugely sprawling patter-and-plot number.  In it, the dilemma of western ships approaching Japan’s isolationist shores is expressed by the Shogun’s mother.  She offers her son her warnings, advice, and tea through lyrics that simply outdo themselves in rhyme.

Best line:  “Have some tea, my Lord, / Some chrysanthemum tea. / It’s a tangled situation, / As your father would agree. / And it mightn’t be so tangled / If you hadn’t had him strangled? / But I fear that I stray, my Lord.”

“Poems” – As Kayama and Manjiro journey, they play a game of almost “dueling” poems, inventing compositions based on one another’s opening lines.  Some of the imagery is just terrific, and I like the way they both write for their respective “ladies”:  for Kayama, his wife, and for Manjiro, America.

Best line:  “Moon, / I love her like the moon, / Making jewels of the grass / Where my lady walks, / My lady wife.”

“Someone in a Tree” – This is such an intriguing number; I adore it.  Here, an old man reminisces about the day he saw the westerners come, aided by the memory of himself as a boy and a soldier listening to the proceedings.  It’s a gorgeous contemplation on the nature of observation and history, the idea that nothing quite matters unless it’s been witnessed.

Best line:  “I am hiding in a tree. / I’m a fragment of the day. / If I weren’t, who’s to say / Things would happen here the way / That they happened here?”

 “A Bowler Hat” – A great passage-of-time song about gradual assimilation.  Through Kayama, we see how the influences of the west bleed into Japan.  The way each stanza builds upon the previous one by echoes and slight changes is excellent, and it’s a great showcase for the actor.

Best line:  “No eagle flies against the sky / As eagerly as I / Have flown against my life.”

“Pretty Lady” – This song is creepy-beautiful Sondheim at its best.  In the number, a trio of British sailors come upon a young woman they mistakenly believe to be a geisha.  While the melody and overlapping harmonies are absolutely rapturous, the lyrics – in which their desire for her becomes increasingly insistent – make it hair-standing-on-end foreboding.  Truly amazing.

Best line:  “Pretty lady, you’re the cleanest thing I seen all year. / I sailed the world for you…”

Crimes against Emma Swan (Once Upon a Time)

Here’s a new periodic feature on the blog.  “Crimes Against…” looks at a story or a particular aspect of it, specifically examining how the writing has let it down.  Now, I’m not sure the second half of Once Upon a Time’s fourth season is definitely its weakest so far, or if it just feels that way because I watches seasons 1-3 on Netflix and clipped along at a good pace with them.  However, I have a few major gripes with season 4B, the first of which is the focus of today’s post (Emma-related spoilers for season 4B.)

Quick background:  in this half-season arc, we learn that, prior to Emma’s birth, Snow and Charming discovered there would be a chance their child would be born with “great darkness” inside her.  Desperate to keep their unborn child from coming in the world a villain, they strike an extremely sketchy deal with a shadowy figure and essentially transfer Emma’s “darkness” into another unborn child – a girl/dragon baby, care of Maleficent.  In general, this thread is part of the convoluted “write me a happy ending” plot, and it also serves the show’s larger tendency to woobify their villains and tells us how much the heroes suck.  (Sigh… remember when the heroes were flawed but admirable people struggling to do the right thing in an uncertain world?)

I have dubious enough feelings about the above aims, but I’m entirely against the implications this plot has for Emma.  Under this retcon, Emma was basically reprogrammed to be a hero, to be a noble person who leans into the wind and maintains an inner lightness no matter how difficult things gets.  In a way, it means that Emma’s heroic qualities aren’t really hers, weren’t forged within her, but bestowed upon her.  In a show that places a premium on the discussion of good and evil, Emma was born with a winning ticket in the lottery of souls.

And I hate that, because it takes so much of what’s so awesome about Emma and puts it in the hands of some sorcerer’s apprentice.  This is a series that enjoys explaining villainy with sob stories, showing us how the baddies’ parents didn’t care about them, their chance for love was torn from them, and, of course, the heroes were super mean to them.  To me, Emma is the answer to all of that.  She came into our world virtually alone.  She was bounced from foster home to foster home.  Any time she thought she might have found somewhere that could become home, everything fell apart.  There wasn’t a single trace that her parents ever existed, her friends lied to her, and those she loved betrayed her.  She was a runaway, a convict, and a pregnant teenager, and she’s wonderful.

Emma doesn’t take all those terrible things that happened to her and become scornful or destructive.  She’s damaged by her experiences, certainly – she’s incredibly slow to trust, and it takes her a long time to even consider the idea that someone could love her – but she doesn’t let them poison her, doesn’t vent her frustrations outward.  The young woman who did jail time becomes an instrument of justice, tracking down bail-jumpers with investigative skills honed by a lifelong search for absent parents.  She protects the downtrodden and encourages the weak to find strength inside themselves.  In season 1, she stays in Storybrooke despite not believing Henry’s story about fairytale characters come to life; she realizes that he needs her, and she carries out the mission in small, unconscious ways, bettering the circumstances of those around her.  All that bleakness and misery is turned into something good, and I can’t stand the idea of anyone taking that away from her through some prenatal cosmic interference, not my Emma.

That Old-Time Racial Insensitivity…

*Disclaimer: I get that my opinion on the level of racism in Buster Keaton’s films isn’t really helpful or welcome. While I do still think that the racism in Buster’s movies, for the most part, isn’t as egregious as some of the material I’ve seen in other films from that era, that doesn’t particularly matter. “Not as racist as it could have been,” as a designation, serves no point beyond me wanting to feel better about liking Buster’s work in spite of its occasional racist content. This was an unnecessary post, and it’s clear I went easy on Buster because I’m such a fan of his work.*

Today’s Buster Monday post isn’t a subject I’m crazy about, but I’d like to address it.  The golden age of Buster Keaton was the 1920s; admittedly not the worst era of American race relations, but not a good one, either.  A number of Buster’s independent films, both shorts and features, include people of color.  And just how does race figure into his movies?

As with most media of the past, the films are products of their time.  Looking at them from a modern perspective, the most uncomfortable parts are definitely those involving blackface.  At the worst, there’s the servant in Seven Chances, who adds to the film’s central misunderstanding by repeatedly failing to deliver an important message.  I wouldn’t quite call it minstrelsy, but it’s a poor characterization that plays on “lazy Black servant” stereotypes.  There’s also a lot of redface in The Paleface, since many (all?) of its Native American characters are played by white people.  This scenario isn’t as egregious to me; the short’s portrayal of Native Americans is certainly ignorant, and it hinges on a White Savior trope, but the clear antagonists are the unscrupulous white folks trying to steal Native land.  Here, my biggest gripe is the mere fact that white people were cast in the Native American parts, much as I resent whitewashing, colorism, and racial corner-cutting in Hollywood today.

Unfortunately, Buster himself wears blackface a few times.  I think it’s interesting that it’s never actually Buster doing it but his characters.  By that, I mean he doesn’t play characters who aren’t white.  Instead, his white characters, on rare occasions, adopt blackface.  There’s the dream sequence in The Playhouse, in which some of Buster’s many characters are minstrel performers (the most unsavory bit here is the poster advertising the minstrels with a drawing of a monkey playing a banjo – it might have been typical for the time, but it’s gross.)  In College, Ronald poses as a Black man to get a job as a waiter.  Though it’s obviously very sketchy, I’m grateful that Buster’s performance here isn’t mocking.  Including Neighbors is a bit of toss-up, since Buster’s character isn’t technically in blackface.  Instead, he just gets so grimy that the policeman he angers thinks he’s Black, meaning Buster can escape simply by scrubbing his face.  Much like the chief villains in The Paleface are the white businessmen, the chief fool in this bit is the policeman who can’t tell the difference between a Black man and a muddy white man.

As far as actors of color go, there’s not much to impress.  The tired “Black folk are scared of ghosts!” cliché is trotted out a few times.  Also, Black extras are sometimes used as a visual punchline, where they’re first seen from behind and only later found to be Black:  one of the women Jimmie tries to propose to in Seven Chances, or one of the men Bill thinks might be his son in Steamboat Bill, Jr.  In contrast, the best example of Black people in one of Buster’s movies comes in The Navigator, when Rollo sees a pair of newlyweds and decides he’d like to get married, too.  From what I can tell, there’s no added comedy to making the newlyweds Black – they simply are, and it’s a nice moment (too bad Rollo and Betsy are attacked by “cannibal” islanders later in the film.)  Overall, when I look at race in Buster’s films, the impression I get is that his portrayals are uninformed and overly simplistic but not malicious.  The jokes feel more lightly-intentioned than a lot of contemporary entertainment might have and don’t seem to come from a place of perceived superiority or spite.  Though they’re obviously still insensitive and I completely understand that others may very rightly take offense, this lighter tone makes it easier for me to take them as what I think they are – unpleasant products of their time.