Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky

-Replacing his vitimens with poision

- getting her brother to invite him out onto his boat and then killing him and dumping him in the ocean and saying he got drunk and fell off.

- get tboned with him in the passenger seat and then once he was in the hospital theres all kinds of easy ways to kill him like not washing my hands after a poop and then touching his wound casually.

-replacing his drink of choice with moonshine!?

- take him on a hike thats locally notorious for a rapid otter attacking hikers and once he had rabies I could just kill him any ol way and say self defense.

Great thought, but for those unaware, Kate Mulgrew’s gorgeous tux from The Killing Game was 100% a reference to Dietrich’s suit in Blonde Venus (1932) with Cary Grant, a pre-Code film directed by Josef von Sternberg. It’s hard to tell in Killing Game, but Mulgrew’s lapels are also sequined. So is the stripe in the trousers. It is basically a replica of Dietrich’s suit, no question.

Okay, so I have a PhD in queer fashion and media. So this is something I happen to know a lot about. So let me explain a few things.

For starters, You cannot get a more explicitly queer-coded woman than Marlene Dietrich.

Cary Grant (another closeted Queer in Hollywood) is also in Blonde Venus, and although their chemistry is great, their romance is unbelievable because it’s very clear that they are both absolutely queer. Hattie McDaniel appears in this film, another Queer in Hollywood (and the first Black person ever to win an Oscar). In both Blonde Venus and Morocco (1930), Dietrich flirts with both men and women. Dietrich was considered a Drag King in her day. She famously proclaimed, ‘I am a gentleman at heart.’

Dietrich often refused to wear anything but trousers, and openly declared that she had plenty of women lovers. She is an iconic staple for queer sexuality even today. She famously kissed a woman in Morocco whilst wearing a tuxedo- with an audience watching and cheering. She then kisses a man, the audience applauds, and she exits. This scene (below) was added at Dietrich’s own behest. The scene was extremely controversial, and they had to defend it against the censors for months.

This very scene is one of the many reasons The Hays Code was enacted (rules from a super-Catholic man who bribed his way into Hollywood and forced the religious ideologies onto the screen), and this scene was one that The Hays Code often pointed to as ‘immoral’ and ‘perverted’ and ‘sexually explicit.’ You can thank the Hays Code for the split beds Lucy and Ricky had, for rules that a kiss must not last longer than a certain amount of time, that, absolutely, NO queer ANYTHING could be acknowledged to exist. Everything had to be subtext, and that’s why so many old black and white films feel really queer.

But Dietrich openly proclaimed herself queer, dressed in men’s clothing, kissed women on screen- and became a Queer icon not just in fashion, but in sexuality, decadence, and identity. The so-called famous ’Dietrich’s Sewing Circle’ (of which Hattie McDaniel was a member) was essentially every Queer woman in Hollywood who all had affairs with each other. Books have been written on this. Here’s a brief article about one of those books that goes through some of the basics.

Okay, Queer Fashion Film Academic, what’s your point?

The point is that by wearing a duplicate of a Dietrich suit- one where she openly flirted with women, no less–Janeway is 100% coded as queer in The Killing Game.

Especially with that tuxedo scene and the way she’s talking to Seven. In fact, most of the scenes in those episodes where she is talking to Seven, you will notice that Mulgrew plays Janeway with a bite- her eyes linger on Seven just a bit longer, her body language is just a bit more open and fierce than usual.

Even in Paris, for a woman to wear what Mulgrew/Janeway is clearly coding herself as a Queer person through that specific outfit. She is wearing a giant billboard that says I AM QUEER.

By putting Kate Mulgrew in a replica of a Dietrich 1940s tuxedo, Janeway is visually coded as queer through replication and imitation of one of the most Queer icons in cinematic history. That suit is too famous, too iconic, too specifically loaded with subtext and text of queerness through Dietrich.

I am convinced that the costume department 100% knew what they were doing, and part of me wonders if Kate Mulgrew herself had pushed for that suit. Why? Because Kate Mulgrew herself was the one who pushed for Janeway to have a same-sex relationship. According to Screenrant, anyway):

Above quote from this article.

(Anyway, regardless of whether Screenrant is correct or not, the point still stands without that.)

Watch Blonde Venus. Watch Morocco. Then, watch Kate Mulgrew in The Killing Game. She imitates Dietrich’s body-language, her mannerisms, the smirk, in that opening scene. There is no question- Janeway has been possessed by Dietrich’s characters.

Funnily enough, for the rest of those two episodes, Kate Mulgrew is also very clearly imitating another Queer woman through her voice intonation and mannerisms, general fashion and hairstyles: Katharine Hepburn.

Because of her absurd visual and voice similarity to Katharine Hepburn (another Queer in Dietrich’s sewing circle), Mulgrew once played Hepburn in Tea at Five.

Like Dietrich (bisexual), Hepburn was very clearly Queer coded. Evidence suggests that she was a lesbian and that her relationship with Tracy was set up by the studios, but it is possible that she was bisexual as well. Like Dietrich, she was also famous in Hollywood for her male-coded attire, though she preferred regular suits to Dietrich’s tuxedos.

She, like Dietrich, had the same problem whenever they teamed up with Cary Grant- watch Philadelphia Story and tell me that the real ending of that movie is not Hepburn’s character, Grant’s character and Stewart’s character all ending up in a thruple together. The movie makes no sense if that’s not the real ending.

Hepburn wore trousers on film sets and this upset the studio so much they literally stole her trousers, trying to force her into a skirt. Hepburn just walked around in her knickers, refusing to wear the skirt. Eventually, the studio gave her back the trousers.

Okay, I’m going off tangent. Here’s your takeaway:

Kate Mulgrew, (because she’s an absurdly amazing talent), is very heavily is influenced in mannerism, voice, accent and appearance by two of the most Queer-Coded women in cinematic history in The Killing Game. Through fashion and performance, she embodies Dietrich’s Blonde Venus and Morocco characters, and through appearance, voice and body language, she gives that image an additional layer of of Hepburn’s fierce, Queer persona.

Conclusion: Arguably throughout all of Voyager, but specifically In The Killing Game, Kathryn Janeway is visibly Queered.

By the way, although she never got credit for it, the person who wrote Blonde Venus was Dietrich herself. Both she and von Sternberg were suspended for several months because the movie was considered too salacious by the Hays code, and it caused production problems for over a year.

The BFI has a great write-up on Dietrich’s queerness and fashion, you can read it here: https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/my-best-girlfriend-queer-dietrich-screen

Jurassic Park is a 1990 science fiction novel written by Michael Crichton. From Wikipedia: "A cautionary tale about genetic engineering, it presents the collapse of a zoological park showcasing genetically recreated dinosaurs to illustrate the mathematical concept of chaos theory and its real-world implications.

Jurassic Park critiques the dystopian potentialities of modern science. Similar to how his other novels represent science and technology as both hazardous and life-changing, Michael Crichton's novel highlights the hypocrisy and superiority complex of the scientific community that inspired John Hammond to re-create dinosaurs and treat them as commodities, which only lead to eventual catastrophe. Jurassic Park is another version of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, where humanity creates something without truly knowing anything about it. In Jurassic Park, scientist Henry Wu is unable to name the things that he creates, which alludes to Victor Frankenstein not knowing what to call his flawed imitation of God's creation. The immorality of these actions lead to human destruction, echoing Frankenstein.

One of my favourite illustrations of this was in a First Aid class. The instructor was a working paramedic. He asked, “Who here knows the stats on CPR? What percentage of people are saved by CPR outside a hospital?”

I happen to know but I’m trying not to be a TOTAL know it all in this class so I wait. And people guess 50% and he says, “Lower,” and 20% and so forth and eventually I sort of half put up my hand and I guess I had The Face because he eventually looked at me and said, “You know, don’t you.”

“My mom’s a doc,” I said. He gave me a “so say it” gesture and I said, “Four to ten percent depending on your sources.”

Everyone else looked surprised and horrified.

And the paramedic said, “We’re gonna talk a bit about some details of those figures* but first I want to talk about just this: when do you do CPR?”

The class dutifully replies: when someone is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse.

“What do we call someone who is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse?”

The class tries to figure out what the trick question is so I jump over the long pause and say, “A corpse.”

“Right,” says the paramedic. “Someone who isn’t breathing and has no heartbeat is dead. So what I’m telling you is that with this technique you have a 4-10% chance of raising the dead.”

So no, artists did not stop the Vietnam War from happening with the sheer Power of Art. The forces driving that military intervention were huge, had generations of momentum and are actually pretty damn complicated.

But if you think the mass rejection of the war was as meaningless as a soufflé - well.

Try sitting here for ten seconds and imagining where we’d be if the entire intellectual and artistic drive of the culture had been FOR the war. If everyone thought it was a GREAT IDEA.

What the whole world would look like.

Four-to-ten percent means that ninety to ninety-six percent of the time - more than nine times out of ten - CPR will do nothing, but that one time you’ll be in the company of someone worshipped as an incarnate god.

If you think the artists and performers attacking and showing up people like Donald Trump is meaningless try imagining a version of the world wherein they weren’t there.

Yes, it’s just a pie. Yes, the pie itself doesn’t do much direct damage in the grand scheme of things. But the pie is resistance, and resistance inspires resistance. Resistance inspires survival. Throwing pies sometimes starts a movement. Throwing pies sometimes saves lives.

And of course, we haven’t spoken about the inherent morality of throwing pies at oppressors in a world where oppressors have outlawed pie throwing. At the very least, pie throwing is a reminder to the oppressors that no matter how much money they have, no matter how much power they have, there are still some people, some moments they can’t control.

Imagine sitting in a packed auditorium and some asshole is up front is spouting bullshit about minorites. Like saying they’re filthy and deserve a violent death etc. And there are lots of people nodding along and even cheering and applauding

But no one is saying or doing anything to disagree, so you think that you’re the only one who opposes the speaker. And you don’t want to say anything because you don’t want their ire or violence to be aimed at you

So you go through the entire speech, and possibly your entire life, thinking you’re alone

BUT if just one person has the courage to speak up, to throw a pie, to project art on the screen behind the speaker, then that single act of resistance will inspire others to do the same. It could even inspire you to stand up. Or if you’re the first, then you can inspire others

3.75% of the entire country was in the streets on Saturday. Might not sound like a lot, but those are the kind of numbers that signal a toppling government or a revolution.