Critical Apprehensions & Intemperate Discourses

Kip Manley, proprietor

Falling will fall, fell.

The Fall, okay, but did anything ever actually fall? Did the story ever scale vertiginous, dizzying heights, only then to plunge? Or the characters, or a character? An action? —Not as such, no. —Mostly I’m left with a lingering confusion with Tarsem Singh’s spectacular 2006 film whenever I try to talk about it, which is annoying, but mostly to me. —Oh, this: I wrote this a few months back, as part of a conversation with Lili Loofbourow about why I’d liked it, and she hadn’t, and why I’d ended up coming rather forcefully around to her side of the matter; she’s the “you” in what’s below, and this piece in particular is what it’s responding to—treat this post, if you like, as an off-brand badly xeroxed fanfic installment of Dear Television, or something, with parenthetical interruptions from the show itself as it was being written about. —Anyway; enough prologue: with the announcement of season three, and with the occasional bits of praise I’ve been seeing from others (who really ought to know better), here’s the matter as it began the beguine back when:

The Fall, okay, but nothing ever fell, as it were. Except, y’know, the bad guy, I guess, at the end? —And oh for God’s sake Milton? —I’m typing this as the last episode is playing on the other screen, so there’s another piece of evidence to add to the snack-grabbing and beard-shaving you noted.

But first maybe why I liked it, or was liking it, or was thinking it was something I was liking. (Gibson’s one technique is to play on, or instruct others to play on, the desires of her subjects, and welp, here’s Spector looking right at the camera in the interview room and calling our attention to precisely how clever this is.) —Sorry. —The first season was appointment television for us, in the sense that Jenn and I made appointments to sit down and watch an episode or two together, when we got a chance, between day jobs, childcare, and creative enterprises. (And now Gibson’s proxy with Katie, the handsome young detective she requested before she knew she’d need a handsome young detective, has just made a mess of getting any actual information from Katie, and made a hash of treating Katie in any sort of a humane fashion, but has of these two mistakes made what was supposed to be a dramatically satisfying moment.) —Other appointments were made for Hannibal, and Top of the Lake, and (in theory) The Good Wife, and Orange is the New Black, but: appointments are hard to keep, and it’s easy to watch television while you’re doing something else, like coloring comics, or running maintenance routines on a database, which is why she’s watched all of Orange herself, and I’m caught up on Good Wife, and we never did finish Top of the Lake, which I’m tempted to go and take up again now, and feel a little guilty about that.

(The mannequin in the trunk. I admit I’ve completely lost track of where that was supposed to’ve come from.)

But! The Fall! Gillian Anderson rocking her cool, severe British accent! Rainy grey cinematography! (Oh, and here’s the daughter’s interview, to remind me where that damn mannequin came from, though damned if I can actually remember it myself. And Gibson, tearing up, telling her proxy precisely why she’s tearing up, thanks.) —What’s not to like, really. (Oh for God’s sake the miscarriage.) —Sorry. That first season of The Fall we did finish, is the basic point, I guess, and there’s a there there: the aforementioned, plus a slow, steady, controlling hand in the direction, a keen eye for place, and a fascination with the minutiae of process—as opposed to the sterile gestures of the procedural, which I should mention as another media-consumption data point: the fucking procedural, the Castle and the Bones and the House and the Elementary and the Person of Interest and the Psych and the Leverage and yes also the Miss Fisher’s and that dam’ Good Wife, each with its rhythms, its shorthands, its conventions, and though they may play with them, some better or at least with more evident joy than others, or mutate them over the course of their run or even once or twice upend them utterly, they’re still there, implacable skeletons that mean you can queue one up on the one window of your computer set-up and go about your business in the other and surface three or four hours later having watched four or five episodes without ever really seeing one, you know? —So when there’s a show that doesn’t immediately tip its hand, that takes its time, that buries the lede, I suppose, I tend to sit up and take notice, but also to cut it some slack.

(And here we are, the confrontation we’ve been slow-burning our way to through ten previous episodes: Gibson v. Spector, cara a cara! —I paused the playback to put some additional fillips on clauses, here and there.)

One of the procedurals I was watching in and around the same time was Criminal Minds, which, ick. —I watched some of it in small part because of Mandy Patinkin, but mostly because there’s a webserial by a group of genre writers, some of whom I’ve been a fan of since high school, such as Emma Bull and Steven Brust and the infamous Will Shetterly, who was once more firmly on the rails (“It is utterly compelling, compulsive,” is not the language of someone speaking about a thing they’ve experienced themselves, but of someone attempting to describe what they’ve seen someone else experience, which—oh, never mind)—Criminal Minds, yes. The webserial’s a game of procedurals—it’s called Shadow Unit; the authors take turns writing short stories which are (sort of) thought of as episodes of a television show, sort of horror, sort of urban fantastic, about a semi-occult task force in the FBI—I had something of a professional interest, as well as enjoying the stories, and seeing what the writers were getting up to with something of a new-media experiment. —Anyway: they’d talk about enjoying this program, Criminal Minds, which they’d based Shadow Unit on, so I finally got around to watching some episodes, and wanted to take a long hot shower after: Bones is full of deeply unpleasant, self-absorbed people, and Castle’s awfully blasé about death and civil rights violations, and House is just plain mean, but Criminal Minds is the foulest moral pornography, a terrifically ugly example of reveling in what you pretend to condemn, ideology they don’t even bother to rinse off much less gussy up, which is why, I’m sure, it’s on its tenth season or whatever over on CBS.

I mention (all) this because what was compelling, what was compulsive about the first season of The Fall, for me, was how it handled Spector. Unlike a procedural’s monsters-of-the-week, he’s very much a part of the world: he has a job, he has appointments, he has a family, and a family has him, and this humanized him—in a very frail, limiting, deflating way, deftly making the point that Gibson rather stentoriously makes to Burns just before this climactic interview: he’s just a man, a person, a human being. No monster, not in any sense of the word. Not empowered; not invincible. Arrested.

The attention paid to the logistics of his activities, the lack of attention that seemed to be shown for any attempts at patly explaining or reasoning through the why of what he was doing—it’s not, of course, that this has never been done before, but it was such a welcome change of pace from the Criminal Minds approach that, well, I mean. If you’re going to watch shows about serial murders and rapes and such.

And none of this is to take away from Gillian Anderson and her Gibson, about whom so much ink has been spilled—though dear Lord, to insist she doesn’t pursue self-destructive sexual relationships? Every single one we see either risks or damaged, long ago, some aspect of her professional life, which is the only life we see. —But I digress. I was talking about Dornan’s blithely pathetic Spector.

(“The people who like to read and watch programs about people like you,” says Gibson, and fuck you, show; you just blew the last of my good will right out the window with that direct punch on the nose.)

—There’s two moments, in the first season, that jolted like electric shocks, and fixed it in the plus column for me. —There once were, I should say. —The first was when Spector crept into his sleeping daughter’s bedroom, climbed up on her bed, pushed away the bit of ceiling and tucked his book away in the attic: brute force, perhaps, but still: the mean logistics of his evil, how it had to be folded into and worked around the quotidian, how—and I’m gonna digress for a moment, but: I did a lot of babysitting, in high school? And one thing I discovered, after making sure the kids were asleep, when I went snooping about the houses, as one does when one babysits, one thing I discovered was almost every single house had a stash of pornography, and sometimes it was under the bed, and sometimes it was in a nightstand, and quite often it was on a shelf high up in the closet; anyway. This little depth charge of someone else’s desires, squirreled away. —The moment had resonance. There was a shivery horror to it that stuck.

The second moment was that first phone call between Spector and Gibson. It’s the first time he gets to perform as the monster he’s supposed to be; it’s the first time we’re privy to any attempt to explain why he does what he does, and, well, as with any of these shows or stories, it’s bullshit, utter adolescent cod-Nietzsche bullshit. But: the show knows it’s bullshit. And astonishingly, electrifyingly, for that one moment Spector gets to know it’s bullshit. He falters, he hesitates, there’s a look in his eye—that feeling, when you’ve been living with an idea, holding it in your head, telling it to yourself, and you finally get a chance to say it out loud to someone, and you hear yourself, the words coming out of your mouth, and you realize it’s all crap, the magic’s gone, it was never really there in the first place—to have that basic interaction applied to serial-killer nonsense was beyond refreshing. It felt revelatory. The weirdly anticlimactic structure of the first season, with no actual confrontation as such, with him getting away, as it seemed—it felt deliberate, as if the show wanted to say forget catharsis, forget quote-justice-unquote, this, here, this moment, this is the important thing to take away: he’s pathetic, he’s feeble, he’s destroyed real people and that makes him contemptible, he’s just a person himself, and there’s no deep insight into rage or fantasy or desire here. Go home.

So, y’know. I liked it.

(And yes, of course, Rose is alive! God, what a weirdly desultory bit of plot that was. I will say that a show that has become this fetishistic about process and detail is nonetheless and of course terribly squeamish about what and how a person might excrete, trapped in a trunk for was it three episodes? Or four?)

There were a number of ways the show could’ve carried on into a second season; what I’d thought—Stella Gibson moves on to another

(—oh for FUCK’s sake extrajudicial execution ex machina—)

where was I? —How it could’ve carried on, yes. The continuing adventures of Stella Gibson as she moves on to another town where she’s had an inappropriate relationship with someone in the police hierarchy that might compromise yet another investigation of a sadly all-too-human fuck-up drunk on patriarchal power, haunted every now and then by the one that got away, in Belfast—that wasn’t going to happen. Spector retreating, doubling down on his bullshit in isolation, resurfacing to try and make another go of it, okay, there’s possibilities there, and the fact that he does find someone he can articulate his bullshit to, who’ll validate it and egg it on, and it’s a teenager, there’s potential there, too, dicey, but. (Oh, Katie! I really hope you end up in a Kelly Link short, so you can finally become the whacked-out Nancy Drew you so desperately want to be.) —Anyway. Second season, I was still on Team “Aw, I liked it” through the first episode and into the second. I’m a sucker for brooding on ferries, what can I say.

But! That third episode. Two moments, again: first, there was the dizzying bewilderment that came when, almost immediately after Gibson gives a distraught-for-her tirade about how it’s the task force’s fault that Rose was taken by Spector, Archie Panjabi’s M.E. (I nip over to another tab to Google—her name was Reed Smith? What?) rather firmly informs Gibson that it’s highly likely Spector found Rose because of the task force, and Gibson nods, considering, yes, this is likely true. It was like two scenes from two alternate takes on the story slapped into the same show without anyone realizing the causality breach, and while I’m as big a fan of kicking over the traces of story-logic as the next fellow, they don’t need to be so carelessly Brechtian. —So that was the first moment I sat up and said, wait, show, what?

The second comes at the end of the interminable sequence in Gibson’s hotel room, after the bit in the bar, and the wildly, desperately obvious fanservice-kiss and flirtation. —We get Spector’s infiltration of the hotel, which is insultingly contrived: the waiter’s just put down a tray right by the service entrance! He’s left a master key-card on the tray! Spector knows what a master key-card looks like, and can do! Look, room-service orders, hanging on the wall right there! And that one, right there, it’s from Stella Gibson! See, how cleverly he hacks the script? I mean, the hotel? —And all of it done in one shot, too. I’d‘ve found it far more “realistic,” far less noticeable and off-putting, if the show had just made it clear he’d broken into her room somehow, who cares, let’s not bend over backwards to justify how. —So there’s that. There’s Burns, dropping by to whinge drunkenly about the B-plot of the first season, and since there’s no further fallout from this the only reason he does so is to get punched, which, okay, good moment there, and then he gets cleaned up, and more discussion of this or that explicative point, and then we shifted somewhere else I think? Long enough for Stella to change out of her suit into a robe just like the one she was wearing in the dream sequence, huh, and then she boots up her computer to see what Spector’s done to her desktop, and—she leaps for her gun!

Which is an impulse I can totally understand, if one were used to guns, and had one at one’s disposal. But in the flow of the episode, the tonal shifts, the way everything intervening had been strung out to such lengths, how we’d already had the one confrontation in that hotel room just minutes before, it felt wildly out of place. I laughed, when I should’ve jumped. A definite stumble.

And then things start to snowball, and where I might’ve cut some slack before, I now shook my head. Spector’s wrestling with logistics becomes instead superhumanly smooth urban-ranger skillz, to the extent that he seemed to be colluding with the writers to get away with stuff. The minutiæ of process becomes fetishistic, calling attention to precisely how much labor and money was being poured into this task force that can’t seize actual evidence from a house they’re destroying to surveil. (Though I did initially like the murmuring Greek chorus effect of the surveillors all checking in with dispatch, it got numbingly repetitive after a bit.) —You mentioned the slow-motion shots of his being hauled into the police station; I found the sullen gotcha! of his arrest to be, well, arresting: let him go from the scene of the officer-involved shooting, as if he’s not a person of interest in any other matter, let him walk half a block away, look about, and then let someone else march up out of nowhere to arrest him for Rose’s abduction—why? What on earth was the point of that?

I’d like to think the show itself was aware, just for a moment, of just how far it had fallen when the abusive husband got the phone call from his mate, oh, hey, I just saw your wife, the one you’ve been looking for. —But I can’t be certain.

Looking however briefly into the production history it’s easy to take what I think I know of the making of these things and run some diagnostics: the first five shows were ordered in one batch, and proved so popular a second batch were ordered, and not everyone could come back for them, including the director of the first batch, so the writer directed the second run, and voila! And now there’s going to be a third. —But this reading is awfully generous to my own half-considered initial impressions of the show, a decent-enough first outing run into the ground by a thoughtlessly extended second, so I distrust it, because what the hell do I know. —I’m left with a point Sady Doyle made about Agent Carter, about how feminism is just a button to be pushed now by multinational corporations, a niche to be pandered to, and that’s kind of what this feels like: hey, that misandry’s pretty popular with some folks, let’s see if we can make a splash. —But that’s uncharitable, and I do try to have some charity, so I’ll walk that back; it’s not worth it as a punchline.

So. Anyway. —Thoughts! I had some.

—Filed 3547 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment [3].

Previously, on—

• Marfisa, once the Axe, had finally broken with her brother, the Axehandle;
• Luys, the Mason, had been sent by his occasional lover the Duke to find Jo;
• now, the two of them have met under the tree in Pioneer Square (where they’d fought a duel just weeks before).
• (Luys had been wearing a mysterious mask at the time, the mask worn by the swordsman Vincent Erne, when he’d been Huntsman to the Court.)
• —The Duke then went on to challenge the Axehandle and the Guisarme, Banker to the Court;
• That done, he went in a snit to sit the Throne, and only his (mostly) ex Jessie to witness his apotheosis.
• His other ex, Orlando, the Mooncalfe, had won the keeping of the Bride by defeating Jo in a duel;
• the Mooncalfe then went on to murther the Shootist and the Gammer, all to take away the Bride he’d already won;
• but Ysabel, terrified she might be broken, appalled she might not be, fled from the Mooncalfe…
• …only to meet a lugubrious, grey-faced man, who hailed her as the Queen.
• (Jo, meanwhile, who’d found the Huntsman’s mask, went on to trade a briefcase full of porn for a gun,
• (and Messrs. Keightlinger and Charlock went somewhere—else?—and brought back something—else?)
• Then, it started to snow.

Now!

• Marfisa, Luys, and Orlando have asked their questions of the witch, Miss Cheney;
• Ysabel, having run from the Mooncalfe, runs to Messrs. Charlock and Keightlinger, and their employer, Mr. Leir;
• Jo finally figures out what it was Miss Cheney had told her, and goes to see Becker, the right one, second;
• and she fires the gun she bought, even as Mr. Charlock—Mr. Leir?—looses what he’d found;
• and Ysabel, Bride of the King Come Back, Queen of the Court of Roses, is suddenly gone from a rather different world—

That’s, I guess, where we were.

Beginning Monday: City of Roses no. 21, “Gallowglas.”

—Filed 4040 days ago to Indulgences; Comment.

No less than a kingdom.

Have some books. “Wake up…” collects chapters 1 – 11; The Dazzle of Day collects chapters 12 – 22; the first season omnibus, Autumn into Winter, collects all 22 in one handy ebook—so you should get the two, or the one, but not all three, unless you’re feeling especially generous. —You can buy copies through Amazon, or Smashwords, or Payhip, or (of course) me; you can add them to your Goodreads or LibraryThing shelves; you might, if you need a little more convincing, read some reviews and interviews first.

No. 21, “Gallowglas,” will see its free online premiére on Monday, April 21st, with no. 22, “Maiestie,” to follow. Until then, you’ll need to secure a copy of The Dazzle of Day or the omnibus (or the paper chapbooks, of course) to read them. —And after that? Well. Whatever comes next is after that.

—Filed 4092 days ago to Indulgences; Comment.

“This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it.”

On the one hand:

On the other:

He says his son had about a six-inch screwdriver and was threatening to fight his mother, so they called police to calm him down.

Wilsey says everything was under control until a third officer arrived, and the situation took a dramatic turn.

“Murder. They murdered our son for no reason,” Wilsey said. “Everything was going good, then this fat cop from Southport walks in the room, walks around the corner, says, ‘We don’t have time for this. Tase that kid now. Let’s get him out of here.’”

Wilsey says like any teenage boy, his son tried to run when he heard the word tase.

“The tasers hit him, he fell back. Two officers were on top of him. You know, he’s got the little screwdriver. I mean, I would have went and got the screwdriver from him. I went to help, and I hear a shot,” Wilsey said.

Wilsey says he grabbed the officer so he could not shoot again.

—Filed 4142 days ago to Squawkbox; Comment.

There were still a number of these little fragments of glass floating about in the air, and now you shall hear what happened with one of them.

I wasn’t going to see it. —The ads looked atrocious: more of the same grim bonhomie that’d soured me on Tangled, and do they even give a damn about how ugly this participial trend in titling comes off? Like they’re steering into what otherwise would’ve been an unavoidable Tony Awards skit, Neil Patrick Harris shouting Frozen! Tangled! Tattered! Feathered! Sorcelled! Fired!

I wasn’t gonna see it, and then I saw this:

So, yeah. Well.

This snow-flake grew larger and larger, till at last it became the figure of a woman, dressed in garments of white gauze, which looked like millions of starry snow-flakes linked together. She was fair and beautiful, but made of ice—shining and glittering ice. Still she was alive and her eyes sparkled like bright stars, but there was neither peace nor rest in their glance. She nodded towards the window and waved her hand.

“It was the best movie ever that I ever saw,” pronounced Taran as we left the theater. We’d talked beforehand, to let her know how it was going to be in a theater, and loud, and there would be scary bits, and she promised to be as brave as a bumblebee and not yell. She did yell: “I want to watch something else!” which is what she says at home, whenever a show gets too intense. —Not so much at the spills and thrills, the wolves or the roaring snow-beast; these she took in stride. But when actual stakes were on the line, however quietly: Anna, betrayed by clever Hans, left to die by the unlit fire. —You know this won’t be allowed to happen, and so do I; there are Rules. But Taran’s only five. She doesn’t know the Rules yet, and can’t bear what knowing the Rules makes bearable: the possibility of what might happen, if. What might be lost if not. —She wants to watch something else.

You know this, and I do, and for sure and certain they know the Rules: that Good, imperiled, will recover, restored with the help of True Love; that Evil will be vanquished, and if not plunged to its death will at least be roundly humiliated, kicked in the butt on the way to the brig. Way of the world. Well, a world. This world. —Oh, there’s some little flexibility to the Rules, changes that might be rung, and they are, most notably in the form and fashion True Love takes (though they telegraph their punch with constant emphasized references to it as an Act thereof). But: Good, triumphant; Evil, vanquished; swell to the chorus of the theme and: credits.

He told her he could do mental arithmetic, as far as fractions, and that he knew the number of square miles and the number of inhabitants in the country. And she always smiled so that he thought he did not know enough yet, and she looked round the vast expanse as she flew higher and higher with him upon a black cloud, while the storm blew and howled as if it were singing old songs.

You know this, and so do I—but I’d seen that song, remember?

A mostly generic new-model Disney princess belts through a radio-friendly rip of “Defying Gravity” (it’s okay, they got Idina Menzel to sing it) and blows her way through a magical-girl transformation into something of a different genre, if not richer and more strange: something of an actual, maybe, antagonist? (—Not that the Snow Queen is all that much of an antagonist in her own story; not that her own story even has that much of an antagonist, aside from cosmopolitan sophistication, or maybe atheism; any given intellectualism, really, and also robbers.) —But: a Disney princess? An antagonist? —She sheds her cloak, her glove, her tiara, her (as the lyrics make painfully clear) past, but: look at the joy, as she finally lets it go, unleashes the magic that’s been leaking frightfully from her all along thus far, learns what she can do with it, and how far it can take her, and how (through that scrim of Disney CGI) beautiful it is—but also how cold, how inimical, inhuman, how—therefore—villainous? —And the transformation, the (yes) sexualization, through that same scrim—a sure sign of villainy, in Disney. —But the va-va-voom slink, the precisely flawless makeup under the artfully touseled hair, it’s all a bit too studiedly much, isn’t it? A Disney, a Barbie-doll idea of sophistication, a perfectly realized burst of adolescent excess, of someone trying something new, of trying the very act of trying something new, of succeeding wildly in that first wild flush, giddily heedless of the cost they know they don’t, can’t know.

I may have watched it a few times.

So I knew, but I was starting to think that maybe, this time, I didn’t, I wouldn’t know. A glimpse of a possible if, a might-maybe. The Rules were creaking, bending, those serried ranks of Good and Evil muddling, confused: would she be triumphant? Or vanquished? I didn’t know! Or thought maybe I didn’t, anyway.

As Anderson-Lopez recalls, “Let It Go” was the first song she and her husband wrote that ended up staying in the movie. Its composition also led the film’s team to rethink its entire approach to the character of Elsa, a.k.a. Frozen‘s take on Hans Christian Anderson’s Snow Queen. In previous drafts, Menzel’s character had a villainous bent. Once the couple penned “Let It Go,” though, they finally began to understand what really made Elsa tick: She’s a scared, repressed teenager, not a malicious ice queen. “As the movie got rewritten and rewritten around ‘Let It Go’ to earn that moment,” Lopez explains, “she became more and more the protagonist along with Anna” — Elsa’s younger sister, voiced by Bell.

If I’d read that before I’d gone to see the movie, I would’ve.

The very idea that a scared, repressed teen could ever become the most malicious of wintry metaphors. That a malicious ice queen could ever be identified with, could possibly be sympathetic, could be a protagonist. I mean really.

X’s first novel, title, was rejected by a publisher because its female protagonist didn’t “triumph over all adversity,” thereby providing the requisite happy ending. XX’s title sold to a German publisher for six figures, but American publishers refused to buy it unless she made her lead character “more remorseful” for having a passionate fling. An editor of XXX’s title said that although readers would be “haunted and moved” by her protagonists, she should turn them into characters that readers would regard with “genuine affection.”

The original soundtrack album for Frozen includes a number of demos, drafts of tracks that didn’t make it into the (currently) final version, that suggest directions and misdirections in the revising and rewriting Kristen Anderson-Lopez refers to, herrings kippered and otherwise. —One of these demos is for “Life’s Too Short,” and in its introduction, Robert Lopez tells us, “One of the songs we knew we had to write was, the song between Elsa and Anna, at the end of which, Elsa had to freeze Anna’s heart with a blast of magic.”

Anderson-Lopez chimes in: “This first attempt was more confrontational than what ultimately ended up in the movie, but we enjoyed going to that drama place.”

It’s an oddly sprightly track, for a confrontation—

—but there’s still a charge there, an anger, on the parts of both our protagonists: a drama: they sing at each other, to each other, and what they want—who they are—is set in direct conflict: Elsa, terrified she’s the prophesied unending winter, giving in to her frozen power anyway, hiding her fear with spite and rage; Anna, who in another cut song refers to herself as the spare to the heir, eager to save their little realm, even if it’s from her own beloved sister—until the song climaxes with that magical strike: “I’m not the prophesy!” cries Elsa, as she fulfills it.

But conflict is confrontational; people get hurt, and people do hurt, and when it’s over someone will have won, however provisionally, and someone will have lost, something. Unless it’s muddled, confused, someone will be triumphant, however muted; someone will be vanquished. The story will have chosen, because there are Rules, and the logic of them works backwards as well as forwards: someone will turn out to have been Good, and someone will have been Evil all along.

And so in the revising, and the rewriting, to soften, remove, erase her villainous bent, to make her more likeable, to earn that moment—of sympathy, of identification, of grace—the conflict is ducked, dodged, leashed, concealed, not revealed:

They sing past each other, now, in this final version: choruses and recitatives that interlock musically, but don’t respond to, don’t struggle with, don’t even acknowledge each other. When Elsa learns that in letting go she’s released enough power to freeze the realm, she doesn’t retort; she crumples into a muttering despair that Anna’s soaring refrain doesn’t even notice. And when Elsa lashes out, the blow that freezes Anna’s heart, it’s unconscious, accidental; she doesn’t even notice. —No intentional villany, here—just misunderstanding: regrettable, yes, but once explained, easily enough forgiven. Swell, and: credits.

(It’s not just our Snow Queen’s possible-maybe villainy that’s softened, of course. In that unused demo, Anna’s insisting Elsa put her gloves back on, to stop eternal winter—the gloves she’d let go. And this is a demand more specific, more actionable than her vague if plaintive cries of don’t shut me out, don’t live in fear, just unfreeze it, you can do it ’cause I know you can! —A stifling, smothering, repressive demand, a frightening demand that directly opposes what Elsa wants, what we’ve been told Elsa needs, and thus a hurtful demand—and while a protagonist, a hero, can deliberately hurt a proper villain, a malicious ice queen, with no mark or stain or blemish to her character, hurting a fellow protagonist is, well. Tricky. Not likeable. So soften; so leash; conceal, don’t feel, don’t reveal. Rewrite. Revise.)

One day, when he was in a merry mood, he made a looking-glass which had the power of making everything good or beautiful that was reflected in it almost shrink to nothing, while everything that was worthless and bad looked increased in size and worse than ever. The most lovely landscapes appeared like boiled spinach, and the people became hideous, and looked as if they stood on their heads and had no bodies. Their countenances were so distorted that no one could recognize them, and even one freckle on the face appeared to spread over the whole of the nose and mouth. The demon said this was very amusing. When a good or pious thought passed through the mind of any one it was misrepresented in the glass; and then how the demon laughed at his cunning invention. All who went to the demon’s school—for he kept a school—talked everywhere of the wonders they had seen, and declared that people could now, for the first time, see what the world and mankind were really like. They carried the glass about everywhere, till at last there was not a land nor a people who had not been looked at through this distorted mirror. They wanted even to fly with it up to heaven to see the angels, but the higher they flew the more slippery the glass became, and they could scarcely hold it, till at last it slipped from their hands, fell to the earth, and was broken into millions of pieces.

Protagonist, antagonist, villainy, Good, Evil, Rules—I hope the soaring refrain hasn’t misled you as to whatever point it is I think I’m making with these muttered divagations. —I’m not, mind, arguing that Elsa should more properly have been a villain, any more than I’m pleased with Anna as a plucky, fiesty-pants protagonist. I mean, Good, Evil, anti and pro—what are we really on about, here?

Frozen is a fantasy, which means (broadly, crudely) it’s about restoration and return: of proper summer, undone and overwhelmed by the unnatural winter that Elsa embodies, had been holding back by force of will and gritted teeth and gloves, and closed doors now thrown open, now relaxed, now, at last, herself—and there, right there, that’s the kernel: in threatening what’s seen as natural, usual, expected, Elsa’s turned against what’s Good; in trying to restore and return, Anna’s doing the story’s work, fixed against Evil, as ineluctably as the tide. The efforts the movie must go to, to face them both in the same direction, as jointly likeable protagonists, according to the calculus of these Rules; the Evil the story requires, thus unmoored, has only clever Hans to bear its weight, and while his heel-turn’s admirably, literally chilling, he’s far too slight for the existential threat of eternal winter, of summer forever forgone. —No, that’s resolved almost as an afterthought, an accident: “Of course!” cries Elsa. “Love!” —And just like that the power she’d let go, the existential threat, is leashed; can now be let out, on holidays, and state occasions, as lovely sheets of skating ice and charming flurries, rather than snow-beasts and threatening, phallic spikes.

That’s all it took; that’s all the conflict required: the restoration, the mere expression of a love that was never really in jeopardy. Elsa’s rejection, her letting go, her moment, her song, the one I saw, up there, is all undone; was undone, when she crumpled at the first sign of opposition, the first indication of hardship. In an older version of the story, in an earlier draft of this story, she’d’ve been a proper villain, and fought for what she wanted. It would’ve meant something, to her, to the story, to us. It would’ve been earned. —But in that story she would have to lose, would have to have been vanquished, would have hurt someone, would not have been likeable, could not have been a protagonist, or a Disney princess.

Good, this Good, according to these Rules, because there can be no real dissent among its partisans, is necessarily univocal: we all of us good people want the same thing, right? Essentially? The restoration of the natural order, the return, undisturbed, of the safety of our realm. And so there is no contest. There can be no contest. Not if you want to be triumphant.

And the buttercups sparkled gayly, and looked again at Gerda. What song could the buttercups sing? It was not about Kay.

But that’s according to those Rules. —What I’d seen? That moment, above, the one they wanted to earn? What I’d hoped that maybe this time I wouldn’t know? That maybe this time the Rules themselves were being questioned? The kernel, cracked? That more than one vision of Good was in play, on the surface, explicitly, rather than desperately read into the cracks and fissures, the what-ifs and the mightabeens? And none of them wrenched into the role of villain, of antagonist, of Evil, despite their differences? That—instead—forged somehow between them some actual forgiveness, however fleeting? One that meant something because of what it cost, to give, and to receive? That this might be the 102 minutes’ traffic of our screen?

I mean, I guess what I’d been hoping for was a post-Brave princess movie, and what I got instead was post-Wicked. —And this, this wandering argument, this glib anti-climax, none of this is meant to take away from what Frozen manages to accomplish, and even do well; there’s good stuff in there for you. Go, see it, if you haven’t.

But still. —I wanted to watch something else.

—Filed 4144 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

Mr. Waturi’s lament (2014 remix):

I know they can do the job, but can they get the job?
I know they can get the job, but can they get paid for the job?
—I’m not arguing that with you, I’m not arguing that with you, I’m not arguing that with you, mic drop.

—Filed 4146 days ago to Squawkbox; Comment.

With all due apologies to D’Invilliers,
and Fitzgerald,
except the ones set aside for Kyle Baker,
and of course for you, Dear Reader:

Then wear the Google Glass, if that will move her;
if you can slurp the brogurt disaffectedly, slurp for her too.
Till she cry “Lover, Google-Glassed, brogurt-slurping lover, I must have you!”

—Filed 4454 days ago to Poprocks; Comment [1].

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