Sherlock, mad bombers, and the way forward

This afternoon explosions wounded and killed a number of people at the Boston Marathon, prompting me to continue to write about Sherlock. This will make sense, I promise (as much as these glimpses into my brain ever do).

My other post on Sherlock was largely about Irene Adler, but I did touch on what I believe to be a flaw in the first two seasons of Sherlock, which is its outsized emphasis on Jim Moriarty, Sherlock’s incarnation of Professor Moriarty. My beef with the character in that post was, to briefly sum up, that he was basically everywhere. If you know the canon, his presence hangs over the first episode, because of the admittedly wonderful misdirect midway through the episode. Watson receives calls and texts from someone named ‘M’ who tells him not to get involved with Holmes. Eventually he is picked up on the street by a car with a woman who reveals little information. He’s taken to an empty warehouse, where he meets someone who fits the archetype of Moriarty perfectly; he is posh, upper-class, clearly intelligent, dresses well, and even has a cane.

When you’re watching an adaptation and you know the source material, there’s often something in the back of your head that’s comparing what you’re seeing to the source, and also something that’s picking out every new element you see and running it through a database of references back to the original. ‘M’ is very obviously set up to tweak that sense, but as I said, it turns out to be a brilliant misdirect, because ‘M’ is Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s brother, warning Watson off for far less sinister reasons than he might have if he actually had been Moriarty. This gives us a thrill, but it also plants this thought: “If he’s not Moriarty, who is?” It sets us up for the reveal at the end of the episode, where the murderer reveals he was approached by Moriarty and was compensated by him for every murder he committed. The first season was filmed out of sequence, with the initial 60-minute pilot that formed the basis of the first episode completely re-worked and filmed last; the finale, where Moriarty is revealed and squares off against Holmes, was filmed first.

If you know that, it makes complete sense that references to him would be seeded into the first two episodes, because Andrew Scott’s Jim Moriarty is an astonishing creation. My comparison in the other post to Batman and the Joker was purposeful, because Scott’s Moriarty has a similar psychopathic quality to him; at times playful and other times violently aggressive, and all the while capable of great violence. He is like no other Moriarty I’ve ever seen.

The finale of season two, “The Reichenbach Fall,” features Moriarty at his height, perpetrating a series of public crimes that get him arrested and put on trial. His plan, however, is to publicly embarrass and discredit Holmes, which is accomplishes quite adeptly, establishing Holmes as a fraud by befriending a reporter (who Holmes insults early in the episode) and establishing himself as an actor hired by Holmes to play the part of “Moriarty.” By the end of the episode, Holmes has met Moriarty on a rooftop and is faced with an ultimatum. Leap from the top of the building, or assassins will kill everyone close to Holmes. By this point Holmes is on the run from the police and discredited in the press (Watson’s blog and subsequent media coverage have, over the course of the season, made him a sensation) and seemingly has nothing left to lose. He briefly rallies when he realizes that as long as Moriarty is alive there’s a way to prove he isn’t a fraud; Moriarty’s response is to shoot himself in the head. Holmes is left, seemingly, with no way out; he calls Watson and confesses that he is a fraud (a confession that we know is a lie, by the way; this is not a Christopher Nolan film where we’re shown flashbacks that reveal Holmes has been faking it the entire time) and leaps from the rooftop, seemingly killed by the impact.

He isn’t, of course. The last shot of the season, after Watson has mourned at Holmes’ grave, is that of Holmes, standing hidden, watching, and clearly alive. So there’s that. His reputation has been destroyed and most of his relationships damaged. Moriarty hasn’t quite won, but neither has he lost. He set out to ruin Holmes and he largely succeeded, and here’s where I start to have problems with Sherlock and with the overarching Moriarty story the series decided to tell with its first two seasons.

The ultimate message here seems to be, “if someone decides to ruin your life, they will, and there’s basically nothing you can do about it.” Which is an entirely understandable subtext from anything created after 9/11, or Aurora, or Newtown, or Boston. Looked at in a certain light these tragedies all have in common the idea that things were normal, and then, suddenly, they weren’t, forever. It’s easy to draw a line from Adam Lanza or James Holmes to Moriarty, to reduce them down to their one monstrous act and extrapolate from that a giddy imp who sows chaos wherever he wants, ruining lives haphazardly, destroying whatever he touches. Its absolutely tempting, but it leaves the viewer with nothing but fear; it offers no way forward, nothing but nihilism and the nothing that if someone decided to ruin your life, they will, and there’s basically nothing you can do about it.

There is always a way forward. Wounds heal, the pain of loss eases. Property can be rebuilt, possessions can be replaced. The capacity of humanity to weather adversity is limitless.

I am exaggerating my case slightly, because of the day; Sherlock not as bleak as it could be (it's not as bleak as, for example, anything Neil LaBute ever wrote, given that seeing or reading LaBute is like staring into the mouth of God as he screams, "FUCK YOU," for 90 minutes). I am also not begging my escapism for a moral lifeline; I am not coming down the mountain with Sherlock etched on one stone tablet and The Wire on the other, living my life according to fiction, holding a mirror up to the mirror held up to nature, eating and choking on my own tail. I know the way forward (short version: embrace peace in your hearts, you fuckholes), and I think it's only responsible for art and artists to do the same.

So as much as I love Sherlock as a series, I'm uncomfortable with the way it ends, for the moment. We have at least six more episodes on the way, and Andrew Scott has mostly confirmed that his character is dead; this means nothing in television, of course, because as soon as someone has a good story, back Moriarty will come, springing down the lane with a mad grin and a bomb in his coat pocket. But for now I'm very much looking forward to seeing Alanon Bumbershoot portray Holmes as he shines his intellect into the dark corners of the world. Perhaps when season three commences, he will show us the way back.

Sherlock and the war within

I always feel a bit villainous about nitpicking things that I love. It's always done with the best of intentions ("if only they'd done this it would be so much better (for me personally)")  but it still feels a bit churlish. If something is mostly okay, and has a few brilliant, perfect moments, isn't that enough? For some, probably, but if you haven't noticed by now that I compulsively over think things, let me state clearly that I can't help but dwell on those 'if only's' until they burst forth from their gestation in my brain into blog-post form. So, before I dig too hard into the picking of nits, let me establish up-front that I love the BBC version of Sherlock, with everything that word entails, from the initial infatuation to the deep-respect and the forgiveness of faults.

The show has much to recommend it, from the impeccable performance of the preposterously-named Benedict Cumberbatch as the title character to the even more impressive work done by Martin Freeman as his Watson, from the brilliant innovations in incorporating the modern world in all its text-messaging, computer-saturated glory to the sweeping, epic scores. All of the brilliance of the things the show gets right far eclipse its flaws, but it is the flaws I dwell on. And all of that brilliance and all of the flaws appear in starkest detail in my favorite episode of the show's six episode run, "A Scandal in Belgravia."

The episode's name is a nod to the original Doyle story, "A Scandal in Bohemia," and if you're familiar with the original stories, you might guess that this would be the Irene Adler episode. And you would be right! Adler, for the uninitiated, is regarded as one of the pivotal figures in the Holmes canon; despite only appearing in the one story her appearance in any adaptation is an inevitability. The story features a few good examples of Holmesian intellect, the most notable being the ruse he uses to enter Adler's lodgings and the means by which he ascertains the location of the incriminating photograph Holmes has been hired to pursue. However, the story is notable not for this but for the fact that Adler outwits him. Holmes, after learning the location of the photograph, plans to leave and return with his client (the king of Bohemia, no less, who fears that the photograph will be used to blackmail him after his upcoming nuptials to a woman who is not Adler) and secure it then. However, Adler sees through the ruse, disguises herself and follows him home, then flees the country with the photograph, leaving a letter explaining herself and promising never to use the photograph for purposes of blackmail, as the king so feared. Hereafter, according to Watson, Adler was, to Holmes, always the woman, and to readers, she was the woman who beat him at his own game.

No subsequent adaptation has really done her justice; I haven't seen A Game of Shadows, the second outing by Robert Downey, Jr. as Holmes, but by all accounts it does her no favors. And, unfortunately, Sherlock is no different. The basic set-up and motivation is similar, although the one potentially being blackmailed is English rather than Bohemian royalty (and a lady rather than a gentleman). However, Adler is not a former opera singer, as in the original story, but a professional dominatrix, known professionally as, "The Woman." Many of the show's nods to Holmesian canon are moderately subtle, but this one is a screaming red klaxon. What's more, it's unnecessary, because Holmes refers to her as 'the woman' later in the episode and so we get the nod anyway, now undermined by the repetition. It is not the only thing undermined in the episode.

The trap that a number of Adler adaptations seem to fall into is making Adler into a love interest to Holmes, with various degrees of one-sidedness depending on to what degree that particular Holmes is socially inept and emotionless. It makes her dependent on Holmes, in a way, whereas in the original story Adler had no particular interest in Holmes other than as someone who could potentially do her harm; she flees the country with her husband, who she marries mid-way through the story. Holmes has little respect for women in the original stories much of the time, although to be fair he has little respect for most everyone, and there are problematic elements in the way Adler is portrayed even there (her initial description from the king of Bohemia, for example, contains the line, "You do not know her, but she has a soul of steel. She has the face of the most beautiful of women, and the mind of the most resolute of men."). Yet the Adler of the original is independent in a way that no Adler since has been able to really claim.

I understand the impulse to translate that independence into some sort of non-traditional occupation, which is how we get Adler-as-sex-worker. I don't even really have a problem with that in principle, although it does go against the spirit of the original. The only crime Bohemia-Adler had committed was the threat of blackmail against a powerful former lover who had wronged her; she felt, quite correctly, that she would not be safe against someone of such stature without the insurance of the photograph and the threat of ruin its revelation might bring. Belgravia-Adler is a blackmailer many times over, having access to secrets that go far beyond marital infidelities and into the realm of national security. Worse yet, she reveals near the climax of the episode that she really had no understanding of how to use the information she had until she was told by someone else. So much for independence.

It is in that 'someone else' that we come to one of the structural flaws that plagues the entirety of the first two seasons of Sherlock, and that is the obsession with Jim Moriarty. If Adler is one inevitability of a Holmes adaptation Moriarty is the other. I quite understand the notion of killing the author, and so I'm not going to go into a tiresome multi-paragraph dissection of the fact that Doyle's intention with Moriarty was not to provide some overarching raison d'etre for his most popular character but to kill him off so that Doyle could focus on what he felt was more important work writing historical fiction (entirely believable if you remember the multi-chapter diversion into early American history that interrupted "The Sign of Four."). What matters is not intention but what's actually on the page, and the idea of someone of fearsome intellect devoted as wholly to crime as Holmes himself is devoted to detectoring is compelling. So I get why Moriarty is always introduced. The problem with this, and unfortunately I can't find the blog post that convinced me of this, is that Moriarty is boring. Yes, even when he's conceived, as he is in Sherlock, as the Joker to Sherlock's Batman, he is deadly boring.

The lure of the Sherlock Holmes stories is not seeing Holmes face off against brilliant master criminals. The thrill is in seeing him navigate the messy, chaotic ordinariness of crime, untangling the web of motivations of ordinary people driven to do horrible things. The thesis of the blog post that is lost somewhere on the internet was that every time Moriarty comes out, normal motivations are thrown to the wind and we become locked in a cat-and-mouse game where two smart people try to outsmart each other while everyone else runs around and looks baffled. The criminals are as important in a good mystery story as the protagonist; we can be driven to hate them or to sympathize with them, to yearn for them to be brought to justice or to be exonerated, or to escape as Adler did. With Moriarty all we can hope for is that he be caught and either thrown over the falls or be put back in the Baker Street Asylum, where he sits until he feels like escaping and tormenting his arch-enemy again. There is never any ambiguity about it; he is the yin to Holmes' yang, and so we yearn for his internment.

Sherlock doesn't seem to be aware of this problem, because Moriarty is involved in every single episode of the series run. In the pilot he's the man behind the main villain, paying him off for every murder he commits. In the second episode, he gave the villain the information they needed, and kills them off to ensure his existence isn't revealed. He then reveals his existence in the third episode, "The Final Problem," where he confronts Holmes and Watson at the end of the episode, revealing himself to be both brilliant and out of his gourd. The episode ends in a cliffhanger, with Holmes and Watson on the verge of being murdered by hidden snipers. The fifth episode, an execrable adaptation of, "The Hound of the Baskervilles," features Moriarty at the end being released from prison (with no indication of how he got there), and the sixth is a rough adaptation of, "The Final Problem," and the problem seems to be that all the story beats from the fatal confrontation between Moriarty and Holmes were used up in the episode that bears that name, leading so some of them being rehashed; it works, but mostly in spite of itself.

Which leaves us backtracking to the fourth episode, where Moriarty is the one who knew what to do with the information Adler was trying to get out of Holmes. She had been given a code from one of her clients and needed Holmes to decipher it (because she is a poor witless woman). The code is an airline seat allocation number to a flight that British Intelligence knows is going to be targeted by terrorists; they know this because they've broken the terrorist's codes. However, they don't want to indicate that they know this, so they fill the plane with cadavers, planning to have it take off and be blown up with no casualties, ensuring they can continue to receive intelligence from the terrorists without them being the wiser. Adler's womanly brain cannot possibly conceive of any use for this information beyond feeding it to Moriarty who, it is presumed, tells the terrorists (because he is bad), leaving the British and American intelligence agencies involved with nothing for all their efforts.

The beat is marginally the same; Adler beats Holmes at his own game. And yet, because it's yet another move in the long game of chess between Holmes and Moriarty (a game that we know ends with both men knocking over their own kings), her role is sad and diminished, moreso when Holmes finally cracks the code on her cell phone to gain access to all the blackmail information she's been hiding away. So Holmes doesn't really lose, and Adler doesn't really win; in fact, she begs him not to unlock the phone, since doing so would deprive her of the protection she needs. The information she was keeping is the only thing keeping her enemies from killing her. A woman, serving one man, begging another for her life. Hardly the picture of independence.

And yet I can't deny the perfection of the scene where he finally, after trying time after time to figure out what code she could possibly be using for her cell phone, figures it out; never has punching in four characters been so dramatic. Nor can I deny the final scene, the denouement; the fade to black, the silence, the moan, oh, the moan, which we have been trained to react to all this time, an indication of her become an indication of him. Forgetting, and forgiving, that a narrative about a brilliant, insubordinate woman has now narrowed to a damsel-in-distress scenario.

"When I say run...run!"

I love this episode, more than nearly any other episode of television I can name, more than most movies I've seen (and at 90 minutes an episode of Sherlock is only a budget increase away from being a movie as it stands). Everything I wrote above is true and yet none of it matters. I cannot watch the end without crying; I cannot listen to Irene Adler's theme without doing the same. I would change so much, if I had the power, but I wonder how much I would also destroy if I made those changes. The episode is problematic, yes, but it works, and so the burgeoning feminist in me butts up against the artist, the one who says, "let it be, because it sings."


The episode, and the show, is flawed, but in interesting ways. It's on NetFlix, if you haven't seen it. Its virtues outweigh its mistakes, in the end, even if those mistakes are worth noting so that they aren't repeated.

Empathy Don't Come For Free

Around mid-January, when I was in the grip of a literal month long illness (a cold that evolved, Pokémon-style, into a horrible cough and sinus infection), I, for whatever reason, bought the discography of U.K. garage/hip-hop artist The Streets, né Mike Skinner, and then proceeded to listen to the whole thing in the worst way possible, which was in a giant playlist that for whatever reason was arranged by album track number. In other words, the first tracks of each album would play, then the second, then the third, etc.

As a technique for immersing yourself in one dude's voice it has a lot to recommend it, but the thing about each of The Street's albums is (I learned later, doing things the proper way, i.e. listening to each album separately at work) that each one has its own character. We may now be living in the era of the single, where the other nine tracks on the album aren't nearly as important as the one that's going to get the radio play, but Skinner didn't play like that. Original Pirate Material is minimalistic, The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living and Everything is Borrowed are like the Dark and Light sides of the Force, one brutal, knife-edged lightning and rage and the other subtle and positive while leaving almost no impression in the mind, and Computer and Blues harnesses everything Skinner had learned through the previous four albums and creates a deft picture of the modern world while managing an elegiac tone befitting his retirement from The Streets project. Each album is of a piece, and almost demands a certain mindset (I still have trouble listening to Hardest outside of the goofy, aggro-yet-sweet relationship post-mortem "When You Wasn't Famous,"). And none of these albums suffers more from not being listened to continuously, beginning to end, than the second album, A Grand Don't Come For Free.

My first exposure to concept albums was Dream Theater's Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory, a title that certainly doesn't sound like it belongs on this blog. Metropolis is an epic of love, lust, betrayal, addiction, murder, past lives, reincarnation and spirituality, with majestic rock instrumentation to match its subject matter. It's an album I can listen to on loop over and over (outside of "Through Her Eyes," a song which can be forgiven its existence only if looked at as a chance for the band to take a break during concerts, and "The Dance of Eternity," a technically impressive instrumental number that I mainly enjoy for about thirty seconds of hilarious, out-of-nowhere old-timey piano).

Grand, as a concept album, is as small-scale as Metropolis is large for much of its length. It follows a young man through his days as a youth in England (possibly Brixton, where Skinner moved from Birmingham, although I don't believe the location is ever specified). I don't know to what degree the album is auto-biographical. At one point Skinner, as the main character, makes reference to having to pick up his epilepsy medication, and Skinner himself suffers from epilepsy; in addition, I believe someone refers to him as Mike at one point. Skinner renders the day-to-day of the character so well it feels real, so whether the album was keenly observed or felt is immaterial except to someone like me, a story archeologist always searching for origins and hidden connections and sucking the marrow (and fun) out of the bones.

Grand starts with the protagonist losing the titular grand, a thousand quid (about $1,500 US), which he had saved with the intention of putting in the bank. He finds this out at the end of a long, deeply shitty day, where nothing goes right, each verse beginning with an iteration of what he has yet to do and what's already gone wrong ("So I failed at the DVD, couldn't withdraw any money/but I still had to call mum, get the savings, and then hurry,"). Also his TV breaks, which actually becomes important later.

From there he meets a girl named Simone, hits it off with her, tries to win some money betting on football (and is prevented from losing his shirt by happenstance) and goes to a nightclub, where he takes ecstasy and thinks he sees Simone kissing his friend Dan, with whom she works. He's, "fucked and he don't care," so he makes nothing of it, and soon he moves in with Simone.

After an argument where she kicks him out, he goes on holiday, tries to impress a girl and then immediately regrets it the next day when he realizes he wants to be with Simone. If you read the previous paragraph you probably have an idea that this ends badly, and indeed it does; he finds out from his friend Scott that Simone has been cheating on him with Dan (Scott knew about this but didn't say anything because he didn't want to betray either friendship). Simone breaks up with Mike, and we come to the last track on the album, "Empty Cans."

The first time through it, listening to it in the midst of all the other track tens from the complete discography, I skipped ahead after a few minutes, and that's because it's really two similar songs in one. In the first, Mike is sitting alone in his apartment, feeling sorry for himself. Scott reaches out to try and make things right and Mike tells him to, "fuck right off chap," then finds a TV repairman in the phone book to finally try and get his TV fixed. The guy comes, takes the TV away, and then comes back later, saying he's found something in the back of the TV. Mike immediately assumes that the repairman is trying to him up for more money and gets in an argument that turns physical and ends with the repairman wrestling Mike to the ground, bashing his head into his fridge, and then running out of the apartment shouting. The chorus for this part of the song is, "No one gives a crap about Mike that's why I'm acting nasty/You know what you can do with your life introduce it up your jacksie," and once he went into that for the second time I thought, "what a miserable piece of shit," and skipped to the next track.

Context is, of course, everything, and when you listen to the tracks from the album like I did you have no idea that they're all of a piece, that they're sketching a life and a character and leading him to this moment; not the moment where he's sitting drinking beer on his settee with a bashed-up head, but the moment where Scott texts him. If I had waited just a few more seconds, I would have heard the song reset itself back to the beginning, where Mike is once again bemoaning his fate, surrounded by empty cans, feeling sorry for himself and like no one has his back. However, the second time around, he doesn't tell Scott to fuck off, but accepts his apology and says he can fix the TV as payment, to which Scott agrees. Scott comes over, starts rooting around in the back of the TV, and then discovers something that fell in the back of it, which turns out to be, amazingly enough, the thousand quid from the beginning that Mike thought was lost (or that, in darker moments, his friends had stolen).

This is a nice bit of symmetry, but it actually isn't what, in my mind, the album was building to, although it is an amazing moment. The important bit is after, and here I'll quote the song extensively:

"... i realized that it is true;
No-ones really there fighting for you in the last garrison.
No-one except yourself that is, no-one except you.
You are the one who's got your back 'til the last deeds done.
Scott can't have my back til the absolute end,
Coz hes got to look out for what over his horizon.
He's gotta to make sure he's not lonely, not broke.
It's enough to worry about keeping his own head above."

Initially this looks cynical and borderline narcissistic, especially if you only take the first part into account, but I don't see it that way. Mike has, to this point, been self-pitying and self-centered, viewing many of his problems as caused, if not by his "mates," then at least by their inaction; if only they would 'have his back' he wouldn't be in the position he's in, wouldn't have lost the grand, wouldn't have lost Simone, none of it. What this realization is is that no one has it out for them as much as they have their own lives and problems. "It's enough to worry about keeping his own head above."

Most people agree that empathy is a positive force, that having an understanding of others and what they're going through can help everyone tremendously as we all make our way through this world; that it's easier to stand together than alone, that loving your neighbor as yourself is something to strive for. But you don't often hear songs showing how you get there from zero; more often you get things like, "Imagine," which, however much you agree with the sentiment, is not likely to be a song that changes anyone's mind. Either you agree or you don't; Lennon isn't walking you down a path so much as he's throwing down a gauntlet, since, "imagine there's no heaven," is already distasteful enough to some people that they're simply not going to hear what comes next, much less understand it.

Skinner takes, with the back half of, "Empty Cans," and the album as a whole, that first step towards a larger understanding of the world. The protagonist goes from demanding that the world help him, and shouting that if you're not with him you're against him, to realizing that he has to help himself, and from there it's not hard to imagine that he could one day come to the realization that he has the ability to help others. Even better, he isn't preaching, or telling; he's showing, in the manner of all great storytellers, showing the dark, fenced-in world of a Mike that rejects friendship and then showing the flip side and letting us feel which one is better through the music (I like to imagine that the Mike from the first part of, "Empty Cans," is the Mike that went on to write The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living, while the Mike from Earth-2 wrote Everything is Borrowed. I'm not sure if Computer and Blues required some sort of Crisis on Infinite Streets). In a way, even though I was exposed to the album and the last track in particular in the worst way, I'm glad I did it the way I did, because the moment of impact was that much stronger for me when I finally realized what Skinner was doing. It may not be as epic or bombastic as Metropolis, but in its own way it's no less philosophical, or as brilliant, and in its own way it may be the more insightful of the two. Not that anyone's counting.

This is dedicated, in my own small, strange way, to Roger Ebert, who passed away today at the age of 70. Ebert was many things, but to me, he was someone who showed that examining the things that we love can be valuable. He was not critic as destroyer, but critic as enthusiastic participant, trying (and succeeding) to explain just what about the movies he was seeing had affected him, and trying to share those things he loved with the world. Thank you, Roger.

My new favorite movie: Kung Fu Panda

"Yeah, I stayed. I stayed because every time you threw a brick at my head or said I smelled it hurt, but it could never hurt more than it did every day of my life just being me. I stayed because I thought if anyone could change me, could make me not me, it was you, the greatest kung fu teacher in all of China."

You might confuse this for dialogue from some self-confessional mumblecore indie dramedy, but for those last few words, but no, this is, in fact, from Kung Fu Panda, a movie that is ostensibly for children.

When Americans say, "kung fu," we're talking about martial arts, usually referring to China's equivalent of our B-westerns, movies cranked out by the dozens and mostly seen here with grainy, low-quality film stock and awful dubbing. However, "kung fu," means, for the Chinese, human achievement or self-improvement. You could talk about someone's sword fighting kung fu, but also their calligraphy kung fu, or, for that matter, their animation kung fu. ("Wu shu" is martial arts, if you're not talking about a specific school of martial arts, such as Wing Chun, the form popularized by Bruce Lee before he invented Jeet Kune Do.) The film features a good deal of well-animated martial arts, but it also trades heavily in that more accurate definition. And when you're talking about self improvement, you have to go to dark places, because you have to look at your weaknesses and your failures honestly.

Po, the titular panda, hates himself. He never comes out and says, "I hate myself," but it's not hard to read between the lines. He says, in so many words, "every day that I wake up as myself is worse than having a brick thrown at my head." That's a heartbreaking sentiment, and the movie doesn't shy away from that moment, because Po's teacher, Master Shifu, is just as lost as his pupil. Shifu has spent the majority of the movie trying to drum Po out of his kung fu training, convinced that the tubby panda is worthless as a student of martial arts. Now, with Master Oogway, Shifu's own master, having disappeared in a burst of cherry blossoms and Tai Lung, the villain of the piece, on his way to the valley, bent on taking the secrets of the movie's MacGuffin, the Dragon Scroll, for himself, Shifu has no choice but to believe in Po, as Oogway did.

"Believe in yourself," is one of those hoary old cliches that pops up in young adult (and old adult) literature. For good reason! I'm not shitting on that message; it's a beautiful message. It's also like an old cassette tape that's been played so many times that it's just a bunch of unintelligible squeaks and scratches. (Do we still know what cassette tapes are, here on the Internet?) When it comes up in most stories it's almost impossible to process on its face, so unable are we to make it new. And yet.

Shifu doesn't have an answer for Po in the scene above, because this isn't a movie that's just about Po and his improvement. It's also about Shifu, who is not incredibly wise in the way of his own master, but who is an incredible teacher of martial arts. Shifu is fallible; the action of the plot is driven by his failures in training Tai Lung, his old student. He doesn't always have the answers. He is, in his own way, lost. Po asks, desperately, what they're going to do, and Shifu answers, "I don't know! I don't know."

Tai Lung is a terrifying villain. The scene where he breaks out of prison is exhilarating, in a way, because no matter what his captors throw at him, he adapts, overcoming every obstacle thrown in his way. He is presented as unstoppable, reinforced by his next fight scene with Po's idols, the Furious Five. Tai Lung defeats them as well, handily, sending them back to the monastery in order to instill panic. Later, he takes on Shifu in possibly the darkest scene in the movie, a vicious fight that ends with Tai Lung victorious and on the verge of murdering his former mentor. Every time Tai Lung is met with violence he wins, because he is more dedicated to destruction than anyone he fights. In other words, whenever anyone tries to fight Tai Lung as Tai Lung, as a force of destruction, they fail.

The goal of kung fu is not to be someone else. The goal of kung fu is to be a better you.

Po's battle with Tai Lung is brightly colored and fun not because Kung Fu Panda is a kid's movie, but because Po himself is a fun, friendly guy. He wins the Furious Five over not by being the best at kung fu but by making them laugh and cooking for them; in other words, by being himself. The Tai Lung fight repeats maneuvers used earlier in the film, except now that Po has undergone his training montage with Shifu (who realizes that the way to motivate his student is with food), he's the one in control.

The Dragon Scroll is blank, but reflective; the secret is that there is no secret. If it were just blank, that would be one thing; in fact, it would be kind of shitty. And when Po finds it out, he does think it's shitty. He leaves the temple to evacuate the valley, meeting up with his father (who is a goose, and voiced by James Hong, who also voices the head of the Sun On Yee triad in the GTA-clone Sleeping Dogs, an eclectic pairing if ever there was one), who tells him the secret of his special noodles; nothing. There is no secret ingredient.

Tai Lung defeats Po, initially, and takes the Dragon Scroll for himself. He unfurls it and looks. The camera is over the shoulder as he says he sees nothing. And we see his own face, reflected in the scroll. Tai Lung can defeat any warrior who comes his way, but he has sunk into a pit of anger and rage because he cannot even see himself. He looks at his own face and sees nothing. Po, when he speaks to his father and takes a second look at the scroll, sees himself.

There is no secret ingredient. There is no solution outside of yourself, no peace, no success, no satisfaction. This doesn't mean these things don't exist; it means that they're not found in a Dragon Scroll, or a secret ingredient, or even the act of apprenticeship to an acclaimed teacher. Po's study under Master Shifu doesn't produce results simply because Shifu is a good teacher, but because Po became a good student. Po's fight with Tai Lung is ultimately successful, even after Tai Lung takes the scroll, because Tai Lung's victory condition was meaningless, and because Po has embraced his own strengths. Shifu is successful as a teacher because he learns to trust his student; just as Po has his own journey to make before he can be as skilled as the Furious Five, so Shifu has his own realizations and improvements, his own kung fu, to go through before he can be Oogway. And neither of them will truly be these things; Po will never be Tigress, or Mantis, or Viper or Monkey or Crane. Shifu will never be Oogway. They will be themselves, every morning, and as long as they don't give up, they will awaken a better Po, a better Shifu. This is the message of my new favorite movie, Kung Fu Panda, a movie that shows us what happens when we believe in ourselves.

I Read the Freeh Report, and Other Stories

Those of you who make your home underneath large stones may have missed the media frenzy surrounding the conviction of Jerry Sandusky for multiple counts of child molestation, the subsequent report by Louis Freeh summarizing his investigation into how exactly something like this could have been concealed at Penn State for so long, and the sanctioning of Penn State by the NCAA. It's engaging because it involves sports, our national obsession, and because the crime is so horrendous that you instinctively recoil. It's almost impossible to be neutral about what Sandusky did; even if you discount the accusations of the victims who weren't involved in the case (his stepson, for instance, as well as additional victims who claim to have been molested during the '70s and '80s) the width and breadth of the crimes he committed demand response.

When the Freeh report was released, every news site in the country put out stories summarizing and characterizing what was in it, as news sites do when reports are published. They read it so we don't have to. Now, I have no claim to intellectual rigor. I like to think I take facts and evidence into account, but too often I'm content to let someone else's analysis and opinion about facts and evidence sway me, especially if it's someone I tend to agree with. So, when the Freeh report was released, I read it.

I didn't read the whole thing.  I skimmed the recommendations, because I'm not a Penn State board member and so what Louis Freeh thought they should do with his findings is not terribly germane to me. I also didn't read the appendices, which contained the primary sources Freeh went through to compile the report and which were cited in the body. I probably should have done this; although by reading the report I went beyond reading what someone thought about what Freeh wrote, I was still reading what Freeh thought about what he read instead of also reading what he read and drawing my own conclusions. Nevertheless, reading the body of the findings put me further ahead of the game than I normally am.

What stood out for me, apart from the fact that Paterno, Spanier, Schultz, and Curley let a serial pedophile molest boys on their campus for decades, was a footnote on pages 65 and 66 detailing examples of the massive influence of Paterno and his football program. Students who were sanctioned by the school never had their penalties reduced unless they were part of the football program, in which case their punishments were lessened or dropped. (The woman whose experience was summed up in the footnote, Vicky Triponey, was the subject of a CNN.com profile which goes into the matter further.)


The young men who were involved in these incidents were done a disservice by their coach, Joe Paterno, and by the university personnel involved in those decisions. College faculty and staff have a number of responsibilities, all of them intertwined and none of them easy. They need to educate students, which involves bringing in and keeping qualified faculty. They need to make sure those students not only learn, but graduate, and that once they graduate, they get and maintain employment. They need to keep in contact with their alumni and foster good relations with them. They need to offer extracurricular activities. They need to provide a safe environment for all these things. They need to keep the lights on, and keep up with the latest technologies and teaching tools, and have an easily accessible and navigable library with a good supply of books and other archived materials. And so on, and so forth. But above all of these things, they need to be role models and good leaders, because you don't just learn how to do calculus from your math professor but also how to conduct yourself, how to think, how to navigate this world. And when your coach and your administrative staff are showing you that it doesn't matter how you behave in your daily life as long as you win football games, and that you'll be allowed to do whatever you want as long as you win football games, you won't learn how to be a good person and to treat others with respect. You'll learn that you don't have to follow the rules and that you don't have to consider other people.

And when your coach, your mentor, and the administrative staff of the university are covering up darker crimes than a couple of rowdy football players assaulting other students, when those men are involved in a decades-long cover up because they feared for their reputation, with no consideration for the victims or their families (note, from the report, the multiple attempts to let Sandusky know he should stop what he was doing, but no attempt to contact law enforcement or, more importantly, the victims or their parents), then you are learning the wrong lessons.

I'm not suggesting everyone who went to school at Penn State is a warped monster. Sandusky is, I think, a singular parasite, whose particular pathology had no genesis at the school he coached for (though it was given corners to prey in). And I even think Paterno passed along some good along with the implicit bad he was passing along with his behavior and his laser focus on winning football games. I don't hold the kids who graduated out of that program, and the kids that are there now, responsible for the failures of their leaders. Paterno said, of the Sandusky business, that it wasn't a football scandal, which is true in the sense that The Crucible is not a play about McCarthyism. The losing of the forest for the trees, however, is not a failure unique to football programs; it happens in any situation where the institution becomes more important than the ideals for which that institution was established, or more important than a sense of right and wrong. However, I, and a great many people, judging for how many were clamoring for the blood of the Penn State football program and for Paterno's statue to come down, find it far more respectable for a leader to take an action which might damage his or her institution's reputation for the sake of doing the right thing than for a leader to protect the image of said institution by letting shady doings continue. Paterno and the rest did more damage by keeping silent than they would have if they had spoken up in 1998 (or in 2001).

I don't hold the kids responsible for their leader's failures. However, the NCAA did. Everyone thought Penn State would get the so-called "death penalty," i.e. no football for a year (or possibly longer). What they ended up getting was much harsher, including voiding past victories, eliminating post-season games, scholarship reductions, and much more (in addition, the Big Ten conference barred Penn State from the tournament for the duration of the punishments). These last for four years. It's a devastating punishment, and it's a punishment that falls nearly wholly on the kids.

I understand the response. I absolutely do. Nothing than anyone can do can erase what Sandusky did. It's a long, hard road back to normalcy for those boys; their entire lives will be shaped by Sandusky's crimes. Those crimes could have been prevented, or curtailed, had someone at Penn State showed backbone or character. And we, here, in the year 2012, can't make sense of our powerlessness in the face of these crimes.

The NCAA had to act. I see that. But what they did went beyond the true perpetrators of the crime, Sandusky and his enablers. Is there anyone at Penn State who doesn't know that their past victories are tarnished? Is there any danger of them forgetting what happened? More to the point, is there any chance we will let them forget? Penn State's name is going to be synonymous with Sandusky's crimes for a very long time, and for the actual students of the university that's the only thing they should be suffering. There should be an examination of the influence of football and sports culture in general, and not just at Penn State; if you think that's the only school where winning sports teams are treated differently than the rest of the student body you are delusional.

The Penn State program didn't need to be burned to the ground. All that needed to happen is this. Anywhere on campus that where you could see a reference to a football victory (a sign, a banner, a trophy case) there should also be, in a place of equal visibility, a picture of Sandusky in handcuffs. I find the elimination of Penn State's victories from the record to be a touch Orwellian. For me it's more poetic if no one is allowed to forget what was being done in the name of victory. But none of that means that the young men and women now attending Penn State shouldn't be allowed to strive for honest victories, and to show they have more honor and character than the men who led them to this ruin.

Gatsby was a bootlegger, not a bootstrapper

There exists, on the Chicago Tribune website, an analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby which is so stunningly misguided that I felt the need to offer a rebuttal.  The author's thesis is that those who interpret the book as a criticism of the American Dream are "grievously misinterpret[ing]," and that Gatsby should be admired as someone who bootstrapped his way up the ladder into high society, as all of us should aspire to.  She ends with this, ". . . Not everyone in America succeeds, but everyone has the chance to. The green light — the one Gatsby watched, night after night — is visible to anyone, from any angle, and while we all won't reach it, we can all dream ardently of doing so. The true beauty is in the wish, not the attainment."

My issues with the piece actually begin around the middle, when she dismisses the ending, saying, "[t]he tragedy that befalls him — we're treading delicately here, to avoid the dreaded spoiler — is based on a misunderstanding, and could've befallen anyone. His fate is almost beside the point."  This is nearly nonsense, in a number of ways.  I understand the desire to avoid spoiling the ending (Gatsby's death at the hands of Wilson) given that part of what this piece is trading on in terms of relevance is the imminent film adaptation, which will potentially attract viewers who haven't read the book.  However, it is impossible to meaningfully critique a piece of art without experiencing the whole of that art; if you're critiquing a TV show, you have to watch all the episodes, if it's a movie you have to stick around to the end, if it's an album you have to listen to each song, and if it's a novel you have to read to the end, even it, for whatever reason, the death of the titular character strikes you as "beside the point."

 Film Crit Hulk, an insightful commentator on pop culture who writes in all caps in the guise of Marvel's Incredible Hulk (which is much less gimmicky than it sounds at first glance) wrote a great article in which he advances his view that, "THE ENDING IS THE CONCEIT."  The whole article is worth reading, and if the Hulk-speak bothers you a) there is a website somewhere that will de-Hulkify it and b) you are a big baby.  Since reading it, the idea has stuck with me as something true not just for film but for all storytelling.  What he's saying may seem self-evident; the ending changes and informs the meaning of everything you just saw, or read, or experienced.

Consider Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen's third album.  It opens with what many consider to be Springsteen's best song, "Thunder Road," and the title track comes third in the line-up, but the album ends with "Jungleland," a song that contains the lyric, "Outside the street's on fire, in a real death waltz/Between what's flesh and what's fantasy/And then the poets down here, don't write nothing at all/They just stand back and let it all be/and in the quick of the night/They reach for their moment/And try to make an honest stand/But they wind up wounded, not even dead/Tonight in jungle land," after which we hear a furious piano solo and a haunting, wordless howl from Bruce before the song comes to an anti-climactic end.  You can talk about how much "Born to Run," rocks, but you can't say that the entire meaning of that album is locked up in that one song, and a critique of Born to Run that avoided acknowledging the placement of "Jungleland," at the end (and the fact that it's immediately preceded by the grim, low-key "Meeting Across the River,") is like, well, a critique of The Great Gatsby that ignored Gatsby's ignominious death by the pool.


Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, often described by people who had to read it in high school and never experienced it anywhere else as a great love story, is a story utterly transformed by its ending.  I have seen people describe it, with a straight face, as being a play with the message, "Love conquers all."  This is a play, need I remind you, where the male lead murders his way into exile from his own city (a pretty big deal back in the day) and away from his love, and where the two leads do not live happily ever after but die alone in a tomb.  You could write a dramatically feasible ending scene where Romeo says, "Thus with a kiss I die," and goes to drink the poison, only for Juliet to dramatically awaken.  Then the lovers embrace, their parents arrive and somehow Romeo is forgiven for his killing spree and the two teens are free to populate Verona with tiny Capugues.  That's not the play Shakespeare wrote, however; he wrote a tragedy, where the hatreds of the elder generation infect the younger, and where the youth are set free in a world with no moral guideposts and no way to get reliable advice (the Nurse exists for Juliet, but the Nurse hates Juliet; on Romeo's side, there is Friar Lawrence, a largely out-of-touch clergyman whose solution for the reuniting of the lovers proves as misguided as anything), a play where the parents are only able to see the results of their feud after it has annihilated their children.  Yes, Mercutio is an engaging character, yes, the love poetry is amazing, but this is because Shakespeare understood contrasts.  A reading of Romeo and Juliet as a simple love story is like, for example (something I'm just pulling out of thin air here), a critique of The Great Gatsby that ignores Gatsby's waterside end.


I took issue with the Peter Jackson adaptation of The Return of the King because of his omission of the Scouring of the Shire, as did, I am sure, many other pedantic nerds.  For me, the Scouring was part of what made the book so resonant.  Yes, it's grim, but for me it made the book's central quest more real.  There were obviously terrible consequences if Sauron got that One Ring (or if someone else got their hands on it), but the more real evil for me was the evil of Saruman coming and twisting the hobbit's home into a smaller version of what the rest of the world ultimately would have been.  It showed that heroism isn't just going out and doing great deeds, but being able to come home and do them too.  That bad comes with good, that the world is unpredictable, that we may be required to stand up not just when the large goes wrong but also when the small does.  I don't think the movie needed yet another denouement, necessarily (although I think, and have said, that if Frodo and Sam weren't detained for half the movie in Osgilioth during The Two Towers that they would have been able to fit more stuff from Return into that movie and thus make space for the Scouring).  The lack of the Scouring in the movie changes it, much as The Great Gatsby becomes a different book if you, for some reason, omit the death of Gatbsy.


I feel I've sufficiently belabored the general point about why the ending matters, but the ending of Gatsby, and Gatsby, matters because it transforms the meaning of all that came before.  Gatsby's dream wasn't for wealth for its own sake, to pull himself out of a life of poverty into one of comfort and leisure; it was to become wealthy so that the lies he told Daisy about himself could become truth, and he could become worthy of her.  His dream was romantic; to sweep his long-lost love off her feet and live with her a life of happiness, but to be beguiled by Fitzgerald's prose and Gatsby's dream is to ignore the reality of what Gatsby was trying to do, which was break up a marriage (with a young child), and the reality that Daisy was a woman who would do those things.  Gatsby wasn't a self-made man; he was a front for Wolfsheim, necessary because the people Wolfsheim was bootlegging for wouldn't deal with a Jew.  Gatsby didn't participate in his own parties, which were thrown for Daisy (who, when she finally attended, didn't like them) and, as D'Angelo from The Wire, which for me is fast becoming the Kevin Bacon of criticism, points out in season two, "he frontin' with all them books, but if you pull one down from the shelf, and none of the pages ever been opened (sic)."

To focus on the glittering parties and the green light and the poetry, as Keller does, is to ignore the realities of who Fitzgerald told us these people are.  The poetry is important, yes; it's part of why Fitzgerald is read today, part of why the story sticks with us.  Poetry will elevate something from good to great; we have Shakespeare Festivals in most, if not all, of our states, but you will find a Webster Festival or a Marlowe Festival somewhat sparsely attended.  But poetry in The Great Gatsby is but one of many moving parts, all of which are working to tell a more complicated story than Keller is willing or able to admit.  Her insistence that reading Gatsby as a criticism of the American Dream, and her view that it is a trumpeting of it ignores the idea, noted in the comments on the article, that both things could be happening simultaneously, that the American Dream is a coin with two sides, either of which could come up at any moment.  That there is the potential, in theory, for any one of us to find wealth and success and happiness, but that reality often conspires to limit opportunities for those not born into some sort of privilege.  It ignores the fact that Gatsby's happiness was found not in his success and his parties, but in Daisy, and that happiness turned out to carry the complications that led to the spoiler-that-dare-not-speak-its-name.


Keller says that, "literature often is far more transparent and straightforward than it is given credit for."  I would argue the opposite, but even if I were willing to grant the premise I would not grant it here.  The American Dream is a complex thing, and Fitzgerald's novel exploring it is equally complex.  To read it without a sense of irony or nuance, to visit it as one would a party and gulp it down like so much champagne, to see only the green light and not the gritty end, will inevitably lead to "grievous misinterpretation," but those misinterpretations will far more resemble Keller than those she accuses of same.

Seeing and not seeing

If you live in Chicago, as I do, you will eventually see a homeless person.  You can find the homeless in other cities, obviously, but I don't see, for example, the Los Angeles homeless every day on the way to the Metra, seeing as how I am unable in my current state of evolution to surpass the limits of time and space.  I am not a connoisseur of the homeless; I saw homeless men and women when I was a kid coming up to the city, and I see them on my way to wherever I happen to be working at the time, but I'm sure there are Chicago natives who have been ignoring the homeless for far longer than I.  Nevertheless, I have now seen, on multiple occasions, homeless people with dogs.

The mind already puts up barriers when we're dealing with the homeless.  I know I do it all the time.  I stare straight ahead and pretend not to see them.  I turn up my .mp3 player.  I fiddle with my phone.  I walk on, convincing myself in that moment that it's very important for me to get to wherever I'm going, that I don't have the time to stop or the money to give (although frequently I don't have to pretend about that last part), that someone else will stop and help, that they'll be okay.

In other words, I tell myself stories.

When you see a homeless man clutching a dog, this practice goes into overdrive.  You have to tell yourself a story to make that okay because if you really truly confronted what that meant it would ruin your day at the very least.  That guy has to be a scammer.  It's not his dog, it's just a stray he's found to make people feel sorry for him.  He's not really homeless, he's just bilking gullible tourists out of their money, and he's going home to some apartment somewhere after the lunch rush.  He's a drug addict, or an alcoholic.  He knows where the shelters are and just doesn't want to go there and get help.  He's too lazy to keep a job.  He pissed away an inheritance.  He deserves to be out there.  He deserves what he got.  It's fine.  It's okay.  You don't have to care.

Never mind that health care for many people is prohibitively expensive and that if he has any kind of medical condition or complication that becomes too much for him to financially cope with he can be out on his ass.  Never mind that not everyone has a stable family structure that can support them through hard times.  Never mind that people with mental illness, especially returning veterans with PTSD, can find it difficult to function in a society that doesn't fully understand that kind of struggle.  Never mind that the notion of someone making a full and healthy five-to-six figure yearly wage begging chump change from passing strangers is so far into the realm of fantasy that you might as well believe he used to be a dragon slayer.  Never mind that so many people in this world struggle with addictions of all shapes and sizes and that none of us are in a position to judge someone who battled with those demons and lost, that it's not a matter of weakness or strength but of access to treatment and care and empathy from out fellow humans and that anyone can be brought low.

We tell ourselves stories because we don't want to believe that that could be us, and we go into overdrive when we see a man or a woman out on the street with a dog because that just brings that reality into sharper relief.  We tell ourselves stories to eliminate the humanity of the homeless.  But they are human, living in conditions we can't and won't imagine, and our illusions are stretched to the breaking point when we try to make a monster out of a man holding a dog.

"If you want to be perfect, go and sell what you own and give the money to the destitute, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come back and follow me," said Jesus.  I don't believe he was the son of God, but I do believe he was more revolutionary than people really know.  Just as that man holding the dog was more human than I, and the sea of humanity passing him by, could bear.