A Life On Our Planet

I’ve just watched David Attenborough’s “A Life On Our Planet” and it’s beautiful as always, frank, open, heartfelt, a powerful plea to protect, preserve and even expand the wild places that he so loves and has made it his life’s work to document and explain. To do so, he says, is not mere environmentalism, but a necessity if humanity is to survive on this planet. It’s all delivered in his trademark BBC tones of gentle wisdom and quiet authority—not the gravelly voice of God a la Freeman but something warmer, more familiar and human—it is assured, it is educated, intellectual, knowledgeable and kind without being saccharine. It is a chronicle of nature in the 21^st century, which means of course it is a chronicle of how fast that nature is disappearing and—OH MY GOD WE MADE DAVID ATTENBOROUGH CRY. Well done, us. I hope we’re fucking happy with ourselves. We’ve saddened this beautiful, beautiful man, whose hiking boots we are not worthy to—oh, it makes me mad. MAD. I’ve been listening to Sir Dave since Life on Earth, back in the early 80s, and it is just heartbreaking to hear him talk about how much has been lost, much of it irrevocably. His prescriptions are not novel, and repetition from the mouths of other environmentalists has stolen some of their thunder, but he does stress how attainable they are—greater use of renewable energy, cooperative and planned utilization of ocean resources, less dependence on meat-heavy diets, an end to human expansion. Fine goals of course, but the challenge is (as it always has been) that many refuse to admit there is even a problem. I’m sure this documentary gets a rougher reception down America way, where belligerent climate change denial has become a cornerstone belief for half the population (the message probably also faces an uphill battle in, say, China or India, sorry Americans for picking on you again, but you are the Florida Man of the English-speaking world at the moment). Which is also sad, if not quite as sad as seeing Sir David upset. It is so frustrating to hear people at times bemoan our modern lack of moral compass, the cliched “What would Jesus do if he was alive today” when we are surrounded on all sides by Attenborough and Mister Rogers and Bob Ross and Steve Irwin and Keanu Reeves and, idk, Dave Grohl, we are surrounded by figures pointing the way to kindness and humility and respect and we keep throwing up our hands in the air and saying “Welp, too bad everything sucks, that’s life.” The answers are all around us, people. Worried what to do about climate change? Just listen, listen for once in your goddam lives instead of yammering away on Facebook and Reddit and Twitter and Instagram and just listen. What would Jesus do? I DON’T KNOW WHY DON’T YOU TRY FUCKEN LISTENING TO ONE OF THE THREE DOZEN SHINING, POSITIVE FIGURES IN OUR CULTURE. Maybe we wouldn’t be in such a goddamn mess then. But no, it’s Donnie Trump, football players and the sodding Kardashians. Mad. But back to Sir David. The poor dear is 93 but still going, if not strong, then gently and calmly as ever, and I would say “we shall not see his like again” but I don’t want to jinx it, I sincerely hope we do see his like again, whole battalion of Davids, great regiments of Attenboroughs sweeping across the continents, documentary teams in tow. Endless Davids, a never-ending stream Attenboroughs. Then maybe life on this planet will actually be worth living.

Enola Holmes

Title: Enola Holmes
Directed by: Harry Bradbeer
Screenplay by: Jack Thorne (based on a novel by Nancy Springer)
Network: Netflix

My favorite scene in Netflix’s YA breezy, light, fluffy and fun Nancy Drew-slash-Ferris Bueller knockoff “Enola Holmes” is when the black woman jiujitsu instructor in Victorian London turns and says directly into the camera: “Sherlock Holmes failed to dismantle the patriarchy.”

Which is to say, it’s a fun little adventure movie several cuts above your usual made-for-Netflix fare but my god is it horribly unsubtle with its out-of-place political posturing.

You could, you know, make a movie that inspires the audience to reevaluate the place and role of female characters in period dramas by doing what this movie does the other 90% of the time when it’s not having anachronistic hyper-modern women totally destroy those fuddy-duddy Victorian men with FACTS and LOGIC—i.e. by creating an enjoyable, engaging movie in which women happen to play all the central roles. That would do it, guys. That would get your point across. You don’t have to bring the action to a screaming to a halt just so someone can break the fourth wall and just say the premise straight to the audience.

It’s weird, it’s distracting, it detracts from what would otherwise be a ringing endorsement of more female-centric movies. Bah humbug get off my lawn.

Anyway. So. The actual movie. Enola Holmes is a fictional sub-creation of the blessedly copyright-free Sherlock (here played with marble stiffness and facial inarticulation by Henry Cavill), a supposed younger, precociously and spunky and plucky teenage sister of the big cocaine-addicted S, played with instantly adorable and delightful charm by Stranger Things’s Millie Vanilli Bobbie Brown Bel Biv DeVoe. With Sherlock and brother Mycroft (Sam Claflin) grown up and moved away, Enola is raised by her independent, eccentric domestic white terrorist mother Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter) who speaks in inspirational poster homilies (“If you want to be heard, you’ve got to make some noise,” says the fey dearie as she builds pipe bombs to slaughter innocents).

All seems well until Mother disappears one day—ooh, a mystery, involving a Holmes, who would have guessed. Enola’s search takes her to London, and along the way stumbles across a plot to bump off the young, pale, slightly foppish but actually not really his personality is a bit of a mess honestly Marquess or Possibly Viscount of Somewhereorother (Louis Partridge and His Hair), in order to prevent said Lad Who Is Quite a Modern and Liberal Thinker from voting the wrong way on a historically inaccurate bill to give women the vote. Enola promptly stops looking for Mumsie (probably just as well, as this is not a terribly compelling arc) and resolves instead to save the Marquess (or Viscount) and His Hair. Aided by numerous and repeated flashbacks to Enola and Eudoria beating the hell out of each other at juijitsu, Enola solves the case, er, mainly by using jiujitsu to beat up and kill the assassin sent after the young Laird. Not much sleuthing going on, really.

Enola’s two talents appear to be decrypting messages that have been purposely fed to her in order for her to read, and dressing up as a boy. Because either the scriptwriters aren’t that good at coming up with clues and mysteries, or because (as I’ve whined about elsewhere) our society is currently incapable of thinking of any way to show strength other than beating people up.

Sherlock does show up once or twice, but is here mainly used for the “Worf effect”, that is having a supposedly intelligent character get out-thought by the protagonist in order to showcase just how gosh darned smart she is.

In between, Enola talks to the camera in the style and tone of Ferris Bueller, which doesn’t add much to either the plot or our understanding of the character, but hot damn, that Millie Bobbie Brown can charm the back legs of an Arcturan Megadonkey.

All this leads to the rousing climax in which Enola saves the Lord, gets women the vote several decades too early, and manifests her manifesto, declares her independence and sets up the sequel. Huzzah. 

And I’m being incredibly cynical about the whole thing, maybe because Generation X as a whole has been raised to view the world through the filters of irony and cynicism, maybe because I’m an incorrigible misanthrope, and yet this movie has moved me to wonder—is the English-speaking world finally moving past detachment and irony as its default and primary if not only means of interpreting the world? The bromides in this movie about equality and gender ring tinny and false in these tired, failing old ears, surely nobody could say this with a straight face, yet the movie’s single notable characteristic is how committed and sincere it is about everything. Could, my crusty old heart wonders, audiences actually mean it, sincerely mean it, sincerely enjoy having characters stand up and declaim their beliefs with outthrust jaws and beaten breasts? Are we (and as a terminally-repressed Englishman in Canadian disguise, I shudder at the prospect), are we on the cusp of a new era of genuine emotion?

People online have long bemoaned the death of satire, but few have considered what is taking its place, and I think I see now: Sincerity. Meaning what you say. No more “ironically” enjoying things that are objectively awful. No more sarcastically quipping lines you don’t believe in. No more sneering at genre tropes or cliches in shows or movies that consciously ape those tropes and hold them up to ridicule or else seek to subvert them.

A movie about a plucky, spunky teenage girl who is (A) plucky and (B) spunky and that’s it, that’s the whole thing, it revels in her terminal pluckiness overload and in her anaphylactic-shock-inducing abundance of spunk. It wears its applique-thin iron-on primary school philosophy on its sleeve and is proud of it, genuinely proud, is not afraid to bellow it into your face. So to me, the effort feels hopelessly misguided, because who my age takes philosophical moralizing in a movie aimed at teenage girls seriously, but I’m the one out of touch now, there’s a coming wave of genuine-ness and it wears the winsomely smiling face of Millie Bobbie Brown.

Foe

Title: Foe
Author: Iain Reid

Junior and Hen, a couple living on an isolated farm in the near future, are suddenly informed that Junior is being conscripted into a two-year space exploration program. During his absence, the agency will provide a synth/replicant that looks just like him, to take care of Hen and keep her company. As the government agent regularly visits the couple and peppers them with strangely personal questions, Junior starts to suspect the program is not what it claims, and something more sinister is happening. At that point, I was figuring either (A) the protagonist, Junior, would turn out to have been a synth the whole time, or (B) he’d go away and when he came back his wife would have been replaced with a synth. I must be some kind of goddamn genius, because ladies and gentlemen: It’s both. For all the predictability of the twists, this is still a neat little novel that packs a punch, particularly when you go back and review the interactions between notJunior and his wife in a new light, realizing that despite Junior being the “I” of the novel the main character is actually his wife, Hen, grappling with living with this replicant imposter of her husband, with the dissatisfaction that comes when you feel your life is in a rut, everything is routine and one day blurs into the next. It’s essentially a married woman having a mid-life crisis, dressed up in SFnal trappings. The writing is sharp and snappy at first but starts to wear after a while, as all Junior’s three-word declarative sentences get to be a bit monotonous after a bit, and you kind of wish Iain would vary the pace every once in a while. The blunt droning of Junior’s inner monolog isn’t helped by the fact that aside from the two big twists, this short novel is essentially plot free, nothing much happens except !Junior argues with his wife and gets confused and irritated with everyone and everything else and—just as an aside—I empathize 1000% bro, I really do. People are all malfunctioning robots, my guy, there’s no telling what is going on in their faultily-programmed brains. Seriously, I’ve given up trying to understand my fellow human beings, you’re all aliens to me. Anyway, real Junior comes back, unJunior gets deactivated, but then real Junior and his wife fight because he’s a real selfish asshole who really left her to go off on a real two-year space program and she kind of liked the replicant better. So she ups and leaves him, but before Junior realizes what’s happened, the agency quickly subs in a replicant for his wife. Real Junior and unHen waltz off into the sunset, happy in their comforting irreality, their artificial facsimile of a happily married life. I’m not sure the plot makes a whole lot of sense once you know the ending—why tell the replicant about the space program? Why tell him that he is going to be replaced, when he already is the replacement? Why not just have it live a normal life until the real guy comes back? But I get why it’s structured that way, for that little dopamine rush when you figure it out. It’s not a book built for the CinemaSins crowd, and I get that structurally the point is to mislead the reader about what’s going on so you get that Eureka! Moment and all those weird conversations between notJunior and Hen suddenly make sense. Is the real horror the way our lives dissolve into drudgery, the way we exist in order to keep on existing, that any change no matter how dramatic eventually becomes mundane, routine, boring. Is the numbing comfort of the familiar the real foe? I don’t know, you’re the robot aliens. You figure it out.