Well, one of these movies is now on Netflix here and the other was finally released in theaters (being an Oscar winner gave them the cover they needed to justify showing it I suppose), so here goes.
Barben-
Robbed of much of its impact by omnipresent memes
online. Not one single moment of this movie came as a surprise.
Thought the first 2/3 was pretty good actually,
nicely done satire that bites pretty deep, until the last third does away with
subtlety and starts pounding you over the head with it.
-heimer
Man invents nuclear bomb and forever dooms
humanity to live in the shadow of annihilation (not to mention guaranteeing
tens of thousands of Japanese would never live in the shadow of nuclear
annihilation) and later must suffer for it by, um, having his security
clearance cancelled. But not to worry, the guy who blackballed Oppie also suffered
a minor disappointment in his career.
Truly, all these results are equally
weighty. Karmic balance is achieved.
Meanwhile, the soundtrack attempts to perforate
your eardrums.
Shogun, the 1975 novel by James Clavell, is a
fictionalized account of the journey of William Adams, an Englishman who
visited and eventually settled in Japan in 1600.
I, the 1976 human being by Mr. and Mrs. I Senior, am a distressingly
nonfictional person who visited and eventually settled in Japan in 1998.
The two events are related.
Shogun, the 1980 miniseries by NBC, first sparked my
interest in Japan and led to my visit and subsequent ensettlement 18 years
later.
I was thus quite interested to see
Shogun, the 2024 miniseries by FX, an adaptation of the
1975 novel
Shogun, and to compare it to my memories of the 1980
miniseries,
Shogun.
It is an ambitious failure.
It’s sporadically brilliant. Individual scenes absolutely sparkle, as
joyful as a sake cup filled to the brim, as beautiful and delicate and
understated as a spray of cherry blossoms, as sharp-edged and pointed as a
katana. The actresses in particular, Anna Sawai (Mariko), Fumi Nikaido (Ochiba)
and Moeka Hoshi (Fuji), present a master class in saying everything while
saying nothing. A sidelong glance. A cup raised to cover a smile.
On the darker side, there’s also a fascinating study of an abusive
relationship between an outwardly brash but inwardly sentimental man who mistakes
possessiveness for love, and the woman who refuses to cave because she refuses
to acknowledge him at all.
But the whole thing feels a bit muddled, and this is because
Shogun, the adaptation of the novel
Shogun, doesn’t actually want to adapt the novel at all.
The novel is nearly as old as I am, and wears its years with about as much
grace, viz none whatsoever. Mr. Clavell was captured by the Japanese army
during WW2 and spent years in a fairly nasty POW camp, but to his credit came
out of the experience determined to understand the people who’d held him
prisoner. He gives it a good college try but the book does contain a number of
inaccuracies, and subscribes to some of the more offensive stereotypes about
Japanese people—about the second conversation the local have about our English
protagonist is to marvel at how big his penis is.
That said, it is not a “white savior” story, which much like “gaslighting”
or “woke” is a term the Internet seems eager to stretch into oblivion. The
protagonist John Blackthorne (as William Adams is called in Mr. Clavell’s
version) spends over 1000 pages in Japan, and if you keep a carefully track of
the number of people he saves over the course of this epic, at the end your
tally will be: 1. He saves one guy. In an earthquake.
He, er, also loses his ship, the woman he loves gets blown to bits, and the
man who controls his life ends the book by musing on the fact that Blackthorne
is effectively a prisoner in the country.
Blackthorne/Adams does potter about feudal Japan, befriends the man who
will one day become Shogun, Yoshii Toranaga (based on Tokugawa Ieyasu), falls
in love with his translator Mariko (the historical Hosokawa Gracia), fights
some ninjas, and learns about the Japanese people and culture. He is, in
essence, a reader stand-in, the portal through which an audience unfamiliar
with Japan could learn about it.
But that evidently still didn’t sit right with the creators of the new 10-episode
limited series,
Shogun.
In this iteration, they decided to focus more on the Japanese characters
than their white, Western visitor. Which, on the face of it, doesn’t sound like
such a bad idea. 2024 is not 1980 and we don’t really need someone to hold our
hands and explain to us what a samurai or sushi is. Japanese culture,
especially animation, has gone global. It also feels a bit too Last Samurai
to have yet another story set in Japan that is all about the white guy being
cool and getting the best girl.
So, fair enough.
The trouble is, the creators then had to build a show that wasn’t about
a white guy in Japan, based on a foundation that was about a white guy
in Japan. And the cracks, my dear friends, are painfully obvious.
The story of Blackthorne/Adams is the story of a man encountering a new
culture, learning about it, growing to appreciate it, and eventually
assimilating into it, at least to a certain degree. He does not really do much else.
If you do not want to tell a story about intercultural understanding, then do
you not want to tell a story about Blackthorne/Adams. And if you do not want to
tell a story about Blackthorne/Adams, there’s not much point in putting him in
your story.
That’s a problem. Your story should be about whatever your story is
about.
What that means is the Shogun miniseries begins, as the novel does,
with the arrival slash shipwreck of Blackthorne and his crew of Dutch merchants
slash pirates in a fishing village on the Izu Peninsula, where they are imprisoned,
interrogated, and boiled alive (in one case), before Blackthorne is taken to
meet the local warlord, Toranaga, and is introduced to a Japanese-Portuguese
interpreter and noblewoman named Mariko.
Round about episode 4 the story then decides it doesn’t really want to be
about Blackthorne (played by Cosmo “we have a Tom Hardy at home” Jarvis) anymore,
and he sort of hangs around for the next half-dozen episodes bleating about his
ship and men, before the show attempts to give us a satisfying resolution to
the story by having a scene of him working alongside the local villagers.
This doesn’t satisfy as an ending, because the journey between episodes 1
and 10 hasn’t been about him assimilating into this culture at all. He’s
wandered about in a befuddled haze for 9 hours or so and accomplished
absolutely bugger all.
The story would rather be about Mariko (played by Anna Sawai), who let’s
face it is a more interesting character. She’s not only the daughter of Akechi
Jinsai (historical Akechi Mitsuhide), a famous traitor who ambushed and
murdered his liege lord, but also a convert to Christianity in a country deeply
ambivalent about this foreign religion, and one of the few people to speak a second
language (English in the show subs for Portuguese in real history). But if it
is about her, what’s this whiny white dude doing in her show? Why does he get
to start and end her show? He adds nothing to her arc, does nothing to
influence any of her decisions, and even the romance from the novels is largely
repressed here.
It would also like to be about Toranaga (actor Hiroyuki Sanada, who seems
to play the Asian elder in every Hollywood movie now that Ken Watanabe has gone
back to Japan), the cold and ruthless manipulator who uses and discards people
like pawns in his quest to eliminate his rival, Lord Ishido (historical Ishida
Mitsunari) and become the supreme ruler of Japan. But if it is about him, why
are this English fella and minor noblewoman taking up so much of his time and
why does he pay them any attention when the future of the country is at stake?
In the meantime, the show goes out of its way to downplay any contribution
Blackthorne might make to the plot. Does he have anything to teach the Japanese?
No. Do they want to learn shipbuilding from him? No. Do they hope to use him to
open trade with the Dutch? No. Do they learn anything from him at all? No. Does
he learn anything from them? Not really. By the end of the show, he can speak
one or two words of Japanese.
If Shogun wanted to be an outsider story, great. Very popular
choice. Gives the reader a guide who can introduce them to this make-believe
world as they learn about it. Hobbits in Lord of the Rings, the kids in Narnia,
John Carter on Mars, all that good stuff. Ease us into the world of the story.
And then: A crisis. Our outsider protagonist must use the knowledge and skills
they have developed to take control of the situation. They move from passive
observer to active participant in the story. They take control. Only here,
Blackthorne never does. His arc stalls, he treads water, and then we’re supposed
to be happy that everything somehow worked out for him.
It manages to come across as very dismissive of the historical Adams, who
apparently became a valued advisor on nautical matters to the Shogun and helped
promote trade with the Dutch. He married, settled, and had children. In the
show, Toranaga snidely laughs him off as someone he keeps around like a jester,
because “he makes me laugh.” As a white dude happily living and working in
Japan, it’s disappointing that nobody has the courage or imagination to end the
story exactly the way it did in real life, with Adams the white dude happily
living and working in Japan.
But then, once you take out the one unique thing about this story (the first
English guy in Japan) it becomes just another samurai flick, albeit with more
of a political bent. I tried getting my Japanese wife to watch and she gave up
after about five minutes, saying “It’s just another taiga drama” (historical
drama TV shows that have aired in Japan almost every year since 1963: Nothing
new, in other words).
We’ve seen this with Halo, with the Witcher, the Wheel of Time, World War
Z, and if writers don’t want to adapt the original source material, I would
suggest they don’t adapt the original source material. Create something new!
Yes, yes, I know the name is a label slapped on the cover to attract eyeballs,
but it does result in a ramshackle end product, crudely folded together like
amateur origami.
A shame, because the non-Blackthorne bits of the show are often bloody brilliant.
Visually impressive as always with Denis, but
perhaps inevitably flounders on the structural reefs set up by the original
source material. Denis aims to make the warnings of Paul’s story more explicit—that
charismatic leaders are dangerous, for the more followers they have, the more
their mistakes get amplified—but in so doing renders the central relationship
of the story nonsensical.
Dune is a fucken weird book, you know. I’m
not even talking about the flying bird helicopters and desert people orgies. Mutated
fish people who fly FTL ships with the power of drugs. Subliminal messaging in
human voices becoming a form of mind control. Genetic, ancestral memories
giving you the ability to predict the future. Expecting a whoah there far-out psychedelic
frenzy of a book to perfectly map onto social issues 60 years later is just…nuts.
So no, I don’t think it’s especially about “colonialism”
or “oppression” or a “white savior” story. It’s waaay more fucked up than that.
But Denis wants us to see that Paul is not a Good Guy and to do that he plays
up the artificial nature of his messiah-dom, and sets his lover/wife Chani as
the voice of reason in opposition to him. Why she remains attracted to him then
is baffling (she’s not just a little concerned about him, mind you, but dead
set on seeing him as an existential threat to her entire people). But eh. If
you hire Zendaya and FloPu you gotta give them something to do.
Overall, it was still good. I liked the idea Paul
is kind of trapped into becoming the messiah and the more he fights against it
the more events conspire to force him down the same road. And the fremen going
full fanatical jihad was suitably scary. Javier Bardem meanwhile, is reduced to
going full Life of Brian mode in heralding a reluctant Paul as the messiah,
telling his buddies “only the mahdi would say he isn’t the mahdi”—a line lifted
almost straight from Monty Python.
Speaking of doing much with little material, a big
shout out to the Captain of the Emperor's guard though, on the screen for less
than 30 seconds but so memorable, grizzled old dude looks like he's seen some
shit, could wrestle a bear and win, poses for the camera, squints with steely
determination for a sec, charges into a dust storm and promptly gets
obliterated. True hero.
To liven up your experience, I’d recommend sneaking
in a bottle of tequila and doing shots every time the Harkonnens encounter a
minor obstacle and, in a fit of reasonableness, immediately murder the fuck out
of one of their own dudes. Denis’ portrayal of evil is a step up from the book’s
pedo homosexuals, but not exactly deep.
I will, of course, be there to see the promised
third movie on opening night.
I
had fun waffling about cyberpunk in the last post, so here’s another one, this
time harping on another genre I like to talk about: grimdark fantasy.
Much
like cyberpunk, it’s a genre that is both long-lived and has recently enjoyed something
of a revival, thanks to the televisual kinomatic extravaganza that was HBO’s “Game
of Thrones” (about which, I’ve pontificated about here and here).
The
genre itself goes back much further, of course, with one obvious touchstone
being Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone stories that started in 1961, while
the word ‘grimdark’ was inspired by the 1987 tag line of tabletop wargame
Warhammer 40,000 “In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.”
Since then we’ve had a range of authors from Stephen R Donaldson’s “Thomas
Covenant” to R Scott Bakker’s “Prince of Nothing” and is there something about
having the initial R that makes you a nihilist, and oh yes also Joe Abercrombie’s
“First Law” series (here and here) and Steven Erickson’s numerous and ponderous
Malazan books.
Grimdark
fantasy is often described as the antidote to Tolkien, a gritty, dirty, messy
genre for everyone who rolled their eyes every time Galadriel broke into song
or Middle Earth was once again saved at the 11th hour by the
unlooked-for arrival of a flock of Very Large Birds Indeed. Grimdark is unepic
fantasy, populated by angsty antiheroes, hard-faced warriors with anger
management issues, villains who might have a point actually, and lots and lots
of stage blood.
Iconoclasm
can feel terribly clever when you are young, lord knows I was an insufferably
contrarian smart-arse from age about 10 to 30 (well, probably long after that,
truth be told). Realizing that, despite your parents’ admonition to tell the
truth, work hard and be kind to others, it was actually quite possible and
perhaps even advantageous to do none of those things and still be successful,
can feel like an enormous betrayal.
Grimdark
is above all an angry, hurt cry of rejection of the beautiful lies that epic
fantasy tells: Life isn’t like that. Good does not always triumph. Good is
boring, evil is interesting. There are no heroes, everyone is flawed. Nobody
really thinks they are evil. And so on.
Hello, Kullervo
Proponents
always trot out the same handful of rationalizations for the genre’s popularity.
The dark times we live in, you see. As though the year of our lord two thousand
and twenty were in someway harder to live through than two world wars, an
influenza epidemic that killed more than the first war, the worst economic collapse
of the century, the AIDS epidemic or the constant threat of nuclear
annihilation.
As
you can tell, I don’t think there’s anything especially new or innovative about
rejecting or subverting epic fantasy tropes. Here is the most grimdark story I’ve
ever read:
A
boy is orphaned when his parents and family are massacred. He is brought up by
his parents’ killers, rebels against them and is sold into slavery. He escapes,
meets and seduces a girl who he later discovers to be his own sister (unbeknown
to him, she escaped the massacre). When she realizes they have committed
incest, she commits suicide. Blinded by fury, the boy returns to the family
that raised him, slaughters them, and then kills himself. The end.
Pretty
grim, eh?
Here’s
the thing, though. That’s the story of Kullervo, a Finnish legend written down
in the 19th century, but based on a much older oral tradition. It’s
also, pretty much beat for beat except with more elves and dragons, Tolkien’s story
of Turin Turambar, which he first began in 1917.
To
flog the dead horse a few more times: Gilgamesh is a tyrant and despot whose
best friend dies, and later he fails to win either immortality or eternal
youth. Achilles is a selfish arse and dies in the Iliad. Beowulf gets eaten by
a dragon. King Arthur is killed by his own son. So it goes.
To
my mind there’s nothing especially new or modern or even particularly anti-Tolkien
about having troubled heroes who do terrible things. That is, if anything, the
default to which Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is a rare exception.
I'll Show You Realism
Nor do
I think there is anything innately more “realistic” about letting the bad guys
win. George Martin may very well be correct, for all I know might does indeed
make right, but a quick glance at history and a fall back on a slightly
different idiom should tell us that he who lives by the sword dies by it. For
example, let’s have a look at the Roman Emperors who were murdered by their own
Praetorian Guard: Caligula, Galba, Pertinax, Julianus, Elagabalus and Aurelian
and that’s not even going into all the ones murdered by their own regular troops.
The
dictator who rules for a lifetime is a relatively modern invention, and
medieval rulers who tried to act like tyrants and despots were more likely to
find themselves on the wrong end of a hot poker enema a la Edward II (yes,
probably apocryphal, but still a good story to tell).
Being
a ruthless bastards isn’t any more of a shortcut to success than being
virtuous, generous and kind. Honestly, it’s all a bit of a crap shoot. You
always hear about successful authors who got a break because someone assistant’s
wife just happened to read the manuscript and insist it must be published, or
showrunners whose first-ever pitch was greenlit because they have famous
parents or the man who became president of the United States mainly because his
father had been too, and my takeaway is that quite frankly nobody, neither good
nor evil, has the slightest fucking clue what they’re doing. Evil works
sometimes, sure. So does being good. That’s the only reality.
What Audiences Really Want (What They Really, Really Want)
But
of course all these claims at greater realism are a decoy, a smokescreen,
because we all know fiction isn’t really about reflecting reality, fantasy fiction
doubly not so. I mean, the name of a genre is a bit of a dead giveaway, isn’t
it: Fantasy. Not reality.
The whole
point of speculative fiction, non-mimetic writing and fantasy as a literary,
marketing genre is that it draws on myth and magic, legends and fairy tales, in
order to present a world which is very definitely NOT our own. Sure, you could
write a story that is essentially just the real world with a couple of elves in
the background, but then my question becomes why (other than the commercial
reasons) is this marketed as fantasy? Grimdark fantasy, like all fantasy, is
not a reflection but an exaggeration, a specific attempt to highlight and twist
something we find in our world. In this case: the atavistic taste for revenge,
and the desire to indulge our darkest impulses.
Fans
do not flock to watch “Game of Thrones” or pick up the latest god and wizards
tome because they’re looking for an accurate depiction of the human condition.
Grimdark is as escapist as epic fantasy, merely in the opposite direction. It
indulges all the things we’d like to do in our darker moments, the co-worker we’d
cheerfully strangle, the careless driver we’d like to run off the road, the
rude shop clerk we’d like to stuff inside their own till. Grimdark lets you
vicariously live out those fantasies in all their visceral glory.
In
that sense, the genre is regressive and conservative, not iconoclastic.
Nihilism and the refusal to believe in any kind of positive change, preferring
instead to indulge in revenge fantasies, is inherently pro-establishment,
because they’re the ones who benefit if nobody tries to change anything. Audiences
want to have their caked blood and eat it too, to feel they’re doing something
rebellious while engaging in the very boggiest of standard entertainment.
(This
American need to be at once both the rebel underdog and the invincible champion
is probably worth exploring. Maybe next time. On the same note, I make plenty
of digs at America’s expense in this blog, but to be fair, most of the
Americans I’ve met have been wonderful, kind people. This kind of ribbing is
just what you get for being so big and famous and dominating the discourse all
the time.)
It's Not All Bad Though
The
only exception I’ll admit is grimdark that is satire, either of other grimdark
works or of the nihilistic mindset it supports. And to be fair, the Terry Brookses
and Tad Williamses and Robert Jordanses and Brandon Sorensonsons of the genre can
stand to be brought down to earth every once in a while lest they get too
carried away. It’s worth pointing out that for all their medievalist and poetic
trappings the modern epic fantasy is still ultimately about dudes killing other
dudes with swords.
Abercrombie
gets this, I think, with his alcoholic princesses, dashingly brain-dead swordsmen,
manipulative mentor wizards, perfectly pleasant torturers and barbarian
berserkers with a heart of … if not gold, then brass maybe. I think Warhammer
40,000 also had this, until a certain cohort of fans started taking the setting
at face value (you can still see traces of humor in the dimbulb orks, for
example).
In
line with my unwarranted American-bashing above, I note that this kind of
satire seems to be a particularly British thing. I’ve seen this elsewhere too,
with reams of American publications warning you not to try humor. I think the default
American mode of communication is sincerity, which is why political discourse
gets so overheated, nobody can look at the topic or themselves from an ironic
distance. Whereas British people seem much more keyed to look for or expect
life to be absurd. But I’m digressing.
I note
in closing that the “Game of Thrones” fandom has more or less evaporated now
that the show is over (whimper not a bang, there) and the next book nowhere in sight (next year, says
Martin, and we’ve heard that before). That suggests a lack of staying power, a
lack of purchase or foothold on the imagination, and thus a shallowness to the
Gotcha! adolescent epiphany that life sucks. We know, dear. That ceased to feel
insightful by about age 16. These days, it’s the hopeful fantasies that feel
ground-breaking and innovative.
