Episode 203 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
In this week’s episode, I interview poet Campbell McGrath about XX, his tenth book of poetry.
Campbell McGrath (left) and John King (right). Photo by Shawn McKee.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
All 7 panels from Litlando 2016 are now available on youtube here.
The Picasso film I reference is The Mystery of Picasso, from 1956, which is not actually in the 1970s at all.
Check out the music of The Bambi Molesters. Their songs “Rising East” (from As the Dark Wave Swells) and “Chaotica” (from Sonic Bullets: 13 from the Hip) are heard on this episode.
Episode 203 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
How did they get Christopher Lee to star in a TV movie?
So it’s just one more week until Captain America: Civil War, one more week until the Capsicle gets the taste slapped out of his mouth by the Invincible Iron Man.
Let’s talk about their teams. On Iron Man’s side we have the Black Widow, the Iron Patriot (he’s like Iron Man, but his suit is red, white, and blue), Vision (the red robot), and Batman…or is it Catman…The Black Panther? I don’t know who that is. Yeah, I don’t read comics. I’m not a nerd! Anyway, on Captain America’s side, we have Falcon (the guy with the robot wings), Hawkeye (the guy with the bow and arrow who helped the aliens invade Earth in the first Avengers movie), the Winter Soldier (the main villain of the second Captain America movie, a mass murderer), and Ant-Man (an avowed Communist!). So Captain America is siding with super villains? I guess whatever it takes to win, huh Cap!
This week I’ll be reviewing the second Captain America movie from 1979, Captain America II: Death Too Soon. Reb Brown returns to the title role along with Len Birman as Dr. Simon Mills. What kind of name is Len? I don’t think I’ve ever heard that name before. It’s a German name meaning hardy lion, or lion-bold. Maybe it’s short for Leonard. I can’t help, but think the network brass was considering this one for a full season. After all, I think The Six Million Dollar Man started out as TV movies before going to series. Also, The Incredible Hulk and Wonder Woman were popular, so adding another superhero series to the lineup must have seemed like a good idea.
Maybe the 80s brought an end to this type of series. Maybe Captain America II: Death Too Soon brought an end to this type of series.
Our movie begins with Steve Rogers painting a portrait of an elderly woman, obviously, in a park near Venice Beach. She informs him that a gang has been robbing the elderly pensioners in the neighborhood. They wait until each oldster cashes their check and then the hoodlums nab the loot. Well, Steve Rogers is having none of that and asks the old lady to cash her check right now. When one of the scuzzbuckets steals her purse, Captain America is in hot pursuit on his rad motorcycle. When he catches up to the thief, he pulls out his Wildey magnum and asks the scuzzbucket if he believes in Jesus before pulling the trigger.
Oh wait. That was Paul Kersey.
Meanwhile, an evil count/revolutionary/general/international terrorist named Miguel (Christopher Lee) has kidnapped a scientist who has invented a chemical that will make people grow old really fast. Like you’ll age a week in and hour or something to that effect. Miguel sprays Portland with the stuff and won’t release the antidote unless the United States government pays the ransom. Miguel and Captain America duke it out at the end of the movie. Miguel spills some of the aging potion on himself and dies of old age in a matter of seconds, getting tons of wrinkles and gray hairs in the process. I guess that counted out Christopher Lee as a recurring villain.
So Alex asked me for clarification on why last week, I stated that I’d prefer to see the Unwind series as a TV show rather than a set of movies. Also, I learned that a movie is indeed in the works for Unwind. The script is in its final edits and casting calls are behind held as this post is being read.
I’m not stating my preference about visual format because I’m one of those people who prefer the book to the movie. To be fair to movie adaptations, I don’t believe that the source material is always better, because the separate formats call for strengths in different areas. In a book for example, the author can get away with telling the story through lengthy dialogue and exposition. But in a movie, the setting is established in a single shot, and to watch two people have a conversation does not take advantage of the visuals nor pacing.
That’s why certain series such as The Hunger Games works well in a converted format. The writing is fast-paced but straight forward, a survival tale told by a narrator that doesn’t mince words. Because Katniss had to keep her family from starving at such a young age, her independence has served as both her asset and short-coming. She does not pause to reflect on her emotions due to so much consistently happening around her, and the few times she does pause, she is quick to pick up the pieces and react in a way that makes a bold statement. In fact, The Hunger Games benefits as a movie at times due to showcasing war and the other characters, which is limited in the book since we’re confined to Katniss’s perspective. We are able to see how the Game Makers create the harrowing obstacles, as well as why Katniss receives gifts from sponsors, all situations that occur outside of the arena she is trapped within.
On the other hand, the simplicity of this story would prevent it from being a successful TV series. The complications in the story are due to the Capitol sending wave after wave of obstacles at the characters, keeping them from reconciling past actions because everyone is too damn busy trying to survive. Because of the singular point of view, there is also little development of the other characters and when there is, another character provides this outlook mostly through dialogue to Katniss, who is too goal-oriented to notice much about other people on her own. A lot of extraneous padding was added to the third movie so the final book could stand as two installments. I walked out of the theater of the third movie knowing the sequence of events, but having nothing to add to the complexity of the characters.
Meanwhile, the Unwind series began as a trilogy. But as Neal Shusterman wrote UnSouled, he realized that he was nowhere near his sufficient ending with all ends he had to tie up. The story is more than the characters responding to the plot. All the perspectives belong to fully fleshed out beings who are working for a cause that the reader may not agree with, but can at least be understood. Such interconnectedness beckons a longer running format in order to tell the entire story.
Which brings up another fear that I’m concerned about: narrowing the story to a single perspective. Unwind‘s foundation rests on the pro-life/pro-choice argument, which requires a level of suspension of disbelief to really follow along. I feel like Connor would be the safest story to tell because his story literally becomes a legend in the book. Early on he is dubbed as the “Akron AWOL” by the media because of his outlandish escape involving a highway traffic jam, a hostage, and a tranquilizer. In actuality he’s running for his life, making decisions fueled by adrenaline, not caring to make a scene but to survive. But as Unwind‘s media romanticizes the situation, a movie would find this view the easiest to cash in on.
Although I enjoyed Risa’s perspective, she could be easily omitted due to her character development not being the most obvious. And at least in the first book Lev’s point of view stands as the most controversial. And considering that just this week the University of Central Florida’s library was shut down due to the possibility of a praying Muslim woman assaulting the students, I’m afraid that key points in Lev’s story would deter objectivity.
I’m also concerned about the rating system that a movie format would garner. Because this is YA fiction, of course the target audience would be PG-13. But again, the subject involves dismantling teenagers for parts. I feel like the full psychological implications would be glossed over to keep the rating, especially as the story veers into darker topics such as “Parts Pirates” and grotesque bodily modifications.
Take the Marvel Cinematic Universe and how the stories are told as movies, versus as a Netflix Original Series. I fell in love with Jessica Jones, binge-watching all of season one in a matter of days. The story isn’t just about Jessica solving cases because these aren’t isolated incidents. Early on she comes to realize that there’s a connection between the mysteries and a man by the name of Kilgrave, who is heavily wove into Jessica’s past.
What makes this series so awesome are the psychological layers peeled back and scrutinized involving PTSD, assault, and rape. So often in stories we find characters being mind-controlled – just take a look at The Avengers movie. But while Jessica Jones goes into depth on helplessness, recovery, and the victim-blaming, Hawkeye is the only character in The Avengers to comment on his time as a victim. He summarizes his helplessness in a few sentences before the story continues because there is much more to cover before the movie’s end. I’m sure that Hawkeye still thinks about his time as Loki’s puppet, but without his own film or extra screen time in the other films, the character is on his own.
A topic as heavy-handed as rape can fully exist with all of its complexities in a television series, due to the longer run time as well as the freedom to be viewed outside of a rating. I’m not supporting the idea that younger audiences should watch mature television, but mature television is more accessible to them. Meanwhile, a movie can only allot so much time to an individual belonging to an ensemble cast, which is what the Unwind series has.
I’ll still follow the the Unwind movie updates, but considering the trend of YA series and their movie counterparts, I’m not too optimistic.
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Brontë Bettencourt (Episode 34) graduated from the University of Central Florida with a Bachelors in English Creative Writing. When she’s not writing or working, she is a full time Dungeon Master and Youtube connoisseur.
The only revelation in Silent Hill: Revelation (SHR) is the movie is garbage. Some years ago I watched the film out of curiosity and then once more to make sure the movie was not a delusion conjured by my subconscious. Now I find myself having to watch this detritus again for analysis.
Explaining SHR requires a brief summary of the game from which the movie draws inspiration: Silent Hill 3.
Picking up 17 years after Harry escaped the town, a reincarnated Alessa, now named Heather, lives an ordinary life as a teenager in Portland, Maine. While at the mall, she finds out the cult that used her to bring their demon god into reality has returned to give the summoning ritual another try. At the same time, the remnants of her power bleed out and turn her surroundings into a nightmare world as she struggles to stop the cult.
Silent Hill 3 is arguably the best of the original four games. A consistent feeling of doubt enhanced the trademark psychological horror. You never knew what was really happening or why, even when the grotesque imagery was blatant, and were constantly on edge. The story was told in much the same subtle fashion where you had to pay attention to what characters said and read the memos available throughout the levels.
Regardless of how the film fares as an adaptation, SHR does not work as a movie. At least the first tried to be a film and a love letter to Silent Hill fans. From start to finish everything in SHR is terrible and I will do my best to articulate points of note without the bringing up minor infractions.
The first issue is the use of jump-scares. In fact, the word “scare” is redundant because loud noises and orchestra stings are not scary. They are startling and work well with a proper build-up, but they are also cheap and devoid of creativity. Scary things are scary because they inspire discomfort and anxiety by simply being. Xenomorphs, the Thing, and Michael Myers exude elements of terror to induce a sense of fear. SHR has a jump-scare maybe every other scene of things that are not scary. A bloody bunny mascot’s head turns, people wearing skin masks look up, a cenobite knock-off monster drops into an elevator, and a ghost girl looks at the camera. There was no craft or effort, capitalizing off lazy methods to establish a superficial fright.
The grotesque imagery goes overboard to the point the grotesquery is nonexistent. The nightmare world environments are just dirty with scraps of plastic bags hanging from the ceiling and layers of grime spread across the floor and walls. In the last movie the environments had a distinct industrial feel to contrast the normality of the decayed world before the shift in reality. Everything was bloody and rusty with a consistent aesthetic instead of some garbage the production glued to the sets. They are also not particularly well lit because SHR has more lighting than an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The last movie used darkness to convey a sense of isolation and hide as much of the set as possible, but SHR is more concerned with showing everything and killing tension.
The monsters are not scary either with the cenobite creature mentioned before, a muscular Power Rangers villain made of skin, a CG manikin spider that appears for one scene, and some clown children eating meat. Granted, I am slightly desensitized from all the movies and games I play, but with the first Silent Hill movie, the production was smart enough to copy and paste designs from the games because those monsters actually worked. For some reason, SHR went with original creatures and imagery that tries way too hard to be scary. I found myself rolling my eyes when I was supposed to be disgusted and appalled.
The story telling is the movie’s biggest problem. The narrative is easy to follow and somewhat similar to Silent Hill 3 (give or take a handful of inconsistencies), but how SHR conveys information is that of an amateur writer. With film you have the ability to tell the audience everything without saying a word. Through acting, visuals, and action you can express all manner of detail without one line of dialog. The writer(s) of SHR obviously did not understand this because there are about three exposition dumps where characters regurgitate what we already learn in previous scenes. Rather than reveal this information overtime like a normal story, the movie is frontloaded with narrative that is later repeated.
The first dump happens when the movie establishes a retcon in a flashback where Sharon is returned to reality with Christopher. Appearing in a mirror, his wife Rose says he needs to keep Sharon safe because the Order is looking for her to escape Silent Hill with a thing called the Seal of Metatron. The Order is apparently the same Puritan cult from the last movie, but they worship a demon now.
The next exposition dump occurs when a private investigator named Douglas confronts Heather at a mall and repeats the same dialog from the previous dump. Douglas is a major character from the game and he shows up for two scenes and dies when the movie does not need him anymore.
Afterward, when Chris is kidnapped by the Order, Heather travels to Silent Hill to get him back. On the way she reads his journal with intricate details of the town’s origins, the Order, and how they sought a child to birth their god into existence. This dump also pokes holes in the movie’s world and logic, saying the Order found Alessa, tried to purify her with fire so she can be resurrected as their god’s vessel before she transformed the entire town into a nightmare.
Besides the fact this contradicts the multiple dimension concept established in the last film, this is a classic case of a retcon gone wrong. Too many additions to the first film fail to gel with the follow-up to the point the revisions do not work logically. The Puritan cult was very much killed off and there were no inklings that they worshipped a demon. Did they change their minds after the end of the first movie? Were there survivors or other residents who chose to worship the demon? That would work, but the movie heavily implies that the Order is the same cult from the first movie, which was massacred at the conclusion.
Instead of a retcon, the smartest choice was to follow the route of the games. The first Silent Hill was about a demon-worshipping cult, but the second was about people travelling to Silent Hill and exploring the darker side of their pasts. That would have been a great idea because the fan base of Silent Hill 2 is massive and the story easier to write without poorly executed plot changes.
If one were to turn off one’s brain, Silent Hill: Revelation makes a great comedy. As a failed horror movie and a bastardized adaptation, the many inconsistencies are great material for a riff party. The jump-scares, bad sets, poor effects, and debouched writing are the mistakes of B-movies, not a production of practiced individuals. At face value, Silent Hill: Revelation is a failure as a film and adaptation, something other videogame movies have in common. To quote Silent Hill 2: “For me, it’s always like this.”
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C.T. McMillan (Episode 169) is a film critic and devout gamer. He has a Bachelors for Creative Writing in Entertainment from Full Sail University.
Dispatches from the Funkstown Clarion Herald Tribune Mirror:
International Version #3 by Simon Bluespire
My distant cousin Clement Hooker, once a townsperson of Funkstown, Maryland, is currently stationed in a secret location in Finland doing genetic experiments. Once a proud portion of the fourth estate, The Funkstown Mirror has merged with several other newspapers during the last hundred thirteen years, and insists on the old-fashioned process of publishing the news on paper, which leaves Clement without any reliable access to it in a timely fashion. But he has used bitcoins to have it digitized in Odessa, where it is then translated into Ukraine, emailed to a foreign exchange student fluent in Esperanto, who then translates in into Morse Code that is then turned into sick beats in discos in Donghae, South Korea, where an obese deejay who suffers from motion sickness translates it back into English. Before he prints out the results on a dot matrix printer, Clem sends them to me, and I hereby share the results with you…
A TRANSCRIPT OF THE NIXON TAPES THAT WAS NOT ESPECIALLY GERMANE TO THE SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE, BUT SEEMS OF ODD HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE NONETHELESS (RECENTLY RELEASED DUE TO A FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT REQUEST BY M. SUNDROP)
APRIL 25, 1971: The President AND H. R. Haldeman, 12:57-1:02 P.M., OVAL OFFICE
PRESIDENT NIXON: Is that sandwich here, Bob?
HALDEMAN: It’s there in front of you.
PRESIDENT NIXON: Not this Goddamn thing. Now what I want you to know, Bob, is that this isn’t the sandwich I am going to eat.
HALDEMAN: Yes.
PRESIDENT NIXON: I mean I am the president of the United States.
HALDEMAN: Sure. The Reuben is gone.
PRESIDENT NIXON: This Rueben atrocity here—am I really expected to put that thing in my mouth? I mean the point here is that I need a sandwich I can trust. I had Buchanan in here, and he was supposed to ask for a ham sandwich. A ham sandwich.
HALDEMAN: I could get Colson to check on that.
PRESIDENT NIXON: If Timahoe was sitting here on the carpet of the Goddamn Oval Office, I wouldn’t feed a Rueben sandwich to him, much less that Reuben sandwich to him. I mean a dog wouldn’t eat that much sauerkraut for Chrissakes.
[Withdrawn item. National Security.]
PRESIDENT NIXON: Look, [jowly munching] I cannot run this high office on an empty stomach. And believe you me, the prosperity of this country—do you think [more jowly munching] that sonfabitch [Ted] Kennedy has these problems, Bob?
HALDEMAN: I think we can [unintelligible].
PRESIDENT NIXON: Good. Get [even more jowly munching] on that. Now get that Rueben outta here. Oh, turn that transistor up. [The Rolling Stones’s “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” is audible. Papers flutter.]
Early on, this Roman Polanski film from 1971, the year of my birth, looks like every non-Shakespearean’s nightmare about what Shakespeare is like: forgettable characters braying gibberish that is meant to set the scene, but in essence makes us not especially want to watch the story at all.
Jon Finch, our Macbeth in this film, looks a little bored at first, with his awesomely sullen Max von Sydow cheekbones, rubbing his ass emerging from a tent or chasing the weird sisters down into a stone basement.
Francesca Annis’s cold, sullen beauty as Lady M makes us wonder, and admire, where this animosity and reckless ambition might come from.
Nicholas Selby is so foppish as King Duncan that we are perhaps too eager to see his slaughter.
Like the recent Justin Kurzel adaptation, Polanski’s Macbeth is traditional, which is to say, medieval. But the landscape of this Macbeth is both strange and unpleasantly earthy. The camera opens on the curves of a beach at low tide, with the odd coloration of dusk (or dawn?) sped up, and then we see the weird sisters, one of whom is missing an eye, messing about in the mud, using a severed hand in their incantations. This movie is bleakly, miserably muddy at nearly every turn, and the mood is even stranger than the Kurzel version.
Within fifteen minutes, the Polanski film draws me in, hypnotically. The mixture of early 1970s facial hair (especially Terence Baylor’s mustache) and quite good acting is intoxicating. And the score, by the experimental ambient group Third Ear Band, sounds like Krzysztof Penderecki somehow riffing on the Barbarella soundtrack, with hints of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew.
When Macbeth is imagining daggers before the assassination of King Duncan, the effect is cheaply psychedelic, like something out of a Roger Corman’s color films, yet is just funky enough, just accurate enough in terms of perspective, to be much better than current special effects.
With soliloquies delivered in voice-over, the overall perspective of the film is disorientingly claustrophobic. This sensibility intensifies when Macbeth has his second audience with the weird sisters. The psychological kinks of this patricidal hero are depicted as a daisy chain of visual signifiers that powerfully mimic the language of the play with a gusto perhaps never before attempted with Shakespeare on film.
And at some point along the way, one begins to see this Macbeth as an especially disturbing film, in its depiction of violence. We are given an intimation of this after the opening credits, when a soldier tests the leg of a fallen enemy.
The enemy is not quite dead, so the soldier whacks into the enemy’s back with the steel ball at the end of a flail, once, twice, three times, four times, until blood thuds through this man’s clothes, and sound of the thumping continues as Duncan’s forces arrive on the scene for its report. These are the good guys, the flailers of wounded men’s backs. This is a world without mercy, without any consideration of the suffering of others. All is death and killing and mud.
When the assassins arrive at Macduff’s home to kill his wife and children, the inconsolable screaming of a woman is heard in the background.
When Lady Macduff, having just had her young son die in her arms, flees the chamber, she collides into the gang-rape of one of her maids that makes the murder seem civilized by comparison. She will see her other children’s corpses, and the family’s chapel in flames before her own inevitable death. The scene is like a medieval version of a Charles Bronson movie. Or worse.
This scene in particular reminded me that this movie was released (October 1971) not especially long after Roman Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, and four other people were murdered by the Manson “family” (August of 1969). Also killed was the unborn child of Tate and Polanski. Sharon Tate was eight and half months pregnant. The director was not at home that night, as he was away scouting locations for a film that he would, under the circumstances, not be able to bring himself to make.
The production schedule of this Macbeth (November 1970 to April 1971) overlapped the Manson trial (June 15, 1970 to January 25, 1971).
These are ghastly things to notice, worthy of tabloid journalism and shabby psycho-biographic scholarship. I notice these facts reluctantly.
Francesca Annis, Lady Macbeth.
Sharon Tate.
Francesca Annis, who in my opinion looks similar to Sharon Tate, plays Lady Macbeth’s somnambulistic scene in the nude, which is far more weird than erotic, despite the fact that the film was produced by Playboy magazine and Hugh Hefner.
Annis’s vulnerability is agonizing, and when she later falls to her death, a plot point that in Shakespeare’s text happens entirely off scene, Polanski directly shows us the horribly misaligned anatomy of her corpse, and then, after the camera cuts away, returns to witness this destroyed flesh in case we looked away the first time.
This extra-textual eeriness reminds me of how Robert Blake’s spooky Mystery Man character in David Lynch’s Lost Highway in 1997 became even more disturbing after he was arrested for his own wife’s murder five years later.
Lest we plummet too far down the speculation pit, however, we do need to remember that Polanski co-wrote the screenplay adaptation with the provocative theater critic Kenneth Tynan, who in 1969 produced the salacious erotic revue, Oh, Calcutta!
Neither Kenneth Tynan nor Polanski seem to have much to relate about Tynan’s contributions. In his diaries, Tynan does tell a story about how he and Polanski had a desultory conversation about the assess of actresses, both of these men being ass men, and that when the conversation turned to Marilyn Monroe’s posteriors, Polanski apparently said, “Oh, if we’re going to talk about dead people, then Sharon’s bottom wasn’t bad” (29), which is perhaps an odd thing for a widower to say–or then again, perhaps that is precisely the appropriate thing to say.
In his autobiography, Roman, Polanski claims that the behavior of Macbeth’s assassins in the court of Macduff was inspired by an SS officer who “had searched our room in the ghetto, swishing his riding crop to and fro, toying with my teddy bear, nonchalantly emptying out the hatbox full of forbidden bread” (333).
Roman Polanski does not seem like an especially self-aware person, so I have difficulty deciding if that explanation, more than the more recent horror of his life, was some extra-textual analogue. As a Jewish child during World War II, he saw an old Jewish woman murdered on the street, and was used mockingly as target practice for some German soldiers. 20% of the population of Poland was murdered in the holocaust.
Ultimately, such questions about the director’s emotional interiority are our burden, not the film’s, and even if Polanski was working through his feelings about the drugged-out, murderous barbarity that had invaded his home, that does not mean that the work would be less significant or valid because of it. When the film came out, Newsweek’s reporter claimed the film was right out of the aesthetic of the holocaust and the Manson murders–now that is barbaric. Before the Manson crew was caught, people and the press speculated that the imagined decadence of Polanski and Tate were the obvious cause of the murder, and Polanski himself was suspected by some people of the murder.
Did I mention that the medieval fight sequence is totally cool? The sequences between Macduff and Macbeth show these soldiers fighting quickly, in armor. Visually, this looks a bit uncouth and goofy, yet also looks totally believable.
As does Macbeth’s severed head at the end.
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Works Cited
Polanski, Roman. Roman. New York: William Morrow, 1984.
Tynan, Kenneth. The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan. Ed. John Lahr. New York: Bloomsbury, 2001.
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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.
Episode 202 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
In this week’s episode, I share Litlando 2016’s publishing panel, featuring Danita Berg, Lisa Roney, Raquel Henry, and Ryan Rivas.
plus Chris Bedell writes about how Sara Shephard’s Pretty Little Liars: Toxic changed his life.
Episode 202 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
Oh my. Everyone is obsessing over the new Captain America Civil War movie. It’s Captain America vs. Iron Man. Which side will you choose?
Well, you can either choose to side with America or you can side with Captain America because let me tell you all something, Iron Man is America! Tony Stark is rich, smart, devilishly handsome, witty, and he’s rich. When the terrorists kidnapped him and forced him to build them a missile, he built a super robot suit and kicked their ass! Steve Rogers was given the super soldier serum so he could send Adolf Hitler to the gates of hell, but he spent most of the war starring in cheesy Saturday afternoon serials. When he finally saw some action, all he managed to do was crash a plane in the Arctic. And rumor has it when they finally defrosted him 70 years later, he couldn’t wait to start collecting those Social Security checks. But of course, Captain America does have that awesome theme song, “The Star Spangled Man with a Plan.” That’s so much cooler than Iron Man’s theme song, “Shoot to Thrill” by AC/DC!
I guess that was a bit of rant there. After all, I’m not here to talk about modern movies. We’ve got a moratorium here at the Museum of Schlock on any movie made after 1979, but as luck would have it, there was a made-for-TV Captain America starring Reb Brown as Steve Rogers.
I don’t know who Reb Brown is. Apparently, he starred in a movie titled Yor: the Hunter from the Future. I’ll have to look for that one! Oh my. The actor looks depressed in that Captain America suit. This isn’t a good sign.
So this Steve Rogers didn’t fight in World War II, but at least he was in the United States Marine Corps. Ummm. Let’s see. Some bad guys dump oil all over a highway road and Steve gets into a car accident when he slips off a cliff. Somehow the bad guys know he’s going to visit Dr. Simon Mills (Len Birman), a friend of Steve’s deceased father. Oh, Steve’s father was given the nickname “Captain America” as an insult for being so patriotic. His father also developed the chemical FLAG (Full Latent Ability Gain) and injected it into himself, passing the chemical on to his newborn son, Steve Rogers. Dr. Mills wants to inject Steve with another dose of the chemical so Steve will transform into a super soldier, but Steve has other plans for his life
You see, Steve is an artist and wants to ride his motorcycle across America, just him and his sketchbook. Well that plan is short lived after the bad guys run his motorcycle off the road. It looks like poor Steve isn’t going to make until Dr. Mills injects him with the FLAG chemical, and presto! Steve is now a super soldier! Anyway, the bad guys are looking for microfilm on how to build a neutron bomb. Dr. Mills creates some toys for Steve Rogers like a plastic shield that can be tossed like a frisbee because it is a frisbee. He also designs Steve a boss RV that contains a red, white, and blue motorcycle that launches out of a hidden compartment. But the pièce de résistance is spandex body suit that gleams in the sunlight. Dear Lord, this movie is awful. It must have sucked to be a kid in the 70s.
Years ago, my friend Sammie recommended I read Neil Shusterman’s Unwind dystology, a science fiction series devoid of those magic or fantastical elements that I normally gravitate towards. But I’m glad I gave the Unwind books a chance, because it stands for everything I believe the Young Adult genre is capable of: being both unapologetically thought-provoking while delivering an entertaining story.
The premise of the Unwind dystology involves a society in which advocates for both sides of the Pro-life and Pro-choice debate have reached a middle ground following the fictional Heartland War. This war resulted from an ever growing generation of teenagers and young adults rioting, fighting, causing chaos to the populace for reasons explained further on. The compromise is the act of unwinding. A parent can choose to retroactively “abort” their child between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. The child is sent to a harvest camp to which their body parts are harvested for later use. Because all appendages, organs and even parts of the brain are reused, the child is not considered dead since all portions are recycled.
This dark premise moves forward with three separate narrators: Connor Lassiter, a delinquent whose parents choose to have unwound; Risa Ward, a ward of the state sent to be unwound due to funding shortages at the orphanage; and Levi “Lev” Calder, the tenth of ten children whose parents choose to unwind for religious sacrament, or tithe. Each child come from a background distinct to the universe that Shusterman has created.
And this is why not only the cast of characters expand in the later books, but why occasionally there are chapters narrated by points of view that are never seen again.
Early on there’s a chapter where an unnamed mother engages in the act of “Storking.” Parents who do not want their newborns will leave the baby on a random household’s doorstep. If the biological parent isn’t caught in the act, and the household is caught finding the child, that child now belongs to that household. Stocking is a common occurrence within this universe explained in a chapter through this unnamed mother. The practice directly effects Connor, Risa, and Lev in the following chapters. Storking also grants the reader insight into an individual of this unique situation.
I think what I love so much about this series is how expansive this controversial reality is, and how the diverse cast of characters respond accordingly.
In the case of stories with multiple narrators, there is usually at least one dull perspective that becomes a chore to read. That doesn’t happen in Unwind, though.
Shusterman’s distinctive perspectives all contribute engagingly to this universe. For example, Lev arguably undergoes the most character development in the series, initially working against Connor and Risa. As a Tithe, Lev sees his unwinding as an honor instead of a death sentence. Because Connor was cast out of his family, much of his struggle consists of him reeling in his emotions, as well as reconciling with the abandonment. But Risa acts as a foil to them both due to having neither a home, nor family life to compromise her emotionally. Her life as a ward of the state means that her life never belonged to herself; the opportunity to escape unwinding marks her greater drive to finally gain autonomy over her own life.
Shusterman excels in juggling a series of fleshed out concepts while accounting for word economy, keeping the pacing fast, the dialogue unexpectedly witty but never insensitively so. And in a series where teenagers are running from being dismantled in a world that claims to not want them, glimmers of humor are much appreciated.
This premise begs for philosophical reasoning that never pins these concepts down as a single answer, but gets me thinking. Does an individual continue to live on although all their physical parts have been dismantled and distributed elsewhere? How does a parent choose to unwind their child? Which beckons the question of what ownership of yourself means before reaching the age of eighteen?
One concept that intrigued me–and if you want to avoid spoilers then skip this paragraph–is that the process of unwinding is never explicitly defined. There is a character later on who is unwound. From the narration there’s a psychological breakdown of the character’s consciousness. But the character is sedated, and cannot elaborate on the procedure itself in solid description. I like that this controversial procedure remains undefined, because Shusterman doesn’t bloody the larger concepts in grim detail. Instead, it’s like he’s providing a commentary on death itself. If unwinding can be considered as the death of an individual, then it’s nice to not have a specific answer of “yes, this person lives on” or “no, the unwound individual is absorbed into the new host’s consciousness.” There isn’t a simple, factual, reductive answer that Shusterman gives. There isn’t a moral that can sum up this series; instead we’re left speculating on a fucked up world that reveals insight into the individuals who are trying to survive it.
The series ends on a strong note that doesn’t go out of its way to comfort the reader. There’s also an eBook titled Unstrung, which chronicles Lev’s whereabouts when he initially parts from Conner and Risa. And just recently Unbound was released, a collection of short stories with minor characters narrating from other aspects of the world.
Although I would love to see more of such a complex universe, I don’t believe this saga would work in movie format. I’m certain all of its complexities and narrators would be constricted down to just a single point of view. If anything, this series deserves a television adaption, where there’s room to elaborate on all that Shusterman writes about. The practice of dismantling teenagers is outrageous enough to draw attention, though the controversial issue
But this is a story that I definitely recommend if you’d like to try some awesome YA fiction. And as a bonus positive, yes there are romances that flourish in the story.
What a breath of fresh air.
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Brontë Bettencourt (Episode 34) graduated from the University of Central Florida with a Bachelors in English Creative Writing. When she’s not writing or working, she is a full time Dungeon Master and Youtube connoisseur.
Jim Sterling is a British born videogame journalist living in Mississippi and one of my inspirations. With a sharp wit punctuated by the passion of a religious zealot, he reports on the industry on his show, The Jimquisition. In between shows, Sterling releases shorter pieces like Squirty Plays, which are first impressions videos that focus on games from Steam, the digital distribution service. One such video set off a feud between him and an indie developer that would go on for years, culminating in a court case that could mean life or death for Internet criticism.
The developer in question is Digital Homicide (DigiHom), a small outfit that uses the open source Unity engine to produce games. One game of their games is The Slaughtering Grounds, a horde-based first person shooter. Jim discovered the title on Steam in November of 2014 and found the technical quality poor and unfinished with an aesthetic of disparate artistic assets. When Sterling posted a Squirty Play of the game, the preceding conflict between the two involved many exchanges over the course of almost two years.
In retaliation, DigiHom released a video called Reviewing the Reviewer, which was just Jim’s Squirty Play with a text overlay commenting on his commentary. Most of the annotations were insults akin to a child having a tantrum, critiquing Sterling’s character, and treating the video like a review. Rather than ignore the meltdown, Jim found the video quite hilarious and uploaded a response of him laughing at DigiHom’s humorless hyperbole.
After some drama on the Steam forums, a brief moment of calm, and Jim covering the rest of DigiHom’s game library, Robert Romine, one of two brothers behind the developer, challenged Sterling to an interview in July of 2015. In the 98-minute conversation, DigiHom questioned Jim’s ability as a critic, his personality, and called to attention his own use of premade assets, a big point of contention. Romine then demonstrated a gross misunderstanding of definition in regards to Fair Use and Copyright Law. He also accused Jim of harming him financially and emotionally by attacking his company by commenting on their games.
While the debate/interview was quite entertaining as DigiHom made arguments that essentially refuted themselves like a snake eating their tail, that 98-minute one-sided argument set off a whole new stage of the feud. In the following months, DigiHom would rebrand themselves multiple times to mask their releases, give away download keys of their games in exchange for votes on Steam Greenlight, and launch a smear campaign against Sterling that allegedly made death threats. The situation proved rather alarming because despite Jim’s impersonal covering of the subject, DigiHom remained steadfast in their pursuit to fight back. They seemed unable to separate themselves from the conflict and move on, taking every chance to stir up trouble.
All the drama and turmoil culminated in a civil suit filed back in March of this year. Robert Romine’s brother James is suing Sterling on 10 counts of libel involving damage to DigiHom’s reputation for about $11 million dollars. The available court documents (55 pages to be exact) list the various charges and background in which the instances of libel took place. The evidence of each moment is detailed and extensive, tracing back to when the feud first began with every joke, comment, and detail of relevance cataloged for reference.
How the case is progressing is unclear, but there is an obvious toll this debacle is taking on Sterling’s life. In a couple of the more recent episodes of Jimquisition, he has displayed signs of distress as the mounting issues related to the case have affected his ability to keep up with work. While any lawsuit can bring out the worst in people, the meaning behind the case is transcendent.
Being a critic with only a couple years experience, I have yet to be attacked on the basis of my work. Apart from critiques on quality, I have not been insulted for my opinions by people who found them offensive. Of course, I am not popular enough to incur such wrath, but I see where DigiHom is coming from.
Writers and artists pour their heart and soul into their work and expect at least some gratification when making their efforts public. No matter what we want our work will always be judged and we must decide if complaining about criticism is worth making our own lives miserable. Considering all the drama, DigiHom clearly lacked the mental and emotional fortitude to simply let their hatred for Sterling pass and move on with making videogames. Their drive for retribution has led them to the utmost extreme and they are bound for a failure that will have a ripple effect across the industry of Internet criticism.
There is a right answer, but because there has been no decided court hearing, we have to wait until judgement is rendered. I also wanted to keep it open to the reader because not everyone thinks Fair Use is just and some people see criticism as bullying regardless of the subject matter. Yes, both Sterling (the critic) and DigiHom (the creator) are small players, but their case represents a turning point in the conflict of Fair Use, Copyright, and Content ID. The verdict will either reaffirm that Fair Use is fair in regards to critics, or that creators can get away with destroying a critic’s livelihood because they did not like the criticism.
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C.T. McMillan (Episode 169) is a film critic and devout gamer. He has a Bachelors for Creative Writing in Entertainment from Full Sail University.