Warren's Tumblr of Dubious Repute

Do you remember when the first song in Les Mis was supposed to convey how terrible the era was rather than just feeling kind of #relatable with only your awareness of how bad the era was to differentiate it from our lives and times?

I just learned they're doing a She-Ra reboot. Curious, I do a search because I wanna know more. And, of course, I find almost nothing but people talking about how SJWs are ruining She-Ra and the like.

Sigh.

I mean, yeah, there's no way you make anything remotely high-profile that has a female hero without this kind of stuff popping up all over the internet, but for it to be so overwhelming that even I'd struggle to learn anything about it beyond the particular, familiar flavors of rage at the leftists (and, of course, people imagining that they are being persecuted when anyone disagrees with their abrasive tirades) just makes me feel like a mostly-dead cat still managing to die a little inside.

I mean, Google’s algorithms are well-aware that I am not the audience for this stuff, but the top result on Youtube was still "Netflix's SHE-RA is already a dumpster fire," followed by the likes of of "THE FALL OF BEAUTY - DISGRACING SHE-RA & STRONG BEAUTIFUL HEROS" (sic), "She-Ra: Storytellers avoiding the Iconic Feminine," "Millennial SJWs de-gender another iconic Generation-X cartoon in their eternal attempt to avoid becoming adults," and "Netflix 'She-Ra' Reboot Strips Princess of Beauty."

As a consequence, I still know frustratingly little about the damn thing. Apparently some low-res pictures leaked to a magazine or something, and that set everyone off, and it’s been a spiral of toxicity ever since? The “CalArts” pejoratives that have come into vogue of late are getting thrown around, of course, but while it’s a far cry from the style of the 80′s cartoon, no matter how much a cock my head and squint, I can’t make myself see the style they’re using as a transgression against good design, and even having watched She-Ra as a child in the 80′s, I never thought the original show’s art design was particularly brilliant.

The misanthropist in me wants to chalk this up to the fact that She-Ra doesn’t have a low-backed, cleavage-bearing, strapless dress anymore and people getting upset because the fact that the new design looks less sexually available makes her seem less beautiful -- less strong? -- and somehow-offensively less gendered to them. And that is apparently a common thread in the backlash to the overwhelming backlash I initially encountered, though some have elevated the idea to something greater about the audience, the messages, and who is entitled to what.

But all I know for certain is that I can’t find any evidence to support the loudly-made claims of myriad livid youtubers that this windmill is actually a giant that needs slaying.

But, hey, I actually like She-Ra’s new look, so I am obviously not part of their target demographic.

@remeranAuthor: Did you know that bourgeoisie actually means "Middle Class"?

@Warren5837: It does, sorta, but with a different idea of what "middle class" means (basically "above peasants, but not nobility"), further adapted by marxist thought in the 1800s to refer to those whose property provides them with income beyond the value of their labor.

@Warren5837: Mixing these definitions and bearing in mind that what few nobles remain no longer occupy a special, ultimate stratum of wealth, it would follow that the bourgeoisie of today are those whose wealth eclipses that of those who labor for pay.

@Warren5837: Or, to put it another way, anyone unable to live exclusively off of returns on their investments is a peasant in the modern economy.

I was talking with a couple of friends recently about Jurassic World, and I finally took the time to articulate why, despite its many fine qualities, I always feel so uncomfortably ambivalent when I watch it.

Disclaimer that the upcoming film has a different director than the last one, and there is some reason to suspect these qualms might not be present this time around.

That said, let’s dig in. Short version: themes.

What bothers me the most about Jurassic World is how it flies in the face of some of the best themes of the original Jurassic Park, not only by putting forward a simpler and less compelling theme with less interesting to say, but by actively acknowledging the more complex and compelling themes of the original to then quietly and deliberately dispute the premises underlying them.

Jurassic Park isn't just about "What has science done?" It's far more about the fact that "Life finds a way." They put the subtext in the text with that line. It's that nature is powerful and ultimately uncontrollable. And yes, things fall apart because of a dude, but the first movie wants to imply that it was inevitable; that it was only a matter of time one way or another, because it is the nature of life itself to resist attempts to constrain it.

While Jurassic World not only fails to present anything that compelling, it also acknowledges those themes and demonstrates active contempt for them. To provide an example without spoilers: there's a scene very early on in Jurassic World where the female lead is talking to one of the men in some kind of control room, and he's speaking the first park with a considerable reverence. It transitions into sort of a philosophical dispute where he's representing the themes of the original and she's representing the idea that those themes are garbage. And while the text of the discussion isn’t quite conclusive, they end it with the man leaving a drink precariously on his desk and then ultimately knocking it over... but only after she'd observed the danger and moved his trash can to catch it.

And that’s the film associating this guy and his ideas through cinematic language with inadequate care and attention; saying that "these bad things happen because of human oversights, and they haven’t happened here because the leadership is more on their game, and that that's really all there is to it. The original park was careless; this one hasn't been." And perhaps that was meant as a justification for the existence of the successful park in the movie’s premise, but it still makes that statement: “It was human failings that led to the first park’s problems, not the things that the first movie told you it was. It wasn’t chaos theory, it wasn’t that entropy is inevitable, it wasn’t that ‘Life... uh... finds a way.’ It was human carelessness. That’s it.”

So they're basically denying the argument the original was making about itself -- that the park’s failure was inevitable -- in order to set up the idea for this movie that everything was fine and would have continued to be if not for the fact that they overstepped natural limitations and used science to do the unnatural. Because the theme Jurassic World does want to revisit is the less-important part of the original that basically asked "What has science done?" which it infuses with a few only moderately well-executed elements about how capitalism, profit-driven motives, and such cause us to be irresponsible when we'd otherwise be doing fine. And that's so much less interesting. It’s so much weaker. And they treat the original like garbage to set it up, not only throwing out the themes, but actively drawing a parallel to the mistakes in the original with something falling into an actual, literal trash can as a symbolic representation of what they claim was the problem with the original park.

And it pisses me off.

I mean, this makes it sound like I hate the film because I'm talking about my biggest problem with it, but I recognize that they did a lot of things right, and it's a quality film in a lot of ways. It's just somewhat difficult for me to enjoy despite otherwise being quite watchable because the theme thing is always nagging in the back of my mind when I do.

Now, full disclosure: I wasn't allowed to see Jurassic Park when it came out because my parents were concerned about violence. Then, when I was old enough to see it, there was a pressure to think poorly of it because my parents (and, by extension, my family) had decided that it was mostly a matter of empty, violent spectacle. And for a long time, I didn’t think much of it. But eventually a friend who loved the film came along, perhaps two decades after it was released, and their enthusiasm eventually enabled me to see the good in the film.

And when I finally came around to thinking highly of it, a huge part of why I ended up doing so was these thematic elements that Jurassic World treated so poorly. Because, yeah, the original Jurassic Park was a solid film overall with reasonably strong characters, good production values (especially for the time), and various other things going for it, but especially as it's grown more dated, the thing that most ensures I can't help but love it even as it creaks with age is this:

It had amazing theming, and those great themes were breathtakingly well-executed every step of the way from the screenplay to the performances to the editing. Everything about that movie, regardless of all the other things it did to keep people entertained, was beautifully constructed until the final product positively thrummed with resonance for a powerful and interesting idea.

That's why I love Jurassic Park now. That's what finally took me past the familial pressure I grew up with to dislike it and brought me to loving it and appreciating the love that the enthusiastic friend who’d brought it back to my attention felt for it. And that, in turn, is why watching Jurassic World, for all its strengths, is somewhat challenging for me given how they not only toss those themes out, but do so deliberately, contemptuously, loudly, and often.

That said, as I stated at the outset, this next one has a different director. And while I’m not going to express optimism on the subject, that’s reason enough to at least acknowledge that it might handle these themes better.

Let’s be real. I’d play the hell out of a Civilization-style, turn-based strategy Fallout game.

So. A new Fallout has been announced, and this time it involves a vault that wasn’t subject to any horrifying experiments. That’s a neat idea. But, even if we set aside my anxieties based on the fact that Bethesda has yet to develop a Fallout game themselves that holds up particularly well after the passing of its hype, they’re setting it ~60 years before Fallout 1, meaning there probably won’t be any well-developed civilizations built in the ruins of the old world (and if there are, it’d be a weird stretch), resulting in wastes more like 1 and 3′s deathscapes than 2 and New Vegas’ emerging larger-scale societies. Which is not only less to my tastes, but a possible wasted opportunity.