Oh, the Blog Posts I'll Never Write! Part 2

Back in August of last year, I tried to initiate a slowdown of my blog, but it didn’t go so well, so I’m trying again. I need to make time and mental space for other things, including other writing, so The Gleaming Sword must retreat into a corner. However, once an idea grabs ahold, I can’t move on until I get it out, so this is another attempt to spit out some quick summaries of ideas I've been kicking around.


In Defense of the Star Wars Prequels

J.J. Abrams has given the people what they wanted. Star Wars: The Force Awakens has been a success among critics and fans, and as a lifelong fan myself, I too found it immensely satisfying. However, it also reminded me of what I loved about the prequels.

Many said Episodes I through III just didn’t feel like the first movies. With its goofy aliens, slapstick humor, and even scatological humor, The Phantom Menace was childish. Attack of the Clones subjected us to a dorky adolescent romance that actually included frolicking in a field. Then Revenge of the Sith was daaark. However, I always saw this as part of George Lucas’s genius. He was clearly more interested in grooming a younger generation that would carry the franchise through the coming decades than he was in pleasing the original trilogy’s older fans, and it worked.

The subsequent changes in tone match Anakin as a maturing character on his way through all the usual life changes, plus some truly awful ones as he becomes a Sith Lord. Meanwhile, Lucas’s new audience was also growing up, perhaps not as quickly, but quickly enough for many to identify with the changing themes of the series. This is a metalevel to the films that fascinates me.

I also liked the epic nature of the prequels, which many considered too complicated. Whereas Episodes IV through VI focused on the adventures of a ragtag band of rebels, the prequels paint on a broader canvas that includes political intrigue and massive military campaigns actuating change on a galaxy-historical scale. Throw in the usual mythological themes, only amped up, and the prequels take the radio-serial style of the original movies and enlarge it to the scale of a Wagnerian cycle.

 

The Force Awakens, on the other hand, comes off very much like a film of its time. It’s a very good one, but there must be other viewers out there who feel something is missing, namely George Lucas’s vision and style.

 

On Feminisms

In Modernism and Nihilism, Shane Weller argues that instead of one single philosophy of nihilism, there are many, sometimes conflicting, nihilisms plural. While reading the shojo manga Revolutionary Girl Utena the other day, it occurred to me that we would benefit from viewing feminism the same way.

In one spectacular sequence in the manga, Utena is playing basketball against the boys and beating them as a series of captions states her philosophy:

“I want to be a prince. A prince is much better than a princess, who needs protection.”

Accordingly, Utena dresses like a boy, uses a masculine first person pronoun for herself, and is confident and physically fit. Later, when she joins an order whose members follow a mysterious code from beyond, she rescues a peer from an abusive relationship and assumes a strong position within the group. When she was a child, a typical handsome “prince” saved her, but at least as of Volume 1, there are suggestions that she herself is, in some magical way, her own hero. The male characters’ only chance of holding their own against her lies in treating her as an equal.

 

This is one style of feminism with roots that go back much further than the Nineties, when Utena was published. It is the feminism of Princess Leia in A New Hope (1976), who talks back to Sith Lords, greets her rescuer with sarcasm, and snatches a blaster from a space pirate so she can shoot her way to freedom. It’s the feminism of Greta Garbo in Queen Christina (1933), determined to walk and talk like a man but accept no man as master (previous post). Both Utena and Queen Christina further their gender-bending with an affection for women that hints at the romantic and sexual.

This style of feminism reminds me of statements by Camille Paglia in Vamps & Tramps. Paglia writes that what she and other feminists in the Sixties wanted was to do what men were doing, so they went out and did it, accepting the risks and responsibility. Paglia has nothing but scorn for feminism that turns victimhood into an occupation. Reading Utena, I couldn’t help but see how different Utena’s pursuit of “strength” and “nobility” is from hyperfeminism online’s whining and bullying.

General education teaches us about the suffragists of the late 19th and early 20th-Centuries and the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties and Seventies. Many remember how feminists in the Eighties were often portrayed as bra-burning, butch, man-hating radicals. I remember reading around the turn of the millennium how feminism had softened to embrace women who wanted to be powerful but also feminine. Now, Third Wave feminism is inescapable and anyone active online is bound to have run across terms like third world feminism and first world feminism.

Thus, feminisms plural isn’t a hard idea to grasp, but learning to be mindful of it and speak accordingly is harder. Yet I’m convinced that more of us doing so would help the current debate about feminism be more productive. I’m always saddened by the discourse of people who appear to feel feminism is one thing to be championed or rejected whole. We might find ourselves agreeing more if we were specific about exactly which of the many feminisms we are praising or condemning.

 

Hermann Hesse’s Demian and Jungian Psychoanalysis

The first time I read Hermann Hesse’s novel Demian, I didn’t know who Carl Jung was. When I dug out an old paperback recently and reread it, I realized it’s informed by more than a little psychoanalysis, and the mystical tone suggests Jung over other theorists.

 

Demian tells of Emil Sinclair’s process of developing his true self, a process Jung calls individuation. An interesting cast of characters aids this process, from his childhood enemy Franz Kromer, to his spiritual teacher Pistorius, his close friend Max Demian, and Demian’s mother Eva. Some or all of these represent psychoanalytic concepts. Is Demian Emil’s Shadow? Is Eva his anima? Are they all psychopomps?

But all I have are intimations of hypotheses that need to be tested by rereading Demian and brushing up on my Jung, and I don’t have the time. Oh, I could Google what I want to know, but this is a train of thought I would prefer to flesh out for myself. Like my planned series of posts on Joseph Conrad, maybe I will someday.

I can tell already that these summaries aren’t going to satisfy me, but 2016 calls for a break with old lines of thought so I can pursue new ones.