Pop Culture Has Never Understood Politics And Voting
Our belief that voting is hopeless, as seen on tv
I remember casting my ballot for the first time as a newly-minted 18-year-old growing up in Northern New Jersey. I was a senior in High School who was filled with so much enthusiasm for the process of voting. I had binged several episodes of the show The West Wing the night before, and I incessantly couldn’t stop quoting lines from the sequel to Legally Blonde — Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, & Blonde.
As Elle Woods would say, “I was there to speak up!” I had researched all the positions beforehand, and I knew exactly who and what I would vote for on the ballot. I marched into the cubicle, filled in my ballot with a blue pen I had brought with me, and dropped it into the ballot box, confident I had made the right decision. My candidate would go on to win, and for a fleeting moment, I believed in the electoral system as a magical force for good.
He would turn out to be a terrible political leader. Many of his campaign promises were lies or outward exaggerations, and I lost all faith in his administration a mere month into his leadership.
I remember not only feeling betrayed by this candidate but also feeling silly for ever believing that I could make a difference.
Years later, I became disinterested in the entire political process. I decided after watching one too many YouTube videos that voting was pointless. I was going to sit this one out. It didn’t matter who I voted for anyway, and besides, the person I wanted to win was probably going to lose to a spoiled rich person, or at least, that’s what the videos told me.
Still, I made my way to a watch party and drowned out my sorrows with a glass of wine as I watched the results on a giant projector with my friends. The results came in. The person I wanted to win did, and we all cheered.
Maybe this whole election process wasn’t so bad, after all?
For many people, their view on elections seem to vacillate between these two extremes — you are either an eternal optimist who thinks that we must trust in the process or a political nihilist scoffing as the powerful do as they please. These two viewpoints are all too common within our media. The optimist is the lawyer on the silver screen telling you to believe in the system, and the nihilist is rolling his eyes two theaters down as the latest conspiracy theory unfolds.
These dominant political viewpoints are radically different from one another, yet they are two extremes built on inaction. Whether you support the story that believes we must honor the process no matter what, or you binge the hit television show with a lead monologuing about how politics is merely a cold exercise in power, both options reduce your electoral participation to a simple true-false statement. You either vote, or you don’t — never mind the thousands of other forms of participation you can and must do in addition to voting.
These stories have been a constraint on how many of us perceive democracy — myself included — and it’s time we tore them apart.
In pop culture, these two viewpoints are built on a reductive analysis of “the system” — a wishy-washy bit of shorthand used to describe literally all power structures within which a person exists. The system includes but is not limited to:
government
capitalism
patriarchy
white supremacy
imperialism
…and so much more.
Some argue that “the system” — although it has some problems — is ultimately a force of good for humanity. One of the better examples of this in pop culture is Aaron Sorkin’s optimistic drama The West Wing (1999–2006), which involves the antics surrounding the fictional Bartlet administration. President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) is a moderate Democrat who frequently monologues about how we must simply have faith in the process.
For example, in the pilot episode, there is a background plot about a group of Cuban refugees heading to America and whether or not the US government should assist them. The administration ends up doing nothing, and 350 Cubans go missing and are presumed dead, while 137 end up being taken into custody in Miami. President Bartlet says of this whole ordeal:
“With the clothes on their back, they came through a storm, and the ones that didn’t die, want a better life and they want it here. Talk about impressive.”
From President Bartlet’s example, we can see one of the biggest problems with process-oriented optimists' perspective: it's an extraordinarily privileged and deluded position to take. It’s easy for President Bartlet to wax poetically about the American dream because he’s in one of the world's most secure positions. There are, however, 350 Cubans in this fictional world who will never experience that reality because they are dead.
The West Wing brought up many tone-deaf examples throughout its run, and in some cases, it could get outright hostile to anyone who opposed “the system.” When character Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) has to meet a “mob” protesting the World Trade Organization in the season two episode Somebody’s Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail, he is indignant about what he believes to be their erroneous stance on free trade. He bemoans to a police officer about how the protestors are nothing more than “philistines” on “activist vacation.” The two even joke about assaulting the protestors — a moment that has not aged well in an era where police officers are violently suppressing protestors across the country.
Source: episode ‘Somebody’s Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail’ — character Toby Ziegler jokingly tells an officer to fire her gun at protestors.
It bears emphasizing that there was and continues to be a lot of media like this — not just the 155 episodes of The West Wing — but shows such as Madame Secretary (2014–2019), whose main character Elizabeth McCord (Téa Leoni), a former CIA agent, helped broker peace between Israel and Palestine in a single episode.
As yet another example, Kevin Costner’s Swing Vote (2008) had an entire movie that focused on how a fluke in electoral politics left the fate of an election in the hands of one apathetic man who doesn’t have a firm grasp on the issues. The movie does not end with him taking a particular stance, but with him casting his ballot — his ultimate decision left unknown. We are meant to conclude that the process working is enough.
This framing is far from simply being a fictional dilemma. It was not too long ago that Francis Fukuyama declared in his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992) that humanity had reached its final ideological evolution and that Western liberal democracy would expand indefinitely. It’s still too common to see technocratic optimists point to declines in statistics such as the world’s absolute poverty rate as a justification for why we simply have to stay on course, and everything will sort itself out. As Dylan Matthews wrote for Vox in 2018 for the article 23 charts and maps that show the world is getting much, much better:
“Under the radar, some aspects of life on Earth are getting dramatically better. Extreme poverty has fallen by half since 1990, and life expectancy is increasing in poor countries — and there are many more indices of improvement like that everywhere you turn. But many of us aren’t aware of ways the world is getting better because the press — and humans in general — have a strong negativity bias.”
Even if these numbers were correct in making this case, however (and rising ecological instability and increasing wealth inequality tell us that they are not), this perspective is still a call to not address the problems in the here and now. When your response to immediate suffering is that people in the long-run will benefit, then what you are really doing is dismissing that person’s suffering under the banner of progress — you are telling people that they don’t matter.
Again, things are not okay with our world. Only privileged people can maintain the illusion that progress is inevitable. And so process-oriented optimism tends to turn a lot of people off from politics. They stop believing that their participation matters and they become political nihilists.
On the other end of the pop culture spectrum is the belief that “the system” is bad. There is a common dogma that the corrupting influence of power taints all politicians, no matter how good and pure a person starts. The people who have the most success within it are believed to be unscrupulous sociopaths with a suit fetish. This can be best summed up in the words of Lord Acton when he wrote to Bishop Creighton in 1887 that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
The quintessential pop culture text that underscores this ideology is the Netflix show House of Cards (2013–2018). The show depicts House Majority Whip Francis Underwood (Kevin Spacey), who plots to take the presidency after being denied Secretary of State from the incoming administration. Francis or “Frank” is so unscrupulous that he kills a dog within the show’s opening scene. Throughout the series, he kills his enemies and former allies alike and destroys Democratic norms to stay in office one more day. He has a very Machiavellian conception of power. As Frank says at the beginning of season 2:
“For those of us climbing to the top of the food chain, there can be no mercy. There is but one rule: hunt or be hunted.”
Another example is Lord Petyr ‘Littlefinger’ Baelish in Game of Thrones (2011–2019), describing “chaos as a ladder” one uses to gain more power. It’s easy to see how people disillusioned with the “process is good” argument can gravitate towards this mindset because it’s everywhere. Many people either can no longer maintain the illusion of infallible progress or never had the resources to do so in the first place, and here comes this dominant culture narrative validating their fear that it doesn’t matter and that life is inherently cruel.
I don’t want to pretend like there aren’t people in the world who believe in the naked pursuit of power and power alone. Recent history has taught us that this is very much the case, but history is also filled with martyrs and communities willing to sacrifice for what and who they believe in. Chelsea Manning didn’t leak US secrets and go to jail for seven years to get a book deal (there are easier ways to do that). There are political dissidents across time and place who altruistically sacrifice their material interests to advance their conception of the greater good.
To assume that our world of politics is just about accumulating power, you would have to ignore these dynamics of faith and belief. The simplistic narrative of an all-encompassing “system” seems to be more about shielding people’s psyches than a general desire to understand politics.
Sometimes when people argue for their disinvestment in “the system,” they are doing so from a position of extreme privilege. Lonely Island’s comedy song Threw It On The Ground is probably the pinnacle of this position. A privileged Andy Samberg perceives all attempts to interact with him as indoctrination into “the system:”
You must think I’m a joke
I ain’t gonna be part of your system
Maaaaaaaaaaan!
Source: Fashion Maniac — Andy Samberg throwing an item on the ground in his hit song.
Mostly, though, I see a lot of pain and fear when people declare to the world that their participation in “the system” is pointless. There are many people rightly bitter about our society’s failure to give them a good life. While I understand this perspective, it often seems to be a defense mechanism to innoculate yourself against the worst. As Redditor Do_GeeseSeeGod remarked on the 2020 election cycle in the thread unpopularopinion:
Do you really think rich people are just going to pack it in if Bernie or Warren or whoever gets elected? “Well, fellow billionaires, we had a good 7000 year run, but it looks like the poors are going to get healthcare and living wages now. We’re going to have to settle for having a little less money.” Seems highly unlikely.
Even in your local elections, the people with money run shit. They always have and always will. They’ll placate us just enough to avoid a riot. That’s it. If your bank account is less than 8 digits, you have zero control over political policy.
We see here that this rationalization acts imperfectly as a shield. The person is trying to forecast that the rich will always maintain control over our government, but saying that the system is bad doesn’t seem to make them feel better. It is an attempt to hurt yourself before the world can do it first (if it hasn’t already), and sometimes this defensiveness can get quite dark.
Doomerism, for example, generally describes a philosophy where the fall of humanity is heralded as an inevitability either due to ecological or economic collapse. It is best known by the Doomer meme, which is a Wojak character that originated on 4chan. The meme depicts a depressed 22-year old wearing a black hoodie and beanie while smoking a cigarette.
Source: Know Your Meme — a graphic of the Doomer character with accompanying text.
I can’t say everyone who prescribes to doomerism is actively depressed, but when you look at the r/doomer subreddit, that sentiment comes up a lot. “I will kill myself tonight,” writes one user. “NEED [Playstation Network] FRIENDS STAT!!! I need someone to [game] with. In a really dark place right now and need companionship,” calls out another user.
Depression and burnout are obvious causes for a lot of people’s loss of faith in the system. “The system,” though, is not a singular force. It is a multitude of intersecting and contradictory institutions imperfectly benefiting some individuals while denying others their humanity. The truth is that some systems are terrible, odious things that do need to be torn down, but that transformation cannot happen by people sacrificing some of the little power that they possess.
We must remember that those in power would love nothing more than for you to throw all your hope away.
The fight for enfranchisement in America has been a bitter one. It’s a common talking point in political circles about how originally the only people who could vote consistently were white men with property. This is true — though that standard was a little murky, depending on your state. Yet, something that we sometimes lose sight of is that even voting secretly was a hardwon victory.
Ballots used to be public, and citizens faced severe, sometimes violent consequences if they voted for their local opposition. In the middle of the 19th century, Americans were killed going to the polls during Election Day riots. Corruption was rampant, and party bosses used the visibility of people’s ballots to pressure local elections. In the words of Harvard professor Jill Lepore:
“…if I see you at the polls and you are bringing a blue papered ballot to vote for Smith as opposed to a green one to vote for Jones, I can know that you actually voted the way I paid you to vote. Therefore, I can buy your votes, and you can sell your votes. Or I can beat you up if you don’t vote for Smith. Or, if I am your boss, I can say, ‘If you don’t vote for Smith, I can fire you.’”
Source: Wikipedia — Louisville Bloody Monday Election Riots of 1855
Reform in this area was difficult, and the concept of private voting faced heavy opposition on multiple fronts. Virginia orator John Randolph claimed that a secret ballot would “make any nation a nation of scoundrels.”
Yet, electoral progress is never linear. When the private ballot was finally widely adopted in America, it was not only because of its efficiency but because it helped some states discriminate against Black people. At a minimum, the private ballot required voters to know how to read and write, which disadvantaged the poor, the uneducated, and former slaves who were often both. States began to use the written ballot as a pretext to establish literacy tests to disenfranchise Black voters. In one Virginia District, for example, all ballots were written in Gothic Lettering to make it harder for uneducated Black men to read them. The year after Arkansas passed its private ballot law, the percentage of Black men who managed to vote dropped from 71% to 38%, and similar drops were seen all over the country.
Literacy tests would eventually be overturned by the Voting Rights Acts of 1965, but enfranchisement is still a struggle for countless people across the country. The Supreme Court struck down section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in their 2013 ruling Shelby County v. Holder. Section 5 had formerly granted the Department of Justice the ability to veto what it considered bad state voting laws, leading to greater enfranchisement. Unfortunately, the overturning of section 5 has allowed states all over the country to pass Voter ID laws, which have been likened to modern-day literacy tests because certain racial groups are statistically less likely to have such identification.
From denying former prisoners the ability to vote to the purging of voter rolls, our right to vote is in a precarious position, and sometimes we aren’t aware of how. The act of registering to vote — the legal process of declaring your eligibility to vote in a certain state— is itself a form of voter suppression. In countries such as Canada, this process happens automatically. In other countries, voter participation is mandatory. Yet in America, our system is so dysfunctional that we spend a lot of our electoral efforts convincing Americans to overcome the logistical hurdles to vote in the first place.
This is all by design, but again, the solution to overcoming these hurdles is not to make it easier for the people trying to oppress us. Voting matters a great deal. We know this because if voting were such a useless thing, then racist, rich oligarchs wouldn’t have spent so much of their time taking it away from the people they wished to dominate.
We know it matters because the wealthy still have higher voter participation than the lower classes. There is unsurprisingly emerging evidence positing that states with a wealth gap in voter participation are less likely to enact minimum wage increases and other liberal policies. The wealthy would like nothing more than for you to stop caring and let them continue to be over-represented in politics.
However, we must simultaneously remember that voting is not itself a divine good that will automatically lead to an ideal society. Process-oriented texts such as The West Wing and Swing Vote are frustrating because they gloss over the messy realities of politics. Not everyone has the luxury of waking up one day and deciding to suddenly engage in politics and then seeing that opinion being honored by larger American society. Some people have died trying to cast their ballot, and others have faced arrest because of oppressive laws — some of which are still on the books and leading to the arrest of Black people.
Source: The Guardian — Lanisha Bratcher was arrested under a Jim Crow-era law for voting while on probation.
Voting is a tool, and it is one of many that is needed to institute actual reform. Some of those tools include protests and marches. Others involve mutual aid, civil disobedience, and some sadly include mobilization of force and strategic violence.
It’s not popular to talk about now, but how many unions received policy concessions in the 1800s was through such mobilization. Much like now, capitalists used to hire guards to maintain active surveillance (and worse) over their workers to prevent them from unionizing. Workers responded with civil disobedience and marches, yes, but things could sometimes get downright violent. The 1800s are dotted with the massacres of workers at the hands of police and hired guards, and understandably in this shuffle, workers started to fire back (literally).
Political mobilization is far more complex than a yes or no choice. It’s a series of interlocking actions: sometimes they involve compliance, and other times outright resistance. Your decision to vote does not bar you from other activities, and we need people to feel this reality both on and off the silver screen.
I had to unpack many toxic narratives on my way to believing I could participate in politics. It involved unsubscribing from channels and learning to put away authors I had once loved, but it also meant realizing that politics was more complex than I once perceived it to be.
We need cultural narratives in pop culture that reflect the complexity of voting and political mobilization. I see glimpses of it starting to emerge in some titles. The video game A Night In The Woods (2017) ends with the main character’s father announcing his intentions to fight to form a union.
Likewise, the movie Suffragette (2015) chronicled women freedom fighters in the United Kingdom who employed violent action (i.e., bombing mailboxes, cutting telegraph wires, etc.) in their call for emancipation. This history, however, is removed by 100 years. It is also overwhelmed by pop culture texts that either describe politics extremely optimistically or nihilistically.
These stories are great starts, but mostly we need more of them.
There is so much more to do besides voting. You can vote for a candidate you only marginally like one day and then protest them in the streets the next. You can volunteer, and provide mutual aid, and participate in coordinated strategies online with comrades you meet on Reddit. You can donate to local candidates across the country who share your values and badger the ones who do not. You can write and share articles like this one that try to capture the truth, and you can prepare yourself and others for more direct action.
There is so much more to do than just voting, and none of it is made lesser through the act of casting your ballot.
The Subtle Copaganda of ‘The Legend of Korra’
Peeling back the nostalgia surrounding the hit Nickelodeon TV show.
Source: The Verge
I loved The Legend of Korra when it first aired (2012–2014). The show is the sequel to the hit animated series Avatar The Last Airbender (2005–2008). The series takes place in a world where people can master a form of martial arts that allows them to manipulate one of the four elements (i.e., Earth, Fire, Air, and Water). Only one person, the Avatar, can master all four elements. There is only one Avatar at one time, and when they die, they are reincarnated as someone else in the element cycle, and he and she is the core protagonist in both of these shows
Avatar The Last Airbender focused on the plucky Aang (Zach Tyler) as he traveled the world with his friends. In contrast, The Legend of Korra focuses on the brave and steadfast Korra (Janet Varney) as she spends most of her time in the metropolis known as Republic City. The show’s decision to center a strong woman of color when the Internet was far-less forgiving of such things hooked me right away (note the voice actress, Janet Varney, is white). Korra ended before the Gamergate scandal even happened. Yet swimming within such a toxic Internet culture, it tackled so many important issues: Korra had to recover from PTSD; she combatted figures representing diverse political ideologies; and in the show’s closing moments, she walked into the interdimensional sunset with her romantic partner, Asami Sato (Seychelle Gabriel).
This show has a lot of important firsts in pop culture. Korra’s relationship with Asami is personally very special to me. The love I have for this particular aspect, however, doesn’t mean I am not going to point out other things I find wrong with The Legend of Korra. From its handling of whitewashing to an uneven development schedule, the show had some problems. Its relationship with the police is no exception.
While the series is progressive on many laudable fronts, it’s ultimately regressive in how it views power and policing. It often places the police of its world in an uncritically favorable light, and more than that, it emphasizes the need for order and stability over the fight for social change.
While Aang traveled the world with his friends to stop the evil Fire Lord Ozai (Mark Hamill) from taking over the world, Korra tries to safeguard a mostly “stable” world from arising threats. With a few exceptions, she often ends up as a force protecting the status quo. She spends most of her time with titans of industry, heads of state, and police officers.
The first introduction we have to Republic City’s metal-bending police is telling. It features a series of beautiful shots as the officers descend elegantly onto the street below. Korra actually gushes about how cool they are before they arrest her for vigilantism. This framing of police as “cool metal-benders who dispassionately enforce the law” is the primary way they are portrayed on the show. We only ever see the metal-bending police portrayed negatively when the corrupt councilmember Tarrlok (Dee Bradley Baker) manipulates them for his own nefarious purposes.
In fact, the show doesn’t stop with cool police background characters. Many of Korra’s immediate influences are kickass police officers. The most obvious example is Chief of Police Lin Beifong (Mindy Sterling), a reoccurring character, who first meets Korra in an interrogation room. Korra has been arrested for attacking members of a crime syndicate known as The Triple Threat Triad, and Lin has come to give the Avatar a talking to. She has faith in the system and believes that Korra should have let the police handle the situation:
LIN: Oh, I am well aware of who you are, and your avatar title might impress some people, but not me…You can’t just waltz in here and dole out vigilante justice like you own the place.
Lin believes in the system, even if the Triple Threat Triad members probably would have succeeded if Korra hadn’t intervened in this particular instance. This tension means that it takes episodes for these two characters to develop an actual rapport. Their friendship does build, however, and we are meant to see Lin as redeemed when it happens. She saves Korra from a great fall in the Pro-bending Arena, and then later, heroically sacrifices her bending in a bid to give Tenzin and his family the chance to flee Republic City from a violent separatist movement. Lin may be cold and stubborn, but ultimately the show emphasizes that she cares deeply about the world around her.
Our love for Lin is further accentuated by the fact that she is the daughter of Toph Beifong (Kate Higgins) — a fan favorite from the original series — who single-handedly discovered metal-bending. She was also the original Chief of Police for Republic City, which adds further credence to the entire organization.
The other major police officer character in Korra’s life is her dear friend and former romantic partner, Mako (David Faustino). Partly to atone for his past as a former gang member, he joins the police force as a beat cop in season 2 and remains more or less attached to it for the remainder of the series. His faith in this system is strained at several moments, but never breaks, and sometimes that faith can cause him to unfairly judge people in dire straights. When a teenage petty thief and an orphan named Kai (Skyler Brigmann) joins the cast in season three, Mako cautions him with some pretty harsh words:
“I just want you to know, I’m going to be watching you kid. I know exactly what you’re all about because I’ve been there before. You don’t have me fooled.”
To reiterate, Kai spent his entire life as an orphan. He was then adopted by a rich family, and stole their possessions and went on the run, which is a very realistic response from someone who has never known any security in their life. Why would you trust someone after a lifetime of vulnerability?
Mako looks upon that history, one he should understand as a former poor orphan, and treats it with distrust and disdain. He doesn’t think Kai should be trusted partly because he is ashamed of his own past as a wayward youth, and sadly, that distrust is proven right in the narrative. Kai goes on to do many morally questionable things (e.g., stealing Mako’s wallet, trapping Mako and his brother in the lower ring of Ba Sing Se, etc.). While Mako eventually grows to accept Kai, it’s only because the latter proves himself through heroics on the battlefield and the air nomad lifestyle, not out of any empathy for Kai’s former circumstances. His apology towards the end of season three reflects this:
Mako: Hey, I appreciate you coming back for us. Sorry for ever giving you a hard time.
Kai: That’s okay. I probably deserved it.
Mako: Yeah, you kinda did.
I personally found it frustrating that Mako, as a police officer, learns to like Kai only after the teen proves themselves to be of value. It’s a troubling framing, and while I don’t think the creators intended it this way, it's the message that bleeds through regardless.
Mako may be a little bit of a doofus when it comes to communication, but like with Lin, we aren’t meant to dislike him. He is one of the show’s leads, and he turns out to be another gruff-yet-likable cop. There may be the occasional inefficiency and corruption within this world's police system, but there are always people like Lin and Mako to pick up the slack and make sure that Team Avatar beats the bad guys.
It may be easy to dismiss this world as pure fantasy, but the cops in The Legend of Korra often draw parallels to the cops of our world. Season 2 involves introducing two characters — Lu (Mark Allan Stewart) and Gang (Rick Zieff) — who appear to be direct spoofs from old buddy cop movies. Except for the magical-bending, there is no attempt to institutionally distinguished the police officers of this world from the ones of our world. So the fact that their portrayals are so positive and sympathetic undeniably enters the realm of copaganda.
However, the situation in The Legend of Korra is actually far worse than the police officers in her life. Her character is fundamentally the manifestation of the copaganda trope, and to talk about why we have to dive a little more into the specifics of what copaganda even means.
Korra is not a police officer. She is a kickass bender from the Southern Water Tribe who spends most of her time butting heads against authority figures such as President Raiko (Spencer Garrett), Chief of Police Lin Beifong, and Councilmember Tarrlok. She went against everyone's better judgment and opened the portal to the spirit world, and she has never been shy to assert her voice above her peers.
By Avatar Kyoshi’s war fan, how can this show be anything close to copaganda?
When we talk about copaganda, it’s important to distinguish between the word and the phenomenon it describes. The term is a portmanteau of the words “cop” and “propaganda ” We can find traces of it stretching back over a decade in liberal activist circles. The word generally describes media that favors the police and depicts them as a supreme good in our society. This type of media existed long before the term itself and it’s problematic because it ultimately ends up creating an ideology of “Law and Order” that flattens the nuances surrounding crime and justice.
Cops are good. Criminals are bad. End of story.
We have a widespread belief in America that this simplistic ideology is not only necessary, but that it is the only thing that stands in the way between us and “evil.” When, for example, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, then-Governor Ronald Reagan blamed the assassination on the Civil Rights Movements’ campaign of civil disobedience. He remarked on the day of Martin Luther King Jr’s funeral that it was “…a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order and people started choosing which laws they’d break.’’
The desire for “Law and Order” is something so baked into our society that it infects nearly every aspect of the zeitgeist. As you are probably well aware, there is a popular crime genre franchise literally called Law & Order (1990–2010) with four spinoffs (Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999 — present), Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2001–2011), Law & Order: Trial by Jury (2005–2006), Law & Order: True Crime (2017; hiatus)) that all total over 1,174 episodes and counting, with two more shows in the works (Law & Order: Organized Crime and Law & Order: Hate Crimes). Nearly every episode of Law & Order involves a hardboiled group of detectives locking up a criminal in 45 minutes or less to avenge a victim who has been wronged, which dovetails very succinctly into our working definition of copaganda — the police catch the bad guys, and that makes everyone safe.
Law & Order is by no means an anomaly in popular culture. Crime shows reached their lowest point in the 2019–2020 television season by making up only one-fifth of all scripted shows on network TV. These shows have historically been told from a white perspective (e.g., they have little or no minority representation on screen or in the writer’s room or directors chair) and that biases their overall construction.
This problem with perspective is a trend dating back over half a century. The NBC show Dragnet (1951–1959), for example, was a widely influential police procedural during the 1950s that began every episode telling its viewers that the story they were about to see was true. The show worked closely with the LAPD to obtain that veneer of authenticity, a partnership that led to police officers' depiction as objective dispensers of justice. As the character Frank Smith says in episode 28, season 7 (The Big War):
“You know Joe, you have to be absolutely factual in your reports: factual, brief, and accurate.”
Even though such a characterization glossed over a more brutal history of racism and corruption within the department, it quickly became the standard for most procedurals. It’s nowadays difficult to find a show that doesn’t try to depict police officers' heroics in the crime-show genre through the lens of authenticity. Law & Order likewise began every episode with a similar theme that told their viewers that they were seeing the stories of investigators and prosecutors. We even see the relatively progressive buddy cop show Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013 — present) depict most cops as good people inching towards incrementalist reform. As Captain Holt (Andre Braugher) states in episode 3 of season 3 (Boyle’s Hunch):
“All the headlines are about the bad cops, but there are good cops, too.”
This trend of portraying the police as “the good guys” who solve society’s most heinous problems has been going on for a long time, and yet, it doesn’t align with reality. We have seen from multiple reports on policing across the United States that most officers' time is not spent solving “serious” crimes, but more mundane activities such as traffic and noncriminal calls. When officers are involved with solving rape and murder incidents, it doesn’t necessarily lead to the heroics of your favorite crime show. In a recent article in the New York Times, four victims of sexual assault discussed how police downplayed and dismissed their claims. Other reporting has sadly revealed that cops themselves often use their position of privilege to commit sexual assault.
This more complicated reality is why progressives and leftists routinely categorize shows such as Law & Order, Dragnet, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine as copaganda. These shows maintain a fantasy that actively gets in the way of our discussions on justice. There might genuinely be people in police forces who believe they are doing good. Still, they end up enforcing a system that routinely punishes poor people of color for minor offenses. In fact, recent reporting from The Atlantic and NPR indicates that cops who try to hold their fellow officers accountable are disproportionately censured or even fired. Cop shows bury this reality by making people believe in a version of policing that is a lie.
The copaganda label doesn’t stop and end with TV series’ either, and can expansively be applied to any media that uncritically glorifies police officers as heroes. News articles that overemphasize police officers' perspectives are also commonly placed into this category, as well as social media posts that depict police officers positively for the sake of clout.
Again, copaganda is about the false mindset of glorifying our society's watchmen without criticizing their authority. Its impact is far-reaching and has pervaded our very notion of what a hero means.
We exist in a moment in pop culture where a lot of divergent trends (e.g., our ideas of crime, heroics, and nerd culture) have collided together in film and television to say something unique about heroes. Some of the highest-grossing films of all time are superhero films (e.g., Avengers: Endgame, and Avenger’s: Infinity War). A lot of these cultural products are rooted in source material that intersects with or, in some cases, directly embraces copaganda.
Many of us are familiar with the two largest comic book publishers in the United States — DC and Marvel — but what might be lost to history for some fans is that many comic-books originally started in the crime genre. DC is actually short for Detective Comics, and during the comic-book boom of the 1940s and early 1950s, crime stories were some of the highest-selling stories. Popularity in this genre has since wained, in part due to regulation and a reactionary backlash. Children and adults alike are now far more likely to read stories of caped crusaders than grizzled detectives. The DNA of that history, however, remains in the stories that we read.
When we look at Batman and Spiderman, they often have a close working relationship with the police. The game Spiderman (2018) on the PlayStation 4, for example, depicts hero Peter Parker (aka Spiderman) idolizing the police so much that he has a goofy alter ego called “Spider Cop.” Superheroes, in many ways, embody the values copaganda says our cops should possess. They are frequently righteous defenders who defeat bad guys for the betterment of society. This connection caused Eliana Dockterman to write in Time:
…most superhero stories star straight, white men who either function as an extension of a broken U.S. justice system or as vigilantes without any checks on their powers. Usually, they have some sort of tentative relationship with the government…And even when superheroes function outside the justice system, they’re sometimes idolized by police because they are able to skirt the law to “get the job done.”
Many of our most fantastic heroes can sadly fall within the realm of copaganda, including Avatar Korra.
Korra can master the four elements because the spirit of light and peace, Raava (April Stewart), embodies every Avatar reincarnation. The Avatar’s job is explicitly to bring “balance” to the world, but what that balance looks like is highly contingent on her privileged upbringing.
The daughter of the Chief of the Southern Water Tribe, Korra was born into a world built by Aang’s victory against the Fire Lord 70 years earlier. She was isolated at a young age by her father and the Order of the White Lotus to protect her from a rogue anarchist group known as the Red Lotus. This insularity made her independent and headstrong with a desire to rebel against authority figures such as her father, Tonraq (James Remar), or her teacher Tenzin (J.K. Simmons). The show wants us to believe that Korra is balancing out different perspectives on her journey of self-discovery (and she does in part), but she oftentimes ends up reinforcing the power structures she has always known.
Each season has her battling against a foe that represents a distinct political ideology: season one has her fighting against the anti-bender Equalist Amon (Steve Blum) as a cipher for communism; season two is against religious fundamentalist Unalaq (Steve Blum), season three, she fights the radical anarchist Zaheer (Henry Rollins), and season four she wages war against authoritarian dictator Kuvira (Zelda Williams).
These ideologies are never presented in good faith. The villains are frequently power-hungry and, in some cases, are just lying about their intentions. Amon, for example, pretends to carry a scar inflicted upon him by a fight with a fire bender, and Unalaq gaslights Korra for most of the second season. We never seriously see someone besides the villain advocate for their beliefs, and it undercuts their credibility. The closest exception comes in season four by fan-favorite Toph Beifong.
While in the Great Swamp, Toph lectures Korra about the wisdom of her enemies:
“You said you saw your past enemies…you ever consider maybe you could learn something from them?…Listen what did Amon want? Equality for all. Unalaq? He brought back the spirits. And Zaheer believed in Freedom. The problem was that those guys were totally out of balance and they took their ideologies too far.”
Toph argues that all the show’s villains had fair points, but their methods went too far, yet this viewpoint is nonsensical.
The ideas of anarchism, communism, religious fundamentalism, and authoritarianism— although they can overlap in some areas — are widely contradictory. It’s not possible for all these viewpoints to be “correct.” Toph’s and, by extension, the show’s worldview belies an understanding of “progress” that focuses less on the beliefs people are fighting for and more on preserving institutionality.
The major reforms that take place in this world happen because good institutions let them happen. The United Republic Council — an unelected group of representatives appointed from each of the world’s five major polities, that governed the United Republic in the first season— dissolves itself sometime offscreen between the first and second season. The equalist movement “proved” to the council that they were unnecessary, and they then voluntarily choose to dissolve themselves in favor of a democratically elected president.
Likewise, Prince Wu (Sunil Malhotra), who was slated to take over the Earth Kingdom before Kuvira staged a coup, decides at the end of the fourth season that he is going to turn the Earth Kingdom into a democracy. This transition happens suddenly because he just decides it’s the better decision for his people. As he says nonchalantly in the series finale: “I really think the Earth Kingdom would be better off if the states were independent and had elected leaders. Like The United Republic.”
These changes happen because powerful people eventually see the error of their ways, and not because of political movements fighting for power. Change is institutional. The main characters fight to preserve harmony between the nations of the world, and progress sorts itself out.
When that harmony isn’t maintained, such as when Zaheer assassinates the Earth Queen in season three, it leads to general anarchy that places the whole international system into jeopardy. The Earth Kingdom capital of Ba Sing Se, for example, descends into a disorganized riot upon the queen’s death as looters begin to steal possessions from the upper rings. The following years then involve a brutal struggle for control as the Earth Kingdom is thrown into general chaos.
If that description sounds like a bunch of dog whistles, well it’s because the overarching philosophy on The Legend of Korra can at times be strangely conservative.
The idea that a lack of institutionality can lead to dangerous anarchy is itself a political assumption about human nature that is highly contentious. The belief that order is all that stands in the way between us and barbarism is one that has been debated in philosophy for centuries, and directly ties into our current cultural battle over the police. The Defund the Police movement is based on the principle that “mutual aid,” or the voluntary exchange of resources within a community, not order, is what lessons crime. We have seen a myriad of public figures argue recently that if you invest in things such as mental health, housing, food security, education, and so forth, you will actually build a more stable society.
We even see this within the fall of Ba Sing Se. The city was a heavily stratified society with poverty everywhere in the lower rings. The fall of the Earth Queen prompted rioting, not because it was inevitable, but because people were starving and needed the resources to eat. The Earth Kingdom’s government was a threat to its people's standard of living, and so its collapse makes perfectly logical sense. Why would people stay committed to a political organization that does not serve them? That’s not chaos, it’s a natural chain of events in response to a long chain of abuses.
The rise of the dictator Kuvira occurred because the international community, however, assumed that that anarchy was inherently dangerous. They tasked Kuvira with reuniting the Earth Kingdom, and ended up creating a political order that threatened their stability — Kuvira turned her sights on the world. Her dictatorial impulse, however, was not itself the problem. If Prince Wu had returned to his throne at the beginning of season four, it’s doubtful that Korra would have ever butted heads against Kuvira or Wu. The harmony between the Five Kingdoms would have been restored — the citizens of the Earth Kingdom be damned.
It’s only when Kuvira decided to disrupt that institutional balance that she was cast as a villain, and that conception of harmony strikes at the core of why I think this show is copaganda. The Legend of Korra is not just copaganda because of it’s many positive police characters, but because Korra herself is the physical manifestation of the status quo. She is like a living, breathing NATO willing to scorch the world’s enemies with whatever element is required.
I loved this show growing up, and part of me still does love it. I had to rewatch this series several times to make this article and much of what I adore about it is still there. I love the beautiful way this world is rendered, the stunning choreography of the fight scenes, the intergenerational dynamics between Tenzin’s children and his siblings, and the budding, albeit subtle, relationship between Korra and Asami.
When I think of this show’s larger themes, however, I can’t help but cringe. The show undeniably fits some of the worst aspects of copaganda, and it unsettles me. It feels like staring into a time capsule of another life — one where people honestly believed they could solve their problems by just trusting the process. I don’t know if such a belief was ever actually real, but the world I live in now makes it hard to even go through the notions of such a false idea. Bad faith actors have ravished my world, and I don’t have a spirit of light to protect me or the ones I love.
I instead have had to see politics for the reality that it is — one of asserting your beliefs for survival. We don’t have the luxury of having to pretend like all sides are equally valid, and many never did.
Korra wasn’t able to make that distinction because she existed within a privileged worldview — one that made it difficult for her to make hard stands against people. She would have had to declare that people such as Lin or her partner Asami of Future Industries are in the wrong, not simply situationally, but systemically.
She would have had to oppose the systems that some of her cherished friends upheld, and they probably wouldn't have been friends anymore.
Criticism hurts because it’s seeing the harm that has always been there. It can be a painful process because it means you can’t look upon something the same way again. Hard as I might, I am not going to be able to return to The Legend of Korra’s world with enthusiastic eyes. I don’t believe in this show’s foundational principles anymore, and that makes me want to weep for the illusion of progress I thought I had, but that our society never really went through.
The good news about criticizing the things that you love, however, is that it makes space both personally and societally for new things to cherish. We open up the conversation for new cultural products to better tell the truth as we see it, albeit imperfectly, and the cycle joyously begins anew.
The Unexpected Radicalness of ‘Jupiter Ascending’
It’s quite frankly a rare analysis in an age where texts praising rugged individualism and hustling are all too common. Critics' failure to capture this very transparent theme says something worrying about the state of media criticism — that we focus on aesthetics over a text’s substance and maybe, that our definition of a hero might very well be systemically flawed.
The movie Jupiter Ascending (2015) is known for being awful. It’s a story that’s brought up as an example of how creative endeavors can just so utterly fail. The Wachowski sister’s project cost anywhere between $179 and $200 million, and that doesn’t include the cost of the film’s robust marketing campaign. However, it only made $183 million, which means that financiers did not get a return on investment.
It was also critically panned for being campy, overly saccharine, and ridiculous. Half the film takes place in a space cathedral tucked away beneath the surface of Jupiter, and that tipsy-topsy setting was enough to turn a lot of people off.
Underneath the questionable dialogue and fights scenes that drag on just a bit too long, however, is a fascinating treatise on the exploitative nature of mega-conglomerates and tax law (yes, I did write that sentence). It’s quite frankly a rare analysis in an age where texts praising rugged individualism and hustling are all too common. Critics' failure to captures this very transparent theme says something worrying about the state of media criticism — that we focus on aesthetics over a text’s substance and maybe, that our definition of a hero might very well be systemically flawed.
This movie is one of those subjects you can spend hours explaining and still seem like you’ve gone nowhere because it sounds utterly bonkers. The bare-bones premise is that a woman named Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) learns she is the genetic reincarnation of an intergalactic space monarch who died tens of thousands of years ago. Jupiter is now involved in a family turf war over who owns Earth and its inhabitants. Her three children named Balem Abrasax (Eddie Redmayne), Titus Abrasax (Douglas Booth), and Kalique Abrasax (Tuppence Middleton) are each vying for her attention, or in some cases, trying to kill her outright, so that they can secure a better standing in the intergalactic stock market (we will get to that).
And that’s just a summary. We haven’t even gotten to the fact that some humans are part dog or that space vampires are a thing. The aesthetic of this movie comes greatly down to taste. You either think Kunis’ acting as a disgruntled housekeeper who hates her life is believable, or you don’t. You either love the Warhammer meets Guardians of The Galaxy style choices, or you think that they are childish and derivative, and at the time, most people gravitated towards the latter.
To reiterate, the critical consensus surrounding this movie was not just that it was terrible, but that it was one of the worst movies of the year, or even of all time. Gus Lubin hyperbolically wrote in Business Insider that the film “…[was] so bad it made [him] want never to go out to the movies again.” Eddie Redmayne earned a Razzie Award (from a spoof award ceremony which claims to honor the worst actors, directors, and films in Hollywood) for his performance as Balem.
Source: Razzie YouTube Channel — Razzie presenter Thushari Jayasekera announces Eddie Redmayne is the “winner” for that year’s worst supporting actor.
Before we address these criticisms, I want to emphasize that this film has noticeable issues that go back to its production. According to reporting from Deadline, the Wachowski sisters' closest ally at the company Warner Bros., president Jeff Robinov, left shortly after signing off on a lot of the film’s expenses. This situation meant that the ever-insular Wachowskis had the go-ahead for filming, but not a good contact person to represent the studio's interests.
While the Watsoskis have done great works, they are not infallible, and such insularity has impacted their decision-making in the past. When they made the 2012 flop Cloud Atlas, they received financing from dozens of sources to keep the filming going, including the mortgaging of their homes. This position again gave them the freedom to be really innovative. It also controversially allowed them to include the use of yellowface for some of their characters. There were arguably narrative reasons for this decision, but it has not aged well and is an example of how belief in an uncompromising vision can hurt the end product.
The insularity in Jupiter Ascending likewise means that some scenes, especially the action sequences, drag on a little too long, and many characters are poorly made. For example, Sean Bean’s Stinger Apini has a daughter named Kiza (Charlotte Beaumont), who is frustratingly underdeveloped. Jupiter first meets Kiza while a fight is happening in the background between Stinger Apini and Channing Tatum’s Caine Wise. Caine asks to speak with Kiza, and she tells the two of them: “Don’t drag me into your male mating rituals.” She then goes up to Jupiter and shakes her hand.
This introduction says everything that I need to know about Kiza — that she’s cool-under-pressure, funny, and confidant — and it's also the last major scene we see her in. She is sidelined several minutes later to focus on her father, Stinger. When I watched this film for the first time, I kept waiting for Kiza to return, but she never did. This type of mistake frequently happens in this film. There are very interesting characters in this universe we know next to nothing about, from talking space lizards to double-crossing bounty hunters.
I do not think Jupiter Ascending is a great film. It is not a Parasite (2019) or Sorry to Bother You (2018). I don't want to pretend like its this misunderstood gem whose flaws are secret strengths. It is structurally flawed on many levels, and any good critique should address them.
Its problems, however, are no worse than any other action movie, such as Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014), that dotted the era. It seems strange that this film received so much hatred, especially when, unlike many other action films, it does address some truly thought-provoking themes and concepts that were rare for the time.
Regardless of your palette, this movie's philosophical foundations are much more complex than the “shoot the bad Decepticons” logic of the Transformer franchise. The central theme in Jupiter Ascending is not some trite observation about how how “good triumphs over evil,” but how commoditization can be harmful to society.
Yes, this movie is about the corrosive effects of capitalism.
In this world, our species’ origin is not Earth, but the planet Orous and the human race has settled most of the galaxy. The majority of these holdings, however, are not colonies, but biomass farms. Corporations such as Abrasax Industries grow their various worlds to the point where they are almost unsustainable. Then they harvest the humans on them to create an elixir called RegeneX, Nectar, or Abrasax, which is used to extend the lives of more “advanced” humans. Time has become the ultimate commodity. As Kalique Abrasax tells Jupiter:
“In your world people are used to fighting over resources like oil, or minerals, or land. But when you have access to the vastness of space, you realize there’s only one resource worth fighting over, even killing for. More time. Time is the single most precious commodity in the universe.”
The Abrasax have used their production of the elixir to refeudalize much of the galaxy. They are corporate monarchs or “Entitled,” leading a vast, planet-spanning empire and business. The children of the House of Abrasax have consequently become so far removed from the concerns of everyday people that they can literally shape their realities: they own planets like the rich own second homes, on a whim, they can construct thousands of robots to act as guests for a wedding ceremony, and all of their servants are biogenetically engineer to be in whatever form that their masters wish.
This removal from their fellow man is highlighted in how they view “less developed” humans as no more than cattle. The scene the Abrasax siblings are first introduced literally has them discussing harvested humans in much the same way we talk about the animals we consume here on Earth.
TITUS: “Have you ever seen a Harvest?
KALIQUE: “No. Never! But I’ve heard they feel no pain. It’s all quite humane from what I’ve been told.”
Source: Fandom.com —
The movie uses the language of ethical meat production to emphasize how far the upper class will justify the exploitation of their fellow human beings. This sci-fi element allows the Wachowskis to literalize the horror that comes about when a business commoditizes other humans, and it's hard to ignore. During the climax of the film, the viewer is hit over the head with this message when the big bad Balem monologues to Jupiter about how our state of nature is consumption:
“Life is an act of consumption. Jupiter, to live is to consume. Now the human beings on your planet are merely a resource waiting to be converted into capital. And this entire enterprise is just a small part in a vast and beautiful machine defined by evolution, designed to a single purpose — to create profit.”
In case you missed the entire plot, this theme is also constantly related to our world through Jupiter. Our capitalist system also devalues her worth. She is a maid on Earth who no one appreciates. She is even pressured at one point by her cousin to sell her eggs for cash, yet he tries to take the majority of the profits from this exchange, telling her: “That’s capitalism babe. Shit rolls downhill. Profits flow up.”
None of this is subtle.
It should be noted that this is not an alien opinion, either. We exist in a world where just a handful of people controls a disproportionate amount of our global wealth. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made headlines recently by becoming the first person with a wealth of over $200 billion. We are well on our way to experiencing a refeudilization here on Earth, and just like with the Abrasax, some of our “Entitled” hold contempt for the “less-developed” humans serving beneath them. Poor people who rely on social safety net programs are routinely derided as lazy or worse.
The anti-capitalist themes in Jupiter Ascending, while not a rarity in film history, were certainly a novelty with 2010 blockbusters. The anti-capitalist, sleeper-hit Snowpiercer (2014), for example, was not given a wide release in the United States because movie producer Harvey Weinstein (yes, that Weinstein) didn’t think it would be palatable to US audiences. We have only within the past few years, reached a point where films such as Parasite (2019), Ready or Not (2019), and Knives Out (2019) with capitalist-critical or, at the very least, anti-rich messaging have been widely celebrated.
Jupiter Ascending’s unabashed themes should have merited some wider discussion when this film first aired, but overwhelmingly, critics were instead bogged down in a sophomoric debate about the text’s “originality.”
The critics who mentioned Jupiter Ascending’s anti-capitalist messaging were far and in between. The largest outlet that did so was probably Emmet Asher-Perrin’s article ‘Jupiter Ascending is A Chilling Look at Our Possible Future, in More Ways Than One’ in the well-regarded online publication Tor.com. All other examples I can find which survived the test of time are small players such as WordPress and Tumblr blogs and a community post on the left-of-center website The Daily Kos.
The more professional critics did not touch this theme and instead focused on the film's “originality.” During the 2010s, we were in the middle of a reboot and sequel-mania, spurred by projects such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the recent Disney live-action films — a trend that still hasn’t ended. There was a fear among critics that “original” works would be harder and harder to come by if we didn’t support innovative directors such as the Wachowskis. Writers Brent Lang passionately penned an article in Variety titled ‘Jupiter Ascending’ Flops: Why the Wachowskis’ Failure Is Bad for Movies.’ In another example, Angela Watercutter made this message a call-to-action, writing:
“The script is uneven, the editing is weird, the performances are weirder, and, for added measure, it all lacks focus. Now shut up and go buy a ticket.”
This argument generated a backlash as some critics argued that no actually Jupiter Ascending was not original. Writer Ryan Britt, again from Tor.com, argued that Jupiter Ascending’s mishmash of various aesthetics made the text derivative and that its harvesting people plot was recycling elements from other texts such as Soylent Green (1973) and The Matrix (1999). On the site TV Over Mind, writer Aiden Mason even argued that the movie would have been better if it were based on a book.
Source: Martin Graupner YouTube Channel — the famous scene and meme where the protagonist realizes his primary food sources is made of corpses.
To be blunt, both the pro and the con sides of this debate are vapid. No story is completely original. All stories are remixing old themes and narratives to say something contemporary about the society they exist in. Soylent Green and Jupiter Ascending may both have plot elements about consuming people. Still, in Soylent Green, it's used to talk about themes of environmental degradation and overpopulation, while Jupiter Ascending is discussing consumption and alienation inside capitalism.
In many ways, this form of criticism treats originality like a commodity that someone can plug into a spreadsheet. (Take 2 Wachowskis. Add $170 million. Bam original work!). The vampire story Dracula, as another example, is also about consuming people, but that doesn’t mean Jupiter Ascending lacks artistic merit simply because Bram Stoker did it first. If story-telling were only about the plot, then we would never tell new stories again because all major plot elements have sort of already been done in one form or another.
Even the critics that tried to examine this work’s messaging often were unable to escape the lens of treating it like a commodity. To many, Jupiter’s actions were frustrating not because they were unrealistic, but because they cast aside the illusion of choice.
A common criticism of this film was that Jupiter Jones starts the movie as a maid scrubbing a toilet and ends the movie as a maid scrubbing a toilet. There was a general frustration in feminist circles that Jupiter lacks “agency” or the ability to impact the story. Channing Tatum’s Caine often has to rescue our protagonist. We often see Mila’s Jupiter wait patiently in an elegant dress, or as she’s falling, or sometimes even both. People wanted her to take charge and fulfill this conception of agency. This viewpoint is perhaps best summed up by Alyssa Rosenberg in the Washington Post, writing:
“…But she’s also apparently not good enough to take on real stewardship of her own planet. Defying Balem’s insistence that she’s superior is a way for Jupiter to let herself off the hook for any responsibility she might have to raise Earth’s level of development or its standing in the galaxy, which has a lot more to offer than just an eternal-youth fixation.”
This mindset wants Jupiter to take on her mantle of power and use it to guide Earth in the “right” direction. It’s a desire for her to take control — to make a choice.
The thing about this interpretation is that it affirms the very same power structures Balem and his siblings upheld — that certain people deserve to rule. Yet, the film suggests that there is something wrong with placing yourself above others. When Jupiter confronts Balem in the climax about how she’s nothing like his mother, the idea of class is front and center in their conversation:
Balem: You should have stayed dead.
Jupiter: I am not your mother.
Balem: No, my mother never cleaned a toilet in her life.
Jupiter: Maybe that was her problem.
Our culture tends to create heroes that are not only the arbiters of their own realities but fit roles of extreme physical prowess or privilege. They are the knights, scholars, or kings of their world, and never the maids or dry cleaners. When I think of the most outstanding feminine heroes of pop culture, they are usually extraordinary, such as Furiosa (Charlize Theron) in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) or Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) in the Harry Potter series (2001–2011).
They more than just survive: they kickass.
In the multiple interviews I have read; however, it's clear that the Wachowskis wanted to craft a different kind of hero. They wanted to make a lead who was empathetic, flawed, as well as someone who used negotiation instead of violence to resolve her problems. Someone who was a very small part of a much larger universe. As Lana Wachowski remarked in an interview with Uproxx:
“That’s one of the biggest pieces of mythology offered up by the film, this idea that we are very young and we are not the center of the universe. We are made very small by the world imagined in this film, insignificant, and our entire history is rendered a footnote in something much bigger.”
If you, a normal person, were thrust into the strange, fantastical world of Jupiter Ascending, then you wouldn’t have the ability to topple the House of Abrasax or the Intergalactic Commonwealth. You’d barely be able to understand the rules of this new universe before being eaten alive by space lizards. I would too.
Jupiter imperfectly makes her way through this movie because she’s a human struggling in a corrosive system far larger than herself, which in a nutshell, is the story of most people struggling within our system. She makes decisions, but they often boil down to whether she works within the system (i.e., does she sign this contract or get married) or does she work outside of it. Her biggest choice is to go to a fortress beneath the planet of Jupiter to rescue her family, and tactically, it’s a flawed plan. She would have died without Caine’s heroics.
Her character upsets our classic model of agency. She is a hero who upsets the false belief that one person can heroically overcome and dismantle a bad system.
Jupiter Ascending is a flawed text that has many structural issues with its narrative and characters. By all means, dump on the zany fight scenes or Eddie Redmayne’s raspy voice.
Yet, the inability of critics to pick up on themes and messages that were very transparent to the plot, at times frustratingly so, reflects a gap in our ability as a society to recognize realistic heroes in our media, especially when those heroes our criticizing a system integral to our daily lives.
Nowhere is this point made more transparent than in the film's closing. The film ends with our lead, strangely happy. She has come to understand more about the universe around her, and she no longer wakes up in the morning, telling the viewer that she “hates her life.” Critics like Alyssa Rosenberg thought this made the narrative regressive because Jupiter has not changed her economic circumstances. She’s still at the bottom of the economic ladder.
Yet as she rides off into the sunset, the text suggests that this is a transitionary period. Caine asks her what she will do with her title as ruler of the Earth, and she claims that she’s still sorting it out herself. “Maybe,” says a smoldering Channing Tatum, “it just means that your majesty’s planet has a different future than the one that was planned for it.”
Often in science fiction, we like to think that a certain future is inevitable — that we will be like the planet Orous and spread humanity (and capitalism) to the far reaches of the galaxy. In its closing moments, Jupiter Ascending screams to its audience with all the subtlety of a bus crashing through your window, that maybe we can push for a different future.
In the meantime, we have to handle the dissonance of the here and now. Your shitty 9-to-5 (or increasingly, your 7-to-9) doesn’t go away simply because you have become cognizant of the oppressive nature of your reality, but that doesn’t mean you stop fighting for a better future anyway.
You put up with what you must and muster yourself to fight a battle that might last longer than the House of Abrasax itself.
We Probably Shouldn’t Teach Kids Hangman Anymore
You might never have heard this game described in such exacting terms before, and that’s because it represents a dark part of American history that our society would prefer to forget. It’s one of the small ways we teach children to be silent on our nation’s past sins, and if we want to heal as a society, we probably shouldn’t have them play games like this anymore.
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
If you are like me, then you might have fond memories of the childhood game Hangman. This game starts with a teacher, counselor, or guardian drawing the abstraction of an empty gallows on a chalkboard. This sketch is followed by a crossbeam with a narrow line hanging down from it, representing a noose.
Dashes are placed beneath the gallows representing the letters of a word or words, and children go around the room guessing letters. If they guess accurately, then the adult fills in the dashes with the correct letter. If they guess incorrectly, then a stick figure is filled in one body part at a time, beginning with the head down. When and if all the body parts are filled in, then the game ends, and implicitly, the figure on the chalkboard (metaphorically) dies.
You might never have heard this game described in such exacting terms before, and that’s because it represents a dark part of American history that our society would prefer to forget. It’s one of the small ways we teach children to be silent on our nation’s past sins, and if we want to heal as a society, we probably shouldn’t have them play games like this anymore.
The person often accredited for Hangman’s earliest iteration is Alice Bertha Gomme (probably because they are referenced to in the Wikipedia entry) in her compendium of children’s games titled The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland. This collection of games was released in two volumes during 1894 and 1898, respectively. Gomme was a famous folklorist, and she allegedly compiled this list from both her own observations and other interviewees. In Volume One, there is a game called Birds, Beasts, and Fishes that is somewhat similar to the quintessential Hangman game, except there are no gallows on the chalkboard, and the word a player can choose is limited to that of a bird, beast, or fish.
Source: The Project Gutenberg — the cover to ‘The Traditional Games of England’
As a student of folklore, Gomme wasn’t making up this game. She was recording something that already existed. Somehow the DNA of that game transmuted into a far darker variant called Hangman, and like with much of folklore, this transition isn’t well-documented. We can only see the after-effects and retrospectively have to fill in some of the dots, or in this case, the executions.
The concept of hanging may seem unsettling to us now, but during the time immediately before The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland’s publication, it was a common occurrence. The legal system between the 17th and early 19th century is known retrospectively in the United Kingdom as “The Bloody Code,” which prescribed the death penalty for countless offenses, some of which were relatively minor (i.e., stealing cider, cutting down young trees, etc.). Hangings were a public spectacle that could draw a huge crowd. The last “official” public execution in Great Britain took place on May, 26 in 1868. This execution was the hanging of Irish nationalist Michael Barrett and it allegedly drew in a crowd of thousands.
Source: The Irish Times — an after the fact illustration of Fenian Michael Barrett’s execution.
It’s easy to see how children might bring such a dark activity into their games. Public executions may have been banned three days after Barrett’s death under the 1868 Capital Punishment Amendment Act. Still, the practice was not abolished outright in Great Britain until 1965 and 1973 in Northern Ireland. Following the capital punishment reforms of ’68, children below the age of 17 were no longer executed, but dozens of young adults above that age were hanged.
America may have been a sea away, but it shared many similar cultural elements, including hangings. Since the year 1700, there have been 9,183 recorded hangings within the United States, and in 1895, when The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland was published, there were 109 alone. These were similarly public spectacles that sometimes drew large crowds. When Rainey Bethea became the last person to receive a public execution in August 1936 in Owensboro, Kentucky, his death reportedly drew in 20,000 people. Rainey’s hanging was by no means an “adult” affair, and there were children in the audience. As reported by The Louisville Courier-Journal:
“The crowd came in automobiles, wagons and by hundreds of freight trains. . . . Hotels were full. In some of Owensboro’s homes all-night “hanging parties” were in progress. At the gallows, located in a vacant lot, hundreds of men, women and children had slept under the gallows’ shadow. . . .”
Source: The Boston Globe — picture of Rainey Bethea’s execution.
Public executions have fallen out of favor in most countries across the world, including the United States. We now consider them to be barbaric, yet the legacy of that trauma continues to echo in our culture, and it is mostly unresolved. The debate over state-sanctioned executions or “Capital Punishment” is still ongoing, with 22 people executed last year, and unsurprisingly that trend cuts unevenly along racial lines.
You may think that Hangman is just a game — a harmless few lines drawn on a chalkboard — but games are often how we teach children what to value, and more importantly, what behavior they should ignore. When we look at our society’s most troubling trends, it is partially through games that they are reinforced. The “boys will be boys” line in response to male aggression, for example, has often been linked to rape culture and sexual assault. The idea that male violence is natural has become a meme we are still grappling with as a society, and such a problem begins with what types of play we condone.
Hangman is a similar, albeit subtle, reminder of the types of violence we consider permissible, and the kinds of lives we think matter. As with many things within America, hangings have a very racialized context.
For many people, the noose is not an abstraction on a chalkboard, but rather an enduring symbol of terror.
The United States has executed many people during its short history (about 16,000 according to information compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center). When you comb through that data, a disproportionate amount of people who have been executed were (and are) Black. There is a famous study done by academics M. Watt Espy and John Ortiz Smykla (commonly called the “Espy file”) that attempts to chronicle all government-sponsored executions in the United States from 1608–2002. Of the executions recorded, 7,353 of those executed were Black.
That’s 50.5% of the total. Black people are roughly 13% of the current population, and even at their height, never surpassed more than 21% (note that accurate estimates remain challenging because of stigmatization). The disproportionate amount of Black people executed is a reflection of historic dehumanization. Two hundred seventy-seven instances in the Espy file come from slave revolts, which were retrospectively never justified. Even more come from the charges of murder, theft, and rape against white Slave Owners and Landowners.
Accusations of rape are particularly contentious because there is a long, bitter history of white womanhood being weaponized against Black people, particularly Black men. There is profoundly-ingrained propaganda within our culture that frames Black men as a hyper-sexualized and dangerous threat to white women. The OFTA Film Hall of Fame movie The Birth of A Nation (1915), for example, features a Black “predator” who lusts after an “innocent” white woman who our “heroes” try to valiantly save. This movie was seen by millions and is considered to be one of America’s first blockbusters.
Source: Roger Ebert — still of the film ‘The Birth of A Nation.’
The hanging we discussed earlier of Rainey Bethea ties into this trend because he was a Black man accused of rape. Rainey allegedly raped an elderly white woman and then suffocated her. We will never know if the official summary of events were what happened (though given our history, I have my doubts), but we do know that the spectacle of white womanhood was one of the reasons the hanging drew such a substantial crowd. The previous sheriff had died, and his wife Florence Thompson had inherited his job, making her the first woman executioner in United States history. As written in The Los Angeles Examiner:
“Much as she abhors the job, Mrs. Florence Thompson, Daviess County’s woman sheriff, is going to spring the trap that sends Rainey Bethea, Negro murderer, to his death…”
The attention given to Mrs. Florence for this execution is both a subversion and enforcement of the fragile white woman trope. She is defending her fellow white women against a perceived injustice, but she’s not deferring that punishment’s enforcement to a man. This context is why the emphasis is made on her “abhorring” the job because its a thing that goes against her alleged white femininity.
While Rainey’s execution happened within the confines of the United States’ perverted justice system, there were also extrajudicial murders known as “lynchings” throughout the 19th and 20th centuries (which continue to this day). These were killings perpetrated by multiple people outside the justice system — though members of the law often condoned them outright. The NAACP notes that from 1882 to 1968, there were 4,743 recorded lynchings and that 3,446 victims, or 72.7% of the total, were Black. From 1920 to 1938, the lynching of Black people was so prevalent that outside the NAACP’s headquarters was a banner with the text: “A man was lynched yesterday.”
Source: Library of Congress — the text “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday” hanging on a banner outside NAACP HQ.
For rape allegations, the white womanhood trope was the bedrock for many of these lynchings, and it was common knowledge. As activist Ida B. Wells documented extensively in her analysis, The Red Record (1895), which was one year after Gomme’s The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland was published:
“In numerous instances where colored men have have been lynched on the charge of rape, it was positively known at the time of lynching, and indisputably proven after the victim’s death, that the relationship sustained between the man and woman was voluntary and clandestine, and that in no court of law could even the charge of assault have been successfully maintained.”
Lynchings were not just limited to rape allegations. They had an array of “justifications” — all of them rooted in instilling racialized terror among Black Americans. While lynchings took numerous forms, from burnings to gunfire, hangings remained viscerally attached to the practice, and because of this fact, the noose has left a scar in our collective memory. All across the United States are stories of hanging trees where lynchings, both real and imagined, took place, and many have even become the subject of modern-day folklore.
For example, in Brazoria, Texas, a tree still referred to fondly by some as the Masonic Oak is the alleged site where two slaves were hung to death. As a ghost story, people continue to claim these slave’s spirits haunt the surrounding landscape. Ironically, the story of the Hanging Tree (and the two slaves who were unjustly killed there) has been overshadowed by another tale about the Masonic Lodge’s founding. People prefer to remember the Lodge’s story, while the former account has been obscured by legend. There are thousands of stories like this across America. We may have ignored much of this history in school, but it still reemerges in our ghost stories and childhood games.
Source: Yan Lee’s Big Tree Studio — an ink illustration of the 400-year-old tree.
The noose is burned into the American consciousness as a symbol of terror, and to this day, people will use it as an act of intimidation against Black people. Shortly after the National Museum of African American History opened in 2016, several nooses were left on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Laminated cards of Black victims of police brutality were recently found tied to nooses on a tree in Milwaukee’s Riverside Park. And of course, lynchings still happen both at the hands of the police (e.g., George Floyd) and private citizens (e.g., Ahmaud Arbery).
The grim history represented in Hangman is fresh, and so it seems a little strange that we would reenact this trauma as a game in classrooms across America.
Children are not oblivious to their history. I was struck the other day when a teacher remarked on Twitter (under the handle @queenyennifer_) how their 8-year-old student was aware of much of the history I have just addressed, writing:
“Today I was left speechless by an 8 year old, who politely told me that it was inappropriate to play hangman with them because of the lynchings of black men and the current state of the world and you know what? He was totally correct. I’m bringing him a prize tomorrow.”
We should not pretend like children are ignorant of the more pernicious aspects of our culture. Games can be both “light” diversions as well as the enforcers of social norms. Children are taught concepts such as responsibility, marriage, or beauty norms on the playground (or Zoom chat) well before being taught the history surrounding them.
What socials norms do you think Hangman enforces?
I loved playing Hangman as a kid. I must have played this game hundreds of times throughout my life. I also didn’t learn about the history in this article until well into adulthood, and if you are like many white Americans, then you probably didn’t either. Hangman seems to be more indicative of our ability to trivialize and ignore our cruel past than to learn from it. This form of behavior hasn’t helped us grow as a society, and it’s time to set it aside.
If you are considering playing this game, maybe think of something else instead. Some teachers currently employ a version where they draw an apple tree instead of a gallows and erase an apple for each incorrect letter. In another version, the teacher draws a snowman one piece at a time.
It’s not difficult to rework this game into literally anything other than a man hanging to their death from a rope.
This point might sound like a small criticism to make given the more massive battles we have to fight, but if we want to build a more tolerant future, we should not trivialize these lynchings and hangings. We should place them in their proper historical context, and part of that work means removing the tools we have used to ignore our past.
It’s only through this work that we can honestly face the weight of history.
You Are Not Crazy for Hating the Idea of Work
Few people I know have admitted to liking what they do at first, if ever, and that speaks to something profoundly disturbing about the nature of work: it’s a deeply unhealthy way to organize our society, and you are not crazy for hating it.
Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash
About a year ago, my friend texted me at two in the morning: “I hate my job. I am going to do it. If I don’t quit soon, then I am going to blow my brains out.”
A natural worrier, I asked her to call me, and we entered into a conversation that lasted well into the early morning. She had been at this position for over three years, and she claimed to have hated every single day. She couldn’t stand it anymore, and in her mind, the decision before her was to either off herself or quit.
“Is this all there is?” she asked tearfully.
I was able to talk her off that ledge, but this has been by no means a one-off experience. I have been receiving a lot of these calls recently, and they have been happening, paradoxically, when millions of Americans are unemployed and need a job more than ever.
If you are like me, then you probably blame yourself for your work-related unhappiness and anxiety. This is a facet of the human condition, you tell yourself, and so there must be something profoundly strange and irregular about you. Everyone else is doing fine. You are the one who cannot get your act together.
The more I have read about work and talked to other people about it, however, the more I have learned that this feeling isn’t an irregularity, but a normal condition of working. Few people I know have admitted to liking what they do at first, if ever, and that speaks to something profoundly disturbing about the nature of work: it’s a deeply unhealthy way to organize our society, and you are not crazy for hating it.
The first thing I want to validate is that your feelings of hatred, anxiety, depression, and alienation towards your job are entirely normal. There is a lot of shame surrounding this topic because unemployed people are often considered lazy, parasitic or worse, but your dissatisfaction with your work is a common one. This trend has been going on for the majority of the American workforce for decades.
As early as 2019, Gallup released a report titled Not Just a Job: New Evidence on the Quality of Work in the United States that claimed that 60% of Americans believed themselves to be in bad or mediocre jobs. This type of finding was not new for the polling organization. In 2017, Gallup released its annual report titled the State of the Global Workplace, which found that only 15% of employees worldwide (and closer to 30% in America) were engaged at work. “Low engagement” is defined here as either having a negative view of the workplace or only doing the bare minimum to make it through the day. Half a decade earlier, in 2013, that same annual report found engagement was similarly at 13% worldwide, and 29% in the US and Canada.
To say that Americans dislike their jobs would be an understatement. We have had a disengaged and unhappy workforce in this country for a long time, and it’s not a phenomenon confined to the 2010s. We have seen similar headlines resurface every decade or so. The release of a 2001 report by the Families and Work Institute found that 70 percent of Americans wanted a different job, with many expressing burnout and stress. The ‘90s had rising complaints of downsizing, burnout, and an overall loss of meaning. The ‘80s saw headlines such as the LA Times article Survey Finds Ambivalence on Workers’ Satisfaction.
Overall satisfaction was reportedly higher before the 1980s, but this was an era of even more pronounced work-related nationalism in daily life than today. It was during the Cold War when critiques of work could very quickly get you called a communist or worse. Elites routinely depicted labor organizing as the first step towards communism and chaos.
Source: New York Evening Telegram — Cartoon “Step by Step” by Sidney Greene (1919)
This had a chilling effect because dissent could be conflated with a failure to uphold fundamental societal ideals. There was a lot of pressure to conform to the life script of the working man (and honestly, there still is). And yet even during this period when job satisfaction was reportedly high, many specific complaints still lingered. As Bob Baker wrote in the LA Times in 1989:
“Every poll since the late 1950s has found job-satisfaction levels between 81% and 92% despite simultaneous responses indicating that only about one-third of all workers are satisfied with issues like job autonomy or the assistance they receive from supervisors.”
The whispers of dissatisfaction have been there for those willing to look, and it is not something simply found in polls and reports. We can observe it in the bedrock of our culture.
Popular songs about hating your job, for example, have existed for over half a century. Singer Lee Dorsey lamented about the soul-crushing work of a coal miner back in 1966, singing: “Five o’clock in the mornin’. I’m already up and gone. Lord, I’m so tired. How long can this go on?” We would see this musical trend of grieving work reoccur throughout the decades: such as with Johnny Paycheck’s Take This Job and Shove It in 1977, Lou Reed’s Don’t Talk to Me About Work in 1983, The Flaming Lips’ Bad Days in 1995, the Cursive’s Dorothy at Forty in 2006, JbDubs’ I Hate My Job in 2011, Twenty-One Pilots Stressed Out in 2015, and many, many more.
The bad workplace is an entire genre in media. The most prominent example in the modern era is The Office (2005–2013), which is primarily about the aimless shenanigans of employees at the Scranton Pennsylvania branch of a paper distribution company called Dunder Mifflin. The underlying humor centers on the utter pointlessness of the work being done there, and the incompetence of the branches’ boss Michael Scott (Steve Carell). The Office is itself a reboot of a British show of the same name, and there are many similar ones lampooning off work such as The IT Crowd (2006–2013) and Workaholics (2011–2017). There are also movies and musicals about the absurdity of corporate culture such as Office Space (1999), Horrible Bosses (2011), How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961), and Promises, Promises (1968).
Of course, the most prolific cultural gripe is the “I hate Mondays” meme, perhaps best personified by the cartoon character Garfield. While this meme is sometimes used to reference the cartoon cat’s own distaste for the weekday, more often than not, it’s brought up in offices around the world to complain about the start of the workweek.
Source: Teepublic — this is a fast-fashion shirt design you can buy online right now.
At this point, ‘I hate my job’ might as well be our national anthem (followed closely by ‘why aren’t you employed yet, you bum’ and ‘how dare you be so ungrateful with the complaining’). Your feeling of dissatisfaction over your wage job is not unusual or strange. It is part of a mundane, albeit ill-spoken of tradition in American life. We talk about it through whispers, jokes, and asides, but never directly.
Millions of people have struggled with this feeling, and yet we still often believe ourselves to be unique in experiencing it. We think that we are crazy for thinking this way because we have been led to believe that the alienation of our working lives is a solitary burden.
Worse, when we finally dare to tell people we are unhappy with working, the answer we receive is that our thoughts go against the very fabric of reality.
Defenders of the working order will often wax poetically about how this system of work is the best way to structure society. Everyone from Pope Paul II to Benjamin Franklin has praised the dignity of work. It was President Bill Clinton who famously extolled the virtual of wage jobs as a justification to sign a piece of legislation that rolled back safety net programs in favor of work requirements.
“We all know that there are a lot of good people on welfare who just get off of it in the ordinary course of business but that a significant number of people are trapped on welfare for a very long time, exiling them from the entire community of work that gives structure to our lives.”
The problem, and the reason so many of us feel crazy, is that this conception of work is a fabrication. Humans didn’t walk out of Africa with a suit and a desire to meet their scrum targets. Many hunter-gather societies weren’t performing the long sprints typified by modern work. An analysis of the Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia found their workweek to be around 15 to 20 hours, and its not the same type of labor we are familiar with. Academic Peter Gray. for example, described in his Play Makes Us Human series for Psychology Today how a lot of these societies engaged in work that was complex, community-driven, and self-directional.
Modern work can, in many ways, be more taxing and limiting by comparison. One study out of the University of Cambridge found that when hunter-gathers in the Philippines converted to farming, they worked an average of 10 hours more per week (i.e., they moved from 20 to 30 hours on average). This workload is far less than the packed schedules of fully “developed” societies. The average American employee works 44 hours per week, and some Americans can get up to 70, 90, or even 100 hours a week.
Source: MotherJones — illustration by Mark Matcho for article ‘Harrowing, Heartbreaking Tales of Overworked Americans’
We see here how societal progress has not necessarily led to greater leisure. We have, in fact, largely moved away from the less stressful work environments of pre-agricultural societies towards ones that are more atomized and laborious. These more demanding schedules, as we have already seen, have led to a lot of workers being depressed and unhappy with their jobs.
I want to stress that this is not a call to return to that state of “pre-civilization.” I happen to like penicillin and cat memes. Life then was hard (though if you could make it past adolescence, not as short or as brutish as some assume), but I bring up this research to highlight that our ideas of work have very much been in flux over the millennia. The modern job, in particular, is somewhat new. Some people trace it to the chemical corporation DuPont during the 1910s.
The era of the modern wage job is tied to Industrialization. The loss of leisure and independence that came with a paycheck was something that greatly concerned many self-employed, predominantly white Americans during the 19th century. Labor was primarily seen by that segment of the population as a transitional activity you did until you had the capital to open up your own shop. As Abraham Lincoln said at the Wisconsin State Fair in Milwaukee in 1859:
“In these free States, a large majority are neither hirers nor hired. Men, with their families — wives, sons, and daughters — work for themselves, on their farms, in their houses and their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand, nor of hirelings or slaves on the other.”
We are now far removed from that world — and it’s essential to bear in mind that it was one never accessible to many women, people of color, and poor whites. As Industrialization started to take root in America, the people who did live that life, however, became bitter about its end. Organizations such as the Knights of Labor would sometimes refer to a waged position as “wage slavery” because you were tied to the capital of your employer and not your own.
To be fair, Industrialization did make the life of the average worker a lot worse before it got better. Workers in American factories could be expected to pull ten or twelve-hour days, six or seven days a week. The labor of the standard American factory worker was often done in appalling conditions where accidents and even deaths were alarmingly common.
During Industrialization, this exploitation was based heavily on the classist idea that work was the proper place of all men. As Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle summed up in his inaugural speech as the new Rector of the University of Edinburgh on April 2, 1866:
“Work is the grand cure for all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind — honest work, which you intend getting done.”
This rhetoric was more than an inspirational quote to put up on posters. Elites in both the United Kingdom and America believed it was their proper place to push back against the overly entitled poor. This often meant scaling-back protections to hold the poor “responsible” for their lot in life, and in some cases, sent to prison for their debts (see Debtor’s Prisons).
Source: Department of Justice — A building in Accomack County, Va., which served as a debtor’s prison from 1824 to 1849.
While the fight for better working conditions and benefits is retrospectively depicted as a march towards higher productivity, the truth is that the early twentieth century was a time of intense mobilization from the working class. Henry Ford, for example, is often given credit for the five day work week because he standardized it for his employees on September 25, 1926, but the history of the Ford Motor Company was filled with violent clashes against its workers. One of the darkest periods in its history occurred six years later when a ‘Hunger’ March led to a confrontation with police and security guards that claimed the lives of four protestors. Ford Motors would end up being one of the last major automotive manufacturers to recognize the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, or UAW for short, and let its employees unionize under them.
As we can see, the movement towards unionization was not an ‘objective’ attempt to wrangle more productivity out of workers, but an intense series of engagements — both physical and political. These efforts (and the countless like them by other organizers in sectors across the country) led to many of the labor protections we enjoy and know today. Everything from the eight-hour workday to employer-sponsored healthcare can be traced back to the labor movement. By the 1950s, their efforts had become an ingrained part of US society. As President Eisenhower said of unions in 1952:
“Today in America, unions have a secure place in our industrial life. Only a handful of reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions and depriving working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice.”
For a long time, there was an uneasy truce between the employer class and their fortunate employees. This state of government-backed, employee-protections, however, was not any more natural than the classist worldview of Carlyle or the Libertarian mindset of Lincoln. These were rights hard-won through political mobilization, and over the past couple of decades, we have seen them chipped away. Unions have been on the steady decline due to both anti-union legislation like right-to-work laws as well as companies engaging in regular union-busting. The very welfare reform legislation Bill Clinton signed into law in 1996 detrimentally added more stringent work requirements to those Americans drawing on the government for help.
For the longest time thought to be backward and archaic, the Victorian work norms of the 19th and 20th centuries have once again permeated our culture. We right now exist in a time of a scaled-back safety net, and insecure employment. Conservatives now want to undo the employee-employer bargain entirely, and they aren’t subtle about it. During a segment for the Fox Business Network about how many Americans can no longer afford to retire, Chief Investment Officer for Trend Macrolytics, Donald Luskin, had this to say:
“What a great country where we have the opportunity to keep working … This is a great blessing! You should embrace it.”
If Thomas Carlyle were alive today, then it would take little imagination to see him calling America’s insecure state of employment a blessing as well. Luskin would go on in that interview to mock leisure activities done during retirement as uninteresting and dull when compared to work. We see here how the managerial class is more than willing to call you crazy for wanting to be protected from their exploitation.
In fact, it’s their first line of defense against all dissent.
When employee engagement or happiness is discussed, employers often point out superficial justifications for why so much of the workforce has been dissatisfied for over half a century. For example, when considering that widely read State of the Global Workplace report we mentioned earlier, the Chairmen of Gallup, Jim Clifton, blamed ill-equipped bosses as the primary cause, writing:
“Employees everywhere don’t necessarily hate the company or organization they work for as much as they do their boss. Employees — especially the stars — join a company and then quit their manager. It may not be the manager’s fault so much as these managers have not been prepared to coach the new workforce.”
In other words, it’s middle-management who’s to blame, not the system.
Listicles and opinion pieces are very keen to keep workplace dissent in the realm of individual reform. The conversation tends to never go beyond learning how to up-manage your boss or polish your resume. When breaking down a similar Gallup poll two years later, for example, the HR website StaffedSquare listed five major reasons why employee engagement was so low. These were: your boss, your colleagues, type of work, commute, and stagnant career growth. Notice that none of these points touched upon systemic problems such as poor pay or diminishing labor rights, and some of them were downright demeaning. In one suggestion, the editor mentioned that worker attitude could be a factor, writing:
“A poor attitude from the employee can create a bad air at work. If they aren’t willing to try to be happy, they never will be.”
These suggestions make it sound like most workers are suffering from an individual misalignment issue. If only they got the “right” job, boss, or weren’t such sticks-in-the-mud, then they could indeed be happy.
The reality though, is that many times the employer, not the employee, is to blame. There has been, for example, a lot of reporting in the last couple of years about how bad warehouse jobs can be. Amazon, in particular, came under fire in 2018 when it was discovered that some employees were peeing into bottles to meet tight deadlines. We have since learned that the floors of Amazon warehouses can be a grueling environment where workers are pushed to meet punishing quotas in exchange for meager pay and little benefits.
Source: MarketWatch — JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Amazon is by no means the only type of company with such a terrible environment for its employees. Warehouses across the economy receive similar complaints. Similarly, many fast-food settings are also negligent in treating their employees, who, on top of erratic schedules and non-livable wages, routinely receive burns and other preventable accidents. The underclass of Americans who have “low-skilled” jobs (a derogatory term used to devalue certain work) often have to endure terrible pay, irregular shifts, and mediocre benefits.
Even Americans with “good” jobs are still suffering longer hours, stagnating wages, and decreased benefits when compared to their peers in other developed nations. Paternity leave and robust, government-financed healthcare are privileges enjoyed in nearly every industrialized economy on the planet, but not in America, where two-thirds of all bankruptcies cite medical issues as a chief financial reason.
We should want to improve upon these sub-optimal conditions, but rather than systemically address them the number one response from employers is to blame employees for their own suffering. Companies such as Amazon will routinely deny the complaints of employee organizers as being directed by outside influences. Some entities will be far more direct. Warehouse consultant Rene Jones wrote a condescending article titled Career Advancement Tips for Warehouse Employees back in 2006 in Electrical Wholesaling, and his advice was:
“No one wants to be miserable at work. If you feel you have been slighted by the organization, that is your problem. Either do something about it, talk to your supervisor, or leave.”
To suggest that someone’s unhappiness with their warehouse job is because they are professionally misaligned is insulting to their humanity. Yet, that’s the first and only piece of advice most people receive. Many of these workers are experiencing subpar or even abusive working conditions, and that cannot be resolved by a simple heart-to-heart with their manager.
This solution obscures the real problem at hand. A company does not stumble into longstanding, abusive workplace practices. It’s a purposeful choice, and changing it is something that often has to happen in spite of leadership. When Amazon workers recently staged a strike on May 1st, this year, they weren’t protesting better lines of communication with their bosses. They wanted materially better protections and benefits, and Amazon denied there was even a problem. The company blamed the strike on the “irresponsible actions of labor groups spreading misinformation.”
By individualizing systemic problems, this mentality blames many workers for their own oppression, and it makes a lot of us feel crazy. When breaking down her personal experience as a warehouse worker, Emily Guendelsberge, talked extensively about how such jobs impact your mental health: “It’s making us sick and terrified and cruel and hopeless.”
As workers, it’s not enough to overcome the gaslighting of our employers. That’s the easy part. We also have to silence the oppressor inside our minds.
When you start to critique the state of work, the first thing you notice is how hesitant people are to engage in this topic at all. Many workers do not feel like they can even have this conversation. During the 2008 recession, for example, Gallup’s Lydia Saad released an article with the title US Workers’ Job Satisfaction Is Relatively High, which strangely placed complete job satisfaction among US workers at almost 50%.
When looking at this data more closely, however, something peculiar happens. Workers in that 2008 study may have indicated a high amount of general job satisfaction. Still, as the article would go on to note, the same could not be said about their “job stress (only 27% completely satisfied), pay (28%), company-sponsored retirement plans (34%), chances for promotion (35%), and health insurance benefits (40%).” Everything was okay, except when it came to the little things like being stressed, and having enough pay, and proper health benefits. (Note: in the survey, most workers still noted some satisfaction in many of these areas.)
There is intense pressure to always express gratitude for having a job in the first place. When describing his work-related angst in the article 3 Things You’ll Only Understand if You’re in the “I Hate My Job” Club, the writer Richard May repeatedly expressed feeling “lucky to be employed at all,” and mind you, this was for an audience of people dissatisfied with their employment. This internal monologue is ever-present for most people, and yet as we have seen, it exists alongside a reportedly growing dissatisfaction with the nature of work.
Source: idlehearts — a widely circulated quote of actress Cameron Diaz from an interview she did on the 2006 film ‘The Holiday.’
There are many reasons for this dissonance. I have written in the past about the social stigma that occurs from even broaching this topic (see The Stigma of Not Working). Another thing that deserves to be highlighted, however, is that employers hold a lot of leverage over their employees’ standard of living. As Lydia Saad described condescendingly in the Gallup article above:
“To some extent, this [high satisfaction] may reflect a heightened appreciation on the part of some workers for having a job at a time when they realize good jobs are hard to come by, and when being out of work is no picnic.”
It’s only alluded to here, but that “no picnic” is the starvation and homelessness that results from a loss of income. While some people do genuinely enjoy what they do, many more are afraid that tomorrow will be the day this all ends, the day they will be left starving on the street. When describing the view of his career in the video Moving to LA during a nervous breakdown, breakup, BLM protests, & a pandemic, YouTuber Tarek Ali had this to say:
“I am just a huge planner, and I have the worst anxiety when it comes to making decisions because I feel like nobody is there to catch me, and if I mess up, I’m going to be on the street.”
I see this fear reflected everywhere, and it can cause people to enter into terrible working relationships. A 1993 study released by the Families and Work Institute found that: “conflicts between work and family tend to be resolved in favor of the job, usually to the detriment of the family and the worker.” A 2009 Pew Research poll found that the primary reason nine-in-ten Americans’ work was to support themselves or their families. When reporter Emily Guendelsberger talked about her experiences at several fast-food jobs, she remarked on how providing for one’s families was how many workers found themselves trapped in dead-end situations. Her manager at a McDonald's told her to ignore the harassment, saying:
“You have a family to support. You think about your family, and you walk away.”
If you don’t have a job, then you and your dependents are denied the tools to live. I think we have to be honest with ourselves about how that hold over our subsistence plays a massive role in why we take a job in the first place.
One of the best descriptions of this bind might come from Heike Geissler’s autobiographical novel Seasonal Associates (2018). Early on in the book, Geissler describes her justification for taking a Holiday shift at an Amazon warehouse in Leipzig, Germany, in 2010.
“You don’t want this job but you’re sensible and you have kids who want things every half hour, and your boyfriend wants things occasionally, and you want things of your own as well, although you hardly ever want anything and you usually pretend you need the things you want. You simply need money regardless of the time of year, you’re just like everyone else in that respect…”
This is the paradox of a lot of jobs. They are unhealthy. Your body physically and mentally wants to be someplace else, but you cannot leave because you need the money to survive. You are torn between the cruelty of having to stay and the psychological desire of wanting to go anywhere else. You dream of leaving, but in your mind, there is nowhere else to go free from exploitation. You start to go crazy because everywhere people tell you that this is normal, and yet everything you experience tells you that it is not.
This leaves you in the precarious position of not only having to fight for better labor conditions and a more livable salary, but also having to fight against the oppressor inside your own head.
You find yourself asking: Is that all there is?
The famous jazz singer Peggy Lee released the song Is That All There Is? (written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and originally performed by Georgia Brown) in 1969. The song is about a narrator reflecting on her life, and her amazement that there is nothing more to major milestones such as marriage that she has been told hold intrinsic significance.
Is that all there is, is that all there is
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is
Leiber and Stoller’s lyrics reflect a deep nihilism with social constructs. Under this interpretation, the things we think matter do so more because of the psychological power we as a society give them. Marriage is only a big deal because people say so, and the same can be said of work.
I bring up this song because I see this feeling a lot with new workers. Many people will enter the labor force after being told grandiose or even mythological stories about how meaningful their participation will be, only to realize that that vision does not align with reality. You are not doing some intrinsic duty. You are filling out spreadsheets or lifting boxes to pay the rent.
After a fair amount of anger and depression, they will start to ask the question, ‘Is that all there is?’ and something that saddens me is that for many people, the answer is yes. I have known too many friends who have lost people to depression and anxiety over the past few years. Suicide is, by some accounts, the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, and among Millenials and Gen Zers, it’s far higher. I have been there myself, standing on the roof, asking myself if it really would be so terrible to jump.
For me, it took taking a break from work to get a better hold on my mental health. When I hear people dismiss other’s criticisms of work, my experience tells me that they are making a call on whose lives they think do not matter. I hear a match being lit as the word crazy is formed before it’s ever spoken.
And some people do end up jumping.
There has been a lot of talk about burnout and depression these past few years. Our work culture has been called unhealthy everywhere from The Atlantic to the ever-business friendly Forbes, and I think its time to start asking if the status quo is worth it.
Do we really think the current system is truly worth all of this unhappiness?
Is it worth us doubting our own sanity?
Is it worth all the lives of those we have lost?
Is that all there is?
Yes, people do like doing “things.” People wrote, farmed, made art, built buildings, advanced science, and created communities before the emergence of the modern nine-to-five. Those tasks, however, are not the same thing as earning a wage for labor you may or may not want to do, on a schedule you may or may not control, with people you may or may not like, for a person who dictates what you can and cannot do.
A job is not the same thing as your labor.
I do not doubt that a minority of workers are happy. I am friends with a few of them. I see their Instagram posts. I read their comments on my articles as they complain that I just don’t see reality as they do. They do seem content.
I also do not doubt that these people are a minority. They are the winners of this bizarre system. They are often more prosperous and more powerful than everyone else, and we should not pretend like their satisfaction is a thing experienced by the majority of humanity.
It is not.
We must embrace that this is a bad system. It is something that actively makes many around us unhappy.
And you are not crazy for hating it.
The Pain of Revisiting ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’
A lot has changed since the 90s, both for me and society-at-large. And so when I recently revisited the family comedy, I did so with apprehension. I had the sneaking suspicion that it would not hold up to the nostalgia of my youth, and sadly, I was right.
When I was a teenager, I had a habit of rewatching movies over and over again on my bulky Dell Laptop. These movies were often awful. I obsessed over Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever (1995) or the slap schtick shenanigans of Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler, and Diane Keaton in The First Wives Club (1996). I didn’t realize at the time that all of these movies were campy and often had a gay or queer subtext.
Of all the movies I watched, no film was I obsessed with more than Mrs. Doubtfire (1993). The Robin William’s comedy about a man cross-dressing as a nanny to secretly spend more time with his kids was a movie I delighted in, although, at the time, I didn’t understand why.
In retrospect, it was one of the few mainstream movies that had actual queer representation, and in the smallest of ways, I felt seen.
A lot has changed since the 90s, both for me and society-at-large. And so when I recently revisited the family comedy, I did so with apprehension. I had the sneaking suspicion that it would not hold up to the nostalgia of my youth, and sadly, I was right.
Mrs. Doubtfire was a smash hit in the early 90s. It grossed over $441 million worldwide, which would be almost $790 million today. The film’s success was the result of several simultaneous factors. There was, first and foremost, the star appeal of the late Robin Williams, who had impressed the world with his comedic chops in the Disney film Aladdin (1992) a year prior.
There was also the fact that this film normalized a contentious issue in American culture — divorce. The protagonist Daniel Hillard (Robin Williams), goes through a messy breakup with his wife Miranda Hillard (Sally Field) in the movie, and a big takeaway is that it doesn’t make that family unit inferior. As Daniel’s female persona Mrs. Euphegenia Doubtfire says at the very end of the film in response to a little girl’s letter:
“You know, some parents, when they are angry, they get along much better when they don’t live together. They don’t fight all the time, and they can become better people, and much better mummies and daddies for you….There are all sorts of different families, Katie. Some families have one mommy. Some families have one daddy or two families…But if there is love dear, those are the ties that bound. And you’ll have a family in your heart forever.”
We have retrospectively come to praise this film’s take on the modern family, but that perspective wasn’t a given. When no-fault divorce became an option for Americans, starting with California in 1970, there was this irrational fear that the family unit would implode, especially after the divorce rate rose dramatically throughout that first decade. Conservative organizations like Marriage Savers (1996) were founded in the 90s with the intended purpose of lowering the divorce rate, you know, for the children.
These fears proved to be unfounded. The divorce rate rose mainly because, well, people finally had the option to, and ever since then, it has slowly lowered. This decline is especially true for Millennials and Generation Zers. For a variety of reasons (cough, cough, wealth inequality, and changing gender norms), they have not been marrying at the same rates. Mrs. Doubtfire was a cultural touchstone pushing to normalize divorce, which at that point was a common but ridiculed trend for decades.
Another thing in this film’s favor is its large queer following. Author Tim Teeman described the film in the Daily Beast as the “opening salvo” in a pop culture war that led to LGBTQIA+ acceptance. Writer Derrick Clifton mentioned in Mic how the movie inspired them to dress in drag for the first time.
Mrs. Doubtfire would arguably be classified as camp, which is a loose term for a genre of over-the-top works that usually focus on marginalized voices laughing in the face of mainstream society. They are works full of what Susan Montag would describe as “artifice and exaggeration,” and Mrs. Doubtfire certainly has a lot of that. This film is chock-full of references to various things in queer culture. When Daniel is “transforming” into Mrs. Doubtfire for the first time, for example, he goes through a serious of impressions from Barbara Streisand singing Don’t Rain On My Parade, to the song Matchmaker from the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, to Norma Desmond’s “I’m ready for my closeup” in Sunset Boulevard.
There is also the fact that the lead’s brother Frank (played by gay icon Harvey Fierstein) is heavily implied to be gay, which was sort of that actor’s entire schtick (see Independence Day, Mulan, etc.). Frank lives with a flamboyant man named Jack (Scott Capurro), who Daniel openly refers to his children as their aunt. Frank and Jack are presented as asexual in that 90s way queer characters were portrayed back then (see also To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar), but their presence would be hard to dismiss simply as two friends living together.
It was sadly daring during the 90s to have any gay representation, let alone, a couple in a film purporting to claim how family structures should work. To give you an example of how homophobic society was back then, the year following Mrs. Doubtfire’s release, Democratic president Bill Clinton signed the policy Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which banned openly queer people from serving in the military. The closing monologue given by Mrs. Doubtfire might not mention queer families, directly, but the subtext was definitely there.
From this perspective, Mrs. Doubtfire is a progressive movie. By many respects, it still is, and yet, these relatively positive portrayals come at the expense of a text that is pretty openly transphobic.
The painful thing about Mrs. Doubtfire is that it’s a movie uplifting so much (e.g., gay people, varied family structures, etc.) at the expense of trans people. When you comb through the narrative closely, a lot of the humor is centered around how peculiar it is for Daniel to be in a dress, and that is not a perspective that honors varying gender identities but lampoons them.
When Daniel, for example, sees an image of himself in the mirror while in a dress without Mrs. Doubtfire’s facial prosthetic, he casually calls himself Norman Bates. This comment is in direct reference to the movie Psycho (1960), where the character Norman adopts the persona of his mother to kill occupants of his motel. It may seem like an off comment, but trans people have been likened to serial killers for decades (see Silence of the Lambs), and it ties into a long, bitter history.
In another example, Daniels’s wife Miranda puts out an advertisement for a nanny, and Daniel calls in as various “eccentric” voices to make his bid as Mrs. Doubtfire seem better in comparison. Amongst people advocating for corporal punishment and putting their children in cells, we have someone say: “I don’t work with the males because I use to be one.” Based on the horrified look on Miranda’s face as she ends the call, this is portrayed to the viewer as a bad thing.
When Daniel’s kids discover Mrs. Doubtfire is not a cisgendered woman, their first response is to threaten to call the police and assault her. “You are going to get it in the balls,” Daniel’s son says. Keep in mind this is before Daniel’s deception is revealed. The only they know at this point is that Mrs. Doubtfire has a penis.
That response (although common for the 90s) is still transphobic, and the text doesn’t bother to refute this position. When Daniel comes forward with the truth several moments later to his two eldest children, the response from his son is telling. Chris Hillard (Matthew Lawrence) refuses to hug his father, and Daniel shrugs it off by saying, “It’s okay. It’s a guy thing.”
None of this has aged particularly well, and that is especially true for the plot itself. One of the most common transphobic arguments is that trans people are pretending to be trans so that they can have access to “vulnerable” people. The bathroom debates of the 2010 culture wars, for example, were centered around the erroneous assertion that men would use trans identity to sneak into bathrooms to rape women and abduct children. This type of thinking was prevalent even before the 2010s (note a huge reason why the Equal Rights Amendment was killed during the 70s was that opponents such as Phyllis Schlafly argued that it would lead to the mandating of unisex bathrooms).
This characterization is false on multiple levels that have been thoroughly debunked elsewhere (see some here and here); however, within this very liberal movie, we have this same talking point reenacted uncritically. The plot of Mrs. Doubtfire is that of a cisgendered man who has been barred from the courts from parenting his children because of his gross negligence, only to use cross-dressing to circumvent that order secretly. Daniel uses the gender identity of Mrs. Doubtfire — one he is only voyeuristically attached to — to manipulate and spy on his family.
This plot is a narrative right out of the conservative imagination, and one very much rooted in 90’s culture.
When we talk about older works, and yes, 1993 was almost 30 years ago, the phrase that often gets trotted out is that you have to place the work within its proper historical context. I have always struggled with this justification because, for me, it has often seemed like an excuse. People who ask you to place something into a historical context are many times trying to sidestep discussions of discrimination that occur within a text, and by extension, the discrimination that occurred within that time period at large.
Acts of transphobia do not happen in isolation.
The 90s were extremely discriminatory toward LGBTQIA+ people, especially trans and gender non-conforming people. The right to not be fired for your gender identity was only just affirmed with the Supreme Court ruling Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, in June of 2020. In the 90s, it was very much a possibility (and for many, an ongoing reality) that you could be fired or denied housing for your gender identity.
There were also the physical acts of harassment, assault, and outright murder that occurred. We don’t have the exact number of hate crimes committed against trans people during this time. The FBI only started recording such things as recently as 2013, and even then only unreliably so, but we know it happened. The same year Mrs. Doubtfire came out in theaters, a trans man named Brandon Teena was raped and murdered in Nebraska (his story would become the basis for the 1999 movie Boys Don’t Cry). We will probably never have an accurate number of such assaults because that would rely on law enforcement to gender trans people correctly, and even now, that does not always happen (see Jayne Thompson).
When I watch Mrs. Doubtfire, I cannot help but see how this context of transphobia is mostly ignored. A viewer can watch this film and walk away wholly ignorant of the outright discrimination trans people experienced during that time. Yet, the same cannot be said about the affirmation of their own transphobia.
A great example of this happens near the climax of the film. After Mrs. Doubtfire has been outed to the Hillard family, a judge solidifies Daniel’s custody arrangement because he thinks he is fundamentally unwell:
“The reality, Mr Hillard, is that your lifestyle over the past month has been very unorthodox. And I refuse to further subject three innocent children to your peculiar and potentially harmful behaviour…I am suggesting a period of psychological testing and perhaps treatment for you.”
While the judge may not say outright that he finds Daniel’s gender non-conforming behavior to be an act of mental instability, that is definitely the subtext there. If you are unaware, queer identities have often been conflated with mental illness. It was all too common during much of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century for people to send queer loved ones to conversion therapy or reparative therapy so that they could be “cured.”
It’s only been very recently that this harmful practice has been banned in many states across the country, and its legally still allowed in numerous regions throughout the US. During the 90s, the idea that queerness was a mental affliction was even more common than now, and many Mrs. Doubtfire viewers would have held it.
Daniel having his children taken away from him is depicted as a sad moment. Still, I never felt like they refuted the transphobic subtext woven into the judge’s final remarks because narratively, the judge is kind of right. Daniel’s behavior was extremely inappropriate. He was a negligent caregiver who manipulated his way back into his children’s lives through cross-dressing. This duplicitousness fulfills a lot of negative stereotypes about trans people, and it can be seen as hurtful. As a recent Change.org petition remarked on why they wanted to cancel the 2019 musical adaptation of this film:
“Violence against trans people, especially trans women of color, is on the rise, and this is due in part to our culture’s assumptions that trans people are sneaky, lying, or perverted. We can’t change the ideas that were propagated by our industry in the past, but we can keep them from existing in the future.”
By voyeuristically using the veneer of transgender identity to talk about a cisgendered relationship, the film unintentionally says some pretty offensive things in the process.
I loved this movie as a kid, and in many ways, I still do. It does so many things right: Robin Williams is a great actor, even if many of his jokes no longer land for me; I admire what is being said about all family dynamics being acceptable, and now that I am in an actual queer relationship, Frank and Scott’s dynamic is actually funnier to me. I have had many similar catty conversations with my husband.
I do not think the creators purposefully intended to lambaste trans identity in the way that I have described. I have found no evidence that suggests director Chris Columbus or writers Randi Mayem Singer or Leslie Dixon set out to be maliciously transphobic.
In fact, I don’t think it was even a consideration.
That doesn’t mean the jokes I described above sting any less. While we could say that the creators were working within the confines of their society, I think that gives them too much of a pass. Many times people make bad films and jokes not because they are carefully weighing what polite society will permit them to say, but because they agree with the prevalent norms of “polite” society. Their hatred comes out, not willfully so, but instinctually, almost like breathing, and retrospectively, we don’t need to give that subtle hatred the benefit of the doubt.
We are not required to be kind about the past’s mistakes.
While we can recognize the historical context of a work (and we should), that does not mean we need to ignore its flaws for the sake of other’s comfort. It’s true that Mrs. Doubtfire, as well as other films such as In & Out (1997) and The Birdcage (1996), went a long way in cementing queerness in popular culture. It’s also true that many of these films drew upon stereotypes that we would not find appropriate to replicate today.
Mrs. Doubtfire conformed to some norms while flaunting others, and both that good and bad deserves to be highlighted.
Rather than lament this fact, we should celebrate this film’s datedness. We are no longer in the 90s anymore — with all the hatred and hurt that came with it — and I couldn’t be happier.
“Daenerys was Wrong” & Other Lies We Tell Ourselves About Violence
In focusing on how the show failed her, however, we ignore what making her into a villain says about the state of entertainment. Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) wanted to change the world, and the quickest way she saw to do that was to kill countless people. That framing says something about how the privileged view progress: you either bend to the worldview of your oppressor in favor of incrementalism, or you light the match that causes it all to burn down.
Daenerys of the House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, The Unburnt, Breaker of Chains, Mother of Dragons, and Queen of, etc., etc., was wrong.
Near the end of season eight, the “Mad” Queen sacks the capital of King’s Landing with her mighty dragons. She storms the gates and tries to conquer the Iron Throne through cruel and violent means and kills thousands of people in the process.
She was also a hero who freed tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of slaves from captivity. She destroyed imperialist lineages everywhere she went and made a concerted effort to listen to those “beneath” her. The populace of the Medieval continent of Westeros — although indeed not its nobility — might have been better off if she had succeeded in her conquest.
So was she a hero, or was she a villain?
There has been a lot of ink spilled on why the series finale from the hit TV show Game of Thrones (2011–2019) was so terrible. Some have argued that it was sexist to depict one of the most powerful women in media as a genocidal monster. Others have asserted that her characterization makes no sense in the context of her arc and the larger story. These are all excellent points that have been written about extensively and merit wider discussion.
In focusing on how the show failed her, however, we ignore what making her into a villain says about the state of entertainment. Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) wanted to change the world, and the quickest way she saw to do that was to kill countless people.
That framing says something about how the privileged view progress: you either bend to the worldview of your oppressor in favor of incrementalism, or you light the match that causes it all to burn down.
For the privileged, there is no in-between.
For many, talking about the Game of Thrones (GoT) finale is an emotionally charged ordeal — even almost a year after it aired. Many people were invested in how the show would end, and not just because the HBO network released a ubiquitous ad campaign across the country. GoT was one of the most-watched shows in the world at the time. It averaged over 40 million views per episode in season eight (a number that doesn’t include illegal streams).
This attention had as much to do with its characters as it did with the notorious twists and turns in the narrative. Daenerys, or Dani, as she became affectionately called by fans, earned so much attention that many named their children after her. As one fan told the Ringer about their decision to name their daughter Khaleesi (the Dothraki word for Queen):
“What I liked about [Game of Thrones’] Khaleesi is that she was strong. No matter what happened to her, she always found a way to survive and come out on top.”
This love often had to do with what she stood for. She not only assembled an army to assert her claim to the Iron Throne but attempted to right injustices wherever she saw them. She dismantled slavery and uplifted former slaves as advisers to her court.
In a world full of men (and a couple of women) monologuing about power and honor, she was one of the very few who unapologetically wanted to undo the status quo. As she remarked to Tyrion Lannister about the Westerosian nobility in Episode 8 of Season 5, Hardhome:
DAENERYS: Lannister, Targaryen, Baratheon, Stark, Tyrell: they’re all just spokes on a wheel. This one’s on top, then that one’s on top, and on and on it spins, crushing those on the ground.
TYRION: It’s a beautiful dream, stopping the wheel. You’re not the first person who’s ever dreamt it.
DAENERYS: I’m not going to stop the wheel, I’m going to break the wheel.
Daenerys wanted to change the world, and she wasn’t afraid to do so through steel and flames.
Source: Nerdist — a shot of Daenerys after she has burned the Dothraki leadership alive.
The decision to make one of the few characters fighting for social justice an insane tyrant seemed like a betrayal of the type of change Game of Thrones implied was possible. People like Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) and Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon) may be the ones who hold actual power in the system of Westeros (and ours as well), but for a fleeting moment in time, we were led to believe that dissidents like Daenerys and Jon Snow (Kit Harington) could organize for the greater good. They built a coalition to combat the White Walkers (i.e., the evil, zombie-like horde threatening the world) and coordinated many of the Kingdoms against the leadership of the much-hated Cersei.
In the penultimate episode The Bells, however, all of this hope came crashing down. The writer’s decided Daenerys would have a “mental” breakdown during the battle, and she turned her dragons on the citizenry of King’s Landing. She incinerated men, women, and children alike, and the show implies that this was the inevitable outcome of her worldview. As Tyrion said to Jon Snow shortly before the latter stabbed her to death:
TYRION: When she murdered the slavers of Astapor, I’m sure no one but the slavers complained. After all, they were evil men. When she crucified hundreds of Meereenese nobles, who could argue? They were evil men. The Dothraki khals she burned alive? They would have done worse to her. Everywhere she goes, evil men die and we cheer her for it.
This monologue is remarkably similar to the Holocaust speech “First They Came…” by Martin Niemöller. In the speech, Niemöller talks about how he accepted the Nazis as long as they didn’t target his preferred group, but by the time they went after him, there was no one left to speak up on his behalf.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.
It’s a famous and well-studied speech about the dangers of ignoring the early warning signs of totalitarianism, and I guarantee you that many Americans had to read it in school. The prolific nature of this framing means that Daenerys is not-so-subtly being compared to Adolf Hitler in this scene. Her efforts to undo the status quo of slavery and aristocracy are consequently flattened to be no better than the Third Reich targeting marginalized groups such as the Jews.
This flattening has a name — “moral equivalency,” or the concept that one stance is just as bad as another. We see this type of argument a lot in pop culture whenever a protagonist or group dares to take up arms to challenge the status quo, and it has some real-world parallels as well.
There are countless examples in media about freedom fighters and revolutionaries descending into terrifying authoritarianism. The famous video game BioShock Infinite (2013), which has sold over 11 million copies, has a notorious example in the way of minor antagonist Daisy Fitzroy (Kimberly Brooks). She is a black, anti-racism advocate who leads a revolution against the violent, white supremacist state of Columbia only to be depicted as going mad with power.
“Cut ’em down, and they just grow back,” Fitzroy said as she held a terrified white child in her arms, pointing at his head with a gun. “If you wanna get rid of the weed, you gotta pull it up from the root.” The NPC character Elizabeth (Courtnee Draper) then guns Fitzroy down several seconds later.
Source: RPG Codex
We find another example in the Star Wars film Rogue One (2016). Protagonist Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) has to track down former Rebel General, and father figure Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) — a not so subtle nod to controversial Cuban revolutionary Ernesto Guevara de la Serna or Che Guevara — because he is holding a critical person hostage. Saw Gerrera, at this point, has been kicked out of The Rebellion because his tactics are considered too extreme. As Senator Mom Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) describes him to Jyn:
MON MOTHMA: Saw Gerrera’s an extremist. He’s been fighting on his own since he broke with the Rebellion. His militancy has caused the Alliance a great many problems. We have no choice now but to try to mend that broken trust.
In story after story about revolutionary movements or dissidents, we see the “good guys” distinguish themselves from the “bad guys” not only through their ideals but through their nonviolent methods as well (see The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Brazil (1985), etc.). Protagonists may take the law into their own hands, but at least they don’t kill innocent people — that is “bad guy” territory.
Source: Polygon
When violence does come out, it is either the product of lawless mobs or reserved in the narrative to a morally justified individual or small group fighting against an entity that doesn’t respect the same code of nonviolence towards innocents. The line between good and evil in our media is often drawn by who is willing to inflict “unjustified” harm on others: Batman doesn’t kill civilians, but the Joker does; the Star Wars Rebels always keep collateral damage to a minimum, and the X-Men only ever target evil mutants.
In real-life, this aversion to violence manifests in a norm that emphasizes peaceful disobedience at all costs. We uplift idealized versions of nonviolent political activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. or Mahatma Gandhi because that is seen as the “right way” to do things. You can see this outlook in the wake of the recent Black Lives Matter protests incited by the murders of black Americans such as George Floyd at the hands of the police. As Governor Jay Inslee said of the protests:
“I applaud every Washingtonian standing for what they believe in, but we must do so in a way that allows space for these important and necessary discussions, not in a way that inspires fear. If you choose to protest today, please be safe and peaceful. These are important issues that deserve our full attention, without distraction from violence and destruction.”
This caution arguably comes from the horrors of our past. We have seen through history how promises of freedom and equality can spiral quickly into Trails of Tears, Killing Fields, Gulags, and Plantations. Not every revolutionary figure keeps or even intends to keep their promises. We should not automatically accept revolutionaries such as Daenerys without holding them accountable to the ideals they claim to fight for.
The problem with hyper-focusing on how revolutionary movements can spiral into mass killings and despotism, however, means that we have a dearth of media explaining how movements can successfully use violence to achieve their goals. This tunnel vision has us look at the massacres committed by Daenerys as acts of inevitable insanity, which consequently ignores the political reality upon which they were built.
Let us get one thing clear: violence is and has always been a successful tactic in politics.
If you are reading this article right now within a democracy, then chances are your past is one of a people violently overthrowing an imperialist aristocracy, or imposing one, or both. Britain required a significant amount of force to transition from an Absolute Monarchy to one where Parliament was calling the shots. The violence surrounding the French Revolution is infamous the world over. The United States did not peacefully secede from the British, and its territorial expansion westward was not one of peaceful acquisition from Indian Country.
The infamous painting ‘American Progress’ by John Gast with some notes.
To decry violence committed by groups as extremism, especially marginalized groups, is paternalistic. It ignores the history of violence the powerful have used to get their way. Figures like Martin Luther King Jr., although firm believers in their nonviolent tactics, were operating within a system that actively squashed all armed dissent. There have been at least 250 attempted slave uprisings throughout the United States’ history, and even today, Black groups deemed to be too “militant” have actively been spied upon and infiltrated (note: this has included entities as innocuous as black-owned bookstores).
It seems naive to assume that violent oppression has not played a role in what types of dissent we consider to be possible in America, and by extension, in American pop culture. As King himself said when describing the riots of ’67 to a mostly white audience at the American Psychological Association’s (APA’s) annual dinner in Washington, DC:
“The policy makers of the white society have caused the darkness; they created discrimination; they created slums; they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society…Let us say it boldly that if the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years were calculated and were compared with the lawbreaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man.”
This history is what makes the extremist label in media so frustrating because it’s a decision to ignore power dynamics. When we insist on nonviolence at all costs, it has the effect of silencing the immediate violence being inflicted upon more disprivileged groups. This can manifest in the form of the slums King was describing above or outright shootings, but the effect is the same — people die.
It would be easy to remove the sacking of King’s Landing from its greater historical context, and to just focus on the awfulness of the deaths Daenerys caused in battle. She killed a lot of people, and under the norms of the “good guy” code, killing innocents is bad. Tyrion tries to bring this point home by claiming that you could “pile up all the bodies of all the people [his sister and father] ever killed, there still won’t be half as many as our beautiful queen slaughtered in a single day.”
Yet, the world Daneyrs lived in was one where a cruel aristocracy regularly killed those beneath them through both armed violence and neglect. While the various Houses were fighting “The War of Five Kings” to see who would succeed Robert Baratheon, it’s speculated that thousands died due to food shortages and increased instability.
Source: Hollywood Reporter — the Great Sept of Baelor being blown up with wildfire by Cersei Lannister
Later, Cersei Lannister blew up a holy building within her own capital called the Great Sept of Baelor to squash a populist religious movement. She brutally suppressed all rivals and refused to send troops up north to fight the White Walkers, even though they threatened the stability of the world.
Tyrion may be brilliant, but he occupies a privileged perspective that prevents him from seeing the indirect harm those in his class have caused to literally everyone else on the continent. He has had the privilege to be emotionally uninvested in the turmoil his sister and family have caused. It is telling that the crossed line for him was the sacking of his home, and not that of Winterfell, Highgarden, or any other destroyed town or city in the series.
Daenerys, on the other hand, is a character who is aware of the power dynamics at play here because she is one of the few characters who has bothered to listen to the counsel of everyday people. She has appointed former slaves as advisers and listened to the petitions of ordinary citizens, and yet, somehow, she is the one pushed into the villain role.
In the final episode (The Iron Throne) Daenerys rationalizes to Jon Snow her recent slaughter of innocent civilians by arguing that she is doing so to build a better world, saying:
“We can’t hide behind small mercies. The world we need won’t be built by men loyal to the world we have…It’s not easy to see something that’s never been before. A good world.”
This reasoning is the all too familiar “the ends justify the means” argument that we have seen used everywhere in pop culture (and history) from wizarding eugenist Grindelwald in Harry Potter to Thanos in the MCU. This is “bad guy” logic. We are meant to think that she has become a cold, heartless person who is willing to break the world to achieve her vision of utopia.
She has become a Daisey Fitzroy, a Saw Gerrera, or worse.
Stories are not recorded histories, however, but choices made by the story-teller. The person the viewer is being asked to hate here is the social justice warrior, and the person we are meant to empathize with, as he walks through the charred streets of King’s Landing, is Tyrion Lannister.
We have a story that makes the wealthy aristocrat the victim.
This fixation on Tyrion’s privileged perspective says something about whose voices we prioritize in our stories, and because art is an imagining of what’s possible, it’s a fixation that has real-world implications as well.
Later in the final episode, after Jon Snow kills Daenerys and her armies are assuaged, the remaining nobility of Westeros is deciding how they will rule themselves. Character Samwell Tarly (John Bradley) meekly suggests to the council that the people should govern themselves, and all the main characters laugh in his face.
The mere idea of equality is laughable to them.
The nobles take Sam’s idea of elections and apply it only for themselves. The aristocracy will nominate their ruler democratically while keeping titles and serfdom very much intact. Judging by the history of the world’s lore, this is an unstable system likely to implode the next time a new ruler has to be appointed, taking the lives of thousands of people ground beneath the still-spinning wheel.
And so, who is worse here? Who is right? The tyrant who wants to genocide the nobility and doesn’t care who gets in her way to do it, or the nobility willing to continue the suffering of untold millions to preserve its privilege?
I don’t think this answer is supposed to be easy, and I never hope it is because that would imply an utter lack of empathy for all those involved. We can talk about how Daenerys was wrong to willfully incinerate civilians (and she was). Still, there is something deeply unsettling to me about portraying the oppressive aristocracy as “the good guys.” We can label the character Daenerys’ actions wrong, while still decrying the broader trend of depicting all revolutionary movements as inherently extremist and volatile.
We live in an inequitable world. Some people are so steeped in their own privilege and power that they are not capable of seeing how said positions of privilege harm others. It would be nice if all we would need to change their minds were a kind word, but more often than not, powerful people are more likely to laugh in the face of progress than accept it.
History has shown us that force is sometimes necessary to push for change, even if it’s only the implied force from that of legislation and greater organization. We need media that shows us how to actually hold those above us accountable, but right now, we are hindered by stories that fixate on the privileged at the expense of everyone else.
We need stories that don’t make us feel crazy for wanting to change the status quo, or otherwise, the feudal world of Westeros will quickly become more than a mere fantasy.
Tiger King Proves We’ve Learned Nothing From Trump
We are a nation that not only uplifts awful people for the sake of our entertainment but equalizes everyone in their orbit as “the same” so as not to ruin the fun.
Tiger King mania has swept the nation.
The reality show masquerading as a documentary is about the “crazy” world of exotic pet handlers. The story centers explicitly around Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage (stage name Joe Exotic). He owned the Greater Wynnewood (GW) zoo in Oklahoma and had an intense hatred for Carole Baskin — a woman he tried to kill because she wanted to regulate his industry.
Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness is a text that delves into a lot of complicated intersections. Joe Exotic is a gay, polyamorous, conservative, gun-toting private zoo owner who desperately and shamelessly wants to be famous. There has been a lot of ink spilled over what this text represents for the various identifiers to which Joe Exotic contradictorily clings too, but today, we are going to focus on why the show is so popular with Americans.
Put simply, it’s popular because we do love our drama. We are a nation that not only uplifts awful people for the sake of our entertainment but equalizes everyone in their orbit as “the same” so as not to ruin the fun.
It’s a formula that creates binge-worthy television and a broken political system as well.
A sickening trend in Tiger King is that the majority of the exotic pet owners on the show are not just bad people, but active sexual predators (note — that I am not referring to the handlers who manage the day-to-day maintenance of these zoos, but owners like Joe Exotic). The show explicitly details how these players used the lure of baby tigers to bring women and men into their orbit to have sex with them, and often these relationships were abusive.
The Myrtle Beach Safari owner, and mentor to Joe Exotic, Mahamayavi “Doc” Antle, for example, is described in episode Two (“Cult of Personality”) by a former staff member as controlling and manipulative. He allegedly selected staff members on attractiveness and then had them work long hours with little pay. This staff member further claims that Antle used his position to sleep with many of the female staff members there and that she was personally pressured to get breast implants and to change her name to something more exotic (“Bala”).
Antle has denied these claims, though his accuser has further expanded her position in her own words in an essay released by Elle. We may never know the extent of his abuses, but it’s clear that Antle is manipulative. It’s hard to trust a man with an ego so inflated that he describes himself as such a popular person that animal rights activists are jealous:
“I am popular. I am so well known as ‘big cat guy’ around the world, that people who are against having relationships with animals, period, want to destroy me because I am out there in the forefront so known of being this guy that is in love with big cats and has them love him back.”
There are other sexually abusive players on the show as well. Trainer Tim Stark admires Doc Antle’s set up, or as he puts it, “the way he had them women trained.” Jeff Lowe, the man who would take over the zoo from Joe, used baby tigers to set up a penthouse in Las Vegas for him and his wife to swing. He is the person who says the Intenet meme: “A little p*ssy gets you a lot of p*ssy.”
Joe Exotic, like the rest of the players here, is also quite predatory. He traps several men on his compound — men that are described as aimless with nowhere to go — and ropes them in with the allure of his lifestyle and drugs. As employee Joshua Dial says of his boss Joe:
“There are people out there. They will look at a person who is in desperate, dire need of something. In Travis’s case, he was addicted to meth, and they take that need and they fulfill it until they become the only person that can fulfill that need.”
All of Joe’s three husbands would leave him by the time he entered prison. His husband John Finlay ends up partnering with another woman, and Dillion Passage silently fades away into the background (after one or two TV appearances). His partner Travis Maldonado feels so suffocated by Joe’s abusive behavior (he is not allowed to get a job or leave the compound) that he ends up shooting himself in the head while cameras were rolling nearby.
Joe Exotic is not a good person. He ended up hurting a lot of people in his life, both on and off the screen. Rather than highlight the intersections of poverty and power that trap people like Travis into abusive relationships, the show wants to keep its focus on the eccentric behaviors of Joe Exotic. As a reporter covering the story, named Sylvia Corkill, said of his persona:
“Joe Exotic was someone that makes good TV, makes good news. Even if it’s a train wreck, you can’t help but look.”
Tiger King revels in Joe’s perspective, often letting Joe or his closest supporters speak their minds, unchallenged in closeup monologues. This focus on the spectacle of Joe’s unsubstantiated, hate-filled ramblings leads the show to explore some very uneven dead ends. Every demonization of Joe’s rivals is taken seriously, such as the unfounded conspiracy theory that Carole Baskin killed her former husband in the 90s.
Everyone gets dragged down in the mud, which means bedazzled Joe Exotic looks stunning by comparison. We are left with a perspective that is ultimately quite humanizing of him. Tiger King ends with characterizing him as an empathetic person who used to care about the animals but somewhere along the way lost his direction. As JoeExoticTV producer Kirkham lamented in the last final minutes of the closing episode (“Dethroned”):
“I truly believe that Joe started the zoo for good purposes, good reasons. But as the money rose, I think his care for the animals declined.”
We have no evidence that he ever cared, but the humanization of Joe is vital to the show’s success. It’s doubtful that anyone would binge Joe’s antics or make plans to cosplay him for Halloween if he had been described as a malicious sexual predator from the getgo (which, again, he is).
This alchemy of transmuting awful people into bingeable trainwrecks has been happening a long time in America, and it is not a harmless process.
We can pretend like the worship of characters such as Joe Exotic is a new phenomenon that began when we all got trapped indoors by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s been happening for a long time.
In America, we are willing to forgive someone for a lot as long as they are entertaining from afar.
An example of this is the cult classic The Room by director Tommy Wiseau. This B-movie is beloved by a lot of people for being “so bad that it’s good.” Much like the Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), fans enjoyed the 2003 film in midnight screening decades after its initial release. Tommy Wiseau played the lead character Johnny, and part of the fun watching the movie comes from reveling in the bad dialogue and acting. As Jusef Conesa writes in Why I Love Movies:
“Wiseau didn’t set out to make this a cult classic, “so bad it’s good” movie, but watching the fandom grow and the joy spread has a been a treat. The Room is one of the few movies of its ilk that has been cemented in our Zeitgeist and after you finish watching it you will know why.”
Tommy Wiseau was a real person, though. He was a man of unknown origins with seemingly bottomless wealth, and that insulated him. The reason the script and dialogue were so bad is that he was such a flagrant narcissist that he didn’t listen to any of his colleague’s suggestions (a fact parodied greatly in the movie The Disaster Artist (2017)). He went forward with a suboptimal script to make a film that, despite spending over $6 million (maybe?) of his own money, gives the impression it cost only $600.
There are a bunch of so-bizarre-they-are-funny scenes in The Room, but it starts to become uncomfortable when you dig into the history. Wiseau yelled at actors on set, showed up late consistently, and reportedly refused to pay for air conditioning, which led to one cast member (Carolyn Minnott) to faint from heat exhaustion.
The character Lisa (Juliette Danielle), the person who comes closest to being the film’s villain because she cheats on the main character, is, in retrospect, framed in a way that is quite misogynistic. She has an infamous and uncomfortable sex scene in the film, and her character is routinely mocked in screenings for it by fans, some of which contact her about it over social media.
In an interview with Uproxx, Danielle described the fallout from this film as “a very negative part of my life. It’s something that forced me to hide.” She was diplomatic in saying that not all fans contributed to that sense of dread, but it cannot be ignored that Danielle took a break from acting while Wiseau has continued to make admittedly bad movies. Wiseau is by no means considered the auteur he imagined, but he has continued to thrive, and fans' reaction to The Room is part of the reason why. As Aja Romano wrote in Vox:
“Had The Room not come packaged with so much internal befuddlement, a legendarily strange production experience, and a mysterious man at its center, it would have been destined for obscurity.”
We like movies such as The Room because of their backstory, but we are careful to never dig too deeply.
From the works of Woody Allen to Alfred Hitchcock, there are plenty of texts that are only enjoyable if the viewer ignores the awful reality underneath. Reality television was built on the foundation of treating real people like fictional characters, and Tiger King is no different. We have to ignore a lot to enjoy the spectacle of Joe Exotic.
We talked about how abusive Joe was to his partners, but that applies to pretty much everyone in his life. He paid staff so poorly that they scavenged a Walmart expired meat truck meant for the tigers for food. The trailers that staff lived in had no running water. He placed the park in everyone’s name, including his parents, which put them in the middle of a contentious court battle that drained their savings.
Yet, on the show, Joe is narratively depicted as someone who falls from grace, or a tragic hero, which means his enemy — animal rights activist Carole Baskin — is the villain. The editing of the show takes great care to depict Carole and her husband maliciously. Whether it’s ominous music playing in the background as they pose with cat ears or the fact that they brought out champagne and brie to celebrate Joe going to prison, Tiger King wants us to associate Carole Baskin with elitism and manipulation.
While she is far from perfect, Baskin is not in the same league as the other players on the show. She is a noted activist whose facility, Big Cat Rescue, is accredited by the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries. Joe not only fails to meet these standards but his facility was, by all accounts, atrocious to both the animals and people inside it.
He is also a well-documented harasser of Carole’s and played plenty of cruel pranks on her. He, for example, mailed to her (either directly or through his followers) live snakes. He has made multiple videos threatening to kill her, and in one, he shot a sex doll he named Carole with a gun.
He also, you know, unsuccessfully hired someone to kill her.
Of course, she’s popping champagne bottles when he goes to prison. I would too if I were in her position. And yet by the time the series comes to a close, we are meant to think that she is just as bad as the other private zoo owners on the show. When GW zookeeper Saff (who is misgendered by everyone in the series) describes the situation in the last episode, he paints the battle between Carole and Joe as a pointless endeavor that was detrimental to the animals involved.
“Nobody wins. Everyone involved is a so-called animal advocate. Not a single animal benefited from this war. Not a single one.”
This flattening of morality for the sake of entertainment should sound very familiar to anyone who has paid attention to recent history. When we glorify entertaining people, it doesn’t just harm those in their orbit but also gives them power too.
In episode five (“Make America Exotic Again”), we learn that Joe Exotic ran for President, and then when that failed, governor. His race was treated like an oddity, and he ran a campaign that highlighted that spectacle. He passed out condoms that said things like “vote for me or you need this cause you’re screwed.”
In the end, he failed to win the Libertarian Primary, finishing off in a distant third. We would like to think this is where people like Joe naturally end up — that the American public chooses sanity over absurdity — but that doesn’t always end up being the case.
In fact, we are a nation that’s obsessed with the idea of awarding entertaining people with public office.
The state of California — the entertainment capital of America — has elected several former-actors to the office of mayor, governor, and even President. Actor Clint Eastwood was elected mayor of Carmel, California in 1986. Ronald Reagan rode to high office after being a famous actor as well as serving as President of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) — a union for actors. Arnold Schwarzenegger of Terminator fame was governor of the state from 2003 to 2011.
Other famous celebrities turned politicians include singer Sonny Bono in the House of Representatives (1995–1998), former wrestler Jesse Ventura as governor of Minnesota (1999–2003), and Law & Order actor Fred Thompson as a US senator for Tennessee (1994–2003).
Joe Exotic’s desire to pivot his celebritydom into high office is very much rooted in recent history. If you are a man, especially a conservative white man prone to saying outrageous things, then it’s not far-fetched at all to expect to be able to turn that social capital into political power.
The most obvious example of this rule is the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump. The real estate tycoon-turned-reality TV star built up a persona on the NBC show The Apprentice as America’s businessman. He was the person that yelled “you’re fired” at people, and then returned home to gaudy rooms laced in gold and inlaid with marble. He may have been a terrible person who lobbied to have the Central Park Five executed and falsely accused President Obama of not being a US citizen, but he sure was an entertaining person that always made the headlines.
Post-2016, there was a lot of time spent analyzing why he was elected president over Hillary Clinton.
Did he tap into some legitimate economic or racial angst?
Was he a political savant?
Is he a symbol or cipher for some burgeoning political movement?
The most obvious explanation was that he was entertaining. He ran a subpar campaign with a lackluster ground component, but according to a study from mediaQuant, he received billions of dollars in free media attention. This coverage was overwhelmingly negative, often in reaction to something ridiculous he said, but it didn’t really matter. As one author wrote of Trump’s negative press coverage for a study released by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy:
“The news is not about what’s ordinary or expected. It’s about what’s new and different, better yet when laced with conflict and outrage. Trump delivered that type of material by the cart load. Both nominees tweeted heavily during the campaign but journalists monitored his tweets more closely. Both nominees delivered speech after speech on the campaign trail but journalists followed his speeches more intently. Trump met journalists’ story needs as no other presidential nominee in modern times.” — Source
The attention he gave them was enough, and while no single factor ever determines an election, it was a huge one.
We must remember that the attention that reality TV stars gain while wooing America does not always start and end on the small screen. Reality TV stars have capitalized on their 15 minutes of fame to become wine entrepreneurs, start fashion lines, create health empires, and in the case of Donald Trump, become President.
In early April of 2020, a reporter asked President Trump if he would consider pardoning the Tiger King, who is currently serving a 22-year sentence in prison. Trump, who at that point had not seen the show, joked in his typical “maybe-I’m-not-joking” fashion that he would look into it.
It’s unlikely that Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage will receive a presidential pardon (though stranger things have happened), but it underscores how far-reaching cultural moments like this can become. Our celebrities wield a lot of raw power in their hands — a fact that Donald Trump is at least partially aware of every time he rants on Twitter.
We don’t know yet who, if anyone, will be able to translate Tiger Mania into actual political power. These things do not always happen the way we think they will. If you had asked me four years ago who the first reality TV president would be, I would have guessed either Omarosa or Kim Kardashian.
That was then.
Now the one thing I can say with certainty is that we have to be more careful about whom and to what we give our attention to. History has shown us that yesterday’s funny idiot on TV could be tomorrow’s dictator.
Who will you spend your time watching?
‘Steven Universe’ Destroyed What It Means to Be a Hero
Although not the first empathetic hero out there (e.g., Aang from Avatar The Last Airbender (2005–2008) also comes to mind), the existence of hero’s like Steven is the refutation of a type of storytelling decades, arguably even centuries, in the making. His use of empathy in the original series challenged the very values we think a hero should have.
The animated show Steven Universe (2013–2019) by Adventure Time animator Rebecca Sugar has always been more than a kid’s show. The cartoon about a half-human, half-gem battling evil monsters from outer space, was rooted in empathy. Steven was the hero not because he was the savior of the universe — though he was that too — but because he responded to those threats with kindness and compassion.
Although not the first empathetic hero out there (e.g., Aang from Avatar The Last Airbender (2005–2008) also comes to mind), the existence of hero’s like Steven is the refutation of a type of storytelling decades, arguably even centuries, in the making. His use of empathy in the original series challenged the very values we think a hero should have.
Steven Universe Future takes this criticism one step further and challenges our need for a singular hero at all.
In media, there is a narrative structure that some controversially believe to be the underlying-template for all popular stories that exist — “The Hero’s Journey.”
Joseph Campbell first popularized this theory in the book The Hero With A Thousand Faces (1949). Campbell argued that in a variety of cultures across time and space, there was a meta-trend in storytelling — something he called the “Monomyth.”
It has three essential parts (although depending on who you ask, it has anywhere between nine to seventeen in total). The condensed version is that the hero hesitantly leaves home, has a transformative adventure in a new or extraordinary environment, and then returns home with new knowledge or a “boon” to bring back for the betterment of society. The plot or adventure becomes a stand-in for the thematic and emotional changes that happen to the protagonist along the way.
Joseph Campbell would expand upon this theory in several books (The Inner Reaches of Outer Space (1986), Transformations of Myth Through Time (1990), etc.) as well as documentaries (The Hero’s Journey: The World of Joseph Campbell (1987), The Power of Myth (1988), etc.), but the reason why it has entered the popular lexicon is partly due to our love of a galaxy far, far, away. George Lucas credited Campbell as one of his major influences for the creation of Star Wars (1977). Campbell and Lucas reportedly had a deep friendship, and this publicity, in part, led to the Hero’s Journey’s proliferation within the film and television industry.
Even before the Campbell-Star Wars connection was widely known, Hollywood Executive Christopher Vogler allegedly wrote about the similarities between Campbell and Star Wars while studying cinema at the University of Southern California. This analysis became the basis for a widely distributed, 7-page memo he wrote while working for the Disney Corporation. Executive Jeffrey Katzenberg loved the memo and made it required reading, which is partly why Disney films ranging from the Lion King to Mulan follow the Hero’s Journey template.
Vogler would go on to adapt his analysis into a widely-read book called The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (2007), which is considered to be a must-read for anyone interested in learning story structure.
Today, the Hero’s Journey is the default narrative structure in Hollywood. Every major story from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) to Harry Potter uses it, and retrospectively its an analysis that is applied to a lot of old works. Some have argued that Lord of the Rings, for example, is a quintessential archetype of the Hero’s Journey. The same has been said for The Hunger Games series.
While this analysis is prolific, however, it is a mistake to claim that it is THE default narrative structure across all cultures. This may sound redundant to some, but at the risk of sounding obvious:
Oher story structures exist.
Anyone who has seen a Bollywood film knows that it’s possible for stories not to emphasize the plot at all. In the words of academic Sabrina Ciolfi in her work “Popular Hindi Cinema: Narrative Structure and Points of Continuity with Tradition:”
“Returning to the narrative structure of popular Hindi cinema, the first element that strikes and confounds western criticism is the apparent lack of a story — or at least narrative coherence — in the film, which usually shows a somewhat fragmentary structure…In popular Hindi cinema, in fact, the plot is considered to be of decidedly secondary importance among the various ingredients of the film; according to the authors themselves it serves solely a basis for the representation of emotions as well, obviously, as creation of the spectacle.”
The 1970 cult classic Mera Naam Joker (“My Name Is Joker”), for example, is about a clown’s career (Raj Kapoor) and his romantic encounters with three separate women. There are no Empires, Deatheaters, or Capitals to be encountered, only his own emotional turmoil.
Conversely, the plot and emotional development in many “Nollywood” films (a term for Nigeria’s film industry) are considered orthogonal to thematic tensions. In the words of Olagoke Alamu in his essay “Narrative and Style in Nigerian (Nollywood) Films:”
“Due to their status as among the society’s primary mass media, Nigerian films are stabilizing forces that contribute to the maintenance of social order…For these reasons, films display a range of ideological and cultural positions that are consciously portrayed by filmmakers in their stories.”
The focus is not always so much on the story itself, but the values being transmitted.
Other stories exist, Hollywood.
Stories with multiple, disconnected characters. Cyclical stories where characters end precisely where they started. Stories like the sitcom, which are typified with no character growth whatsoever.
There is nothing monolithic about the Monomyth. It’s a vague template that applies to a group of some narratives, but it should by no means be treated as an all-encompassing roadmap.
For this reason and more, the glorification of the Hero’s Journey in film and television is quite contentious. There is a growing movement among creators and critics to reject the Hero’s Journey as the dominant format in Western media.
Steven Universe is one of the latest and clearest examples.
Steven (Zach Callison) has many similarities to the typical Campbellian hero. He is an extraordinary human living in the rather ordinary vacation town of Beach City. He has magical space powers, and throughout the series, he goes on many fantastical adventures.
While many of the elements are there, however, they do not mesh together in the way that Campbell describes. An essential part of the Monomyth is that the hero has a call to adventure that they initially refuse, but then reluctantly heed as they transition from the world of the ordinary to the world of the extraordinary. This step is called the “crossing of the first threshold.”
For Steven, this distinction never truly happens. We meet him already emersed in the fantastical world of the Crystal Gems (Deedee Magno, Michaela Dietz, Estelle) — the rebellious aliens fighting a battle against the imperialist Diamond Authority. They have raised Steven since he was a child, and his magical destiny is not a secret he has to discover from an old wizard, a desert hermit, or a Giant motorcyclist. The local residents are so familiar with his magical powers that within the first scene of the first episode of season one (“Gem Glow”), one of the townsfolk makes fun of his “magic bellybutton.”
Steven’s story is not centered around a journey where he sets out on the proverbial road to stop the Diamond Authority in the same way Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, or Frodo Baggins would do. He may make trips to outer space, strange aliens worlds, and fantastical dungeons, but he always comes back to the small town of Beach City. He is just as likely to commit to helping out the local boardwalk or pizza shop as he is to dismantling the evil Diamond Authority that rules the galaxy.
Traditional heroes, according to Campbell, have to face a series of trials as they go on their adventure during a phase called “the initiation.” They are tested by some force or forces (either individual, cosmic, or societal), and along the way, they gain allies and skillsets that help them overcome the big bad by the time the story comes to a close. Luke Skywalker must learn to use the force to defeat the Empire and is helped by the Rebel Alliance. Harry has to discover magic to stop Voldemort and is supported by the students and teachers of Hogwarts.
Likewise, Steven has plenty of powers that he doesn’t fully understand when the story starts, and part of his journey is learning how to tap into them to defend his friends. He also does gain allies throughout the show slowly, over time.
Still, ultimately his journey differs from Campbell’s in how there is no linear progression leading to a set endpoint where he triumphs over “evil.”
Steven Universe is a story that emphasizes emotional rather than narrative development. Steven’s main journey is reconciling the image that he has of his mother — a woman he initially believes to have been a hero — as he learns more about her manipulative past. She was a member of the Diamond Authority and concealed this truth from the Crystal Gems, and much of the show is Steven dealing with the emotional fallout of his mother’s actions and deceptions.
This emphasis on emotional, rather than climatic storytelling is one that runs counter to Campbell’s masculine conception of a hero. Campbell wrote his template from the perspective of an American white man in the 1940s during the height of the Cold War. It should surprise no one that there was a sexist lens to much of his writing. When we look at many of his archetypical heroes, they are often examples of raw masculine power. As Craig Chalquist, Ph.D. wrote in the HuffPost:
“First of all, the Hero isn’t always a good guy. Gilgamesh, the first great Hero figure in Western lore, hacked down a forest, gave the goddess Ishtar the brush-off, and raped his women subjects. Herakles destroyed his own family. Cuchulainn got into such battle frenzies that he had to be plunged into nine vats of water just to cool off after a fight. He died as reckless as he had always been.”
Steven does not meet many of these traditional qualities. He is comfortable with sharing his emotions. He cries pretty much every episode, and this is never portrayed as a bad thing. In fact, his feelings are linked directly to his powers. He has to be in tune with them to use them correctly, and they are not the phallic swords, lightsabers, or wands of traditional stories. He wields a magical shield, and his chief power is the ability to heal — a traditionally “feminine” power.
The subversion of traditionally feminine and masculine attributes is not the only thing that sets Steven Universe apart from Campbell’s Monomyth. Campbell had a gendered way of perceiving antagonistic forces in general. He believed that womanly temptation was a mainstay of the Hero’s Journey. During the initiation phase, there is a particular stage called the “Woman as Temptress,” where the hero comes across a force that wants to tempt them away from their set path. As Campbell wrote in The Hero With A Thousand Faces:
“But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our attention, that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to the pure, the pure, pure soul.”
This trope problematically links to a long, oppressive history going further back even than Eve from the Bible where women are labeled as the source of all temptation (see Pandora’s box). Campbell believed that the hero was reaching towards something pure, above the material world of man, and that that part of their initiation was overcoming worldly temptations of the flesh.
The “Woman as Temptress” is most viscerally contrasted against the “Atonement with the Father” stage, where the hero confronts the ultimate masculine force that they either have to overcome or reconcile with. Star Wars plays with this pretty directly where Luke Skywalker literally reconciles with his father, Darth Vader, at the end of Return of the Jedi (1983).
Steven Universe blows up this gendered dichotomy by making the majority of the forces — both the “good” Crystal Gems and the “evil” Diamond Authority — one gender. The alien Gem race is entirely female, and the one person who would qualify under the “Atonement with the Father” stage — the person Steven has spent the entire series fighting against — is his mother, and reconciling with her is impossible. As Steven says in the final episode of season 7 (Change Your Mind): “She’s gone.”
Furthermore, the world Steven is fighting for is not some mythical ideal separate from the material (or from “the flesh,” as Campbell would say), but is built on tangible, everyday connections. Steven is not trying to make the world less like itself. He is fighting for us to understand the world — for us to love one another — and that extends to his foes. Steven’s trump card isn’t a magical ring or a mythical sword, but empathy. He talks “the bad guys” out of their worldviews. All of his enemies, even the mighty Diamond Authority, become his friends.
His solution — that of changing other’s minds — is not some divine gift he receives when he “defeats” White Diamond. He has consistently demonstrated this desire from early on in the show. Whether its calling acid-spraying, baby centipeetles “cool,” or throwing a dance mixer for Homeworld Gems, he has demonstrated a radical empathy that has allowed him to connect with even the most hardened of individuals.
If Steven Universe ended with the last episode (Change Your Mind), then I would say that the moral of the story is that we need different kinds of heroes. The manly fighters of yore were products of a patriarchal society that valued aggression over empathy and understanding, and we need to change the types of people we look up to.
With the conclusion of Steven Universe Future, however, the message seems to go one step further: we need to get rid of our idea of a singular hero entirely.
The limited-run series Steven Universe Future is effectively an epilogue to the main show. It takes place following the events of the original series (Steven Universe, and Steven Universe: The Movie, respectively) and focuses on what happens after Steven has peacefully dismantled the tyranny of the Diamond Authority. There are no epic quests or villains to battle. His primary dilemma is adjusting to a world with no existential conflict — a world that no longer needs him to be the hero.
Steven has founded a school for displaced Gems to acclimate to life on Earth, and he is the head administrator, but it’s actually him who is having trouble adjusting to this new environment. Steven has spent his entire existence mitigating the mistakes of the past, especially those of his family.
This is the first time in his life, he has the emotional space to think about the future (hence, the title), and when he looks around, he sees a world moving on without him. His friends have all built intricate lives in between the five-year gap between Change Your Mind and Steven Universe The Movie : his friend’s band breaks up, his father Greg (Tom Scharpling) has become the new band’s manager, former will-they-or-won’t-they-couple Lars (Matthew Moy) and Sadie (Kate Micucci) have split up, Steven’s close friend Connie (Grace Rolek) is heading off to college, and all the Gems have become teachers at the new school.
Steven feels like his support network is drifting away, and, to some extent, it is, but because he is so used to being the hero, he doesn’t know how to ask for help. He instead pushes everyone away. Steven quits his job due to feelings of existential dread and lashes out at his friends. He even makes the rash decision to propose to Connie so that he can follow her to college and not make plans for the future.
These minor stressors lead to magical panic attacks where he turns pink, and his powers activate erratically. When he attends a doctor appointment with Connie’s mother (the doctor, played by Mary Elizabeth McGlynn), in episode fourteen (Growing Pains), she links his panic attacks to the trauma he has experienced while being a hero:
“…adverse childhood experiences, or childhood trauma, can have a lasting impact on how your body responds to stress. This can affect your social, emotional, and physical development. When humans are in crisis, the brain releases the hormone cortisol. Your heart races, your muscles tense…
I think all these experiences have been subjecting your body to a harmful amount of stress, and that’s affecting your ability to respond to new forms of stress in a healthy way. You’ve been dealing with geuine threats from such a young age, your body now is responding to minor threats as if your life were in danger”
Steven’s role as a hero has given him a severe form of psychological stress that is detrimental to his wellbeing. We don’t always think of our heroes in this way, but it’s a common theme running throughout much of media. The protagonist Katniss Everdeen, for example, ends The Hunger Games book series in exile and psychologically scarred.
This type of anxiety happens for people in real-life that we have given the label of “hero.” The rate of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which is a type of condition where people who experience a traumatic event feel afraid or stressed even when there are not in danger, is high among physicians, firefighters, soldiers, and more. There is also the risk of trauma that happens from absorbing the psychological trauma of other people (sometimes called Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS)). This is common in other hero roles, such as that of teachers, nurses, and counselors.
We have only recently started to acknowledge the trauma that comes from fitting into one of society’s many heroic roles. When past heroes, both real and imagined, have talked about their trauma, larger society did not always treat them well. The literary character Harry Potter, for example, was routinely mocked in the mid-2000s for being “emo.” As one poster noted in the fan site theleakycaudron.org:
“…a lot of people I’ve spoken to, in person and online, have said that one of the things that they didn’t like about the book was Harry’s seemingly constant anger. I’ve heard many things such as, “He was way too moody’ “He was so ticked off all the time’ “His anger was so irritating’ and “He was such a whiner in this one.”
Harry spent his formative years trapped in an abusive household and then escaped that situation only to become the de facto figurehead in the fight against a homicidal eugenist.
He was under a lot of stress.
When his character reflected that emotional truth, many fans categorized his behavior as “unrealistic” and “annoying.”
We do not like it when our heroes buckle from the pressure of their unrealistic expectations, and despite his support network, Steven has internalized that message. In Steven Universe Future, a series of events (i.e., killing Jasper, assaulting White Diamond, etc.) cause him to spiral out of control, and he transforms into a literal monster. He becomes stories high and threatens to trample the town of Beach City.
Steven does not share his feelings with anyone in time to get help because he is used to being the one who listens — the person who takes on the Secondary Traumatic Stress of others. As Connie says in episode nineteen (I Am My Monster):
“Maybe Steven would care how sad you are because he always puts everyone else’s feelings first! But he can’t do that for you right now because he needs us this time! We all had Steven when we needed him, but the only person who’s never had Steven is Steven.”
The demand placed on Steven caused him to deaden parts of himself in an unhealthy way. In a heartbreaking scene, all of Stevens’ friends ultimately have to come together and hold him tightly until he finally feels safe.
It’s time to do that for the rest of the world as well.
In Campbell’s conception of the hero, the story ends with him returning home to share new knowledge with the world, forever changed by what they have experienced. The new hero reluctantly returns home (“the refusal of the return”), but goes back for the good of society to share their “boon.” It is a self-sacrificing mythos that places the hero’s duty above their own emotional health and safety.
In Steven Universe Future, the opposite happens — he leaves home forever.
Steven heads out on the road to carve out a life where he doesn’t have to take on the burden of saving the world. While he is changed by his experiences (and some hardcore Campbellian’s might argue that his rejection of herodom itself falls into Hero’s Journey territory), we walk away relieved Steven is leaving this situation.
We are also disgusted that he ever had to do it in the first place.
Campbell centers the entire process of the Monomyth on the hero being afraid to start the journey and then terrified for it to end. He assumes that the weight of destiny will propel these characters forward and treats them less like people and more like ciphers. The ultimate emphasis is on how they change over time.
There is never a stage where the hero is given the emotional space to process not just their doubt and fear over the quest, but the pain of their position and actions.
Never a stage where their allies pause to take on the Hero’s Anxiety.
Never a stage where the hero becomes not just one or two individuals, but a community.
Those human emotions of pain and assistance are left for the moments when the pages end and the screen fades to black.
We exist in an age of heroes. The highest-grossing films of all time right now center on superheroes saving the world to fulfill some grandiose destiny. We selfishly put so much on the individual and, collectively, give so little in return. We expect a hero to save us, but real salvation comes when we all come together to help each other.
If we can’t recognize that the current hero archetype is unhealthy in our fantasies, then how can we expect to build a world of real heroes in the here and now?
Nintendo’s “Birdo” is NOT a Trans Icon
Nintendo means something to queer people around the world. These were the stories we grew up with. Although Nintendo has not handled the issue of gender particularly well, that proximity to childhood means that plenty of queer people saw themselves in ambiguously gendered characters such as Zelda, Vivian, and Birdo.
Photo by Elias Castillo on Unsplash
The character “Birdo” premiered in the Mario-verse in 1988 in the Nintendo game Super Mario Bros. 2. She is a pink dinosaur-like creature of the same species as Yoshi, steed sidekick to protagonist Mario. Sources such as The Advocate have described her as one of the first trans characters in the video game industry, but there’s an obvious problem with this characterization.
While many fans identify with her, the Nintendo company has yet to fully embrace Birdo as trans. The company instead has waffled on how to treat her character — sometimes depicted using “she”; other times “it”; always unaccepted — her depiction underlines a contentious issue in both fandoms and media consumption alike:
What types of representation are valid?
Do you call out Nintendo’s transphobic characterization for what it is, or do you accept the interpretation of her fans?
And how does this rewriting of history shape the video game community’s collective understanding of queer history?
The initial portrayal of Birdo’s transness was complicated. She was initially not in a Mario game at all, but the 1987 Nintendo game Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic or Dream Factory: Heart-Pounding Panic. It took place in an Arabian setting and was a promotional game for the characters of a carnivalesque event in Japan called Yume Kōjō ‘87.
That previous year in 1986, Nintendo of America had rejected a prototype of Super Mario Bros. 2 (later called Super Mario: The Lost Levels) because they thought it would be too hard for Americans to play. Doki Doki Panic was easier and met many of the series requirements. So with some minor modifications, they reskinned the game with classic Mario characters and released it in 1988 as Super Mario Bros. 2 for American audiences. Characters such as Shy Guy, Birdo, Pokeys, and Bob-ombs were initially designed for Doki Doki Panic and were kept in the sequel for the sake of convenience.
In the game, Birdo was a minor boss who fired eggs at the player. The manual for the Japanese version refers to her as Catherine, a man who thinks of himself as female, and the name Catherine is still used in Japanese descriptions to this day. The manual for Super Mario Bros. 2, also misgenders and deadnames the character (i.e., the practices of refusing to use a trans person’s preferred pronouns and name), but in this instance, she is referred to as Birdo. The text in the manual is as follows:
“He thinks he is a girl and he spits eggs from his mouth. He’d rather be called ‘Birdetta.’”
It’s important to remember that this transphobia comes from a clear cultural context. There are few places in the world that have known trans equality. The United States has an abysmal record on transgender acceptance, and so does Japan. As recently as 2019, the Human Rights Campaign defined the process for changing one’s gender there as “regressive and harmful.” The misgendering and deadnaming of Birdo in the manual above would sadly not have been considered strange in the 1980s in either the US or Japan.
LGBTQIA+ representation existed in the 80s — queer people have always existed — but insensitivity to such groups was the norm. Several years before Birdo debuted, the textbased game Mad Party Fucker (1985) started with the text: “The object of this game is to fuck as many women as you can without getting bufu’ed by fags (contracting AIDS).” The makers of this misogynistic game were using homophobia here as a punchline to appeal to conservative straight people.
It should surprise no one that Birdo, as an early piece of trans representation in video games, followed this trend of using queerness as an edgy punchline. When the Satellaview version of Super Mario Bros. 2 was advertised to the Japanese public as BS Super Mario USA (1996), the character Birdo was used to promote it. One commercial has a sexy Birdo laid out on a couch, beckoning the viewer with text that translates to English as “Welcome to Catherine’s Room.”
Source: 1996 Japanese Commercial for BS Super Mario USA
This commercial (as well as the BS Super Mario USA game itself) employed an “Okame” voice actor to play Birdo, which is derogatory Japanese slang that can describe a range of “sexual deviant” people from homosexuals to transsexuals to crossdressers. The term Okame, like with the English term transvestite, is complicated, and now is mostly considered to be offensive. It would not have been uncommon, however, for cisgendered people (and even some trans people) during the 80s to use the term to describe the sexual or gendered “other.”
There were famous queer people in Japan during the 1980s (cabaret singer and drag performer Akihiro Miwa, real name Maruyama Akihiro, immediately comes to mind). This acclaim earned by a few, however, does not change the reality that trans people were (and still are) not widely accepted in larger Japanese society. The humor here for Birdo comes not from a place of empowerment, but the all too common trend of the majority ridiculing the disenfranchised as a means of control.
Birdo is supposed to be funny because she is an “other.”
A strong example of this otherization is the Japanese exclusive Wii game called Captain Rainbow (2008). The protagonist of the game is a human named Nick, who has a superhero alter ego, Captain Rainbow. There is a sidequest in the game where Nick has to rescue Birdo from jail after she was arrested for using the wrong bathroom (i.e., the women’s bathroom). You then have to find an object from her house, probably her vibrator, that “proves” to the robot police officer that she is a woman. The bathroom debate for trans people is a very contentious issue, and this joke plays into that painful history.
While transphobia in Japan translated into a belittling trans caricature for Birdo, in America, it (mostly) resulted in silence. References to Birdetta were scrubbed following Super Mario Bros. 2’s initial release. Her secondary sex characteristics (e.g., pink bow, pink skin, etc.) meant that she was primarily portrayed in US media such as the Super Marios Bros. Show! (1989) as a cisgendered woman. She was even shown to be in a relationship with Yoshi in Mario Tennis (2000).
This omission in the states is often depicted as censorship, and it is to some degree, but as we have seen, Nintendo’s portrayal of Birdo was predominantly transphobic. When her transness would bleed into English-speaking media, it would problematically always come from the perspective of a man wanting to be a woman.
When, for example, a minor character named Popple introduces Birdo in the 2003 game Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, the character hesitates to call her a dame. When she asks to be called Birdie instead of Birdo, Popple refuses:
Source: Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga
Popple: This, uh…dame passed my audition perfectly, see? She’s my all-new, bigger-and-better rookie, Birdo!
Birdie/Birdo: Darling…don’t call me Birdo. Call me Birdie!
Popple: …I don’t care about names, see?
This perspective of Birdo “being a man” has remained unchanging throughout her thirty-plus-year run. Her gender has flipped-flopped across translations between he, she, and sometimes something far more ambiguous. In the fighting game Super Smash Bros: Brawl (2008), a trophy of Birdo refers to her as it.
Source: Super Smash Bros: Brawl
“A pink creature of indeterminate gender that some say would rather be called Birdetta. A big ribbon on its head is its most distinguishing feature. In Super Mario Bros. 2 you can return fire by jumping in the eggs from its mouth. Be careful not to get psyched out by fake-egg fireballs!”
While gender fluidity and agender identities are 100% valid, this portrayal is not coming from the perspective of trying to respect and understand these marginalized identities. She is being portrayed here as an other. This has been a problematic perspective throughout the franchise, and it is one that did not die in the late 2000s. As late as 2018, fans noticed discrepancies with her gender across various translations for the switch release of Marios Party (2018).
There has been no evolution of Birdo’s characterization from Nintendo. Progress has been assumed from what actually appears to be a disconnect between the Japanese construction of her identity and the English-speaking one — a vacillation between offensive caricature and oppressive silence.
We should be able to classify these various portrayals from Nintendo as transphobic, but that’s largely not how the greater fan community has reacted to her. She is depicted by many as a trans icon.
This reading of her character not only ignores much of the history we have already discussed, but it has the effect of erasing queer history.
The classification of Birdo as a trans icon can be traced as far back as 2000 when designer Jennifer Diane Reitz argued for Birdo’s transgender status in an article titled “The First Transsexual Video Game Character?” Reitz made the argument that Birdo had received the magical equivalent of a sexual resignment surgery, saying:
“To the best of this game otaku’s knowledge, Birdo is the very first transsexual video game character, and best of all, succeeded in achieving full transition and acceptance. You go, Birdo!”
We can find a more contemporary version of this argument with Trans Youtuber Riley J. Dennis. She argued in her video essay Why Birdo is a trans icon that Birdo had effectively gone “stealth,” which is the practice of transitioning and then going about the world as cisgendered.
These arguments do not follow the strictest interpretation of history; in fact, they run counter to a lot of the points that we know. They are instead “headcanons,” which, for the non-shippers out there, is the practice of a fan interpreting a character or characters in a way that is not officially supported by the text.
This practice is prevalent in the queer community because, for much of history, it allowed LGBTQIA+ people to feel represented by a world that shunned us. A great example of a popular headcanon is the speculated relationship between Science Officer Spock and Captain James T. Kirk on the science fiction show Star Trek. Many fans noticed a tension between the two characters and decided they were in a relationship.
It should surprise no one that headcanons fall neatly in line with slash or fan fiction. Fans often rewrite characters, so they satisfy the reality they wish to portray — a reality that is often denied them. That’s the beauty of the human imagination. Once a character is out in the world, no one can control how others remix it. Spock and Kirk may not be romantically inclined in the original series, but are here, here, here, and here.
Birdo may be a little iffy in the franchise, but in my version, she is queer AF.
A person’s headcanon, however, does not undo the textual representation we see in the original work. The transphobic caricature in games such as Captain Rainbow and Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga still exist, and that deserves to be highlighted. The problem with depicting Birdo as not only a Trans icon, but the originator of Trans representation in video games, is that it reshapes history to problematically place Nintendo at the epicenter of a story it does not own.
When you search for LGBTQIA+ representation in video games, Birdo will come up time and time again as the first trans character, and she simply is not. While Birdo has been depicted as an “other” that exists outside the gender binary, she has never been officially confirmed as trans by Nintendo — let alone confirmed as having sexual reassignment surgery, and going stealth.
She was a joke character, and us placing the start of LGBTQIA+ history here erases actual representation.
Do you want to know what game came out three years before Super Mario Bros. 2?
The Rocky Horror Show on the Commodore 128 (also on Amstrad CPC, Apple II, ZX Spectrum, etc.). The admittedly bad arcade game was based on the cult queer classic of the same name, and it has its protagonist (you choose between either Brad or Janet) racing through Frank-N-Furter’s mansion before it blasts off to planet Transsexual.
The year after Mario Bros. 2 debuted, in 1989, game designer CM Ralph released Caper in the Castro, a murder-mystery adventure on HyperCard for the Mac Plus. You play lesbian detective Tracker McDyke searching for her missing friend and drag queen, Tessy LaFemme, in San Francisco’s famous Castro district.
This game is considered by some to be one of the first LGBTQIA+ games ever (the 1992 D&D parody GayBlade has also been given this accolade). It was released as “Charity Ware” and asked players to donate to the local AIDS charity of their choice.
Source: Caper in the Castro
The following year in 1990, the game Circuit’s Edge, based on George Alec Effinger’s 1987 novel When Gravity Fails, was released by Westwood Associates. Circuit’s Edge is a game that centers on private investigator Marid Audran as he navigates the seedy underbelly of the fictional Arab city of Budayeen. Marid has a trans-ex-girlfriend the games’ introduction describes as follows:
Source: lgbtqgamearchive.com
“Yasmin was Marid Audran’s long-time girlfriend, although she hadn’t been born female. They seem to have grown more distant lately. Yasmin may be tricked into being an excellent source of data on Marid.”
Circuit’s Edge is far from perfect. It, at times, exoticizes the Arab world in an unhealthy way, and it treats its sex worker characters poorly. The game’s treatment of Yasmin, however, is surprisingly not terrible, especially for the 90s. We have a trans woman who is not deadnamed or misgendered, and while her portrayal is oversexualized, she has far more characterization and empathy than Birdo just two years earlier.
Developer Jennifer Diane Reitz was probably unaware of this history when she argued that Birdo was the first transgender video game character. There have been decades of research done since then by organizations like the LGBTQ Game Archives. We simply know more than we did in the year 2000, and we shouldn’t start the beginning with Birdo anymore.
Even if Birdo were the first trans character, however (and she is not), that doesn’t make her a trans icon. Her portrayal has been actively transphobic for much of her history, and that makes sense given the conservative nature of the company which birthed her.
Since its inception, Nintendo has advertised itself as a family company. The colorful graphics and child-friendly imagery have been part of a purposeful campaign to capture an early, lifelong, and committed fanbase. When asked about their family-friendly focus by the Toronto Star in 2018, then-president for Nintendo of America Reggie Fils-Aimé said:
“It’s been an incredibly important market because the kid who’s 5 or 6 today is going to be 12 or 13 and not all that many years later 18 or 19 … And when you have an affinity for Pokémon or The Legend of Zelda series or Mario Kart or Super Mario Bros. that affinity carries with you.”
Nintendo has always tried to be a company that capitalizes on nostalgia. They have created characters that follow you for your entire lifetime. This focus on younger viewers — on being family-friendly — has typically meant appealing to the broadest, most conservative portion of society at the expense of marginalized identities.
For queer viewers, this has translated to a lot of queer subtext with characters such as Birdo, Zelda, and Vivian, but an outright hostility to anything that affirms queer relationships both on-and-off the screen.
For decades, this meant no recognition whatsoever. When queerness was mentioned in Nintendo’s orbit, it was usually through the lens of homophobia, not positive representation. Several examples include that time Bayonetta director Hideki Kamiy made it clear to the world “he was not gay” or that DS Homebrew, where players had to avoid gay blobs.
It was only when LGBTQIA+ rights started to more seriously solidify in the late 2000s and early 2010s that this oppressive silence started to be addressed. A flashpoint came in the mid-2010s when Nintendo refused to let same-sex relationships in their quirky Sims-esque simulator Tomodachi Collection: New Life (2013/4). Male-on-male pairings were initially allowed in the game, and when Nintendo caught wind of this feature, they labeled it a bug and released a patch to remove them.
Unlike in previous decades, however, this omission was not met with silence. A fan named Tye Marini led a campaign for “Miiquality” to try to push for same-sex pairings in the game. When Nintendo responded with the tone-deaf statement that it “…never intended to make any form of social commentary with the launch of Tomodachi Life,” there was an immediate fan backlash. The company had to apologize, and although it refused to reinstate same-sex pairings in that game, the stage was set for future conflicts.
In 2019, another scandal occurred after the company removed a user-generated Super Smash Bros. Ultimate course for being “inappropriate and/or harmful.” The course had a trans flag with the title “Trans Rights Now.”
User Warm Safflina claims their account was suspended for nine hours for making this course. When they asked for clarification, they were told it was because the map was a “political statement,” and that they should appeal to corporate.
We have only started to experience more positive representation within the Nintendo-verse in the last year or so. The newest chapter of Animal Crossing, for example, has some queer references and greater gender customization. The Fire Emblem series has also had queer characters for years (though not always positive ones).
These subtle nods, however, are small when compared to the bolder representation happening with companies such as Bioware. Nintendo is a very conservative company that has frankly not demonstrated the desire to be at the forefront of queer representation in video games.
Its icon status is unearned.
In November of 2019, DONTNOD Entertainment (e.g., Life Is Strange, Vampyr, etc.) released a trailer for their upcoming game Tell Me Why. Reports for the game tell us that there will be two main characters — Tyler and Alyson Ronan. Tyler is a trans man. DONTNOD Entertainment worked closely with the LGBTQ media advocacy organization GLAAD to make sure they portrayed Tyler’s character respectfully.
He will be, by all accounts, one of the first playable trans characters in a mainstream series.
Several years earlier in 2014 — the same year Nintendo refused to add in same-sex relationships for Tomodachi Collection: New Life — Bioware made headlines with the introduction of the character Cremisius Aclassi or Krem in their fantasy game Dragon Age: Inquisition. Krem is second-in-command of the mercenary group Bull’s Chargers, and the way his story was handled earned Bioware praise from publications as far left as the Mary Sue.
The age of divining representation from half-assed subtext is quickly coming to an end. We are soon going to have actual representation, and that makes Birdo’s status as a trans icon contentious.
Nintendo means something to queer people around the world. These were the stories we grew up with. Although Nintendo has not handled the issue of gender particularly well, that proximity to childhood means that plenty of queer people saw themselves in ambiguously gendered characters such as Zelda, Vivian, and Birdo.
That beautiful, queer subtext was never something Nintendo purposefully brought to the table.
That was the work of Nintendo’s unappreciated queer fans.
Hopefully, one day Nintendo’s version of Birdo will more closely align to the reality the queer community wanted: that of a trans woman, out and proud to her boyfriend Yoshi, the Mushroom Kingdom, and the world.
To get there, however, it means accepting the reality that we are in. We must be critical of Nintendo for their historical and current conservatism, and that involves uplifting stories with trans characters in the actual text, not just the subtext.
We must painfully admit that Birdo is not a trans icon. She never was, but hopefully, one day, she can be.
The Witcher’s Cool Girl Has No Chill
The series is at war with itself as it strikes a balance between affirming its male fans' toxic fantasy of feeling special, while simultaneously easing those said fans into the reality that women can be heroes too. It creates a chimera soldered together by empowerment and misogyny alike. This makes the show cringeworthy to watch at times, and enjoyable at others.
Even before it debuted on Netflix in December of 2019, The Witcher was polarizing viewers. The series is based on the book series of the same name by Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski, which has already been successfully adapted into an equally divisive Witcher video game franchise. This controversial series has been criticized for its misogyny, and we see some of those problems permeate in the new show.
Both the video game franchise and the show are centered on the titular Witcher, Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill). He is a magical mercenary traveling the medieval lands known simply as “The Continent” for his creature-hunting expertise. He is officially hired to stop magical creatures from hurting people, but usually, it happens to be the other way around.
This is a grim fantasy land where it’s often humanity that turns out to be the real villain: the elves have been pushed off their native lands, mighty dragons have been driven to the edge of extinction, and human rulers are petty tyrants who care nothing for their citizenry. Geralt, technically being a magical creature himself, many times empathizes with these creatures over humanity, and it makes for some interesting, albeit predictable, tension.
In traditional conservative fantasy, the world would not deviate from his perspective. The Witcher would fall into a long line of fantasy works that manage to make the strapping guy “the real” oppressed one (see Carnival Row, The Mandalorian, and The Harry Potter Universe). The show tries to counteract this by having powerful women on every rung of the political spectrum — both the good, the bad, and the complicated.
The most prominent of these women is Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), the magical sorceress who would sooner let the world burn than meet its expectations. Yennefer straddles a lot of complicated intersections of what a woman, particularly a “strong woman,” should be.
Attractive, empathetic, cold, and deadly, she is a “Cool Girl” with no chill. Her portrayal is both a subversion of one of cinema’s most damaging tropes, while simultaneously being the enforcement of one.
The Cool Girl is a trope written by and for men as the manifestation of two paradoxical, patriarchal desires. She is a woman who is strong and independent, but simultaneously, she is also a woman who doesn’t have emotional needs of her own. She is a Stepford Wife who doesn’t display the artifices of being controlled because her genuine goal in life is to “coincidentally” like all the same things her male partner likes at all times. As the video series The Take commented:
“This bro-y temperament is packaged in an effortlessly hot female form. She’s easy-going and never gets angry. Most saliently, The Cool Girl isn’t a real girl. She is a myth, created by men, perpetuated by women pretending to be her.”
Cool Girls are women who enjoy guy things like sports, cars, and beer, but also don’t make a big deal about “girly” things like emotions and being a functional human being. Cameron Diaz’s Mary in the 1998 film “There’s Something About Mary” is a perfect example. She genuinely likes traditionally masculine activities and desires a partner who can keep up with her enjoyment of these activities.
She is also “traditionally” attractive (i.e., thin, blonde, white), and is the fixation of all the men in her life. Mary has been stalked so intensely, that as an adult she had to change her identity and move to a different state. This premise seems horrific, but because it was written and directed by men, her stalking is depicted as comedic. She falls for protagonist Ted (Ben Stiller) after he has the “courage” to admit that stalking her was wrong. Her feelings are ancillary to how the male protagonist feels about her, and in the end, she dumps long-term partner Brett Favre (of real-world football fame) because Ted’s such a “nice guy.”
The “Cool Girl” trope was common in the 90s and 2000s (and now) as men tried to reconcile their sexist desire for control with the relatively new norm of female empowerment. We see it replicated again and again with Megan Fox’s mechanic character Mikaela Banes in Transformers (2007 to present), Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders) in How I Met Your Mother, and Jennifer Lawrence in many of her breakout roles.
The men who wrote these stories are defining empowerment for these Cool Girls as uncritically affirming both male activities as well as men themselves. These women do not question their male partner’s motivations or demand emotional needs of their own, lest they are labeled clingy, needy, and uncool.
The validity of this trope started to be called into question more seriously in the early 2010s, which was coincidentally around the same time that women started to gain the power to question such things.
The most seminal work on this topic was Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl — later adapted into a movie in 2014 — that deconstructed the psychic toll such unrealistic expectations have on the women who try to replicate them. As the main character, Amy Dunne (played by Rosamund Pike in the film), says of this trope in the book:
“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.”
Amy becomes so resentful of these expectations that she frames her husband for her own murder. She disappears and leaves behind enough evidence for police to suspect him, all while watching the incident in the news from a safe distance several states over. Flynn seems to imply that the Cool Girl is not only unrealistic but a debilitating expectation that can drive women to insanity.
The Cool Girl continues to exist in the public consciousness, but its no longer viewed as innocuous. We have started to call attention to what this means. This revaluation makes Yennefer’s portrayal complicated because, in the TV show, she is a Cool Girl written like a person (not just a male fantasy) and we as the viewer are left wondering if that’s okay.
Yennefer has many of the archetypical qualities of a Cool Girl. She is traditionally attractive and detached. In season one, she moves through the world, pretending as though she is disengaged from the conflicts of The Continent, even though as a sorceress, she is very much connected to it. There is one haunting scene where she gives a monologue to a dead baby, where she advocates for radical ambivalence: “I’m sorry you didn’t have a life. But if truth be told, you’re not missing much.”
The character of Yennefer is also the subject of rampant male objectification. It’s easy to find searches on the web that articulate how “hot” she is, such as BestOfComicbooks.com’s 2018 list of “49 Hot Pictures Of Yennefer From The Witcher Series Which Will Make You Fall In Love With Her Sexy Body.” Her body is a commodity for some members of the fandom, and there is validation in the TV series as well. Yennefer is objectified multiple times on screen (though refreshingly, this extends to Geralt as well) in a way that’s inescapable for the viewer:
Source: The Witcher (2019)
The show uses her body to engage in a type of fanservice, and like any Cool Girl, Yennefer is down to have sex. Her and Geralt first meet at an orgy she has magically orchestrated out of boredom. She engages sexually with Geralt casually over the literal decades, and at first, it seems very chill. In a stereotypical narrative, she would dutifully end up with Geralt after he slowly chipped away at her “unobtainable” veneer.
From the onset, it’s made transparent to the viewer, however, that the Cool Girl persona she puts on is constructed. Yennefer is not actually as detached as she wants to appear. She gets into a fight with Geralt because she discovers he magically wished for her, and she dramatically breaks up with him. She petulantly refuses to listen to her magical mentor Tissaia de Vries (MyAnna Buring) at nearly every turn. She tracks down her spurned lover Istredd (Royce Pierreson) out of the blue, years after he’s moved on.
She is emotional to her core — the very opposite of chill.
Her beauty is also literally fabricated, and by no means “effortless.” She originally had a hunchback, and her father sold her into slavery because he considered her to be too disfigured to love. She gets a magical surgery to become “beautiful” not for beauty’s sake — Tissaia gives a very moving speech about her being perfect just the way she is — but out of a desire to obtain power. As she tells her former lover Istredd:
“My world is cruel, and predictable. You enter. You survive. You die…I want to be powerful. It is what I am owed.”
Yennefer is not living for the women and men around her, but for herself. She does terrible, complicated things that often defy other people’s expectations to a frustrating degree. She vies for a position at court, only to abandon it once she gets bored. She finds the perfect “nice guy” and spurns his happily ever after to pursue power. She sacrifices her ability to give birth in exchange for beauty and then spends years trying to find a magical way to get it back just because she can.
This last point is particularly poignant, given the reality that powerful women are often expected to sacrifice aspects of their feminity to gain power. In the real world, successful women will defer pregnancy altogether to climb an inch up their male institution of choice.
From this lens, her surgery can metaphorically be viewed as the sacrifice women make to gain power in a patriarchal world. Yennefer resents that she was forced into such a position at all, and is fighting it. As she tells Geralt about her desire to reclaim her fertility: “They took my choice. I want it back.”
The entire first season, people are trying to get her to conform to the world around her, even the people who care for her immensely. Her mentor, for example, paints her “erratic” behavior as a liability. As Tissaia tells Yennefer in the second episode (Four Marks) on why she might fail as a sorceress: “You lie. You succumb to emotion. To weakness. Do you actually have what it takes?”
Again, the push for women to conceal their emotions is something very much rooted in the real world. Women are often taught to “man-up” and not express feelings to get ahead, and Yennefer refuses to adhere to this false choice.
In fact, her emotional nature turns out to be the thing that saves the Continent from the antagonistic Nilfgaardian Empire. In the last episode of the first season (Much More), she defeats an army by unleashing all her fiery fury at once. She gives in to the chaos inside her, her rage, and it turns out to be the thing the world needed.
Yennefer is so uncool, the world burns around her, and the show suggests that this is a good thing.
This depiction of Yennefer might make it sound like The Witcher is a feminist masterpiece, but like with Yennefer herself, it’s complicated.
There are a lot of profoundly complex women on this show. We mentioned Tissaia already, but there’s also Ciri (Freya Allan), the magical princess (and another lead character) who had to run away after Nilfgaard sacked her kingdom. There is Fringilla (Mimi Ndiweni), the authoritative Nilfgaard sorceress leading the armies against the North. And let’s not even get started on the complexity of Ciri’s grandmother Queen Calanthe (Jodhi May), the woman so ballsy she told fate to screw itself.
These women are fascinating portrayals of powerful women in a patriarchal society, but unfortunately for us, there’s also the men, and they often undermine these women’s moral point of view in the narrative. The loose rules of this fantasy world mean that the text itself often bolsters the actions of the men.
In episode three of the first season (Betrayer Moon), for example, the Witcher stumbles across a kingdom haunted by a monster. This magical creature is the lovechild of an incestuous relationship between a king and his sister. This depiction is controversially cast as true love, and it’s the court physician who turns out to be the man responsible for the curse. A confession from him confirms the king and queen’s love. So we, as the viewer, are forced to accept the consensual nature of this relationship — the sister’s perspective centuries buried.
We see this again with Queen Calanthe from the kingdom of Cintra. In episode four (Of Banquets, Bastards and Burials) we learn she doesn’t want her daughter to marry a cursed knight of low birth. Calanthe uses both force and manipulation to try and prevent the arrangement.
In doing so, Calanthe turns out to be violating a cosmic force of the universe called “The Law Of Surprise” (i.e., someone is owed what their debtee did not know they have). In this case, Calanthe’s husband unwittingly promised their daughter to this knight, and she now has to submit to this law. Her daughter also coincidentally loves the knight, continuing a trend of convenient love that prevents the men from being demonized in the text. The narrative forces Calanthe’s hand, and in the end, this fictional conceit proves her wrong and the male knight right.
Calanthe’s resistance to The Law Of Surprise would lead to the eventual sacking of her Kingdom by Nilfgaard because she refuses to hand her grandaughter over to The Witcher, who was also promised Ciri by the same mystical force. It’s heavily implied that this fate could have been avoided if only she listened to Geralt. We are left blaming the woman who tempted fate, even though that ultimatum would not have existed if Geralt had not decided to collect in the first place.
The men are almost always proven right or superior by the narrative at the expense of the strong women around them, and that includes Yennefer. When she first meets Geralt, she is trying to bind herself to a genie to restore her fertility. Her methodology is discovered to be wrong (despite having studied magic for decades), and the Witcher has to save her before the genie rips her apart.
On a meta-level, the rise of Nilfgaard — the evil empire on the show — is implied to be Yennefer’s fault. She was supposed to go there on assignment, and during episode six (Rare Species) a prophetic dragon directly insinuates that a stronger sorceress (i.e., her) may have been able to stop the country’s rise:
“Perhaps if Nilfgaard’s religious zeal had been tempered earlier by a stronger hand…:
When you get down to it strong, complicated, “problematic,” women can be blamed for many of the Continent’s largest snafus (i.e., the rise of Nilfgaard, the fall of Cintra, etc.).
There’s also the issue of how the framing of many of these scenes undercuts the empowering message being sold to us textually. If you have ever seen the Feminist theory episode of pop culture critic Lindsay Ellis’s introduction course to film studies, then you are familiar with the concept of how visuals can sometimes sabotage what’s being said by the characters.
Ellis uses the first Transformers movie to discuss how the dialogue is empowering, but Michael Bay’s misogynistic filmmaking dilutes that message. We all remember Megan Fox’s car scene, and yet what’s often forgotten in that scene is her discussing the misogyny she faces in the realm of automobile repair:
Mikaela: My dad. He was a real grease monkey. He taught me all about this. I could take it all apart, clean it, put it back together.
Sam: That’s weird. I just wouldn’t peg you for mechanical.
Mikaela: Well, you know, I don’t really broadcast it. Guys don’t like it when you know more about cars than they do.
The text is empowering, but Michael Bay’s framing is, well…
Source: Transformers (2007)
Similarly, Yennefer says a lot of important things textually, but the framing we see on screen undermines her words. When Yennefer gets magical plastic surgery, for example, the symbolism behind the operation is that it’s a form of genital mutilation. The scene is spliced with Geralt fighting an actual monster, and we aren’t meant to think it’s a “good thing.”
There is textually a complexity as to why Yennefer is getting this surgery (power, expectations, etc.), but visually her surgery is framed sort of sexually.
Source: The Witcher (2019)
Yennefer may scream in pain, but viewers are “treated” to her lying back, and then after her reproductive organs are removed, we see her exhausted naked body. This visual language spattered throughout this show is what makes the feminist moments within it so frustrating. Good points are being made here, and they are being undercut by contradictory visual and narrative messaging.
Whose story matters here — Yennefer’s or Geralt's? Because they do not seem to exist on the same moral footing, and they often contradict.
The Witcher is admittedly a hard text to adapt. It has a sprawling world that requires a lot of exposition to establish, and on top of this, it also has a very toxic fandom that has carried over from the video game series and books. You have an audience that played those games, and there is an expectation that those norms will bleed through into this new series.
It’s clear, though, that showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich does not want to tell the same type of story. The decision to have two female main characters running side-by-side Geralt’s story demasculinized the narrative in a good way.
As the first season progressed, it became apparent that Geralt was not going to be the singular, driving force behind everything in the narrative. The final episode tellingly ends with Ciri, who has been trying to reunite with Geralt the entire time because of The Law Of Surprise, asking him: “Who is Yennefer?”
The screen then cuts to black.
The series is at war with itself as it strikes a balance between affirming its male fans' toxic fantasy of feeling special, while simultaneously easing those said fans into the reality that women can be heroes too. It creates a chimera soldered together by empowerment and misogyny alike. This makes the show cringeworthy to watch at times, and enjoyable at others.
Yennefer serves as a salve for those bruised egos. She has the appearance of a Cool Girl — the prize “nice guys” have believed to be theirs for decades — but she does not act like one at all. She is a messy, emotional being of immense power.
She has no chill whatsoever, and for chaos’ sake, men better get used to it.
Was The World Ready For The First Trans Supervillain?
The portrayal of Whiterose from the TV show Mr. Robot, though controversial and flawed, will undoubtedly represent a shift in how we will perceive trans characters in the future. She is one of modern cinema’s most enticing villains, and yet, one has to ask: is this portrayal the breaking of a trend or the enforcement of one?
Photo by Fatima Akram on Unsplash
Trans representation is so sparse in media that, for some, you can squint and pretend like it doesn’t exist at all. There have been a few noteworthy standouts in recent years (e.g., Pose, Orange Is The New Black, Grey’s Anatomy, arguably Steven Universe, etc.). Yet for most of cinematic history, the few visible trans characters on film and television have been either “evil” or tragically silenced.
Trans people have barely started to see themselves reflected back, albeit imperfectly, from the silver screen. We had only just gotten to the point where trans characters were being portrayed as actual people when Whiterose, from the hacker tv show Mr. Robot, effortlessly walked on screen and changed everything.
Her portrayal, though controversial and flawed, will undoubtedly represent a shift in how we will perceive trans characters in the future. She is one of modern cinema’s most enticing villains, and yet, one has to ask: is this portrayal the breaking of a trend or the enforcement of one?
An Abridged History Of Trans “Evil”
When we first meet Whiterose, as she casually lights up a cigarette, we are told upfront how powerful “he” is (at first, the protagonist Elliot mistakenly assumes the gender of the world’s most legendary hacker). She is the leader of the Dark Army, the elusive hacker collective behind some of the world’s greatest hacks. Her time is so precious that she times their initial conversation, and will allot Elliot no more than three minutes.
This initial impression of power is never questioned. There is a moment in episode ten of season two where Phillip Price (Michael Cristofer), the CEO of E Corp (a combination of Enron, Bank of America, and Facebook all rolled into one) is talking about the worlds most influential people and says:
“In my life, as I was making my way, I always asked the question, am I the most powerful person in the room? The answer needed to be yes. To this day, I still ask that question. And the answer is still yes.
In every room in the entire world, the answer is yes with the exception of one. Or two. And that drives me.”
He is referencing her. She is the exception.
Historically, trans people in media have been allowed to be a lot of things — duplicitous, confused, tragic — but powerful has rarely been one of them.
This was by design.
Under the threat of greater regulation from Congress, the Association of Motion Pictures adopted the tediously named Motion Picture Production Code in 1930 to “maintain social and community values” in films. This set of rules would become known as the Hay’s Code after the then-president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), William H. Hays. The moral conservative and former chair of the Republican National Committee would start to more strictly enforce the rules in1934, which is “coincidentally” when films began to get a whole lot less progressive.
The Hay’s Code does not reference LGBTQIA+ people directly — that would require recognition — but it does forbid films to make references to “sexual perversions of any kind,” which queer people would have been considered to be at the time.
The Hay’s Code also required that criminal activity in films be portrayed in a way that neither provides sympathy for the criminal nor encourages imitation. Aspects of transness are still illegal today, and would undoubtedly have been more so when the codes were drafted.
These regulations meant that if a filmmaker wanted to have a queer character, then they couldn’t make direct reference to their queerness, and their portrayal could not be openly positive. This moral framing meant that queer characters were almost exclusively linked with criminal activity, which affirmed the widely-held conservative belief that they were criminals in real life.
A classic example of this is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho, which is about a motel owner, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), who kills their clientele. We are led to believe that they are following their mother’s wishes, but in the film’s shocking closing moments, it is revealed that Norman has been cross-dressing as her this entire time. Their gender identity is a byproduct of mental instability.
Even when the Hay’s Code was overturned in the mid-60s in favor of a rating system, the queer association with criminality would not end. The trans serial killer, in particular, would remerge now and again in pop culture such as with Christopher Morley’s transvestite character in “Freebie and the Bean” (1974), psychiatrist Robert Elliott (Michael Caine) in “Dressed to Kill” (1980), Angela Baker (Felissa Rose) in “Sleepaway Camp” (1983), “Buffalo Bill” (Ted Levine) in Silence of The Lambs (1991) Leatherface (Robert Jacks) in “Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation” (1995), and many more. We would see this trend continue well into the 2010s with “Insidious: Chapter 2” (2013), where the main villain was shown to crossdress before committing murders.
For the sake of our comparison with WhiteRose, however, a telling example is the 1994 cop comedy “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.” The antagonist of the film turns out to be Lieutenant Lois Einhorn (Sean Young), who changed their gender to get revenge on their former football teammates. The protagonist, Ace Ventura (Jim Carrey) makes Einhorn reveal her genitals to prove she isn’t a real woman. Her transness is the butt of a joke and effectively undermines her villainy.
Whiterose counters a lot of these old assumptions. Although she is a criminal of epic proportions, her transness is not the reason why she is “evil.” She is, importantly, never portrayed as a person deserving of mockery. Her identity is not a twist, but rather something we are aware of from her opening introduction.
The question becomes whether this breaking of the old and offensive trans criminal stereotype is enough.
Whiterose’s “Problematic” Identity
The first issue people have with this character is one of representation. Whiterose is played by cisgender actor BD Wong. There is a long history of cis actors, or in the case of sexuality, heterosexual actors, playing LGBTQIA+ roles (see Jeffrey Tambor in “Transparent,” Jonny Beauchamp in “Penny Dreadful,” Rebecca Romijn in “Ugly Betty,” etc.). This “cis” or “straight” washing denies LGBTQIA+ actors’ roles in an industry that has historically barred their entry with a vengeance.
Whiterose falls into this phenomenon. Show creator Sam Esmail reportedly saw several trans actors for the role, and yet he ultimately went with BD Wong. As Wong told Vulture in September of 2015:
“I was then told Sam did meet some trans actors but didn’t pick them, and then he asked me to do it. I don’t know why he was asking me to do it, and I was putting up a little bit of resistance.”
Wong is a great actor, but for some people who are tired of ciswashing, it understandably might be a bridge too far.
Casting is not the only problem people have with her character. There is also the issue with the arguably predatory romantic relationships Whiterose has had with her subordinates. She is one of the most influential people on the planet, maybe even the most powerful person on the earth, and it’s implied that she engages with sexual relationships with her assistants. As Dark Army operative Irving told then-Whiterose assistant Grant in Season three:
“Tell me something. She still making her spontaneous overtures? She make you taste her yet? Remember, doll face, I was you years ago. And I’ve already done my time. I think she’ll be good with me.”
While the idea that a powerful person would abuse their position in this way is not unrealistic, this accusation hits close to home because of the stereotype that trans people are inherently predatory. Straight men will often accuse transwomen of “trapping them” into sex — sometimes referring to them as “traps” for short. This meme recasts trans identity as being duplicitous. It consequently is often used as a pretext to assault and kill trans people, which is partially why trans individuals are killed at such an alarmingly high rate.
On a societal level, this same justification was and is still used to discriminate against trans people. The bathroom debate of the mid-2010s (and now) framed trans women as men using their trans identity as a pretext to gain entry into female spaces. Former North Carolina governor Pat McCrory is infamously remembered for warning people that trans rights would “[put] citizens in possible danger from deviant actions by individuals.”
Whiterose’s predatory framing is further complicated by the fact that she is a Chinese woman, which means her relationships with her subordinates can arguably fall within the Dragon Lady stereotype. This trope is when strong Chinese women are depicted as overbearing and emasculating (see the majority of Jackie Chan’s American movies). As Elizabeth Ho wrote in The Michigan Daily:
“In her relationship with Grant, whiterose epitomizes this stereotype with her domineering behavior. While the Dragon Lady can also positively represent Chinese women as assertive and independent, in this case, it only further emasculates Chinese men.”
Season four tries to reverse course with this association by giving Whiterose a female-presenting assistant Wang Shu (Jing Xu). This relationship is not framed as abusive or sexual, but respectful and professional. The final season clearly learned from some of its past mistakes.
In doubling down on Whiterose’s power, however, the show highlighted another chief problem — that of placing a trans character in the center of a vast, globalist conspiracy.
The Trans Agenda
Whiterose is not just in charge of a malicious hacker collective but also moonlights as Zhi Zhang, the male Chinese Minister of Defense. She uses this high-ranking position in the Chinese government as a cover to control much of the world’s affairs, and this trope falls into a tragic stereotype about marginalized people.
Discrimination has manifested in conspiracy theories for centuries. It doesn’t take too long on the Internet to find bigots justifying their hatred of a marginalized group by claiming that said group is a part of a cabal of people secretly running the world. Anti-semitism, for example, has been an unfortunately stable aspect of anti-globalist discourse for hundreds of years. The European world has blamed the Jewish population for everything from eating babies to poisoning wells to spreading the black plague itself.
In 1903, a pamphlet titled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (sometimes abbreviated as The Protocols) began circulating in the Russian newspaper Znamia. The document claimed to print the notes from a secret meeting, where the Jewish people allegedly planned to undermine Christian civilization through a vast conspiracy. This pamphlet, which was later deemed fraudulent, was “coincidentally” released around the same time the Russian people were expelling their sizeable Jewish population from the Pale of Settlement through a series of violent pogroms.
The idea that Jewish people are undermining the world through the secret control of established institutions has never entirely died. The Protocols would recieve renewed interest under Nazi Germany and controversially are still spread today by organizations around the world. Its footprint can even be felt indirectly. The 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, for example, believed that Jewish billionaire George Soros single-handedly controlled the world economy.
Jewish people are not the only marginalized group to be the object of such conspiracy theories. When LGBTQIA+ rights started to pick up steam in the United States in the lates 80s and early 90s, it was not uncommon for conservatives to claim that there was a “gay agenda.” Critics labeled many queer civil rights campaign as an attempt to make society, particularly children, gay. As hate activist Phil Burress remarked of a California bill that would require foster parents to recieve LGBTQIA+ sensitivity training:
“This is the way the homosexual activists continue to build their numbers — is to get people confused about their gender identity and start acting out.”
Some people are likewise convinced that we are amid a trans agenda. As the ideas of genderfluidity (i.e., the concept that not all people embody a rigid male-female dichotomy) has entered school curriculums across the country, similar conspiracy theories have amassed. The state of California’s decision to pass an LGBTQIA+ inclusive sexual-education curriculum, for example, has been met by some as an attempt to convert their children. One parent told Vox News they wanted the law to be overturned or otherwise:
“… our children are going to be against us.”
From stealing babies to brainwashing them, conservatives have been blaming social minorities for such conspiracies for centuries. Whiterose fits into this long, complicated history because, in the world of Mr. Robot, such a globalist conspiracy is real. An investment firm called the Deus group (a pun on Deus Ex Machina) has been pulling strings since the end of the Cold War. As Phillip Price said in episode two of the last season:
The Soviet Union, a great world super power, was collapsing.
And where some saw freedom, a young, imaginative Minister Zhang saw possibility.A new world order.
So Zhang formed an investment group called Deus.The goal, bring together the world’s wealthiest, most powerful men to consolidate control and manipulate global events for profit.
Whiterose, a trans woman, is the de facto head of this globalist conspiracy to hoard the world’s wealth. Her goal with that wealth could arguably be construed as good. She is trying to build a machine that “makes the world better” (note — we never learn what the machine does), but that doesn’t change the fact that she has done a lot of bad to achieve this goal. Her grasp on the world’s most powerful institutions comes with all the baggage that that power represents.
Given that we exist in a world where some of the world’s most powerful men believe in conspiracy theories like the “trans agenda,” Whiterose’s character should not be taken lightly. The criticism that “this narrative is inappropriate” is worth listening to.
Loving Whiterose, Despite Her Edges
Near the end of the final season, Whiterose’s position at the Deus group is revealed to the world. The camera opens on her looking into a mirror to finish up her makeup. When she is ready, armed guards escort her down the stairs of her elegant mansion. We, for a moment, think that this is it for her — that these are the guards sent from the Chinese government to whisk her away to prison or worse.
We then see the dead bodies everywhere and realize that she has won this battle. She leans over a dying soldier and says:
“You were looking for Minister Zhang? He isn’t here.
He’s dead.
There is only Whiterose.”
When trans people transition, they sometimes take on a new name, and their old name is referred to as their deadname. To deadname someone is a way to invalidate a trans person’s identity. You are aware of their preferences and refuse to recognize them anyway.
When I first watched this scene, I burst into tears. As a nonbinary person, I have been misgendered countless times. I have grown accustomed to the feeling of discomfort as I navigate whether or not I should be open with those around me. There are few moments where people come to my defense, let alone armed guards.
To witness a transperson powerfully rebuke her deadname, even as someone as “evil” as Whiterose, was something I had rarely experienced in media. It made me feel powerful, and despite Whiterose’s many character problems, I will always remember the catharsis I felt from this single scene.
This is all to say that Whiterose straddles a lot of complicated intersections. She is a trans character played by a cisgender actor who, at times, embodies some problematic tropes that have haunted trans people for decades.
She is also a powerful trans woman in charge of everything, and there is an odd beauty in being able to witness her trying to control a world that hates her.
I can’t say the world of media was ready for the first trans supervillain, but because of Whiterose, it will undoubtedly be prepared for many more.
Jedi Are Just As Tired Of Gender Politics As You Are
For most of the Star Wars universe, the Sith and Jedi represent the two sides of “traditional” masculinity. Feelings are framed either as a weapon or a weakness. You can either lash out against the world as a Sith or bury your feelings deep inside yourself as a Jedi. The Jedi Order is composed of a group of repressed men (and a few women) who would rather watch the galaxy burn than talk about their feelings.
When Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi was first introduced to audiences in the 1977 movie A New Hope, he nostalgically described the fallen Jedi Order as a benevolent organization. From his perspective, the Jedi Knights were “guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic.”
As more and more installments of the Star Wars universe aired, however, this initial impression became increasingly harder to justify. This was the organization that “obtained” orphaned children from battlefields across the galaxy, and rather than give them therapy, turned them into unfeeling child soldiers. It was the entity that pressured children and teenagers to bury their feelings of anger and love so deeply that if they ever slipped up, then they were told that they could become some of the Galaxy’s worst monsters.
To be a “good” Jedi or Sith, you had to go your entire life feeling either rage or nothing at all. It is toxic masculinity as a religion, and we see this mindset with both the light and the dark.
The Dark Side Of Masculinity
The Force — the cosmic entity that flows through all living things — is all about balance. The dark and light sides are described as interconnected aspects of the same whole, and so we cannot talk about the Jedi without also first addressing the Sith.
The most famous Sith in the public imagination is Anakin Skywalker, father of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), who is known infamously by his moniker Darth Vader. The legacy of his image lingers with us even today. We remember Vader for his deep-sounding voice (brought to us by the magic of James Earl Jones) and his sickening black cape, but there is another aspect of his personality that always lies just below the surface — his rage.
We see Vader throughout the first three films choke rebel alliance foot soldiers, freeze dissenters in carbonite, and give the order to destroy entire worlds. The Empire and Sith are modeled loosely off of Nazi Germany, so unsurprisingly, this violence is embedded into the code of the Sith Religion itself. The first line of the Sith Code begins by claiming:
“Peace is a lie, there is only passion.”
The Sith are not talking about the entire spectrum of emotion here when they use the word passion. The only type of emotion we see them express care in cultivating is anger. As Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) tells Luke Skywalker in Return Of The Jedi (1983):
“Let the hate flow through you”.
In one of Vader’s most well-quoted scenes, he is arguing with a subordinate (Richard LeParmentier) about the force. He then utters the line, “I find your lack of faith disturbing,” and uses the force to choke his dissenter into submission. His application of the force here is the ultimate expression of masculine anger, powerful, but unexpressive at the same time.
Vader is chill, which is to say that he is holding in barely contained rage at all times.
The ability to express yourself through physical violence while not being able to handle your emotions is an integral part of toxic masculinity. When discussing the link between masculinity and anger, the American Psychological Association posted the following in the fall of 2018:
“In early childhood, violence and aggression are used to express emotions and distress. Over time, aggression in males shifts to asserting power over another, particularly when masculinity is threatened”
To be a man, you have to be willing to hurt those trying to expose your natural limitations, and if there’s one thing Vader is, it’s a man.
In the force choke scene described above, the subordinate is expressing the fear that the Rebels — who have just stolen plans for the Empire’s planet-destroying superweapon the Death Star — will uncover an exploitable structural weakness. Vader dismisses this legitimate concern and then waxes poetically about the force. His subordinate scoffs at his religiosity, and that is when Vader intervenes with a good force choke.
This scene is meant to demonstrate Vader’s power, but in retrospect, it makes him seem weak. Vader’s inability to examine his weaknesses — both tactically and emotionally — leads to the destruction of a starbase the size of a moon.
Over a million died to satisfy his ego.
The latest trilogy still lives in the shadow of Anakin’s performative anger. Minor antagonist Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) stares longing at Darth Vader’s crushed helmet whenever he needs inspiration or direction. He looks up to him as a role model on how to behave, and he replicates that raw masculine energy constantly. Rather than process his own emotions, Kylo will do things like smash computer terminals with his lightsaber.
Vader and Kylo Ren’s violence are toxic by design. They are the “bad guys” in these films, and we aren’t supposed to think of their behavior as redeemable (until we are).
While substantially less violent, the light side of the force isn’t much better. It possesses the same emotional stagnation as the Sith.
Like most men, the alternative to anger is nothing at all.
May The Patriarchy Be With You
The Jedi code is about duality, and this fact is echoed within the naming conventions of the primary characters. The word Luke is a derivative of the Latin word lucere — a verb meaning to shine. Luke is literally the light side of the force.
If the Sith are all about unrestrained rage, then you would think that the natural duality to that end of the spectrum would be learning to process your emotions. The Jedi would conquer the Sith by taking that pain and anger and channeling it productively, and compassionately. We would see an Order devoted to cultivating people’s love and joy.
The Jedi, in a way reminiscent of real-world Buddhism and Taoism, instead, focus on the principle of non-attachment. Their entire order is built on not feeling any emotions at all. The Jedi Code begins with the phrase:
“There is no emotion, there is peace.”
For most of the in-universe lore (and indeed all of the movies), Jedi are not allowed to marry. They are discouraged from forming significant attachments outside of their paternalistic relationship with their masters. We see this sentiment echoed with Anakin. We learn from The Phantom Menace (1999), that before being whisked away by mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi, he was a slave on the desert planet of Tatooine.
To become a Jedi, he had to commit to not only never see his mother again, but never to feel anything about her at all. When he consults Master Yoda about visions of someone in his life dying, he is told to stop thinking about it:
“Careful you must be when sensing the future, Anakin! The fear of loss is a path to the Dark Side. Rejoice for those around us who transform into the Force. Mourn them, do not. Miss them, do not. Attachment leads to jealousy, the shadow of greed, that is. Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.”
It should be noted that telling a person with PTSD to cut off their emotional past is not healthy. Anakin would bury these feelings of trauma deep within himself, and like a lot of men, it meant he was ill-equipped to handle future disappointment and pain. This pressure to hide his feelings behind a facade of detachment is an integral part of toxic masculinity. As Bell Hooks explained:
“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence towards women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.”
When Anakin inevitably developed feelings, in this case, romantic ones for Queen Amidala or Padmé (Natalie Portman), the shame instilled in him by the Jedi Order caused him to handle everything in secret. By the time people like his master attempted to provide emotional support, Anakin had become the very thing the Jedi had feared. As he told Padmé in Revenge Of The Sith (2005):
“I won’t lose you the way I lost my mother. I am becoming more powerful than any Jedi has ever dreamed of, and I’m doing it for you. To protect you.”
Rather than an inevitable outcome of emotion, however, this consequence seems to be a result of his improper support system. One has to wonder if the trauma of losing someone “like he lost his mother” would still be as potent if he had had the emotional space to process that pain. As Dr. Nakia Gordon, a professor of psychology at Marquette University, remarked to Discover Magazine about Yoda’s philosophy:
“The first thing I thought of when you sent this request was my interpretation of Yoda as asking Jedi not to feel any emotion (which would just be bad). You need emotions to make informed decisions, and more recently, research has demonstrated that people make more cooperative decisions when they made a choice quickly and emotionally, rather than thinking “rationally” about it.”
The Jedi were constructed to respond to emotion not as we feel them, but as most men think they should be. This toxic mindset is one that has continued into the present day.
Compassion Without Feeling
There is a scene in The Return Of Skywalker (2019) where Jedi Rey (Daisy Ridley) is on the sands of Pasaana fighting with Sith Kylo Ren over an escape shuttle. They are both using the force to push the craft back and forth, and in a flash of anger, Rey loses control and releases a wave of force lightning. The blast eviscerates the ship, and as a result, we are led to believe that her Wookie friend Chewbacca has died.
Her emotions killed her friend.
It’s clear here that even as our norms on masculinity have evolved, the Star Wars universe continues to struggle with how the Jedi should operate in a more equitable world.
On the positive end, the movie demonstrates several examples of Rey showing compassion to creatures and entities that past Jedi would have sliced down without a moment’s hesitation. There is one scene, in particular, where Rey heals a menacing-looking sandworm, in a way that nicely juxtaposes to how Luke Skywalker killed a Rancor in Return Of The Jedi.
She questioned the sandworm’s right to exist, while Luke did not.
Women are often given the role of “the healer” in fantasy films, though, so it remains to be seen whether this is a breaking of a masculine role or the enforcement of one.
Additionally, as with most Jedi, Rey is still not allowed to feel. When her emotions become too potent, as they did on the sands of Pasaana, they fall beyond her control and are immediately weaponized. This follows the “traditional” model of masculinity that we have spent this entire article critiquing, and it makes one wonder if this franchise intends to truly evolve at all.
There was an attempt in The Last Jedi (2017), the second movie in the latest trilogy, to deconstruct the toxic masculinity in the Jedi Order. We had an entire subplot where Rey pushed against the stubbornness of a much older Luke Skywalker, who had retreated to the edge of the galaxy to avoid dealing with his perceived failures. The primary one being that he had attempted to preemptively kill Kylo Ren because he feared the young Jedi was heading to the dark side. Rey chastized him for this extreme measure:
“Ben, no! You failed him by thinking his choice was made. It wasn’t. There is still conflict in him. If he turned from the dark side, that could shift the tide. This could be how we win.”
She was advocating for a message of understanding and compassion that did not categorize the world into dark or light. This conversation was refreshing to many feminist critics, but a fan backlash seems to have caused the franchise to reverse course.
Sadly, The Rise Of Skywalker does not deconstruct what it means to be a Jedi but instead speaks of the force in the same dark-light dichotomy that has existed since the first movie. When discussing how Rey “brought balance to the force,” co-writer Chris Terrio told IndieWire:
“I think that the balance is restored, because the dark had been growing much, much more powerful than the light. By Rey striking this blow, it doesn’t mean that everything is happily ever after forever, but it means that at least for this moment in time, the dark has been held off as the light has pushed back.”
This interpretation, while useful for setting up future installments, does little to help people understand why past Sith have gone to the dark side. When we look at the galaxy’s most infamous fallen Jedi, they appear to have turned to the dark side because they weren’t able to talk about their feelings. Kylo fled because his master and mentor, Luke, tried to kill him for communicating with Supreme Commander Snoke. Anakin had to keep his feelings of pain and love a secret from the Jedi Order. Even Palpatine is primarily motivated by the fear of death — a concern detached Jedi aren’t supposed to think about.
By essentializing these men’s “evil” as an inevitability, the Jedi never have to question how their mentality pushes their fallen away. Rey may have brought balance to the force by killing the Sith, but we have yet to see a meaningful reformation to the Jedi ideology.
Balance To The Force
For most of the Star Wars universe, the Sith and Jedi represent the two sides of “traditional” masculinity. Feelings are framed either as a weapon or a weakness. You can either lash out against the world as a Sith or bury your feelings deep inside yourself as a Jedi. The Jedi Order is composed of a group of repressed men (and a few women) who would rather watch the galaxy burn than talk about their feelings.
There is an argument to be made that protagonist Luke Skywalker won at the end of Return Of The Jedi by disregarding the light-dark dichotomy of the Jedi Order. His decision to love his father prompts Vader to renounce the emperor and throw him into the Death Star’s main reactor. The same can be said of Rey, who reaches out to Kylo, and through understanding, helps him to return to the light.
In the Expanded Universe (now decanonized by Disney as Star Wars Legends), Luke Skywalker attempts to build a more compassionate Jedi Order. He allows Jedi to marry and marries Jedi Mara Jade. He learns from the dogmatism of the past and tries to prevent future Jedi from following his father’s path. Luke brings balance to the force, not by evening out a cosmic chessboard, but by correcting its mistakes.
If Rey wants to do the same for the next inevitable trilogy, then she should reflect on why Kylo and Anakin turned to the dark side. The galaxy needs Jedi that can express their emotions — who can vacillate between more than only rage and nothingness — and the world needs that as well.
When Evil Choices in Gaming Spill Into the Real World
Players have the right to be dicks in video games, and that’s being exploited by white supremacists. It allows for an outlet of expression that, while not necessarily homicidal, can enable members of the “alt-right” to make crossroads with gamers “hypothetically” reconstructing the Third Reich in space. This type of play style exposes a minority of gamers to radicalization, and we need to ask if these types of narratives are necessary for players to have fun.
In 2010, Firaxis launched Civilization V for Mac and PC. The strategy game asks players to cultivate a civilization from the Stone Age to the present day, conquering the world through diplomatic, cultural, scientific, or military means.
At the heart of this game is a type of escapism that allows us to briefly believe we have control over the entire world. The diversity of play styles permitted in games like Civ V allows us to model society however we wish to. We are the voices that lead humanity to supremacy.
And so it should surprise no one that the open-ended nature of a lot of strategy games creates breeding grounds for supremacists and trolls.
Civ V was tremendously successful when it came out. It sold over 8 million copies and continues to enjoy a solid fan base, even though a sequel, Civ VI, hit stores in 2016. I am one such fan. I have logged hundreds of hours playing it.
The chief appeal of the vanilla game was about the accumulation and implementation of power. The question “What do you spend the most time doing in Civ?” was posted recently on the Civ V discussion board on the gaming platform Steam, and the top answers were “war” and “nuking people and making plans to nuke people.”
This power fantasy plays an important role in many games, but something of note in Civ V is the morally ambiguous approach taken in allowing players to construct their own realities. Players are not only allowed to conquer the world under the command of George Washington or Indonesia’s Gajah Mada, but the game also lets you go into battle with more problematic leaders like Jefferson Davis as he leads the Confederacy to victory against the Union.
On July 9, 2013, Civ V released its second major expansion pack, dubbed Brave New World after the Aldous Huxley book of the same name. The expansion tweaked the gameplay significantly, and one small addition was a scenario called The American Civil War. The expansion allowed players to fight either on behalf of the Union or the Confederacy to change or affirm the outcome of the Civil War.
Like all Civ V playthroughs, there is no morality on whether individual decisions are right or wrong. If you win as the Confederacy — a side fighting to preserve the institution of slavery — this is the only thing the game will tell you: “The world has been convulsed by war. Many great and powerful civilizations have fallen, but you have survived — and emerged victorious! The world will long remember your glorious triumph!”
The American Civil War scenario in ‘Civilization V’
At the time of release, neither The American Civil War nor the second scenario, the Scramble for Africa, which allowed players to recreate the European colonization of Africa, garnered controversy. If you look at the sparse reporting on these updates, game journalists restrained their commentary to the technical aspects of their playthroughs.
Game reviewers have only recently begun to examine the morality of games, a blind spot that has historically created intellectual safe spaces for “alt-right” or white-nationalist trolls with severe consequences.
In 2014, the gaming community was shaken by Gamergate, which was a harassment campaign that targeted several prominent female game makers and critics. The toxicity of the community has only intensified since then as a small percentage of gamers have become radicalized by online communities.
An infamous example of this phenomenon is gaming vlogger PewDiePie, whose “edgy” memes and humor have been used to push users to more extreme content. It’s not uncommon for gamers like PewDiePie to recommend anti-Semitic or racist YouTubers to their followers. Since YouTube’s algorithm likes to suggest similar content, this can create a ripple effect that pushes some viewers to the most extreme parts of the platform.
The public’s awareness of this issue grew after the March 2019 New Zealand Mosque shooting, when the perpetrator shouted “subscribe to PewDiePie” shortly before killing 51 people. The meme referenced was a subscription competition between PewDiePie and the Bollywood channel T-Series.
Since then, journalists have written hundreds upon hundreds of editorials about why gaming culture is so susceptible to radicalization. The YouTube channel Innuendo Studios has a video in its series, “Alt-Right Playbook,” about how the “alt-right” likes to take over affinity groups to get more members. The desire for recruitment is undoubtedly a factor. Still, gaming culture’s moral acceptance of, or at the very least ambivalence to, white supremacy is also a reason why gamers (and not, say, knitters) are so ripe for radicalization.
If you peruse the mod section for Civ V, then you will quickly come across fan mods that allow you to play some of history’s worst dictators, ranging from North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il to Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler. Some of these mods’ fans are just doing so for the act of escapism, but it doesn’t take long to find actual white supremacists engaged in direct recruitment.
On the first page of the discussion forum for the Adolf Hitler mod, I found a user named “The Entrenched Soldier” asking another user to research the movie The Greatest Story Never Told. This movie is a piece of white supremacist propaganda by film producer Dennis Wise that tries to spin Hitler’s actions in a positive light.
Source: Steam discussion page
The truth is that Steam has had a Nazi problem for a while. Reporters have long noted the prevalence of white supremacists on the site. In one infamous example, a Steam user named Nicholas Giampa used the site’s lax regulation to disseminate his radical opinions online. He would later go on to kill his girlfriend’s parents for criticizing his white supremacist views. As HuffPost writer Andy Campbell wrote in 2018: “What’s interesting about Giampa’s online presence ― and the Steam community as a whole ― is that the Nazi symbolism and other hate speech don’t appear to faze anybody. It’s too rampant, too normalized.”
Valve has quietly worked to delete the most obvious white supremacist accounts on its site. If you go on Steam now and search keywords like “Nazi,” you aren’t going to get as many hits for white supremacist groups as you would have in 2018. Problematic fan mods are still there, though. The same can be said for games such as the Blitzkrieg DLC for the game series Order of Battle or the card game Hearts of Iron, which place the user in command of Nazi forces.
When it comes to publishing games, Valve has maintained a “censorship-free” stance since 2018. The company only removes games on a case-by-case basis when they get too much attention in the press, are deemed illegal, or are overtly pornographic. This policy means that as long as white supremacists aren’t too vocal about their stated goals, then they can still play games that allow them to recreate their race-based power fantasies of Hitler conquering the world or Jefferson Davis vanquishing the Union.
The refusal of platforms such as Steam to judge the morality of games exposes gamers, a portion of whom are younger and male, to literal Nazis. It’s a moral hazard that extends beyond historical simulators alone.
Unfortunately, white supremacy isn’t limited solely to recreations of World War II. The ability to role-play as an awful, xenophobic person or empire is quite common pretty much across the board. In the past, I’ve written about the extensive amount of slavery in the MMORPG Eve Online, but consider also the game Stellaris.
Stellaris is a Civ V-esque game where a player can spread their civilization across the universe through cultural, diplomatic, or military means. I am a huge fan of this game, and I will be the first to admit that one of its greatest strengths is that it permits for a diversity of play styles; players have the ability to build Dyson spheres, create robot armies, and explore the galaxy.
The problem with the gaming community is that we are so used to letting players cosplay as awful people that we have trouble telling the difference between people who are joking, “half-joking,” and deadly serious.
Sadly, players also have the option to rule a slaver’s empire. The game allows player civilizations to capture foreign populations, force them into slavery, neuter them, process their bodies for food or energy, or exterminate them outright.
Half the appeal of many games is allowing players to role-play as maniacally evil people. The original Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, for example, had players giddy with the prospect of being a Sith lord. The game allowed players to execute innocent bystanders, sell the cure for a plague to a crime syndicate, and order your Wookiee companion to kill their best friend, Mission. One user remarked about that last quest: “I felt like an epic d-bag after I [killed Mission] the first time. Then I did thrice more, and I just laughed.”
Some players are undoubtedly into playing games like this for the raw power fantasy, but others have an appeal rooted in white supremacist impulses. As Reddit user The9thMan99 jokingly remarked about Stellaris in the eu4 (Europa Universalis IV) subreddit:
Stellaris is the superior Hitler simulator. Yes, in [Hearts of Iron] you literally can play as Hitler, but you don’t get to do any hitlery stuff, only go to war. In Stellaris you have a detailed control panel too [sic] choose how you want to hitler your inferior races … you can literally choose a population to be enslaved and turned into food or worked to death.
This particular user claims to have been joking, but it doesn’t take long to find a user on one of these forums apologizing or massaging Hitler’s atrocities. For example, in the Stellaris Steam discussion board devoted to the hypothetical question “What’s the best way to make the third reich?” user Jimib4158 posted a lengthy defense of the genocidal leader.
“As someone really into miltary [sic] history, and of Jewish roots, i would surprisingly say you may be a little too hard on the Nazis, while they certainly were NOT the good guys, they were a product of their time.”
Eventually, someone enters the feed who isn’t joking and has genocidal desires that are more than hypothetical. The problem with the gaming community is that we are so used to letting players cosplay as awful people that we have trouble telling the difference between people who are joking, “half-joking,” and deadly serious.
The perceived neutrality of these games allows white supremacists to interact with users who enjoy these games for non-race-related reasons. These “regular gamers” come to reenact a power fantasy divorced from white supremacy and get exposed to communities that — in-between Twitch recommendations on “resource optimizations and build styles” — talk about how “Hitler was maybe misunderstood.”
For decades now in politics and the press, we’ve debated over whether or not video games cause violence. This talking point is used by conservative and liberal defenders alike who blame the violence in video games and other forms of media as a cause for things such as shootings. President Donald Trump pressed this claim after the Parkland shooting and made it again during the summer of 2019.
There is no compelling evidence that playing video games causes players to pick up a gun and start shooting people. It does no one any favors to advance this claim.
Media, though, does have a more diffused effect on the consumer. There is some evidence, for example, that a viewer’s higher exposure to positive portrayals in the media of marginalized groups such as gay people and racial minorities leads to more accepting views. We may intellectually know that these people aren’t real, but that doesn’t stop our lizard brains from connecting with them (see “parasocial relationships”).
This effect of representation is why media representation groups such as GLAAD exist. The characters we see in our media will potentially go on to affect how we perceive people in the real world.
Video games are not divorced from this equation, and historically, they have been awful at representation. The ability for the player to control an avatar, however, makes gamers a more integral part of the narrative. We’re living that experience, but at the same time, the simulated nature of that experience is ever-present and, in some cases, challenging to take seriously. A study from the University of Illinois, for example, found that when players were allowed to adjust their characters in the soccer game FIFA, they defaulted to racial stereotypes and perpetuated racism.
This complicated status makes it possible for even the most well-intentioned portrayals in video games to permit players to perpetuate racist views and beliefs. Lisa Nakamura, director of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan, told NPR that a white player experiencing racism while playing a video game “does not actually improve the suffering of other people who he’s aligning himself with, because he still is benefiting from his whiteness in other parts of his life.”
There’s a balancing act in games between instilling empathy and permitting unhealthy voyeurism. There are plenty of white men masquerading as half-naked women in-game, but that doesn’t mean it’s making them less sexist. The way player choices are constructed does matter, and as we have seen, when you don’t put enough thought into player outcomes, your game can become an outlet (and recruitment tool) for white supremacists.
Some members of the gaming community prioritize player choice over player empathy and understanding. They’re allowing their players to role-play as the Third Reich, win the Civil War for the Confederacy, and enslave the galaxy for funsies.
Players have the right to be dicks in video games, and that’s being exploited by white supremacists. It allows for an outlet of expression that, while not necessarily homicidal, can enable members of the “alt-right” to make crossroads with gamers “hypothetically” reconstructing the Third Reich in space. This type of playstyle exposes a minority of gamers to radicalization, and we need to ask if these types of narratives are necessary for players to have fun.
This criticism is not a call to ban all depictions of slavery, violence, and objectification in video games. There have been games such as Undertale that deconstruct the concept of player violence by permitting said violence in their gameplay.
Neither should we label all gamers white supremacists. This claim would be wildly untrue. It would also do a disservice to all the amazing gamers and fandoms that mobilize for benevolent causes and charities (see Hbomberguy’s charity Twitch stream as an example).
We should, though, start to be more critical of in-game behaviors. We are long past the days of an entire game involving a pixelated figure saving a princess. Modern video games tell complicated, in-depth stories that can give any movie a run for its money. These games should be scrutinized beyond whether or not they’re merely fun to play. Narratives that glorify awful characters and points of view should be judged for their impact.
Along the way, this type of gaming criticism might just help us fight some real-life Nazis.
This article was originally published on OneZero.
The Stigma Of Not Working
People might not be criticizing our current system of work — not because it provides them profound meaning — but because doing so invites intense social stigma that jeopardizes their ability to subsist within our capitalist system.
Whenever employment is brought up in a conversation, inevitably a conservative actor will talk about how providing resources to the unemployed is a terrible idea. We could be talking about anything from the work requirements in safety-net programs to the fear that a universal basic income (UBI) will encourage laziness. Conservatives will claim that “helping the poor” not only makes them unproductive members of society but also that it stifles a core human drive to work. These Concern Trolls believe that the desire to work is an ingrained aspect of human behavior, which can paradoxically be squashed with the slightest amount of government intervention.
When we examine this argument more closely, however, we realize that this appeal to human nature is reductive at best, and at worst, it’s a cynical ploy to control those that are stuck within exploitative or dead-end positions. People might not be criticizing our current system of work — not because it provides them profound meaning — but because doing so invites intense social stigma that jeopardizes their ability to subsist within our capitalist system.
But Actually, The Argument Is…
Whenever we throw around labels like “conservative” and “work,” there will always be people who disagree because these are charged words that define people’s entire identities. Opponents might disagree because charged statements tend to trigger charged, emotional responses. They also might disagree because they hold different, contradicting arguments for why work is necessary.
In this context, we are referring to the argument that people need to have employment to be fulfilled and happy. This argument can best be summarized by former Mitt Romney domestic-policy director Oren Cass, who was paraphrased in the Wallstreet Journal stating the following:
“Unemployment, more than any of life’s other rough patches, leads to unhappiness and family breakdown.”
This justification is a common one among anyone who upholds the current economic orthodoxy of work. When, for example, former Democratic President Bill Clinton signed the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWORA), which was a law that imposed work requirements or “workfare” on top of the existing safety net system, he used the specter of this very argument. In a speech he provided about the PRWORA, Clinton remarked:
“From now on, our Nation’s answer to this great social challenge will no longer be a never-ending cycle of welfare, it will be the dignity, the power, and the ethics of work.”
Proponents of this worldview (and there are many) do have some evidence for the claim that work is necessary. For one, humans do like “doing things” beyond merely subsisting on food. If ancient cave paintings are any indication, humans have been pushing themselves to experiment and create for thousands of years. There is evidence that it’s partly psychological. As writer Caroline Beaton remarked in Psychology Today:
“In hunter-gatherer times, work was literally a matter of life and death. Now, the stakes are lower and work is more complex. Modern work is divided into minutia: infinite industries and companies, hundreds of departments, unlimited specialized roles. Many workers, and even companies, lose the forest through the trees. We forget why what we’re doing matters. But employees innately crave seeing the bigger picture: the fruits of their labor.”
Surely, if humans need to “do things,” the conservative argument goes, then working is a vital component to human psychology.
Another common argument cited about the unemployed is that they are generally unhappy. Unemployed individuals are far more likely to be depressed. Unemployed Americans are also far more likely to be consumers of alcohol and narcotics. For example, a meta-study of 28 studies published between 1990 and 2015 found that “unemployment increases psychological distress, which increases drug use.” From a superficial reading of this trend, it would appear that the absence of work is making these people unhappy.
If these humans merely got a job, then wouldn’t they be less depressed?
These readings, however, ignore the reality that work is a rite of passage that holds a special place in our society. People are told that they must work from a very early age. The refusal to do so means that they suffer both material and social penalties (i.e., starvation, ostracization).
To not work is to buck a severe societal taboo.
Does Unemployment Mean Failure?
We are all indoctrinated quite early to think of ourselves in relation to work. A common question we ask children is “What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?”. The answers we prime children to give are almost always career-oriented (e.g., firefighter, astronaut, YouTube star). Seriously, check out this video where a hundred children are asked this question. Only a small fraction of them said anything beyond a career.
Rarely do we ask what values we want our children to strive for. It’s an omission that can have some adverse effects on their development. When we ask children to define their self-worth in relation to what they can do, it can create unnecessary anxiety. Some evidence suggests that a search for a calling in of itself can lead to an unhealthy amount of indecisiveness. In the words of organizational psychologist Adam Grant:
“When we define ourselves by our jobs, our worth depends on what we achieve.”
This line of questioning, sadly, never stops. In the United States, one of our primary icebreakers is asking people “What Do You Do?”. Again, this line of questioning is almost always implicitly asking people about their chosen career path, as opposed to what values they strive to achieve.
That’s damaging, and it’s not merely probing questions about employment that create this feeling of inadequacy. We see this expressed on a cultural level in the way we demonize the poor for insecure or total lack of employment. It’s not uncommon for more well-off people to assert that unemployed people are undeserving of help. In his article Why I Don’t Give Money To Homeless People, contributor Charlie Pabst stated coldly:
“You and I have jobs. We work and probably work very hard. We put in the time and we get paid for it. That is called fair exchange.”
A similar sentiment can be found among politicians, CEOs, and even presidents.
In the US, we have a society where people are trained from adolescence to the day they die to believe that employment is the most essential thing in the world. When a person doesn’t achieve that ideal, they are forced to internalize a lot of stress. A simple Internet search reveals thousands of testimonials from people who feel like failures for not fulfilling that ideal (check out some here, here, and here). This psychological stress can correlate with increased drug usage, alcoholic consumption, and even TV viewing habits. The meta-study referenced earlier stated that an increase in psychological stress among the unemployed was the primary reason why they self-medicated.
Sometimes this shame can lead people that need financial help to reject it outright. In one well-known example, a homeless man in Canada returned a sum of $2,400 he found on the street to the local authorities. The story went viral, and a GoFundMe page was made to reward the man for his selflessness. The page raised over $5,000, and the man initially turned down the funds and instead requested that the money be funneled to a local nonprofit. The thing the man really wanted, police later confirmed, was a job.
There is an undeniable stigma around asking for help, especially when related to safety net programs. In one terrible example, US Representative Jason Lewis infamously called recipients of government assistance “parasites.” This stigma means that sometimes people don’t take the help that society has already allocated for them. The federal food stamp program, which is known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), never reaches full eligibility. In places such as Nevada’s 2nd congressional district, it’s not uncommon for only about 2/3rd’s of the eligible population to be reached, and shame is a huge reason why. In the words of Vicki Nash when discussing her experiences with unemployment:
“I don’t claim welfare of any kind, because apart from anything else I am far too proud, another one of my failings.”
Of course, unemployed people are depressed and self-medicating. They are actively being told that they have failed to uphold basic societal standards. They are then shamed into not accepting the financial help that would mitigate their hardships. A person in that position is unlikely to have the emotional or physical resources necessary to be happy.
If unemployment-related stress were solely an issue of internalized shame, however, then it could easily be rectified through awareness. It would only take a couple of people living their “truth” to eventually dissipate that shame.
The problem is that employment is linked to a lot of people’s ability to subsist as human beings — i.e., you need a job to eat. This leverage prevents employers from receiving negative criticism about the systemic failures surrounding the nature of work. Employers don’t have to listen about how their jobs suck, and they often choose not to. Those who challenge the structural problems with work are routinely dismissed as problematic and “unprofessional.”
Unprofessional people have trouble eating.
Would You Hire A “Difficult” Employee?
The reality is that a lot of jobs suck. Study after study illustrates that Americans are unhappy with their jobs (though some recent data counters this trend). A 2018 survey by the Conference Board reported that roughly only half of Americans are satisfied with their jobs. For something that’s supposed to be an ingrained part of the human condition, it sure does make a lot of people unhappy.
There is a lot of evidence out there to suggest that, in comparison with other developed countries, American workers put in more hours annually than other work-obsessed countries such as Japan and Germany. Yet, they receive fewer benefits overall. Americans have experienced stagnated wages in recent years and face disproportionately higher medical, housing, and educational costs.
They are working harder and getting less in return.
Some jobs are just plain exploitative. Amazon, in particular, has come under fire for its terrible treatment of warehouse workers. It was reported in the UK that workers were scheduled so strictly that some employees were peeing in bottles to avoid being punished for taking breaks. Similar findings have been reported in the US. With ever-increasing quotas, the warehouses have been likened to sweatshops by employees.
Amazon’s conditions are by no means unique. For example, when undercover reporter Emily Guendelsberger worked at a McDonald’s for a story, she found the conditions there to be extremely hazardous. As one worker in the story remarked:
“My managers kept pushing me to work faster, and while trying to meet their demands, I slipped on a wet floor, catching my arm on a hot grill. The managers told me to put mustard on it.”
When it comes to the American workplace, there’s quite frankly a lot to complain about. When you ask Americans about job satisfaction directly, however, they tend to upsell their current positions while paradoxically reporting greater stress and less security. A Pew Research report on American Employment found that a high percentage of Americans believed their prospects were personally improving. They also thought that their current jobs were more stressful than in previous generations and would become more demanding in the future. A staggering 65% also claimed that good jobs were hard to find in their current communities.
There is a considerable amount of dissonance here. Everything cannot be simultaneously fine and super stressful; secure and ready to fall apart at the slightest change.
This is a framing issue in how Americans view work.
Some of it has to do with the internal shame we discussed earlier. The way employers permit criticism in the workplace also has a massive impact on how Americans talk about the nature of work both publicly and amongst themselves.
Employers generally do not like it when employees bring up structural problems at the office, and such dissent is often depicted as agitation or ungratefulness. Amazon workers who are striking for Prime Day have been described by the company as agitators spreading misinformation to increase union dues.
Likewise, when Emily Guendelsberger reached out to McDonald’s to get their perspective on their hazardous working conditions, the company discarded the complaints and blamed activists. In a statement, McDonald’s claimed:
“It is important to note that these complaints are part of a larger strategy orchestrated by activists targeting our brand and designed to generate media coverage.”
Retaliation from these companies does not always come in the form of propaganda either. While technically illegal, there have been countless cases of employees who have been fired for labor organizing: as McDonald’s workers were in 2014; and as five Walmart stores were in 2015; and as teachers for the Alliance College-Ready Public Schools (a charter school network) were in 2016; and as a group of Tesla employees was in 2017; and as a group of engineers for the software company Lanetix was in 2018; and as Amazon workers were in 2019.
The list goes on.
Again, this is illegal. It’s effortless, however, for companies to obscure such decisions as cost-saving measures, especially for employees working under at-will employment.
Some rare American companies may allow political dissent, but this policy is entirely voluntary. The ability for an employee to complain in the workplace (free from retaliation) depends both on what’s stipulated in their contract as well as the laws of the state they are in, but ultimately protections in the US tend to be lacking for private-sector workers. Georgia, for example, is an “at-will” state, which means in the absence of a written contract, an employer may fire their employee at any time. The first amendment generally provides Americans who work for private companies no protection from being fired for what they have said in the workplace or outside of it (and that includes social media).
There have been countless examples of employees being fired for their controversial beliefs outside of the workplace. People have been fired for making racist tweets, tweeting critically about the President, wearing racist hats, attending a rally outside of work, and even writing a controversial blog post (gulps loudly).
The employer class’ general imposition towards framing criticism as ungratefulness effectively cuts off a lot of dissent from their workers.
Would you openly tell your employer that your job makes you unhappy?
Could you even be honest with yourself to give such an answer?
Implicit Biases Surrounding Work
When we talk about this subject it’s important to remember other areas that run into the same sort of problem. For example, the thankfully growing-stigmatization around explicit acts of racism has made publically identifying as a racist less popular.
This societal shift, however, has meant that you cannot ask people directly if they are racist, and then call it a day. For decades psychologists have consequently tested people’s implicit racial biases through tests such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT). In the words of Vox correspondent German Lopez:
“The IAT tries to solve a very tricky problem we’ve seen in social science over the past few years: Measures of explicit racism (for example, directly asking whether a person thinks white people are superior to black people) have appeared to show a decline. But how much of that actually shows that racism is diminishing? Is it possible that people are lying when they answer those questions, fearing that telling the truth would make them look racist? And even if people don’t report explicit biases, is it possible they have implicit — meaning subconscious — ones?”
Tests like the IAT reveal little on an individual level, but in the aggregate, some believe that they can cast a light on systemic issues. The Scientific American has reported on the fact that communities with higher reported levels of implicit bias have a more substantial racial disparity in police shootings as well as an equally alarming racial disparity with infant health problems.
Implicit bias research extends beyond the issue of race. There has been good research surrounding the implicit bias around gender, sexuality, and even body type.
This is all a very roundabout way of saying that we cannot simply ask people if they enjoy their work. There are cultural factors that prevent people from answering these questions honestly. Employees face both internal shame for not conforming to ingrained norms, as well as an outward fear of being deemed “unprofessional” and losing their means to subsist. Anyone who doesn’t factor this reality into their analysis on the state of work is either being naive or duplicitous.
As we analyze the state of work, the stigma of not working, and how that impacts our psychology, needs to be a part of the conversation. We need to recognize the social and psychological costs that come with being critical with the current working order.
Otherwise, we are just circulating empty talking points that mean nothing.